There’s a new breed of Black women in town

It’s funny how life sends you circumstances when you resist your internal urges. For a few days now, I’ve been thinking about writing a little something about this new breed of Black women. I kept putting it off and now it seems I must do so because a young lady has put forth a call to have a civil discussion about an article she reposted supposedly to incite people to think.

The said article was nothing less than ignorant, repulsive, misogynist crap. I won’t even quote what it said because it was so vile and offensive that it doesn’t even deserve any more attention. Suffice it to say, it was from the type of emotionally retarded black man who feels free to degrade women for not conforming to his sexist oppressive definition of a woman. The article did NOTHING to make people think. Its sole purpose was to spew sexist rhetoric, displace blame for any wrongdoings men do and place it unfairly on the shoulders of women, and to get women to blindly follow along and jump through chauvinistic hoops in order to degrade other women.

My concern is not the young man who wrote the initial article however. I write enough about that sort of Black man who feels so threatened by Black women that he takes every opportunity to denigrate us and claim he wants to go back to the good old days when men were King of the castle, yet he has NO CLUE how to reign as anything other than an oppressor. You know the one, the guy whose only response is to call a Black woman angry or imply that she doesn’t have a man because she dares to challenge Black men’s obvious short comings. This dude wasn’t even particularly unique, he was typical, stupid, no, ignorant is a better word, and just disgustingly sexist. This dude is laughable and cliché. He’s symptomatic of this ever growing portion of Black men that need to degrade Black women in order to feel manly.

Like I said, my main concern is not the dude who wrote it. My overwhelming concern is the young lady who reposted it, defending her repost of it by saying that it “had validity and truth to it.” My main concern is the generation of young women who can’t articulate, or even recognize and identify, men who are blatantly sexist and offensive. It’s not just this one particular young lady, it seems to be scores of Black women. These women, who, by all measures, should be reasonably intelligent, seem to be as dumb as a bag of rocks when it comes to defending the honor of Black women or even articulating an argument that seems reasonably cogent when such flimsy attacks on us are made. Not only do they not take offense, they celebrate these men.

It’s what I like to call the “Michael Baisden Fan Complex”. No matter how offensive and sexist his comments, no matter how disrespectful his is to Black women, women callers are waiting on the line to say, “Yeah, Michael, you are right.” It’s a new breed of women who defend, coddle, agree with, support, and otherwise glorify the sexist, offensive, divisive, vitriolic filth that emotionally immature men spew and they sign on for it, lock stock and barrel. We’ve raised several generations of Black women to be enslaved to their own oppression. We, as a society, have taught women to conform to men’s sexist demands and to never question, speak out, or confront men whose only interest is in getting women to appease their grandiose and diseased egos. They are so blissfully ignorant, they don’t even have a concept that they should be offended. We’ve let them believe that being called a feminist is a far worse thing to being called than a bitch.

There is something pathological and sick about a man who feels the need to denigrate a Black woman for what we stand for, for what we’ve had to endure, but the sickness is even greater when Black women don’t scream out in outrage. What does it say about us, about our mental health, when Black women pat men on the back for their offensive beliefs? It’s like these young ladies are incapable of even recognizing how detrimental these types of statements are.

What have we done to our young Black women? We teach them that their beauty is in the length of their hair, the roundness of their behinds, the price of their high heeled shoes and pocketbooks. We cripple them by never making them question the status quo and telling them to conform to an ideal of beauty that doesn’t look like them. We celebrate them when they fall in line with the narrow definition of femininity and we try to silence and denounce them when they stand up and say, “No, I won’t be your black Barbie Doll, I’m far more than that.” When Black men say stupid shit like, “What’s wrong with the Black community is Black women haven’t raised Black children right,” these young ladies don’t even have enough common sense to say intelligently in response, “Black women are doing the best they can with the broken tools we’ve been given considering Black men are absentee as fathers, only interested in fathering sons not daughters, and emotionally immature fathers at best when they are around.”

We are in peril as a people as long as we let diseased men define us and Black women follow along like hypnotized drones. Black men keep making the box smaller and smaller for what is acceptable for Black women and Black women keep redefining themselves to fit into that tiny box. As long as our value and worth is placed in appeasing the distorted beliefs of sick men, in feeding their needs as egomaniacs, then we will perish as a people. If Black women can’t even identify blatantly offensive rhetoric that is undermining to Black women as a whole, we are doomed as a mentally enslaved people.

Scottie Lowe