New Introduction to Black Macho and The Myth of the SuperwomanBy Michele Wallace (Revision January 4th, 2014).

When Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman was

published in December of 1978, accompanied by a large

excerpt in Ms. Magazine with my face on the cover when I was

27 years old, I had my fifteen minutes of fame. I was not

grateful. I was not surprised. I felt entitled. At the

time, I confidently anticipated that such furor would be my

life from then on but I was wrong.

These 35 years later at the age of 62, I can see that

the attention I got then from the media and from readers was

never going to return in the same way. Ever since I

realized that the spotlight was never coming back (which

dawned on me slowly) I have made an informal study of

writers who were in their mid or early twenties when first

publishing a well-received book. Invariably, I find, no

matter how well written the book, there’s always something a

little naïve, foolish or just downright incautious about the

1

endeavor.1 My situation was no different. People will argue,

I hope, about whether or not the book was worthy of the

attention for a long time to come. Not sure if people fully

realize how unusual it is to even be talking about a book

that was published 35 years ago because most books never

garner a large enough audience to break even much less

become profitable to anyone.2

As for 35-year-old books still being controversial,

well this is a rare problem indeed. If you don’t already

know this, just take a stroll around your local library and

check some of the dates on the books.

The problem with such a book is that since not as

many people are interested in the author anymore, they are

not interested either in corrections she might like to make

or lessons she has learned. It goes without saying that

there will be little interest in subsequent books. In 1990,1 I don’t want to turn this essay into an act of gratuitous literary criticism so I won’t name the books or the authors.2 Contrary to popular belief, writers don’t usually profit even from a book with a considerable audience. I have profited very little over the years from the publication of Black Macho. But what it did do is guarantee me a career as an academic and a scholar, and to a lesser degree as a published writer.

2

Verso Press, under the aegis of editor Michael Sprinker,

republished Black Macho along with a new introduction by me

in which I tried to note some of the things I had learned in

the interval from 1978 through 1990 that were relevant to

the text. At the same time, Verso also published my second

book, Invisibility Blues, which included the revised text of

my Master’s Thesis in English at the City College of New

York. Both the essay for the new introduction as well as

much of the text of my thesis, in which I tried to

demonstrate knowledge of some of the new theoretical

techniques of interpretation that were so popular in

academia then, were a matter of defending myself from the

obscurity that had descended upon me in the shadow of Black

Macho’s disappearance from print with no significant

publications to follow. I think it must be difficult for

young people today to imagine what it was like to want to

know things that were not yet known and that did not in the

70s yet seem to be on the horizon.

After the first publication of Black Macho in 1979,

I went back to school to do a Ph.D. in American Studies at

3

Yale University.3 At the time I wrote Black Macho, I had

only a Bachelors in English from the City College of New

York. I yearned deeply for more knowledge, which made Yale

the perfect place for me for a time. Unfortunately, the

flood of new knowledge was overwhelming and knocked me to my

knees, resulting in my first nervous breakdown4 at the age

of 29 in 1981.

Of course, there were other factors in my illness, some

of which it would take me decades to discern,5 but what I

remember most clearly about this time is the mind blowing

experience of the revelation that there were places like

Yale where scholarship in the humanities was earnestly

pursued. What really floored me was the manner in which 3 The return to school followed a relationship with Cornel West, who first brought me to New Haven, described in some detail (if not accurately) in Brother West—Living and LovingOut Loud: A Memoir co-authored with David Ritz. SmileyBooks 2009.4 Mental collapse and exhaustion followed by illness and hospitalization for two months in Harlem Hospital, a fascinating learning experience in its own right.5 I was finally diagnosed with Atypical Depression by a Psychiatrist and Lupus by a Rheumatologist in 1993. See discussion of these experiences in the Introduction and “Angels in America, Paris is Burning and Queer Theory” in Dark Designs and Visual Culture (Duke UP 2004), 1-84, 430-453.

4

Yale altered my perception of the potential compass of

scholarship. First, given how intimidated I was by the newly

fashionable approaches to English studies of Deconstruction

(Yale was then the home of this methodology of literary

analysis, which included regular visits from its reigning

star, Jacque Derrida), and Post-Structuralism, I chose

rather to focus on my new and actually first scholarly love,

American history, which was also a field strenuously

represented by scholars in residence at Yale. Also, at the

same time and quite accidentally I found myself in the very

place that was set to pioneer the new field of African

American studies. Three major lights in the field were then

present on campus: Henry Louis Gates, Robert Steptoe and

Abenia Busia. Among my classmates were Hazel Carby, Michael

Denning, Rock Dutton and Roger Gouveneur Smith. During my

time there, among our visitors were Wole Soyinka, Ishmael

Reed, Leslie Fiedler, Toni Morrison, Stanley Aronowitz and

many many more.

