McLarin Womanish

A Grown Black Woman Speaks on Love and Life
1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-909762-98-5
Verlag: Jacaranda Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 216 Seiten

Reihe: Jacaranda

Courage and outrage inform 13 essays about black womanhood. Searing in its emotional honesty, Womanish is an essay collection by award-winning author Kim McLarin that explores what it means to be a Black woman in today's turbulent times. Writing with candor, wit and vulnerability on topics including dating after divorce, depression, parenting older children, the Obamas, and the often fraught relations between white and black women, McLarin unveils herself at the crossroads of being black, female, middle-aged and, ultimately, American. Powerful and timely, McLarin not only draws upon a lifetime of experiences to paint an intimate portrait of a Black woman trying to come to terms with the world around her, but also exposes a society trying to come to terms with Black women.

Kim McLarin is the author of the critically-acclaimed novels Taming It Down, Meeting of the Waters, and Jump at the Sun, and a memoir, Divorce Dog: Motherhood, Men, & Midlife. Her work has been honored by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, the Barnes & Noble Discover Program, the Hurston/Wright Foundation and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, among other organizations. McLarin's nonfiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, Glamour, The Washington Post, Slate, The Root and other publications. She is a former staff writer for The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Associated Press. McLarin appears regularly on the Emmy-Award winning show Basic Black, Boston's long-running television program devoted to African-American themes. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston, and a member of the board of PEN New England.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McLarin, Kim

Leseproben

ALRIGHT, CUPID

When we have pleaded for understanding, our character has been distorted; when we have asked for simple caring, we have been handed empty inspirational appellations, then stuck in a far corner. When we have asked for love, we have been given children. In short, even our plainer gifts, our labours of fidelity and love, have been knocked down our throats.

—Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” 1974

The first step of deprogramming is education, informing the person you are trying to free just how indoctrination works to hamstring a mind. But information alone will not free a believer from her beliefs, no matter how destructive, because belief is not intellectual. Emotion got you in and emotion will get you out.

By the time I stepped into online dating, I knew a great deal about the corrosive internalized effects of white supremacy and anti-Black bias. I knew about the old doll test1 and the new doll test2 and the Implicit Bias data showing 50 percent of Black people prefer white faces over Black. I knew that even as dark-skinned Black women evidence remarkable levels of self-esteem, colourism remains alive and well in the Black community. I even knew, after not-insignificant therapy, that I was kind and intelligent and compassionate and also, by the way, beautiful—and that nothing American society had been whispering in my ear should stand in the way of my feeling worthy of love.

I also knew that it did.

What I needed, it turned out, was a cheap, effective, powerful tool for deprogramming myself of the belief— partly personal, mostly hegemonic—in my own unlovability, a tool of liberation and empowerment, one that worked on both mind and heart. Audre Lorde famously wrote that the master’s tools would never dismantle the master’s house, but what I needed was to first dismantle the shack the master had built for me, and then to build myself a new home, brick by brick. Using, you know, the tools I had.

This is where online dating comes in.

•

These are the lessons I learned from online dating:

I.

After her divorce, my mother never dated. In part this was because she had four young daughters (and one young son) to protect and knew well the dangers of leaving unknown men lying around the house. But she also believed (not unreasonably given her experience) that men were more trouble than they were worth.

That a woman is complete unto herself and does not need a man (or any partner) to live a rich, fulfilling life is a truth that begs the question: the issue is not need but want. A lot of straight women I know “don’t want to be bothered” and though some of my friends in this category are white the majority of them are Black. , they say as I recall my latest dating disaster. , they say as I cry about a broken heart. , they say and I hear, beneath the personal declaration, a judgment, an implication that continuing to want to be bothered reveals some major weakness, some lacking of self. But maybe that’s just the way I’m hearing it. Maybe the oppressive spectre of the Strong Black Woman/Black Superwoman haunts only me and not my sisters. Maybe their white female friends and acquaintances were not constantly saying to them, “You’re the strongest person I know!” even as they stood there and crumbled. Maybe these women had not, in fact, internalised the notion that not only should Black women not expect to be loved, they should not even desire it.

