The relocation of the angry black woman

At the beginning of my journey my intention was to add as many visual images, articles and theory that reflected my own story. As I got a better understanding of what I actually wrote about, how I wanted to articulate my story and put the focus on I changed the outcome of my archive. The essence of my archive is not to show the most but show the items that influenced and impacted myself and my story the most. At the end a lot of items didn't benefit or added any value add all. It showcased how disorganised I started the formation of my story. The essence of my archive is showing how and what contributed to the articulation of the road to my identity and reflection of it.

The I am Tired project, by Paula Akpan and Harriet Evans
https://theimtiredproject.com/aboutus/

Perception in everyone’s words or eyes may be different but in my own words it means the way we view things seeing and analysed from our own mind and perspective. Your own perception is created through the process of steps that begin with stimuli in the environment and ends with your own interpretation.
Growing up my family had a lot of influence on me as a young girl. On the good and bad moments, positive and negative thoughts, differentiating good from evil and the other way around. How I needed to behave, what I could and couldn’t do. Me being a Surinamese/Nigerian young woman I had always been curious about our heritage. What shaped our country, how our traditions came about but also how I /they shaped my view of the world. I was taught to be proud of where I came from, to wear my heritage and blackness as a prize on my sleeve. The female members in our family were seen as strong black women, who are independent got their lives and business together, but most importantly always keep it together and strong for themselves and the family.

Being so brought up on our history also had a down side. From a young age, I started to realize how society and people were shaped. I started to realize how the proudness that I was brought up with wasn’t embraced by everyone. For example, I started to notice how black people were portrayed as lazy, as criminals, not able to pursue their dreams, only fit for certain job descriptions or dangerous. The concepts that immediately come to mind are the construction of systematic racism and stereotyping of black people within a white build system and perspective of society.

I’ve always questioned why and how. Why do people create these stereotypes to portray a certain ethnic group? To create a narrative that doesn’t define who we as people are. This question has always been something I wanted answers to. I was brought up with one of these narratives, to perceive myself as ‘strong black woman’. In my family being strong showed strength, ability to conquer each and every situation. Always standing on both feet regardless of how you feel. But doesn’t this mask eventually fall off? How many times do I have to motivate myself to keep staying strong even when I feel I don’t have any more strength left and I’m actually tired? This narrative has impacted to me a lot. It helped me remember that regardless of what I go through I would make or break my own life and no one would be in the way of achieving what I want. Being a strong black woman to me also feels like having a lot of responsibilities, assumptions or behaviour thrown or shown towards me. People already having their prejudice ready without actually getting to know me rather than the strong black woman that I perceived to be.

‘‘’Representation is the way which meaning is given to the things depicted, how the media presents reality.’’ (‘Representation & the Media: Featuring Stuart Hall’, 2006). This quote by Stuart Hall regarding the representation of identity is a great introduction to the relation of my own identity viewed by others. Representation is organised by the hegemonic elites to create a fixed meaning of the perception of society. Stereotypes are generated because of the limited representation the hegemonic elites show us. Regardless of the situations or perceptions the hegemonic organisations want to create, in each case they offer us a repeated lack of representation of aspects of the world in order to attempt to fix a preferred or dominant meaning in society. Why? To assert dominance. To keep those of non- elite or minorities in their place. The way black women have been represented in the media plays a big part in the way black women are viewed and their behaviour is portrayed. I can honestly say that I noticed the lack of representation of black women in Dutch society more when I started studying for my bachelors. Why? Because that specific moment I started to have doubts about myself but also the way black women were perceived. I couldn’t identify myself with anyone in the media rather than my own family members when it came to accomplishments and goals.

According to Redmond Amsterdam a non-profit organisation, black women are underrepresented in the Dutch media (RedmondAmsterdam, 2013). When we do see women of colour they are often seen as exotic or hypersexual. In several Dutch shows, movies or commercials black women are portrayed in a stereotypical way, with a heavy accent, shouting or being loud, living as a single mom in the cities Amsterdam Bijlmer or Rotterdam. We hardly see any families of colour or dark-skinned women in the mainstream media, they’re either mixed or shown as a family of a lighter skin complexion.
A prime example of a movie where the representation of a black woman was fully perpetuated as ‘loud and obnoxious’ was in the movie Alleen maar nette mensen written by Robert Vuijsje. The movie depicts a clash between two clichéd and caricatured cultures, a proper Jewish guy who meets and finds excitement in the relation with a ‘ghetto fabulous’ black women with a curvaceous body. Not only is this the worst example of the representation of a black woman from Amsterdam, but also shows how stories written by white men keep on asserting the dominance amongst the representation of black women in the media. How can the perception of a white men, written by a white man visualize the reality of a black woman? Well not! To me the white washing of black stories in particular the representation of black woman shows the mediocre worldviews of the white Dutch people who create or are offered platforms to represent ‘the people’. In the white Dutch society, you either have to choose between being a woman (while accepting that the representation of women in the Netherlands is shaped true the eyes of white feminist) or being black, which means you are seen as a minority, you should be rightfully happy that you’re able to live here and experience the so called multi-cultural Holland.

