Chapter 8 doing the work of love
Whenever I lecture on love and speak about black male and female relationships audiences always assume that I am talking about romantic bonds. I have to remind them that romantic relationships are just one of the bonds black males and females share, that I am including the relationships between parent and child, brother and sister, and so on. These source relationships —that is, the intimate bonds we make in our family origin— tend to shape the attitudes, habits of being and modes of interacting that we bring to romantic partnerships. Everything we commonly hear about romantic partnerships between black women and men is negative. We hear that black men are dogs and black women bitches and ho’s. We hear that the divorce rates are so much higher than those of other groups. We hear about the lying and the cheating and the lowdown violence. We hear about the mistrust and the hatred. We hear that black women are getting more of society’s good than black men are, that they are moving ahead and leaving black men behind. We get the bad news. And it is repeated again and again. It’s the stuff movies are based on. It’s the stuff of novels and poetry. In popular culture there are a bevy of loudmouths who let us know what goes wrong when black men and women get together. We get books with titles posing the question “Do Black Women Hate Black Men?” or announcing that the “war between the genders” continues. We do not commonly hear about the black males and females who love each other. We do not hear how they manage
