An Open Letter To Black Men: Your Proximity to Us Isn’t Enough.
Tags: Feminism, Equality, Racism, BlackLivesMatter, Black Women

Dear Reader, as you begin this article I’m going to warn that I do not come in peace. I am not interested in being nice and respectable because the world as of late has treated black women with nothing but absolute savagery. This is the rant of a black woman who is rightfully angry, fed up, and tired. You’ve been warned.

During the past few days, I have become glued to my phone as I have watched black women once again be dragged through the mud on social media. For those of you who don’t know, the latest news originates from the pits of Youtube where a Youtuber who markets himself as a dating coach went viral for publicly humiliating a black woman when he told her that due to her status as an average looking single mother and her inability to submit to a six-figure high-value man she will die alone. Not only have I watched many black men endorse this man’s message, but I’ve always watched black women be complicit in the degradation of their own image and help to deliver this man thousands of more subscribers and free publicity. Now I’ve known for a long time about black men and their violent and sickening misogynoir towards black women but there are no words to describe how frustrated and angry I am as I write this (I’m literally shaking with fury). Now I won’t link the video in this piece, nor will I mention his name because I don’t believe that his platform is conducive to promoting healthy and happy black women and it doesn’t deserve any more fame or publicity. But what I do have to say is that as a black woman I am tired. I am tired of watching men who look like me pimp out my image for clicks, views, and money. I am tired of watching grown men blame women who look like me for their own actions. I am tired of the misogyny and I am tired of the racism. I am tired of the whole world telling black women that we are defective, broken, and worthless and I’m tired of black women believing it (but that’s for another article).

In my exhaustion, I was very ready to take my place as a divested black woman…until I decided to take a step back and do some research. In doing so, I came across an article that discussed the anti-black male bigotry and transphobia rooted in the divestment movement neither of which I stand for. I believe that black women whether they be cis or trans deserve to live in a world where they can navigate the internet without fear of being told about how defective the world thinks they are. I believe that it is in black women’s best interest to put themselves and their interests first because 2020 has been a year that has made it very clear that no one else is going to and I believe that black men should be left alone to deal with themselves in the process.

So in order to find another route and return to the safety of neutrality, I did more research.

I looked up statistics that showed how black men are more likely than black women to bring home at least $75,000 annually due to gender disparities continue to place black men as the breadwinners in the African American community. 54% of black men completed a college degree (but only compared to 60% of ‘all’ men). I began to think to myself ‘maybe there were good black men out there’ (and by good black men I meant black men who had stable jobs, an education, etc). But despite this, there are still two million more black women than men in the U.S, not enough to have every black woman in the U.S partnered. At least not to Black American men. The out of wedlock birth rates in the black community are the highest in the country and even though many black men will tout the statistics that black women are the least married in the U.S, 52% of black men have never been married in comparison to 48% of black women. But the more I saw these dialogues play out the more I realized that black women have been using the wrong criteria to determine what a ‘good’ black man is.

Of course, there are Black men who have stable jobs and are educated. If you look in the right places they really aren’t hard to find. But having a job and education isn’t enough to educate these men out of the misogynoir they so desperately cling to. I realized that many of the ‘good’ black men are slow to defend black women’s image and personhood in the face of misogynoir and quick to point the finger at us when something goes wrong, absolving themselves of any responsibility in the process. I realized that many of these good black men wear the same mask as many other ‘nice guys.’ That is what makes these men so dangerous. They are not genuine in their allyship towards black women, nor do they come in peace to protect us like they would like you to believe. Like many ‘nice guys’ they mask their misogynoir with smiles, charm, and charisma approaching us with a patronizing, condescending arrogance, telling us that they understand our experiences, all the while minimizing those same experiences, gaslighting us, engaging in confusing double talk, rhetorical manipulation, and weaponizing the same stereotypes and talking points many racist and misogynistic black men engage in.

But they’re just nicer about it.

Photo by Ty Williams on Unsplash

But despite their misogyny, the degradation of our image, and their role in perpetuating white supremacist patriarchy, these men are building platforms teaching black women how to fix ourselves and address our deficiencies. Although I’ll admit that there is a lot of work black women need to do, these men will refuse to recognize the ways in which black men fail to live up to the mantle of manhood and protect and provide from the communities from which they come from. Instead, they march arrogantly into black women’s spaces, take up all of the room that is left, take a deep breath, and howl to black women about how to best please them and make them happy.

I know that there is no way to stop these snake oil salesmen from setting up shop and selling their wares, but I do know that there are too many black women willing to buy them. I know that there are still a lot of black women who are starved of the love, admiration and respect any and every human being needs to thrive. I know that there are a lot of black women who are lost in their womanhood, with no women in their lives that they trust to show them the way. Because of this, there is a huge market of black women who will run to these men looking for advice about how to best get and keep a man and how to best express their womanhood in order to be successful in doing so. But before you run into the lion's den, let me tell you a little secret: no man can teach you how to be a woman.

