Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman by Michele Wallace

First published: 1979

Type of work: Autobiography/cultural criticism

Time of work: Late 1960’s-1978

Locale: United States

Principal Personages:

• Michele Wallace, an African American female adolescent
• Faith Ringgold, Michele’s mother and an African American feminist artist

Form and Content

Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwomanconsists of two essays on the title topics, a bibliography, and an index. Michele Wallace attacks the male supremacist bias of 1960’s and 1970’s African American politics. She shows how the Black Power movement that attempted to empower African Americans only empowered African American men. Women remained marginalized, unable to develop a political strategy to take control of their own lives.

Wallace argues that African Americans had been systematically deprived of their own African culture. While slavery and segregation were enormously damaging, African Americans were also hurt by integration and assimilation that denied them the knowledge of their history of struggle and the memory of their own cultural practices. In the process of assimilation, integration, and accommodation, African Americans took on white cultural attitudes and values in regard to sexuality and gender. As a result, African American men became sexist and misogynistic and African American women became self-hating. In hating African American women, African American men hated themselves. They had accepted the dominant culture’s negative stereotypes about the African race.

The roots of African American self-hatred are found in the United States’ history of lynching African American men who purportedly pursued white women. The idea developed that an African American man’s access to white women was a prerequisite of his freedom. This notion shaped the minds of both those white women who came to the South as part of the Civil Rights movement and the African American men who met them there. Since many such men had come to think of themselves in largely physical terms, the inaccessibility of white women represented a severe limitation to their manhood. Liberal white women did not want to oppress African American men by rejecting their sexual advances, while African American men gained no status by romantically pursuing African American women.

Thus, Wallace argues, African American men began celebrating masculinity at the expense of their race. When Shirley Chisholm, an African American female legislator from New York, ran for president in 1972, African American political forces—all male—did not support her. They actively opposed her nomination, attempting to humiliate her as a political being as well as a sexual being. The man on the street seemed either outraged that Chisholm was running or simply indifferent to her campaign. As a result, Wallace was baffled to hear African American men argue that African American women should ignore feminism and focus on African American interests. African American men obviously identified as men before they identified as African American: They had demonstrated by their attitudes toward Chisholm that they wanted African American men to be privileged ahead of African American women.

The Black Power movement pursued African American male superiority instead of African American superiority. Black power advocates celebrated a type of African American manhood, or “black macho,” that combined the ghetto cunning and unrestrained sexuality of African American survival with the unchecked authority, control, and wealth of white power. African American men who stressed a traditionally patriarchal responsibility to their women, children, and community were seen as feminized. Instead, an African American man’s sexuality and the physical fact of his penis were the major evidence of his manhood and the purpose of it. Black macho permitted its adherents to embrace only the most primitive notion of women—as possessions and spoils of war—leaving African American women as devalued symbols of defeat.

As Wallace explains it, the myth of the superwoman holds that African American women have inordinate strength, with an associated ability to tolerate an unusual amount of misery and heavy, distasteful work. According to this myth, the African American woman does not have the same fears, weaknesses, and insecurities as other women, but views herself as stronger emotionally than most men. In 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan published “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” more commonly known as the Moynihan Report. The report blamed African American women for being strong and therefore imposing an intolerable burden on African American men that destroyed African American families.

While African American men attacked Moynihan for taking the responsibility for racism off the shoulders of whites, they also agreed that African American women had substantial advantages over African American men educationally, financially, and in employment. This attitude led to scapegoating of African American women. Rather than carve out a place for African American men in the white-dominated economy, African Americans sought to reduce the accomplishments of African American women. Successful African American women were made to feel guilty for being successful.

Critical Context

When Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman appeared in print, Wallace was twenty-six years old and unprepared for the resulting onslaught of criticism. While some members of the African American community supported her work, many others were openly hostile. Wallace was accused of causing a division in the African American community that would aid whites, of being a dupe of white feminists who only wanted to exploit her, and of weakening the African American community. The sharp criticism gave Wallace a nervous breakdown.

In subsequent years, Wallace’s work became recognized as pathbreaking and enormously significant. Feminist scholars built on her discussion of African American sexual politics, though there remained comparatively few works on African American feminism. However, Wallace’s hope that African American women would design their own liberation has not been fully realized, nor has the dream of cohesive African American political action.

Bibliography

Byrd, Rudolph P., and Beverly Guy-Sheftell, eds. Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Explores the place of African American men in African American feminist criticism, as well as the patriarchy’s exploitation of African American women.

Carson, Clayborne, Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner, and Gary B. Nash. The Struggle for Freedom: A History of African Americans. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. One of the best general histories of African Americans.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge, 2005. Essentially the successor book to Wallace’s work, Collins’s text explores how images of black sexuality have been used to oppress African Americans.

Collins, Patricia Hill. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. One of the best histories of modern black feminism.

Estes, Steve. I Am A Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Examines male attitudes toward the Civil Rights movement and the Moynihan Report.

Robnett, Belinda. How Long? How Long? African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. A history of the Civil Rights movement from the perspective of African American women.

Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking Penguin, 2000. One of the best histories of the women’s movement.