Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman

Michele Wallace

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781781688212
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781688229
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Black Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1978, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman caused a storm of controversy. Michele Wallace blasted the masculine biases of the black politics that emerged from the sixties. She described how women remained marginalized by the patriarchal culture of Black Power, demonstrating the ways in which a genuine female subjectivity was blocked by the traditional myths of black womanhood. With a foreword that examines the debate the book has sparked between intellectuals and political leaders, as well as what has-and, crucially, has not-changed over the last four decades, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman continues to be deeply relevant to current feminist debates and black theory today.

PART I

Black Macho

They face each other, the Negro and the African, over a gulf of three hundred years—an alienation too vast to be conquered in an evening’s good-will, too heavy and too double-edged ever to be trapped in speech. This alienation causes the Negro to recognize that he is a hybrid. Not a physical hybrid merely: in every aspect of his living he betrays the memory of the auction block and the impact of the happy ending. In white Americans he finds reflected—repeated, as it were, in a higher key—his tensions, his terrors, his tenderness. Dimly and for the first time, there begins to fall into perspective the nature of the roles they have played in the lives and history of each other. Now he is bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh; they have loved and hated and obsessed and feared each other and his blood is in their soil. Therefore he cannot deny them, nor can they ever be divorced.

(James Baldwin, “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown,” Notes of a Native Son, New York: Dial, 1955.)

1

You could have called the New Lincoln School in New York a radical integrationist’s dream. Small and private, with about five hundred students from third to twelfth grade, it was located on the very boundary of the ghetto—noth Street, Central Park North—sandwiched between black Harlem on the west and Puerto Rican Harlem on the east. The teachers were mostly well-intentioned Wasps. For a while there was a black principal. The student body was predominantly Jewish—a hodgepodge of performers’, intellectuals’ and ordinary capitalists’ children. A quarter of the kids were black, mostly middle class with a sprinkling of semighetto bunnies on half and full scholarships. The blue jeans uniform was worn by one and all. Everyone rode the city buses—some going south toward the doormen and canopies of Park Avenue, others to destinations farther north deep into the bar and storefront-church haven of the slums.

I entered New Lincoln in 1963, in the seventh grade, and got along passably well. There was, of course, racism, but it tended to be the subtlest kind. New Lincoln’s attitude was quite casual about certain things that might have provoked the outright racist. During any given year, for example, at least a handful of black girls were dating white boys. Only the black students seemed to be occasionally disturbed by this. The spectacle of black girls fawning over white boys was perhaps rightly seen as an indication of white fever; even then it was considered bad form to make such tastes conspicuous. When gossip was scant, the subject was hotly debated by the blacks. But mostly, interracial dating was tolerated in silence, if not totally ignored, by everyone.

But then we had no black consciousness. The Civil Rights Movement had been going on for most of our lives but it had not yet challenged the notion of white superiority. By suggesting that it was better to be near whites than not to be, that the morality of whites was not substandard but merely sluggish and in need of awakening, the Civil Rights Movement had condemned itself to the category of more-of-the-same in our book. The Movement had yet to intrude upon the frustration of our daily lives. Even at the exemplary New Lincoln, black kids still refused to eat watermelon when it was served for lunch. We weren’t black—the word was still an insult—we were just second-class white kids. During class discussions of race, we still squirmed in our seats and referred to ourselves as colored. Otherwise we did not refer to ourselves at all.

It was especially difficult for my classmates and me to identify with the struggle for the privilege of sitting at lunch counters and attending school with whites, since we were inclined to take such privileges for granted. Passive resistance also baffled us, perhaps because we and our families had been engaged in a lesser form of it up North for years and it had won us only the dubious distinction of being tolerated by whites—if we were well behaved. Or it may have been that the Civil Rights Movement only served to reinforce our sense of guilt, to aggravate the already painful awareness that other, poorer, less educated blacks were suffering in our stead.

The increasingly regular news coverage of blacks in the Civil Rights Movement—the bombings of churches and of buses full of black school children served to break through our surface sophistication about social intercourse with whites. The now highly visible plight of blacks in the South and the courage with which they fought became more immediate to us. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Our position had changed. We black kids at New Lincoln began to gain something we had never had: an identity, beyond being the in-residence representatives of the losing side in Tarzan movies, beyond being the butt of endless suntan jokes. We were no longer spooks, but martyrs. If we looked evil, it wasn’t because we hadn’t had our daily pigfoot, or because “niggas just get that way sometimes,” it was because we were victims of racism—a word that had never really been in our vocabularies before. If we were grinning, it wasn’t because niggas were happy-go-lucky, but because of our moral superiority.

