Bad Girls In Three Parts: Reading “The Black Sexism Debate”

by Tiana Reid 0 Comments

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You bad girl

You sad girl

You’re such a dirty bad girl

— Donna Summer, “Bad Girls” (1979)

What correct analysis of this rotten capitalist dragon within which we live will legitimize the wholesale rape of black women by black men that goes on now within every city of this land?

— Audre Lorde, “The Great American Disease,” in “The Black Sexism Debate” issue of The Black Scholar (May/June, 1979)

 

How are we to read the 1979 special issue of The Black Scholar on the so-called “Black Sexism Debate”? What word in this title is up for discussion? (Hint: It’s the not the “black” part.) What does it mean that we are in the realm of a named dialogue? What does it mean that we have to name this discussion that is always up for debate? How do we confront the seemingly antiquated (read: racist, patriarchal, and biological) language that permeates the occasion for the issue, Robert Staples’s “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists”?

In this post, I’m not going to rehash any of the arguments from the issue or offer any of my own in part because I can imagine June Jordan in her hazy-beautiful voice (see above) saying, as she does in the opening to “Black Women haven’t ‘Got It All,” “All I have time to say to Robert Staples is this: Are you serious?” (39). Instead, I’m going to present a few provisional fragments as guideposts and entryways into this historical text that embodies such a fascinating affective register. I am totally serious.

  1. Let me start things off with a now-ritualized beginning, a quote from scholar Hortense Spillers in her 1989 article “Mama’s Baby: An American Grammar Book:”

Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar, ” Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have been invented. (64)

I begin with this opening just to try and open things up and not get too bogged down with the structuring logics that are handed to us one after the next in the short articles in The Black Scholar. There are several references in “Mama’s Baby” to recurring keywords in “The Black Sexism Debate” such as: the Moynihan Report, theories of black family, the black woman as an invention, (un)gendering, black feminist theory, sexuality, the sociological, psychoanalysis, slavery and its afterlives, kinship, intimacy, and more. It’s a text to read if you haven’t yet and to read again and again if you already have.

  1. What I found so striking while sifting through the “Black Sexism Debate” issue was the ongoing and deployable tension between the literary and the sociological. In “On Wallace’s Myths: Wading Thru Troubled Waters,” M. Ron Karenga warns us about literature before he even begins to address its power. He writes,

This is why even literature is a weapon for or against us, and why the oppressor will make sure Wallace sells more books than Staples and that Shange (1977) plays to countless houses across the country and be recognized as a spokeswomen [sic] for millions of black women who don’t know her and disagree with both her lifestyle and literature. (38)

Perhaps Karenga is predicting the 2015 reissue of Michele Wallace’s The Black Macho and The Myth of the Superwoman by Verso. Or the For Colored Girls film adaptation by Tyler Perry in 2010. Cam’ron might say,

Karenga ends with literature, I think, because he wants to address (im)possibility. A little earlier, he writes, “it is important that we see and stress the social basis of these contradictions so that a social rather than personal analysis and solution can be supplied” (38). What does Karenga mean by “social” here? Can we think sociality as separate from a sociological gaze? What relationship does black literature or, say, literature by black women have, more broadly, to the sociological?

The forum section of the “Black Sexism Debate” issue is organized into the following sections: “Feminism and Black Liberation,” “Political and Historical Aspects of Black Male/Female Relationships,” and “Cultural and Interpersonal Aspects of Black/Female Relationships.” The literary, then, is not named upfront as one of the lenses through which we might talk about the debate at hand. (There is, of course, a separate poetry section.) Why isn’t literary criticism explicitly named as a way to think through Shange’s for colored girls in particular? Are Shange’s poems mere evidence for sociological problems? If Robert Staples is a sociologist and W.E.B. Du Bois was a sociologist and Orlando Patterson is a sociologist, how might we learn how to read sociology that has black women as an object of study? How is it different from reading literature?

Ntozake Shange’s two-pronged response proposes reading practices in its own way by skirting the idea that the bedrock of the “Black Sexism Debate” is its interpersonal dimension. In “is not so gd to be born a girl (1),” she offers a poetics of suffocation vis-à-vis a perfect zeugma that I tweeted this morning on an empty stomach:

In “otherwise I would think it odd to have rape prevention month (2),” Shange offers a list of alternatives that range from self-defense and gun-carrying to a general strike. These are not the policies of a social scientist. This is a writer writing.

  1. My first fragment was anachronistic, I suppose, but I want to leave off with a few sounds from the 1979 Billboard charts. They circle around ideas of family, black sexual politics, myths of the strong black woman, backlash, pleasure, and pain. It’s both a response to and a refusal of the violent language of distraction that permeates “The Black Sexism Debate,” that is, the insistence that there is always something more important, more coherent, less frivolous, less feminine, less erotic (etc.!) that we should be focusing on.

 

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