Confinement Too Costly For Middle-class Black Women: When Dr. Lisa B. Thompson names modern women who fit the iconic 'Black lady' mold - Coretta Scott King, Anita Hill, Condoleezza Rice and Michelle Obama - you know exactly whom she is trying to liberate. Chances are your mother played this role. You probably do, too, if you are a Black woman involved in higher education.
It is time for middle-class Black women to break the mold, Thompson argues in her book, 'Beyond the Black Lady, Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class' (New Black Studies Series), University of Illinois Press. Being this 'lady' is not all it is cracked up to be. The role is far too confining, and it comes at the high cost of denying any claim to what she calls 'sexual agency.' Such women do so in a valiant effort to 'uplift the race' by countering intractable stereotypes of Black women as 'promiscuous, seductive and sexually irresponsible,' she writes.
To pull it off, they 'have to be so morally upright they are almost inhuman,' she tells Diverse.