Among those with whom I had the opportunity to study

briefly were John Blassingame, historian of African American

5

Slavery, Sidney Ahlstrom, historian of American Religion,

David Brion Davis, pre-eminent authority on the comparative

history of slavery, author of Slavery in the Age of

Revolution and Slavery in the Age of Democracy, and Edmund

Morgan, who was then best known for his innovative work on

slavery in the colonial Period. Moreover, Yale introduced

me to the idea that there were different strands of

historiography, as well as the epistemological quandary of

analyzing such matters in the context of the ongoing African

American struggle for freedom.

For the entire time I was in New Haven, even before I

began to attend Yale, I yearned to explore thoroughly the

conceptual universe that was opening before me, with an ache

that could only come from a lifetime of having been headed

in an entirely different direction. I had no idea who I was

or would subsequently become intellectually. Indeed, I had

no idea that mine was the temperament of an intellectual,

and that until I felt comfortable in that world, I would

never feel comfortable in the world at all.

6

My ambition until then had been to be a novelist. I

was, in fact, at that very time working on the third or

fourth draft of a novel for which I had a contract. My

education at CUNY, which had been largely focused on

literature and creative writing, had done fairly well by me,

but it hadn’t given me that sense of the place of the

analysis of intellectual and cultural history, which was

from that day to this the most important key to my future

life of the mind that I would ever obtain.

I can still remember the excitement of the discussions

that ensued with my CCNY mentor Mark Mirsky and his artist

wife Inger at their loft on the Bowery on my visits to New

York. Indeed, it had been Mirksy as my teacher as an

undergraduate who use to say to me again and again, whenever

we would inevitably encounter that lacunae in my endless

questions about the nature of things literary and

philosophical, you should be at Harvard.

I was so clueless as to what such an education in the

humanities might constitute (as are still most Americans,

especially those who are black) that it never occurred to me

7

to take his suggestion seriously. We black folk hadn’t yet

entirely absorbed the national obsession with business, law

and medicine but the humanities and the arts at any

university were definitely not on the agenda either. But

Mirsky was Jewish, only about ten years older than me, had

come from the inner city of Boston and gone to Harvard as an

undergrad himself and he knew what such an opportunity to be

exposed to world-class minds might do for one such as me. It

wasn’t a matter of just continuing the elite education I had

begun at New Lincoln. Of course, going to an Ivy League

school would provide that as well. But for one such as me

it was more a matter of being some place where challenging

intellectual discourse was the norm. Yale was such a place.

And as I would subsequently discover on my endless lecture

tours to promote Black Macho, there were many schools in the

United States capable of providing this level of

intellectual rigor.

But when I finally found myself surrounded by such folk

at Yale, I was caught short. And these students really were

the best and brightest those very same American colleges had

8

produced because remember, no one who was trying to be rich

or financially successful would be pursuing a Ph.D. in

history or literature or philosophy, or most especially

American Studies, which was kind of the new kid on the

political block in academia. They didn’t have any money and

they had made financial sacrifices to pursue their Ph.D.s at

such an early age. They were the children of The New Left.

In that sense, I was very much in the right place because

that was what my mother had been and still was: a political

progressive.

I was often quiet in class because I was simply

flabbergasted by the depth of my ignorance of writings and

concepts my classmates regarded as indispensable. Moreover,

I quite simply did not know what to regard as important. I

didn’t know, for instance, what the lampposts of such a

discussion were, the ebb and flow, the beginning, middle and

end. It seemed a kind of complicated rhetorical game in

which actual knowledge was not the prize or even the

measure. It had more to do with the production of knowledge.

There was a gamesmanship about it. I knew when it was

9

happening but I could not yet identify or name its parts,

much less describe it. I had read the book we were all

assigned to read (we read at least a book a week for each

class). Presumably everybody in the room had read some

portion of the book and yet the ensuing discussion seemed to

have nothing at all to do with the book I had read.

Perhaps the best example can be provided by my

experiences in the two twentieth century intellectual

analyses classes I took, one each semester I was at Yale.

These classes actually provided the most confounding

experiences because we were often discussing issues related

to intellectual history, itself, and even the lives of the

authors of the texts. Sometimes our readings came directly

from writers who were working and teaching and living in the

world around us.

We read in these classes as I recall works such as

Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, Shulamith

Firestones’ The Sexual Revolution, Nell Painter’s Hosea

Hudson, as well as other, older American Studies classics.

10

Discussions were, for whatever reason, much more rigorous

than in other courses, perhaps because our teachers for

these classes were younger and were less likely to lecture

to us. They were genuinely interested in our ideas, more

likely to regard us as intellectual equals, or maybe it was

competition because the difference in rank and status

between graduate students and junior faculty is frankly

quite nebulous, especially in the Ivy League where junior

faculty often have to go elsewhere to achieve tenure.