Apparently, I had.

During this time I watched old reruns of the . Cavett was an awkward, slow-witted and deeply unfunny interviewer (Lord, give me the career of a mediocre white man) but his show attracted extraordinary guests, including Lauren Bacall and Lena Horne. One night I watched Bacall discuss how she was punished, career-wise, for being human and refusing to try to live up to all the impossible fantasies America heaps upon the white female body and white female heart. Another night I watched Horne discuss how she was punished, soul-wise, for being human, to refusing to live down to all those other American fantasies, the ones of Black women. “I was very icy for many years,” she told Cavett. “I could not be at ease with you or many people, because of the ice society had put around my heart. When things that happened to me broke my heart I realized I wasn’t my ice. I was very fragile, very human and a woman who had been this way for protection.”

Both women impressed me. Only Lena Horne made me cry.

In the face of dehumanization, any expression of one’s humanity is both resistance and reinforcement. In launching myself into online dating I admitted—to my friends, the world and most of all myself,—that, yes, I wanted to be loved, that I yearned for companionship and caretaking and connection. Instead of pretending to have it all together, I announced it was sometimes perilously close to falling apart. Like anybody else.

I wrote a profile and found a photo and posted them: Love Wanted.

It felt good.

II.

Seeing how many men desire you is empowering.

In America, telling Black women what’s wrong with them is always good for a cheap laugh (DL Hughley), political advancement (Clarence Thomas) or a bestselling book, movie and bewildering-successful career (the execrable Steve Harvey). In some (not all) Black churches the preaching of Proverbs 31 (“Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies... She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands... she bringeth her food from afar. She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household...” etc). is an evergreen, a club used to clobber women into submissive, virginal behaviour while they wait passively to be found worthy of some man’s love. The idea that Black women are unworthy beggars at the table of love (and thus better fix themselves or die trying) grows like crabgrass out of the compacted, grub-ridden lawn of white supremacy and misogynoir. It’s a big lawn; a lot of people wander on to it without thinking, having absorbed myths about Black women—and especially dark-skinned Black women—as Mammies (loud, fat, domestically asexual) or Jezebels (hypersexual, animalistic, loud) or Sapphires (aggressive, angry, loud).

Even the very narrative around online dating twists against Black women. Data about user racial preferences from OKCupid, one of the largest free dating websites, consistently places Black women (and Asian men) at the bottom of the desirability heap.3 According to OKC, some 80 percent of non-Black men on the website apply a “penalty” to Black women, meaning they are less likely to either message them or respond to their messages than with white, Latino or Asian women. Even Black men, who generally tend to show no racial preference either way, tend to rate Black women slightly lower than Latino or Asian women. (Though not white women. Which is interesting).

This kind of thing can get a girl down, no matter how much she dusts herself in BlackGirlMagic. It is difficult not to notice how rarely Black women are celebrated as desirable and beautiful, even in movies and television shows hemmed by Black men. It is difficult not to notice that even when the love interests of Black male characters in movies and on hit television shows Black women they are usually fair-skinned4,5 ( Uhura in the rebooted movies, etc). It is difficult not to notice how many of one’s fly and fabulous sister friends are unwillingly single, or how many of one’s steady and serious brother friends (not to mention race men like Sidney Poitier, James Earl Jones, Donald Glover, Harry Belafonte, the list goes on and on...) are partnered with/ married to white women. The fact that Black men are twice as likely as Black women to marry someone of another race, a statistic that does not hold true for white, Asian or Hispanic men,6 says nothing about any specific person or relationship. But it sure as hell says something about American society, and about the interplay between social structures and what we like to think of as individual agency.7

To be sure: plenty Black girls grow to adulthood un-nicked by the knives of misogynoir. But many of us spend a lifetime bandaging the cuts. I grew up without a father, who, after my parents’ divorce, largely absented himself from concern about our lives. My mother, herself under-loved and under-valued, focused her energies primarily on not letting us die: she didn’t have a lot of time for building our self-esteem. I was the third of five children, middle girl and middle child. I thought myself weirdly tall, embarrassingly short-haired,...