Internalizing the Angry Black Woman Stereotype
A Sort of Rant
The angry black woman stereotype is something that has plagued me my entire life.
Even before I fully understood it, the ABW stereotype would interject itself several times throughout my life. I used to chalk certain occurrences up to my resting bitch face. Although as I got older I realized there was something more underneath the microaggressions directed towards me. That “something” I’ve now come to know as society’s discomfort with black women and our emotions.
The angry black woman stereotype is the misperception of black women as ill-mannered and quick to catch an attitude. What this means is that almost any expression of emotion or strength by black women is susceptible to being perceived as anger. This has happened to many powerful black women such as Serena Williams and Michelle Obama who refuse to accept this world’s dismissal of them.
In college one of my professors would stop class on more than one occasion to question what my problem with him was. He would make comments in front of the entire class such as “She always looks so mad. Why are you mad?” In these moments I wanted to tell him off. But I did no such thing, after all, it would only confirm his beliefs on the type of person that I was. I found myself wanting to work extra hard to prove to him that there was nothing wrong with me. I wanted to prove that not only was I friendly but I was smart and competent as well. Thinking about it now, it’s ridiculous to me that I wanted so hard to prove myself to someone who was lacking themselves. But that’s the way that society’s presumptions of my character warped my thinking. These microaggressions pop up into our lives haphazardly and dismantle our abilities to fully come into ourselves.
Even though I know what it feels like to have false assumptions put on me I would still do the same thing to other black women. I developed a certain set of expectations that I wanted all black women to live up to. I used to have an issue with women, like Amanda Seales, being what I thought was “extra” or “doing too much.”
While she is someone that I don’t always agree with, there has been a multitude of times that Amanda has been labeled as the angry black woman for simply speaking her truth.
If you don’t know who Amanda Seales is, she is an actress, comedian, author, and talk show host on The Real. Among all these things she is also vocal about black rights and the advancement of black women and black people as a whole. In my opinion, she is knowledgeable about the topics that she speaks on and isn’t afraid to speak her mind. However, even though I do think highly of Amanda Seales today, I can’t act as if my appreciation of her and those like her wasn’t a process.
I would cringe at the outspokenness of women like Amanda and found myself anxious to see how the people they were addressing would react. It has taken some serious self-reflection to figure out that the root of these feelings stemmed from my internalization of the perpetuation of negative stereotypes about black women. These stereotypes were why I’ve always found myself “adjusting” in certain circumstances.
While it is important to recognize that there is a time and a place for everything, I now believe it’s more important to stay true to ourselves and question why it is we feel the need to alter our behaviors so much. There is nothing wrong with behaving professionally but you shouldn’t be dimming your light for the comfort of others. I’ve seen many black women develop a habit of altering themselves too much to be able to better fit in. But I’ve learned that there is no point in changing yourselves to fit into a society that was never genuinely ready to accept you anyway. It is important for black women, as well as other minorities, to focus on building ourselves and our communities up. We need to create room for ourselves in this world so that we never have to seek validation from those set on misunderstanding and mislabeling us.
Though whether everyone wants to accept it or not we all have something to add to this world and none of us should have to fake our ways through life to prove that.
