Critical Noir: Taking One for the Team -- Michele Wallace
By Mark Anthony Neal, AOL BlackVoices columnist
When Michele Wallace published "Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwomen" in early 1979, the book made public -- very public -- the gender tensions that simmered within black communities. "Black Macho" ushered in an era where black communities more openly discussed issues of gender and sexuality -- a conversation that is ongoing as demonstrated by films such as Aishah Simmons's "NO!" and Byron Hurt's forthcoming "Beats and Rhymes" and last year's Spelman College protest against Nelly's "Tip-Drill" video, all of which confront issues like domestic abuse and misogyny. But for Wallace there was a price to pay, as she has faced all form of psychic, intellectual and emotional retribution for speaking "truth to power" about the realities of sexism, misogyny and patriarchy in black communities. The recent publication of "Dark Designs and Visual Culture," a collection of Wallace's writings from the last 30 years, offers a look back at her legacy.
Many black folk were unaware of Michele Wallace, then a journalism instructor at New York University, before she graced the cover of Ms. Magazine in December 1978 -- an issue that included excerpts from "Black Macho." Months later, when Newsweek suggested that the tensions between black women and men represented a "new black struggle" it was clear that Wallace's "Black Macho" helped instigate this so-called struggle. Wallace argued that during slavery black men were disappointed that the "black woman, his woman, was not his slave." About the Black Power Movement of the 1960s, Wallace asserted its motive was "revenge" adding that "It was not equality that was primarily being pursued but a kind of superiority -- black manhood, black macho -- which would combine the ghetto cunning, cool and unrestrained sexuality of black survival with the unchecked authority, control and wealth of white power."
"Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman" was more a critical rant than a fully argued piece of scholarship, but like Ntozake Shange's "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf" (1974) and Alice Walker's "The Color Purple" (1982), "Black Macho" created a context where black women could more openly articulate concerns about their roles within black communities and American society. As the late Toni Cade Bambara wrote in her review of "Black Macho," "What we are left with is a clarity, as well as an occasion for fashioning a collective ideology with which to build, among other things, a coherent Black Women's movement."
With the publication of "Black Macho," Wallace became an overnight celebrity, though there were many who felt she had done so at the expense of the black community. Such thinking was captured by Dr. Maulana Karenga (the founder of Kwanzaa), who quipped, "Books like 'Black Macho' and plays like 'For Colored Girls' only help to divide us, while flattering the white oppressor." Underlying Karenga's criticism was the notion that Wallace had done the unacceptable -- she had aired the proverbial dirty laundry of the black community, an act tantamount to race treason in some sectors. But Karenga's comments also neglect that fact that the charge of "airing one's dirty laundry" was often used to police critical dissent within black institutions and organizations.
"Airing one's dirty laundry" is a phrase based in a fear that white folk's knowledge of some of the more unsavory aspects of black life would be used against blacks, if they were made public. What such thinking has produced is a context where black male leadership, for example, has been spared public scrutiny of some of its more dysfunctional and damaging characteristics. It is one of the reasons why too many of us are too often silent about the incidences of domestic violence and sexual assault in our community.
Today Wallace has mixed emotions about "Black Macho." In "Dark Designs and Visual Culture" she writes, "I had blurted out that sexism and misogyny were near epidemic in the black community and that black feminism had the cure...At 26 I had written the book from hell, and my life would change forever." Wallace is even more explicit in the introduction to the Verso Classic edition of "Black Macho": "I wanted to destroy the book because my desire for something more from life than my marginal status as a black women writer could ever offer was so palpable in its pages." Despite Wallace's ambivalences about "Black Macho," the reality is that the issues of sexism, misogyny, and homophobia are still very much with black communities, but because of Wallace's courage there are now generations of black women and men, who are more committed than ever to rooting these problems out of our communities.
Michele Wallace took one for the team.
March 2, 2005