What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what? Guileless and without vanity, we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness. Jealousy we understood and thought natural — a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.

To acknowledge the history of sexism is not to say that sexist articulations do not change over time. The toasts of a hundred years ago are not the same as rap lyrics today. ... The tenor and focus of the attacks on Black women in rap lyrics speak to contemporary heterosexual Black male anxieties. Black male anxieties regarding Black women and their newfound sexual freedoms, as well as Black male fears of vulnerability are cast in distinctly late-twentieth-century language describing the transformation of courtship rituals, marriage, economic equality, and commitment.

It is critical to understand that male rappers did not invent sexism. Black practices have been openly sexist for a long time, and in this regard they keep solid company with many other highly revered dominant Western practices. Today's rappers are not alone in their symbolic objectification of Black women. They have lots of real live, and substantially more powerful, company, none of whom rap or make records.

The problem is ... that technology brings these vernacular practices, the practices most vulnerable to middle-class outrage, into spaces where they might never have been heard twenty-five years ago.

The turn of the century had seen racial violence, disfranchisement, and segregation collapse the public and political world of African Americans into a private world of community institutions—the traditional and expanding world of women. Although female leaders tackled national issues like lynching, and confronted white officials, they did so from their seat of strength—clubs and associations that had a community base and a community objective. Civil rights and black nationalism had not yet molded a public world for black men because accommodation rather than confrontation was the order of the day. In the post-World War I era, as real and figurative confrontation replaced accommodation, a new public and political role was created by and for black men. These roles rebutted women’s allegations of male weakness by highlighting man’s superior strength and fighting abilities. They promised to liberate black women from backbreaking work and sexual violence. Contrary to the [NACW]’s woman-centered race-progress ideology, the proponents of New Negro ideology made race progress dependent on virile masculinity.

Along with other blues singers, Ida Cox validated an image of black women very different from that cultivated by clubwomen, especially those who worked hard at being the best arguments for the race. Cox, Bessie Smith, and Ethel Waters sang songs about black women who were fallible, about women who were disgusted with the migrating, abandoning men who left them when times got hard. Their women were depressed living a life of never ending work and worry; they were sensual women, who enjoyed sex and used it for financial and emotional gain. Although many songs, like Bessie Smith’s “In House Blues,” lamented the plight of women trapped at home, betrayed by the men they loved, other songs like “Freight Train Blues,” sung by Clara Smith, suggested that women could be as footloose as any male:

I’m goin away just to wear you off my mind.
I’m goin away just to wear you off my mind.
And I may be gone for a doggone long long time.