Via Celie’s Revenge: Radical Feminist Jurisprudence!

This morning I started wondering if Black men and women have ever really been on the same side.

Are we on the same side now?

I want to believe there was a time when we saw in each other our own reflection; when we saw one another as more than just male and female, but more deeply as partners, comrades, and allies in a struggle against an enslavement and imperialism that tore us apart. Weren’t we once more than just broken “traditional patriarchal families”? Why can’t we see one another’s broken Black souls, beyond gender, without roles? Seeing and being our own reflection is not about possession. Possession is the white man’s goal. Our struggle should be fighting for one another and imagining a world in which we are all free: free from white domination, and male domination in all its degrading forms.

Being on the same side means looking at one another as equals, with respect, looking at one another as a reflection of ourselves and everything we want for ourselves. It means we fight for others to have what we strive to have, mutually.

I don’t know if we’ve ever been on the same side. But my experiences with Black men have led me to conclude that most of them are not on our (Black women’s) side. They do not want for us what they want for themselves, because one of the things they want for themselves is us, to define themselves against. And so our success is seen as “threatening.” Our strength is called “emasculating.”

While they are entitled to their anger as victims of racism, we are not entitled to our own anger as victims of sexism and racism. While they are entitled to their demands for an end to a system which makes them victims of white supremacy, we are not entitled to our own demands for an end to systems which make us victims of patriarchy and white supremacy.

I’ve concluded that Black men have chosen to side with their erections over Black women, literally and figuratively speaking. They’ve decided that getting off and feeling like a man who believes himself superior to women is way more important than revolution. Although we’ve always been Black and in this thing together they’ve never hesitated to cash in on their male privilege when it was afforded to them. And when they couldn’t be men in the eyes of the white world they took it out on us at home and conditioned us to believe that fighting for their penis power would free us to be the women we were destined to be: mamas and hoes. This is Black male vision for Black women. Their imagination for liberation is stunted by their ultimate thirst for control over what is misperceived to be another group, Black women, whom they can oppress without fear of reprisal by white patriarchal society.

Black women are only women when it is convenient. We are women for roles that serve men, not for our own liberation. Being wives and mothers, or providers of sexual satisfaction, for Black men does not carry with it a ticket to our liberation. We are told we exist only to empower Black men. We are also supposed to be available to white men who have taught Black men how to effectively wield patriarchal power as pimps, players, fathers, and husbands. We are not women who need liberation like all women. Like white women.

Enough is enough. I have no patience for or interest in Black men who actively resist racism but not sexism. It’s not asking much for a man to consider why a woman being called a bitch should be any different than him being called a nigger. (And I, like most Black women, have been called both.) We must remember that the same men who love to call Black women gold diggers probably grew up with absent fathers who contributed nothing but one squiggly sperm to single mothers who never received child support, or any other kind of support, from Black men. And yet the gold digger stereotype of black women never ceases to inspire hit after hit in our community!

When Black men imagine freedom for their community, it always means reinforcing gender roles that allows men to be men and women to be women in ways that benefit men, in ways that allow Black men to use Black women to ease their woes, while also blaming Black women for those woes. Because their rage can’t be expressed directly to the white man, they’ll make due laying it on us, the very women who nurture Black men and boys every day, at our own expense and peril.

The legacy of racism is never considered alongside the legacy of patriarchy. Why? Because ending patriarchy would mean that Black men could no longer be men. And that’s all they’ve ever wanted out of this struggle: to be men, as brutal and callous to Black women as white men are to all women, and all non-white peoples.

If we are on same side then your liberation as a Black male should be inexorably linked to my struggles as a Black female, struggles I experience not only due to my race. Even while my liberation requires you to give up the entitlements you’ve grown accustomed to possessing as a man, you should still fight for my liberation with me because we are reflections of each other, after all. If your liberation can only come at the expense of my right to be free from your sexism, then we are not on the same side. When you struggle for your liberation while ignoring mine, you target white people and Black women as your enemy while it is only Black women who continue to take care of you. And yes, I’m pissed off about the inequity of that arrangement.

The black man’s vision is just a taste of his power; a chance at bat; the master’s tools! And it disgusts me as a black woman that black men have become so deeply mesmerized by white male power that they’ve sold us out just for some pathetic crumbs of manhood that will be the downfall of us both. They’ve betrayed us so thoroughly that we can hardly imagine ourselves out of this mess!

Black men who feel deeply threatened by Black women’s anger have chosen sides, and it’s an allegiance to their erections and those of their white brothers. When I say erections I mean the physical manifestation of heterosexual Black man’s fantasy of their sense of self, including their sexuality, being predicated on our submission in the home and in the street. I mean the physical evidence of the idea that Black women everywhere are expected to behave according to men’s heterosexist demands. The kind of manhood Black men envision is always heterosexual, and always hateful of women and gays. The roles they want from us maintain the oppression of us. Their desire for us as women in those roles does not reflect what they want for themselves: liberation from any form of oppression that harms Black men.

It seems like a dated concept, us being I-N-D-E-P-E-N-D-E-N-T women and all, but if hip hop and Black pop cultural representations of Black men and women are any indication, it appears that Black men feel a rampant need to restore some lost sense of manhood and control. But whatever Black men have lost, it was lost because of white supremacy, not because of Black women’s strength: our strength kept and keeps Black men alive.

If our strength and success as Black women is not the strength and success of Black people, what is it? The answer is always the same, and our own cultural entertainment and media reflects that answer: Black women’s empowerment emasculates Black men. There is no possibility that self-respecting, non-homophobic, and woman-respecting role models will emerge for Black men when the media and other cultural products are more concerned with demonizing and dethroning Black women (now where did I put that crown?) than it is with wrestling down white male power. The proliferation and consumption of pornographic images of Black women by Black men, the ongoing sexual harassment we experience in public spaces, and the multitude of other misogynistic indignities we face daily as women are just some of the conditions that speak to a Black male project to put Black women in their place–in the place white men put Black men, with hatred of women folded in. Their vision for our freedom really means their freedom. That vision is nothing more visionary than them as strong fathers and us as sexy mamas. And I have no interest in being anybody’s sexy mama!

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