Dating a white girl that says nigga meme

The White Woman:

The Black Woman's Nemesis

Françoise Burgess Université Paris VIII - St. Denis

Living in a country completely obsessed by race and gender, African- American women have experienced a particularly painful marginaliza- tion: they suffer from the double burden of being black and female in a nation that has always given priority to the experience of whites and males. From the days of slavery to the Moynihan Report and to today's worries about "the disappearing black male", the black woman has remained on the periphery watching many episodes of the American racial drama acted out among the white man, the white woman and the black man while her participation was largely ignored and arrogantly dismissed. Lip service is paid to the of such heroic black women as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells but their impact on the fate of black women has been minimal: Rosa Parks, the mother of the Civil Rights Movement, was recently robbed and severely beaten in her apartment by a young black man.

In her recent book, Vivian Gordon defines racism as "the power to control and manipulate the major societal forces, and the ability to define for the 'other' the requirements for participation"1. As controversial as this defi-

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nition is for some, it is nevertheless commonly accepted among many black Americans today for whom both racism and sexism are a matter of power and control, neither of which is within their grasp. Toni Morrison's analysis confirms this theory: "The black woman has nothing to fall back on: not male- ness, not whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality, she may very well have invented herself."2 She is truly, in Zora Neale Hurston's word, "the mule of the world."

The first and heaviest burden of these mules has been, perhaps, the white woman whose ideological attributes, defined by the plantation ideol- ogy-her fragility, purity, chastity and domesticity-and standards of beauty-the blond silky hair, the blue eyes-posited the existence of a polar opposite, a black woman viewed as ugly, loose, immoral and oversexed. Thus, from the very beginning, the seeds of resentment between black and white women were sown; and the mythical image of the white woman as a goddess worthy of worship made black men find white women "strangely alluring and seductive", to quote Paula Giddings.3

In stark contrast to the novels of black men who are literally obsessed by "the Man" (the white man, in black English) as the principal obstacle to their manhood, the black woman has a different ax to grind. She has one Nemesis: the white woman. For Alice Walker, white women are "frivolous, helpless creatures, lazy and without imagination", a perfect updating of the stereotypical plantation mistress. "White women (are) useless except as baby machines which would continue to produce little white people who would grow up to oppress (black women)... They [do] not even smell like glue or boiled corn; they smell of nothing since they [do] not sweat. They [are] clear, dead water." This is an interesting combination of images, associating sex- lessness and death, again an image inherited from slavery. Thus a white woman is a "route to death, pure and simple" or "some kind of a large, doll,"4 not a real human being.

The doll image is forcefully developed by Toni Morrison, in the Bluest Eye. Claudia wonders why her parents keep giving her as a "loving gift. . . a big blue-eyed Baby Doll." She is physically revolted and secretly frightened of "those round moronic eyes, the pancake face and orangeworms hair." She had only one desire: to dismember the doll, "To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped [her]." And she thus symbolically proceeds to kill it.5 This beauty, the love that the world gives those blue eyes, is what the heroine, Pecola, yearns for; and this wish to be what she cannot be drives her to insanity in much the same way as it has destroyed her mother's sense of self, damaged irrevocably when the movies she used to watch rapturously tell her in no uncertain terms that the physical beauty they worship is not her own: "(White physical beauty) probably the most destructive idea in the history of human thoughts. . . originated in envy, thrived in insecurity

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and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it and collected self-contempt by the heap."6

As a result the typical attributes of white women's beauty are scorned. For Sherley Anne Williams, blue eyes are "steel cold" or "covered by some film, milky and bland. There (is) only emptiness in them" and red lips are "like a bloody gash... like an open wound across the paleness of (the white woman's) face." For Louise Meriwether, a white woman on a beach looks like a "gaunt cadaver in a loose fitting bathing suit" and her white skin is "more peeling red than white."7 This hostility attacks an ideal of beauty which has given the black woman the "pain of being unlovely" according to Gwendolyn Brooks. No wonder black women have, under such circumstances, manifested an extreme sensitivity to shades of skin color and initiated endless discussions about good- i.e. silky-looking-and bad -i.e. kinky-hair. Dorothy West makes it graphically clear in her latest novel, The Wedding: Gram, the archetype of the bigoted Southern white woman, cannot bear to touch her lovely dark grandchild since "skin color is a direct barometer of virtue."8

Black women are also understandably jealous of the white woman's social position. They have retaliated by creating the stereotype of the "privileged white feminists" who always seem to live lives of ease, not because of their own worth and socio-economic position but because they owe it to their men, an image partially derived from the black mothers' as maids in white homes. Consequently, black women novelists have not yet accepted to discuss independent white women who make it on their own. In many essays, if not in novels, black women have accused white women of being duplicitous: while they proclaim sisterhood in theory, they are unable to overcome their racial prejudices in practice.

