“Have race and gender relations made positive strides toward progression or have they merely shifted into new, different forms of cruelty?”

In the past, state and social institutions were unhindered in their blatant support of race and gender hierarchy, thus paving the way for many of the current conditions for underrepresented groups. Past relations must certainly be understood through a historical lens to fully understand the “progress” in our society.

Racism and patriarchy is embedded in law, education, media, and entertainment systems to ensure that institutional power remained solely within the dominant group.

Given the landscape of our hierarchical society: how do we assess the social, political, and economic state of the Black woman?

Folks are largely disconnected from the struggles that Black communities face because masses are unaware of the historical contingencies that led to their present-day circumstances. Lessons on slavery and Martin Luther King Jr. are a skewed focus that does not represent a full panoramic view of the physical, mental, emotional, and psychological effects of state systems on Black people, especially Black women.

Black youth, specifically Black women and girls, often harbor emotions of anger, guilt, shame, and confusion about social expectations of them as hypersexual, loud, or mean. This is because there are no historical references of their generational experiences provided in public education institutions. As a Black woman educated through these very institutions, I was freed from these similar emotions once I independently sought to understand history as it relates to my own identity. Peace of mind is restored once preconceived notions are understood as a product of history rather than one’s own individual being.

The 18th century London Morning Post wrote, of her body: “her contour and formation certainly surpass anything of the kind ever seen in Europe, or perhaps ever produced on Earth.” Saartije “Sarah” Baartman was taken from her slave lodge in Cape Town, Africa and brought to London to be presented before Europeans in circuses, freak shows, and science fairs.

According to scholars Pamela Scully and Clifton Crais:

“Sarah Baartman had to learn to act the part of the Hottentot Venus. On stage, Baartman had to erase aspects of her personal history, experience, and identity in order to make her performance of the Venus credible to the audience that was staring at her. As Rosemarie Garland-Thompson has noted, “staring is structured seeing. It enacts a cultural choreography between a disembodied spectator and an embodied spectacle that attempts to verify norms and establish differences.” Sarah Baartman’s significance to the English public was indeed that she was “au-thentic” and representative of a people allegedly without a history.”

Exhibiting “exotic” humans for the interest and delectation of the crowd was a norm within European societies. Hundreds of thousands of people visited “human zoos” where they could watch people of Afrikan descent act out war dances and supposed religious rituals. What started as wide-eyed curiosity from Paris, London and Berlin observers turned into scientific work around racial theory which formed a foundation for law, education, media, and entertainment systems.

France hosted “The World Fair” which housed the “Congolese Villages”, a space that presented nude or partially-nude Black women and children in cages. The village was visited by 28 million people in 1889 and through the middle of the 20th century, a number of the original 297 of those in the Congolese villages died and were buried in a mass, unmarked grave. Europeans did not stop attending human zoos until the advent of motion pictures in 1958.

Deeply rooted historical biases and racism still have a traumatic impact on 21st century Black women globally.

Sarah Baartman, the Black women within the World Fair and Congolese Villages, and more were forced to fabricate performative identities of Blackness for the entertainment of paying audiences. Still today, Black women feel the effects of pervading biases that challenge their sense of identity, efficacy and viability; whether tangible or intangible, not all damage can be documented, contextualized or studied for a statistic.

Black women should continue to understand ancestry as it pertains to the self in order to reject false notions of Black womanhood and reshape our present and future narratives.