Nevertheless it wasn’t the spectacle on the evening news so much as the appearance of a strangely related phenomenon that, more than anything else, made us aware that a new day was coming. Black boys at New Lincoln started dating white girls. And in the streets we could see interracial couples composed of black males and white females much more frequently.

1968 was the year that would revolutionize the way blacks were viewed in this country. SNCC, the nonviolent integrated student organization for peace and brotherly love, would become the all-black, nationalistic Snick for Black Power. SNCC had been founded by black students in 1960 at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and was best known throughout its Civil Rights career for its dramatic style in grassroots organizing. By 1964 its membership had grown from sixteen to one hundred eighty, of whom half were white. Besides the more visible black male leadership, black women played an important role, as they did generally in the Civil Rights Movement. Yet women, both black and white, handled an inordinate amount of typing, coffee making, housework, in addition to their other duties. Black and white women might have fought this inequality together if a certain situation had not rendered them mutually antagonistic. During the summer of 1964 hundreds of middle-class white women went South to work with the Movement and, in a fair number of cases, to have affairs with black men. Some of the women were pressured into having these affairs (anything to avoid the label of being racist), others freely chose to do so. The black men, by all accounts, were not unwilling and often eager. Occasionally the relationships were lasting or at least loving. Often they were abusive. Whatever the case, black women felt they were being shut out. Cynthia Washington, director of a freedom project in Mississippi in 1964, wrote about her experiences in SNCC:

We did the same work as men—organizing around voter registration and community issues in rural areas—usually with men. But when we finally got back to some town where we could relax and go out, the men went out with other women. Our skills and abilities were recognized and respected, but that seemed to place us in some category other than female. Some years later, I was told by a male SNCC worker that some of the project women had made him feel superfluous. I wish he had told me that at the time because the differences in the way women were treated certainly did add to the tension between black and white women. (Cynthia Washington, “We Started from Different Ends of the Spectrum,” Southern Exposure, IV, 1964.)

Shortly after that summer, black women in SNCC complained to the male leadership that they could not develop relationships with black men as long as black men could so easily turn to involvement with white women. Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, a powerful black woman in SNCC, participated in and perhaps led a sit-in earlier that year in SNCC offices protesting the relegation of women to typing and clerical work. She is said to have written a paper on the position of black women in SNCC. The paper was lost and no one is quite certain of its content because Robinson died of cancer in 1968, but reputedly it prompted Stokely Carmichael to respond, “The only position of women in SNCC is prone.”

With freedom presumably on the horizon, black men needed a movement that made the division of power between men and women clearer, that would settle once and for all the nagging questions black women were beginning to ask: Where do we fit in? What are you going to do about us? It was the restless throng of ambitious black female civil rights workers—as much as any failure of the Civil Rights Movement—that provoked Stokely Carmichael to cry “Black Power!”

On August 11, 1965, riots erupted in Watts, a black section of Los Angeles. The next morning an aide of Chief William H. Parker of the L. A. police said, “It was just a night to throw rocks at policemen.” Five days later, thirty-five were dead, four thousand more had been arrested, and the major part of Watts was in ashes.

On May 29, 1966, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem, then Chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, said at Howard University:

Human rights are God-given. Civil rights are manmade…. Our lives must be purposed to implement human rights…. To demand these God-given rights is to seek black power—the power to build black institutions of splendid achievement. (Chuck Stone, “The National Conference on Black Power,” The Black Power Revolt, ed. Floyd B. Barbour, New York: Macmillan, 1968.)

One week later SNCC’s chairman, Stokely Carmichael, was down in Greenville, Mississippi, where James Meredith, one of the first black graduates of Ole Miss, had begun his own march from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, “to show courage and inspire it in other blacks.” He was pretty much alone until someone took a shot at him. He immediately found himself surrounded by a motley crew of civil rights leaders: Dick Gregory, Martin Luther King, Floyd B. McKissick, and Carmichael. A struggle ensued among the principals. Carmichael had won by the time they reached Canton, Mississippi. The eyes of the world were upon him and he made the most of it. “Black Power,” he said. “It’s time we stand up and take over. Take over. Move on over or we’ll move on over you.”

Next Powell convened a Black Power Planning Conference on September third in Washington, D. C., which was attended by one hundred and sixty-nine delegates from thirty-seven cities, eighteen states, and sixty-four organizations. On March 1, 1967, the House of Representatives unseated Powell because of his refusal to face up to a libel conviction in New York.

Carmichael spoke at Nashville on April seventh and eighth. The second night, students at Fisk University rioted, crying, “Black Power.” At Mississippi’s Tougaloo College, Carmichael spoke of the “Nashville Rebellion.” A month after his Mississippi tour black students at Jackson State rioted for several days. Four days later a gunfight between black students and police at Texas Southern University ended with one policeman dead, and three policemen and one student wounded. Four hundred and eighty-eight students were arrested.

