Historically, White women were portrayed as models of self-respect and decency, whereas, Black women were seen as overly sexed animals. These myths and stereotypes have impacted not only the images of black women upon themselves, but also how the male gender views them as well. Accordingly, sexual harassers statistically appear to disproportionately victimize Black women as compared to White women. The comparison suggests a similar operation of racialized gender stereotypes that conceptually distinguish “pure” White women from “wanton” Black women. This paper will first give a brief history and overview of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act 1964.1 Next, the paper addresses the alarming disparity between white and black female victims of sexual harassment. This paper will then explain the correlation between these numbers and the negative stereotypes and images created by film

History of Sexual Harassment

Women were sexually harassed long before there was a word for it. Under slavery, African American women were sexually used by white masters. Women working in homes have long been targets of sexual abuse. Since industrialization, women working in factories and offices have had to endure sexual comments and demands by bosses and coworkers as the price for economic survival. As students, women and girls have been sexual prey to teachers for as long as they have been allowed to be educated. On the streets and in the home, sexual pressure that women are not in a position to refuse has been invisible but pervasive. The exchange of sex for survival under conditions of coercion that defines prostitution has also marked women and men’s unequal relations throughout and across societies.

In the mid-1970s women began to speak in public for the first time about this form of sexual abuse. The Women’s Center at Cornell University held the first Speak Out in May 1975; feminists in Boston and women workers in New York formed action groups; women students organized at Berkeley and Yale.2 In this political context, the words “sexual harassment” emerged to describe and give coherence, communality, and communicability to an experience that women previously had no choice but to consider just life.

The history of sexual harassment is, to an unusual degree, a legal history. Unlike most abuses of women, sexual harassment was established as a legal claim long before it was commonly accepted as harmful. In the early 1970s, before the law against sexual harassment existed, individual women, most of them Black, brought suits against perpetrators and institutions for acts amounting to sexual harassment under civil rights laws, arguing that they were victimized by sexual harassment because they were women, hence treated unequally on the basis of sex. In 1977, in the case of Paulette Barnes, an appeals court first agreed; other courts soon followed. Sexual harassment was recognized as a legal claim for sex discrimination at work under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.3

The sexual harassment claim provided by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has evolved fairly recently and continues to be defined in federal courts across the nation.4 Many of the requirements necessary to prove a claim of sexual harassment, and more specifically, hostile environment harassment, have been the subject of controversy among courts and commentators.

Title VII states that:

(i)t shall be unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or natural origin.5

One of the first cases to recognize sexual harassment as a violation of Title VII was Williams v. Saxbe.6 In that case, a female employee was dismissed by her boss from her job because she refused his sexual advances. The defendant argued that this type of sexual behavior did not fall within the purview of Title VII because it was not discrimination based upon the class of the victim, but discrimination based upon the victim’s personal attributes. The court rejected this argument holding that “retaliatory actions of a male supervisor, taken because a female employee declined his sexual advances, constitutes sex discrimination within the language of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.7

In the decade from 1976 to 1986, as hundreds of cases were adjudicated, sexual harassment was legally divided into two types. The simplest, termed quid pro quo, demands sex in exchange for benefits to which a person is otherwise entitled.

However, sexual harassment can be oppressive and exclusionary in itself also, whether or not a measurable benefit or opportunity is lost. This second type is termed hostile environment. Sexualizing a job or school environment can poison it for anyone who wants to be accepted as an equal worker or student—something few men have to tolerate. Often the perpetrators are otherwise women’s equals in formal hierarchies, or even their formal subordinates.

Environmental sexual harassment can include sexual advances, epithets, and forced sex—all imposed forms of sexual behavior that a woman must either tolerate or leave where she is entitled to be, free of sex discrimination. When men are harassed sexually because they are men, the same prohibitions apply, although the hierarchy of men over women in society makes this rare.

Sexual harassment was recognized as a practice of sex discrimination, hence illegal, by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1986. The case that established this principle was brought by Mechelle Vinson, a Black woman who sued her supervisor for sexual harassment because she had been raped by him over a period of two-and-a-half years. She argued that having to tolerate forced sex to keep her job was environmental sexual harassment, hence sex discrimination in itself, whether or not she actually lost the job for this reason. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed, establishing freedom in the working environment from severe or pervasive sexual harassment as women’s human right.8 In 1993, in Patricia Harris’s case, the Court further specified that a woman need not be psychologically damaged by sexual harassment to sue; being disadvantaged by it because she is a woman is enough.9

Racial Disparity of Sexual Harassment

Although White women complainants of sexual harassment account for the vast majority of EEOC sexual harassment charges, in racially comparative terms, White women are underrepresented. Specifically, White women accounted for only 61.9% of the sexual harassment charges in 2002, even though they made up 84.8% of all women employed in the civilian labor force in that same year.

