CONTEMPORARY SCHOLARSHIP OF twentieth-century black political formations has documented the historical devaluation of issues pertaining to the specific plight of Afro-American women. Besides the male dominance of black ethnic institutions (e.g., churches, black colleges, black insurance firms, professional organizations), the absence of much concern about black women’s issues stemmed from an overarching ethnic belief that the enemy of black progress was white supremacy. In this view, white supremacy did not differentiate according to gender. Thus, to champion issues that presupposed a unique plight for black women was tantamount to undermining race unity. Despite the historical marginalization of such issues, black women have played crucial roles in all social movements toward black emancipation.
Black women, for example, were essential participants in the Civil Rights movement. They could be found among the demonstrators and even in its leadership circles. From the refusal of Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to the women who organized the subsequent bus boycott to women like Septima Clark who worked in citizenship schools, black women “carried their weight.” Despite not being supported by the Democratic Party’s leadership, Fannie Lou Hamer, an uneducated Mississippi sharecropper, challenged the Mississippi racial oligarchy at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. Ella Baker, a lifelong political activist and organizational genius helped construct the community empowerment model adopted by the organizers of SNCC. In SNCC, women like Gloria Richardson, Diane Nash, Faye Bellamy, Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson, and Joyce Ladner were important participants and leaders. Earlier, Daisy Bates, president of the NAACP chapter in Little Rock, Arkansas, managed the highly contentious desegregation of Central High School.1
Nonetheless, the debate continues over the degree to which women in SNCC were subjected to sexist treatment by male activists. Similarly, there are questions about whether the experiences of black women in the Civil Rights movement generally were different from those of their white female peers. In How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights, Belinda Robnett shows that black women were crucial as leaders and rank-and-file participants in the Civil Rights movement, although they usually were not given formal leadership roles.2 Black women often became leaders on the strength of their individual personalities and or during crises when their competence could not be as easily ignored. Therefore, even though black women were not equally represented in the formal Civil Rights movement leadership, their participation marked the peak of female participation in black political movements of the twentieth century. Then, the decline of the Civil Rights movement and the subsequent rise of the Black Power movement signaled a massive retreat in the already minuscule ability of black women to shape national and local black political agendas.
Robnett notes that the rise of the Black Power movement out of the ashes of the Civil Rights movement meant more rigid hierarchies “and fewer free spaces for women’s leadership.” Concerning the gender implications of the emergence of the non-southern-based Black Power movement, Robnett writes:
And in the North, the exhibitionism of manhood was not mitigated by the strength of Black institutions whose most vital resource was women. Both black men and radical-chic white men-women, too applauded the machismo of leather-jacketed young men, armed to the teeth, rising out of the urban ghetto. The theme of the late sixties was “Black Power” punctuated by a knotted fist . . . common ethos between northern and southern blacks. Although it may not have been consciously conceived out of the need to affirm manhood, it became a metaphor for the male consciousness of the era. As Floyd McKissick . . . explained: “The year 1966 shall be remembered as the year we left our imposed status as Negroes and became Black men.”3
The Black Power movement’s emphasis on men also coincided with the valorization of violence as the means for attaining freedom. The physical aspects of struggles for freedom were considered a male domain insofar as warriors were deemed to be males.4 In turn, the idea of a violent black struggle was enhanced by the example of the Vietnamese, who at the time were waging a devastating struggle against the United States military. The Vietnam example was an important influence on the Black Power era, for not only were the Vietnamese nonwhite but they also were successfully waging war against the “white man” without having access to the phenomenal technologies of war used by the United States. Throughout the nation, militants wondered whether blacks could do the same.
Many blacks, however, regarded the adoption and the rhetoric of violence as reversing the acquiescence and docility of passive nonviolent resistance, the dominant praxis of the Civil Rights movement. By 1965, Martin Luther King Jr.’s image had begun to dim in the eyes of many northern black political activists, although he remained popular with the black rank-and-file. In the eyes of the national media, after the Watts riot of 1965 Martin Luther King Jr. and his disciples lost much of their ability to influence the moral image of blacks. Black protesters were no longer depicted as respectful citizens in search of what was rightfully theirs. Having lost their association with religiosity, Black Power activists appeared on American television screens as would-be destroyers of the social order. Instead of appealing to the conscience of white Americans, the dominant public spokespersons of the Black Power movement, including figures like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, rhetorically assaulted and threatened white America. The writings of Baraka, Karenga, Huey Newton, Julius Lester, Eldridge Cleaver, and George Jackson reiterated these threats.
Even though the rhetoric of Carmichael and Brown and the writing of Baraka and Cleaver were ominous, they were overshadowed by and dependent on the images of looting, arson, and gunfire that dominated television news broadcasts as city after city exploded in urban rioting. Not only were urban police forces incapable of quickly subduing the disorder, but it also became clear that many blacks on the streets were challenging the legitimacy of the state’s authority. The black urban riots of the late 1960s underscored the rhetorical threats of violent revolution by Black Power spokespersons. Ironically, the consequent increase in the cultural authority of Black Power spokespersons allowed many of them to feign a role in these urban explosions that they really did not possess. That is, Baraka and the others must be seen as clever elements in the black bourgeois intelligentsia who used the urban riots to enhance their own political capital and voice.