Indeed, as it happens, today one of the most famous members

of the faculty then and now had that very experience.

Whereas Steptoe received tenure at Yale, Gates did not.

Gate then went from Yale to Cornell and then to Harvard

where he remains the Chair of the Dubois Center and African

American Studies.

Since I have taught so much myself since then, I can

now look back on what happened in these classes with a good

deal more analytical distance. Pretty soon I began to

notice a few things that were entirely unspoken. First,

certain students were the most vocal and exerted

11

considerable leadership in the discussions. Second, often

these students had quite apparently not done all or even

most of the reading. Invariably, such a student would make

a claim for an alternate reading or set of ideas as more

important to the topic than the reading we had been

assigned. I don’t think I need to point out that this

student was almost always male, or that I was invariably the

only black student in any of my classes.

But every time I watched and heard this occur, I was

so intimidated, it rendered me speechless. It went against

everything I had ever learned about performing in an

educational environment. Of course, I had never been a

particularly proficient performer in an educational

environment. Indeed, I had become comfortable with the idea

that I wasn’t smart. But what I began to notice was that

being smart seemed to have little to do with whether or not

you had done the homework. From this I learned that it was

the more relaxed mind, the familiarity with one’s own

intellectual disposition and what one thought about a

variety of related matters that was much more important to

12

holding one’s own in discussion, or indeed in any

environment in which words were key.

In addition to classes, there were entirely voluntary

study groups on every conceivable topic related to the

humanities. The one that astonished me the most was the

group that met to talk about the Bible as literature because

my early education had been heavily religious, since from my

earliest memories as a child I was a Baptist on many

weekends I spent with my grandmother at the Abyssinian

Baptist Church in Harlem, and a Lutheran during the week at

the Our Savior Lutheran School in the Bronx. My grandmother

who was still my favorite person in the world slept with the

Bible next to her bed and was an avid reader of this text.

Therefore, up until the age of 11 I felt myself to be

completely immersed in scripture and Biblical teachings,

having spent most of my life until then in church in one

form or another. I sang in choirs both at school and at

church. On our way to school on the public bus, Barbara and

I would pass the hour of our commute often singing different

hymns. My Dad once told me that he had a friend who use to

13

miss her stop every morning watching us, listening to our

conversation and our singing.

When my sister and I had switched over to the

progressive, liberal New Lincoln School in which many of our

classmates were red diaper babies, I had been transformed

into an agnostic in short order. But I continued to attend

church with my grandmother and with my friends in Harlem so

embedded it was in the social life of our community. Now I

found new uses for this knowledge of religion, crucial to

intellectual history at Yale, which had begun as a Divinity

School. Some of my best and most interesting friends at Yale

were students in the Divinity School. Some of them were

black and they were always the more activist politically.

The potential for working with primary sources in my

chosen field of African American history were endless.

Should I focus my attention on mastering available sources,

such as the writings of W.E.B. Dubois (whom we simply did

not study in any sense as we do today), or should I delve on

own into as yet insufficiently explored primary sources?

*

14

Despite my fondness for strenuous exercise, I had

learned very little yet about either my physical or my

mental capacities as an individual, much less how to marshal

my resources, and focus my energies for the desired result.

I had written a book, just barely, and literally by the skin

of my teeth. I could write and I could write a lot in

grammatical sentences but that would no longer be

sufficient. I was out of my depth and I knew it.

Instead of curtailing and/or ceasing all extra curricular

activity--probably drinking was the most deleterious for my

mental equilibrium, I thought it would be sufficient just to

focus on school when school was in session. It was not. Like

a lot of people, I am guessing, I have a very sensitive Eco-

system connecting my mind and my body.

Meanwhile, I had my first encounter with the essays

that made up W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

He had been the first black man to complete a Ph.D. at

Harvard. His dissertation, The Suppression of the African

Slave Trade (1899) was his first important book in a truly

stellar career. Moreover, that you could still read such

15

books and make discoveries you had not previously fathomed

was a revelation, the power of which has never left me. As

I, myself, was grappling with the difficulty of what I would

do with the rest of my life, Yale helped me to begin to

grasp the fruits of longevity and intellectual productivity,

which were the daily preoccupation of everyone’s study

there.

It was with great and lasting regret that I was forced

to leave Yale because of my illness in the fall of 1981. I

was given the opportunity to return but I had lost my nerve

and all of my confidence that I could complete such a Ph.D.

