Black Myths

Airing family quarrels

There is a growing distrust, if not hatred, between black men and black women.

Bitter words? Perhaps. But in the eyes of their author, they are tersely accurate. According to Michele Wallace, 27, a truculently articulate, handsome, Harlem-bred writer, the battle of the sexes in the black community verges on open warfare. Today's black women, she says, have in effect committed "social and intellectual suicide" under the domination of "unintrospective and oppressive" black men.

Wallace takes aim and fires in a recent book titled Black Macho & the Myth of the Superwoman (Dial; $7.95). Tracing the breakdown of black male-female relationships back to the civil rights struggles of the '60s, she writes: "During the summer of 1964 hundreds of middle-class white women went South to work with the Movement and, in a fair number of cases, to have affairs with black men. Some of the women were pressured into it (anything to avoid the label of being racist), others freely chose to do so."

The upshot, concludes Wallace, is that black men bought the racist "blackbuck" image of themselves. They became content to mouth slogans ("Black Power") and affect Afro hairdos and guns, and all but abandoned effective political action. "Come 1966," says Wallace in her polemic style, "the black man had two pressing tasks before him: a white woman in every bed and a black woman under every heel." In response, she says, black women became more submissive and, despite the image of some social scientists of black society as a matriarchy, no longer behaved like the mythic black superwoman.

Since her book's publication in February, Wallace has become something of a heroine to the white feminist movement, which relishes such sardonic Wallace lines as, "Could you imagine Che Guevara with breasts? Mao with a vagina?" She has appeared on the cover of Ms. with Editor Gloria Steinem's endorsement that "she crosses the sex/race barrier to make every reader understand the political and intimate truths of growing up black and female in America." Some blacks have also joined the acclaim. Novelist Ishmael Reed (Mumbo-Jumbo, Free-Lance Pallbearers), for example, says that Wallace has brought "cool clarity to a subject about which so much frenetic and feverish nonsense has been written."

But many other black intellectuals do not share that enthusiasm. Some insist she has played into the hands of the white Establishment, which, according to Howard University Psychologist Harriette McAdoo, is all too "eager to believe there is a schism between black men and black women." Many regard her account of the great biracial crusade of the 1960s as a historical distortion, and as Sociologist Robert Staples of the University of California at San Francisco insists, "a slur on everything that went on in the movement and everyone who took part." Others acknowledge that there are indeed tensions between black men and women that are exacerbated by a numbers game--there are 1 million more black women than men. But they insist that the real trouble is rooted in lingering hostilities between blacks and whites: the high jobless rate among black men, the curtailment of affirmative-action programs and other manifestations of what many blacks consider a white backlash, all of which affect the black male's sense of self and thus his relationships with women.

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