Intersectionality of oppression on the black female

Sanelisiwe Miya, SANBI KZN Herbarium

On 01 May 2021, I witnessed a Hulk of a man tormenting a short tiny woman in my favorite fresh produce shop.

I did not particularly like the fact that he spoke with this booming voice and that condescending tone. He called the Packer both lazy and stupid because there were no boxes at the front of the shop for him to be able to put his groceries in. He then proceeded to threaten her with the loss of her job, instructing her to call her superiors so that they would fire her because she is lazy and stupid.

Initially, I thought he was just another jovial customer having a go at the staff, as I often laugh and joke with them too. It was only as his voice rose and the insults got sharper that I realized, HHAYBO, this was no joke. I immediately stepped in and stood up for the helpless woman he was attacking with insults.

As soon as I started my tirade towards him he immediately took his groceries and left the shop. (I think being huge myself somewhat helped.)

At some point the managers had come to the till but they didn’t necessarily stand up for the employee, they were listening to him rant. As he left the shop, they said to me that “sometimes, you know, you just leave these kind of things because with some people, it’s just not worth it”.

The funny (not) part is that it was only after my cashier said to me: “Oh thank you for standing up for this lady, this Indian man couldn’t have expected that a black person in here might know any English and stand up for an employee”. That’s only when it occurred to me that this could have been a racially motivated incident.

My role was just to say: “NOT TODAY, Satan!!” because his victim was obviously feeling very threatened and incapable of defending herself.

I came back home and continued my preparation for a Sexual Harassment talk at work on Monday. As I was conducting further research, I came across a study (titled Race, Threat and Workplace Sexual Harassment: The Dynamics of Harassment in the US, 1997‐2016 and was published in the journal Gender, Work and Organization), that suggests that black women are more prone to sexual harassment in the workplace. As bad as that statement alone is, what got to me was the reasoning behind it.

“Sexual harassment in the workplace is an expression of power—a way for men to assert their dominance. The shift from sexual harassment of white women to African-American women indicates that harassers are conscious of power relationships and choose to target more vulnerable women in their workplaces.” Dan Cassino and Yasemin Besen-Cassino conclude. Male predators in the workplace tend to prey on women whom they perceive to be less powerful and less likely to file a harassment complaint. The paper also showed a disturbing correlation between the U.S. national unemployment rate and incidents of sexual harassment at work.

“When the unemployment rate goes up, producing greater social strain and a need to assert dominance, reported sexual harassment goes up as well,” the authors write.

South Africa’s systemic racism and gender inequality force a large proportion of women (and black people in general) to opportunities in lower-paid industries, leaving them more vulnerable to employers, managers, and supervisors who sexually harass them. But the seemingly “better-off” professional industries female employees are not faring any better. Many are 1^st -generation professionals in their families, with greater responsibilities that their same-age counterparts from other races.

It does not help that the stereotypical perceptions of black women that lead to their oversexualization in the minds of their oppressors and causes their eventual harassment, is the very same stereotyping that causes them to not be taken seriously, much rather merely as an “angry black woman” when reporting said incident.

Given that one in three women state that they were retaliated against for reporting their sexual harassment complaints, it comes as no surprise that many do not even report the matter. This greatly increases the emotional stress that all women feel.  Add this to:

• not being supported by her colleagues
• being told to not publicize the incident by members of her own family/community
• some going as far as blaming her (the victim), or
• having her claim being dismissed as “boys being boys” …

…and it can make for a very traumatic and frustrating experience.

It is this combination of issues, or rather, the “intersectionality” of these issues as Kimberlé Crenshaw theorized it in 1989 – (Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics). “Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination. But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm.” – that creates an environment where exploitation becomes the norm, and in some instances, has even been seen as the “cost of working”.

Basically, what the above is saying is that: when a black woman is sexually harassed in the workplace it is often very difficult to determine whether she is being harassed:

• because she’s a woman or,
• because she is black or,
• because there is an expectation/knowledge that she is of a lower income class than the oppressor and would be desperate to keep the job.

The black woman’s apparent “strength” and “resilience” hugely belie our proneness to victimization. More so in the workspace where the truths of our lived experiences are enshrouded in forced secrecy, lest we lose our jobs.

I approached the whole scene with the big man in the shop from the perspective of: “Here’s a bully ridiculing the smallest kid on the playground”.
Meanwhile, the fact that:  

…all could have contributed to how the bully conducted himself that day. In the same vein as the difficulties portrayed in Sexual Harassment cases above, the blackness of this woman brings an intersection of oppression that few people outside of this demographic can truly understand nor remedy.

All discrimination is wrong. Neither can there be any equality between the sexes and amongst the races, that we claim we have (or want to achieve), if the injustices we witness (or are part of), are not addressed. Yet, it is within us all to be an agent for change. 
“All it takes for evil to thrive is for good men to do nothing.”

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/gwao.12394