The Black Power movement was seen as a moment when black men would rise as men. Cleaver referred to the history of black America as “four hundred years minus my Balls.”5 The days of Step ’n Fetchit had been replaced by the presence of armed black men in berets and black leather jackets who were willing to kill police. Images of angry and armed black men who seemed not to fear their own deaths or those of others momentarily replaced the ubiquitous Soviet Communists as mainstream white America’s worst nightmare.6
Perhaps no single figure embodied the new black male assertiveness more than Malcolm X. His straightforward and forceful rhetoric cut against the grain of the bourgeois civility that had governed the public pronouncements of King, Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, and other civil rights leaders. His stridence inspired many blacks who had grown tired of the pleas of the traditional civil rights leadership sector. Moreover, he appeared to be beyond compromise. Fearless, Malcolm told “the white man” precisely what “whitey” did not want to hear and, in so doing, vicariously empowered a generation of blacks. Many black men found in Malcolm a surrogate for their manhood.
In no small measure, Malcolm’s status was enhanced by his membership in the male-dominated, highly organized Nation of Islam. Under the direction of Elijah Muhammad, the Nation tried to initiate a cultural revitalization movement among urban blacks. The centerpieces of this effort were (1) a blackened version of the Protestant work ethic for men, (2) an essentialist belief in black racial superiority and the necessity of black unity, (3) the rehabilitation of criminals and otherwise incarcerated black men, (4) the promotion of a black patriarchal family structure, and (5) the rejection of the immoral white man’s values and cultural influences (e.g., smoking, drinking, dancing, drugs, sexually provocative clothing). Furthermore, Elijah Muhammad advocated puritanical heterosexual relationships before and outside marriage. (Of course, not everyone practiced what he preached!)
Many black women were drawn to the Nation of Islam precisely because of its conservative cultural practices. As members, they could expect to be treated respectfully by male members and even male nonmembers who respected the possibility of male retribution from the Fruit of Islam. When these women married men who belonged to the Nation, they had reason to believe that they would not be abandoned or otherwise left to fend financially for themselves and their children. Because the Nation of Islam instilled in its male members the importance of fatherhood, it appears to have attracted black women seeking a stable, patriarchal family. What may have appeared to many outside the organization as its endorsement of female subservience was frequently viewed by female members of the Nation as a respite from the chaotic heterosexual relationships prevalent in urban black communities.
Women in the Nation were taught to excel at the domestic “arts” of cooking, sewing, and mothering. Equally important, they were taught to dress conservatively and to refrain in public from interacting informally with men. A student of the Nation of Islam described the peculiar status of women in the organization:
The image of virtuous womanhood presented to the public through Muslim displays of chivalry and propaganda often gave outsiders the impression that female believers actually held a superior place in the temple. However, the reality of Muslim power arrangements and gender relations confirmed for the insider and the keen observer that the pedestals on which woman were placed had been constructed by men and could be cast aside when a female believer needed a good “smack in the face” for challenging the will of her male counterpart.7
The reasons for the religiously sanctioned sexism of the Nation of Islam may have been similar to those in black American Christian churches. In Christianity, it was thought that as descendants of Eve, women were more susceptible to sin than men. Elijah Muhammad maintained:
Allah, Himself, has said that we cannot return to our land until we have a thorough knowledge of our own selves. The first step is the control and the protection of our own women. There is no nation on earth that has less respect for and as little control of their woman as we so-called Negroes in America. . . . Our women are allowed to walk or ride the streets all night long, with any strange men they desire. They are allowed to frequent any tavern or dance hall that they like, whenever they like. They are allowed to fill our homes with children other than our own. Children that are often fathered by the very devil himself.
. . . Our women have been and are still being used by the devil white race, ever since we were first brought here to these States as slaves.8
Elijah Muhammad’s teachings influenced Malcolm’s views on women. In his autobiography, Malcolm stated that all women “by their nature are fragile and weak: they are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.”9 Malcolm’s sexism did not diminish his popularity among Black Power activists (including, probably, most female Black Power proponents). To the contrary, Malcolm’s sexism was one of the core components of his appeal. He became the living reversal of the emasculated black male. Malcolm had “balls.” The eulogy delivered by Ossie Davis at Malcolm’s funeral captured the significance of his life as a black man:
And if you knew him you would know why we honor him: Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves.
. . . And we will know him then for what he was and is—a Prince—our own black shining Prince!—who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so.10
Malcolm’s militant black manhood inspired Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to form the Black Panthers and intensified the political energies of LeRoi Jones. Following Malcolm’s lead, Jones became a public truth teller who was willing to incur the wrath of whites. Ultimately, however, Jones confused the goal of telling truths that might upset whites with the goal of upsetting whites.
Jones had been hurling threats and invectives at whites long before it became de rigueur for Black Power advocates. He had become particularly entranced by the idea of frightening white Americans. It was as if he had deliberately chosen to be Jimmy Baldwin’s antithesis. Whereas Baldwin was writing about the suffering of black folks and the subversion of white humanity in white supremacy, Baraka spoke of killing whites. He was not concerned about their moral redemption. His unstated aspiration was to rhetorically decimate whites in a manner comparable to their historical persecution of blacks.
Jones’s maniacal desire to frighten whites reached a peak with the publication of “American Sexual Reference: Black Male.” Republished and widely read in Home, the essay originally appeared in Cavalier Magazine in January 1966. The cover of the magazine reads “LeRoi Jones Tells It Like He Sees It: The White Man Is Obsolete.” Accompanying the article is a photograph of Jones casually posed in a sports coat, tie, and tennis shoes. He holds the proverbial writer’s cigarette in his hand. This relaxed photo was placed against his bombshell essay, an irony not lost on the magazine’s editors, who wrote below the published photo, “This pleasant, affable young man has a message for you.”11 Jones’s decision to publish this vitriolic article in a predominantly “white” magazine revealed the parasitic status of those victim-status blacks who were locked into a quest for white recognition by means of fear. The smug picture of Jones accompanying the article does not indicate his awareness of his dependence on whites. If anything, Jones looks as though he actually believes that he has written something quite provocative and radical.
