KOLUMN Magazine
Share
On May 16, in a congressional hearing room built to look calm on camera—wood paneling, nameplates, the choreography of decorum—an insult landed with the casual precision of a schoolyard jab. It wasn’t about legislation. It wasn’t about the witness. It was about eyelashes.
Representative Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat from Texas, had been speaking when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene took aim at her appearance, a remark that prompted a flare of outrage and an instantly shareable moment. Crockett later described the double-bind Black women in public life navigate: be polished enough to be “professional,” but not so visible you become a target; respond sharply and you’re “angry,” respond softly and you’re “weak.” In an interview that followed, she made the point with a clarity that sounded less like spin than survival: Black women often feel they must be “flawless” to be treated as baseline competent.
The exchange was quickly packaged for social media. Clips traveled. Reaction videos multiplied. The outrage economy did what it does: strip a moment of its context, refit it as content, and sell it back to viewers as proof of whatever they already believed.
In that churn sits a distinct, increasingly influential subculture: prominent Black American conservative men—Larry Elder, C.J. Pearson, Brandon Tatum, the Hodgetwins, Terrence K. Williams—who have built audiences by presenting themselves as translators between right-wing politics and Black life. Their brands vary: radio-studio seriousness, youth-activist swagger, ex-cop authority, twin-bro banter, “comedian” provocation. But the through-line is familiar. When Black women enter public life, these men often become part of the megaphone that turns critique into contempt—deploying a repertoire of stereotypes America has used for centuries to manage Black women’s visibility.
This story is not about disagreement with Black women politicians. Democratic politics is not sacred; no politician is. Scrutiny is democratic oxygen. The question is what kind of scrutiny is being monetized—and why it so predictably concentrates on Black women’s bodies, sexuality, tone, and “place.” What does it mean that attacks that would be career-ending if directed at most other groups—sexualized insinuations, body-shaming, imagery that rhymes with slavery’s dehumanization—continue to circulate as mainstream-adjacent entertainment, sometimes boosted by Black male voices who insist they are merely being “honest,” “funny,” or “anti-woke”?
To answer that, you have to start further back than TikTok clips and cable-news panels. You have to start with the old American archetypes: the ones designed to justify ownership, violence, and exclusion—and later to rationalize why Black women should not be listened to when they demanded rights.
The old stereotypes never died. They just learned new platforms.
American politics did not invent contempt for Black women; it refined it. What social media has changed is not the substance of the stereotypes, but their speed, reach, and profitability. The controlling images that once traveled through plantation ledgers, minstrel stages, pulp newspapers, and evening news broadcasts now circulate through timelines, podcasts, livestreams, and algorithmically boosted outrage. They arrive faster, repeat more often, and feel, to many consumers, less like ideology than entertainment.
To understand why attacks on Black women in politics so often default to the body, the bedroom, or the lash of ridicule, it helps to be precise about where those ideas come from—and what work they have always done.
From the beginning of American slavery, Black women were forced into an impossible narrative trap. Enslaved labor required them to be strong enough to work like men and reproduce future laborers, while white supremacy required them to be cast as morally deficient, sexually excessive, and emotionally unrefined. The solution was stereotype: a set of myths that explained exploitation as inevitability and violence as order.
The Jezebel figure framed Black women as innately sexual, erasing the reality of coercion and rape by transforming assault into appetite. This was not merely cultural insult; it was legal and social infrastructure. If Black women were imagined as always willing, then no violation needed redress. That logic does not disappear when the law changes. It mutates. In contemporary politics, it resurfaces when Black women’s ambition is sexualized, when professional advancement is framed as transactional, or when their personal lives are treated as public evidence against their legitimacy.
The Mammy myth, by contrast, sanitized exploitation. It cast Black women as nurturing, loyal, and self-sacrificing—safe figures who existed to support others but never to lead themselves. In political life, this stereotype emerges as an unspoken expectation: that Black women should serve quietly, uplift generously, and accept disrespect with grace. When they fail to perform gratitude—when they demand power rather than proximity—they are treated as having violated an unwritten contract.