African- American women writers resent and envy the power and ease of white women's lives. In an early poem, "What Would I Do White?", June Jordan depicts white women as rich, haughty, lazy and acquisitive, and muses about what she would do as a white woman: "I would do nothing. That would be enough."9 In much the same way Lorraine Bethel's trenchant poem "What 'Chou Mean 'We' White Girl?" expresses a bitter resentment:

/ bought a sweater at a yard sale from a white skinned... woman. When wearing it, I am struck by the smell-it reeks of soft, privileged life without the sweat, stress, or struggle. When wearing it, I say to myself: this sweater smells of comfort, a way of being in the world I have never known in my life, and never will.10

Toni Morrison offers a different interpretation:

Black women have always considered themselves superior to white women-they have been able to envy white women, [...] fear them,[...] even love them. [...] but black women have found it impossible to respect white women. I mean they never had what black men have had for white men: a feeling of awe at their accomplishments."

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In fact, black women novelists often see through white women's power- lessness and humorously analyze their situation:

White women are not free [...] but most of them think they are and that is because the white man pats them wherever he feels like patting them and throws all that boogie-joogie on them and they eat it up! It's killing them, but they eat it up and beg their doctor for a prescription so they can get more [...] He pats them on the head and lets them sleep in the house, but he ain ' gon ' treat neither one like he was dealing with a person. n

As early as 1953, Anne Petry had confirmed this analysis in The Narrows, in which she portrays an oddly innocent, beautiful (blond, blue- eyed, long-legged) romantic young white woman whose reciprocated love for a Black man brings death upon him because she is in fact the wealthy, careless and frustrated wife of a wealthy businessman. Like Fitzgerald's Daisy, she retreats upon her pedestal when disaster strikes.13 Mary Helen Washington, in her introduction to Black Eyed Susans, explains why this pedestal discourse of power abounds in the contemporary literature of African- American women novelists:

This discourse implies, of course, the worthlessness of white women's lives [...] The [white woman], without exception, is always condescending [...] Black women are not reacting to an individual white woman. They are reacting to centuries of abuse, alienation and hostility, in short to what White Woman has meant to Black Woman. They are reacting to the privileged status of white women in this country. They are reacting to all the years that black women have done slave work in the homes of white women while neglecting their own; to all those white women who called them by their first names, no matter how old they were while they continued to address their employers as Mrs. So and So [...] to all those years when it was possible for a white woman to pretend rape and have a black man executed and no one to whom a black woman could cry rape [...] The Black Woman was not permitted the dubious distinction of being feminine. '4

Black women writers have no empathy for the white feminists' claim of oppression since, to quote Vivian Gordon, "Seldom attention is given to the extent to which white women have benefited from the oppression of black women". She goes on to argue that "white women are saying to the white male power structure: Move over. We want to be part of the power structure. Black women are saying: 'The structure is wrong'."15

We find a particularly good example of this quarrel in the way these novelists describe the diverging attitude toward work held by women of both races. In A Short Walk, Alice Childress has her heroine, Cora, angry at her husband, Cecil, whose white mistresses fight for the "right to work" tell him that she has had this right all her life. If this is liberation, then the black woman would be the most liberated creature on earth. The typical working black woman is the maid, subservient, denigrated, but a true observer and a

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silent rebel: she is the true "Outsider Within" whose insights give a devastating image of white women's social hypocrisy.

