Revisiting Michele Wallace’s Essential Black Feminist Text ‘Black Macho’“In 1979 M

Revisiting Michele Wallace’s Essential Black Feminist Text ‘Black Macho’“In 1979 Michele Wallace’s face was splashed across the cover of Gloria Steinem’s historic feminist publication Ms. magazine. A bolded headline, layered over 27-year-old Wallace’s afro, hailed the black feminist critic’s first book, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman , as “the book that will shape the 1980s.”Upon the book’s publication in 1978, it caused a firestorm; many prominent black male scholars refused to believe “that the significance of black women as a distinct category is routinely erased by the way in which the Women’s Movement and the Black Movement choose to set their goals and recollect their histories.” A year after the publication of Black Macho , one of the oldest African American academic journals, The Black Scholar , published its “Black Sexism Debate” issue. In it, critic Robert Staples penned “ a response to angry black feminists ” that denied sexism’s existence for black women. I opened up my phone interview with Wallace using the same question that many of Wallace’s initial critics, who dismissed her work as “divisive,” had in the 70s and 80s. Substituting “the civil rights movement” for “Black Lives Matter,” with a tired sigh: Does talking about the black patriarchy, or misogynoir, distract from the “bigger” issue of fighting white supremacy?The answer is still of course not.  Even before Black Macho was published there was controversy. As a black woman publishing a simultaneously personal and academic text at the tail end of feminism’s second wave, Wallace was engaged in a struggle against implicit sexism and racism. Her publishers at Dial Press (who also published James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time) were even hesitant to call the book feminist at all.“There was a pervasive situation that feminism was not viable,” Wallace remembers of the months leading up to Black Macho’s publication. “When it came time to promote the book, my publishers Dial Press were adamant—despite the content of the book being feminist—that the book, that I, should not be described as feminist because it would doom the book financially.”What could be worse than a feminist? A black feminist, it turns out. “My publishers insisted that feminism is dead, there’s no black readers, and the ideal reader is a little old lady from Pasadena. It’s hard to imagine now how completely unwilling people were to concede that there was a black reading public or that there could be one. [They thought] anyone who would buy the book would be totally turned off if I were described as a black feminist. I had to insist on that.”Read the full piece here -- source link

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