Black Women In America Research Articles

Abstract A014: Connecting with Black patients through targeted, breast cancer messaging in the clinic setting

Abstract Background: While overall breast cancer incidence among Black women is lower than among white women, Black women are, on average, about 40 percent more likely to die of the disease as compared to white women. And the incidence rates are higher among Black women under age 40 (where incidence is the number of new cases that develop in a specific time period). Black women experience higher rates of death from breast cancer due to a combination of factors, including barriers to early diagnosis, the aggressive nature of certain breast cancers that are more prevalent in Black women (Triple Negative Breast Cancer and Inflammatory Breast Cancer, for example), and a lack of quality care. One of the key findings from Komen’s report ‘Closing the Gap: A Roadmap to Save the Lives of Black Women in America’ (2021) indicated a need for better education and resources for patients to support health decisions. Specifically, qualitative data from focus groups across 10 cities with significant disparities in breast cancer outcomes showed information was needed about breast cancer screening guidelines and family health history in the community to identify high-risk families. Hypothesis: To determine if targeted, patient-faced educational messages in point-of-care settings would connect with Black patients and educate them on breast cancer resources provided by Susan G. Komen. Our efforts focused particularly in cities with the greatest breast cancer disparities (Atlanta, GA; Chicago, IL; Dallas, TX; Houston, TX; Los Angeles, CA; Memphis, TN; Philadelphia, PA; St. Louis, MO; Tidewater, VA; Washington, DC) . Methods: In 11 focus cities, select educational messaging over a six-month period appeared through static digital content in patient exam rooms featuring Black imagery and patient-empowering breast cancer resources content. The 20-second reels appeared every 15-20 minutes in 471 primary care and OB/GYN offices/2,336 exam rooms. Patients in these offices responded (n=315) through an online survey to share demographic information including gender and ethnicity and to identify how aware they were of Black women’s risk of breast cancer mortality, that resource programs exist to support breast health including those offered by Susan G. Komen and that Komen has a program aimed at addressing this disparity within the Black community. Results: By sharing educational messaging directly to patients in the clinic, significant awareness was achieved. Those who responded to the survey included 38% Black women. The targeted messaging campaign reached the intended audience and connected Black patients with additional resources to take action on their breast health. In particular, increased awareness of specific interventions was achieved. In future efforts to empower Black women and improve outcomes, direct, culturally tailored education presented in the clinic setting may be a useful tool and lead to better utilization of key resource programs and overall improved health education. Citation Format: Nikki Hopewell, Brady Kazar, Michelle Strong, Krissa Smith. Connecting with Black patients through targeted, breast cancer messaging in the clinic setting [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 16th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2023 Sep 29-Oct 2;Orlando, FL. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2023;32(12 Suppl):Abstract nr A014.

Black Women Reporting and Seeking Help for Sexual Assault: A Call for Action

Black women in America have historically been victims of oppression, racism, and sexual assault. This victimization can be traced as far back as the forced immigration to America in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. Forced travel bondage on slave ships highlights the institutionalized pattern, not only of their suffering from repeated rape, but also logs their victimized sufferings in silence that they had to endure then and continue to endure in 21st century contemporary America. Black women have been socialized intergenerationally to respond in a specific manner similar to the female slaves who endured rape from ship crew members during their long voyage to the Americas. Even after slavery was legally abolished in 1865, Black women continued to endure victimizations not only due to their gender, but also due to discrimination, classism, perceptions regarding their sexuality, racism, and fear. These intersectional factors cause Black women to have become unique experiences at the hands of rapists. Thus, Black women have unique experiences as victims of rape than other individuals who are also rape victims. Any discussion of Black women and rape must be placed in a sociohistorical framework. The purpose of this article is to revisit historical underpinnings about the rape of Black women in a socialized manner that continues to hinder a silent, nonactive role, and in some instances denial of being a victim of rape. The aim is to sensitize, stimulate, and motivate action by increasing social work classroom discussions about the topic, increasing research in the area of rape of Black women utilizing an intersectional approach reviewing factors that are unique to Black women, and providing more information as a resource to enhance community awareness. Effective intervention strategies are also delineated.

Bag Lady: A Soulful and Scientific Reflection on Black Women's Health.