On the contrary, the data indicates an overrepresentation of women of color as complainants in comparison to their representation in the female labor force. Black women, made up only 11.5% of all women employed in the civilian labor force and yet they accounted for 14.4% of the sexual harassment charges.

Although a number of factors could plausibly contribute to the racial disparity in sexual harassment charge statistics, the existence of some correlation between rates of sexual harassment and race-based decision-making on the part of harassers is undeniable.

What is even more alarming is that recent studies show that black women in fact, have a tendency to under-report instances of sexual harassment.

Early Explanations for the Statistical Pattern

Early theorist suggested that the disparity in these numbers was a result of the nature of the Black woman, which made it easier for her to conceptualize her victimization as harassment, whereas White women might have experienced greater difficulty in articulating their experiences as something other than overly aggressive dating overtures.10

However, this theory was rejected in the early 90’s when the view of sexual harassment as a legal claim became part of the national consciousness. Therefore, the racial disparity in sexual harassment charge statistics was no longer correlated with the “benefit” Black women have in

experiencing sexual harassment as a more “easily recognizable” racial hostility.

Also, some studies suggest that White women tend to perceive incidents of sexual harassment as more serious than Black women do, and have a broader range of behaviors that they classify as sexual harassment. 11

Although there is no mechanism to absolutely determine why these numbers are so disproportionate, an understanding of the perceptions of Black women in society may help to draw certain conclusions.

Early Stereotypes and Myths about Black Women

There are numerous myths related to the sexuality and role of the Black woman in our society. Unfortunately many of these images of Black women are negative and harmful, with a focus particularly on their sexuality. It only makes sense that this discussion starts with the icon of racial inferiority and black female sexuality, Sara Baartman.

Saartjie Baartman, a Khoisan slave woman who at the tender age of 20 was taken from Cape Town to London and then on to Paris to be displayed naked in their streets and at their circuses like an animal her European audiences viewed her to be. She was most often obliged to walk, stand or sit as her keeper ordered, and told to show off her protruding posterior, an anatomical feature of her semi-nomadic people, and her large genitals, which varied in their appearance from those of Europeans.

Khoisan people anatomically have honey-colored skin and stock their body fats in the buttocks rather than in the thighs and belly. These are natural things for them, but Europeans found them to provide an excuse for stereotyping African blacks in grotesque ways. For example, the British described her genitals as like an apron, “skin that hangs from a turkey’s throat.”12 Her anatomy even inspired a comic opera in France. Called The Hottentot Venus or Hatred to French Women, the drama encapsulated the complex of racial prejudice and sexual fascination that occupied European perceptions of aboriginal people at the time.

Sara Baartman died in Paris in 1816, an impoverished prostitute, a lonely woman, and an alcoholic.13 She had come to be known as the “Venus Hottentot,” which was a derogatory term used to describe “bushmen” of southern Africa.

As saddening as this story is, what is more unfortunate, is that it was almost the norm during those times. It has been well documented that sexual promiscuity and exploitation of female slaves was common and even encouraged by slave masters. Historically White women, as a category, were portrayed as models of self-respect, self-control, and modesty – even sexual purity, but Black women were often portrayed as innately promiscuous, even predatory.

Slave women were property, therefore legally they could not be raped. Often slavers would offer gifts or promises of reduced labor if the slave women would consent to sexual relations, and there were instances where the slaver and slave shared sexual attraction; however, “the rape of a female slave was probably the most common form of interracial sex.”14

People make decisions based on the options they have and the options that they perceive. The objective realities of slavery and the slaves’ subjective interpretations of the institution both led female slaves to engage “voluntarily” in sexual unions with Whites, especially slavers, their sons, and their overseers.

A slave who refused the sexual advances of her slaver risked being sold, beaten, raped, and having her “husband” or children sold. Many slave women conceded to sexual relations with Whites, thereby reinforcing the belief that Black women were lustful and available.

