Misogynoir
A new word, coined in 2008 by Moya Bailey, it means a prejudice or dislike of Black women specifically.
She wrote:
I was looking for precise language to describe why Renisha McBride would be shot in the face, or why The Onion would think it’s okay to talk about Quvenzhané the way they did, or the hypervisibilty of Black women on reality TV, the arrest of Shanesha Taylor, the incarceration of CeCe, Laverne and Lupita being left off the TIME list, the continued legal actions against Marissa Alexander, the twitter dragging of black women with hateful hashtags and supposedly funny Instagram images as well as how Black women are talked about in music.
It’s a portmanteau of “misogyny” and “noir,” which is French for the color black.
Why I Looked It Up
I ran into it in an essay claiming discrimination against Black glamour models on Instagram. The claim was that the photos of Black women were censored more often than equivalently racy photos by white women.
Postscript
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On the Wikipedia page for Kevin Samuels:
Samuels’ critics decried him as being actively misogynoir, and a part of the Black manosphere, whereas his supporters defended him as an advocate for “traditional values”.
Postscript
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Right after Kamala Harris started her presidential campaign in July 2024, someone tweeted:
It’s time for everyone to look up the word misogynoir, if you don’t already know it. You’ll need it in the months ahead of us.