At the intersection of sexism and racism, Black women experience undue burden of poor health. Established literature in both scientific and artistic arenas archive health disparities facing Black women such as mental health and suicidality. Using poetry, this piece serves as a channel to express the joys and pains of the human experience as well as inspire healing and synergy through honest examination of societal structures. This mixed media artistry (intended to be sung and spoken) weaves together lyrical and literary works, featuring by quotes from Erykah Badu's Bag Lady; Dr. Maya Angelou's many works; Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf; and Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry's Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. It ultimately articulates how to journey across the arc of triumph for well-being synergizing mind, body, and spirit.

Black women’s quest for identity: A critical Study of Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun

Tracing the history of black feminism, it becomes evident that the social construction of racism, sexism and classism was the driving force behind the widespread violence and discrimination against black women. They are found searching and struggling to attain their identity in this patriarchal world. Black feminist thought leads to certain ideas that clarify a standpoint of and for black women. Black feminist perspectives focus on the social domination on the basis of gender, race and class oppression. These oppressions are densely interwoven into social structures and work collectively to define the history of the lives of Black women in America and other coloured women worldwide. It takes us back to the era of United States slavery during which period, a societal hierarchy was established, according to which White men were supposed to be at the top, White women next, followed by Black men and finally, at the bottom were placed Black women. Black feminists were critical of the view that suggests that black women must identify as either black or women. The present paper looks at Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun from a black feminist viewpoint. It discusses position of a woman in male dominated society and her struggle for identity. It unfolds the saga of suffering and silencing of a black woman, which pervades the black women writings. It is depicted that black women have to face the unique challenging task of fighting for black liberation and gender equality simultaneously. The play effectively unthreads the history of African American women’s lives and their quest for identity in African American society. Issues of masculinity and femininity are deeply woven in this play. Women in this play present a microcosm of society; they are treated as second class citizens in society. Hansberry has depicted through her play the superiority that men pose over women. The glimpse of patriarchal dominance is visible throughout the play through different male characters. It further focuses on the value of the individual women’s identity and women’s right and freedom to construct their own separate identities rather than having them imposed against their wishes. It delineates how African American Women try to speak out against oppression and create a sense of individual identity in the face of silence and absence.

Study of black oppression in Alice Walker's the color purple

The life of most women in American society during the era of the nineteenth century made them into victims as the case with the protagonist of the novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker. Such a life of women as depicted in the novel is full with obstacles that come around due to the negative dealings they face by men aided with bad social norms, which make men use women as a tool to satisfy their sensual desires. Thus, the experience of black women in America is one of such great suffering. This study aims to clarify how Celie and other women suffer a lot to justify their life under the dominance of males as well as filling out their suitable seats in such environment of unjust social norms. Therefore, by studying this topic about the southern slave system, the research is going to have a good understanding of the community of the American society as a whole.

Behind Black Women’s Passion: An Examination of Activism Among Black Women in America

Black women in America have consistently been at the forefront of almost every civil, political, and cultural activist movement. Within the past two decades, Black women have created movements such as Black Lives Matter, the Black Youth Project 100, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Say Her Name, and Black Girls Vote. Considering these trends, there is a need to understand what factors influence Black women’s commitment to activist movements. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to identify factors that contribute to activism among Black women. To do this, 107 Black women from a mid-sized, Southeastern city were sampled for primary data analysis. Regression analyses were used to assess associations between activism, perceived racism, psychological empowerment, and spirituality. The results indicated significant positive relationships between activism, perceived racism, and psychological empowerment; such that perceived racism and psychological empowerment were both significantly related to increases in activism. Contrary to expectations, spirituality and activism were not related in the present study. These results have implications for future researchers, mental health professionals, and policymakers.

On Not Being Born: Contraceptive Experiments in the Era of Demopower

“On Not Being Born: Contraceptive Experiments in Bangladesh in the Era of Demopower” traces the development of two abortion technologies created by lay abortionist Harvey Karman, their travel from America before Roe v. Wade to Bangladesh in the infancy of its postcolonial statehood, and their remarkable afterlives. One is celebrated as a technique of the contemporary global development apparatus, and the other is reviled as a debunked medical atrocity. Menstrual regulation, a lay abortion procedure for which Karman is known, is today the fourth most common form of contraception in the developing world. The other, the super coil method, which Karman tested on Black women in Philadelphia, was responsible for catastrophic injury. Read together, the lives of these two technologies offer an account of how experiments on women’s bodies in Bangladesh, as part of a humanitarian mission, justified catastrophic experimentation on Black women in America and became packaged into a narrative about the struggle for abortion as a singular right of American womanhood. This essay argues that menstrual regulation and its repudiated kin are techniques of what I call “demopolitics,” produced by demographic surveillance, monitoring, and abstraction that are financialized through an American foreign aid apparatus of debt. Not being born, in Bangladesh, is the goal of a global futurism that invests itself not in reproduction and the management of life but in contraception and the prevention of birth.

