With friends across the millennial spectrum, I’m often reluctantly raked into conversations on cohabitation, marriage, and children.
Meanwhile, I’m still figuring out if I even like men. By men, I mean Black men: the only men I date. The men that The Black Community has raised with a fragile and externally dependent self-efficacy. The men that our oppressors have intricately brainwashed Black women to hate and fear. The men that hold everyone accountable for each role played in their destruction except their own. The men who, I believe, love Black women with their whole hearts but won’t show it because no one ever taught them how. The men who hold tight to that excuse because familiarity is comforting, and growth is strenuous. *Scoffs* Weak.
I often liken my love life to that of Fiona Gallagher from Shameless (U.S.), minus the cheating … and minus being able to find men willing to commit to a relationship because *taps mic* I am a Black woman who only dates Black men. Millennial Black men seem to only have one goal in mind: that lean, mean, mean green. Granted, The Almighty … dollar is what we all seek after as college-educated young professionals trying to make it in America. The difference, however, lies in how we socialize our children based on their gender. As Ms. Mary Jane Paul has shown us, having all the money and esteem in the world won’t keep you warm at night. Black women are taught to value relationships, platonic and romantic, and to break our backs to maintain them no matter how busy work gets.
In previous generations, patriarchy in government and culture intentionally and successfully crafted the American male identity. The White patriarch was the sole source of income and decision making in the household. Having had the transatlantic slave route power wash away memories of Dahomey warriors, queen mothers, and other indigenous African structures of communal governance, the postbellum Black man mimicked the only structure he saw in an effort to build a life in America. This is when the riff began.
Despite the freed slave’s dream of a big house with a wrap around porch, on which his wife could finally relax and sip lemonade, Black families could not afford one source of income. The Black woman had to go back to work. Forever threatened by the Black man’s potential for strength and dominance, the Jim Crow White, even in the North, kept job availability for Black men minimal, dangerous, and low-wage. All the while, he provided more opportunities for advancement for the Black woman, who he trusted to keep his house and rear his children, something our men have yet to forgive us for.
In America, to take away a man’s ability to provide for his family, is to castrate him. Emasculated, depressed,and perpetually anxious, many Black men turned to crime and/or addiction. They wallowed in the only emotion they deemed appropriate for a man to show: anger. Reduced to unemployed husbands and fathers, men began to abuse the only power they felt they had left, physical force and their women’s emotional dependence. If our men were not taken by mass incarceration and addiction, Black women either succumbed to physical and emotional abuse at their hands or sacrificed their emotional security for the safety of our children and ourselves. Unprotected by our men, we created the necessary armor to weather the storm of our plight in White America, using our own bodies to shield our children along the way. Often impenetrable and always resilient, the Black matriarch took the blame for the Black man’s emasculation. The Black man was becoming extinct.
When the 1950s mass media forced American Whites to look their demons in their eyes, in the comfort of their own homes, it sparked the Civil Rights movement. The Black Community’s victory resulted in White men being forced to throw some scraps of power and opportunity our way. Though not yet granted a seat at the Good Ol’ Boys’ table, Black men were now at least able to buss his dishes. The Black community strengthened, reveling in post triumph cohesion. The White man’s scraps were enough to pay the rent in the Black ghetto so our women could finally become homemakers, An American Dream.
Generation Y has brought the death of Joe Jackson (literally), Troy Maxson, and James Evans, the overbearing, problematic, abusive Black patriarch. We were raised by Claire Huxtable, Deidra Mitchell, and Harriette Baines-Winslow. Whether growing up in a single-parent matriarchal household, or with a homemaker mother and blue collar worker father, one could identify with these steel magnolias.Our village of mothers, aunts, sisters in the hair salon and at our church were the strong as metal, elegant and poised as a flower, women whose work pumps we aimed to fill one day. Despite the influence of these strong-willed, smart mouthed, intelligent, working wives and mothers, why did Black women millennials grow up to become Maxine Shaw, Teri Joseph, and Mary Jane Paul, college-educated, esteemed, single, childless, emotional wrecks of women?
The War on Drugs launched the second wave in the destruction of the Black household. Again, and still, addiction, mass incarceration, and other constructs of institutional racism snatched away our men. When the father is absent, Black boys are rarely consoled by a village of men like Cliff, Frank, or Carl. These hard working, masculine, secure in themselves, Black woman marrying and empowering characters remain just that. In real life, our Black men walk in fear, insecurity, and defeat as America lays fresh cement along the school to prison pipeline, paving the way for him to leave his mark for himself, and often, for his children too.
Black men who beat the odds become college-educated, esteemed, millennial men who are utterly incompatible with their female counterparts. While Black men are busy dancing in their newly awarded seats at the Good ‘Ol Boys’ Table, they often overlook the Black women on the sidelines rooting for them.
Adapted traits of the Black Matriarch were passed down generations. So too was our fathers’ grudge against her. Our men remain at bay, finding comfort and power beside women in all shades but Black, whom have been deemed everything they claim we aren’t: submissive, supportive, and simple.
Black women millennials have formed our own grudge. The “niggas aint shit,” movement has grown some serious traction over the past few years, especially on Black Twitter. Black twitter allows for the widespread sharing of male toxicity and degradation of the Black woman, slander of both Black men and Black women by those who don’t know the difference between Feminism and Womanism, and cyber-bullying from all parties. We showcase it for White America to see. Us at each other’s throats, doing the dirty work for them. Digging the hole deeper, we’ve found an avenue to mass produce the next generation of “aint shit niggas” who hate Black women and Black women who sentence all Black men to perpetual “aint shit niggadom.”
The only being as resilient and powerful as the Black man is the Black woman. Yet, we run from each other. The Black Power couple is obsolete. It died with The Huxtables, The Mitchells, and The Winslows. Black millennials were sold a dream. In the 90s, we created ourselves in our own image. On tv, we were strong, afrocentric, successful, educated, emotionally intelligent, and most of all, we were building lives, families, and communities together. Institutional Racism works around the clock, gaslighting the Black community to insure that this does not become a reality. The longer Black men and women hold onto our respective grudges, the more we’ll lose touch with each other. We must rebuild before we continue to reproduce the hate they gave us. So no, “If the love doesn’t feel like 90s R&B, I don’t want it.”
-A Black Millennial Steel Magnolia