But what I did do--because I never really gave up on the

life of the mind that Yale opened up to my examination--is

that I kept all of the materials related to my education

there, my papers, my study materials, my books (and I bought

every book I could find). I took them with me everywhere,

and studied it all until I had mastered every page, every

author, every word, every sentence. You could perhaps say

that I took Yale on the road with me. And as I shifted my

career from being a wouldbe novelist to being an academic

16

and intellectual, I continued to study the ideas to which I

had first been introduced at Yale on my own. Whenever I saw

an opportunity to follow up on a set of ideas that I had had

to abandon at Yale, I did so. For one day, I returned to

Yale after the psychiatrist at the Health Center had okayed

me for return to school. That first day, I had a class with

David Brion Davis, all of whose books I have subsequently

read, and he distributed photocopies of the manuscript of

Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death, which had not

yet been published. I had it with me when I left New Haven

for the last time. And a close study of this text, further

pursued to the notes and supplementary materials when the

actual book came out, begun my education in my own Yale

without walls.

In 1993, I finally continued my pursuit of the Ph.D.

in Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, which I

completed in 1999. I chose Cinema Studies because the

opportunity was there to do so without financial cost, and

given that the pursuit of a Ph.D. in English or in Art

History, either of which I would have preferred, didn't seem

17

a real option. Since I was already a tenured professor in

English at both the City College of New York and the CUNY

Graduate Center, where I was empowered to sit on other

people’s Ph.D. committees, I did not want to do anything to

jeopardize my credibility in that context. As for Art

History, the lily whiteness of the field was too daunting.

Why did I not return to American History? This was because I

felt as though Yale had turned me into a viable amateur

historian. Being an eager amateur historian had advantages

that being a certified historian does not. The credential

means you must answer to many masters. Actually this is the

drawback of every kind of Ph.D. So my life has been littered

with regrets, particularly of an intellectual and

educational variety, but regrets become opportunities.

*

Despite the possible futility of such an endeavor,

especially after so much prolonged re-education, I cannot

resist making another effort after all these years to

18

address the deficiencies of the text I wrote in 1979.6 I

will take them in order of appearance in the original book.

Black Macho begins with an ode to interracial dating

at the New Lincoln School, an experimental private school I

attended from 1963 through 1969. But it remains to be said

that New Lincoln, which no longer exists, positioned

deliberately, as it was, on the border of East Harlem,

Central Harlem and the Upper Eastside, was an extraordinary,

wonderful and entirely unique school. I have learned a

great deal more about this school than I knew when I was in

attendance or when I first wrote Black Macho, partly from a

very ambitious Harvard Honors thesis written by Michaela

O’Neill Daniel in 2003, partly through a feature on New

Lincoln in Ebony Magazine in 1965, and partly through

ongoing communication with other students who attended the

school around the time I did.7

6 I wish I were the sort of person who could find something praiseworthy to say about my work, but that simply isn’t whoI am. If the experience with Black Macho has taught me anything, it is that humility is the truer road to follow. 7 Michaela O’Neill Daniel, “Race and Progressivism at The New Lincoln School: Teaching Race Relations Through Experience,” A thesis submitted to the Department of Afro-American Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements

19

From my limited perspective as a young woman, from the

age of 13 through 17, both the dating and the racial

situation were a preoccupation, one that I used as a bridge

to my discussion of gender politics in the 1970s. Gender

politics are extremely crucial for anyone who is 27 years

old, had never been married, had never even had a really

serious romantic relationship of any kind. This would be

equally true for young women today but at 63, I regret to

concede that these matters are now of much less interest.

for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors. Harvard University, Cambridge Massachusetts, 21 March 2003. “Michelein the 60s and the Early 70s,” Sunday December 1, 2013:http://ringgoldinthe1960s.blogspot.com/2013/12/michele-in-60s-and-early-70s.html Michele in the 60s: A gallery curatedby Michele Faith Wallace. 12 Photos.https://www.flickr.com/photos/mjsoulpictures/galleries/72157623976615706/Photos of Attica protests in 1971 with Faith Ringgold (my mother), Kate Millet, Yvonne Rainier, Alice Neel, Jon Hendricks and others at the Leo Castelli Gallery and at MOMA. “Photo Essay: Michele in Anything Goes 1968” Soul Pictures: Black Feminist Generations:http://mjsoulpictures.blogspot.com/michele-in-anything-goes-1968.html“New Lincoln Picture 1960s”:http://mjsoulpictures.blogspot.com/2009/07/new-lincoln-picture-1960s.html

“New Lincoln Reunion”http://mjsoulpictures.blogspot.com/2008/06/new-lincoln-reunion.html

20

As a young black female in the 1960s and 70s, I didn’t have

a lot of choices as to whom I would date. As my mother

likes to say, the men do the picking (if you are

heterosexually inclined and I was). Because I was dark

skinned, and black males then as now predominantly preferred

light skinned females, and my parents were not interested in

assisting me in the selection of appropriate male company, I

was pretty much left to my own devices, which never turned

out well. I think what happened when I went to Mexico and

got involved in the commune there at 17 after graduating

from high school provides a pretty good indication of what

my instincts were at the time. I had no idea about men or

male company.

