This past weekend, Black Students at Yale held their annual Black Solidarity Conference. A coworker of mine (the other young black woman on staff) got funding from the school for us to take a few students. The day we spent at the conference was exciting and disappointing—the shallowness of a lot of analysis around me was disappointing, as was the immense middle-classness imposed on everyone there (which I will write about, but I’m still and forever wrapping my mind around the black bourgeoisie). Even still, this is only touching on the gender issues I had with the conference, as well as those I’ve been thinking about since.
The two students I was with during a poorly facilitated discussion after lunch, both male, were really alienated by how the conversation about “redefining” gender roles was moving. They both felt like the whole thing was about all the things men should do for women, and they wanted to know that in a hetero relationship, they would also get benefits instead of just providing. Which was interesting, because the conversation quickly went from, “Men can’t expect women to do all the cleaning, etc.” to “Men should be willing to take care of all sorts of things.” It was this really unnuanced view, and definitely didn’t feel very empowering: demanding the right to sit on my ass is not why I use feminism.
I wouldn’t want to have changed the course of the group discussion to appease the two young men I was with, because I did want to keep the needs of women central. But I also know that those two young men are wonderful (not perfect, but wonderful) allies. In some ways, I really trust the womanist instincts of a lot of my male students; they, having been led through so much shit by their single mothers and grandmothers, know maybe even better than I do how tough black women can be, but also how human. So if we’re talking feminism, they’re precisely who I want to bring into the conversation, and that wasn’t happening at all. They were just being told “Fuck you,” in a way that wasn’t being justified. The two of them are really willing to explore gender issues and to be challenged but instead just felt shut out.
And there are ways and reasons for black women to tell black men “Fuck you,” not in so many words but when they need to know that yes, the world is stacked against them but that it is also stacked against black women, so sometimes they need to fuck off and shut up and make space for us. I say this at times to my younger brother, I’ve given up on saying much else to my father, and I sometimes get heated and say this to my students—again, in different words. It is a momentary “fuck you,” one that says, I know you can do better, and I will get in your face if that’s what it takes.
I also can’t imagine having any use for a feminism that isn’t informed by constructions of black masculinity. So, even when I am telling black cis men to fuck out of a conversation, it never means they have no place at all there. It just means that, for that moment or in that space, they need to back off.
The other strange thing about the conversation was that it focused on gender roles within monogamous heterosexual relationships, as though that’s the only place gender exists, as though we don’t have genders outside of our relationships. Additionally, black families have never adhered as strictly to the one-mom-one-dad nuclear family as white families have; black families, since slavery, have always come in many forms. There’s plenty of fear mongering about the “deviant” black family being headed by single mothers, so that kind of relationship seemed additionally like a big assumption.
And, those gender roles were being defined largely around norms that were never the norm for us. A lot of women in the room were pushing back against having to be the only person in a relationship who cooks or cleans or raises children, as though they were afraid of finishing their college education only to become a housewife. But black women, by and large, never had the luxury of being housewives the way white women did. Most black women have worked outside their own homes since before the WWII push to get women into factories. So, it was again an atypical thing for black women to be pushing back against, since it largely hasn’t applied to us.
My feminism needs to be so much more complicated than not wanting to be the rare black housewife in a monogamous hetero marriage, because honestly, I can’t imagine that ever happening or having ever been assumed of me. How I do feminism means taking notes from my younger brother about how he’s perceived as a young black man. It means having spent years in an abusive relationship with a man of color, without the white-feminist resources to get out, knowing that going to the police wouldn’t have been that simple in a system designed to care for neither one of us. It means pushing my male students to appreciate the women around them, but not condescending to them about how strong women can be, since I grew up with the privilege of a two-parent family and most of them did not. It means that most of my female role models would never call themselves feminists, because white feminism has never done much to bring them in. It means understanding ways that white women can manipulate and oppress black men, and seeing the fight against that oppression as a feminist fight.
As it stands, I have been growing more by pushing and pulling with men of color than I ever had while trying to stay afloat in white-centered feminism. It is stagnant. It gave me no space to grow if I was always pushing for visibility.
