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Dr. Khadijah Miller

Dr. Amelia Ross-Hammond

Dr. Edith White

How Women Can Support Each Other

By Rosaland Tyler

Associate Editor

New Journal and Guide

     If mood disorders and depression disproportionately strike all women, as a recent report suggests, then do African American women need more support?
    The breadwinner in nearly half of all African-American homes, according to the recent National Urban League report, she may be among the nine million Americans who are classified as the working poor. If she is a homeowner, her home was five times more likely to be financed by a subprime mortgage. More likely to live in a low-income, urban neighborhood, she is more likely to die from heart disease, which is the No. 1 killer of black women.
    “We often don’t take time to breathe. Our own self centeredness blocks our view,” said Dr. Khadijah O. Miller, who heads the interdisciplinary studies program at Norfolk State University.
   “We have brought into ideas that are not always community-minded such as, it’s a cut-throat world—where we believe in the survival of the fittest. But at what cost?”
Some black women have simply developed tunnel vision, said Dr. Amelia Ross-Hammond, a Norfolk State University professor, who was appointed last year to the Council on the Status of Women for the Commonwealth of Virginia.
    Many black women have buried their need for support, said Hammond, who is also the university’s coordinator of service learning and civic engagement. “Earlier women were homemakers and came into the workplace later.”
    But jobs and the necessities of life were not as plentiful for blacks who moved from the farm to factories at the turn of the century, Hammond noted. And scarcity may have made many African American women develop tunnel vision, and “to turn everything into a competition,” Hammond suggested.
   “There’s a fear” that there is not enough for every woman,” Hammond said. “And as soon as we can get over thinking there’s not enough for everybody, the more support women can lend to each other.”
But women are busy. “And that leaves little time for women to spend with each other. There may not always be time, but we can make the decision to make time,” Hammond said.
    If the price of progress is tunnel vision, does it mean black women are often divided into two camps?

Posted March 19, 2008

      First, there are those who obsess over the American dream? Next, there are those, who (see it as unattainable) and turn to fantasy?
    Although hard numbers do not exist to show if tunnel vision has forced more African American women to support the billion-dollar romance-novel industry, Kensington Publishing launched its first line of black romance novels in 1994.
However, many hard-working black women simply put down magazines such as True Confessions or other romance books with white characters.
Considered a growth area by industry experts, the black-romance-novel business has few hard numbers on how many readers or writers are black.
But novelist Gwynne Forster says her readers are often attracted to stories that depict black men as characters who are caring, loving, respectful and nurturing. “Here we see ourselves as we know ourselves to be,” Forster said.
NSU’s Miller added, “Circumstances have taught black women to function without love,” “But without love, we are not at our best. We all desire love but may not be willing to admit it. We all crave it.”
    Long before the Katrina crisis showed black folks suffering in New Orleans, there was a compassion gap.
Few people recognized that they had a moral obligation to provide a helping hand to those in need.
   “They are scolded and told that they have caused their own misfortunes. That’s our compassion gap,” notes a 2006 American Sociological Association report titled: The Compassion Gap in American Poverty Policy;
   “The compassion gap has been greatly increased by the revival in the 1980s and 1990s of the very old theory that the real source of poverty is bad behavior.
   “This theory defines these people as morally deficient. Its proponents assume that anyone with enough grit and determination can escape poverty.”
But “the compassion gap does not just happen,” the 2006 report notes. “It results from two key dynamics.” First powerful public groups insist that support for the poor creates dependence.

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