But then the observations about interracial dating

led me to make certain suppositions about the drawbacks of

Black Power and male leadership in the Civil Rights

Movement. These days I would defer to the still most

impressive example of such scholarship of Paula Gidding’s

When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race

and Sex in America (1984). This book does an excellent job

21

of telling accurately much of the story I tried to tell in

Black Macho of the first wave of black feminist thought as

represented by black female involvement in anti-slavery and

the early discussions of black female suffrage. Giddings

goes on to continue the story through the development of the

early black female club movement through the contributions

of black female leadership to the Civil Rights Movement and

the Black Power Struggles.

In the meanwhile, since Gidding’s book, there have

been many significant additions to our knowledge of the

history of black feminism in relationship to the Civil

Rights Movement, among the ones that have particularly

caught my attention recently there is Barbara Ransby’s

fascinating study of Ella Baker and The Black Freedom

Movement (2005), Danielle McGuire’s At The Dark End of the

Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—a New History of

the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of

Black Power (Knopf 2010) and Jeanne Theoharis’s The

Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Beacon Press 2013).

22

For documentation concerning earlier contributions of

black women to feminist thought and activism, one should

refer to Paula Giddings magisterial Ida, A Sword Among

Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching

(Amistad 2008). In regard to even earlier stages of black

feminist activism, in recent years we have seen a number of

useful books on both Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth,

including Nell Painter’s Sojourner Truth: a Life, a Symbol

(Norton 1996) and Margaret Washington’s Sojourner Truth’s

America (University of Illnois Press 2009) as well as Kate

Clifford Larsen’s Bound for The Promised Land: Harriet

Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (Ballantine Books 2004)

and Jean M. Humez’s Harriet Tubman: The Life and Life

Stories (The University of Wisconsin Press 2003).

One of the stories of black female participation in

the abolitionist movement I really got wrong in the first

edition of Black Macho was that of Harriet Jacobs, a

fugitive slave, abolitionist and author of the still

fascinating Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written

by Herself (1861). I pointed out the mistake that many

23

still make of thinking that the book was fictional because

Jacobs used the name Linda Brent in my new introduction of

1990, a correction first revealed by Jean Fagin Yellin in

her annotated edition of Incidents. Yet it has been a source

of great disappointment in ensuing years that this first and

only self-authored slave narrative by a black woman remains

unheralded and unrecognized. It was naive to think that

once the mistake was revealed, the previous incorrect texts

would simply vanish. They have not. Having had the

experience of teaching Jacob’s narrative repeatedly now, I

know that these old editions proliferate on the secondhand

market and are perhaps more widely available than the

corrections. Students willingly soak up the old, incorrect

story and find it very difficult to accept that there are

books that have the wrong information.

Perhaps that, itself, is the kernel of truth in the

myth of the superwoman, that black women of accomplishment,

achievement and daring, invariably have myths about them,

which conflict with the truth of black female experience.

And so we continue to marshal our resources. Extremely

24

useful in this regard has been more recent work on Harriet

Jacobs, including a biography of her written by Jean Fagin

Yellin (2004) as well as the Harriet Jacobs Papers, still

forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press.

In particular in the half of the book devoted to “the

myth of the superwoman,” I made comparisons and observations

about black women that seem to me now not particularly

useful or helpful. For instance, contrasting Harriet Tubman

and Sojourner Truth with Harriet Jacobs and Charlotte

Forten, because the first two were unlettered and the latter

were light skinned and bi-racial in Jacobs’ case, and

educated and born free as in Forten’s case, was due to my

lack of knowledge and understanding (and experience) of the

durability of gender constructions even across racial and

educational boundaries, especially in the nineteenth

century. The much greater knowledge we all share about the

lives of black women under slavery and during the 19th

century owing to the depth of feminist historical

scholarship has really helped me to grapple with the plight

25

of all these women much better. And I hope young readers of

my book will avail themselves of these sources as well.8

In regard to the Civil Rights Movement and the Black

Power struggle in general, the weight of scholarship

produced since I wrote Black Macho is truly awe-inspiring.

The time and space to devote to this subject here is limited

but I would like to point out three sources I still find

thrilling. The first of these is one I criticized in the

1990 edition of Black Macho through a lack of access to the

original. This would be the Eyes on the Prize: America’s

Civil Rights Movement (Blackside 1986) reissued by PBS on

dvds in 2006. Possession of these dvds, along with the

accompanying workbook, has made it possible for me to study

its contents in great detail. It guides me and I suspect

everyone in all subsequent reflections on the Civil Rights

Movement if for no other reason than that it would be

8 Recently did a panel on the prints of Kara Walker, whose willful misappropriation of the slave experience continues to hold a certain art world audience enthralled, or as a white student explained her adoration—“it’s so visceral” as though that this would be a benefit was beyond dispute. Walker works the raw materials of the myth. Like making a cake from a pre-packaged mix, its always the same cake.

