The Iconic antiTHESIS of blackWOMAN

Frantz Fanon, a Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher of colonialism, made a profound prediction in the 1960’s. It was a time when colonialism was falling apart in African nations. He predicted that if the African leaders who were rising up to recapture their homelands from colonial nations, did not also recapture or recreate a distinctly African identity, then they would, in fact, become like the colonizers. Furthermore, because the African leaders grew up in the colonial system, which was a system that created in black peoples a fragmentation of the self as you are compelled to become assimilated into a politics of whiteness that obliges you to disconnect from everything that you are as a black person, Fanon predicted that these African leaders would become worst than the colonizers in brutality, greed, and dysfunctionality of rule. He predicted this scenario because the revolutionary leaders knew no other way of being, except the brutal dictatorial rule of leaders who raped the land of all natural and human resources. Therefore these upcoming African leaders would imitate the only form of leadership they had come to know, and they would be better at it, because it is the only thing they have ever known. Fanon’s prediction was spot on.

Likewise, African American men have fallen prey to similar dysfunction with regard to African American women. African American women have historically been positioned on the outermost rungs of our society. We are least like the norm as one can possibly be. We are neither male, nor a member of the majority race. Such a position poses a precarious proposition for the holder of that placement. How are you to integrate into a place when you are so recognizably not a part of that place. Your outside position is literally inscribed in your flesh: the color of your skin, the texture of your hair, the shape of your hips, your derrière. It is also etched in the thoughts of your disposition, the history of your traditions, and the potential of your future – all shaped by the outer rung of normal. When black men give life to stereotypes like “angry black women”, they are using the tools of our former joint oppressors to further locate black women into a position of outsider.

In labeling black peoples as an “angry people” we are denied the opportunity to challenge the agency of those who participated in engendering that anger. When black men participate in this game that was designed to undermine their opportunities to confront the social forces at play in a systemic racialized context, they acquiesce their place of authority in the struggle for equality.

This relinquished place of authority looks like Hughley taking a deliberately constructed misconception promoted in Hollywood media about black men and turning it on black women. The concession of this place of authority is prompted by fear of a historically fragmented self coming home to roost.

We owe it to ourselves, as a people, to recognize our agency in the application of the subtle pins of discord that have not come from us, but from those who for 400 years employed legalized oppression against us, and for 200 of those years legally declared that we were not even human. The process of subject re-narration occurs over a period of time and in various stages; and I urge you Mr. Hughley  to recognize that we are in a different historical moment, one in which the tools of oppression are, though subtle, equally destructive. I echo Frantz Fanon: we must not take on the identity of our oppressors and attack one another with their tools. We must retain our ability to act as free agents and recreate our own distinct identity and our own way of engaging with the struggles of one another.

by: Dr. Sharon Washington

Dr. Sharon Washington is an education anthropologist with more than 18 years of experience in education. She has worked in anthropological education research, policy analysis, program design, and teacher preparation in various parts of the world. That work includes co-founder of a progressive public middle school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City; and school turnaround efforts that include: school design, teacher preparation, and leadership development in the United States, southern Africa and Latin America.

 

 

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