What's love got to do?

Cross Currents, Fall, 2004 by Stephanie Y. Mitchem

The fear of lesbians in black communities is real and is also used to control the behavior of African American women: Who would want to be called a lesbian? And so the phobia spirals and embeds itself even more firmly. Womanist scholar Renita J. Weems exposes this aspect of homophobia and the different responses that might buy into or resist the pressure to conform.

      In light of the mindless homophobia (exacerbated by the hysteria
      surrounding AIDS) that exists in the Black community, the
      accusation of being a lesbian is most often a ploy to castrate a
      woman, to silence her, to scare her into obedience, to undermine
      her effectiveness before her peers and clients, and to remind her
      of her place. In some instances, it has been effective. For I've
      seen friendships terminate; I've seen women denounce other women
      to win male affection; and I've seen women turn in their placard
      and withdraw from a movement for fear of being labeled a
      lesbian. (18)

Kelly Brown Douglas has begun a discussion of the problems and complexities of sexism in black communities. Her work is groundbreaking, bringing these discussions into the dimensions of black church life. Simply put, how can the black Christian community continue to implicitly or explicitly uphold sexism? The answers to that question are not simple. Douglas grounds the reasons for these problems in the deep and dividing legacy of white sexual assault on black people, a form of colonization. She stated: "A history of having their sexuality exploited and used as a weapon to support their oppression has discouraged the Black community from freely engaging sexual concerns." (19)

The need to name our realities, in light of history and stereotypes, will further expose the ways that African American sexuality is misnamed in the United States. We must recognize that there is a cultural bias in preferred American family and marriage structures and gender constructions. That bias is for white, middle class, physically able, nuclear families with the matching heterosexual gender role constructions: these are established as normative. Any other possibilities are construed as deviant. We must recognize that there is also religious bias in preferred American family and marriage structures and gender role constructions. The white Anglo-Saxon Protestant views of marriage, family and gender are blessed and fused to the cultural biases, creating religious mythology about what a good and, by implication, godly family and its members look like. As soon as African American families and marriages do not meet these surface descriptions, they are considered ungodly. While all societies define their norms as part of processes of socialization, yet African Americans were not consulted when the norms were constructed. During the creation of these normative views, African Americans were, first, enslaved, and later captured under legalized segregation. The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision of the Supreme Court that declared separate but equal an impossibility could not magically erase different social structures and values, divergent political views, or distinct religious perspectives. The Great Society programs of the 1960s, anti-poverty programs, and affirmative action did not reach far enough to create such substantive changes as to erase the gulf between black and white Americans.