Black Women, White Gay Men, Friendship, and Justice
Mural of Nina Simone in Richmond, VA
When I was 16 years old, I saw the film “Dreamgirls” in theaters four times. As I sat wide-eyed in my Texas hometown’s one movie theater, Effie White (Jennifer Hudson’s character) captured my closeted boy’s heart. At the film’s premier, so I read, her rendition of “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” got a standing ovation. I dreamed of being there. When no one was around to hear me, I would sing that song and imagine myself to be her: powerful, passionate, confident, defiant, beautiful Effie White.
“You are not a black woman, and you do not get to claim either blackness or womanhood.” So begins Sierra Mannie’s masterful piece “Dear White Gays: Stop Stealing Black Female Culture.” It’s an incisive indictment of white gay men who playfully appropriate various elements of black womanhood (i.e., the cultural construction of black womanhood—which, to borrow Toni Morrison’s phrase, has been constructed under the white gaze). Along with her compelling account of injuries that racism and sexism inflict on black women, Mannie argues that these appropriations of black womanhood are “damaging and perpetuating of yet another set of aggressions against us. … claiming our identity for what’s sweet without ever having to taste its sour. … breathing fire behind ugly stereotypes that reduce black females to loud caricatures.”
In addition to teaching me a valuable lesson, Mannie’s piece prompts me to ask: Why do so many white gay men engage in such behavior in the first place? Answering this question, it seems, is an important step towards solving the problem. At least part of the answer, certainly, is that white gay men are doing what white people at large have done for generations: appropriating material from black culture for their own use and pleasure (e.g., in the music industry). But why have they—we—honed in on black womanhood specifically? If we dig underneath the ill-considered and destructive comedy, might we discover a seed of genuine identification, of sincere longing?
As a child and young adult, I was distinctly drawn to black women. Growing up in a black church, I felt an affinity for Sister Annabelle Wilson, Sister Gloria Perryman, and other women in our congregation. As a seminary student, I formed unique bonds with several of my peers and mentors who are black women. While those bonds can’t be reduced to our respective identities of race, gender, and sexual orientation, I do believe that I was drawn to these and other black women in part because of my identity and experience as a gay man. So, in dialogue with a few of those peers and mentors (as well as scholarship on race and sexuality), I came to the following conclusion: the practices of appropriation that Mannie rightly decries are manifesting a complex, largely subliminal attraction that many white gay men feel towards the cultural construction of black womanhood. The better that white gay men understand this attraction, I think, the more likely it is that they will form healthy friendships and just alliances with black women.
To begin unpacking this claim, let’s talk about sass.
In an essay on theology and suffering, Womanist scholar M. Shawn Copeland defines sass as “impudent or disrespectful back talk” that serves “to guard, regain, and secure self-esteem; to obtain and hold psychological distance; to speak truth; … and, sometimes, to protect against sexual assault.” From their struggles in enslavement to their struggles today, Copeland testifies, black women have utilized sassy language and behavior to fend off the poison of oppression and even to dish out doses of vengeance. So, notwithstanding the facile and pernicious portrayals of “sassy black women” under the white gaze, black women’s sass has historically served as a vital strategy for resisting injustice.
In fact, gay men (and queer people in general) have a similar history with sass. Plenty of queer theorists have illustrated this point in scholarship, but I’m especially fond of a less formal illustration: in a YouTube video for Dan Savage’s It Gets Better project, Stephen Colbert describes an exchange that he observed as a 13-year-old:
[“Queer”] was the word that got thrown around as a weapon when I was a kid. It was the most hurtful thing that the bullies could call you. But one day, I had this revelation, because a friend of mine named Pat, who was also picked on by the bullies, was called “queer” by a big jock. Instead of flinching and running away, Pat looked him in the eye and said, “Yeah, I am a queer. Kiss me.” And the bully said, “What… What are you talking about?” [Pat said,] “You called me a ‘queer,’ and I am a ‘queer,’ kiss me, I’ll prove it.” And the bully just turned around and walked away quietly. And I was stunned. I couldn’t believe the magic that Pat had just worked.
Like black women, queer people (whatever their race or gender) come from a line of underground magicians, and sass is one of our best tricks. Instead of using this trick to oppose our own and others’ oppression, however, many of us white gay men use it to get a laugh at the expense of our less privileged kindred. But whether we recognize it or not, whenever white gay men tap into the multivalent power of sass, we are following in the footsteps of the countless black women who have creatively, courageously wielded that power in their resistance to racism and sexism over the centuries. What’s more, whether we recognize it or not, white gay men have been instructed and strengthened in their own resistance to homo-antagonism (Womanist scholar Emilie Townes’ term) by the continuing legacies of these women.
So, instead of exploiting that legacy for comedic effect, I strive to remember and honor the black women from whom it comes. I look up to and learn from those who built the legacy in years past, and I commit myself to supporting those who are at my side now, still building it. I watch them work their magic, and I rise to my feet in applause. Then I work my own.
If I do it right, and if she and I stick around each other, who knows what our future will hold?