The kitchen is the site of black women's functional inferiority, "the black town, the nigger room of the white house" in Trudier Harris's sarcastic comments.16 It has become a metaphor of space, the area where the two female actors of the racial and sexual drama of the United States confront each other. The white woman's pretense of sorority and/or good will is laid bare as she is revealed as a stingy, pretentious, lazy and often deluded woman. Alice Childress's heroine, the maid Mildred, contrary to the claims of her white woman- boss, never considered herself and never was Like One of the Family. Witness her first comments to Mrs. C, her new boss whom she describes as "the woman I took over from Naomi", an indication that she views herself as being in charge of a baby she is responsible for. Mrs. C. has told her friends who are over for lunch that "we just love (Mildred). She is like one of the family and she just adores our little Carol". To which Mildred responds: "In the first place, you do not love me; you may be fond of me, but that is all [. . .] In the second place, I am not just like one of the family at all! The family eats in the dining room and I eat in the kitchen." Thus when she later invades the forbidden space of the living room, she sends a strong political message as she disturbs spatial and social arrangements.17 Even more openly rebellious, Sofia, in The Color Purple, bluntly answers "Hell, No" when Miss Millie, a white woman, asks her if she would like to be her maid. For this sin, she will be sent to jail, will eventually be forced to work for her, but will gleefully use every possible opportunity to reveal Miss Millie's helplessness, including-tellingly and symbolically-the fact that the white woman does not know how to drive since she "dont know how to do nothing but to go forward".18

Morrison chooses another track and her Pauline Breedlove is a portrayal of a woman, lucid and critical of her white boss at first, but driven into sycophantic love of the white home where she works because it is the only place where she gets a modicum of recognition and can satisfy her compulsive need for order and beauty. The first family she works for is nasty and arrogant:

Soon as I worked up a good feeling on her account, she'd do something ignorant and start to telling me how to clean and do. If I left her on her own, she 'd drown in dirt. I didn 't have to pick up after Chicken and Pie the way I had to pick up after them. None of them knew as much as to wipe their be hinds. I know, 'cause I did the washing. And couldn 't pee proper to save their lives. Her husband ain 't hit the bowl yet. Nasty white folks is about the nastiest things they is.

But once her emotional life and her household is in tatters, we see her as a "queen" in the Fisher household whose "members are affectionate, appreciative and generous."

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Here, she could arrange things, clean things, line things up in neat rows [...] Here she found beauty, order, cleanliness and praise [...] She reigned over cupboards stacked high with food [...] she was queen of canned vegetable" [...] Power, praise, and luxury were hers in this household. They even gave her what she had never had-a nickname— Polly. "

This description is a telling sign of how inverted Pauline's world has become and how mentally sick she is: she lives a day-dream, thinking this white world of luxury is hers and ultimately sides with the white, blond, blue-eyed girl (who loves her, no doubt) against her own daughter. The alienating domestic work at her employer's home has become a surrogate haven; her own sense of family structure is completely shattered.

Little wonder that, under such circumstances, we find very few examples of interracial friendships in the fiction of African-American women. Interestingly enough three novels and a short story dealing with that theme (Meridian, Beloved and Dessa Rose) take place at two pivotal moments of race relations: slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. Amazingly, Beloved and Dessa Rose, while dealing with the horror of slavery, offer the most likable white women of this generally sorrowful gallery. Dessa, the slave, has been hiding at the dilapidated plantation of Miz Rufel, an unconventional white woman who nurses her and her baby back to health, breast-feeds Dessa's baby (an astonishing role reversal symbolically of Rufel's defiance of the plantation world's conventions, as is her mating with the black slave Nathan) and offers her friendship to the leery and hostile Dessa. In the end, Miz Rufel literally saves Dessa's life and the novel ends on the former slave and the former mistress exchanging their names: "My name is Ruth, I ain't your mistress-Well, if it come to that, my name is Dessa." A symbolic gesture, but a very significant one. Equally kind, generous and warm-hearted is the character of Amy Denver in Beloved : she saves Sethe's baby life and helps her to survive by wrapping her up in her undergarments, tries to heal Sethe's wounded back and feet, transforms metaphorically the devastating signs of slavery on Sethe's back into a symbol of life (a "chocke- cherry tree") and disappears silently when she is no longer needed. A friend? No. A warm human being? Yes.