26

impossible to reconstitute the footage and interviews

gathered herein by any other means. There have been many

wonderful documentaries made about the Civil Rights Movement

since then but invariably, it seems to me, one has to go

back to Eyes on The Prize as the gospel. It provides a

picture of the Civil Rights Movement mid-point between its

conclusion in the eruptions of Black Power in the late 60s

and a present in which we have a black president, which

surely results in part from the sacrifices made during that

past. 9 As time goes by, more and more of the people who

were able to make their opinions known on matters related

therein are no longer alive. Important leaders of the Civil

Rights Movement who are now elders are pictured in their

youth.

The second source of wisdom concerning the Civil

Rights Movement has been the work of Clayborne Carson 9 I think I am just going to make the assumption that havinga black president is a good thing, without explanation, evenas I know that many folk now wonder, and were so astonished that he should turn out to be consistent with, and so good at upholding the history and the performance of previous American presidents, despite his race. It’s been astonishingto watch the raw power of racism to tarnish even this otherwise impeccable record.

27

(Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project) in

general. My unfailing guide to the historical outline of the

Civil Rights Movement has been his Civil Rights Chronicle:

The African American Struggle for Freedom (Legacy 2003),

which further supplements the Eyes on the Prize outline. I

like especially his attention to the contributions of women

and to contributions made in the arts. I simply cannot

imagine what it would have been like to have written Black

Macho with access to such sources.

But perhaps my favorite recent source of insight into

the history of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power is

Manning Marable’s brilliant biography of Malcolm X: A Life

of Reinvention (Viking 2011). I say this not only because I

knew Marable personally and counted him both an advocate and

a friend. I doubt Marable’s book will be the final word on

Malcolm X’s legacy but what I appreciate and value is the

manner in which it guides me into a greater understanding of

the political, cultural and religious landscape evolving

around me and my African American predecessors from roughly

the turn-of-the-century at the time in which my grandparents

28

(whom I knew) and Malcolm’s parents were born through the

death of Malcolm X in 1965. I was 13 in 1965. As a resident

of Harlem, and as the daughter of parents who deeply admired

Malcolm X, I remember clearly when he died. I read and

remember all the signs that Marable interprets in this book

but I had no idea, whatsoever, of their meaning and lasting

significance until I read this book.

Most of all, I had no idea that there was a black male

whose path crossed my path, who existed in the same area in

Harlem where I lived who was of such abiding interest to the

FBI, CIA And the New York City police department that

together they produced thousands of pages of documentation

of his life, ultimately helping to lead to the injustice of

his untimely death. From this book, I have obtained great

insight into the possibility of a template for the

interweaving and interpretation of a historical grid of

intellectual and cultural complexity I had not imagined

before. Since my preoccupation these days is visual culture,

what I find most stimulating is the possibility of further

cultural interpretation of the rich world of African

29

American thought and religion he reveals.10 I understand

that some people may not be satisfied with what Marable did

with Malcolm X’s life but for me it represents a new

beginning for looking at events of this period, of

considering the impact of a single life beyond anything I

had ever imagined before. Reading this book has changed the

way I teach, the way I think, the way I conceive of the

value of individual contributions in terms of their larger

impact on humanity.

Until I read this book, I scarcely had any idea at all

of the historical importance of

The Black Muslims, or what had become of them, despite the

fact that for years I passed them every day on my corner,

much less how to consider them in the larger context of the

historical developments of the Civil Rights Movement. This 10 When the book first appeared, my neice Faith Wallace Gadsden (Ph.D. in Micro-Biology and President of the Archimedes Project) and I were constantly reading it on our kindles and constantly texting one another back and forth about it. It was one of the most exciting and invigorating reading experiences I have ever had. That my niece who is 30years younger than me was as fascinated and riveted with thecontent as I was made this a life transforming experience. It was like the thesis seminar of our intellectual work together over the years.

30

book made me aware for the first time, for instance, of the

brilliance of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, which I

hadn't understood at all before. Because of this book, I

will never think of the Civil Rights Movement again without

the participation and importance of Malcolm X’s life and

death.

In the portion of my book devoted to “the Myth of the

Superwoman,” I made two major errors, which I will now

address. The first of these was the failure to give

appropriate credit to the contribution that black women

writers had made to challenging the “myth of the

superwoman.” The second was the failure to recognize and

acknowledge the enormous contribution to my own development

and to the development of black feminist struggle and

achievement in general made by my own mother, Faith

Ringgold.

