Black Men Should Be Fierce Feminists
…and not just because we owe it to Black women.
It is often said that the most difficult thing to be in America is a Black woman for one simple reason: They are simultaneously members of two of the most marginalized groups in this country. It is also often said that Black women missed out on many of the advancements and a chance to more heavily influence the feminist movement of the ’60s because it was occurring at the same time as the Civil Rights Movement. When faced with the zero-sum choice of where to focus their energies, many chose to go all-in on supporting the Black fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons in their lives. Rosa Parks could have just as easily formulated a genius act of civil disobedience to highlight her oppression as a woman. Fannie Lou Hamer could have spoken just as powerfully about how sick and tired she was of being sick and tired about the treatment of women. Instead, they, and many others, lent their bodies and voices to the cause of racial solidarity in the fight against racism. Even without this huge debt we, as Black men, so clearly owe to the women in our lives, we should be excellent feminists simply because of how women’s struggle for equality in this society so closely mirrors our own.
It should not take a great leap of imagination for a Black man to put himself in a woman’s high heels…or sensible flats. We can relate to being part of a system we had no say in the design of and that was, in fact, created to similarly hold us down simply because of the bodies we were born into. Surely we recognize the frustration that comes with looking at people in power and historical figures and seeing very few people who look like us. We also know the trauma that comes with being told our actions are to blame for acts of violence inflicted upon us. We can relate to the rage that boils up with having our experiences with discrimination be dismissed as emotional imaginings by the same people perpetrating the mistreatment. And no doubt we have similarly been left dumbfounded while watching a chosen few’s mediocrity succeed over our excellence.
While many of the injustices women face in our society are analogous to our own struggles and many of the villains are the same, issues of race and gender do not entirely overlap. Women deal with many threats that we, as Black men, typically do not. Even worse, with issues like domestic and sexual violence, we are every bit just a capable as any other group of being the perpetrators failing to recognize ourselves, the historically downtrodden, as having the ability to oppress others. And while I think Black men should be the natural allies of women, we are just as likely to harbor outdated and backward views about them that have been consistently transmitted to us growing up in a society that viewed their subjugation as an ideal.
This, however, neatly brings us back to another reason Black men should be excellent feminists. If we are able to recognize that racism is so deeply embedded in American culture that every white person's thinking will, to some degree, be affected by it, we should be able to recognize the same is true about sexism. If we are able to understand that racism is about more than just using the n-word and burning crosses, then we should be able to understand that supporting women is about more than just not being physically or verbally abusive. If we know that a white person in American society must constantly examine how this country’s foundational racism has impacted their conceptions about race and what is normal, then surely we can understand that we must do the same in regards to gender. That we know a person having a Black friend or family member doesn’t mean they are inoculated against racism means we should understand that loving our mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters doesn’t make us immune to benefiting from an unjust power imbalance in our personal relationships or in society as a whole.
As Black men, we have a unique insight into some of the struggles women face if we allow ourselves to think about it. That insight, that understanding, can, if we let it, turn us into the fiercest of feminists allied in a struggle against a common foe and bonded by a desire to undo centuries of harm and subjugation.