What's Wrong With Women? Real Talk With Amiri Podcast

Real Talk With Amiri

The Angry Black Woman
The Sapphire Caricature portrays black women as rude, loud, malicious, stubborn, and overbearing.1 This is the Angry Black Woman (ABW) popularized in the cinema and on television. She is tart-tongued and emasculating, one hand on a hip and the other pointing and jabbing (or arms akimbo), violently and rhythmically rocking her head, mocking African American men for offenses ranging from being unemployed to sexually pursuing white women. She is a shrill nagger with irrational states of anger and indignation and is often mean-spirited and abusive. Although African American men are her primary targets, she has venom for anyone who insults or disrespects her. The Sapphire's desire to dominate and her hyper-sensitivity to injustices make her a perpetual complainer, but she does not criticize to improve things; rather, she criticizes because she is unendingly bitter and wishes that unhappiness on others. The Sapphire Caricature is a harsh portrayal of African American women, but it is more than that; it is a social control mechanism that is employed to punish black women who violate the societal norms that encourage them to be passive, servile, non-threatening, and unseen.
The angry Black woman stereotype exists in many parts of American culture — including the workplace. Studies show people in organizations believe Black women are more likely to have belligerent, contentious, and angry personalities, an assumption not as readily assigned to other men and women. Recent studies suggest this negative perception is a unique phenomenon for Black women, and the researchers suggest that when Black women outwardly express anger at work, her leadership and potential are called into question.close

The angry Black woman stereotype has penetrated many parts of American culture, including the workplace. This pervasive stereotype not only characterizes Black women as more hostile, aggressive, overbearing, illogical, ill-tempered and bitter, but it may also be holding them back from realizing their full potential in the workplace — and shaping their work experiences overall.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says Black women make up nearly 7% of the workforce, and still, they are severely underrepresented in leadership positions, especially among CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Ursula Burns, the former CEO of Xerox, became the first Black woman CEO of a Fortune 500 in 2009. As of 2021, Walgreens CEO Rosalind Brewer and TIAA’s chief executive officer Thasunda Brown Duckett are the only two Black women who currently hold that position. Overall, the U.S. Department of Labor reports that in 2020, Black women’s unemployment rate was 10.9%, compared to 7.6% for white women.

These realities led to our desire to look more closely at the angry Black woman stereotype. We argue that companies could miss out on the full contribution of Black women in their organizations because of this image.

Where The Angry Black Woman Stereotype Came From

Notably, characterizing Black women as loud, irascible, too straightforward — and just plain angry — isn’t a new practice. In her book Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South, Rutgers University history professor Deborah Gray White notes that the angry Black woman image is deeply rooted in American culture and dates back to chattel slavery in the U.S.

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