The idea that Black women were naturally and inevitably sexually promiscuous was reinforced by several features of the slavery institution.15 Slaves whether on the auction block or offered privately for sale, were often stripped naked and physically examined. In theory, this was done to insure that they were healthy, able to reproduce, and, equally important, to look for whipping scars- the presence of which implied that the slave was rebellious.

In practice, the stripping and touching of slaves had a sexually exploitative, sometimes sadistic function. Nakedness, especially among women in the 18th and 19th centuries, implied lack of civility, morality, and sexual restraint even when the nakedness was forced. Slaves, of both sexes and all ages, often wore few clothes or clothes so ragged that their legs, thighs, and chests were exposed. Conversely, Whites, especially women, wore clothing over most of their bodies.16

The contrast between the clothing reinforced the beliefs that White women were civilized, modest, and sexually pure, whereas Black women were uncivilized, immodest, and sexually aberrant.

The Mammy, the Jezebel, and the Sapphire

From the institution of slavery, three recurrent sexual stereotypes of Black women came about: the sexless, but nurturing Mammy, the Jezebel, or sexually “loose” Black woman, and the emasculating Sapphire.

The Jezebel stereotype was used during slavery as a rationalization for sexual relations between White men and Black women, especially sexual unions involving slave masters and slaves.17 The Jezebel was depicted as a Black woman with an insatiable appetite for sex. She was not satisfied with Black men. The slavery-era Jezebel, it was claimed, desired sexual relations with White men; therefore, White men did not have to rape Black women.

Most commonly portrayed as heavy set, having dark skin and traditional African features, the Mammy has been characterized as unattractive, asexual, and unsuitable as a sexual partner. Created to justify the economic exploitation of house slaves and sustained to explain Black women’s long-standing restriction to domestic service, the Mammy image represents the normative yardstick used to evaluate all Black women’s behavior. By loving, nurturing and caring for her white children and family better than her own, the Mammy symbolized the dominant group’s perceptions of the ideal Black female relationship to elite white male power.18

According to this well constructed myth, outside of mothering, Mammy has no desires or needs of her own, and is quiet content in her subordination.

Similarly, the most salient features of the Sapphire myth of Black female sexuality are her lack of femininity, her sexless, harshly aggressive nature, and her inclination to emasculate the Black male at any chance she gets. She is portrayed as evil, bitchy, stubborn and hateful.19 In other words, Sapphire is everything that Mammy is not. She is a twisted take on the myth that Black women are invulnerable and indefatigable, and that they always persevere and endure against great odds without being negatively affected.

Ernestine Ward popularized the Sapphire image in the Amos and Andy television series. Ward played a character known as Sapphire, and her husband, Kingfish, was played by Tim Moore. Sapphire’s spiteful personality was primarily used to create sympathy in viewers for Kingfish specifically and African American males in general.20 As a result, many African American women suppress these feelings of bitterness and rage for fear of being regarded as a Sapphire.

The characterizations of African American women as asexual Mammies, promiscuous Jezebels, and antagonistic Sapphires reaffirm society’s belief that African American women are less individualistic than white women.

These stereotypes, which evolved during slavery, continued to exist after the end of slavery and still contribute to the unique harassment experiences of African American women today.

Films Influence on Perpetuating Negative Images of Black Women

Films are often reflective of social stereotypes and standards. It is no surprise then that the social stereotypes and standards for Black Women reflect almost in entirely the roles they play in movies. Since they first started getting roles, Black Women were often type cast, as well as minority men, into roles and situations that perpetuate myths about sexuality and embodiment.

The transition between mammy/jezebel and more complex images of Black Women in film was not a swift one. Gone With the Wind, directed by Victor Flemming and released in 1939, is seen as a “classic” in the eyes of many critics, despite the fact that it plays into many negative preconceived notions about gender, race, class, age, etc.21 The Mammy character in this film is actually called Mammy. This version of mammy has embodied the stereotype perfectly.

Played by Hattie McDaniels, Mammy of Gone With the Wind is the essential mother to her master’s white children. Mammy is the rock of the family,22 she is happy and humorous as the world crumbles around the O’Hara family during the civil war. Not only does Mammy manage to raise what is left of the O’Hara family, she is there as the third generation is born and is ready to raise them as well.

