Black Women in The White American Dream

Women’s History Month, The Legacy of Jim Crow, & The State of Violence Against Women in The South

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40 acres, mules, cotton, and white picket fences. In the land of the free, the nation often overlooks that many Black women have and continue to exist outside the white American Dream. We tend to circulate violence against white women for days until searches are completed and new policies are formed. Violence against Black women, however, regularly falls in the gaps, streets, and… in caskets to be forgotten.

This stark contrast is more evident in the South, where the legacy of segregation and white privilege prevails. In North Carolina, for example, violence against Black women significantly escalated during the pandemic.

Violence remains one of the most salient features in the lives of Black women across the South. As a result of the harsh legacy of embedded Jim Crow restrictions, there is concentrated community disadvantage, reflecting the damage of institutionalized racism in the form of unjust economic and residential segregation policies.

The longstanding problem in too many segregated Black hoods is high unemployment rates among Black men. This can trigger toxic Black masculinity issues that translate in to increased crime and violence. These circumstances turn Black women into yet another brief headline, hashtag, t-shirt and obituary.

The normalization of violence against Black women can create an expectation of violence, which both reduces the shock of an assault and limits efforts to address or retaliate against it. These factors perhaps help explain why Black women are less likely to seek help or report those who bring harm to them. Because when confronting the choice of surviving abuse at home or calling the (white) police, “who will revere the Black woman?” And is it better to stay safe, or, as YG raps, stay dangerous?

Jaqusica Wilson. Raven Tolbert. Mercedes Gibson. Paula Henson. Jamaica Allen. Delores Burwell. These are the names of Black women killed in the South in the past three months alone. Black women are far more likely to experience violence or homicide by their partners than white women. In addition, an alarming number of Black women across the nation witness violence: 30 percent have seen a murder, stabbing or shooting, research shows.

But violence is not often only physical. Jim Crow’s unequal distributions, residential segregation, and its deliberate exposure to community violence in Black communities also impedes collective efficacy, enlists Black women to daily superhuman strength, and normalizes abuse.

For a Black woman living in the south, violence is not just a result of power imbalances in her humble abode or community. She must also endure attacks via a median income of almost $34,000 or a relationship with her partner making a median hourly wage of $14, compared to the $17 his/her white counterparts are making. She must navigate her way (and her health) through neighborhoods riddled with large potholes, overpolicing, and small tree coverage. She must exhaust herself through family tension to survive and expect violence…because it’s all she’s ever known. And it’s all systems in the South have ever taught her.

Why does Jim Crow matter?

The South has a long history of inflicting structural violence on its Black residents. While the term “Jim Crow’’ can be traced back to as early as 1830, some of these laws did not become evident in certain southern states until the 1860s. Laws in the forms of statues, ordinances, and policies in the state sought to disenfranchise Black people by way of unequal school funding, literacy requirements for voting, and jury participation. Today, what some choose to believe is eradicated still exists through Title I schools, pollution segregation, and strict voter identification requirements. More notably, Jim Crow has left a legacy of redlining, restrictive covenants, and regulating property through racial zoning policy. Today, many Black communities that were once targeted by redlining, are now economic goldmines for investors.

“People get pushed out because they can’t afford to live there anymore,”

Tim Stallmann of Bull City 150 (Durham, NC) says, “There’s a lot of neighborhoods, historically Black neighborhoods that are facing pretty rapid gentrification.”

The problem with these newfound ‘treasures’ is that surrounding property values are forced up and Black citizens are forced out into less attractive areas. Areas where grocery stores are limited and convenience and liquor stores are essentials.

In the City of Durham, alone, there is a gentrification crisis — one of Jim Crow’s most prominent legacies- along with disadvantaged affordable housing conditions, poor schools, unsafe streets, limited access to jobs, and concentrated poverty in Black hoods.

Concentrated disadvantage like this is a cesspool for violence, creating generations of social and physical conditions fraught with uncertainty, chaos, and unaddressed and unhealed trauma. As a result, cities like Charlotte, Durham, and High Point rank among the deadliest in the U.S. for homicides. Community violence, defined as “aggression that occurs outside the home among non-family members; though it may involve known others and even family members as victims or perpetrators,” is also particularly threatening to Black women.

Black women are left to navigate not just visible flying bullets, but invisible waves of structural violence on a daily basis. This structural violence gives way to a variety of vulnerabilities the country at large fails to address, to include broken schools, high unemployment, marginal and unstable housing, street violence, missing Black girls, and homicides. While violence against Black women remains complex and cannot be solved with a one-size-fits-all solution, as we reflect on the history of this month and our nation…perhaps the first step is our collective reckoning.

A reckoning with our roots. With our soil. And most importantly….with our branches.