It led to a new subject category (“Woman Slaves”) in the Library of Congress and was voted as being among the 100 most admired American history books by the Organization of American Historians.Īll of which makes her uniquely situated to understand what successful African-American women – and all black women – are up against. She’s written widely on the history of black women in America, and her monograph Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South was highly lauded and widely influential. She codirected “ The Black Atlantic: Race, Nation and Gender” project at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, was a research professor at the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women, and is chair of the Rutgers University Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Populations in Rutgers History. She’s a Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History, a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and a former chair of the Department of History at the School of Arts and Sciences. White is more than conversant with success. “Sometimes," she says, “the more success you have, the more threatening you appear.”
And yet Deborah Gray White isn’t celebrating – yet. If you sort Americans by gender and ethnicity and look at the percentage of each group attending some form of higher education, you’ll see that African-American women are enrolled in college at a higher percentage than any other group. It would seem to be cause for unequivocal celebration.
Over the next several weeks, Rutgers Today will be highlighting many of the women whose work is making a noticeable impact. Before the Women’s Marches and the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements made headlines and brought issues of women's rights back to the forefront, Rutgers scholars had been working for decades as ardent advocates through their research, teaching and outreach.
0 kommentar(er)
