In Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody examines how her gender influences the oppression she faces as a Black woman due to the intersection of racism and gender inequality. As soon as Anne begins to grow into a teenager and a young woman, the men in her life start to treat her differently, and begins to receive excessive attention that makes her uncomfortable. The white men, especially, harass her and make her feel unsafe. While Anne is growing up in Centreville, Mississippi, it is common for white men to have affairs with Black women. But whereas a Black man involved in sexual relationship with a white woman and would be gravely punished, these white men evade punishment. This double standard, as well as the frequency of Black women being raped that Anne sees while working as a civil rights activist in the city of Canton, Mississippi normalizes the idea that Black women are sex objects and therefore less worthy of protection than white women. Because of the danger this double standard poses to Black women, Anne’s experience working for the CORE in Canton differs from that of her male colleagues. In order to stay safe, the women working for CORE must stay in the house without ways to blow off steam. Anne’s intense work in activism without any sort of release contributes to her extreme burnout from the Movement. So, though most of the victims of the racially motivated murders that Moody’s memoir explores are Black men, Anne’s personal experiences show how gender inequality creates different experience for Black women, often exacerbating the oppression Black women experience due to their race.
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Gender and Racism Quotes in Coming of Age in Mississippi
I’m still haunted by dreams of the time we lived on Mr. Carter’s plantation. Lots of Negroes lived on his place. Like Mama and Daddy they were all farmers. We all lived in rotten two-room shacks. But ours stood out from the others because it was up on the hill with Mr. Carter’s big white house, overlooking the farms and the other shacks below.
She treated me just like I was one of her friends and I never thought of our color difference when I was with her, except when she paid me.
As they sang… I had chills all over my body and I was overcome by a sudden fear. The faces of the whites had written on them some strange yearning. The Negroes looked sad…. I got a feeling that there existed some kind of sympathetic relationship between the older Negroes and whites that the younger people didn’t quite get or understand.
A Negro man had a hard road to travel when looking for employment. A Negro woman, however, could always go out and earn a dollar a day because whites always needed a cook, a baby-sitter, or someone to do housecleaning.
“Just do your work like you don’t know nothing,” she said. “That boy’s a lot better off in heaven than he is here.”
I was fifteen years old when I began to hate people. I hated the white men who murdered Emmett Till and I hated all the other whites who were responsible for the countless murders Mrs. Rice had told me about and those I vaguely remembered from childhood. But I also hated Negroes. I hated them for not standing up and doing something about the murders. In fact, I think I had a stronger resentment towards Negroes for letting whites kill them than towards the whites.
I looked so good that it became somewhat of a problem. Whenever I was in town white men would stare me into the ground.
[Emma] didn’t blame Wilbert for shooting her. She placed the blame where it rightfully belonged, that is, upon the whites in Woodville and how they had set things up to make it almost impossible for the Negro men to earn a living.
