Salvation

Black People and Love

bell hooks

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780063215962
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

"A manual for fixing our culture…In writing that is elegant and penetratingly simple, [hooks] gives voice to some things we may know in our hearts but need an interpreter like her to process."—Black Issues Book Review

New York Times bestselling author, acclaimed visionary and cultural critic bell hooks continues her exploration of the meaning of love in contemporary American society, offering groundbreaking, critical insight about Black people and love.

Written from both historical and cultural perspectives, Salvation takes an incisive look at the transformative power of love in the lives of African Americans. Whether talking about the legacy of slavery, relationships and marriage in Black life, the prose and poetry of Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, and Maya Angelou, the liberation movements of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, or hip hop and gangsta rap culture, hooks lets us know what love's got to do with it.

Combining the passionate politics of W.E.B. DuBois with fresh, contemporary insights, hooks brilliantly offers new visions that will heal our nation's wounds from a culture of lovelessness. Her writings on love and its impact on race, class, family, history, and popular culture will help us heal and create beloved American communities.

Nine

Heterosexual Love—Union and Reunion

THERE HAS NEVER been a time in this nation when the bonds of love between black women and men have not been under siege. If slavery was not an institution powerful enough to destroy the ties that unite and bind us, we have every reason to hope that bonds of love, of union and reunion, will be ever possible between us. However, this does not mean that heterosexual relationships between black women and men are not in crisis; they are. Talk to any black person who was active in the sixties’ struggles for black liberation and they will recall that the most packed meetings were those focusing on black male-female relationships. Those were the days when astute black leaders acknowledged the need for there to be ongoing critical discussion about heterosexual bonds.

Bonds of affection and love that are forged in the midst of profound trauma and oppression have a resiliency that can inspire and sustain generations. Our history as black people can never be marked solely by the experience of enslavement; instead it must be marked by the fusion of circumstance between the free and the bound. Even though there were only a small number of free black folks who chose to immigrate to this so-called New World, their presence had a profound impact on the imagination of the masses who were enslaved. Imagine how just the sight of or knowledge of one free black person would have gripped the imagination of any enslaved individual. Among that small group of black folks who had migrated to the Americas by choice and not by coercion, black males were the majority group, free black females were few. Any black male, free or slave, who wanted to have a union with a black woman had to confront the reality of slavery and indentured servitude.

Historically, all unions between black women and men were forged within a culture of white supremacy wherein all bonding which did not serve the interests of white people was deemed suspect and threatening. No group of black people knew better than the slaves that positive union between black women and men threatened white supremacist claims on black bodies. Free and enslaved black folks fought hard to privilege these relationships by rituals and ceremony, both illegal and legal, because they recognized that solidifying these bonds, gaining public recognition of their value, was crucial to the freedom struggle. Reading accounts of heterosexual black relationships during slavery reveals the extent to which the desire to create long-standing domestic partnerships, whether through marriage or shacking (living together without benefit of clergy), often served as the catalyst inspiring individuals to fiercely resist bondage and work for freedom. Importantly, remembering that white supremacist thinking is always challenged by loving unions between black males and females sheds light on why there have been so many obstacles placed in the path of such unions.

Socialized within the context of the United States to believe that men should be dominant and women subservient, the vast majority of African-Americans have held in high esteem a patriarchal vision of family life. Despite the fact that the systematic institutionalization of white supremacy and everyday racism made it impossible for the vast majority of African-Americans to create family life based on the sexist assumption that men should be providers working to sustain the material needs of the family and women nurturers taking care of emotional needs and the concerns of the household, black people have worked hard to conform to this model. Even when our lived experience indicated that the model of communal kinship with gender equality was both more constructive and more realistic in a world where employment was and is hard to find for any black person, most black folks continue to accept patriarchal notions of sex roles as the standard to judge and evaluate black life. I can remember my mother expressing a desire to try and find work so that my father, who worked hard as a janitor, would not have to bear all the economic burdens of our household, but he was adamant that no wife of his needed to work, even if that meant material lack. To him, supporting his wife and family affirmed his manhood. This affirmation took precedence over material needs.

