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A review by audreyvm
Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman by Michele Wallace
4.0
I’ve been going round my circles in my head trying to work out how to review Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Michelle Wallace’s 1978 tract on Black Power, masculinity, and the sexism internalised by the African-American community. How does a white girl born 6 years after this book was published critique such a deeply personal, passionately written and important book? Perhaps the safest route to take is to say that she doesn’t really. She reads. She admires. She learns. There are flaws in the reasoning in this book, and issues left un-examined, but Williams was younger when she wrote it than I am now, and she has come over the years to openly acknowledge the gaps in the book. None of that takes away from how important a text it remains.
oThe central thesis of the book – or the one that I came away with firmly lodged into my brain – is that African American culture has accepted external white definitions of masculinity, family, femininity and gender relations to the detriment of their own culture and their own struggle for equality. When the black man is struggling to be perceived as a man on white terms, he is neglecting the needs of his own people and fighting a false battle. When black culture in American accept uncritically the portrayal of the black slave woman as a collaborator who had a privileged status in the slave-owners home, they do untold damage to the unity of their fight.
What really struck me here are the parallels with the argument Christine Delphy makes in another upcoming release from Verso Books, Separate and Dominate, which I reviewed here just last week. In her book she speaks powerfully of the way in which the dominant class sets the paradigm and the rules which the oppressed need to conform with in order to be fully accepted and equal; standards which they can never meet because of their otherness, but which they are then blamed for failing to meet. And their failure to meet these false standards justifies their continued exclusion. The complexities of the hierarchies of oppression, whether race or gender or class or any other based, are fascinating in their similarities.
The arguments in Black Macho are not intended to feel fully formulated and academic. They are based on personal experience, on popular culture and on mainstream media. For the interested reader this makes them all the more readable, as we jump from an autobiographical note to a lengthy discussion of Norman Mailer’s ‘The White Negro’ to LeRoi Jones, Angela Davis, Nikki Giovanni. This book left me with lists of names to look up; black authors and poets and figures in the Black Power movement. It made me realise how ignorant I am of black history in the States. And ultimately, whether every claim the book made will stand water or not is not the point. It hooked me early; it was compulsively readable; it made me think and it opened my eyes. What more can I ask for?
Read more of my reviews at www.goodbyetoallthis.com
oThe central thesis of the book – or the one that I came away with firmly lodged into my brain – is that African American culture has accepted external white definitions of masculinity, family, femininity and gender relations to the detriment of their own culture and their own struggle for equality. When the black man is struggling to be perceived as a man on white terms, he is neglecting the needs of his own people and fighting a false battle. When black culture in American accept uncritically the portrayal of the black slave woman as a collaborator who had a privileged status in the slave-owners home, they do untold damage to the unity of their fight.
What really struck me here are the parallels with the argument Christine Delphy makes in another upcoming release from Verso Books, Separate and Dominate, which I reviewed here just last week. In her book she speaks powerfully of the way in which the dominant class sets the paradigm and the rules which the oppressed need to conform with in order to be fully accepted and equal; standards which they can never meet because of their otherness, but which they are then blamed for failing to meet. And their failure to meet these false standards justifies their continued exclusion. The complexities of the hierarchies of oppression, whether race or gender or class or any other based, are fascinating in their similarities.
The arguments in Black Macho are not intended to feel fully formulated and academic. They are based on personal experience, on popular culture and on mainstream media. For the interested reader this makes them all the more readable, as we jump from an autobiographical note to a lengthy discussion of Norman Mailer’s ‘The White Negro’ to LeRoi Jones, Angela Davis, Nikki Giovanni. This book left me with lists of names to look up; black authors and poets and figures in the Black Power movement. It made me realise how ignorant I am of black history in the States. And ultimately, whether every claim the book made will stand water or not is not the point. It hooked me early; it was compulsively readable; it made me think and it opened my eyes. What more can I ask for?
Read more of my reviews at www.goodbyetoallthis.com