The Mammy Caricature Anti-black Imagery Jim Crow Museum

In addition, Black men and women are overrepresented in jobs that have nonstandard hours of employment. Thirty-four percent of young Black children living in a single-parent, low-income household—and 70 percent of young Black children living in a two-parent, low-income household—have parents who work a combination of standard and nonstandard hours. Nineteen percent of Black children living with two parents had one parent who worked overnight hours, and 6 percent had both parents working overnight hours. Furthermore, 23 percent of those living in a single-parent household had a parent working weekend hours.

The Jezebel, a stereotype of a sexually voracious, promiscuous black woman, was the counterimage of the demure Victorian lady in every way. The idea stemmed from Europeans' first encounter with seminude women in tropical Africa. The African practice of polygamy was attributed to uncontrolled lust, and tribal dances were construed as pagan orgies, in contrast to European Christian chastity. The Mandingo is a stereotype of a sexually voracious black man with a huge penis, invented by white slave owners to promote the notion that black people were not civilized but "animalistic" by nature. They asserted, for example, that in "Negroes all the passions, emotions, and ambitions, are almost wholly subservient to the sexual instinct" and "this construction of the oversexed black male parlayed perfectly into notions of black bestiality and primitivism." As a Black woman, I was brought up to undermine stereotypes, to defy the odds.

Of course, knowing the rate at which students are hooking up does not tell us how much they have casual intercourse, because not all hookups involve intercourse. As students define the term “hookup,” a hookup may involve little or even nothing more than making out, and these data show that about 40% of hookups involve intercourse. To get at whether students had had casual intercourse, the survey asked if they had ever had sex outside of an exclusive relationship. The question didn’t clarify what was meant by “sex.” However, there is lots of qualitative evidence that heterosexual students usually take the term to mean intercourse, whereas a majority of what they call hookups do not involve intercourse. Racial groups also differ little in their ideas of the best age to do these things, with the average age seen as ideal for marriage between 25 and 28 for all groups and the average ideal age for having a first child between 27 and 29.

The enduring legacy of slavery, in addition to subsequent discriminatory and racist housing policies, is evident in the geography of where Black people live across the country. During the Great Migration, from 1916 to 1970, millions of Black Americans left the rural South for Northern and Western cities to get away from the oppression of racism and White hostility and to search for better employment opportunities. In the past 30 years, however, more affluent Black Americans have participated in a “reverse migration,” moving back to the South to settle in cities with lower costs of living and better economic and educational opportunities. As a result, Black American families and children across all economic strata are currently highly concentrated in the Southern parts of the country and along the East Coast. Fertility rates for Black women have declined slightly over the past 10 years, from 70.8 births per 1,000 women in 2008 to 62.0 per 1,000 in 2018. Thirty-seven percent of Black women have a first birth between age 20 and age 24, and birth rates for Black women are highest from ages 25 to 29.

Meanwhile, everywhere we look, women like me see successful black men coupled with fair-skinned female partners who pass Like the paper bag test – a remnant of the Reconstruction era, where the only black people worthy of attention had to be lighter than a paper bag. This “test” was even instituted in places such as historically black colleges and universities as an informal part of the admissions process. Culturally, Black Americans have long highly valued romantic partnerships, marriage, and children. The percentage of Black women ever married, however, is lower than those who have cohabitated, at 37 percent. Importantly, each of these theories—implicitly, and sometimes explicitly—acknowledges the potential role of systemic racism and its impact on the marriage rate of Black Americans. Because of the angry black woman stereotype, black women tend to become desensitized about their own feelings to avoid judgment.

Between the last recession and 2016, the wealth gap between Black families with children under age 18 and both White and Hispanic families with children under age 18 widened, despite the income gap remaining relatively constant. In 2019, median household income for Black households was $45,438, compared to $56,113 for Hispanic households, $76,057 for non-Hispanic White households, and $98,174 for Asian households. Black women are having children at the same ages at which they may be enrolled in school or entering the workforce. Three decades after Cooper published “A Voice from the South,” fellow Black feminist Amy Jacques Garvey shed light on the role of Black women in advancing equity and prosperity for Black people and all people of color.