This essay reveals Jones’s willingness to use vicious and vulgar sexism and sickening racist depictions of blacks in order to terrify whites. He argues that because of their history in America, black men were more in touch with their sexuality than white men were and that recognition of this black male predicament had led to white women’s sexual desire for black men.
The reason the white woman was supposed to be intrigued by the black man was because he was basic and elemental emotionally (which is true for the nonbrainwashed black, simply because there is no reason he should not be; the black man is more “natural” than the white simply because he has fewer things between him and reality, fewer wrappings, fewer artificial rules), therefore “wilder,” harder, and almost insatiable in his lovemaking.12
When one realizes that “fewer things between him and reality, fewer wrappings, fewer artificial rules” is, for Baraka, a description of the black male’s distance from Western civilization, the similarities between his comments and Mailer’s “White Negro” become astonishingly apparent. Most repugnant are the affinities between Baraka’s “almost insatiable” black man and the black beastly creatures in the novels of Thomas Dixon.13 Jones’s statements may help us understand why he had not earlier responded to Podhoretz’s claim that Kerouac and the Beats in general had racistly romanticized black sensuality and sexuality. Perhaps Jones had not disagreed with Kerouac’s stereotypes of black sensuality. Consequently, his objection to the “Crow Jane” sexual ethic in the Village was not the white woman’s perceptions of the sexual superiority of black men. Those perceptions were supposedly accurate. Rather, Jones’s anger was directed at her desire to sap the vitality from the black man. Although Jones does not say so, his anger was also implicitly directed at the eagerness with which black men relinquished their virility to her.
The black man of “American Sexual Reference” was simultaneously morally innocent and apelike in his uncontrolled libido. Jones’s new black man was the authentic Noble Savage and morally superior to the white man, for as a victim he had no access to the power to do evil. In addition, he was blessed with the inadvertent sexual superiority of the beast. As an oppressed being, the black male had sidestepped those anxieties of modern life that had dampened the eroticism of his white male victimizers. The result was sexually impotent white men. “Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder their faces are weak and blank. . . . Can you, for a second, imagine the average middleclass white man able to do somebody harm?”14
In Jones’s homophobic eyes, the association of white males with homosexuality confirmed their weakness and impotence. Gay men were always imagined as feminine. Given his devaluation of women, this association was a hypernegative stigmatization. But Jones could not explain why the so-called weak white man was able to so thoroughly subjugate blacks, including the hypermasculine black male.
The literary scholar Robyn Wiegman viewed such rhetoric as an attempt to invert the “representational economy that depicts the black man as either literally or metaphorically less than a man.” Baraka, she noted, “aligns feminization with whiteness, defining white men as ‘effeminate and perverted.’”15 Jones’s homophobic diatribes against white men were critical to his explanation of why the white man wanted to oppress the black man. In lieu of a socioeconomic, political, or psychological theory to explain the rationality of the racist oppression of black people, Jones adopted a mythlike tale that white men had invented technology as a means to control black men because black men were their sexual masters and thus their superiors. White men were too scared and too weak to confront black men in face-to-face penis duels, and evidently the white woman knew this.
Jones used a “state of nature” argument to situate heterosexual potency as the central dynamic in race relations. Effeminate white homosexuals (i.e., all white men) were no match for black men. For similar reasons, black homosexuals were considered incapable of participating in the Black Power struggle. Even more despised than the idea of the black female mistress to a powerful black-male-hating white man was the black male homosexual who longed to be “fucked” by white men. Black homosexuals were by their very nature weaklings and thus tempted to become whores and race traitors for the white man. They were therefore, incapable of being free, that is, free to act in the manner of victimizers.16 Only real men could lead the freedom struggle. Women and those men who acted like women would have to follow.
Perhaps the most vicious statements that Jones ever wrote concerning women were those assertions in “American Sexual Reference” that attempted to legitimate the black male rape of white women. “That is the average ofay [white person] thinks of the black man as potentially raping every white lady in sight. Which is true, in the sense that the black man should want to rob the white man of everything that he has” [my emphasis]. Sounding a great deal like a script writer for “Birth of a Nation,” Jones continued:
But for most whites the guilt of the robbery is the guilt of rape. That is, they know in their deepest hearts that they should be robbed, and the white woman understands that only in the rape sequence is she likely to get cleanly, viciously popped, which is a thing her culture provides for only in fantasies of “evil.” . . . The black man, then, because he can enter into the sex act with less guilt as to its results, is freer. Because of the robbery/rape syndrome, the black man will take the white woman in a way that does not support the myth of the Lady, thus springing an outside reality that will seem either beast like or god like, depending on the lady’s psychological connection with the White American Crime.17 [my emphasis]
Baraka’s inability to view white women as other than objects owned by white men was classically sexist. His willingness to state that white women could justifiably be raped by black men engaged in the act of stealing property from white men was racist-inspired misogyny. According to this argument, the black man could supposedly take whatever he wanted from the white man, whether it be televisions, shoes, or “his women.” Such was the nature of the unequal distribution of private property. Of course, for a black nationalist like Jones to suggest that the “revolutionary” black man would even want to rape a white woman demands an explanation, unless rape was less an act of sexual desire than an act of violence against the white man whose task it was to protect this woman. Jones’s crude logic is confusing, for if he viewed rape as merely an act of violence, he would have to view the woman, not “her man,” as the subject of the violence.