Experiences of the Marginalized Women in America: Re-reading Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970)

The aim of this article is to discover unnoted experiences of African-American women by taking Angelou’s novel in focus. Experiences of marginalized women in African American haven’t got sufficient attention. Their literature hasn’t accorded the level it deserves. Specifically, autobiographies of black women have been ignored more severely than those of Americans. Maya Angelou, who won Pulitzer Prize for her first volume of autobiography-I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, is one of the significant authors who wrote in addressing American subalterns’life. This article applies text based analysis and Black feminist literary theory. As a theoretical framework, it enables one to interrogate the relationships between self and selves of black women in America. Hence, race, gender and class issues were the general brands of black women’s oppression. Racial prejudices against black women and the response to the injustices have been discussed based on the nature of resistance from helpless anger to outright protest. In addition, sexual abuse and segregation followed by ignorance and maternity have been analyzed as interlocked oppressions of black feminism. Although different kinds of oppression such as race, gender and class are discussed, the article argues that Angelou’s feminist portrayals are optimist. Thoughtful and kind as depictions show that the triple form of oppression of racism, sexism and classism can be resisted.

Black Women’s Counter Narratives: Art and Activism in a 21st Century American Struggle

America has the look of a broken thing. In an era of systemic racism, domestic terrorism, police brutality, gender bias and misogyny, many Americans would like strategies that enable personal and collective healing accompanied by an enabling morality. One approach to accomplishing these things is to engage in the stories that confront the myth of Americanness as inclusive and safe. Focusing on the benefits of telling stories of Black women in America, the disruptive and constructive capacity of counter narratives help to illustrate how we can eschew culturally destructive behavior and replace it with conscious and ethical evolution.

The Strong Binti in Nnedi Okorafor’s African American Science Fiction

By looking carefully at the history of science fiction, we can notice that African American authors have been excluded from the scene for a long time due to the “whiteness” of the genre in terms of writing and publication. In addition to racism, sexism persists in the science fiction community. Hence, marginalized black women writers of science fiction try to include more black women characters in their literary works. Through Binti, Binti: Home, and Binti: The Night Masquerade, Nnedi Okorafor focuses on the experience of being black and woman in a technological society of the future. This study discusses how Okorafor provides sharp comments on the lives of black women in America in terms of “race” and “gender.” She challenges the stereotypical image of the black woman as “other” through the subversion of white norms and traditions. In this analysis, we use “Afrofuturism” and “black feminism” as a theoretical framework since “Afrofuturism” tackles African American issues related to twentieth-century technoculture, and “black feminism” deals with black women empowerment. The major character, Binti, proves that she deserves to reach a higher position as an empowered girl of the future, which gives her self-confidence to be autonomous and to have control over her own life.

Relationship between adherence to diet and physical activity guidelines and self-efficacy among black women with high blood pressure.

Hypertension prevalence is highest among Black women in America. Understanding the relationship between adherence to diet and physical activity using socio-cognitive approaches (e.g. self-efficacy and social support) may be effective approaches in understanding hypertension management. This study found that dietary self-efficacy was associated with dietary adherence, and family social support was associated with both diet and physical activity self-efficacy. Social support mediated the relationship between dietary self-efficacy and dietary adherence. A paradoxical finding emerged where participants in the highest self-efficacy tertile also had higher measured systolic blood pressure. More research is necessary to explore culture-specific factors underlying hypertension treatment management among Black women.

مساءلة النسویة. دراسة نقدیة للأمثال العربیة فی ضوء فکرة النسویة

مساءلة النسویة. دراسة نقدیة للأمثال العربیة فی ضوء فکرة النسویة

A Mother's Cry: A Race to Eliminate the Influence of Racial Disparities on Maternal Morbidity and Mortality Rates Among Black Women in America.