In regard, to black women writers, my particular

favorites remain Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade

Bambara, Sonya Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, and

Nikki Giovanni. Lately I have been teaching a course on the

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novels of Toni Morrison. It has been a fascinating and

enriching experience to probe in particular The Bluest Eye,

Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Jazz with my students,

especially since Morrison was the writer who took it upon

herself in the 1970s to challenge the concept of feminism in

her essay “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib”

(The New York Times Magazine 22 August 1971). It has been a

revelation to recognize that the greatness of a writer is

not a matter of her specific politics, or even the

particular times that produced her. Rather the focus should

be upon her gift for the mobilization of the word for

matters and issues that go much deeper than the passing

fancies of one time or another. Morrison’s gift, as is also

true of many great writers, is that she is able to peel back

the particulars of history to reveal a deeper marrow, taking

us directly to the heart of questions we must continue to

ask, even if we cannot answer them, for the sake of our own

humanity. 11 11 Wonderful students this semester, including a few who suggested as we read Jazz that perhaps the meaning of feminism resided in the willingness to take in the accomplishments of our trailblazers. It’s not so important

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*

As for leaving the work of my mother and the influence

it had on my life out of Black Macho and the Myth of the

Superwoman, there is much to be said about that, indeed an

entire memoir worth having to do with the difficulty of ever

recognizing the contributions of black women in the terms of

the dominant discourse, which continues to be dictated by

issues of concern to the white men who rule and exploit all

of us (including many of their own number). A substantial

portion of what continues to make the power of the Myth of

the Superwoman real is that we black women often internalize

the paranoia and unease that the mainstream forces upon us.

Whenever you attempt to make any correction at all, all

forces immediately move to block your possibilities. I find

this to be particularly true precisely where you need the

most support. That is to say, in the editorial process,

itself. First we black women writers generally suffer from

a lack of editorial attention. When we finally get it,

what they call themselves but rather our ability to follow and to draw from their lead.

33

however, it is usually misguided, in a direction that will

continue to underwrite our negation and invisibility. This

is why my second book was called Invisibility Blues, and why

my third book was called Dark Designs. As I have continued

to write over these past 35 years, I have chosen to focus

more and more exclusively on this process of negation, which

haunts the best intellectual efforts of black women writers

generally.

For examples of how this can work, although I haven’t

looked at it in years (it is still too painful), there is a

substantially edited original manuscript of Black Macho in

the state in which it first went to the publisher’s typist

available to researchers as part of my papers at the

Schomburg Library (NYPL)12 In order, to speed my book to

publication, I incorporated almost all of my editor’s

suggestions because it never occurred to me that she wasn’t

the final word on all things having to do with my book, even

12 http://nypl.bibliocommons.com/item/show/19282597052907_michele_wallace_papers

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though she was a rabid anti-feminist and probably hated

black women like my mother, not to mention having not the

slightest idea of her work or its value.

At the age of 25 to 27, I flattered myself that I

understood this ancient war between white women of her

generation between the feminists and the anti-feminists and

that I had a perfect right to use it to my advantage, since

regardless of whatever they said, they were really all the

same people anyway. They were white women, whatever they

might call themselves. They policed the entryway to

publishing houses and women’s magazines at that time, which

is where the opportunities for women writers remained.

Whichever political hat they wore, they were the ones with

the options. Trusting their animosity for one another to

catapult my career turned out to be a fatal mistake for me,

causing me to trust them in regard to the one thing with

which they were in agreement: that my mother’s work as an

artist was marginal and insignificant to my role as a

harbinger of the future of black feminism.

35

The basic proposition goes something like this: art

has nothing to do with Feminism or Politics. Politics and

feminism has nothing to do with art. Therefore black

feminism has nothing to do with art. Leave it on the cutting

room floor. One day perhaps the time will be right to

reconsider these propositions but that time is not (nor will

it ever be)now.

When it comes to a black feminist, or indeed any

feminist of any kind attempting to acknowledge in public

that she had predecessors and role models that were

important to her, that the example of her mother’s work was

an advantage rather than an encumbrance is as rare now as it

was 35 years ago. Adrienne Rich settled this score, I would

have hoped, years and years ago in her masterpiece Of Woman

Born(1986). But actually all Rich’s book did for the

naysayers was to make them dig their heels in even deeper.

Partly as a result of this and other feminist culture

wars, it is one of the great ironies of feminist discourse,

to the degree that it has been incorporated into the

dominant, that the institution of motherhood, itself, is

36

considered a disaster and a hindrance. As academic

feminists proceed about their merry way transforming

discussions of real women’s lives and concerns into

apolitical and clinical concepts of “gender” and

“sexuality,” they attempt to wipe out all signs of the

history of these matters in feminist debates.

