To Protect and To Serve

Elaine Richardson’s To Protect and To Serve is a very provocative reading. When it targets some of the Black stereotypical labels I am offended, saddened, and upset by the Black women who actually embody these roles. Richardson speaks about how Black women are known as Mammies (usually the nanny and caretaker for white children), Jezebels, wenches (promiscuous women), and hyper-sexed beings. She even talks about how when she used a Yahoo search engine to search terms like “Black Women” and “young Black girls” the majority of the results were pornographic websites. This stood out to me because of the argumentative research paper that I have just recently completed. In my paper I discussed how Black women are viewed as sexual objects and highly degraded in media. To make it worst there are some Black women who do not care about the negative stereotypes associated with us as a group, and continue to portray themselves in a less than respectable way.
As the reading progresses I also appreciate the way that Richardson speaks about mothers. She shows how a mother is very important to the growth of her children. Regardless to how the world may see her, she is still of upmost importance to her children. Even though she may not be well educated, coming from a Black community, and somewhat unable to provide her children a formal education, she has a lot to contribute to their development and must help to shape them so that they may gain knowledge and know right from wrong. This can help to raise a generation that always does the right thing and help to change the negative perception of Black women. Even though some people object to this relationship because of the language of the traditional “mother tongue”, I believe that it is very important. A child must know their history as a minority and know all about their parent’s past struggles. They should be able to relate to the parent just as they should relate to the school teacher. Richardson’s writing helped me to consider the growth and progress of Black women.


Vernee Pelage