every black american feminist is different, but in the black american feminist literary canon (both academic and not academic) there exists a few general (among many) ideas that i think most of you just pretend to tolerate or aren’t prepared to really look at despite your mantras of “support black women,”
black feminists have a structural critique of patriarchy, how black men perpetuate and enable this, and also how black children carry trauma, and how that can be eradicated and solved so all black people can be healed. bell hooks, fannie lou hamer, and barbara smith are all examples of this. barbara smith et al. says,
Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.
As we have already stated, we reject the stance of Lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are. As BIack women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic.
if you have a visceral, negative reaction to this kind of feminist approach, chances are you haven’t read anything by a black american feminist on masculinity that has been written in the past 40 years lol. this is a very common approach among black women due to our trauma as descendants of enslaved africans.
The relationships between patriarchal black males and females will be better understood when it is no longer tacitly assumed that she is emotionally stable and he is emotionally unstable. By considering the possibility that many black males and females are in a state of arrested development, trapped by fantasy bonding and allegiance to the false selves, we cannot only understand better the nature of conflict between us, we can begin to heal our wounds. We can begin to do the work of relational recovery. That work must start with breaking through the denial created by allegiance to sexism that teaches us to despise our need for emotional connections. This denial has been especially damaging to black males as sexism has allowed females the freedom to acknowledge and feel emotions even as we are devalued because of this. Therapist Terrence Real explains: “We force our children out of the wholeness and connectedness in which they begin their lives. Instead of cultivating intimacy…we teach boys and girls, in complementary ways, to bury their deepest selves, to stop speaking, or attending to, the truth, to hold in mistrust, or even in disdain, the state of closeness we all, by our natures, most crave. We live in an antirelational, vulnerability-despising culture, one that not only fails to nurture the skills of connection but actively fears them.” As black people in a white-supremacist culture we have had a psychohistory of learning to utterly hide or repress our vulnerability in order to survive.
this is a very different approach to a kind of feminism that advocates for permanent separation between men and women, or sees maleness (biologically or socially) as a site of being intrinsically unsalvageable in some way. i know a lot of you (incorrectly) deem this ‘liberal’ and incompatible with an emancipatory feminist methodology, and if this is the case, i think you should take a step back and really reconsider if you want to hit the reblog button on those bell hooks quotes that cross your dashboards out of context. our collective trauma as descendants of enslaved africans complicates common assumptions or expectations upon how black feminists ought to address the women, girls, men and boys in our lives. i figured this was obvious, but whenever i see a black woman or a black queer person actually take this approach that was offered by their foremothers, i see a lot of you non-black girls flip out. yet, in the same breath, you might use the term ‘intersectionality,’ (which was born out of black feminist struggle, i’ll add), and you’ll even use black women’s wealth of philosophy and knowledge in different ways, but you don’t respect how it was created. this approach clearly isn’t for everyone (which is why black feminists have been reviled and met with confusion for years), but understand the context. black feminist methodologies are far more expansive and complex than this example and i couldn’t possibly fit them all in one post, but this is jus someting to think about.