Racial/ethnic disparities in maternal care exist, even as medicine continues to progress on several aspects, medical care continues to fail countless women each year, particularly minority women and women of color. Black and American Indian/Alaska Native women experienced exponentially more pregnancy-related deaths. Recognizing factors that underlie disparities in pregnancy-related deaths and implementing preventive approaches to resolve them may mitigate racial/ethnic disparities in pregnancy-related mortality. Future research on these disparities should focus on strategies for reducing racial/ethnic inequalities in pregnancy-related deaths, including improving access to high-quality preconception, maternity, and postpartum care for minority women, multi-ethnic education for physicians and healthcare providers in a bid to eliminate implicit biases, adequate funding, and improvement of healthcare facilities in minority areas, education of healthcare providers on variation in the incidence of some certain conditions in different ethnic groups so that care is patient-centered and culturally appropriate. All of these can be enforced through the community, healthcare facility, patient, family, physician, and system-level collaboration.

The Question of Existence: Revisiting Black Women in Go Tell it on the Mountain

Women had been always at the receiving end of the society and she is forced to cater to the needs of the society she is part of. Existing as an individual with the basic rights and freedom is the bigger question for women as she is always an object of oppression in almost all the society, in particular the ‘Patriarchal society’, in which she is expected to be under the control of a man and tender to the needs of the man and those around him without question. Racism along with Sexism in America ensured the suppression of black women and the white women to a certain extent. The research paper titled ‘The Question of Existence: Revisiting Black Women in Go Tell it on the Mountain’ makes an study on the state of the blacks in general and attempts an in depth analysis on the state of black women in America in the 1920s and the various forms of oppression they endured, from physical to psychological oppression, from skinning to caning to the violence that they have to be victims even after a very long time is studied in this paper.

African American Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence: Lived Experience and Future Directions for Research

ABSTRACT Research indicates that African American women experience especially high rates of intimate partner violence (IPV). Unique contributing factors, such as experiences of racism, compound the experience of IPV for African American women. This complex web of victimization is associated with a host of significant mental and physical health consequences, social and economic consequences, and increased engagement in high-risk behaviors for these women. African American women’s help-seeking efforts are hindered by a diverse set of circumstances. In addition, the picture of the African American community has changed significantly in recent decades. The growing diversity of the “African American” community in the U.S. implores us to enhance our understanding of the unique sub-populations of Black women in America (African Americans, African immigrants and refugees, African Caribbean immigrants, African American lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women) to better meet their needs, and ultimately reduce IPV within the African American community. Despite over two decades of growth in the research and literature on IPV in the African American community, many sub-populations remain neglected. This paper aims to present a brief overview of the current state of the literature regarding the experience of IPV for African American female survivors and identify areas for further research.

Role-Model-In-Chief: Understanding a Michelle Obama Effect

Because of the national conversation about her status as a role model, the former First Lady of the United States (FLOTUS) presents an opportunity to analyze an Obama effect—particularly, the idea that Michelle Obama's prominence as a political figure can influence, among other things, citizens’ impressions of black women in America. Using evidence from the 2011 Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation/Washington Postsurvey, we demonstrate that Michelle Obama's status as a role model operates as a “moderated mediator”: it transmits the effect of the former FLOTUS’ media activities to respondents’ racial attitudes, and the degree to which role model status functions as a mediating variable differs by race (and, to a lesser degree, by gender). Thus, our research provides both a theoretical and an empirical contribution to the Obama-effect literature.

