Broken Bloodlines: The External Gender Environment

In this chapter on the external gender environment, Patterson explains how African-American women are not in fact victims of both their gender and their ethnicity. He argues that African-American women are definitely grouped in with gender discrimination, but not ethnicity discrimination, despite what others may believe.
Patterson starts out by telling us that these days, African-American men are at a greater risk for gender discrimination within their own ethnicity than African-American women. In fact, women of all ethnic groups experience higher levels of poverty than men. He goes on to say that there is little evidence of a “double burden” of gender and ethnic prejudice. African-American women are now making more money than they ever have, and soon will surpass African-American men in income levels. African-American women have come a long way and are now achieving a bachelor’s degree or higher in some cases. Patterson then ends his argument about inequalities in the economic world by pointing out that African-American women do indeed suffer gender biases, but it is equally suffered with Euro-American women as well.
He then goes on to discuss the life chances between men and women. He found that African-American women have a greater life expectancy than that of African-American and Euro-American men, and are fast catching up with Euro-American women. So we can see that African-American women are not at a total loss. Also Patterson discussed the suicide rate briefly. He found that African-American men are 6.2 times more likely to commit suicide than African-American women.
Patterson then goes back to the education factor. He states that in all other ethnic groups, women have been surpassing men in the number of bachelor’s degrees since the early eighties. I thought this fact was quite amazing. The fact that African-American women have come so far in this world is quite impressive, yet knowledge of this seems to be slim to none. If we were to look at the patterns in the workplace, we would learn that African-American women are sometimes at a benefit because of the fact that they are treated more as a professional simply because men do not view them as sexually attractive or as a “women” so to speak. Patterson then wraps things up by stating once again, that African-American women are not at a “double burden” for both gender and ethnic discrimination, they are simply in the same boat as any woman around the world.