Words of Fire (30 page)

Role integration, which I will elaborate upon as the goal and the strength of the black family, is substantially different from the role “usurpation” of men by women. The fact that the roles of man and woman are deemed in American society as natural and divine leads to false ego attachments to these roles. During slavery and following Reconstruction, black men felt inferior for a great number of reasons, among them that they were unable to work in positions comparable to the ones to which black women were assigned. With these positions often went fringe benefits of extra food, clothes, and perhaps elementary reading and writing skills. Black women were in turn jealous of white women and felt inadequate and inferior, because paraded in front of them constantly was the white woman of luxury who had no need for work, who could, as Sojourner Trutrh pointed out, “be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches and . . . have the best place everywhere.”

The resulting “respect” for women and the acceptance of the dominating role for men encouraged the myth of the immutability of these roles. The term “matriarchy” Frazier employed and Moynihan exploited was used to indicate a dastardly, unnatural role alteration, which could be blamed for inequality of opportunity, discrimination in hiring, and sundry other ills. It was as if “matriarchy” were transgression of divine law or natural law and thus would be punished until the proper hierarchy of man over woman was restored.

Black people have an obligation, as do white women, to recognize that the designation of “mother-head” and “father-head” does not imply inferiority of one and the superiority of the other. They are merely arbitrary role distinctions that vary from culture to culture and circumstance to circumstance.

Thus to quip, as has been popularly done, that the only place in the black movement for black women is prone is actually supporting a white
role ideal, and it is a compliment neither to men nor to women to advocate sexual capitalism or sexual colonialism.

It seems incongruous that the black movement has sanctioned the involvement of women in the Algerian revolution, even though its revolutionary circumstances modified and often altered the common role models, but they have been duped into hating even their own slave grandmothers, who in not so admirable yet equally frightening and demanding circumstances also modified and altered the common role models of the black family. Fanon wrote in glorious terms about this role change:

Can it not be said that in slavery black women assumed an increasingly important place in the survival action and thus developed their personalities and sense of responsibility? And after being outraged, violated, and tortured, could she be expected to put herself back into her former state of mind and relive her behavior of the past?

The crux of this argument is essentially that blacks, since slavery and throughout their entire existence in America, have also been living in revolutionary circumstances and under revolutionary pressures. Simply because the black liberation struggle has taken 400 years to come to fruition does not mean that it is not every bit as dangerous or psychologically exhausting as the Algerian struggle. Any revolution calls upon the best in both its men and its women. This is why Moynihan's statements that “matriarchy” is a root
cause
of black problems is as unfounded as it is inane. He does not recognize the liberation struggle and the demands that it has made on the black family.

How unfortunate that blacks and whites have allowed the most trying and bitter experience in the history of black people to be interpreted as the beginning of an “unashamed plot” to usurp the very manhood of black men. But the myth was perpetuated, and thus what brought the alteration of roles in Algeria was distorted and systematically employed to separate black men and women in America.

Unless we realize how thoroughly the American value of male superiority and female inferiority has permeated our relationships with one another, we can never appreciate the role it plays in perpetuating racism and keeping black people divided.

Most, but not all, American relationships are based on some type of “exclusive competition of the superior and the exclusive competition of the inferior.” This means essentially that the poor, the uneducated, the deprived, and the minorities of the aforementioned groups compete among themselves for the same scarce resources and inferior opportunities, while the privileged, middle-class, educated, and select white minorities compete with one another for rather plentiful resources and superior opportunities for prestige and power. Competition among groups is rare, due to the fact that elements who qualify are almost invariably absorbed to some extent (note the black middle class) by the group to which they seek entry. We may well understand that there is only one equal relationship between man and woman, black and white, in America, and this equality is based on whether or not you can force your way into qualifying for the same resources.

But instead of attempting to modify this competitive definition within the black movement, many black males have affirmed it as a way of maintaining the closure of male monopolization of scarce benefits and making the “dominion of males” impenetrable to black females. This is, of course, very much the American way of exploitation.