By the 1970s Black moviegoers had tired of cinematic portrayals of Blacks as Mammies. Thus the birth of a new film genre, Blaxploitation, came about. The term Blaxploitation is a contemporary term applied to the B-rated flicks of the 70s that boasted black stars. These films supposedly depicted realistic Black “experiences,” however many were produced and directed by Whites.23

No longer Slaves and Mammies, they were complex individuals lashing out at the system that still was filled with social injustice. The Blaxploitation era depicted a different image of both Black Men and Women. Although, they were now both given lead roles, they were primarily depicted as pimps, drug dealers, prostitutes, and whores. The only reason Black patrons supported these films was because they showed Blacks fighting the “man.”24 Black actors and actresses unable to find work were forced to be subjected to these roles.

The change during this era was very crucial in the black community and particularly so for the Black woman. The female centered Blaxploitation flicks portrayed Black women as sexually aggressive deviants. Few will argue that Pam Grier was probably the most notable actresses of this period and film genre. Grier made a total of ten major Blaxploitation films that changed the face of Black female representation in film.

In Foxy Brown, one of Grier’s most highly acclaimed films, a sexy Black woman named Foxy Brown, seeks revenge when her government agent boyfriend Michael is shot down by gangsters led by the kinky couple of Steve Elias and Miss Katherine. Katherine, a sadomasochistic madam in cahoots with her drug lord boyfriend has Michael killed for releasing criminal information to the feds on Steve’s dealers. Foxy, realizing that the mainstream establishment was not only unable to protect her community from proliferation drugs and prostitution, but could not ensure the safety of her man, decides to take matters into her own hands. She enlists the aid of “the committee,” a Black Panther-like group that has taken personal responsibility for the cleaning up of the ghetto.25

Once inside, Foxy finds out that a white woman was behind the demise of her lover and thus plots the ultimate strategy of vengeance. Although Michael was murdered, symbolically the Black man was stripped from the arms of the Black woman by a White woman. This is the ultimate pain depicted in Foxy Brown. Brown ends up killing Steve and not Katherine. After following Steve to his hideout, “the committee,” hold him down while Foxy removes his penis with a hunting knife. She then takes it back to Katherine in a jar. When Katherine realizes what is in the jar, she is devastated and tried to kill Foxy but ends up getting shot in the shoulder.

Grier’s role in Coffy was very similar to her role in Foxy Brown. Nurse Coffee enters the underworld by night in an attempt to find the bad guys responsible for slipping her sister some bad heroin. Once inside the “underworld,” she discovers that her Senate-bound boyfriend is working with some of the ghetto’s top drug lords. Brunswick, her boyfriend, is depicted as having lustful inclinations toward White women, however they remain masked until Coffy finds out that the Las Vegas drug ring circuit is funding his campaign and he is sleeping with a White woman.

Posing as an exotic Jamaican prostitute named Mystique, Coffy aligns herself with an influential black pimp who leads her straight to the Las Vegas drug lords. The pimp soon takes a particular interest in Mystique, which makes his favorite prostitute (who is white) jealous. He request that Mystique be sent to his private quarters and there her rampage of killings and revenge starts.

In both Foxy Brown and Coffy, Grier plays a whore who gets revenge on Whites who have victimized her loved ones. Although movies of this era enabled African Americans to progress from the traditional roles of cooks, waiters and servants to prominent roles in movies in which the entire cast was black, the portrayal of Black women as sexually lascivious became commonplace in American film and society. Whether lead actress or not, a whore is still a whore.

Women’s Sexual Liberation in film

“And let’s put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism — the lie that there can be such a thing as men’s liberation groups. Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a “threatening” characteristic shared by the latter group — skin color or sex or age, etc. – Robin Morgan

A sexual revolution has taken place within the lifetime of most women. Images, attitudes and subjects of discussion that are commonplace today would have been unimaginable to people only 40 years ago.26 Yet sometimes it seems that the demands for sexual liberation, which played such an important part in the radicalization of the 1960s, have been turned upside down. It is as if sexism has made a comeback by masquerading as sexual liberation. What sums up both the images of aggressive and sexually predatory women and the notion of women becoming empowered on the same basis as men is that collective struggle is a thing of the past.

