The Essays: Virulent Racio-Misogyny in the Black Community

As you readers of this blog are now aware, we have become infested with a group of people obviously bm, who have written some very hateful things towards us and black women as a group. We have been called overweight, dark-skinned nappy-headed Whoopi Goldberg-lookin' hoes, women without class in public, out of shape, the nastiest weave weares etc.

I want you all to know that when we see what these men are doing as merely sexism, we are missing the bulls eye, and preventing ourselves from understanding the current phenomenon that is characterised by a deep hatred and ill will towards bw. And no wonder we can’t protect ourselves and our daughters because we have failed to adequately delineate and name this phenomenon. The name for it is definitely not sexism and I will explain why.

Sexism is a general term which puts women as a whole in target however what you get in the case of bm, are insults and targeted aggression that are directed specifically at black women and the black female situation, so that it becomes inapplicable beyond black females. As an example, you know how ridiculous it would be to call an Asian woman a nappy headed ho, it just doesn’t apply.

Since sexism targets women equally it doesn’t apply to a situation where men put down bw but praise their non-black counterparts. Remember sexism encompasses a disregard for women as a whole, but where you get one group of women praised vis a vis another then we are dealing with something different. These men call black women hateful names for aspects of black womanhood, but praise non-black women for their attributes be it physical and behavioural and mock black women for being the antithesis of what is good and becoming. Bearing all these in mind, a more appropraite name of this phenomenum being displayed by bm is racio-misogyny.

Racio-misogyny creates as space for non-black women to glory over bw or to position themselves above bw in a way that white supremacy doesn’t provide. White supremacy says, “When you come outside your house, you will know that I reign supreme,” While racio-misogyny opens the door and says “Come in and put yourself above the women in here”.

Racio-misogyny adapts general oppressive norms and makes them more applicable to the specific black situation, meaning that while bw could resist or ignore these more general values and standards because, they are somewhat removed from them, they cannot offer an effective resistance against racio-misogyny which is brought intimately into their situation. This is one of the reasons why I believe that the black community is a ‘failed’ community (just like you get failed states), because a real community offers a buffer or a barrier against the full impact of wider dynamics (just as your skin prevents the sun from frying your liver) but in the black community the wider hostile standards are operating fully and unrestrained against black women.

Racio-misogyny might have resulted from the intercourse of racism and sexism, but it is now its own self-sustaining creature; thus it is time to discard the idea that it is only about internalised racism and to see it only in this framework. It deserves to be ‘mobilised against’ just as we mobilise against racism. Indeed it has now begun to generate its own weapons, exporting terms back into the hands of white supremacy for use to further wreck havoc on black womanhood (the two have found a commonality in their desire to destroy aspects of blackness with bm now helping to defract white supremacist forces onto black womanhood). For an instance, notice how the word ho is now synonymous with the black female character (questionable or not).

Black men have effectively employed the strategy of ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’, in cooperating with wider forces in their attempt to rout bw (how else do you explain bm enthusiastic employment of weapons from the so called enemy to inflict injury on black women), while bw are still paralysed because they cannot seem to move past the fact that a black brother would do what they do to them deliberately, so they are busy trying to understand bm actions in terms of the internalised racism paradigm. But they waste time and energy by not accepting that bm might hold their own self-generating ill will towards bw. Indeed this goes against every framework (especially the very romantic afrocentric framework they have been given to evaluate their situation), which is based on an assumption of goodwill between bm and w before the impact of white supremacy.

My advice is that we bw focus our eyes on the gun pointed at us, and the damage it is about to do, and take our eyes and thus emotions off he who pulls the trigger. Dead is dead!