Black People are Myths

For all the uproar and criticism Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman garnered after its release, I don’t find it to be as inflammatory as I was lead to believe. Reading Michele Wallace’s account on the relationships between black women and men in the 1970s, I wonder how her words have been inside my mouth for as long as I was old enough to say and really feel that “A nigga man ain’t shit” (15). Honestly! How is it that her words feel so eerily familiar as if my mother co-wrote it. I recall very clearly my mother saying in one of them disapproving black women voices how black men flock to white women because they see them as symbols of success, of moving on up the social ladder. Even still, I can retrieve without much effort from my adolescent memories, a friend of my father explaining to me that in the U.S. black men and white men were polar opposites in terms of power; that they were the opponents in the great American struggle. Everybody else, white and black women, were in the middle of it all. Although young and without the words and courage to counter him, I was disgruntled by his statements, feeling that his hypothesis was blatantly ignorant. Women can’t just be passive pawns in the battle of male power.

Wallace’s book is centered around the myths of the Black Macho and the Superwoman. Within a eurocentric society whose gender binary consists of man and woman, black people, by virtue of being descendants of an enslaved people, don’t ascribe to those “normal” gender categories irrespective of their aspirations to do so. It seems that the opposite of dehumanization is overestimation and in the case of black folks we can either be subhumans, close to the monkeys, or the hyper– a black man whose masculinity is defined by his virility and aggression or a black woman whose femininity is also defined by an exaggerated sexuality.

Wallace writes the black woman is “really more of a woman in that she is the embodiment of Mother Earth, the quintessential mother with infinite sexual, life-giving, and nurturing reserve…she is a superwoman” (107). What are the implications of such a myth? Black women being so strong that 1) they can withstand the sexual violence of the slave master 2) serve as guinea pig for early gynecological procedures 3) be ignored by doctors when experiencing pain during pregnancy and risk fatality and 4) endure the bullshit that black men put them through on a daily basis. These are but of few examples of how black women’s real and imagined strength and longevity has been used to justify their abuse. To the last example, think of all the black women celebrities whose personal love lives have made public scandal. What’s the message of Beyonce’s Lemonade? Yeah she’s been heartbroken and cheated on, but in the end she stood by her man through the pain and everyone’s like wow Beyonce’s so strong. What good has this myth of the superwoman brought black women?

Thinking of the superwoman brought to mind my generation’s #BlackGirlMagic movement. The phrase and concept strives to celebrate black girls and women. Odes to melanin and curl patterns make up much of the rhetoric. It affirms our powers. But of course, every seemingly beneficial thing can be criticized. In a 2016 Elle magazine, Harvard professor Linda Chavers wrote a piece disapproving the BGM movement, claiming it was an iteration of the very myth Wallace explains. Chavers assures herself that she has heard “black girl magic” somewhere before:

“The “strong, black woman” archetype, which also includes the mourning black woman who suffers in silence, is the idea that we can survive it all,that we can withstand it. That we are, in fact, superhuman. Black girl magic sounds to me like just another way of saying the same thing, and it is smothering and stunting. It is, above all, constricting rather than freeing.” Black girl magic suggests we are, again, something other than human.”

Although, I see how chanting black girl magic can sneakily affirm the old as (colonial) times idea of a black superwoman, but I think it’s much a stretch to equate it to what Wallace is describing.

You can read the rest here: https://www.elle.com/life-love/a33180/why-i-dont-love-blackgirlmagic/

I find fascinating Wallace’s insistence that black people are mythologized in American society and that black people internalize these myths, believing them to be true of each other. I want to share a scene from the 1974 Afrofuturist film Space Is the Place which stars jazz giant Sun Ra. This is the era from which Wallace writes so it is especially relevant to see her subjects personified. Sun Ra is telling the young black folks that they aren’t real. We are a myth.

Watching this film years ago, this scene and his monologue stuck with me. I had never thought of myself as a myth. Now reading Black Macho I agree more and more that black people are myths. Not to say we aren’t human beings because of course. But Black People™ or African Americans or Negros or slaves are just socially constructed, as is anyone categorized into race, gender, sexual orientation, or class. We aren’t who we are. We are what we/they say we are. To say I am black is to attach to myself a list of concepts, connotations, qualities, narratives and histories that may or may or not be true to anything of who I am as a human. My blackness is perceived and conceived differently in the minds of every person I encounter, making me not who I am but who they say I am. The superwoman is nothing but others’ projection internalized and reappropriated. That is why it is imperative for black folks to be the ones with the power to define ourselves.