Jones implies that the violated white woman would enjoy being raped by a virile black man, for he would undoubtedly give her the thrill of her sexual life. Such an argument was vicious and vulgar, once again indicating his racist misogyny. Jones contended that whereas a black man would rape a white woman for reasons of retributive violence against the white man, the nonracist white woman would experience her rape as sexually exhilarating—a God-like gift that no white man could give to her. Only a racist white woman would perceive her rape by a black man as a beast-like violation. At no point does Jones admit that rape is an assault on a woman.
bell hooks correctly perceived the warped logic of Baraka’s belief in the revolutionary nature of the virile black man, regarding it as ironic that Baraka would accept as valid and then glorify the very stereotypes that had been used by racist whites as a pretext for lynching black men:
Ironically, the “Power” of black men that Baraka and others celebrated was the stereotypical, racist image of the black man as primitive, strong and virile. Although these same images of black men had been evoked by racist whites to support the argument that all black men were rapists, they were now romanticized as positive characteristics.18
Historian Martin Duberman dismissed Baraka’s moronic but passionately articulated vulgarity:
My main reaction to these ravings is not anger or fright but boredom. They are so obviously the effluvium of a disturbed man that they cannot even be taken with the seriousness we accord polemics. Jones is pursuing private catharsis, not communication; there is no room at all for exchange—and apparently Jones couldn’t care less.
As if to inform Jones that his outlandish attempts to frighten whites have been exposed as a fraud, Duberman continued:
No doubt my boredom is what he hoped for; it confirms his expectations of how a decadent, “dead-loined,” smug materialist (i.e., a White) would react to the hip, soulful, virile truth-seeking of a POWERFUL BLACK WRITER. To which I can only repeat—I’m bored. Bored by categories. Bored by pretense. Bored by lectures. Bored by bearded oracles.19
It was certainly Jones’s intention to use these writings to frighten white readers. Because the black rapist remains a feared stereotypical image in the psyche of white and black America, Jones believed that the image of the rapist could be given a radical ethos.20 His image of the revolutionary as rapist prefigured the emergence of an actual rapist as a would-be revolutionary, Eldridge Cleaver. In Soul on Ice, Cleaver wrote,
I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto . . . and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically. . . .
Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling on the white man’s law, on his system of values, and I was defiling his woman—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge.21
Like Jones, Cleaver was utterly incapable of granting any human dignity and autonomy to white women.22 In Cleaver’s case, he also did not recognize human dignity in black women. At some deep level, he simply hated women. His attempt to rationalize rape as an insurrectionary act was nonsense. His claim to have raped white women out of revenge is disingenuous. First, it does not explain why he raped black women. Second, Cleaver’s admission of rape appears in his book immediately after he discusses his phobic attraction to white women. Third, the rape of a white woman in no way hurts white men who rape black women. But it is not surprising that a common but clever hoodlum like Cleaver would try so hard to rationalize his unethical behavior. The differences between Cleaver and Jones is the reader’s knowledge that Cleaver actually committed rapes. While I cannot vouch for Jones’s behavior toward women, his writing appears to be a rhetorical strategy for scaring white folks, and it does morally sanction rape. What remains striking about Cleaver is that his admissions and third-rate moral evasions granted him a revolutionary status in the eyes of many Americans. Perhaps the subtitle to Soul on Ice should have been Reflections on How a Monster Became a Revolutionary by Admitting to Thuggery.
Cleaver’s successful bid to occupy the status of Beast/Gorilla did translate into lucrative royalties, public appearances, and widespread notoriety, however, all of which testified to the dominance of irrationality and image politics during the Black Power era. Despite his embrace of an image that was dependent on the reactions of whites, Cleaver mistakenly believed that he embodied a new, revolutionary, black male ethos. Precisely when he thought he was being most assertive, he was most parasitically dependent on recognition from whites. “Thus, articulating a political agenda of nationalist power, Black Power asserted black masculinity as coterminous with racial emancipation.”23
Like Cleaver, Jones was incapable of realizing that the events and images that terrorized white America were not necessarily the events and images that would emancipate black America. Baraka has always had an infantile, Hollywood-like understanding of social change. Reminiscent of his days in the Village, Jones once again mistook parasitic, ad hoc societal rejectionism for revolutionary praxis. Alarming threats substituted for revolutionary theory and practice.
The significance of the black male rape of the white woman is that it was one of those rare instances to which Baraka could point in which the black man had become an intimate exploiter of a white person—in this case, the white woman and, by default, her overseer, the white man! By acting like the victimizer, the rapist supposedly glimpsed black freedom. Scheler would have recognized in this the deceit of ressentiment.24 Black freedom meant little more than reproducing the behavior of the white oppressors. Baraka had not understood Fanon.25 To those who responded that rape had nothing to do with obtaining freedom, Baraka would retort that white men had historically raped black women and did so in order to deny black men their manhood. Black men were demeaned and emasculated by their inability to protect their women. As a result, black women ceased to look to black men, their rightful protectors, for protection. It was now black America’s turn to change places with whites. Women were but the ground on which battles over manhood—that is, freedom—would be waged.
