“Tell them about the dream Martin,” words yelled by Mahalia Jackson from her seat in 1963 at the March on Washington. “Black Lives Matter,” a popular slogan created by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. Two of those ladies who happen to be queer.
I love to see women take individual or collective agency for themselves, but it becomes a revolutionary love once you see black men praise and defend them openly in an unapologetic manner. Cornel West often states that justice is what love looks like in public. I would take it a step further and profess that respect and love are truly expressed when they are unequivocally expressed to those who try to diminish or dwarf it. Too often black women are treated as singular human beings, instead of within a multifaceted context. They are expected to focus solely on their blackness, while sacrificing their womanhood to devote their attention to racial issues that in most instances exclude them from being acknowledged in the forefront.
When we focus on the current movement that people across the nation are fighting for in regards to brutality by the hands of police and vigilantes the names of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, Akai Gurley, Dontre Hamilton, John Crawford III, Ezell Ford, Phillip White, Eric Harris et al come to mind. One of the underlying problematic thing that’s troubling with those victims is not only that they were killed, but we seemed to erase black women from the narrative. As a community when we are fighting oppression, we at times oppress others within our own community, simultaneously. Sometimes as men it’s a hard truth to grasp and grapple with. Black men know the struggles that we have to endure daily at the hands of stereotypes, systemic racism and white supremacy, but we often have a blind eye to the oppression in our own home.
While we see countless images of black women showing up on the frontlines bearing witness to our struggles for our men and boys, we don’t demonstrate that same assertiveness when it’s their lives that are on the line and we don’t show up in the same capacity. The names of Rekia Boyd, Aiyanna Jones, Yvette Smith, Pearlie Golden, Tarika Wilson, Shantel Davis, Tyisha Miller, Kathryn Johnston, Alexia Chrstian et al seemed to go unnoticed. We allow these names to get erased from our memory and dismissed from the narrative of Black Lives Matter. As black men we don’t just bear the responsibility of loving black women in private, but we must remonstrate our cognitive wiring to animadvert their oppression so that they know and feel that they are loved in public.
In Malcolm X’s famous speech, Who Taught you to Hate Yourself he extemporaneously stated, “The most disrespected woman in America, is the black woman. The most un-protected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America, is the black woman.” When we create a culture of ignoring the violence against women that occurs simultaneously to the violence that is levied upon us we give others the go-ahead to commit these atrocities because the abusers know they will go unchecked, whether the perpetrator is white or nonwhite. Black men telling black women to sit down in the same manner that Mahalia Jackson was treated during The March of Washington is not only disconcerting, but it creates a convoluted movement that causes black women to experience cognitive dissonance because they are told their blackness matters, but just not in the scope of priority when it comes to the thinking process of black men.
Black oppression has no gender, since we live in a patriarchal society we give these movements male attributes to provide a sense of self-identification. When we uphold the masculine constructs and refuse to allow women prominent roles and visibility within the canon we don't allow black women to be viewed in a conterminous way with black men. When we allow this shifting in our paradigms we begin to excavate the very notions that we uphold of what a black woman’s role is. So when we look at our women we must not just limit them to being trophy pieces, instead when must vociferously assert their intelligence, strength , and leadership into the forefront of these movements that we allow to ignore them. This is why loving and respecting black women in public is so important because once we silence our voices to the masses we allow women to become complicit to patriarchy.
We must be conscious of the esthetic apartheid that black women and girls have to experience throughout their lives. When you don’t see yourself in a positive light on television, on the radio, within print ads, on runways, and in equal numbers within high places of power you begin to see your self as less moral, intelligent, and beautiful. The dearth of representation in these key areas can have even the strongest woman questioning her own worth. We teach black women to be strong in the face of adversity and oppression, but in most instances we don’t put in that effort to show that they matter for who they are. We can’t critique women who follow a path to find existential acceptance in a form that is appeasing to the standard thinking of man, which in turn may drown out her own values. Who’s really willing to stand up and say, “Black women you matter!” It’s not enough to love black women privately, but it is are moral virtue to stand up in the face of the opposition that shuns them.
When we think about the SCLC and SNCC and we don’t talk about the influence and leadership from Ella Baker, we aren’t being honest. We can’t talk about the anti-lynching movement without acknowledging the leadership of Ida B Wells-Barnett. Nannie Helen Burroughs, Mary Church Terrell, Jo Ann Robinson, and many others that gave testimony and put in the work to provide the freedoms that we enjoy, but they somehow go unnoticed when we speak of great Black American figures. It is a mendacious act to ignore the contributions of women that have fought for us while we enjoy the fecundity of fruits that have bestowed for us. While it’s important to shine light on Rosa Parks, it’s very dishonest to coin her as the mother of the freedom movement because it may come off as benevolent, but in reality, it adjudicates and excavates those who fought for our freedom previously, while her contributions are worthy of cogitation and praise, it promotes this notion of black female exceptionalism, instead of showing how ubiquitous black female achievement is. Her act of civil disobedience was exceptional, it does however erase the same act that was done previously by Claudette Colvin, while also shaping the minds as if other women didn’t do extraordinary things for black movements. This however is the result of black men refusing to step down or to the side of their bully pulpits to make room for their female counterparts.
The separation of units in the forms of genders reproduces more inequalities, while also gives more power to one group. This is why black female experience is crippled and looked at as absolute in the mainstream construct of how we look at movements and abuse that black people face. These intraracial issues need to demolished and elucidated without us as black men being cantankerous to these changes that need to be made. Men should never assume that we are losing something, by giving power to women. We can’t only acknowledge blackness when a male face is at the forefront of the movement or when it’s a male face being oppressed. By ignoring our sisters, institutions begin to make these practices natural and they become enacted into the fabric of society in subtle ways that are easily hidden, but prominent. We must quantify our appreciation for women in public like we do our men, and we must do it without expecting an award for doing what is morally expected. We can’t look at it as criminal to ask black men to recognize black women in the midst of struggle because it may come off as divisive, by doing that it is critical to note that we are deeming black women as second class citizens. Black men must not be looked at as being seated first class in the plane of struggle because even when the plane crashes everyone dies. We must allow these fresh ideas of femininity to live inside of their own dreams. We must birth possibilities and impregnate them with new ideas. When black men are fighting for the lead and control we are doing a disservice to the movement, by only caring about the image on the frontpage. Sometimes when we preach change with black men as the focal point we allow black women to stay indebted, whether if it’s for the fight against police brutality, education, the prison industrial complex, poverty, or simply by individual recognition.
Once you devalue her life you devalue yourself because she is responsible for your life. Society will not advance until we stop and realize that we need to praise and have a pragma type of love for the women that not only birthed us, but the women who birthed this world.
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