At an institution such as the one where I teach, the

City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center,

academic feminism has had great success at this project. So

much so that when I retire, it is almost a certainty that

the courses I teach and the contribution I have made as a

black feminist will not only remain unrecognized but cease

to exist. I was gratified this fall (2014) to realize

during attending the annual meeting of the National Women’s

Studies Organization in San Juan that this backlash against

Women’s Studies has not poisoned its pursuit everywhere else

in the country as well. What I did notice, however, was

that even in this quarter, Women’s Studies is largely a

sociological discourse and that very little attention is

given to the contributions of women in the arts. I have

37

often wondered about this. Why is it always precisely in the

fields of area studies that the first topics to be cut from

the budget are things to do with the arts? Even though it

is precisely in the democratic realm of the arts and the

imagination, that women, gays and people of color, who are

otherwise ruthlessly discriminated against, can cut off the

shackles of discrimination and stigma to fly as free and as

high as anyone else. But it is difficult to dare to aspire

to be an artist if there is no exposure to the arts at an

early age. Such exposure is now only possible as a result

of an expensive private school education. And yet when you

get that education, it is more than likely that very little

attention will be devoted to the achievements of African

American and/or women artists.

Having devoted the better part of the last ten years

to writing about my mother’s art work and exploring the

difficulties and impediments to publication in the context

of the highly elitist context of the visual arts, I have

come to realize that I will not see significant change

during the course of my lifetime. The situation is very

38

very bad indeed. Like everything else in our world, the

arts are highly corporatized to such a degree that any kind

of evaluation or real critique is suspended in favor of

leaving all decisions to the market. Private art sales are

not even a matter of public record.

As a consequence, the public determination of value

rests upon the auction market, which is closely reported by

the media. Increasingly, whatever sells well at auction (and

there is no way of determining the degree to which such

spectacles have been manipulated behind the scenes) is

deemed to be the standard for museums and galleries, as well

as all subsequent discussion throughout what remains of the

apparatus of critique in the contemporary art world. The

situation couldn’t be more sinister and corrupt. It may, in

fact, be one of the most corrupt and corrupting aspects of

culture under capitalism. Needless to say, such artwork is

always scrupulously devoid of political content. Afterall,

the art market seems to say, the world is a ridiculous place

devoid of meaning or intention. As for all the poor people,

“Let them eat cake!”

39

My mother’s work has now become my life, in a

sense. The power of it I find to contain the essential

mystery of my existence. I imagine that the rest of my life

will be spent documenting, probing and struggling to

interpret the great gifts of her legacy as a visual artist.

Most of all, I wonder about what it means? How does our

visual legacy as African Americans and descendants of former

slaves fit with the rest of that tradition better understood

via literature, music, dance and performance? I have devoted

myself to this writing via the formation of The Faith

Ringgold Society

https://www.facebook.com/groups/FRinggoldSociety/ and the

construction of a blog devoted to the life and legacy of the

women in my family. 13 It is called Soul Pictures: Black

Feminist Generations, located online at

http://mjsoulpictures.blogspot.com. Other sources include as

well, http://ringgoldinthe1960s.blogspot.com.

13 I am just now working on revamping the Society’s website.40

Other writings on the topic of my mother’s work include

American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Painting of

the 1960s, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State

University of New York 2010; “We Came to America by Faith

Ringgold and the Linda Lee Alter Collection of Art by Women

at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,” In The Female

Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World. The Pennsylvania

Academy of The Fine Arts 2012, pp. 235-243;

"The Declaration of Freedom and Independence: The Invisible

Story," In Declaration of Independence: 50 Year

Retrospective of the Works of Faith Ringgold, edited by

Ferris Olin, Rutger's University, April-September 2009;

“The Any One Can Fly Foundation,” In The Marie Walsh Sharpe

Art Foundation: 2008 Supplement Update to A Visual Artist’s

Guide to Estate Planning.

http://sharpeartfodn.qwestoffice.net. "The Mona Lisa

Interview, with Faith Ringgold," http://www.

faithringgold.com.

ENDIT

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PArt I: { People continue to ask, what is a black

feminist? These days the term feminism seems entirely up for

grabs so the question grows more interesting and difficult

to answer. In response to it, I would now say that a black

feminist is anybody who deeply prefers the truth about black

women -- any black woman -- over the myth.

False myths are deeply embedded in our culture. These prove

irresistible for many given the demands of the marketplace

in combination with the attractiveness of simpler,

stereotype driven narratives. As our present gossip

dominated media illustrates daily, the complex truths of

human personality cannot hold the attention of a constantly

thrill-seeking public, particularly when they are also young

and impatient. Differences of gender, race, sexuality,

class, or a more idiosyncratic combination of these and

other personal phobias and dislikes, don’t begin to exhaust

the matters that require our urgent attention. The only

adequate antidote, it seems to me, is to instill in the

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young as early as possible a craving for knowledge and

understanding. }}

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