Posts tagged patriarchy.
— bell hooks
“What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.”
- bell hooks
”If you’re a young man growing up in this culture and the culture is telling you that being a man, means being powerful, being dominant, being in control, having the respect of your peers, but you don’t have any real power, well one thing that you do have access to is your body and your ability to present yourself physically as somebody who’s worthy of respect, that, I think accounts for the hypermasculine posturing by a lot of young men of color… Men who have more power, men who have financial power, and workplace authority, and forms of abstract power, don’t have to be as physically powerful because they can exert their power in other ways.” - Jackson Katz, Anti-Sexist Activist
— Excerpt from the Documentary, “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes” by Byron Hurt
”If we have a glorified sense of our own victimization as black men, brown men, what we must not miss but we often do is to understand that black women, and brown women themselves, are still victimized, not only by white patriarchy but by black male supremacy, and by the violence of masculinity that is directed towards them.” - Michael Eric Dyson
“Embracing patriarchal notions of manhood, black males thought of sex as informed first and foremost by male desire.In his essay “Patriarchal Sex” Robert Jensen explains: “Sex is fucking. In patriarchy, there is an imperative to fuck—in rape and in ‘normal’ sex, with strangers and girlfriends and wives and estranged wives and child. What matters in patriarchal sex is the male need to fuck. When that need presents itself, sex occurs.” Much of the subculture of blackness in the early years of the twentieth century was created in reaction and resistance to the culture whites sought to impose on black folks. Since whiteness had repressed black sexuality, in the subculture space of blackness, sexual desire was expressed with degrees of abandon unheard of in white society…. Those black males who wanted to let the world know that they were engaged in the patriarchal sex that centralized fucking could do so by spreading their seed and making babies. In segregated black communities men in power (political leaders, the clergy, teachers) used their authority to sexually harass or seduce willing and unwilling females. Equating manhood with fucking, many black men saw status and economic success as synonymous with endless sexual conquest. Jensen writes that the “curriculum for sex education for a normal American boy” simply teaches males that they must “fuck women” or fuck somebody. Added to this lesson, Jensen says, was a notion that males should “fuck as many women as often as you can for as long as you can get away it”or “fuck a lot of women until you get tired of it, and then find one to marry and just fuck her.” In segregated African-American life, patriarchal sex was not only the medium for the assertion of manhood; it was also reconceptualized in the spaceof blackness as entitled pleasure for black males who were not getting all the perks of patriarchal maleness in arenas where white men were still controlling the show,
-bell hooks, We Real Cool, p.80
— ― bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
Response to Michelle Obama’s portrayal as an “Angry Black Woman”
The stereotype of the “Angry Black Woman” is used to justify and validate the unjust treatment of Black women in the U.S. This controlling image implies that the U.S. Black woman’s anger deviates from what is culturally acceptable, due to being biologically inferior (being born of the wrong sex and the wrong race, Black and female) or due to being culturally inferior (as a consequence of Black Culture deviating from the white “mythical norm”). By making this assumption, Black women’s anger becomes regarded as invalid and dismissed. The stereotype of “Angry Black Woman” assumes that there is no reason for the Black Woman in the U.S. to be angry. That anger is a deviant behavior due to inferiority. By doing this, we ignore the realities of racist and sexist inequality that exists here within the United States. The stereotype of the “Angry Black Woman” serves to mark the cries of Black women across the U.S. as illegitimate. By further acknowledging this controlling image as valid, we ignore the oppression and obstacles faced by women of color daily. The stereotype of “Angry Black Woman” serves the Patriarchal and White Supremacist agenda to suppress the legitimate cries of Black Women, relieving America of it’s responsibility to this group of people. It also serves Black men who sit at the table of Male Privilege and Male dominance within a Patriarchal society. Black Men who affirm the validity of the controlling image of the “Angry Black Woman” used to deem the cries, hurt, and anger of Black women as irrelevant and unjust, become apart of a interracial sexist alliance that persists in the emotional, social, political, psychological, and oppressive “gang-rape” of Black womanhood.
-Dean Steed
— Bell Hooks
