What is a Negro Bed Wench?
Many things! A reliable hotep identifier. An ash magnet, as anyone who says it immediately becomes engulfed in a shroud of ash, like a chimney sweep with sentience. A valuable source of time efficiency, as hearing those three words in succession lets you know you don't ever have to listen to anything else that person says. And a meaningless and historically inaccurate term conjured out of thin-ass hotep air to make people feel bad. It's basically hotep Coke Zero.
Wait, what?
Nevermind.
Anyway, you'll find this "insult" lobbed at Black women who date interracially. And Black women who claim to be feminists. And Black women who watch Scandal. And Black women who get french toast sticks at brunch instead of waffles. And Black women who use lotion. And Black women with first names starting with the letters "B," "D," "E," "J," "K," "M," "S," "T," and "Z." And Black women with first names starting with all the letters I forgot to list. And Black women who possess the audacity to menstruate. The criteria for Negro Bed Wench distinction is pretty arbitrary. If you're reading this and you happen to be a Black woman, that means (among other things) that you can read. Which might actually qualify you for Negro Bed Wenching.
I see. So, what does Negro Bed Wench even refer to? Why is it an insult?
During slavery, many enslaved Black women were raped by the men who owned them. Sometimes children would be a result of these rapes, leading some people, even today, in two thousand fucking seventeen, to refer to those women as their masters' mistresses. An act which either minimizes or outright ignores the fact that ownership obviates sexual agency.
Last week, the homie Britni Danielle offered a thorough deconstruction of the egregious imprecision and the violence of referring to these women as mistresses.
From The Washington Post:
Just before the Fourth of July, NBC News ran a feature on the room, setting off a spate of coverage about the dig. Many of these stories described Hemings, the mother of six children with Jefferson, as the former president’s “mistress.” The Inquisitr, the Daily Mail, AOL and Cox Media Group all used the word (though Cox later updated its wording). So did an NBC News tweet that drew scathing criticism, though its story accurately called her “the enslaved woman who, historians believe, gave birth to six of Jefferson’s children.” The Washington Post also used “mistress” in a headline and a tweet about Hemings’s room in February.
Language like that elides the true nature of their relationship, which is believed to have begun when Hemings, then 14 years old, accompanied Jefferson’s daughter to live with Jefferson, then 44, in Paris. She wasn’t Jefferson’s mistress; she was his property. And he raped her.
Negro Bed Wench is a reference to that; insinuating that 1. these women voluntarily gave themselves to the men who literally owned them and 2. Black women today who happen to date White men and/or possess the temerity to critique patriarchy and hotepity are the metaphysical descendants of those women.
Wait, so the people who use Negro Bed Wench are making glib references to the abject and unspeakable horrors experienced by Black women?
They are.
Do they realize this?
Maybe?
Can you imagine the outcry if a Holocaust-related insult about Jewish women became as ubiquitous as Negro Bed Wench has?
I can't.
What the fuck is wrong with these people?
I don't know.