While hooks and other critics are correct in condemning Jones’s embrace of the worst stereotypes of black men, they are inadvertently participating in and reinforcing his attempt to obfuscate his own sexuality. Jones’s endorsement of the rape of white women and his homophobic attacks on white men were part of his broader strategy to bury his own homosexual past under black sexual exotica and sexist venom. He knew that popular knowledge of his homosexuality would have undermined the credibility of his militant voice. By becoming publicly known as a hater of homosexuals, Jones tried to defuse any claims that might surface linking him with a homosexual past. Was there a better way to “pass” for heterosexual than to embrace images of the hyper-heterosexually sexed black male beast who preyed on white women? What is amazing about “American Sexual Reference” is that it did succeed in masking Jones’s homosexual past. When discussed, the essay is usually treated solely as an attempt by Jones to appropriate a racist stereotype in order to scare whites, when in fact scaring whites may have been the sleight of hand that hid his homosexual desire.26
It is not surprising that the cultural nationalism propagated by Baraka and Karenga during the late 1960s and early 1970s was sexist. Baraka pointed out that Karenga’s doctrines not only failed to challenge his male chauvinism but granted it a revolutionary legitimacy. Women and men were not viewed as equals but were “complementary,” that is, slightly more equal than master and slave.
In her autobiography, former Black Panther Elaine Brown describes a social gathering that she attended in San Diego at which Karenga and numerous members of US were present. Brown was talking with a female acquaintance when a young woman, presumably a member of US, approached the two women and asked if they wanted to contribute to the group collection being taken to buy some Kentucky Fried Chicken. Brown and her female friend (neither of whom were members of US) contributed money to the collection. When the food finally arrived, Brown and her friend walked toward the kitchen. They were stopped by another female and informed that women were not allowed to eat until all the men had been fed. Brown remembers the woman as saying, “Sisters you will have to wait until our Brothers are served. Yeah, our Brothers are our warriors. Our warriors must be fed first, Sisters.” Brown remembers responding that no one had mentioned that order of eating when her money was solicited for the collection. Later, one of the male members of US explained the “rules” to her. “Sisters, he explained, did not challenge Brothers. Sisters, he said, stood behind their black men, supported their men, and respected them. In essence, he advised us that it was not only unsisterly for us to want to eat with our Brothers, it was a sacrilege for which blood could be shed.”27
Angela Davis had a similar experience with members of US. While helping organize a rally in San Diego in 1967,
I was criticized very heavily, especially by male members of Karenga’s organization for doing “a man’s job.” Women should not play leadership roles, they insisted. A woman was supposed to “inspire” her man and educate his children. . . . The constant harangue by the US men was that I needed to redirect my energies and use them to give my man strength and inspiration so that he might more effectively contribute his talents to the struggle for Black liberation.28
The mention of these incidents should not be interpreted as proclaiming that by default, the Black Panther Party was a bastion of gender egalitarianism. It wasn’t. But the Black Panthers never formally instituted rituals that underscored females’ subservience to males. Whereas women members of US were required to cross their arms over their breasts and bow down before the men of the organization, the Panthers never elevated to doctrine the need for the black male dominance of the black woman. As if to register uneasiness with this female ritual of submission, Baraka reformed the practice in his Newark organization, the Congress of Afrikan People (CAP), so that female members had to bow down only for the organization’s officers, all of whom were apparently male. As the Imamu, Baraka certainly thought that he was worthy of female submission.
Karenga also had wild stuff in his doctrine about how women ought to dress. . . . He said they should show flesh to intrigue men and not be covered up so much. I could never adjust to Karenga’s thing with women either on paper or in the flesh. He was always making “sexy” remarks to women, calling them “freaks” and commenting loudly on their physical attributes. In LA [Los Angeles] Karenga even sanctioned “polygamy.”29
Even though Baraka can now admit that he was sexist, he does not explain how male chauvinism ever came to be a central component of his and other black “revolutionary” agendas. The depth of the sexism in Baraka’s and Karenga’s organizations went far beyond that sanctioned in the existing black community, thus eliminating the possibility of claiming that it was merely a romanticized carryover from Afro-American folk culture. Had their sexist practices been rooted in Afro-American folk culture, with its myriad of patriarchal practices and beliefs, it would still have to be considered reactionary. It remains unclear just what Baraka meant when he stated that he “could never adjust to Karenga’s thing with women,”30 for Baraka uttered sexist claptrap and objectified women with an ease unsurpassed by Karenga. Moreover, Baraka tried to introduce polygamy into his life.
In a 1970 issue of Black World, Baraka published an essay, “Black Woman,” in which he asserted that the black man and woman had become alienated from each other.31 This disaffection had supposedly arisen as a result of slavery and the subsequent persistence of white racism. In hopes of restoring unity to black men and women, Baraka called for the revalorization of African values and the adoption of African identities. By returning to the traditions of African life before the slave trade, black male-female relationships would surmount the divisiveness caused by subjugated life in the diaspora. “We must erase the separateness by providing ourselves with healthy African identities. By embracing a value system that knows of no separation but only of the divine complement the black woman is for her man.” At no point does Baraka tell us how these precapitalist African identities could be transported to the United States or why traditional African male and female relations constituted a model worth emulating in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. Instead of interrogating traditional African gender roles and relationships, Baraka chose to cast demonic aspersions on what he viewed as white American norms. “We do not believe in ‘equality’ of men and women. We cannot understand what the devils and the devilishly influenced mean when they say equality for women. We could never be equals . . . nature has not provided thus.”32
During the height of his allegiance to black nationalism, Baraka used the designation “devil” when referring to whites in order to reverse the deeply embedded white Western association of blackness and/or darkness with evil. Such labeling was also convenient for his dogmatic ideology. If he could successfully label certain beliefs and behaviorisms as creations of the demonic whites, it would preclude the necessity of explaining why such beliefs should be loathed and the behaviors spurned. Essentially, whatever was deemed “white” was bad. Baraka’s ad hoc rejection of all things white was but the latest installment of his parasitic attachments to the parent society. The negative stigmatization of whites had simply replaced his Beat-era demonization of the philistine bourgeoisie.