Then there is Sapphire, the template behind the “Angry Black Woman.” Loud. Sharp-tongued. Overbearing. This stereotype has always been especially useful in democratic contexts, because it delegitimizes dissent. If a Black woman raises her voice, critiques power, or displays authority, her argument can be dismissed not on its merits but on her supposed temperament. Emotion replaces substance; tone replaces truth.
These images were never meant to operate in isolation. They function as a system, allowing Black women to be condemned no matter how they behave. Too quiet, and they are invisible. Too assertive, and they are aggressive. Too polished, and they are artificial. Too expressive, and they are unprofessional. The trap is total.
What is new is the platform logic that rewards this framing. In the influencer economy, conflict is currency. Content that provokes anger, laughter, or disgust travels farther than content that explains. Stereotypes are efficient because they are already familiar; they require little setup and no proof. A viewer does not need to know anything about a congressional bill to recognize the insinuation that a Black woman is “loud,” “sexual,” or “out of place.” The algorithm does the rest.
Digital culture also collapses distance. A slur uttered in a statehouse, a joke made on a podcast, or a comment left on a livestream can be clipped, memed, and redistributed thousands of times within hours. Each repetition strips context and adds confidence. By the time the target responds—if she responds at all—the stereotype has already done its work. The narrative has settled.
This is why contemporary attacks on Black women in politics so often feel less like debate than ritual. They follow scripts that predate the Constitution, dressed in the vernacular of the moment. A congresswoman’s hairstyle becomes a referendum on seriousness. A vice president’s dating history becomes a political theory. A first lady’s physique becomes evidence of moral disorder. These are not spontaneous cruelties. They are rehearsed gestures, made newly efficient by technology.
And because these stereotypes are now laundered through entertainment—through comedy, commentary, “hot takes,” and reaction videos—they arrive softened, plausible, deniable. The speaker can always retreat: It was just a joke. You’re too sensitive. This is what free speech looks like. But the impact is cumulative. The audience learns who is laughable, who is suspect, who does not belong.
In this sense, the platforms are not neutral stages. They are accelerants. They reward the recycling of America’s oldest stories about Black womanhood while insisting those stories are fresh, fearless, or forbidden. The stereotypes did not die with Jim Crow or retire with the end of segregation. They adapted. They optimized. They learned how to trend.
And once normalized online, they are ready for export—into cable news, campaign rhetoric, and the halls of Congress itself—where they attach themselves to real women, real offices, and real power, with consequences that extend far beyond the screen.
When “first” is also a target: The case studies America keeps repeating
Consider what has been done to Michelle Obama, a figure whose public posture was so carefully measured it became its own form of armor. Even that did not protect her. She was repeatedly described in language that animalized her, mocked her body, and questioned her femininity—an old tactic in new clothes. In 2016, a West Virginia official’s racist post described her as an “ape in heels,” a line that ricocheted nationwide, and the incident became emblematic of the way racism and sexism fuse when the target is a Black woman at the symbolic center of the nation.
Or take Vice President Kamala Harris. Her political career has been shadowed by a particular style of smear: insinuations that her professional rise is sexual, transactional, or otherwise illegitimate—Jezebel logic updated for a LinkedIn era. Analysts of online discourse have documented meme ecosystems and hashtag-driven abuse that cast Harris in explicitly sexualized terms—an archive that functions as both harassment and political messaging.
Ilhan Omar, a Somali American Muslim congresswoman, has faced a different but related set of attacks: dehumanizing rhetoric, Islamophobic tropes, and rally-chant politics that treat her as an intruder. In December 2025, she described how repeated personal attacks by Donald Trump contribute to threats and a climate of political violence.
Maxine Waters has long been cast into the “angry” script—her assertiveness framed as threat rather than leadership. Commentators have explicitly connected that dynamic to the “angry Black woman” trope: the idea that Black women’s political speech is inherently “uncivil” and therefore dismissible.
