WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER - EDUCATION, SEXISM, AND CLASS

Blacks are divided by class just like everybody else. Intellectually that's not surprising, I suppose. But was interesting to read how black people had to work to overcome that. 



Music was one of the things civil rights workers used to bring different classes of blacks together. That is, it was a calculated and deliberate thing using music to unite black people at protests. It was not just a black people love music thing like I was always taught (--put this in the bag with the other stereotypes black people like to believe in, right along side the big dick one)


How sexism and poverty come together to create black women's achievement in school was made clear in "When and Where I Enter" as well. It was so obvious, in fact, I couldn't believe I hadn't just come to it myself.

imagine what the year 1890 numbers
looked like down south. As I recall80% of blacks were still down south at the start of WWII

Black men used to quit school to support the family by working the farm or by getting blue collar jobs. Black women would couldn't get the same kind of pay as black men doing manual labor. When doing female manual labor, domestic jobs, black women were paid little or nothing, and raped besides as the rape of black women by white men did not stop the day slavery officially ended.  Therefore, in order for black women to bring more money into the household, they had leave jobs rather than get jobs so they could get an education

Again, blue collar black women (domestics) made a lot less money than black men in blue collar jobs. In white collar "women's jobs," teachers and social workers, black women better off than un-credentialed female domestics, yet they still didn't make as much money as un-credentialed/blue collar black men. At one point during the 60s, despite black women having more education, black women were still, on average, making 75 cents for every black male dollar.


And THIS wage earning, the black female earning a wage so close to that of the black male,  according to The Moynihan Report was part of black women emasculating black men and destroying the black family.

A black woman earning a wage that was critical to the family's survival and earning a wage so close to her husbands (remember it's 1965) was undermining of his masculinity. That's just one of many stereotypes about black women created by men of all colors between during the mid 20th century.

According to the author (and others)  The Moynihan Report was reviewed by many black male civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King, prior to publication. So, Moynihan must have been quite shocked at the nasty reaction he got from the black community.

In the 1960s, many feminists recognized the flaws in Moynihan’s analysis. To African-American feminists in particular, Moynihan propagated a pernicious myth of black “matriarchy” that combined racism with sexism. They noted that many male Black Power radicals shared Moynihan’s idea that achieving racial equality required black men to be patriarchs. For instance, African-American activist Pauli Murray was outraged when she first read in Newsweek about the Moynihan Report and how it endorsed increasing economic opportunities for African-American men at the expense of jobs available to African-American women.

Born in 1910, Murray spent her career combating both the racial discrimination of Jim Crow and the gender discrimination she termed “Jane Crow.” A single African-American woman frustrated by the male monopoly of her chosen profession of law, Murray identified with “the class of unattached, self-supporting women for whom employment opportunities were necessary to survival . . . the ones most victimized by a still prevalent stereotype that men are the chief breadwinners.”

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/moynihans-report-fiftieth-anniversary-black-family/

I'm not sure if The Moynihan Report was the first attempt to shift the effects of white racism onto black culture via the black woman, complete with black cosigning, but it surely wasn't the last.

Read More Part 3   http://thankherforsurviving.blogspot.com/2016/02/when-and-where-i-enter-colorism-and.html

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Book Link 

When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America

by Paula J Giddings