Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "The Raw Courage of a Black Woman Writer" in Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 134-135). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, Spring 1979
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Black Macho & the Myth of the Super-Woman, by Michele Wallace, delivers a knock-out punch to the Moynihan-Eldridge Cleaver garbage that Black matriarchs—rather than capitalism—caused second-class citizenship and second-class egos for Black men.
“And when the Black man went as far as the adoration of his own genitals could carry him,” writes this brave, 26-year-old rebel, “his revolution stopped. A big Afro, a rifle, and a penis in good working order were not enough to lick the white man’s world after all.”
It is good to hear the scathing voice of Black feminism. Wallace not only excoriates the Imamu Barakas and Stokely Carmichaels—and their muling mentor, Norman Mailer —formisogyny against Black women, she also recounts, compassionately but boldly, how Angela Davis and poet Nikki Giovanni, each in her own way, surrendered to the epidemic of masculine mystique that fatally poisoned the Black movement of the ’60s.
“...The single most important reason the Black Movement did not work,” she writes, “was that black men did not realize they could not wage struggle without the full involvement of women. . . By negating the importance of [women’s] role, the efficiency of the Black Movement was obliterated.”
The appalling confusion of racial emancipation with manhood was addressed 14 years ago in a paper I wrote on “The Emancipation of Women.”*
What happened, I said then, was “a paterfamilias despotism, as endorsed by the Muslims, or a more subtle and sophisticated assumption of male supremacy, derived from campus sociology, orthodox Freudianism, and general practice. . . To endure and develop, the Black liberation movement. . .is going to have to rise to heights unachieved by any existing labor or political organization: it is going to have to come to grips with the woman question.”
You bet. And Wallace is one of the tribunes speaking for a new generation of women of color who have cast out the devils of confusion and self-abnegation, defied the black-bitch slander, and shouldered public responsibility for racial and human progress. Right on, sister.
* See "The Emancipation of Woman"