By Brooklynn Jefferson
Thirty-year-old civil rights attorney Kelli Slater vividly recalls sitting in a Tulane University School of Law class and listening to her classmates make snide remarks about her appearance. Slater, who is 6’1”, could overhear the mumbled comments about how masculine she looked during the professor’s lecture. As she listened, she realized two things: both her race and her gender were likely reasons her classmates felt at ease with their insults.
“I think people felt comfortable saying things about me that they would not feel comfortable saying about a person that was not a Black woman specifically,” Kelli Slater told the Youth Media Project.
Slater didn’t respond to the group. Her experience was that people of other races see Black women as beings who always have their guards up, tough and aggressive. Black women are expected to handle and accept more.
Her feelings are not unfounded. Research has shown that the media often portray Black women as overly strong and angry. Stereotypes portray them as people who are supposed to unnaturally withstand tragedy and trauma, not just physically, but emotionally.
This stereotype became public during the term of the country’s first Black president. His wife, Michelle Obama, was consistently stereotyped as the angry Black woman before, during and after her husband’s time in the White House. Political commentators, reporters and politicians made racial comments about her appearance, one calling her an “ape in heels.”
These degrading and mocking media stereotypes can cause Black women to see themselves that way, leading to low self-esteem. Black women are less likely than white women to seek mental-health treatment. A national study revealed that 60% of African American women experience symptoms of depression, but only 12% seek help and/or treatment. They don’t feel supported enough to reach out for help, so they suppress their emotions.
“You kind of feel like you have to hold in your emotions because you don’t want to be considered angry,” said Aisha McKnight, a 48-year-old paralegal for the Carson Law Group. “As we all know, Black women get characterized as being angry when we’re only showing emotions, our facial expressions may be taken incorrectly.”
Caricatures of the Black Woman
Historically, author Tamara Winfrey-Harris writes, media have promoted three main types of caricatures as stereotypes of Black women: Jezebel, Sapphire and Mammy.
Jezebel symbolizes a promiscuous, immoral woman who deceives people to get what she wants. Media often portray the Jezebel as a mulatto woman with thin lips, a tall, thin figure and long hair. During the era of slavery, a lot of “mulatto” women were sold into prostitution, marking the beginnings of this trope. These women are portrayed as overly sexual in nature. Video vixens are today’s embodiment of this caricature.
The Sapphire caricature is the sassy, angry Black woman, often seen in the media as loud, having an attitude and quick to “pop off” at someone. This caricature originated from the character Sapphire Stevens on the 1951 television show “Amos n’ Andy.” The show, created by white men Charles Correll and Freeman Gosden, mocked African American dialect and behavior. In today’s media, this caricature often presents as the loud, sassy side chick or best friend, who is frequently perceived as overly aggressive and unattractive or undesirable.
Sabrina in Tyler Perry’s “Madea’s Big Happy Family” is a present-day representation. In this movie, she portrays Bryon’s “baby mama.” She often has her hand on her hip and her purse in the other hand while loudly smacking her gum. Every time she speaks, she yells.
Mammy is a caricature that originated in the 1830s Antebellum South to normalize slavery by making it appear as if the house servant served by choice. As such, she is shown smiling and content, always eager to serve her white family. Hattie McDaniel—the first black woman to win an Oscar for best supporting actress—did so for playing the role of “Mammy” in the movie “Gone with the Wind.”
Even though the exact mammy trope isn’t typically present in today’s society, the expectation for Black women to be nurturing is still present. An example of this modern-day trope is Tolú Ekundare from the Netflix reality show “The Perfect Match.” Tolu is the token Black friend who is always there to console her white co-stars when something goes wrong, but the show never really emphasizes her struggles. Instead, Ekundare has to be strong for the girls who lean on her.
These tropes are unfair stereotypes that are detrimental to Black women’s health. The mindsets discourage vulnerability, which leads to Black women suppressing their emotions. The representation is unhealthy for the mental well-being of Black women, a topic that is already often shunned in the Black community.
The Toll on Mental Health
Jessica Ford, a 38-year-old mother who works full-time, has battled depression and anxiety that mainly stem from constantly being the primary caregiver. Ford started working at age 13 to provide for her younger siblings. She eventually adopted them at 18.
“I think taking care of them that early on contributed to some of my anxiety and depression later on as well,” Ford said. “From a young age, I’ve been relied on heavily.”
“Everybody needs something all the time. I got to work,” Ford said. “They need stuff at work. My husband needs stuff. The kids need something. They’ve got choir practice, basketball practice, football practice, this and that, and so I’m pulling in all these different directions, and then (I’ve) got to go home to cook and clean.”
A full 84.4% of Black women are already the primary breadwinners, compared to 62.4% of white women. Black women are stereotypically seen as women who do it all. Even though these women have been misjudged and face discrimination and bigotry, people constantly depend on them.
Stigma Blocks Help
Dr. Tonya Hays is a licensed clinical psychologist and owner of both the Gluckstadt-based HayBWell, PLLC, and Thee Antidote Wellness Studio. She said that mental health was a taboo topic in her rural hometown of Forest, Miss.
But Hays has always been fascinated by the human brain and its diverse behaviors. The gradual diagnosis of her cousin’s paranoid schizophrenia pushed her to pursue this specific career.
“A cousin that I grew up with who lived in Chicago would come down on summer break,” Hays said.” Around 16 (or)17 years old, she started acting differently when she came to visit.”
Hays recalls that her cousin began acting very standoffish and accused her of saying things she never said. “She was starting to have a psychopathic break, but still, there was no language for it,” she said. “I knew that the way she was acting was very inconsistent with who I knew her to be.”
Five or six years later, her cousin was medically diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but things had gotten much worse by then. “She didn’t get care as quickly as she needed to because her family was in denial,” Hays said. “They thought that praying it away or ignoring it would somehow make it better.”
Researchers who study African Americans and stigmas related to mental illness have found a long history of negative attitudes toward mental illness. During slavery, Black people were dehumanized and seen more as animals than as human beings. Their masters believed they lacked the ability to develop complex emotions and feelings. This belief led to the perception that they could not develop mental disorders.
“Today, members of the Black community are taught to disregard emotions that they have. They downplay emotions, making them seem less important than they are. “I knew that there were people in my family that acted differently, but the way that they were referred to (was that) ‘their nerves were bad,’” Dr. Hays said.
In the Black community, there is a widespread belief that mental health concerns present weakness. A study conducted in 1990 found that 63% of African Americans believed that depression or persons with depression were weak; however, 7.5 million African Americans have a diagnosed mental illness. Up to 7.5 million more may be affected but are undiagnosed.
Religion is also involved in the discussion of mental health in the Black community, where Christianity is the most prevalent religion. One study found that 90.4% of African Americans reported using religion to cope with mental health issues.
“The first thing they’ll throw at you is to ‘take it to God and go pray about it and let it be, that’s part of it. You still have to have outlets,” Ford said.“You still have to be able to find somebody to talk to.”
Hurdles to Mental Health
Affordability is also a significant problem for African Americans accessing mental health care. Uninsured African Americans are 65% more likely than Caucasians to fall into the coverage gap, when uninsured individuals have to pay a larger amount of money for prescribed medications after reaching a specific limit.
A large number of states in the South, where many Black Americans reside, have not implemented Medicaid expansion, making health care more difficult to afford. Even in areas where mental health services are available to African Americans, providers may not tailor the services to the specific needs of African Americans. Patients in these areas may also struggle to communicate their particular needs to their doctor. Data show that Black patients were 33% less likely to engage in patient-centered communications than they were with white patients.
Ford said that members of Black communities must find ways to eliminate the negative perspectives linked to mental health help, including turning to alternative avenues for therapy and support.
“Sometimes it doesn’t have to be masked as a support group, like something is wrong,” Ford said. “I actually started a book club. We try to meet once every other month. We give about two months for everybody to read the book and then we meet and have drinks, food and just talk about the book and fellowship. Sometimes the conversation leads to nothing about the book. But that’s therapeutic for us. By doing these things we will break generational curses.”
Hays agrees that navigating stereotypes and providing mental-health resources is all about one thing Black people have traditionally been good at: building community.
“I think that we often overlook how much power we have as a community,” Dr. Hays said. “Also, one of the best questions to ask someone is, ‘How might we? How might this community help?’ One of the biggest things as a community that individuals can do is just to simply be present.