Alice Walker offers a more complicated picture of this type of Lynn's and Meridian's relationship, born in the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement, is complex, since Lynn has initially stolen Meridian's black husband, or, rather, Truman has abandoned his black wife for the prized white pussy. Later, abandoned by him, she is raped by a black friend she trusted and who hates her simply because she is white and because the police has maimed him. Her white guilt forces her to remain silent. Close to despair and immensely pitiful, Lynn cannot reach the stage of true friendship with Meridian who refuses to feel compassion for her out of race

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solidarity, the reader is left to assume. But at least, the two women agree on one thing: you cannot trust men. If you do, you run the risk of being destroyed. Walker returns to this theme in her short story "Advancing Luna and Ida B. Wells": Luna, a white Civil Rights worker, remains silent while, once again, a black man rapes her, for fear her scream would cause him to be lynched. The memory of Ida B. Wells' passionate anti-lynching crusade forces her black woman friend, the narrator of the story, not to fully empathize with her predicament. But her pain and discomfort, and thus her sympathy for Luna, are obvious to the reader.

These four unusual white women have one thing in common: they are society's outcasts. Rufel has been betrayed by her husband; Amy Denver is a "poor white trash"; Lynn has been ostracized by her parents and the white world because of her interracial marriage; and Luna is a militant of the Civil Rights struggle. They are courageous examples of the other side of the coin of white women's lives.

The white woman also plays a part in the problematic and often conflic- tual relationship between black men and women. Gloria Wade Gayles has sarcastically commented: "As the black buck of phallic superiority and the white woman of beauty, femininity and chastity played out their historic attraction to each other, black women were reminded that the nation and black men believed that being feminine meant being white."20 The black woman cannot understand what her man finds in a white woman that she does not have. Orde Coombs has explained it in blunt terms that support Gordon's vision of American racism: "To stroke blond hair is to stroke power."21 Obviously, the black woman doesn't see it that way. In Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan "exhales" her rage:

If a man of mine ever left me for a white girl, I'd blow him to kingdom come. Simple as that [...] I hate the fact that they think white girls epitomize beauty and [...] What kills me more than anything is they usually pick the homeliest ones they can find and the ones who don't have shit going for them.12

The white woman is a "person whose value lies in the preciousness of her pussy", thus if she messes up with her man, she is a "slut".23 This is a powerful expression of the black woman's rage at the white woman's social privileges and the iconography of purity associated with her. Fran Sanders, in her open letter to her "Dear Black Man," adds:

Are all these choices [to be lovely, to be feminine and delicate and to be taken care of] to be reserved for white women? [...] What is so different about the Black woman where the Black man is concerned that what may be taken for a very trait of habit or manner in the white woman is derided in the Black, as if she were trying to emulate her white counterpart? [...] I realize that there has always been among Black men in this country a certain amount of hostility in his approach to his woman. One can readily appreciate that, since at every turn in the outside

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world he was met by obstacles of every description [...] So let us try again [...] We Black women don 't want to turn around in a few years to find that you do indeed regard us as sisters and have, accordingly, gone to find your pleasure of the flesh elsewhere.24

Who cannot understand Abbey Lincoln's rage when she wonders "Who Will Revere the Black Woman?":

Our women are encouraged by our men to strive to look and act as much like the white female image as possible, and only those who approach that "goal" in appearance and social behavior are acceptable [...] We are the women whose bars and recreation halls are invaded by flagrantly disrespectful, bigoted, amoral, emotionally unstable, outcast, maladjusted, nymphomaniacal, white women. . . in desperate and untiring search of the "frothing-at-the- mouth-for-a-white-woman, strongbacked, sixty-minute hot black. " Our men.25

This was written in 1970. The same anger is still boiling today and sometimes takes vicious forms. In a recent editorial of the New York Times, Alice Walker attacked some of the leaders of the Black Panther Party, them of having been "punks" and victims of "an homoeroticism so as to be comic." To which Elaine Brown, one of the leaders of the Black Panthers, properly replied, putting racism and sexism once again in a context:

What happened to the business of racism in Alice's America? How shall black people liberate our whole selves from the monstruous ravages of poverty, indignity, self-hatred? Must the black man be a monolith?: sixties manhood versus Ms. Magazine demonhood? Can we not unite in revolutionary love?26

The battle of the sexes is as old as the world, yet it exacts a heavy toll in an America that pays a very costly price for continuing to ignore the sexual and gendered consequences of its history of oppression of non-white racial groups. There is little chance that black women and white women can come together until members in both groups can recognize the functions of racism and sexism as controlling structures in a system that inequality between the sexes and the races. The contribution of the African-American women authors to an ongoing quest and struggle for a truly just order is too important to be ignored.

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Notes

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Notes