Of course the patriarchal idea that men should rule over women did not promote gender equity or love between black women and men. All too often heterosexual relationships based on sexist norms in black life were places where men felt satisfied and women dissatisfied. Male domination does not lead to happy homes, no matter all the propaganda that suggests otherwise. Even in the most benevolent patriarchal households women often feel unloved. When I was a child I often heard adult black females disparage black men for not embracing the role of patriarchal provider. And while there were some men who were prevented from assuming this role because they lacked employment, there were also men who were gainfully employed who did not choose to offer their money to support wives and children. Every black woman I knew growing up dreamed of having a black male partner who would give her financial support and allow her to be a housewife. Of course the reality of class and race politics made it all but impossible for these fantasies to be fulfilled (if there were no jobs for the vast majority of black men, how could they assume the role of providers). The failure of black men to fulfill these fantasies created rage in many black females. That rage intensified as employment opportunities increased, as more black males found work but remained unwilling to assume the provider role.

No research has been done on black males who work, who live in households with wives and children, but refuse to give their income to be providers. Daily we are bombarded with messages in mass media which tell us black women are these strong matriarchs who enjoy being the heads of households, when the reality remains that very few black women have had a choice. Indeed, just as black females often feel rage that black men do not deliver the economic goods, black men often feel enraged that they are expected to provide. The economic realities of black heterosexual life are rarely given proper attention in our society, even though struggles over money are a primary reason couples divorce, irrespective of race. Given the ongoing crisis of employment in black life, these struggles are more intensified. One in three black folks lives in poverty—and half of all black children. Black people who have the same educational background as whites can expect to make 82 to 86 percent of the income of whites. Yet no one talks about how economic injustice creates a context for emotional strife in domestic households.

For years now this nation has acknowledged that black men—and, for that matter, all groups of men who are unable to provide for their families—often feel as though they are emasculated. That is all the more the case if the women in their lives are able to find work when the men cannot. Of course patriarchal thinking presents this news to the public as though it is not only natural for men to want to provide economically for the needs of others but equally natural for men to feel castrated and depressed if they are deprived of access to the jobs that would enable them to be providers. While it is true that partriarchal socialization teaches men that their value lies with work and providing for others, it is also true that many men have long resisted this socialization. Masses of men, many of them white, have high-paying jobs yet withhold financial support from wives and children. These men do not seem to feel at all “castrated” because they are failing to assume the provider role.

Men who provide economically in heterosexual unions are much more likely to use this as a means of exerting power and control over others in the household. Indeed, the notion that black men were castrated was rooted in the assumption that more often than not black women were bringing home the bulk of the family income. Until feminist movement interrogated the notion that men should be the sole providers of families and changed the way we all think about the nature of work, some black men did feel that they could not assume their rightful role as provider. This led them to feel depressed and hostile toward black women who provided. The myth of the black matriarchy falsely projected the idea that black women were castrating black men by being dominant. Created and projected onto black life by a white supremacist patriarchal culture that did not want to assume accountability for the way in which racialized economic injustice assaulted black male self-esteem, the myth was used to encourage black men to enter the military and there regain their wounded and/or lost masculinity. It was definitely a strategic move for white male patriarchs to scapegoat and blame black women, encouraging black males to do the same, because such thinking disrupted the bonds of solidarity that had been forged between black women and men working together to resist racism.

No work really documents the extent to which post–civil rights uncritical acceptance of patriarchal thinking by black males wreaked havoc in black family life. When sex roles in black life did not conform to sexist patterns, black women and men often forged new paradigms of love and affection. From slavery on, black males (and most black females) had theoretically accepted the same sexism that was the norm in the dominant white patriarchy, but material deprivation caused by exploitation and oppression based on race and class meant that gender roles in black life could not conform to sexist norms. Black women were workers. Unemployed or marginally employed black men often cooked, cleaned, and did child care. The fact that black women worked outside the home and worked equally hard as black men in the anti-racist struggle was not seen as detrimental to the psychological welfare of the black family but central to its survival. Gender equity among black women and men, however unchosen and relative, did not create a lack of love between couples, for everyone understood that solidarity was needed to ensure survival.

Congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis tells the story of his parents’ marriage in his memoir of the movement, Walking with the Wind. Married in 1932 to a sharecropper, his mother had no honeymoon with her husband because there was neither time nor money. Lewis recalls: “After Eddie married my mother, they both joined the Lewis family in Lula’s house, and my mother began working with them in those fields, sometimes side by side with her husband, other times ‘working out’ for one local farmer or another, chopping or picking cotton for fifty cents a day.” Whether or not a black woman would work was not a realistic option for most black families. Her economic contribution was desperately needed. Love flourished in situations where black women and men worked together mutually to sustain their bonds and to nurture families.

Without feminist thinking undergirding the alternative gender arrangements black couples had to make in order to ensure material survival, even when they were productive and fruitful these arrangements were often regarded as “wrong” by women and men alike. Most working black women longed for a time when they would be able to rely on their men to be the sole providers. Many white women did not understand this, and when the contemporary feminist movement began, it hailed work as the key to liberation and labeled black women already liberated. In reality most black women knew that they were not at all liberated by backbreaking low-wage labor. Working menial jobs where they were subjected to degradation and sexual harassment by racist white employers did not enhance black women’s self-esteem. Significantly, during the early stages of feminist movement, Gallup polls showed black males to be the group of men most supportive of gender equity in the workforce.

When militant black male leaders dominating the anti-racist movement made freedom synonymous with the subordination of black women, their uncritical embrace of the notion that black men had been symbolically castrated was not challenged by men. Individual black women active in anti-racist struggle and in what was then called “women’s liberation” interrogated these myths and rightly refused to accept any notion that they were the oppressors of black men. Clearly, the widespread acceptance of the idea that black women were the “enemy” created more havoc in black life than any other idea. That havoc is well documented in the 1970 anthology The Black Woman. Reprinted in this anthology was a 1966 essay by Abbey Lincoln, “Who Will Revere the Black Woman.” Lincoln wrote: “But strange as it is, I’ve heard it echoed by too many Black full-grown males that Black womanhood is the downfall of the Black man in that she (the Black woman) is ‘evil,’ ‘hard to get along with,’ ‘domineering,’ ‘suspicious,’ and ‘narrow-minded.’ In short, a black, ugly, evil you-know-what.” Like her progressive black women comrades, Lincoln called attention to the way in which this thinking justified sexist black male use of coercion and abuse as a means to subordinate and/or dominate black women. She identified the extent to which domestic violence and rape were becoming a norm in black life.

Echoing Lincoln’s sentiments in her essay “The Black Woman As a Woman,” Kay Lindsay asserted: “Those who are exerting their ‘manhood’ by telling Black women to step back into a domestic, submissive role are assuming a counter-revolutionary position. Black women likewise have been abused by the system and we must begin talking about the elimination of all kinds of oppression.” In her insightful essay “On the Issue of Roles,” Toni Cade Bambara went to the heart of the matter and critiqued both black males and females for regarding each other through negative sexist stereotypes. Emphasizing the importance of liberation struggle as the “measure of womanhood,” she urged recognition of the need to affirm progressive gender roles, stating: “Invariably I hear from some dude that Black women must be supportive and patient so that Black men can regain their manhood. The notion of womanhood, they argue—and only if pressed to address themselves to the notion do they think of it or argue—is dependent on his defining his manhood. . . . And I wonder if the dudes who keep hollering about their lost balls realized that they probably surrendered them either to Mr. Charlie in the marketplace, trying to get that Eldorado, or to Miss Anne in bed, trying to bang out some sick notion of love and freedom. It seems to me that you find your Self in destroying illusions, smashing myths, laundering the head of whitewash, being responsible to some truth, to the struggle. That entails at the very least cracking through the veneer of this sick society’s definition of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’” Bambara and her progressive black women colleagues worked hard to call attention to the destructive fallout caused by hard-core black male support of patriarchal thinking, but their words did not have widespread impact.

