A brief history of the "nappy headed ho", brought to us by BlackProf.com
Image found at Jim Crow Museum
of Racist Memoribilia :
Jezebel Stereotype
The power of slaveholders to exploit, expose, and control the sexuality of black women was overwhelming. Slaveholders could keep black women and their children in a state of near-nakedness while asserting that modesty and civility required full clothing. They could and did encourage frequent slave pregnancies through a variety of punishments and rewards. They then interpreted black women’s evident fertility as evidence of their uncontrolled sexuality.
The insatiable, sexual black woman did important work for Southern society. The myth of Jezebel created space for white moral superiority. Because she was a seductress, Jezebel justified the sexual brutality of Southern white men. Jezebel not only protected white men’s morality, so assured the purity of white women by offering a sexual alternative to white prostitution.
The point here is that Jezebel is more than a demeaning and false stereotype of black women [...] Jezebel is a deliberate characterization that does a specific service in the context American politics and society.
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Blackness | Exploitation | Mysogyny | Myths | Prostitution | Racism | sexuality | slavery | Stereotypes
And Very Little Has Changed...
It's harder today to tell exactly where to assign blame, but the popularity of hip-hop "video vixens" (aka "video hos") plays perfectly into the Jezebel motif.
The record label executives who fund these lewd and demeaning videos chuckle all the way to the bank at the near-nakedness of these underpaid women to "coon it up." Some probably even marvel at how young black men in hip-hop are doing all the work for them. I know I do!
This seems a prime example of "Tell a child long enough that he's dumb, and he will start to believe it." In this case, tell blacks for generations that they are nasty and immoral -- in fact, light the way for it -- and soon, it will manifest unaided.
Sad state of affairs.
Viqi French
http://southsidestar.blogspot.com