When a little black girl is born, instead of diapers and pink onesies, people should consider luggage because she’ll need it to collect all the problems dropped at her feet as she matures into a black woman in America.
If you let the media tell it, we — black women — are so domineering and emasculating that we’re on autopilot molding generations of black men who are nothing more than uneducated, couch-hopping, prison-record-having, baby-making machines. You and I — being the smart, observant, people that we are with a diverse number of friends, family and acquaintances in the black community—know that this is most certainly not the whole story of our rich culture.
theGrio: Tameka Raymond tweets make her poster child for ‘down low’ fear
However, homophobia in the black community is an ugly reality and black women, as members of that community, we must acknowledge and own our part in that. When we think of homophobia we think of the extremes. We think of people assaulting gay men on the street or bullying people to the point of suicide, but that’s not all there is to homophobia and intolerance of homosexuality.
“It ain’t no good black men out there. Most of them are drug addicts, in jail, or homos. The good ones know they the sh*t so they got 10 women at a time, leaving babies all over the place.” That sounds like the transcription from one of those Black Women Will All Die Single and Sad television specials that were all the rage a year or two ago, but it’s actually a quote from Spike Lee’s 1991 film Jungle Fever. That line was spoken during a scene were a group of black women were consoling a friend and bemoaning the lack of “good” black men.
Funny how a quote from a (fictional) black women over 20 years ago about the frustration of finding a suitable black male mate still resonates with how some women feel today. Even more interesting though is the inclusion of homosexuality in that mini-tirade about black men who are not up to par.
J.L. King and his incessant media blitz in the early 2000’s about the lives of men on the “down low” (men who sleep with men, but do not consider themselves to be “gay” and live publicly as straight men) struck a nerve. Black women in particular were put on alert and some began to question the sexuality of their significant others. It became a running joke of sorts. A man who didn’t want you was probably on the down low, right?
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article courtesy of TheGrio.com
