JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 17, Number 2, 1997 Page: 178
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178 JAC
Usually what we see as the most powerful rhetorical device to deploy against
that racism is to see black women as the carriers of some particular strain or
virus of exemption from white racism. As the story goes, black women are
exempt from white racism because they have it better than black men. You
don't only hear this in terms of black men, you hear it in terms of black women.
Black women are less threatening; black women don't threaten white men in
the same way. There's no doubting, I think, that given that we live in a
patriarchal culture, in a way in which these codes of masculinity operate to
legitimate certain forms of masculine power, that there is a specific dimension
that black men occupy that certainly is a particular and special threat to white
patriarchal power that black women wouldn't be considered to be.
There's no question that there's a hell of a difference in terms of specific
manifestations of challenge from black men and black women. The underside
of that argument is that it tends to privilege black masculine suffering over
black women's suffering, as if they somehow almost genetically, or inher-
ently, don't have the same kind of problems with white racism that black men
have. And so you've got an internal resentment against black women. These
things are at the back of the kind of collective imaginary of black masculine
and black female identities being construed and constructed in one space, and
this space happens to be the space of black American culture at the end of the
century where racial millenialism is being refracted through the prism of this
narrow patriarchal lens. That's why I understand black women's objections
to the Million Man March, because it looked like warming up the same old
patriarchal leftovers and feeding them to them as the new meal of black
masculine identity, and that was really clearly a problem.
The rift between black men and black women has to do with the
perception that black women are somehow exempt from the processes of
white racism, that they are better off than black men materially, and that black
men deserve to be talked about in specific ways because we live in this white
patriarchal culture. The problem with all that, of course, as bell hooks and
other feminists have warned, is that when we look at the liberty of black
people and liberation through gendered lenses, we talk about not castrating
the black man, not cutting off our penises because that is an exemplification
of how the whole race has been treated. Those kind of gendered metaphors
miss the specific forms of female embodiment and how black women have
been differentially treated within a political economy of privilege that has
undermined their capacity to come to grips with their own forms of particular
suffering because they're not named with the same sort of legitimacy that
black masculine suffering is. That means that we're living in a hell of a time
of contestation and conflict between black men and black women.
The academy, then, can do several things. First of all, it can begin to
interrogate how masculinity, like race, is this artificial and social construc-
tion. It can articulate that there's no such thing as a necessary black masculine
experience that has to be felt or interpreted a certain way. What academics
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 17, Number 2, 1997, periodical, 1997; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28619/m1/40/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .