Breaking down stereotypes
In a small townhouse in an Upper Marlboro cul-de-sac live five single black women — three generations of one family.
The eldest is 69-year-old Ruth Lawrence Driver, whom her granddaughters call “Gammy.” In the summer of 1993, Driver and her only child, Tracie Gaines Nelson, moved in when they were divorcing their husbands at the same time. It’s where Nelson’s two teenage daughters, Alani and Niya, have grown up. The fifth woman is Driver’s 63-year-old cousin, who moved in last year to save enough money to return to college and finally get the degree that had eluded her for nearly three decades.
The house in Prince George’s County also is a place where its occupants wrestle, sometimes uncomfortably, with the stereotypes of black women.
Among the favorite television shows of Alani, 17, and Niya, 16, is “Bad Girls Club,” which is about a group of young women who move into a house in a new city for a few months. On the show, the black girls are often the most dramatic — yelling, screaming, cursing.
“They try to make us seem so mean,” Alani says.
She and her sister also watch hip-hop music videos where black women’s primary role is as gyrating backdrops to male rappers. And then there are “Basketball Wives,” “Real Housewives of Atlanta” and “Love and Hip Hop,” all reality-TV programs in which the stars are back-stabbing, conniving, bickering figures you’d hope your grandchildren would never want to be.
“I hope it’s just a passing fad, that they won’t internalize all of these images,” Driver says. “On one of the shows, there were two grown women ready to jump up and fight.”
Nelson talks to her daughters about the differences between reality and fantasy and looks for positive images of black women to put before them. She enrolled Alani in debutante classes organized by her sorority last year and sent Niya to a leadership workshop at which she met black lawyers and businesswomen.
And the teenagers have models of ambition and assertiveness right at home. Their Gammy attended segregated primary schools in North Carolina, where teachers used old textbooks handed down from white schools. She attended a historically black university in 1960 and flourished in spite of the racism and sexism that was present all around her. Now, she is a retired teacher who takes water aerobics classes, goes hand dancing at a nearby senior center and attends church every Sunday.
And the girls’ mom? She also went to a black college, and she studied for her master’s degree in social work while raising two daughters alone. Now, she is a social worker with a tightknit group of black sister-friends. But even with an advanced degree and a respectable job, she could not comfortably support her daughters as a single mother without the help of her mother. Like nearly three-quarters of the black women in the Post-Kaiser survey, Nelson sometimes worries about having enough money to pay her bills. She is constantly telling her daughters to search for careers that will pay them six figures, hoping they will have more financial comfort than she does.
“If a paycheck is missing, they are going to feel it,” Nelson says.
In this townhouse of women, what they feel most is love. There’s always been more laughing than yelling.
“Living in a household of women is portrayed to be this horrible place, but it’s not,” Alani says. “It’s hard sometimes.”
Her sister interrupts. “There are a lot of lessons that come out of this house.”
Alani, a high school senior with average grades and a natural talent for art, received one of those lessons last year when she told her mom that she was not interested in enrolling in a four-year university.
That prompted her mother to shout, “You will go to college!” And that was followed by more yelling that no daughter of hers was going to ruin generations of progress. Tears were shed. Alani relented. And she has begun applying to colleges.
“I didn’t know it was such a big thing,” she says.
Her younger sister has also promised to go to college.
“It’s important to me that they see that they are building upon a foundation,” Nelson says. “We have to continue to build each generation. It’s important for our uplift as a people and our uplift as women.”
Polling director Jon Cohen and polling manager Peyton Craighill contributed to this report.
Coming Tuesday:
Black women’s reflections on Michelle Obama.
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