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Black people will not advance in the way that we can and should until Black men understand the role they play in upholding male supremacist ideologies and deeds. I know it’s tough to imagine that while being oppressed you can be oppressive, but it’s true.
Just think of what happened at True Kitchen, a new Black-owned restaurant in Dallas. A viral video shows the owner of the establishment berating a group of Black women for twerking on his furniture, or more specifically, in his restaurant. The video depicts the owner telling the women to respect themselves by not twerking.
"How can I tell the men to respect themselves and you all are twerking on the glass. If you wanna do that you can get the fuck out my resturant."
If this were a white-owned establishment and the owner had spoken to a table full of Black women in this manner, there would be calls for boycotts. But because the owner was a Black man, many people took his side. Which lead me to ask the Black men in my life: Are you acknowledging your male privilege the way you want a white person to acknowledge their white privilege?
One way in which Black male privilege manifests is when Black women don’t get credit for the important work we do. This year marks the 401st anniversary of Black people being brought to this country, and we are experiencing an uprising of Black people and our allies saying enough is enough. On the front lines of these protests, die-ins and riots, we find the Black woman.
Ever determined to protect her children, her partner, her friends and family, she organizes volunteers, creates demands lists for government officials and walks arm-in-arm with comrades in protest of the unjust system to which we are all subject.
Like the civil rights movement of our elders, she is the silent engine keeping the cause moving forward; or as one of my favorite TV characters, Christina Yang, so eloquently put when snubbed for credit on an award she earned in the name of a Black man, “I am the unseen hand to his brilliance.” For so many Black women who are as we say, “doing the work,” this is their story.
They are the unseen hands to the brilliance more often than not a man gets to take the credit for. Don’t believe me? Quickly Google “civil rights leaders.” In .79 seconds Google will produce ~596,000,000 results and the first five pictures that populate are of five Black men: Rep. John Lewis, Medgar Evers, Fredrick Douglas, Martin Luther King Jr. and Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael).
I am exceedingly grateful for the sacrifices each and every one of these men made in an attempt to create a more equitable world for generations to come; I am because they were. But as a Black woman, I can’t help but wonder about the scores of Black women who no doubt helped to prop them up so they could be the monumental men we know and revere.
Most of us, even from our Black teachers or parents, didn’t learn about the Ida B. Wells’ and Fannie Lou Hamers’ of the movement until well after you knew the significance of Ebenezer Baptist Church or the Lorraine Hotel. We are, even while attempting to save our race, often an afterthought.
Black male privilege is a hard concept for many Black men to grasp because of the way we are taught to synthesize privilege. We are taught whether directly or subliminally that privilege is about access to concrete factors such as economic opportunities, political power and education. If this is the barometer by which we are measuring, I understand why many Black men feel as though Black male privilege simply doesn’t exist. However, privilege does not stop with these tangible factors. It trickles over into the man-made factions of life, including: race, culture, class, sexuality, religion, socialization, etc. This is where we see Black male supremacy most.
Black male privilege (BMP) rears its ugly head in these spheres most because while complicit in the systems of gendered oppression; their Blackness often still bars them from gaining the same status as their white peers. For example, while Black men disproportionately comprise the leadership of churches in the Black community (some going so far as believing women are not fit to lead) they are still the underwhelming minority when we look at the national governing bodies of say, the Evangelical or United Methodist church.
Another time we see BMP exerted is in the realm of abuse against Black women. Now while I do not believe that “Black on Black crime” exists, I do believe that because of hypermasculine attitudes and generations of being stripped of their dignity, we see Black men take advantage of Black women at extremely high rates. Black women are almost three times more likely to experience intimate partner violence (IPV) than white women. Despite making up only 8% of the population, Black women account for 22% of homicides as a result of domestic violence, making IPV one of the leading causes of death for Black women ages 15 to 35. 92% of these homicides were intra-racial, meaning a Black man killed the Black woman.
In the midst of fighting for some sliver of justice for Breonna Taylor (Ase), by keeping her name on the tip of our tongue via social media there surfaced a video of a group of Black men in the DMV area quite literally picking up an incapacitated Black woman and throwing her in a dumpster. In the background of the video you hear jeering and laughing while the cameraman zooms in on her tearstained face.
While most of you clutch your pearls at the thought of ever doing something so heinous to another human being, I wonder if you haven’t been a bystander to a more subtle act of assault against a Black woman. Has one of your friends ever grabbed the booty of a woman walking by and you all laughed? Ever seen one of your friends and their significant other argue, leading to him buck as if to hit her? Ever heard a woman claim to be molested and question the truth of it? Why’s that? Cause “bitches be lying,” huh? All the while, the statistics are screaming otherwise. Studies show that for every 15 Black women who are raped only one reports her assault. The National Center for Victims of Crime found that 53.8% of Black women had experienced psychological abuse and 41.2% of Black women had experienced physical abuse. Yet no one seems to know any abusers.
“I was just too drunk.”
This was the explanation rapper Tory Lanez gave in his apology text to Megan Thee Stallion as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from gunshot wounds he inflicted. Over the course of several weeks we watched rumors that surrounded this tragic story grow from mere speculation to confirmation when on August 20 Megan released a series of Instagram live videos in which she says “you shot me,” talking to Tory Lanez. Megan goes on to say that she was scared to tell the police that he had a gun in the car for fear of him being the next victim of police brutality, saying, “Even though he shot me, I tried to spare him.”
How long will we care for a group of people that often do not care for us? How can we call for equality from an outgroup when those who are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh regard us as inferior beings? Black men, I plead with you today to explore what your male privilege looks like and the way it manifests in your life. I ask you to hold the mirror up for your brothers, friends and teammates in loving accountability that we may truly work towards a more equitable existence.
To be sure, this is not to say that Black women are exempt from benefiting from privileges of our own. As a Christian, light-skinned, middle class Black woman in America, I am aware of the privileges I have as well, and I must, like I’m asking you to do, continually check them. Nor is this meant to be an oppression Olympics, in which we disregard the centuries of dehumanization endured by Black men to say that we as Black women are worse off. This is simply a plea to do better at recognizing the harmful inculcations you may be living with. Recognizing and then stepping away from your privilege is not a one and done act. Rather a progression that we as a people must work on every day, for the rest of our lives.
So, Black men, help us as Black women.
We cannot continue to fight you and white supremacy.
We cannot continue to fight for the rights of you and our children, while fighting you for respect and dignity.
We are exhausted.
