Words of Fire (87 page)

19
Joyce A. Ladner,
Tomorrow's Tomorrow: The Black Woman
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971), 284; Robert Staples,
The Black Woman in America
(Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1975), 174—76; Janice Gump, “Comparative Analysis of Black Women's and White Women's Sex Role Attitudes,”
Journal of Consulting and
Clinical Psychology
43 (1975), 862—63; and Cellestine
Ware, Woman Power: The Movement for Women's Liberation
(New York: Tower Publications, 1970), 75—99.

20
S. Parker and R. J. Kleiner, “Social and Psychological Dimensions of Family Role Performance of the Negro Male,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
31 (1969): 500—6; John H. Scanzoni,
The Black Family in Modern Society
(Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1971); Katheryn Thomas Dietrich, “A Re-examination of the Myth of Black Matriarchy,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
37 (May 1975): 367—74; H. H. Hyman and J. S. Reed, “Black Matriarchy Reconsidered: Evidence from Secondary Analysis of Sample Surveys,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
33 (1969): 346—54; Robert Staples, “The Myth of the Black Matriarchy,” in
The Black Family,
ed. Robert Staples (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1971), 149—59; Alan Berger and William Simon, “Black Families and the Moynihan Report: A Research Evaluation,”
Social Problems
33 (December 1974): 145—61.

21
Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex
(New York: Vintage, 1974); Susan Bell,
Women, from the Greeks to the French Revolution
(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1973); and Alan Cuming, “Women in Greek and Pauline Thought,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
34 (December 1973): 517—28.

22
Notable exceptions are Rosemary Reuther, “Crisis in Sex and Race: Black vs. Feminist Theology,”
Christianity and Crisis
34 (15 April 1974): 67-73; and Reuther, “Continuing the Discussion: A Further Look at Feminist Theology,”
Christianity and Crisis
34 (24 June 1974): 139—43.

23
Barbara Sizemore, “Sexism and the Black Male,”
Black Scholar
4 (March/April 1973): 2—11; and Harry Edwards, “Black Muslim and Negro Christian Family Relationships,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family
30 (November 1968): 604—11.

E
. Frances White's “Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse and African American Nationalism” appeared in the Spring 1990 issue of
Journal of Women's History
and is one of the first essays written from a black feminist perspective that analyzes in a comprehensive manner black nationalist discourse. White is associate professor of history and black studies at Hampshire College. Her essay “Listening to the Voices of Black Feminism” (
Radical America
, 1984) discusses the evolution of her own “incipient feminism” which was fanned by her frustration with black nationalist movements in the 1960s. The essay also critiques several contemporary black feminists.

T
he African past lies camouflaged in the collective African American memory, transformed by the middle passage, sharecropping, industrialization, urbanization. Few material goods from Africa survived this difficult history, but Africans brought with them a memory of how social relations should be constructed that has affected African American culture to the present. Although the impact of these African roots are difficult to assess, few historians today deny the importance of this past to African American culture.

But the memories I seek to interrogate in this essay have little to do with “real” memories or actual traditions that African Americans have passed along through blood or even practices. Rather, I am concerned with the way African Americans in the late twentieth century construct and reconstruct collective political memories of African culture to build a cohesive group that can shield them from racist ideology and oppression. In particular it is the political memories of African gender relations and sexuality that act as models for African American social relations that will serve as this paper's focus.

Below I will focus on black nationalism as an oppositional strategy that both counters racism and constructs conservative utopian images of African
American life. I will pay close attention to the intertwined discussions on the relationship of the African past to present-day culture and to attempts to construct utopian and repressive gender relations. After situating my work theoretically in the next section, I return to an examination of Afrocentric paradigms that support nationalist discourse on gender and the African past. Finally I look at the emergence of a black feminist discourse that attempts to combine nationalist and feminist insights in a way that counters racism but tries to avoid sexist pitfalls.

Throughout the essay, I choose examples from across the range of nationalist thinking. Some of this writing is obviously narrow and sexist. Other works have influenced my thinking deeply and have made significant contributions to understanding African American women's lives. I argue, however, that all fail to confront the sexist models that ground an important part of their work. I imagine that my criticisms will be read by some as a dismissal of all Afrocentric thinking. Nothing could be further from my intentions. It is because I value the contributions of nationalists that I want to engage them seriously. Yet it is the kind of feminism that demands attention to internal community relations that leads me to interrogate this discourse even while acknowledging its ability to undermine racist paradigms. This kind of black feminism recognizes the dangers of criticizing internal relations in the face of racist attacks but also argues that we will fail to transform ourselves into a liberated community if we do not engage in dialogue on the difficult issues that confronts us.
¹

African American nationalists have taken the lead in resurrecting and inventing African models for the African diaspora in the United States. They recognize that dominant, negative images of Africa have justified black enslavement, segregation, and continuing impoverishment.
²
Accordingly, nationalists have always argued persuasively that African Americans deny their connections to Africa at the peril of allowing a racist subtext to circulate without serious challenge. At the same time, nationalists have recognized that counterattacks on negative portrayals of Africa stimulate political mobilization against racism in the United States. The consciously identified connections between African independence and the United States Civil Rights movements and, more recently, between youth rebellion in South Africa and campus unrest in the United States stand out as successful attempts to build a Pan-African consciousness.

