“The ho and her dysfunctional siblings—freak, skeezer, chickenhead, hoochie, hoodrat, and golddigger—are figures that trouble the notion of black collectivity that rests on ideologies of racial uplift and moral citizenship.”

- Dr. Mireille Miller-Young, ‘A Taste For Brown Sugar’

LAs public women who use sex for their own interests (be they profit or pleasure) rather than for the reproduction of the racial community, hoes are not only outside of black respectability politics, they are utterly loathed.”

The slur is used to describe a class of women who are perceived to represent multiple legitimacy crises—the “disappearing” black family, epidemics of teen preg- nancy, hiv/aids, and even the materialism and consumerism of black youth culture.

“Hoes exist as outcasts—part victim, part threatening force.Because, as a subaltern figure, the ho troubles black heterosexist attempts to put her in her proper place in the home, in the church, or alongside a breadwinning husband,the violent disciplining and erasure of her role

“...black communities is legitimated.”