{"id":303,"date":"2015-10-15T20:03:34","date_gmt":"2015-10-15T20:03:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/?p=303"},"modified":"2015-11-12T20:24:11","modified_gmt":"2015-11-12T20:24:11","slug":"bad-girls-in-three-parts-reading-the-black-sexism-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/?p=303","title":{"rendered":"Bad Girls In Three Parts: Reading \u201cThe Black Sexism Debate\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/unnamed-1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-304 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/unnamed-1-214x300.jpg\" alt=\"unnamed-1\" width=\"214\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/unnamed-1-214x300.jpg 214w, https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/unnamed-1-732x1024.jpg 732w, https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/unnamed-1.jpg 738w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 214px) 100vw, 214px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/unnamed-1.jpg\"><br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-304 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/unnamed-1-214x300.jpg\" alt=\"unnamed-1\" width=\"214\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/unnamed-1-214x300.jpg 214w, https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/unnamed-1-732x1024.jpg 732w, https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/unnamed-1.jpg 738w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 214px) 100vw, 214px\" \/><br \/>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/unnamed-1.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-304 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/unnamed-1-214x300.jpg\" alt=\"unnamed-1\" width=\"214\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/unnamed-1-214x300.jpg 214w, https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/unnamed-1-732x1024.jpg 732w, https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/unnamed-1.jpg 738w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 214px) 100vw, 214px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>You bad girl<\/p>\n<p>You sad girl<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;re such a dirty bad girl<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">\u2014 Donna Summer, \u201cBad Girls\u201d (1979)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>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?<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Audre Lorde, &#8220;The Great American Disease,&#8221; in &#8220;The Black Sexism Debate&#8221; issue of\u00a0<em>The Black Scholar<\/em> (May\/June, 1979)<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>How are we to read the 1979 special issue of <em>The Black Scholar<\/em> on the so-called \u201cBlack Sexism Debate\u201d? What word in this title\u00a0is up for discussion? (Hint: It\u2019s the not the \u201cblack\u201d 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\u2019s \u201cThe Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists\u201d?<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/FX4cDezit7I\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>In this post, I\u2019m 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 &#8220;Black Women haven&#8217;t &#8216;Got It All,&#8221; &#8220;All I have time to say to Robert Staples is this: Are you serious?&#8221; (39). Instead, I\u2019m 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.<!--more--><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Let me start things off with a\u00a0now-ritualized beginning, a quote from scholar Hortense Spillers in her 1989 article &#8220;<a href=\"mailto:http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/464747\">Mama&#8217;s Baby: An American Grammar Book<\/a>:&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<blockquote><p>Let&#8217;s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. &#8220;Peaches&#8221; and &#8220;Brown Sugar, &#8221; Sapphire&#8221; and &#8220;Earth Mother,&#8221; &#8220;Aunty,&#8221; &#8220;Granny,&#8221; God&#8217;s &#8220;Holy Fool,&#8221; a &#8220;Miss Ebony First,&#8221; or &#8220;Black Woman at the Podium&#8221;: 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)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>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 <em>The Black Scholar.\u00a0<\/em>There are several references in &#8220;Mama&#8217;s Baby&#8221; to recurring keywords in &#8220;The Black Sexism Debate&#8221; such as:\u00a0the 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,\u00a0kinship, intimacy, and more. It&#8217;s a text to read if you haven&#8217;t yet and to read again and again if you already have.<\/p>\n<ol start=\"2\">\n<li>What I found so striking while sifting through the \u201cBlack Sexism Debate\u201d issue was the ongoing and deployable tension between the literary and the sociological. In \u201cOn Wallace\u2019s Myths: Wading Thru Troubled Waters,\u201d M. Ron Karenga warns us about\u00a0literature before he even begins to address its power. He writes,<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<blockquote><p>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&#8217;t know her and disagree with both her lifestyle and literature. (38)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Perhaps Karenga is predicting the 2015 reissue of Michele Wallace&#8217;s\u00a0<em>The Black Macho and The Myth of the Superwoman<\/em>\u00a0by Verso. Or the <em>For Colored Girls <\/em>film adaptation by Tyler Perry in 2010. Cam\u2019ron might say,<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/bossip.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/04\/camron-you-mad.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"600\" height=\"458\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Karenga ends with literature, I think, because he wants to\u00a0address\u00a0(im)possibility. A little earlier, he writes, \u201cit 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\u201d (38). What does Karenga mean by \u201csocial\u201d 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?<\/p>\n<p>The forum section of the \u201cBlack Sexism Debate\u201d issue is organized into the following sections: \u201cFeminism and Black Liberation,\u201d \u201cPolitical and Historical Aspects of Black Male\/Female Relationships,\u201d and \u201cCultural and Interpersonal Aspects of Black\/Female Relationships.\u201d 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\u2019t literary criticism explicitly named as a way to think through Shange\u2019s <em>for colored girls <\/em>in particular? Are Shange\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n<p>Ntozake Shange\u2019s two-pronged response proposes reading practices\u00a0in its own way by skirting the idea that the bedrock of the \u201cBlack Sexism Debate\u201d is its interpersonal dimension. In \u201cis not so gd to be born a girl (1),\u201d she offers a poetics of suffocation vis-\u00e0-vis a perfect zeugma that I tweeted this morning on an empty stomach:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" width=\"550\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">&quot;those subtlties make being a girl too complex\/ for some of us &amp; we go crazy\/ or never go anyplace&quot; &#8211; Ntozake Shange in <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/TheBlackSchlr\">@TheBlackSchlr<\/a>, 1979<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Tiana Reid (@tianareid) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/tianareid\/status\/654629972615819264\">October 15, 2015<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>In \u201cotherwise I would think it odd to have rape prevention month (2),\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<ol start=\"3\">\n<li>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\u2019s both a response to and a refusal of the violent language of distraction that permeates \u201cThe Black Sexism Debate,\u201d 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.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/HzxW4eu9heY\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/h1qQ1SKNlgY\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/oMVe_HcyP9Y\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ZBR2G-iI3-I\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/EtaZ48fERfc\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; You bad girl You sad girl You&#8217;re such a dirty bad girl \u2014 Donna Summer, \u201cBad Girls\u201d (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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[111,113,119,116,9,115,118,117,120,114,112],"class_list":["post-303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogposts","tag-black-macho","tag-black-sexism-debate","tag-donna-summer","tag-june-jordan","tag-language","tag-literature","tag-michele-wallace","tag-moynihan-report","tag-poetics","tag-sociology","tag-the-black-scholar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=303"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":393,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303\/revisions\/393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}