White feminists (the devils) and their black counterparts (the devilishly influenced) would have been astonished to find out that gender equality had become a white American norm. Perhaps the pervasiveness of gender inequality in most white communities in the United States should have led Baraka to view his celebration of gender inequality for blacks as “devilishly influenced”! For Baraka to retreat to claims of “nature” to justify his assertions of male-female inequality appears somewhat myopic, given the historical invocations of “nature” to support claims for white supremacy. Baraka correctly perceived the struggle for women’s equality as an assault on male hegemony, but he assumed that men were by their very nature destined to rule women and concluded that it was the weakness of the white man that allowed him even to think of women as his equal. Black men, the nation’s only “real” men, would have nothing to do with such foolishness.
Baraka’s formulations of gender relations unequivocally called for the black realization of idealized, traditional American, patriarchal family relationships. Like other black cultural nationalists, Baraka was able to delude himself into thinking that there was something oppositional in the black patriarchal family. As bell hooks states in Ain’t I a Woman, Baraka “did not use terms like patriarchy or male rule; instead he discussed the formation of a black male-dominated household with its inherent antiwoman stance as if it were a positive reaction against white racist values.”33 Baraka’s support of patriarchy is not surprising, given that his hero Malcolm X also tried to market as revolutionary the installation of patriarchal norms in the black family. Like Malcolm and Malcolm’s teacher, Elijah Muhammad, Baraka championed orthodox gender roles. Note the domesticity in Baraka’s ideal black revolutionary woman: “We say that a black woman must first be able to inspire her man, then she must be able to teach our children, and contribute to the social development of the nation.”34
In the essay “Black Woman,” Baraka elaborates on the three duties of the revolutionary black woman. She should inspire the black man by joining him in the creation of a new black nation. For her to succeed, the black woman must have a revolutionary black consciousness that is part of her everyday life. The life that the black man and woman create for themselves and their children will be a microcosm of the life of the future black nation.
The house we live in, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the words we speak, must reinforce our move for National Liberation and the new consciousness of the million year old African personality, and it is the woman who must reinforce these thrusts. She is the creator of the environment, if she is conscious.35
The task of teaching the children is significant because the children are the future of the new black nation. The women must teach black children the values of emancipation developed by Maulana Karenga, and in so doing, they help ensure revolutionary continuity. The revolutionary black man has many other important tasks, one of which is to educate the revolutionary black woman: “It is Black Fathers who must teach Black Mothers, and Black Families, but it is Black Mothers, who are the earliest living memory closest, therefore, of perhaps deepest value as teachers.”36
Women are the leaders in creating a new, emancipated sense of community among blacks:
The woman must encourage the seeds of liberation in her every act. Social Development means education, health, the home, the community—how it relates to the theme of National Liberation. . . .
. . . Social Development means to re-create the life style of a free people, evolving it from the life style of a conquered, colonized, people.37 [emphasis in the original]
In some crucial respects, Baraka’s idea of social development parallels Gramsci’s notion of a counterhegemonic community. Despite being caught in an oppressive system, the revolutionary black woman helps create an oppositional culture and an affirming community that prefigure the life that blacks will live once they are emancipated.
Amina Baraka headed a women’s division in the daily operations of the Newark CAP. She was in charge of social development classes and wrote a regular column, entitled “Social Development,” in the CAP newspaper. Under her leadership, the women of the Newark CAP founded the African Free School. Despite the devalued status of women in CAP, the organization realized some of its greatest successes in those areas controlled by black women. Because of Amina Baraka’s obvious competence in executing her duties in Newark, it is astounding to read her call for black female subservience that was issued at the Atlanta Congress of African People in 1970. As coordinator of the section on “Social Organization,” she announced that once black women rid themselves of Western influences, they would discover their natural roles as complements of black men: “As Maulana points out, ‘What makes a woman appealing is femininity and she can’t be feminine without being submissive.’”38 She then revealed that black women have to be taught the proper ways of being submissive (once again according to Maulana’s dictates). True to her devotion to Karenga, Amina defined the three core duties of revolutionary black women as inspiration, education, and social development.
In “The Black Family,” a resource paper for the Atlanta Congress of Afrikan People, Akiba ya Elimu stated:
We understand that it is and has been traditional that the man is the head of the house. He is the leader of the house/nation because his knowledge of the world is broader, his awareness is greater, his understanding is fuller and his application of this information is wiser. The accepting of the Black man’s leadership has involved the understanding of the African personality which has no superior or inferior, only a complement. The man has any right that does not destroy the collective needs of his family. After all, it is only reasonable that the man be the head of the house because he is able to defend and protect the development of his home.39
Akiba ya Elimu’s statement was a condensed version of the CAP’s formal position on gender relations. In 1971, the Committee for a Unified Newark (CFUN), Baraka’s CAP affiliate in Newark, published a short pamphlet about black women. Entitled Mwanamke Mwananchi (The Nationalist Woman), the pamphlet is as reactionary as any statement issued by the Maulana.