Ayanna Pressley’s body—specifically her hair—became part of the public battleground when she revealed she has alopecia. Coverage of her disclosure underscored a reality Black women in politics know intimately: appearance is never just personal; it is treated as ideological material others believe they can seize.
Lucy McBath’s experience demonstrates how quickly the abuse becomes institutional, not merely interpersonal. In 2020, the Congressional Black Caucus issued a statement expressing concern over the “personal and racial attacks” she faced—an unusual but telling intervention from colleagues who understood that the attacks were not simply about policy disagreements.
And then there is the emerging category of attacks that blends spectacle with sexual humiliation—content that wants the audience to laugh and to learn that the target is not worthy of respect. The point is not to disagree with Representative Jasmine Crockett; it is to make her body and style the argument.
This pattern is not anecdotal. Reporting on Black women elected officials has documented a wide range of racist and sexist abuse—public attacks on physical appearance, gendered slurs, and threats—creating a climate in which holding office can feel like enduring a permanent, personalized harassment campaign.
Where the Black conservative male influencer fits
The men most often invoked in this ecosystem did not emerge accidentally, nor are they interchangeable. Each occupies a specific lane in the conservative media economy—radio, social platforms, campus circuits, cable news—and each converts a particular form of authority into reach. What unites them is not ideology alone, but function: they operate as cultural validators, offering a version of Black masculinity that reassures conservative audiences while disciplining Black women in public view.
Larry Elder represents the longest institutional arc. A former attorney and longtime talk-radio host in California, Elder built national prominence as a polemicist who argues that systemic racism is overstated and that Black Americans—particularly those aligned with liberal politics—are trapped by a “victimhood” mentality. His influence predates social media virality; it is rooted in traditional broadcast media, op-eds, and books. During his 2021 California gubernatorial recall run, reporting resurfaced a long record of remarks about women that relied on appearance, desirability, and sexual skepticism as measures of credibility. In Elder’s rhetoric, gendered dismissal is often framed as blunt realism: a refusal, he claims, to indulge sentimentality. Within attacks on Black women in politics, that posture supplies a veneer of seriousness—misogyny presented as tough-minded analysis.
Where Elder offers establishment gravitas, Brandon Tatum supplies uniformed authority. A former police officer turned media personality, Tatum built his following through viral videos and later through affiliation with conservative advocacy organizations and cable news appearances. His appeal rests on law-and-order masculinity: discipline, hierarchy, personal responsibility. When Black women political figures are criticized within this framework, the critique often centers on tone and decorum—who is “respectable,” who is “out of line.” The effect is to position Black women’s assertiveness as disorder, and Black male rebuke as corrective.
C. J. Pearson occupies a generational niche. Rising to prominence as a teenage conservative activist during the Obama years, Pearson’s brand has always leaned on the optics of youth dissent—a young Black man brave enough to say what others won’t. His commentary frequently frames Black liberal politics as cultural stagnation and Black women leaders as emblematic of that failure. The power of Pearson’s voice lies less in policy expertise than in symbolism: youth deployed against elder women, disruption aimed downward rather than upward.
Comedy, meanwhile, provides both cover and amplification. The Hodgetwins—identical twin brothers who began as fitness YouTubers before pivoting into political commentary—traffic in a hybrid of locker-room humor and ideological grievance. Their content oscillates between parody and provocation, allowing insults to be dismissed as jokes even as they circulate widely. In this mode, Black women politicians become punchlines: their bodies, hair, voices, and perceived femininity rendered as consumable ridicule. Humor functions here not as satire aimed at power, but as insulation against accountability.
A more explicit performance of derision appears in the work of Terrence K. Williams, a social-media-driven commentator who describes himself as a comedian while regularly targeting Black women Democratic officials. Williams’ viral impersonations and skits rely heavily on exaggeration of speech patterns, posture, and sexuality—reviving caricatures that closely track historic stereotypes. When criticized, he invokes comedy as jurisdiction: jokes, he argues, are beyond reproach. But in practice, the humor functions as pedagogy. It teaches audiences how to laugh at Black women in power and, more importantly, why they deserve it.