The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits by Tiya Miles

Reviewed by: The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits by Tiya Miles Celia E. Naylor (bio) The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits. By Tiya Miles. (New York: New Press, 2017. Pp. 336. Cloth, $27.95.) In recent decades, nationwide news articles have underscored devastation, decline, and decay in their descriptions of the current state of Detroit. References to Detroit's heyday usually harken back to its distinction as the "Motor City" and the birthplace of Motown Records. In The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits, Tiya Miles exquisitely excavates and reconstructs "a chronicle of Detroit, an alternative origin story that privileges people in bondage, many of whom launched gripping pursuits of dignity, autonomy, and liberty" (2). Her book unveils the quilted and vexed history of Detroit's multinational, multiracial, multilingual, and multicultural past—composed of Indigenous people (including the Anishinaabeg—Ojibwes, Ottawas, and Potawatomies), people of African descent, mixed-race people, and French, French Canadian, British, and American denizens. To present this history, Miles adroitly mines myriad sources, including the account ledgers, diaries, and letters of merchants, traders, attorneys, government officials, missionaries, and slaveholding men and women; legal documents from property disputes and freedom suits; and the registry of Ste. Anne's Catholic Church (the second-oldest diocese in the present-day United States). Organized chronologically, each chapter exposes a particular swath of the composite historical quilt of bondage in Detroit—the purpose, practice, and processes of slavery among eighteenth-century French fur trader-merchants and Indigenous allies, slavery's expansion under British jurisdiction, and its evolution within a newly constructed American territory. As a historian and storyteller par excellence, Miles remarkably creates spaces for Indigenous and black bondspeople as the backbone of Detroit's history and deftly carves out their presence in the midst of absences and silences. Throughout this book, she assiduously re-creates and reimagines the lives of enslaved people as they lived, labored, and died in slaveholding households and on the waterways, as they resisted and ran away together on their path to freedom, and as they fought individually and collectively as revolutionary renegades (e.g., as part of Detroit's black militia). She also vividly documents the intermingling of their lives with those of other [End Page 133] enslaved and free ("red and black") family members, as well as French habitants, French Canadian, British, and American slaver-traders. By so doing, Miles unearths the threads of experience of Indigenous enslaved people ("Panis"), with particular attention paid to unfree Indigenous women such as Marie-Marguerite, Mannette, and countless unnamed others who made up the largest percentage of enslaved people in Detroit. "Due to their ambiguous position in relation to Native groups and the pattern of French-Indian intermarriage," Miles posits, "indigenous women may well be the most invisible population in the history of American and Canadian slavery" (50). As Miles also poignantly reveals, children of enslaved Indigenous women and black men in this region generally followed the condition of their mothers. Thus the sociocultural dictates of Detroit in this case were more closely aligned with the tenets of partus sequitur ventrum, the guiding principle for the status of children of enslaved black women in America's slavocracy. Enslaved Indigenous women and their children satisfied a number of needs, and in the era of Pontiac's War in the 1760s and 1770s, "privileged residents in the Detroit River region . . . sought slaves for mobility (the movement of goods), for intimacy (the satisfaction of sexual desires), for domesticity (the maintenance of households), and for luxury (the pleasures attached to owning prestige goods)" (64). Miles also breathes life into the fragments of archival material related to enslaved black women. She stitches a patchwork of resistance, vulnerability, fortitude, and coercion in her reasoned questions about the "negro slave" Ann Wyley's motivations (and the consequences) for conspiring with French Canadian Jean Contencineau in an act (or perhaps acts) of burglary at a furrier shop. Woven throughout the second half of the book are the moving accounts of the precariousness of slavery and freedom...

Not Like the Other Black Girls: How Class and Family Structure Impact Young Black Women’s Experiences of Competition and Alienation

For much of the tewntieth century the dominant image of black women in the United States has been that of the low-income single mother. Over the past several years, however, there has been significant scholarly interest in the experiences of middle class black women in America and the double burden of sexism and racism they face. While some of this research has addressed their familial experiences, the complexity of racialized family structure in the black middle class and its impact on women is often overlooked. Moreover, previous studies of the black middle class have typically assumed a backdrop of monoracial family structure. This assumption overlooks biracial and transracial families, however, who also form a core constituency of the black middle class. This paper explores the experiences of college aged middle class black women as they negotiate race, class, and gender against the backdrop of varying racialized family structures. Data is drawn from 25 in depth interviews with young middle class black women between the ages of 18 and 25 who were raised in families with two black parents (monoracial), one white and one black parent (biracial), and two white parents (transracial). Findings suggest that young middle class black women experience particularly tense relationships with poorer black women leaving them feeling “different” and isolated. Transracial adoptees and young biracial women faced unique challenges, however, whereby their connections to the white community served to further isolate them from other young black women.

Conjuring Pasts and Ethnographic Presents in Zora Neale Hurston's Modernity

Abstract Although history suggests that conjure is a practice hidden from plain view, Zora Neale Hurston's ethnographies unearthed the pervasive and varied ways Black people throughout the diaspora—and Black women especially—used conjure to create a new reality or to disrupt the existing one. In this essay, we revisit Hurston's ethnographic and folkloric study Mules and Men to consider the question: What does it mean for Black women in America to conjure in modernity? We use ethnographic examinations of two contemporary locales—one of Florida's fantasy corridors and the South Carolina lowcountry—to unearth how contemporary Black women draw from the conjure tradition Hurston documented eighty years ago. When viewed through Hurston's ethnographic history, contemporary Black women's richly layered conjure practices disrupt the widely destructive effects of modernity.

Book Review: Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America

Book Review: Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America