For all the similarities and analogies drawn between the liberation of women and the liberation of blacks, the point remains that when white women received their voting rights, most blacks, male and female, had been systematically disenfranchised since Reconstruction. And even in 1970, when women’s right of franchise is rarely questioned, it is still a less than common occurrence for blacks to vote in some areas of the South.
Tasteless analogies like abortion for oppressed middle-class and poor women idealistically assert that all women have the right to decide if and when they want children and thus fail to catch the flavor of the actual circumstances. Actual circumstances boil down to middle-class women deciding when it is convenient to have children, while poor women decide the prudence of bringing into a world of already scarce resources another mouth to feed. Neither their motives nor their objectives are the same. But current literature leads one to lumping the decisions of these two women under one generalization, when in fact the difference between the plights of these two women is as clear as the difference between being hungry and out of work, and skipping lunch and taking a day off.
If we are realisticallly candid with ourselves, we will accept the fact that despite our beloved rhetoric of Pan-Africanism, our vision of Third-World liberation, and perhaps our dreams of a world state of multi-racial humanism, most blacks and a good many who generally exempt themselves from categories still want the proverbial “piece of cake.” American values are difficult to discard, for, unlike what more militant “brothers” would have us believe, Americanism does not end with the adoption of Afro hairstyles on pregnant women covered in long African robes.
Indeed, the fact that the independent black capitalism demonstrated by the black Muslims and illustrated in Nixon’s speeches appeared for many blacks as the way out of the ghetto into the light lends a truthful vengeance to the maxim that perhaps blacks are nothing more than black Anglo-Saxons. Upon the rebirth of the liberation struggle in the sixties, a whole genre of “women’s place” advocates immediately relegated black women to home and babies which is almost as ugly an expression of black Anglo-Saxonism as is Nixon’s concept of “black capitalism.”
The study of many developing areas and countries reflects at least an attempt to allow freedom of education and opportunity to women. Yet black Americans have not adopted developing areas’ “new role” paradigm, but rather the Puritan-American status of “home and babies” which is advocated by the capitalist Muslims. This reflects either ingrained Americanism or the lack of the simplest imagination.
Several weeks ago, women’s lib advocates demanded that a local women’s magazine be “manned” by a woman editor. Other segments of the women’s movement have carried on smaller campaigns in industry and business.
If white women have heretofore remained silent while white men maintained the better position and monopolized the opportunities by excluding blacks, can we really expect that white women, when put in direct competition for employment, will be any more openminded than their male counterparts when it comes to the hiring of black males and females in the same positions for which they are competing? From the standpoint of previous American social interaction, it does not seem logical that white females will not be tempted to take advantage of the fact that they are white in an economy that favors whites. It is entirely possible that women’s liberation has developed a sudden attachment to the black liberation movement as a ploy to share the attention that it has taken blacks 400 years to generate. In short, it can be argued that women’s liberation not only attached itself to the black movement, but did so with only marginal concern for black women and black liberation and with functional concern for the rights of white women.
The industrial demands of two world wars temporarily offset the racial limitations to mobility and allowed the possibility of blacks entering industry, as an important labor force, to be actualized. Similarly women have benefited from an expanded science and industrialization. Their biological limitation, successfully curbed by the pill and by automation, which makes stressing physical labor more the exception than the rule, has created an impressively large and available labor force of women.
The black labor force, never fully employed and always representing a substantial percentage of the unemployed in the American economy, will now be driven into greater unemployment as white women converge at every level on an already dwindling job market.
Ideally, we chanced to think of women’s liberation as a promising beginning of the “oppressed rising everywhere” in the typically Marxian fashion that many blacks seem drawn to. Instead, the spectre of racism and inadequate education, job discrimination, and even greater unequal opportunity will be, more than ever before, a function of neither maleness nor femaleness, but of blackness.
This discussion has been primarily to ward off any unintelligent alliance of black people with white women in this new liberation movement, Rhetoric and anathema hurled at the right industrial complex, idealism that speaks of a final humanism, and denunciation of the system that makes competition a fact of life, do not mean that women’s liberation has as its goal anyone else’s liberation except its own.
It is time that definitions be made clear. Blacks are oppressed, and that means unreasonably burdened, unjustly, severely, rigorously, cruelly, and harshly fettered by white authority. White women, on the other hand, are only suppressed, and that means checked, restrained, excluded from conscious and overt activity. And there is a difference.
For some, the dangers of an unintelligent alliance with women’s liberation will suggest female suppression as the only protection against a new economic threat. For others, a greater answer is needed, and required, before women’s liberation can be seen in perspective.
To say that black women must be freed before the black movement can attain full revolutionary consciousness is meaningless because of its malleability. To say that black women must be freed from the unsatisfactory male-female role relationship that we adopted from whites as the paradigm of the good family has more meaning because it indicates the incompatibility of white role models with the goal of black liberation. If there is anything to be learned from the current women’s lib agitation, it is that roles are not ascribed and inherent, but adopted and interchangeable in every respect except pregnancy, breast feeding, and the system generally employed to bring the two former into existence.
Role integration, which I will elaborate upon as the goal and the strength of the black family, is substantially different from the role “usurpation” of men by women. The fact that the roles of man and woman are deemed in American society as natural and divine leads to false ego attachments to these roles. During slavery and following Reconstruction, black men felt inferior for a great number of reasons, among them that they were unable to work in positions comparable to the ones to which black women were assigned. With these positions often went fringe benefits of extra food, clothes, and perhaps elementary reading and writing skills. Black women were in turn jealous of white women and felt inadequate and inferior, because paraded in front of them constantly was the white woman of luxury who had no need for work, who could, as Sojourner Trutrh pointed out, “be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches and . . . have the best place everywhere.”
The resulting “respect” for women and the acceptance of the dominating role for men encouraged the myth of the immutability of these roles. The term “matriarchy” Frazier employed and Moynihan exploited was used to indicate a dastardly, unnatural role alteration, which could be blamed for inequality of opportunity, discrimination in hiring, and sundry other ills. It was as if “matriarchy” were transgression of divine law or natural law and thus would be punished until the proper hierarchy of man over woman was restored.
Black people have an obligation, as do white women, to recognize that the designation of “mother-head” and “father-head” does not imply inferiority of one and the superiority of the other. They are merely arbitrary role distinctions that vary fr
om culture to culture and circumstance to circumstance.
Thus to quip, as has been popularly done, that the only place in the black movement for black women is prone is actually supporting a white role ideal, and it is a compliment neither to men nor to women to advocate sexual capitalism or sexual colonialism.
It seems incongruous that the black movement has sanctioned the involvement of women in the Algerian revolution, even though its revolutionary circumstances modified and often altered the common role models, but they have been duped into hating even their own slave grandmothers, who in not so admirable yet equally frightening and demanding circumstances also modified and altered the common role models of the black family. Fanon wrote in glorious terms about this role change:The unveiled Algerian woman, who assumed an increasingly important place in revolutionary action, developed her personality, discovered the exalting realm of responsibility.... This woman who, in the avenues of Algiers or of Constantine, would carry the grenades or the submachine gun charges, the woman who tomorrow would be outraged, violated, tortured, could not put herself back into her former state of mind and relive her behavior of the past. . . .1
Can it not be said that in slavery black women assumed an increasingly important place in the survival action and thus developed their personalities and sense of responsibility? And after being outraged, violated, and tortured, could she be expected to put herself back into her former state of mind and relive her behavior of the past?
The crux of this argument is essentially that blacks, since slavery and throughout their entire existence in America, have also been living in revolutionary circumstances and under revolutionary pressures. Simply because the black liberation struggle has taken 400 years to come to fruition does not mean that it is not every bit as dangerous or psychologically exhausting as the Algerian struggle. Any revolution calls upon the best in both its men and its women. This is why Moynihan’s statements that “matriarchy” is a root cause of black problems is as unfounded as it is inane. He does not recognize the liberation struggle and the demands that it has made on the black family.
How unfortunate that blacks and whites have allowed the most trying and bitter experience in the history of black people to be interpreted as the beginning of an “unashamed plot” to usurp the very manhood of black men. But the myth was perpetuated, and thus what brought the alteration of roles in Algeria was distorted and systematically employed to separate black men and women in America.
Black women take kindness for weakness. Leave them the least little opening and they will put you on the cross. . . . It would be like trying to pamper a cobra. . . . 2
Unless we realize how thoroughly the American value of male superiority and female inferiority has permeated our relationships with one another, we can never appreciate the role it plays in perpetuating racism and keeping black people divided.
Most, but not all, American relationships are based on some type of “exclusive competition of the superior and the exclusive competition of the inferior.” This means essentially that the poor, the uneducated, the deprived, and the minorities of the aforementioned groups compete among themselves for the same scarce resources and inferior opportunities, while the privileged, middle-class, educated, and select white minorities compete with one another for rather plentiful resources and superior opportunities for prestige and power. Competition among groups is rare, due to the fact that elements who qualify are almost invariably absorbed to some extent (note the black middle class) by the group to which they seek entry. We may well understand that there is only one equal relationship between man and woman, black and white, in America, and this equality is based on whether or not you can force your way into qualifying for the same resources.
But instead of attempting to modify this competitive definition within the black movement, many black males have affirmed it as a way of maintaining the closure of male monopolization of scarce benefits and making the “dominion of males” impenetrable to black females. This is, of course, very much the American way of exploitation.
