What's love got to do?

Cross Currents, Fall, 2004 by Stephanie Y. Mitchem

While walking with friends in downtown Brooklyn in July 2003, our small group passed an assemblage of black men from the Israelite Church of God and Jesus Christ who were proclaiming from soapboxes. They were dressed in costumes reminiscent of a 1940s movie about the French Foreign Legion, pointed black helmets with black velvet uniforms. They spoke over microphones to the mostly black audience, conveying messages about their religion, actively proselytizing the passing crowds. One of their loudest, most virulent pronouncements was about the errors of black women who did not know how to be women, women who were ordained by God to remain silent in society. In fact, the speakers claimed, the Bible clearly delineates the roles of all women as submissive to men. African American women, in error, have totally separated themselves from God with their improper disrespect of black men. One of the members of our small group turned to the rest of us and said, "I never thought I'd hear misogyny preached on a street corner." But I was not surprised by this event. Rather, I was upset because of the ease with which I expected to hear such ravings against black women: African American women's beings, particularly our sexualities, are fodder for anybody's mill.

This essay had its beginnings during that time in Brooklyn. I was with members of the CrossCurrents' Coolidge Colloquium during a break time from writing. My writing task that summer was to develop a book's chapter on black women's love relationships. During the writing process, I found that information about love relationships and black women (or maybe any women) tended toward magazine advice columns or self help books--not my writing aim. So I began to consider my own life experiences.

Years ago, an elderly aunt practically vibrated with rage when I showed up at her house one day. We were to leave for church and she informed me as coldly as possible, "Ladies wear gloves to church." This incident could have happened to any adolescent girl in the United States in the early 1960s, but for me, a black girl-child, the implications were tied to my family's history of leaving Southern lands, separating from "lower" classes, and demonstrating that we were now part of the "better Negroes." In those days before the Detroit rebellion, before many social changes, it seemed that racial pride rose and fell on the successful maintenance of well-defined gender roles, especially that of black women. After the rebellion of 1967, social issues changed the face of Detroit and my own family from whom I, the radical, became estranged. Black power did not end women's constrictions: black women, with Afros neatly combed, were held to standards of black nationalistic gender submission, a new version of the old bea-lady. As some white women were burning bras and beginning other discussions of sexualities in earnest, many black men and women were sneering at such women's uprisings as evidence of white depravity. Of course, there were a few black women who participated in such goings on, but they were often the exceptions--Shirley Chisholm, Nina Simone, Barbara Jordan, or Angela Davis--whose lives hinted at new possibilities.

From the 1960s to now, black women's lives have seemed to improve as evidenced by the numbers of American-type success stories dependent on increasing income. Yet the majority of African American women have not been able to pretend assimilation with their dollars. A few statistics tell the story well. African American female householders have a median income that is $9,000 less than white women in the same category. (1) Additionally, the longer life expectancy of white women (2) and the greater earnings of their families over time indicate greater lifetime resources and earnings that could be passed to succeeding generations, thereby maintaining and strengthening their social positions. In other words, African American families--women, children, and men--work harder, live shorter lives, and receive fewer benefits. The escape route that marriage can offer white women is also closed to black women. Students in my classes have often analyzed the symbolic meanings of wealthy-by-marriage Ivana Trump: someone whom white girls should not want to emulate; someone whom black girls should never think about emulating because society eliminates them from consideration.

It may seem incongruous that discussions of black women's sexualities must encompass economics and life expectancy. However, gender role expectations are constructed and developed in social settings from childhood: whether through an aunt confronting glove-wearing or through the many other messages from home and school that reinforce the expectations. Yet the truth of sexualities may or may not stand in comfortable conformity with those expectations, social expectations that bend us into shapes that do not fit. For African American women, realities of sexualities must include those things which shape us, for good or ill.

African American women are judged for our sexualities when sexuality, like prayer, is personal, reflecting patterns of socialization. Yet, in a country that claims the legal protection of the privacy of its citizens, African American women's bedrooms have been under close and constant scrutiny. For African American women, both black and white communities (at minimum) contour their sexualities as a matter of public concern. Sexuality, like prayer, has become politicized by those who are white, male, and affluent. These are some of the processes of colonizing African American women's bodies, depending on a connection of race and sex that is woven into the history of the country's development.