We understand that it is and has been traditional that the man is the head of the house. . . . Women cannot do the same things as men—they are made by nature to function differently. Equality of men and women is something that cannot happen even in the abstract world. Men are not equal to other men, i.e., ability, experience, or even understanding. The value of men and women can be seen as in the value of gold and silver—they are not equal but both have great value. We must realize that men and women are a complement to each other because there is no house/family without a man and his wife. Both are essential to the development of any life.40
The cultural nationalism propagated by Karenga and Baraka during the late 1960s and early 1970s was intentionally sexist. In line with the rest of the Black Power movement, their nationalism was embedded in a validation of black male agency. Such male assertiveness was viewed as radical when juxtaposed against stereotypical images of black men as cowering weaklings before “the white man.” The hidden premise of the idea of black male revitalization was that racism had been more deadly and disabling to black men than to black women. The fact that the black male could not protect the black woman from white male sexual exploitation was both the cause and the effect of undermining black male authority.
The desire to return the black male to his rightful status was the reason for much of the cultural nationalist project. While the purported primary agenda of black cultural nationalism was the emancipation of black America, an essential ingredient of that emancipation was the reconstruction of black patriarchy. Ironically, Baraka’s and Karenga’s understanding of the debased black male could have been lifted verbatim from Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Moynihan Report. Baraka also seems to have constructed his ideal for gender relationships after reading the report.41 Moynihan argued that the black man needed not only steady employment but also the discipline of the military and an area in which he could realize his universal male desire to “strut.” Kawaida and the various neomilitary groups around Spirit House were Baraka’s version of the military and discipline, and the ritualized female adulation of her gender superiors provided the stage for the male strut.
After evaluating a 1971 position paper issued by the Sisters for Black Community Development (an organizational affiliate of Baraka’s) entitled “Black Woman’s Role in the Revolution,” sociologist Robert Staples concluded:
The position of writer and cultural nationalist, Imamu Baraka (LeRoi Jones), is a clear-cut call for Black female subordination. His organization has a doctrine concerning the Black woman’s role in it. Women should not smoke, drink, wear slacks, or have abortions. They should not be involved in men’s discussions except to serve refreshments. While the men are busy making decisions, women should occupy themselves with ironing, sewing and cooking. The rationale for this sexual segregation . . . is the necessity for developing a unique Black culture that is bereft of all white concepts.42
Jones’s sexism had already been manifested in his creative works written before and during the Black Arts era.43 In Madheart, one of his four black revolutionary plays, he dramatized the use of violence as a method for controlling the black woman. In a scene where a black woman is urging a black man to leave white women alone and come to her, the black male “hero” of the play demonstrates his power to use force to subdue her.”44
In the play, the character BLACK WOMAN chides and mocks the attempts of BLACK MAN to reclaim her as his woman. She essentially tells him that he is in no position to claim anyone, not to mention BLACK WOMAN. Not one to tolerate her disrespect, BLACK MAN intends to show her that he, unlike other black men she has known, is a real BLACK MAN. In the eyes of a real BLACK MAN, BLACK WOMAN has “gotten out of line.”
BLACK MAN: I’ll get you back. If I need to.
BLACK WOMAN: (laughs): You need to, baby . . . just look around you. You better get me back, if you know what’s good for you . . . you better.
BLACK MAN: (looking around at her squarely, he advances): I better? . . . (he wheels and suddenly slaps her crosswise, back and forth across the face.)
BLACK WOMAN: What??? What . . . oh love . . . please . . . don’t hit me. (He hits her, slaps her again.)
BLACK MAN: I want you woman, as a woman. Go down. (He slaps her again) Go down, submit, submit, . . . to love . . . and to man, now forever.45
After pleading with the man not to strike her again, the black woman tells the black man that she has been waiting for him to assume his strong black male identity. She has missed him and has been waiting for him to become strong enough to merit her submission. She acknowledges the humiliation he has had to endure in the face of white racism. She has seen him “crawl for dogs and devils.” He then acknowledges her suffering, for he has seen her “raped by savages and beasts, and bear bleach-shit children of apes.” She tells him that he permitted this to happen to her but that she understands that he was powerless to intervene.
BLACK MAN: But now I can (he slaps her . . . drags her to him, kissing her deeply on the lips). That shit is ended, woman, you with me, and the world is mine.
Kissing and slapping her, BLACK MAN says to BLACK WOMAN:
BLACK MAN: You are my woman, now, forever, BLACK WOMAN.
BLACK WOMAN: I am your woman, and you are the strongest of God. Fill me with your seed. (They embrace . . .).46
The absurdity of the dialogue between BLACK MAN and BLACK WOMAN might lead one to conclude that Madheart was a comedy or even a parody of the sexism present in black male-female relationships. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. A primitive sexism was fundamental to the cultural nationalism of Baraka and Karenga. An important freedom for black men was to be able to dominate “their women” in a manner similar to the way that the white man controlled “his woman.” That is, black freedom meant reproducing the behavior of white men. The subjugated black male envisioned freedom as his ability to dominate others. Once again, we see evidence of the victim status and its accompanying ressentiment.