The order of logic that makes it possible to pronounce, as did Dr. Robert Staples, that “Black women cannot be free qua women until all blacks attain their liberation,”
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maintains, whether purposely or not, that black women will be able to separate their femaleness from their blackness, and thus they will be able to be free as blacks, if not free as women; or, that male freedom ought to come first; or, finally, that the freedom of black women and men and the freedom of black people as a whole are not one and the same.

Only with the concept of role integration can we hope to rise above the petty demarcations of human freedom that America is noted for and that are unfortunately inherent in Dr. Staples's remark. Role integration is the realization that:

Thus, the unwitting adoption and the knowing perpetuation of this American value reflects three interrelated situations:

While the rhetoric of black power and the advocates of cultural nationalism laud black people for their ability to struggle under oppressive odds, they simultaneously seek to strip away or incapacitate the phenomenon of role integration—the very means by which blacks were able to survive! They seek to replace it with a weak, intractable role separation which would completely sap the strength of the black movement because it would inhibit the mobilization of both women and men. It was this ability to mobilize black men and black women that guaranteed survival during slavery.

The strength of role integration is sorely overlooked as blacks throw away the hot comb, the bleach cream, the lye, and yet insist on maintaining the worst of American values by placing the strength of black women in the traction of the white female status.

I would think black men would want a better status for their sister black women; indeed, black women would want a better status for themselves, rather than a warmed-over throne of women's inferiority, which white women are beginning to abandon.

Though most white women's lib advocates fail to realize the possibility, their subsequent liberation may spell a strengthening of the status quo values from which they sought liberation. Since more and more women will be participating in the decision-making process, those few women participating in the “struggle” will be outnumbered by the more traditional middle-class women. This means that the traditional women will be in a position to take advantage of new opportunities, which radical women's liberation has struggled to win. Voting studies now reflect that the traditional women, middle-class and above, tend to vote the same way as their husbands. Because blacks have dealt with these husbands in the effort to secure jobs, housing, and education, it does not seem likely that blacks will gain significantly from the open mobility of less tolerant women whose viewpoints differ little from those of their husbands.

If white radical thought has called upon the strength of all women to take a position of responsibility and power, can blacks afford to relegate
black women to “home and babies” while white women reinforce the status quo?

The cry of black women's liberation is a cry against chaining very much needed labor and agitating forces to a role that once belonged to impotent, apolitical white women. Blacks speak lovingly of the vanguard and the importance of women in the struggle and yet fail to recognize that women have been assigned a new place, based on white-ascribed characteristics of women, rather than on their actual potential. The black movement needs its women in a position of struggle, not prone. The struggle blacks face is not taking place between knives and forks, at the washboard, or in the diaper pail. It is taking place on the labor market, at the polls, in government, in the protection of black communities, in local neighborhood power struggles, in housing, and in education.

Can blacks afford to be so unobservant of current events as to send their women to fight a nonexistent battle in a dishpan?

Even now, the black adoption of the white values of women has begun to show its effects on black women in distinctive ways. The black liberation movement has created a politicized, unliberated copy of white womanhood. Black women who participated in the struggle have failed to recognize, for the most part, the unique contradiction between renunciation of capitalistic competition and the acceptance of sexual colonialism. The failure of the black movement to resolve and deal with this dilemma has perpetuated the following attitudes in American politicized black women:

The recent unabated controversy over the use of birth control in the black community is of grave importance here. Black people, even the “most liberated of mind,” are still infused with ascribed inferiority of females and the natural superiority of males. These same values foster the idea of “good blood” in our children. If indeed there can be any black liberation, it must start with the recognition of contradictions like the following.

It gives a great many black males pride to speak, as Dr. Robert Staple does, of “. . . the role of the black woman in the black liberation struggle is an important one and cannot be forgotten. From her womb have come the revolutionary warriors of our time.”
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