On July thirteenth, that summer, Newark picked up where Watts had left off. After four days, twenty-six were dead, a thousand and four injured. Another four days later, on July twenty-first, the National Conference on Black Power convened in that city. One thousand black people from twenty-six states, two hundred and eighty-six different organizations and institutions and two foreign countries came together to discuss and define Black Power. Although such notable Civil Rights figures as Roy Wilkins, Philip Randolph, and Martin Luther King either refused to come or were excluded, those who assembled were more than just a group of militant extremists. Just about every important labor union and religious, political, and social organization in the black community was represented. Given the diversity of the groups that participated, what they came up with was rather astounding. Only one resolution was officially passed—the Black Power Manifesto, part of which read:

It is, therefore, resolved that the National Conference on Black Power sponsor the creation of an International Black Congress, to be organized out of the soulful roots of our peoples and to reflect the new sense of power and revolution now blossoming in black communities in America and black nations throughout the world. (Stone, “The National Conference on Black Power,” The Black Power Revolt.)

The Black Power Conference also adopted “in spirit” a resolution to “initiate a national dialogue on the desirability of partitioning the U. S. into separate and independent nations, one to be a homeland for white America and the other to be a homeland for black Americans” and it “proclaimed” the “right to self-defense.”

On July 23, 1967, rioting began in Detroit. Forty-three people died, hundreds more were injured, seven thousand were arrested and five thousand left homeless. H. Rap Brown, the recently appointed chairman of SNCC, called the riots a “dress rehearsal for revolution.”

That same fall the streets of New York witnessed the grand coming-out of black male/white female couples. Frankly, I found this confusing. I was enough of a slave to white liberal fashions to believe that two people who wanted each other had a right to each other, but was that what this was about? It all seemed strangely inappropriate, poorly timed. In ’67, black was angry, anywhere from vaguely to militantly anti-white; black was sexy and had unlimited potential. What did the black man want with a white woman now?

The thing that convinced me that this situation had a broader meaning was the amazing way people were taking it. Some white women were quite blunt: They wanted black cock because it was the best cock there was. Educated, middle-class liberal white men, the very people who tended to be the first to make pronouncements on everything, were maintaining a curious silence whenever possible. Otherwise, they seemed to feel it was their duty to condone relationships between white women and black men because that would mean they weren’t racist. Even the lower-class white man tended to simply look the other way. Black men often could not separate their interest in white women from their hostility toward black women. “I can’t stand that black bitch,” was the way it was usually put. Other black men argued that white women gave them money, didn’t put them down, made them feel like men. And black women made no attempt to disguise their anger and disgust, to the point of verbal, if not physical, assaults in the streets—on the white woman or the black man or on both. Some black women would laugh low in their throats when they saw a black man with a white woman and make cracks about his high-water pants or his flat head or his walk, anything that might suggest that he was inadequate: “Only the rejects crawl for white pussy.” Others feigned incredulity: “I mean really. How could he want a white woman when black women fuck better, cook better, dance better, party better.…”

Meanwhile 1967 got away from us and it was 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King, in a move that was definitely ahead of his time, was beginning to shift his emphasis from civil rights to economic issues and was planning a Poor People’s March on Washington. In April Dr. King marched with a band of striking sanitation workers in Memphis. The garbage men wore signs that read, “I am a man.”

On April 4 King was shot and the rioting began again, worse than ever. Praying, waiting, singing, and everything white were out. Rioting was viewed as urban guerrilla warfare, the first step toward the complete overthrow of the honky, racist government. On the cultural level everything had to be rehauled. Black poems, plays, paintings, novels, hairstyles, and apparel were springing up like weeds in Central Park. Brothers, with softly beating drums in the background, were talking about beautiful black Queens of the Nile and beautiful full lips and black skin and big asses. Yet the “problem” with the white sisters downtown persisted.

Some of the more militant sisters uptown would tell you that the “problem” was that white women were throwing themselves at black men and that if they would just let the man be, he’d come home. And, furthermore, there was this matter of a black matriarchy. Everybody wanted to cut Daniel Moynihan’s heart out and feed it to the dogs, but he did have a point after all. The black woman had gotten out of hand. She was too strong, too hard, too evil, too castrating. She got all the jobs, all the everything. The black man had never had a chance. No wonder he wanted a white woman. He needed a rest. The black woman should be more submissive and, above all, keep her big, black mouth shut.

And the black woman started to do just that. She grumbled quietly to herself about the black man and the white woman. The Women’s Movement came...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Jamilah Lemieux
• Acknowledgments
• Epigraph
• Introduction: How I Saw It Then, How I see It Now
• Part I: Black Macho
• Part II: The Myth of the Superwoman
• Selected Bibliography