Messages characteristic of a modern “sexual liberation” or “sexual freedom” discourse are pervasive in many modern day films. We constantly see nudity and actual or suggested sex.27 For modern patriarchy, to present sex free from censorship is considered progress. However, the roles, scripts, attitudes, and values are pre-determined by patriarchal norms. We see a variety of semi-nude women, but rarely any men.

Additionally, there is a complete difference of social meaning for a woman to bare her chest versus a man doing the same. The positioning of characters is also sexist: not only are women frequently topless, while men are obviously clothed, but the men are always positioned to gaze at the women.28 The audience is also positioned to objectify the women sexually and participate as voyeurs.

We constantly see women trying to sexually entice men, but hardly the opposite. We see women in sensual or sexual activity performed for the male protagonists (and audience), but, again, not the opposite. We see sexual torture of women but not of men.

John Stoltenberg lucidly writes, “Sexual freedom has never really meant that individuals should have sexual self-determination, that individuals should be free to experience the integrity of their own bodies and be free to act out of that integrity in a way that is totally within their own right to choose. Sexual freedom has never really meant that people should have absolute sovereignty over their own erotic being. And the reason for this is simple: Sexual freedom has never really been about sexual justice between men and women. It has been about maintaining men’s superior status, men’s power over women; and it has been about sexualizing women’s inferior status, men’s subordination of women. Essentially, sexual freedom has been about preserving a sexuality that preserves male supremacy.” 29

Black Women’s Liberation in Film

“I’ve never really thought of myself as a spokesperson for 35 million African Americans….All my views have been solely my views, and I think that there are African American people who agree with me, but we also have African Americans who don’t agree…It is a fallacy that all of my critics are white.” - Spike Lee

The Grier character flew in the face of the contemporary women’s liberation movement, which was in full bloom at that time. But the exploitation of black women continued through the 1980s, even in movies written and directed by black men. Spike Lee has been embraced as one of the few directors who have made films that depict the African-American reality. In his 1986 film debut, “She’s Gotta Have It,” Lee attempted to portray an independent black woman making her own life choices.

This film was very controversial and evoked much debate. It succeeds in offering a positive image of black women and men from a strictly racial point of view however, from a feminist perspective, the film fails almost completely in spite of its purported focus on a “liberated” woman, this woman is fetishized, stripped of most of her agency, subdued, and undecipherable.30 A female spectator has little incentive to want to identify with Nola’s character, though from the dialogue we are to gather that she is free-spirited, intelligent, artistic, assertive, and actively sexual. Unfortunately, it is hard to fathom what motivates her actions, and though throughout the film she addresses the audience directly like the other characters, her comments never reveal much of her thoughts and feelings.

Towards the end of the film, Nola is raped by one of her lovers, but both of them end up pretending that it was not a rape per se and she even chooses him out of the three men in her life (albeit for a short time). Ironically, the rape here is not portrayed as something negative, something that the heroine survives, but rather an justified reaction on the part of the boyfriend to Nola’s “promiscuity,” the movie seems almost to say that she was “asking” for it, and that she “needed” it in order to settle down.

Girl 6 is the first major motion picture about the phone sex industry. In this film, Lee places would be actress Judy in a position where her best chance to earn a living is by talking dirty to anonymous men over the phone. All day long, she sits in an office cubicle, next to dozens of other girls in similar cubicles, using her disembodied voice to play dominatrix, schoolgirl, housewife, and any number of other roles. However, Judy falls prey to the profession’s dark side.

Lee approaches the film with his usual realistic gusto, which only makes the psychological, parts that much more confusing. Girl 6, as her namelessness indicates, is a cipher. She has no identity other than those given to her by others. Throughout the film she dips into fantasies in which she becomes Dorothy Dandridge or Pam Greer. These transitions between the real and psychological are clunky and the purpose of these scenes never becomes clear. But at least Girl 6’s fantasies have some bearing on the plot; her lack of identity is both a boon and a curse in the phone-sex business. Less relevant is a side story about a girl who fell down an elevator shaft.

Girl 6 becomes fascinated with the child, and aside from the painfully obvious parallels between falling and Girl 6’s declining mental state, it has no relation to the story.

In both these films, Black women were still stereotyped as being the sexual objects who served the purpose of satisfying the sexual desires of men. In contrast, the portrayal of White women’s liberation was taken from a totally opposite perspective.