In actuality, large numbers of sexist black women were as willing to embrace the notion that they should be more subordinate or at least act the part as were black men. Since black women did not then join together in unity to support the need for progressive visions of gender roles in black life, the stage was set for conflict between females. When younger women like myself embraced feminist thinking, we were often seen as traitors to the race and judged harshly by black males and females alike. At the peak of feminist movement Michele Wallace’s polemical nonfiction book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, in conjunction with Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls and a growing body of protest fiction by black women writers, called national attention to the conflicts in black heterosexual relationships. For the first time ever in the nation’s history, television talk shows featured black women writers talking about the dynamics between black women and men. Of course none of the discussion focused on the issue of love. It was all focused on the question of power; issues like whether black women were matriarchal and castrating, holding the black man back, ruled the day. No one talked about the overall psychological impact of the rupture in black solidarity created by patriarchal thinking.

By casting black females as the “enemy,” black men were essentially stating that black women were not worthy of their love and regard. And underlying this insistence on black female unworthiness was the assumption that as long as black men could not be patriarchs they could not love themselves. While all this dialogue was happening in academic and activist settings, in everyday life the vast majority of black women and men grappled with the issue of male domination. Females who wanted black male partners felt that they had to conform to sexist expectations. Tragically, where much attention had been given to heterosexual bonds of affection and love prior to these conflicts, all the attention was now focused on black male satisfaction. There was no discussion of whether or not patriarchal black men who ruled over home and family were actually emotionally fulfilled and loved.

In our patriarchal home, love for our father always took second place to our fear of him. Growing up in a household where our mother was willingly subordinate to our father and used Christian teaching to justify female obedience to males, I witnessed firsthand the way in which male domination, like all forms of domination, makes love impossible. While one can care for someone deeply and dominate them, it is impossible to truly love someone and dominate them. Love and domination are antithetical. In When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, Rabbi Harold Kushner reminds us that “Love can be generated only between people who see themselves as equals, between people who can be mutually fulfilling to each other. When one commands and the other obeys, there can be loyalty and gratitude but not love.” While benevolent patriarchal homes (where men rule without violent and/or abusive coercion) can be and often are households where affection and care abound, love cannot be sustained fully in any environment where the spiritual and emotional growth of any family member is not fully encouraged. Insightfully Kushner, echoing psychoanalyst Carl Jung, reminds us that love and power are not compatible: “You can love someone and give him the room and the right to be himself, or you can try to control him, to make him do your will whether for his own good or for the enhancement of your own ego. But you cannot do both at the same time.” When sexist black males became obsessed with the need to exert power over black females, a barrier was created blocking our capacity to love one another.

Nowhere was a shift in black male thinking about the nature of love more evident than in black popular music. In black expressive culture, a dialogue has existed primarily in musical lyrics. Singers of every ilk, whether blues or R&B or other forms, sang about the longing to love and be loved. Popular male vocalists like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding gave voice to men’s longing, their emotional vulnerability. Songs with lyrics like “Try a little tenderness,” “This is my lover’s prayer, I hope it reaches out to you,” and the eternally popular Aretha Franklin singing, “All I am asking for is respect when I come home,” voiced the emotional conflict of black males and females seeking to learn how to love. Today’s popular lyrics express cynicism about love. Lust and struggles for power define the nature of black heterosexual romance. Dr. Dre, R. Kelly, and a host of other singers project hateful images of women as objects. Lyrics that say “You remind me of my Jeep” dehumanize females. In misogynistic rap music women are degraded objects, “bitches and hos.” While older black folks often sit back and criticize the hatred of females these lyrics express, they do not link this misogyny to the overall insistence on the part of black leaders and many of their followers that black male patriarchy will redeem the black family. Fortunately female singers like Lauryn Hill and MeShell Ndegéocello are wonderful examples of black artists who e...