The order of logic that makes it possible to pronounce, as did Dr. Robert Staples, that “Black women cannot be free qua women until all blacks attain their liberation,”3 maintains, whether purposely or not, that black women will be able to separate their femaleness from their blackness, and thus they will be able to be free as blacks, if not free as women; or, that male freedom ought to come first; or, finally, that the freedom of black women and men and the freedom of black people as a whole are not one and the same.
Only with the concept of role integration can we hope to rise above the petty demarcations of human freedom that America is noted for and that are unfortunately inherent in Dr. Staples’s remark. Role integration is the realization that:• ego attachments to particular activities or traits must be abolished as a method of determining malehood and femalehood; that instead, ego attachments must be distributed to a wider variety of tasks and traits in order to weaken the power of one activity in determining self-worth, and
• the flexibility of a people in effecting role alternation and role integration has been a historically proven asset to the survival of any people—witness Israel, China, and Algeria.
Thus, the unwitting adoption and the knowing perpetuation of this American value reflects three interrelated situations:• black people’s growing sense of security and well-being and their failure to recognize the expanse of black problems;
• black people’s over-identification with the dominant group, even though the survival of blacks in America is not assured; and
• black people’s belief in the myth of “matriarchy” and their subsequent rejection of role integration as unnatural and unnecessary.
While the rhetoric of black power and the advocates of cultural nationalism laud black people for their ability to struggle under oppressive odds, they simultaneously seek to strip away or incapacitate the phenomenon of role integration—the very means by which blacks were able to survive! They seek to replace it with a weak, intractable role separation which would completely sap the strength of the black movement because it would inhibit the mobilization of both women and men. It was this ability to mobilize black men and black women that guaranteed survival during slavery.
The strength of role integration is sorely overlooked as blacks throw away the hot comb, the bleach cream, the lye, and yet insist on maintaining the worst of American values by placing the strength of black women in the traction of the white female status.
I would think black men would want a better status for their sister black women; indeed, black women would want a better status for themselves, rather than a warmed-over throne of women’s inferiority, which white women are beginning to abandon.
Though most white women’s lib advocates fail to realize the possibility, their subsequent liberation may spell a strengthening of the status quo values from which they sought liberation. Since more and more women will be participating in the decision-making process, those few women participating in the “struggle” will be outnumbered by the more traditional middle-class women. This means that the traditional women will be in a position to take advantage of new opportunities, which radical women’s liberation has struggled to win. Voting studies now reflect that the traditional women, middle-class and above, tend to vote the same way as their husbands. Because blacks have dealt with these husbands in the effort to secure jobs, housing, and education, it does not seem likely that blacks will gain significantly from the open mobility of less tolerant women whose viewpoints differ little from those of their husbands.
If white radical thought has called upon the strength of all women to take a position of responsibility and power, can blacks afford to relegate black women to “home and babies” while white women reinforce the status quo?
The cry of black women’s liberation is a cry against chaining very much needed labor and agitating forces to a role that once belonged to impotent, apolitical white women. Blacks speak lovingly of the vanguard and th
e importance of women in the struggle and yet fail to recognize that women have been assigned a new place, based on white-ascribed characteristics of women, rather than on their actual potential. The black movement needs its women in a position of struggle, not prone. The struggle blacks face is not taking place between knives and forks, at the washboard, or in the diaper pail. It is taking place on the labor market, at the polls, in government, in the protection of black communities, in local neighborhood power struggles, in housing, and in education.
Can blacks afford to be so unobservant of current events as to send their women to fight a nonexistent battle in a dishpan?
Even now, the black adoption of the white values of women has begun to show its effects on black women in distinctive ways. The black liberation movement has created a politicized, unliberated copy of white womanhood. Black women who participated in the struggle have failed to recognize, for the most part, the unique contradiction between renunciation of capitalistic competition and the acceptance of sexual colonialism. The failure of the black movement to resolve and deal with this dilemma has perpetuated the following attitudes in American politicized black women:• The belief in the myth of matriarchy. The black woman has been made to feel ashamed of her strength, and so to redeem herself she has adopted from whites the belief that superiority and dominance of the male is the most “natural” and “normal” relationship. She consequently believes that black women ought to be suppressed in order to attain that “natural balance.”
• Because the white women’s role has been held up as an example to all black women, many black women feel inadequate and so ardently compete in “femininity” with white females for black males’ attention. She further competes with black females in an attempt to be the “blackest and the most feminine,” thereby superior to her fellow black sisters in appealing to black politicized men. She competes also with the apolitical black female in an attempt to keep black males from “regressing” back to females whom she feels have had more “practice” in the traditional role of white woman than has she.
Words of Fire Page 23