ABSTRACT
Black women are complex beings, yet history has not treated us as such. We are frequently characterized as sexual or angry or even magical, but communication scholarship often fails to account for Black women, whose identities do not conform to society’s mischaracterizations. This chapter addresses how US Black women have been misplaced and made both invisible and hypervisible in history. The authors argue that while Black women’s representation is slowly increasing in contexts such as politics and the media, theorizing about Black women has yet to catch up with this progress. The authors offer three criteria that must be included when discussing Black women to avoid the erasure or simplification of our experiences: Black women’s complexity, Black women’s strength and need for refuge, and Black women’s joy and imagination.