Taken together, these figures illustrate how influence operates across registers. Elder lends intellectual permission. Tatum supplies disciplinary masculinity. Pearson offers generational rebellion. The Hodgetwins normalize ridicule through laughter. Williams sharpens mockery into spectacle. None of them invented the stereotypes they deploy, but each benefits from refreshing them for contemporary consumption.
What makes their participation especially potent is proximity. Because the messengers are Black men, the message arrives pre-cleared of certain accusations. Attacks that would register immediately as racist or sexist when voiced by white conservatives are reframed as internal critique, truth-telling, or humor. The audience is invited to believe that what is being offered is not cruelty, but correction.
In this way, the Black conservative male influencer does not simply comment on misogynoir; he can function as its cultural broker—translating centuries-old ideas about Black womanhood into content optimized for the algorithm, while insisting that the problem is not the insult, but the woman who refuses to take it.
What this ecosystem ultimately produces is permission—permission to treat Black women in power not as political actors but as bodies, symbols, and cautionary tales. Once the language has been normalized by influencers who insist they are merely joking, correcting, or telling hard truths, it travels easily: from livestreams to cable panels, from comment sections to congressional hearing rooms. The stereotypes do not remain abstract. They attach themselves to real women with real offices, where visibility becomes vulnerability and representation becomes a liability. Nowhere is that clearer than in the public treatment of Michelle Obama, Vice President Kamala Harris, and a generation of Black women in Congress—whose experiences reveal how quickly cultural contempt hardens into a governing atmosphere, and how the oldest stories about Black womanhood are still summoned to explain why their power is considered suspect.
The specific attacks: Body, sex, and slavery’s shadow
The user’s request here demands specificity—particularly around body-shaming, sexually explicit references, and comparisons to enslaved women. There is a journalistic dilemma: repeating graphic language can reproduce harm and amplify the very abuse being analyzed. A responsible approach describes the conduct without reprinting the most sexually explicit slurs or violent imagery.
What we can say, grounded in reporting and scholarship, is that the sexualization of Black women politicians often takes three recurring forms:
The “sex-for-power” insinuation
Harris has been a prominent target of viral claims and meme campaigns that allege she traded sexual access for advancement—an old trope documented in research about the digital discourse surrounding her.
Body policing as political argument
Attacks on appearance—weight, hair, style—function as a proxy for legitimacy. The fixation on Pressley’s hair and baldness illustrates how Black women’s embodiment becomes a public instrument others feel entitled to judge. The fixation on Crockett’s lashes is a newer version of the same mechanism: use “presentation” to imply incompetence.
Slavery’s sexual violence as a rhetorical echo
Comparisons that evoke enslavement—especially sexual availability, breeding, the auction block—are a particularly toxic form of dehumanization because they pull directly from the historical logic of the Jezebel myth, which was explicitly used to rationalize sexual violence against enslaved women. Even when the comparison is not explicit, the insinuation often rhymes with that history: Black women framed as bodies first, citizens second.
These tactics work because they do not need to be “proven.” Their function is atmospheric: to make the target feel perpetually questionable, perpetually discussable, perpetually outside the realm of ordinary respect.
The “welfare queen” and the conservative story about Black womanhood
Any honest history of stereotypes against Black women in politics must stop at the welfare queen myth—not because it is the only one, but because it is among the most politically operational.
The myth’s power lies in its narrative convenience: it turns structural inequality into personal failure and reframes social spending as theft. Over time, it became a shorthand for delegitimizing not just welfare policy but Black women’s citizenship—suggesting Black motherhood itself is a public burden. Analyses of the stereotype trace how it was used to justify cutting social programs and to mobilize resentment.
For Black conservative male influencers, the welfare queen narrative can be repurposed as intra-racial policing: condemn Black women (especially mothers) as the source of Black community problems, while positioning the speaker as courageous for “telling the truth.” It is a form of respectability politics rebranded for the algorithm: the influencer as disciplinarian, the audience as jury, the target as “evidence.”
