Actions

Elaine Richardson’s “To Protect and Serve”: African American Female Literacies brought light to a subject that has been in my mind for a couple of months now. This subject is the actions of our Black females and how those actions portray the Black female community as a whole. The reason that it is on my mind is because whenever I turn on the television, search the internet, or even walk outside I observe “twisted images of Black womanhood” (676). I see women walking around with barely any clothes on, I hear women greet each other with “hey hoe”, and I even watch women fight each other on national television for fun. These actions of our sisters cast Black women in a negative light, which helps the view of White supremacists who already think of us as “unladylike, unfit, and immoral” (682).

Something needs to be done to stop these “ghettoized images” (676) of the Black female. I believe that we need to begin teaching the younger generations the truths about becoming a woman. So, I agree with Richardson when she states “woman is the child’s first teacher”, because it is from the mother or motherly figure that little girls learn to become women. It is the “mother’s tongue” (677) that influences the child first. This concept of the “mother’s tongue” (677) is also brought on by Richardson. It is the idea that we learn all that we know from the mother tongue. Therefore, if the older mothers talk to the younger generations and alert them to change their actions then, maybe we will be able to remove the negative light that we are in today. Maybe we will be able to stop being stereotyped as “heartless Nigger bitches” and “wenches” (676). 

                                                   Work Cited

Richardson, Elaine. "To Protect and Serve": African American Female Literacies. College Compositions and Communication, Vol. 53, No. 4. June 2002. pp. 675-704 . Print. Sept. 2010