Besides the lack of representation, the trope angry black woman was a term that was used quite often against me. The new school environment made me second guess the aspect of myself that I was the proudest of, my identity and heritage. These doubts and thoughts made me reflect on the location of myself as a young black woman and how people, mostly white people at my new school would perceive me. The negative assumptions of me being the only black girl in my class interfered with my confidence. Being capable and the relation between my identity and the way I looked at myself.
My own context of the stereotyping of black women is mainly structured by the American context. Throughout history black women were depicted in reductive ways that denied the different experiences and emotions they had. Depictions or the representation of black women has been used to put forward oppressed ideologies and generalisation. Caricatures of black women have been around in western culture for centuries. They were rooted in the transatlantic slave trade when stereotypes were used to commodify black bodies and justify slavery. The trope ‘angry black woman’ portrays black woman as sassy, ill-mannered and ill-tempered by nature (Prasad, 2018). This trope is often used as aggressive encounters to deflect attention from the aggressor and to project blame onto the target. Used to shame black women who speak on social inequalities, complain about their circumstances or demand fair treatment (Wikipedia contributors, 2020).
Being the angry black woman is a character used not only to label individuals but is also capitalized off in today’s society (Al Jazeera English, 2020). What hurts me the most is that even though there has been a tremendous change in the way black women are represented and by who, to me there is still a heavy feeling on this trope labelled to individuals such as myself. Their needs to be questioned how the stories told through the eyes of the white world are used by finding our humanity in their stories and the way they are represented. But why can’t white people find their humanity in our stories? White society in particular white women do not get labelled when they share their emotions, pains or stories because of the prioritization of white women’s needs and the assumption that white women’s experiences represent the experiences of all women, when in fact they do not (Al Jazeera English, 2020). Instead of being fearful of black women and their stories relating her to a sassy character, eye and neck rolls, maybe we need to listen to her. See why she’s angry, if the emotions shown or spoken are actual anger or just her being who she is. Black women will get angry, because we are human beings to that have the right to feel what we feel without being labelled as anything else.

The label ‘angry black woman’ is supressing the true emotions because society doesn’t want to hear it. As soon as black women speak up about certain issues or expresses her feelings this label is being thrown. The trope ‘angry black woman’ exists to dehumanize and silence black women. It is a clear example of discrediting us as women and legitimizes the mistreatment and submission. Hall also argues that the crisis of identities exists to the extent of how they are shaped, what they consist of and in which directions they move. It consists of examining and identifying the contradictory features and how further developments within society and representation influence cultural or self-identities. The negative representation of black women was an aspect that completely influenced my self-identity. I myself experienced a crisis in self-identity, because it made me choose between the identification of being black or a woman.
The bodies of black women in Dutch society are often policed. It is very evident that racist and sexist trajectories are broader than the visual representations of black women but are ingrained in our society. The misrepresentation of women of colour is a continuous process that is re-entered in the visual representation of women of colour on a constant basis. Looking at the example of the movie Allleen maar nette mensen and the way Sylvana Simons a Dutch politician who’s been shadowed by the treats and racist remarks thrown towards her, demonstrates the invisibility of woman of colour in the mainstream media. The way black women are represented is never positive. Its either a stereotypical visualization of our reality or a negative representation due to having an opinion. The new school environment I was in made think about aspects of myself that I would put on mute, to adjust myself. Such as the way I spoke and my behaviour to more ‘proper”. Proper means; of the required or correct type or form, suitable or appropriate. My class was predominantly white with maybe 3 to 4 people from different backgrounds including myself, which didn’t give me a comfortable feeling at all.
The embodiment of proper behaviour adjustment to being taken seriously meant that I had to remove or rather mute parts of my blackness but also cleared away a trope that was used against me a lot. Code-switching or language alternations happens when a speaker alternates between languages or language varieties in the context of a single conversation. Alternating the way, I spoke within the environment I was in made me assess the structure of the environment or rather the conversations I was having. The issue laid in the part of seeing language as a social structure within that environment. The notion taken in relation to identity and language varieties evoked to being taken seriously (Gafaranga, 2002).
The norm of being taken seriously and seen as intelligent became so dominant that I felt forced to adapt myself without even knowing how or what the environment felt like. I felt like I had to comply with a standard determined from a Western white perspective. The norm is to see one's own culture and ethnicity as superior to other cultures and ethnicities (Baeten, 2018). Today's society is structured from this perspective. This has a number of unwritten rules when it comes to code of conduct, learning environment, talent development and citizenship. In many cases this is not the same as the natural development of people from a different cultural background or ethnicity. I wanted the environment to accept me for who I was rather than the colour of my skin. So, alternating the way I spoke was in my eyes a strategy of survival against a stereotype that I didn’t wanted to be perceived as. Claiming to be a part of a group that I didn’t straightforwardly belonged to (Cashman, 2002).

To refer back to the research question of how the lack of representation in the Dutch media effected myself identity, I came to a conclusion that regardless of how well I spoke or tried to speak, I was and never will be accepted as fully Dutch. And I don’t have to be. The labels that are made in Dutch society or context in relation to the representation of black women do not reflect me as a person. They can create prejudices of me, but it is in my own power how much I let these prejudices, or stereotypes affect me and the way people look at me or the steps that I take to build or shape my own future. From my experience the embodiment of the change or adjustment of language felt like a very shameful experience, because I was so focused on portraying myself as someone I was not. But I now realize that it was a survival strategy or defence mechanism against the way black women have been represented and not wanted to be associated with.