White women’s Liberation in film

In Matthew Robbins, 1985 film, The Legend of Billie Jean, a young teenage girl named Billy Jean Davy and her younger brother, Binx, spend their time riding Binx’s scooter and dreaming of life in Vermont several climate zones away from the humid, omnipresent heat of their Texas town.

One day, on their way from their trailer park home to a swimming hole, the Davy kids run afoul of rich boy Hubie Pyatt and his cronies, who steal and later trash the scooter Binx bought with his father’s paltry life insurance benefits. Demanding payment from Hubie and his merchant dad for the damage that’s been inflicted on both the bike and her brother’s face, Billie Jean narrowly escapes being raped by the elder Pyatt.

In the ensuing scuffle, Binx accidentally shoots Mr. Pyatt, sending himself, Billie Jean, and their friends on the run. When the “Billie Jean Gang” becomes a media sensation, Pyatt capitalizes on their notoriety by selling their merchandise, while policeman Ringwald, who feels guilty for having refused to help Billie Jean, tries to bring the kids in without anyone getting hurt. However, when the gang mock-kidnaps rich amateur filmmaker Lloyd), unaware that he’s the district attorney’s son, the situation spins out of control. Soon, Lloyd’s videotape of the suddenly crop-topped, Joan of Arc-emulating, Billie Jean elevates a local headline into a national sensation, and even Lloyd’s attraction to Billie Jean can’t protect her from the media lightning rod she’s become. Almost overnight she becomes an outlaw and a legend.

In Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise, Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon play Thelma and Louise, two working-class friends who together have planned a weekend getaway from the men in their lives. One of their first stops is a bar where the women relax, dance, and flirt with some of the locals. But the situation turns ugly when one man follows Thelma to the parking lot and attempts to rape her, causing Louise to shoot and accidentally kill him.

Convinced that the police will never believe their version of the incident, the women take off and attempt to jump over the Grand Canyon.

In these two films representing White Women’s Liberation, they both demonstrate the White woman avoiding being raped and making a fool out of the primarily male run justice department.

Conclusion

“Oh my God. I’m sorry. This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It’s for the women that stand beside me, Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett and its fore very nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened. Thank you. I’m so honored. I am so honored and thank the academy for choosing me to be the vessel from which this blessing might flow. Thank you.” - Halle Berry at the 2002 Oscars

In 2002, actress Halle Berry made history by becoming the first African American to ever be awarded the Oscar for best actress, for her role in Monster’s Ball (2001). Although this was a triumphant day in the Black community, it would be naïve to believe that the days of the negative portrayal of Black women were over. As a reminder it must be noted that Halle Berry’s role as Leticia was arguably that of a broken down Black woman who prostituted herself for the White man.

The Oscar for best supporting actress, which runs secondary to the best actress award, was also only won once by a Black actress, Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind (1939). Ironically, in this role McDaniel’s played a Mammy.

So although the Jezebel has replaced the Mammy as the dominant image of Black Women in America, nothing has really changed the perception of these Women in the eyes of a male dominated society. These women are still seen as willing, sexual deviants who will fulfill any and all sexual fantasies.

As a result of this depiction of Black women, the male harasser whether white or black still views her as his own personal sexual object. All one can do is continue to press filmmakers to think outside the box and challenge these negative images and stereotypes.

Woman is the Nigger of the World

John Lennon

Woman is the nigger of the world
Yes she is…think about it
Woman is the nigger of the world
Think about it…do something about it

We make her paint her face and dance
If she won’t be slave, we say that she don’t love us
If she’s real, we say she’s trying to be a man
While putting her down we pretend that she is above us

Woman is the nigger of the world…yes she is
If you don’t believe me take a look to the one you’re with
Woman is the slaves of the slaves
Ah yeah…better scream about it

We make her bear and raise our children
And then we leave her flat for being a fat old mother then
We tell her home is the only place she would be
Then we complain that she’s too unworldly to be our friend

Woman is the nigger of the world…yes she is
If you don’t believe me take a look to the one you’re with
Woman is the slaves of the slaves
Yeah (think about it)

We insult her everyday on TV
And wonder why she has no guts or confidence
When she’s young we kill her will to be free
While telling her not to be so smart we put her down for being so dumb

Woman is the nigger of the world…yes she is
If you don’t believe me take a look to the one you’re with
Woman is the slaves of the slaves
Yes she is…if you believe me, you better scream about it.

We make her paint her face and dance
We make her paint her face and dance
We make her paint her face and dance