The construction of Pan-African connections can have its problems, however. At times it depends on the search for a glorious African past while accepting dominant European notions of what that past should look like. As I have argued elsewhere,
³
proving that Africans created “civilizations” as sophisticated as those in Europe and the Near East has concerned nationalists too much.
⁴
In the process of elevating Egypt, for example, they
have often accepted as uncivilized and even savage primitives the majority of Africans who lived in stateless societies, but whose past deserves respect for its complex relationship to the world around it.
⁵

Perhaps more importantly, the nationalist or Afrocentric construction of a political memory attempts to set up standards of social relations that can be both liberating and confining. The quotation at the beginning of this essay by the “inventor” of Kwanza traditions, Ron Karenga, illustrates this point. Building off conservative concepts of “traditional” African gender relations before colonial rule, he argues that the collective needs of black families depend on women's complementary and unequal roles. As I shall make clear below, Karenga has significantly modified his sexist ideas about gender relations, but the ideology of complementarity and collective family needs continues to work against the liberation of black women.

In addition, many nationalists, both male and female, remain openly hostile to any feminist agenda. In a paper arguing that black people should turn to African polygamous and extended family forms to solve the “problem” of female-headed households, Larry Delano Coleman concludes:

Coleman defines “the race” in a way that excludes feminists, lesbians, and gay men from community support—a terrifying proposition in this age of resurgent racism.
⁷

In advocating polygamous families, Nathan and Julia Hare, the influential editors of
Black Male/Female Relationships,
link homosexuality with betrayal of the race:

Both the Hares' and Coleman's standards of appropriate gender relations depends on a misguided notion of African culture in the era before “the fall”—that is, before European domination distorted African traditions. These nationalists have idealized polygamous and extended families in a way that stresses both cooperation among women and male support of wives but ignores cross-generational conflict and intrafamily rivalry also
common in extended, polygamous families. They have invented an African past to suit their conservative agenda on gender and sexuality.

In making appeals to conservative notions of appropriate gender behavior, African American nationalists reveal their ideological ties to other nationalist movements, including European and Euro-American bourgeois nationalists over the past 200 years. These parallels exist despite the different class and power bases of these movements. European and Euro-American nationalists turned to the ideology of respectability to help them impose the bourgeois manners and morals that attempted to control sexual behavior and gender relations. This ideology helped the bourgeoisie create a “private sphere” that included family life, sexual relations, and leisure time. Respectability set standards of proper behavior at the same time that it constructed the very notion of private life. Nationalism and respectability intertwined as the middle class used the nation-state to impose its notions of the private sphere's proper order on the upper and lower classes. Through state-run institutions, such as schools, prisons, and census bureaus, the bourgeoisie disciplined people and collected the necessary information to identify and control them.
⁹

Often African Americans have served as a model of abnormality against which nationalism in the United States was constructed. White bourgeois nationalism has often portrayed African Americans as if they threatened respectability. Specifically, white nationalists have described both black men and women as hypersexual. Moreover, black family life has consistently served as a model of abnormality for the construction of the ideal family life. Black families were matriarchal when white families should have been male-dominated. Now they are said to be female-headed when the ideal has become an equal heterosexual pair.
¹⁰

As I have suggested, black people have developed African American nationalism as an oppositional discourse to counter such racist images. Ironically, though not surprisingly, this nationalism draws on the ideology of respectability to develop a cohesive political movement. The African American ideology of respectability does not always share the same moral code with western nationalism. Some Afrocentric thinkers, such as Larry Coleman, turn to Africa for models of gender relations and call for polygamy as an appropriate form of marriage between black men and women. More crucially, black nationalists did not and cannot call on state power to enforce their norms. Their opposition to abortion carries very different weight from the campaign of the Christian right, whose agenda includes making a bid for control of state institutions.

It is this lack of access to state power and African American nationalists' advocacy of an oppressed people that gives Afrocentric ideology its progressive, radical edge and ultimately distinguishes it from European and Euro-American bourgeois nationalism. Paradoxically then, Afrocentric ideology
can be radical and progressive in relation to white racism and conservative and repressive in relation to the internal organization of the black community. Clearly, nationalists struggle in a way that can deeply threaten white racism. Both the open repression and the ideological backlash against nationalists indicate that their discourse strikes at the heart of black oppression. Yet I often find too narrow black nationalist efforts to define what the community or nation should be. In particular many nationalists attempt to construct sexist and heterosexist ideal models for appropriate behavior.