What makes this subculture especially combustible is how it merges with contemporary “manosphere” logic—gender hierarchy framed as realism—and with mainstream right-wing messaging that treats feminism as social decay. In that environment, denigrating Black women can be presented not as cruelty but as “restoring order.”
Why some of the loudest amplifiers are Black men
A recurring question—asked quietly in private and loudly online—is why a subset of Black men participate in this ecosystem at all. The answer is not one thing; it is a braided set of incentives.
Visibility and access. In a media environment still shaped by white gatekeepers, Black conservative voices are often rewarded with disproportionate visibility as symbols of ideological diversity. That visibility can translate into speaking fees, platform growth, book deals, and recurring appearances.
Moral authority through proximity. Criticizing Black women from within the Black community can be framed as “family business,” a way to claim authenticity. The critique may land harder precisely because it feels intimate.
The pleasure of disidentification. Some influencers build their brand by rejecting the presumed identity of “Black liberal.” The performance is not only political; it is existential: I am not who you think I am. That stance can slide easily into contempt for the people imagined as embodying the rejected identity—often Black women, who are both prominent Democratic voters and prominent symbols in American racial discourse.
Algorithmic reward. Platforms reward content that generates response. Black women in politics generate response—especially when attacked. The result is a feedback loop: provoke, trend, monetize, repeat.
This helps explain why the rhetoric often escalates beyond policy critique into something more primal. In a system built on attention, the point is not to persuade the target. It is to activate the audience.
What this does to democracy—and to Black women’s political participation
The harm is not only emotional, though it certainly is that; it is also institutional.
When Black women leaders are treated as bodies to be mocked, they are denied the presumption of seriousness. When they are sexualized, they are denied moral legitimacy. When they are framed through slavery’s stereotypes, they are denied basic humanity. And when threats and abuse become constant, public service becomes physically dangerous.
This is not speculative. Interviews and reporting have documented that many Black women elected officials experience racist and sexist abuse, including threats, and few feel safe once in office. In Omar’s case, reporting in December 2025 described how repeated dehumanizing attacks correlate with a broader climate of threats and political violence.
The result is a distorted democratic pipeline: talented candidates must calculate not only fundraising and policy but the likelihood of becoming a target of sexualized harassment campaigns that will involve their families, their bodies, their faith, their names.
And this is where the Black conservative male influencer’s role becomes most consequential. When such figures join the mockery, they add a layer of permission. They normalize the spectacle. They signal to their audiences that the cruelty is not just acceptable; it is righteous.
The exit ramps: What accountability could look like
If this were only a story about a few personalities, it would be easy: stop watching, stop sharing. But misogynoir persists because it is infrastructural—baked into political incentives, media framing, and platform economics.
Still, there are realistic interventions:
Journalistic discipline about “viral moments.”
Newsrooms can cover online abuse without amplifying slurs—centering patterns, describing tactics, naming consequences, and refusing to reprint sexually explicit degradation as “color.”
Platform accountability that treats gendered racial harassment as political violence’s early warning system.
The point is not to police ideology; it is to enforce baseline rules against targeted harassment that relies on sexual humiliation and dehumanization.
Political leaders treating misogynoir as a democratic issue, not a cultural footnote.
When colleagues—like the Congressional Black Caucus in McBath’s case—publicly name racist and sexist attacks, they establish a record that the abuse is not “normal politics.”
A clearer distinction between critique and contempt.
Disagreement is inevitable. Degradation is a choice. The public can learn to tell the difference—and to punish it with disengagement.
In the end, what is most revealing about this subculture is not its novelty, but its familiarity. The content looks new because the platforms are new. The scripts are old. Jezebel, Mammy, Sapphire—updated with ring lights, reposts, and a monetization link.
And the cost is also old: Black women forced, once again, to prove they are not what the country keeps insisting they are.