Most men are too busy talking over women to know what it’s like to move through the world as one. Most men are too busy dismissing women as naive, stupid, irrational, and overemotional to understand women. Most men are too busy thinking that they know more than women to understand women. Most men are too busy trivializing the mere existence of women to understand women. Do you think that these relationship gurus are asking actual women about their experiences before they come to a definitive opinion about the female existence? Do you think they’re going online and checking their opinions about the female experience by female academic scholars who are experts in gender studies and devote their life studying the socialization of women and how women navigate through the world? Do you think these men are going to their local libraries and checking out Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Dr. Brittany Cooper, Melissa Harris-Perry, Kimberly Crenshaw, Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, and Alice Walker? Do you think they’re actually reading books written by actual black women, about the black female experience in this country?

Absolutely not.

Most men, most black men in this world are not taught to be empathetic towards the black female experience. They are not taught to see the world through the eyes of women, and they are not taught to take the perceptions of women seriously. They are taught that the male experience is universal through the black [male] history they learn in school and the centering of the perspective of black men in social justice movements. They can live their lives without learning about black women’s history and reading black womanist works and learning about black women’s issues. They are taught that femininity and anything associated with women is inferior. Is less than. But then they’ll come out in their ignorance, apathy, pride, and ego and think they know a thing or two about womanhood. They’ll tell you that you’re being a woman wrong, they’ll demand black women to be vulnerable and transparent without taking the time to understand that we live in a world that is inhospitable to black female transparency and vulnerability.

Take off their wig/weave they say. Stop being so masculine! Let your guard down!

But when Meg thee Stallion was shot, when she was vulnerable, she was laughed at and mocked. When Ari Lennox broke down in tears on IG after being compared to a dog we looked at her with confused looks on our faces and wondered why. When B. Simone stated she’d like an entrepreneur for a boyfriend she was dragged to the depths. When Blue Ivy wore her natural hair for the first few years of her life, she was called ugly and a petition was made (by black women!) to have it combed. In the midst of their entitlement, black men will forget how they and the rest of the world treat black women who let their guard down. Who let the world in to see their pain.

They devour them mercilessly and rip them to shreds.

Let’s just be honest with ourselves, black women do not owe the world our vulnerability and transparency. They have shown themselves to be too reckless and destructive with it. But these men are so wrapped up in their entitlement to black women, our bodies, and our inner worlds that they can’t think outside of themselves to recognize this.

*sigh*

In their ignorance, these men will fail to understand that as men they know nothing about womanhood and what it entails. And to be honest most of them don’t care enough to do so. Instead of doing the work to understand the experiences of black women, they think that because they are a man that has a black mother, a black daughter, a black wife that’s enough to make them experts on the black female experience.

Because a majority of men aren’t doing the work necessary to declare themselves as experts on the black female experience, because they’re not listening, reading, sitting down and shutting enough, any man who tells you how to be a woman will not tell you how to come into your womanhood in a way that benefits you. He will do it in a way that benefits him. He is projecting a fantasy of what he’d like women to be. How he’d like women to exist and how he’d like womanhood and femininity to be expressed. He’s not thinking about you and your identity and the impact his ‘advice’ will have on you. He’s thinking about himself because that’s all he’s been taught to do.

What black men fail to realize is the individuality and sacredness of womanhood. They fail to understand that womanhood is something that you and only you can define and that the ways in which a girl comes into her womanhood are unique and different to her. The beauty of womanhood and femininity is that it is a journey, not a destination, that each and every woman embarks on for herself. Yes, other women can guide you and give you advice about where to go and where not to go, what to do and what not to do but at the end of the day, your womanhood is something that you must discover for yourself. No man or woman can do that for you. And the thing is, is that this journey of womanhood is lifelong. How you define womanhood will be different at 20 than it is at 30 than it is at 40 and that’s ok. That’s what makes womanhood so beautiful. And at the end of your life, you can look back at the lessons that you’ve learned and how you got to grow into your womanhood and how your womanhood evolved, and hopefully, you can take pride in that journey and the lessons that you’ve learned.

This is the reason why you can never let a man or male-identified woman tell you how to be a one. Womanhood is not a journey any man can embark on with you. Womanhood is not a treasure that a man can explore and define for himself. There is no room on the road of womanhood for men, just like there is no room on the road of manhood for women. Every man who sits there and tells you that he knows all about the treasures of womanhood that await you at the end of the rainbow knows nothing about women. Because if he did, he would know that each and every treasure that a woman finds for herself is different and unique to her experiences, triumphs, and struggles as a woman. The womanhood of a man’s mother is different from that of his daughter, which is different from that of his wife, which is different from that of you.

The gag is that many black men have an extensive history of using their proximity to black women in order to evade accountability for the misogynoir they perpetrate against us. These men will state that they have lived with and loved too many black women to ever hold any sort of contempt and disrespect for them while simultaneously degrading those same women in their lyrics, plays, movies, TV shows, and more recently Youtube videos. While more black men realize the profit that can be reaped from playing two sides of one coin they will continue to increase in number. They will turn their backs on their crumbling, dilapidating manhood in favor of invading black female spaces to lecture black women about our womanhood for a quick buck and for a quick reaction and it is nothing short of pathetic.

At this point, I know I sound like a broken record, but if I didn’t get this rant off my chest I probably would’ve burst. As 2020 comes to a close and I look back on this year I shake my head at how both the ‘good’ black men and the ‘bad’ ones exposed themselves this year. But despite the chaos and heartache, 2020 really was the year of perfect vision. I just hope black women will see it and believe it.