How Feminism Hinders Black Healing
By David Gottfried
Many black men leave their wives and children. The single Mothers become resourceful and independent, and contemporary feminists and black activists have been worshipping before her stout body for decades. Yes, she has some darn good qualities.
However, she is at times too full of her glory. She is proud to be a big, tough mama and she exults in her egotism. And when her man gets her down, she sometimes takes out her frustrations on her children.
One Christmas eve, while I was in a department store, I saw a big fat black momma say to her son, “just wait ‘till we get home. I’m gonna beat you so bad,” and as she described the welts she would inflict she seemed almost orgiastic and her breasts heaved like something so rash they could never be maternal.
I have a black friend, and he was raised by a single black momma, and she beat him when he was a baby, and he bears permanent facial scars.
I knew a black woman, and she was a crack fiend, and while her kids were starving, she would cop more drugs.
I had a black friend, and he was raised by a single momma, and his Mother thought it was a pity he had no male influences in his life. She tried to “correct” the situation by posting pictures of nude black men throughout the apartment.
Of course, there are black mothers who are very, very nurturing, so much so that they seem to be force-feeding their adult sons with their titties. I will never forget my first December in law school. Finals were approaching, and we were a bit antsy. However, no one reached the level of neuroticism attained by one smothered black boy and his blustering bulldog of a momma. She actually came onto the premises of the law school and proceeded to help him go through his law books. Every other law student studied with other law students or by themselves. But this little, little boy of a law student had his Mother teach him the law.
Black men, however, are loathe to criticize their Mothers. Perhaps, a true recollection of their childhoods would be too infuriating. And so instead of acknowledging their misery, they bury the hurtful facts and maintain a romanticized image of their Mother as a blessed Madonna.
However, the rage cannot disappear. Unless and until his brain cells are snuffed out – and given the myriad assaults black men endure, from drugs, from murderous and wicked police, and from the desperate depression so masterfully expressed by Otis Redding in the song “Sitting by the Dock of the Bay,” they are often snuffed out – his rage toward his Mother brews and festers in his unconscious even as he heaps hosannas on her allegedly immaculate soul.
Where does his rage go: His wives, girlfriends and children endure his fury. The cases of domestic violence in the black community are legion. Black women and black children suffer countless ruthless beatings.
He often deserts his children, and the Mother of his children will be embittered, and she will inflict her rage on her sons, and the problem repeats itself.
The black community understood this, and brilliant black writers once discussed race and sex with incisive logic, drama and verve. I am thinking, for example, of Eldridge Cleaver’s work, “Soul On Ice.”
However, today Eldridge Cleaver is often forgotten. His ideas contravene the dominant feminist dogma of our day. The lords and ladies of la di dah liberalism have repressed our memory of Cleaver as completely as the Soviets repressed the memory of Trotsky and Zinoviev.
Feminists find almost any criticism of women, by men, savage or sadistic and never fit for public consumption. (Of course, they are entirely okay when women skewer and slash other women.) Among other things, feminists decry male attacks on Mothers, seemingly convinced that a Mother’s psychopathology cannot adversely affect her son. However, until the black momma is restrained, black sons will continue to hurt their wives and girlfriends (because their rage towards their Mothers will be inflicted on their wives and children), and continue to leave home, and although feminists don’t want to hear it, children raised without fathers generally don’t turn out as well.
If the black community is to heal, it must understand itself and its understanding cannot be circumscribed by doctrinaire feminists who believe that their brand of sterile and stultifying feminism should decide just what the black community should understand about itself.