While I was reading Dee Barnes article in Gawker about F. Gary Gray’s just-released film about N.W.A, “Straight Outta Compton”. “What’s Missing From Straight Outta Compton: Me and the Other Women Dr. Dre Beat Up,” Dee Barnes’s painful admission. The similarities with Michele’s Wallace book “The Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman” were staggering. Talk about appropriating black woman for their own needs.
They both describe the drive for power by black men as sexual outlaws and black women as castrating bitches. N.W.A. and the Panters ascend to power by blaming the hegemony of white supremacy. Something that the black woman are intimately familiar with in her “work” experience since her “arrival” in America. The black woman also had to contend with a couple more hegemonies. White ladies not to be confused with “white woman”. Feminism ( not womanism that had to be invented to deal with Feminism), and, of course, black men.
Black men nonetheless are complicit with their oppressors by engaging and participating in the black stereotype of black men as a sexual outlaw, a formula that works with Pavlovian efficiency. Threaten a black man’s manhood, if you’re dumb. And most of us will go right into decades, nay centuries, of programming, we react. In the case of N.W.A., we sing along because it empowered us and made us feel like a real man. Fuck the police! With the Panthers, they left a whole bunch of light skin and white girls pregnant and dark skin women in jail pining for revolutionary brothers that never existed. Some black women even thought the revolution was about them.
But back in the 80’s everyone loved N.W.A. I love them. That Dr. Dre is a master of “dope” beats. It’s was easy to believe that I’m in this situation as the result of the “man” or the police. That I am a victim of systematic racism, So they were my champions. Right after: RUN DMC; Michael Jackson; LL Cool J; Miles Davis; beastie boys; Grace Jones; Fela Kuti; The Cure; Bronski Beat; PIL; Fun Boy 3; Fishbone; Tears For Fear; Public Enemy; KRS1; Steel Pulse; Black Uhuru and Bob Marley. Yeah, they were right up there. Being from the East coast that Jerry curl was a little bit too drippy, even if all the girls loved it.
However, N.W.A. strengthen the manhood stereotype. Defined by rich white old men who control the media. Somehow black folks had to be as bad as The Terminator and Tony Montana.
To keep us distracted and subservient working jobs they provide. The media has some of us preoccupied with marching and empowering the old plantation owners to recognize that #blacklivesmatters. Like if Hillary or Donald gives a f$$$k.
Michel Wallace and Sista Dee Barnes also have in common is that they spoke up, and people are listening. And as Bell Hooks asserts. The Black woman is both invisible and ubiquitous” never seen in her how right but forever appropriated by others for their own ends”. We men are not going to change our minds no time soon about manhood. But there is another point of view out there for women who are tired of being appropriated: Michele Wallace and Dee Barnes.
This video is about Appropriating Black Woman
