by A. L. Gober Jr.
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W.E.B. Dubois can be considered the forefather of the Freedmen middle class intellectual, since he was the first to articulate its existence and propose the idea that it has a leadership responsibility. His conceptualization of the “Talented Tenth”, while advanced for the time, created an opening for critics from the left (Communists mainly) to denounce and discourage his influence. Garveyites put the final nail in this coffin, as Dubois and Booker T. Washington together were dismissed as elitists by the more populist Pan-African Black Nationalists.
In this way, writes Harold Cruse in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Dubois is our Sun Yat-Sen, the first to articulate the historical role and responsibility of the Black American intellectual middle class to lead and develop new theories. We have failed to do this, mainly because of a pattern of other conflicts (between genders and between classes) intervening and imposing themselves upon the ethnicity question, which at the end of the day is the decisive struggle to wage at this point in America.
The best that the Black intellectuals of the 21st century could come up with, theory-wise, was the idea of “Intersectionality”. Developed by Columbia Law professor and attorney Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersectionality posits that different “axes” of oppression operate on different levels that intersect where the person embodies both. As it applies to Black women, then, it helps explain the unique way in which they are oppressed for being Black, and being women. Ultimately, it feeds into a larger body of work known as “Critical Race Theory”, which represents a postmodern refinement of the Marxist idea of class struggle, now led by Black feminists. It does well in academic circles because it helps rationalize and measure just how oppressed one actually is in relation to others. This mirrors the way women tend to be socialized - by measuring one’s status relative to another, you get a sense of where you are in the social hierarchy of legitimacy created in the new, ideologically “purged” (since Me-Too) academia.
There is an aggressive dismissal from these circles, of the role that traditional gender roles and family structures play in the Freedmen community and social life, and a grave misunderstanding on the part of said feminists of the black woman’s relationship to the black man, white man and white woman, because they have not broken free from the grievance-based framework proposed by the white (supremacist) feminists as the chief way to destroy the so-called patriarchy. Intersectionality represents exactly this. However, not all patriarchies are created equal.
Black patriarchy was never allowed to truly develop except between 1880 and 1960 (despite the horrors of Jim Crow), during which two-parent Black households were the norm, and after which the neoliberals took over the US government and economic policy and deindustrialized the United States — leaving these communities crime-ridden and hundreds of thousands of working class Black men as either vagrants or criminals, unable to support families economically. The federal government then stepped in to take on the now-empty father role, at least economically, by increasing the scope of welfare programs (for both black and white women). To this day white women are (and always have been) the largest demographic recipient of welfare funds, a fact cleverly concealed by racist and sexist Reagan-era propaganda indicating that Black women are the face of welfare abuse.
Black women have never needed the freedom to work, but rather, the opposite: freedom from work. Gender equality for Freedwomen is not, then, a matter of simply hiring more Black women to well-paid jobs (though I am by no means against it), but rather, of empowering their husbands to be adequate providers by guaranteeing and safeguarding the availability of jobs within our institutions for them (when those husbands are Freedmen). This would allow more Black women to gain the space in their lives to pursue their own advancement in any field, or simply be a housewife if she so chooses.
Abortion access is not to be restricted, but neither is abortion to be promoted as a contraceptive. It is a dangerous but potentially life-saving medical procedure. Wherever it is practiced safely, women will travel to. Statistically, the Black abortion rate has a measurable impact on our population, but not as much as some people might think, because the vast majority of Black women do keep their pregnancies. At the same time, that rate is five times higher than that of White women.
How is this possible?
Black women are getting pregnant far more often than White women are. This means you have to adjust the abortion rate by factoring in how many abortions are done by the same woman multiple times. What would become apparent is the fact that a specific part of the Black female population - that is, in the underclass - are getting pregnant and thus having abortions very often, likely often enough to skew the overall rate to look worse than it actually is.
However, our movement takes no official moral stance on abortion, and our political stance is that it is not white society’s place to either promote or restrict it for Freedwomen. The abortion rate is a useful indicator of other problems which, when fixed, will likely naturally lower the rate. For example - if more Black men had stable jobs, more pregnancies would be planned, and thus there would be fewer of the ‘serial aborters’ accounting for the high rate.
The widespread rape and sexual abuse of Freedwomen both during and after slavery by White and Black men has affected their psychology - creating a desirability complex - and created a similar split among Black women in terms of how to treat the issue of dealing with men and their personal safety.