In black nationalist circles of the late 1960s and early 1970s, black women were frequently less than forceful defenders of gender equality. Trapped in the belief that black male needs were superior to their own, they often participated in subservient activities in order to enhance the black male’s image of himself. Not only was feminism seen as racially divisive, but sexism was viewed as a more frivolous form of political subjugation than racism. Even so-called militant black female writers often ignored the specific plight of the black woman. The poet Nikki Giovanni wrote about one version of the antifeminist logic present in militant black female circles:
I think that it’s a moot issue. Just another attempt of white people to find out what black people are doing or to control what we are doing. . . . They [white women] want “equality” to deal with black women because they’ve certainly dealt with black men. They’re so upset about black women not coming in because they’re ultimately trying to control us. There aren’t any other reasons why they could be upset. Black people consider their first reality to be black, and given that reality we know from birth that we are going to be oppressed—man, woman, or eunuch!47
Less prominent but nonetheless politically engaged black nationalist female artists also expressed antifeminist sentiments. Black Theatre #5, a journal produced by the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem and edited by Black Arts playwright Ed Bullins, interviewed Roberta Raysor, a black actress with the New Lafayette. In answer to a question about the role of black women in the revolution, she stated:
You want to do as much as you can and the most you could do, you think, would (be to) give your life to the revolution. You know, gonna fight side by side with your man. But that’s not the way . . . that’s not what you have to do. What you have to do is be a woman. And have babies (LAUGHS). Be women for the men. So the man . . . men . . . let the men be the men, because that’s where the problem is too, in the Revolution. That the men weren’t allowed to be men. And the only way they can be is if we be their women. And fighting side by side with them is not going to help . . . it’s not going to do . . . the women are doing things now . . . talking about what? Women’s rights? And equal rights. . . . That stuff is all a fantasy. (LAUGHS) All part of the white people’s sick, crazy fantasy. . . . That’s what they do. Because the men are faggots, and the women are all . . . you know . . . want to be men. But that’s not our revolution. Our revolution is for women to be women; men to be men and that’s going to make it (the revolution) stronger. That’s the natural way. The secret is nature. The secret is doing it the natural way, ’cause like it’s always the right way.48
All the code words are here: white women are lesbians and white men are homosexuals. It is only because of her manliness and his femininity that white women and men can even consider the possibility of gender equality. A real woman—in this case, the real black woman—has babies and encourages her man to be a revolutionary.
In his autobiography, Baraka praises his wife Amina for struggling against his male chauvinism. It was she, he claims, who “stopped us from getting too far out in Kawaida.” Nevertheless, he admits that both with and without Karenga’s influence, his black nationalist politics projected a crude sexism.
All the black women in those militant black organizations deserve the highest praise. Not only did they stand with us shoulder to shoulder against black people’s enemies, they also had to go toe to toe with us, battling day after day against our insufferable male chauvinism.49
Although we should respect Baraka’s contrition, we do not need to support his unwillingness to question these distorted gender relations, or to explain why black women, who were supposedly empowered as political activists, tolerated such demeaning treatment by black men. But even more conspicuously, he does not discuss the psychological deformation of black men who demanded obsequious deference from black females in order to bolster their egos.
Like many American male intellectuals, Baraka began to wrestle with the question of women’s oppression only after the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s placed the oppression of women before the body politic. After years of making a virtue out of the worst sexist practices, Baraka now admits to having been a chauvinist. In hindsight, Baraka elevated to the status of heroic those women in black nationalist organizations who simultaneously endured and opposed the deep sexism found there. What he cannot admit is that it might have been far more heroic for these black women to have refused to join such sexist circles. Had women spurned these male-centered black nationalist organizations, their reactionary sexist nonsense would have been far more vulnerable to attack.
After becoming a Marxist, Baraka began to view women’s oppression as a fundamental derivative of capitalist oppression. To be opposed to sexism is to be against capitalism. Any antisexist struggle that does not confront capitalism is a fraud. Even though the notion of oppressed women remains vaguely defined and ultimately tangential to most of his Marxian political ideas, Baraka must be given credit for the enormous distance he has traversed to rid himself of his vulgar sexism. One testimony to Baraka’s changed views on women’s issues was his decision to coedit with his wife an anthology of pieces by black American women, Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, published in 1983. Baraka explained the rationale behind the book: “The purpose of this volume is to draw attention to the existence and excellence of black women writers.”50 This supposed rationale for the publication of Confirmation is perplexing given the enormous visibility that many black women writers were enjoying by the early 1980s.
In his introduction to Confirmation, Baraka offered one of his most comprehensive statements about the “black woman question” from the vantage point of his Marxist-Leninist-Maoism:
Black women in the United States are at the very bottom of the American social ladder—as someone has said, “the slaves of slaves.” But even this bitter characterization hides the real nature of the evil we are confronting. Black working women are triple losers . . . they must face the violent attacks of class exploitation, as workers under monopoly capitalism; national oppression as African Americans . . . and as well the horrors of sexual oppression as women.51
What is significant about Baraka’s reflections on the status of women is that he analyzes sexism in the same way that he analyzes racism. Sexism, like racism, cannot be completely overcome until the economic structure that causes it is demolished. Once this economic structure is demolished, sexism and racism will still exist, but only as ideas without material bases.
Although I have been tempted to characterize Baraka’s movement since the middle 1960s as a journey from crude nationalism to vulgar Marxism, this description would unjustly silence his growth on the “women’s question.” It would be more precise to say that Baraka abandoned a vehemently sexist, crude black nationalism for an antisexist, vulgar Marxism. Yet the memories of Baraka’s sexism linger. In his autobiography, he mentions the anger that can overtake his wife Amina, years after the fact, when she reflects on the sexism that she endured from him and others in black nationalist organizations during the Black Arts era.
For Amina, the shattering impact of our move to socialism brought a self-awareness of this intense and formal male chauvinism disguised as African traditionalism that disfigured our movement. The more we saw the atavism and cultural nationalism as backward, so the male chauvinism, in all of its ugly disguises and pretense, the more—she will tell you this—she felt used and made silly by the whole of our ideological trend.52
Regardless of the various arguments that Baraka now invokes to explain his vulgar sexism, the black community suffered at the hands of black activists who advocated the subservience of black women. Black women were demeaned and humiliated, and the weak psyches of black men were propped up rather than challenged. False empowerment in the guise of “controlling our women” became the seedbed of reactionary politics.