Intersecting Identities &Group Relations
Black women belong to two groups, both the Black community and the community of women. Belonging to two groups means having to fit into these two groups, and this is related to social categorization.
Social categorization is what we all do as human beings; we attribute certain qualities to certain groups to make ambiguous things make sense; this can also lead to misattribution (Chapter 5 Kassin et al., 2017), however, and plays into the under and over distinctions we see with Black women in relation to their intersecting race and gender. Misattribution can be a problem because the stereotypes described in the earlier pages can effect how we view and treat Black women.
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It is especially hard for Black women to feel accepted into society if they do not have set a group to fall in, as group identities are important in our society and Black women often must choose between themselves and the community, and this constant choice puts them at a disadvantage – they are more at risk for violence because of it
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Individualistic American Ideals Contrast with Black American's Collectivist Nature
Individualistic societies are more self orientated with less ties to extended family, while collectivism means having group goals and relying on each other; having family and community connections are important (Gomez & Gobin, 2020)
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Black people have a strong group identity; because of this, Black people strongly identify with their group and base their self-identity off of the group
Due to this mentality and interdependence on the group, when Black women are sexually assaulted, they are faced with the decision to either report or not, but they have the added stress of possibly aiding the stereotype of Black men being aggressive (they do not want to hinder the collective perception of their group)
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We are taught to protect our ingroups by being scared or suspicious of outgroups – this is partially why Black women are left out of social movements, because even though the Black community is collectivist in nature, it still does not fully recognize the individual struggles that Black women face (known as “intersectional invisibility” according to Coles & Pasek 2020)
#MeToo Movement and the Exclusion of Black women in Feminism
#MeToo, a movement where many women began speaking out on social media against sexual violence, was centralized around mostly upper-class white women, while Black women were heavily excluded (Gómez & Gobin, 2020); we need to work on making sure that Black women are included in the current feminist movement.
White women tend to treat Black women with benevolent sexism when evaluating violence against Black women; on the other hand, when Black women experience hostile sexism, white women are more likely to intervene (Katz et al. 2018).
A lot of current research about sexual assault is not generalizable to non-white communities due to the different ways sexual assault is understood by Black women and the fact that because of their social responsibility, they carry the trauma of sexual assault differently (Zounlome et al. 2019)
Ingroup vs outgroup perceptions lead to the outgroup homogeneity effect, meaning people believe that those outside of their own group are like each other, but different from them. It gives an us vs. them mentality (Chapter 5 Kassin et al., 2017)
Therefore, Black women are excluded from Black social movements and White feminist movements, because Black men see Black women as too different, and White women do not recognize the differences between them and Black women, so they do not accommodate for them in feminist movements
