BGP Tumbles

Black women face yet other serious forms of gendered racism—the double burden of suffering racial prejudice and stereotyping because they are Black and female. One example is the negative imaging of Black women as “jungle bunnies.” Since at least the seventeenth century, this white (especially white male) stereotype has accented Black women’s allegedly exotic sexuality. Researcher Diane Roberts has shown how white notions of Blackness have frequently been loaded with sexuality. European books, beginning in the 1600s, portrayed Black women and men naked and with exaggerated sexual organs. “The white world drew the Black woman’s body as excessively and flagrantly sexual, quite different from the emerging ideology of purity and modesty which defined the white woman’s body,” Roberts has explained.

This view has persisted now over the centuries. Thus, greatly influenced by and perpetuating such racist images, numerous white men during the days of slavery and Jim Crow segregation sought out, molested, and/or raped Black women. Moreover, today, much social science research continues to show that some white men still image and seek out Black women as exotic sex objects. In this manner, gendered racism is regularly inscribed in the bodies of Black women.