Abstract
In a 1979 essay, “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists,” noted black sociologist Robert Staples unleashes a scathing critique of black feminist writers Ntozake Shange and Michele Wallace, arguing that their critical work and attendant success serve as a proxy for white feminist and white male capitalist attacks on black men specifically and black people generally. Speaking of Shange’s choreopoem, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, Staples writes that the most unsettling part of her work is its insistence that black women find peace and wholeness within: “She does not mention compassion for misguided Black men or a love for child, family and community. It all seems so strange, exhorting Black women to go it alone.”1 He reserves his most disdainful criticism for Michele Wallace, whose charge of sexism he tries to undercut by arguing that black men do not possess institutional control to subordinate black women; that is white men’s terrain. Asserting that black men only head two institutions, the family and the church, he further absolves them of responsibility for black women’s woes by claiming that in relation to the church, black men do not attend and have no investment in its operation, and with respect to the family they are equally absent.2 Staples’s specious explanation of black male powerlessness exposes his ignorance, if not his willful omission, of the workings of patriarchy.
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Notes
Robert Staples, “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists,” The Black Scholar, Vol. 10, No. 6/7 (March/April 1979): 24–33.
Deborah E. McDowell, The Changing Same: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
I take the concept of dominant masculinity from Tony Coles’s “Negotiating the Field of Masculinity: The Production and Reproduction of Multiple Dominant Masculinity,” Men and Masculinities, Vol. 12, No.1 (October 2009): 30–44, in which he expands R. W. Connell’s formulations of hegemonic masculinity to argue that men in subdominant groups can and do in fact exercise different types of masculinities that dominate others even when they are dominated by other categories such as race, class, or sexuality. Although he does not explicitly use the term “dominant masculinity” in “Woman Thou Art Bound,” Robert J. Patterson invokes the same concept with his analysis of a “patriarchy critique-affirmation dyad” in Perry’s works. Patterson argues that despite his contention that his films go against Hollywood’s representations of black people, Perry’s films operate through a “patriarchy critique-affirmation dyad” in which “his works struggle to systematically critique patriarchy as a system, but instead identifies only its most blatant and egregious manifestations as problematic.” My critique of Perry is not unlike Patterson’s; however, I go beyond his examination of marriage and the nuclear family to show how the nexus of individual and community change that Perry advocates hinges on both overt and covert acts of violence against black women.
For further discussion, see Robert J. Patterson’s “Woman Thou Art Bound,” Black Camera, An International Film Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter 2011): 9–10.
Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 21.
William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 7.
Michael Leo Owens, “Capacity Building: The Case of Faith-Based Organizations,” in Building the Organizations That Build Community: Strengthening the Capacity of Faith- and Community-Based Development Organizations, ed. Roland V. Anglin (HUD, 2004), 127–163. This article is also available online at http://www.huduser.org/Publications/pdf/Build OrgComms/SectionII-Paper3.pdf.
The following list of sources on women’s experiences in the Civil Rights movement is meant only as a sampling of the volume of work that exists on the subject. For a discussion of Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal failings with respect to women, see Michael Eric Dyson’s I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.; for an account of Mrs. Parks’s experience and life-long pursuit in civil rights see Douglas Brinkley’s biography of her, Rosa Parks: A Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2005). See Vicki L. Crawford’s Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941– 1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) for women’s personal accounts of shaping the movement;
for a comparative discussion with the Black Power movement, see Bettye Collier-Thomas Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights–Black Power Movement (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
For personal accounts of women in SNCC in particular, see Faith S. Holsaert, et al.’s Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts of Women in SNCC (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012)
and for a white female perspective, see Mary King’s Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Morrow, 1987).
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© 2014 LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, Tamura A. Lomax, and Carol B. Duncan
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Tomlinson, Y.M.S. (2014). “A People That Would Take Care of Ourselves”: Tyler Perry’s Vision of Community and Gender Relations. In: Manigault-Bryant, L.S., Lomax, T.A., Duncan, C.B. (eds) Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429568_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137429568_7
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