Misogyny accepted within many of America's marginalized communities could be problematic in the upcoming election.
Waukesha, WI - Oct. 14, 2024 - A few days ago, President Barack Obama admonished some Black men for seeking "excuses" not to back a female presidential candidate. The conversation stems from a supposed history of anti-woman rhetoric and misogyny that has been openly embraced in many black communities. From the barbershop to the church, the rhetoric has been that in order to uplift black men, black women must shrink themselves and take a second seat.
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What is misogynoir?
[See More @ A focus on misogynoir – the anti-Black forms of misogyny that Black women experience | OpenLearn - Open University; dated: 9/30/22 ]
The term ‘misogynoir’ was coined based on the concept of intersectionality by Black feminist scholar Moya Bailey, and refers to the specific forms of misogyny that Black women encounter at the intersection of racism and sexism. Misogynoir has a significant influence on the lives and online experiences of Black women but is still relatively understudied.
Tone policing, racial gaslighting, white centering and defensiveness were identified as prominent forms of misogynoir in scholarly literature.
White centering is when white people make it about themselves, so they do not have to be uncomfortable or hold themselves accountable for their actions of harming, hurting or ignoring Black people or their feelings or actions towards them.
Racial gaslighting is denying that racism exists or arguing that Black people ‘always make it about race’.
Tone policing is a tactic that is used to dismiss an idea being communicated because the person expressing it appears to be angry, sad, frustrated, or in an emotionally charged state.
Defensiveness typically appears directly in the form of justification of one’s own or another person’s behaviors, rejecting any accusations of racism without reflection.
Most individuals are still unaware of what misogynoir is or how it impacts Black women generally, and when Black women speak up, their experiences are often ignored or deemed unreliable. Misogynoir is a significant problem since it may impair Black women’s self-esteem and confidence and increase their likelihood of suffering anxiety and stress, to name a few effects.
Amnesty International found that 41% of women who had experienced online harassment or abuse felt their physical safety was jeopardized at least once. In addition, though the vast majority of online social networking sites prohibit hate speech, it is incredibly difficult to monitor all of their content due to the enormous scale of their networks and web applications. Even while these social media platforms have extensively been banning and monitoring hate speech, research suggests that these approaches are not as successful for particularly marginalized groups, such as Black women, or for intersectional types of hate speech, such as Islamophobia and Antisemitism. Hence, it is essential to examine techniques to aid platforms in reducing the quantity of hatred aimed against Black women.
In our initial investigation of this phenomenon, we presented a mix of computational and socio-linguistic methodologies for analyzing the public response on Twitter to the self-reported misogynoir experiences of four Black women in technology. Dr Timnit Gebru, April Christiana Curley, Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks were the four Black women whose cases we analyzed, as they had previously worked at Google, Facebook and Pinterest. Our preliminary findings suggest that a lexical approach is insufficient to detect all cases of online misogynoir. Nevertheless, our qualitative analysis reveals that racial gaslighting appears to be a big issue for the women in our case studies and a substantial number of their supporters.
The hashtag #BelieveBlackWomen was a theme across all of the case studies. This is related to tone policing in that if one ignores the existence of racial injustice, one may also disregard the resulting rage. It is also related to white centring in that it is possible to reject racial injustice with alternate reasons, which is both sexist and racist towards Black women (‘whitesplaining’ racism to those who encounter it). While comparable trends may be observed in how women are treated for addressing sexism and how Black men may talk about racism, unique preconceptions about Black women create barriers that neither white women nor Black men encounter.
The study also revealed that misogynoir remains a very contextual and intimate experience; hence, including direct misogynoir experience may assist us in recognizing it. As a result, we have created Misogynoir Online, a website dedicated to collecting the experiences of Black women who have experienced misogynoir. We seek to analyze and investigate these experiences to understand how they emerge online and discover ways to mitigate them. In addition, we are planning another study to examine how having a lived experience of being a target of misogynoir and understanding it affects the way individuals annotate or recognize misogynoir and non-misogynoir messages. This study will compare Black women and other groups with other combinations of intersecting identities (specifically, Black men, white men, and white women) to understand how privileges associated with race and gender impact how people annotate misogynoir messages.
If you want to take part in this study
We ask that if you have encountered misogynoir, even if it is simply ordinary, tiny, or you are so used to it you have accepted it, please share your story to demonstrate how widespread the problem is. Share your misogynoir experiences here: https://misogynoironline.kmi.open.ac.uk/
Read the paper here: Misogynoir: Public Online Response Towards Self-Reported Misogynoir
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Misogynoir: challenges in detecting intersectional hateÂ
Joseph Kwarteng is a PhD Researcher at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) of The Open University and a member of the Social Data Science group. His research project is aimed at investigating Intersectionality in Hate Speech Detection with a focus on ‘Misogynoir’ - a unique form of misogyny experienced by Black women with the intersection of sexism and racism. His study explores how misogynoir manifests online and how it could be mitigated since existing technologies for hate speech detection do not address this type of hate and protect Black women accordingly. Â
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