Black Feminism: A thorn in the side of the Black family

A Black commentator made an interesting, provocative analysis about Black women in a recent podcast. He suggested that the hosts of another well-regarded podcast with two black female (neither of whom are married) and one black male (who is married) host "cryin" over Kamala Harris' loss, invective against the Democratic donor class, who are primarily wealthy, white Jewry out to also protect their whiteness, and sense of betrayal by white women is either misguided or born of naïveté or both. The commentator suggests the sisters along with their contemporaries are victims of their own choosing because they brought into [white] feminism hook, line, and sinker along with those $1,000, 8' long cadaver weaves they fling around unashamedly like vain, adolescent, white girls in a pathetic ode to white supremacy. They fucked around and found out that white feminism was just that exclusively "white." 

The Women's Liberation Movement was fostered by young, white, liberal females in the late '60s in a self-centered quest for sexual liberation, however. They wanted to fuck who they wanted, when they wanted, without being shackled by the day's norms and mores they no longer felt bounded by (to go to college but only to find a husband). Of course this was a controversial departure, a paradigm shift, that a white, conservative society emerging gingerly from 1950s lily-white puritanism was ill-prepared to embrace. The Burn-the-Bra movement rose in adjacency to the Black Liberation Movement freely borrowing many of the tactics, strategies, and, more importantly, idealistic, young Black women who also wanted to be freed from puritanism and patriarchy, which permeated the Black Liberation Movement's male-dominated leadership (revolutionary sister and former Black Panther Assata Shakur was only recently promoted to Field Marshal after over forty years of exile in Cuba). 

Indeed, the dichotomy shaped how black feminism evolved in diametric opposition to the objective of white feminism, which the host claims led to the sense of betrayal many Black women now bitterly feel toward white women. But many sisters refuse to frame their angst contextually through historical analysis: the original purpose of white feminism, which was sexual liberation, not emancipation from either white men or family values. And therein lies the rub. 

White women never abandoned the notion of family or, more importantly, their men; unlike Black women, which is born out by the debate raging on social media by "passport bros" and "independent [black] women" going at it in harsh, bitter, profane and vitriolic repartees. The division has become a wedge issue between brothers and sisters that led some brothers to vindictively support trumpty dumpty because there is literally no other reasonable explanation for their support, showing how damaging Black feminism has been to interpersonal and personal relationships in our community. How it has shaped Black women's perspective on the recent presidential race, which many saw as a panacea for their woes: a validation of their independence, which ironically added fuel to the debate that has grown into a conflagration. 

The host argues that while white women have agency, black women falsely assumed that loss of any part of that agency like reproductive rights would "free" white women up from their innate privilege, rouse them out of their languor, enabling them to abandon their families: their grandfathers, fathers, uncles, cousins, husbands, son, and grandsons in a reckless quest, a fool's errand, to support sisters who openly advocate for the biggest driver of disunity in the Black community in omnipresent private video chats that can be found in a big city near you, which is our family structure. 

There is plenty of blame to go around. But the dissolution of the Black family is the main one. And it is fostered by feminism driven by women who have become the very thing that their babyboomer grandmothers despised; the singular persona that drove them out of the Black Liberation Movement en mass: domineering, patriarchal with all of the toxic masculine energy attendant thereto: a unsavory stew of conflicting needs and wants at odds with their immutable feminine nature, causing many to marry later in life, less likely to marry at all, or have higher rates of marital instability (and infertility). 

Black female Gen Xers and Millennials (especially college-educated ones) are less likely to remain in a marriage they feel they have outgrown, may be abusive, riddled by infidelity, dysfunction, drug or alcohol abuse, because they have their own financial resources, or simply because they "do not need a man," which is a cultural artifact that can be traced back to the earliest iteration of Black feminism in the late '60s. The "I-do-not-need-a-man" phenomenon is not seen in similar numbers within the larger white community, however. 

The host goes on to say that white women may casually complain about their men in private (even among women of different races, ethnicities, and belief systems). They rarely if ever castigate them publicly like Black women saying their men are "dogs," "ain't shit," or a veritable hosts of other negative pejoratives that feed into the racist narrative of Black men not being "providers" or family-oriented, which fosters an  archetype of Black men being oversexed, unfaithful, irresponsible and "controlling." 

In the wake of this cultural evolution, we see many young Black successful women being unapologetic - boasting even - about their illicit sexual conquests or "body counts" like Rapper Megan The Stallion, a self-described "new Black feminist," a college-educated recording artist, who serves as a role model for a generation of Black females coming up behind her. Megan The Stallion has given young, Black women implicit license to become promiscuous without acknowledging its physical, psychological, or spiritual ramifications, which another older Black woman recording artist named Faith Evans suffered. Evans is reported to have said that "intimacy doesn't do anything for me anymore" because of her past debauchery. 

Say what you want about white men. But they prop up their women. And white women know it. Not that Black men do not give props to Black women. But it is far and few in between. 

The independence - e.g., sexual liberation, financial freedom, and agency to say what they want to who they want when they want is not a successful formula for an enduring relationship - that Black women enjoy has become a double-edged sword that pierces right through the heart of Black men and, more importantly, the Black family dynamic. One they vicariously sought to vindicate through Kamala Harris' famously failed candidacy. (She was everything they believe they are all wrapped up neatly in a baggy, ill-fitting pantsuit: an attractive, bi-racial woman, with naturally straight hair, in a late bi-racial marriage with a blended family; she is a successful lawyer and politician and sorer in a major sorority, who was sexually-liberated with no children, and a dubious pass riddled with credible allegations of promiscuity and adultery, both.) Her failure to be elected president of the United States with that resume has become a source of immense, collective, psychic pain; brutally debunking the absurd notion that Black women enjoyed kinship with white women predicated tenuously on gender. 

The only thing Black women have become independent of is Black men (20% of whom supported chump the brain dead comic carnival barker aka klueless the klown in the presidential election out of spite), however. The residual bitterness has to be tempered by an honest assessment of the State of Black America; no longer looking outward but looking inward. 

The realization that white women do not see Black women as allies, only as expendable pawns to promote their own selfish ends. Until Black women stop adopting Eurocentric standards of beauty, seeking validation outside of our community, aligning with causes that do not directly benefit the broader Black community like trans rights, buying Black instead of overpriced designer brands made at slave wages in sweathouses in Vietnam, and bashing all Black men because of the dastardly behavior of the curly-haired, high yella fella they were attracted to because "he cute," loudly proclaiming, "I have my own money," we will only see the continued devolution of the Black family, which has to be the foundation from which any revolution can be effectively mounted. If trumpty dumpty manages to get a fraction of the disastrous policy proposals he has planned enacted into law, the financial independence some successful sisters believe liberates them from traditional family values (and, concomitantly, Black men who run their households like men of old) will evaporate leaving them bereft of ostentatious, materialistic lifestyles their earning power as a single woman may have once commanded.