Black family patriarchy was a lived reality that scholarship on black male emasculation denied

Evidence

More than twenty years have passed since I wrote my first feminist book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Like many precocious girls growing up in a male-dominated house hold, I understood the significance of gender inequality at an early age. Our daily life was full of patriarchal dram a—the use of coercion, violent punishment, verbal harassment, to maintain male domination. As small children we understood that our father was more important than our mother because he was a man. … It was only when I entered college that I learned that black males had supposedly been “emasculated,” that the trauma of slavery was primarily that it had stripped black men of their right to male privilege and power, that it had prevented them from fully actualizing “masculinity.” Narratives of castrated black men, humble Stepin Fetchits who followed white men as though they were little pets, was to my mind the stuff of white fantasy, of racist imagination. In the real world of my growing up I had seen black males in positions of patriarchal authority, exercising forms of male power, supporting institutionalized sexism. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 219

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Black Power masculinity internalized the racist myth of the emasculated Black man — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 1015; Black men asserted patriarchy to compensate for losing status to white men — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 269; Black men pursued patriarchal control to compensate for the weak Black male stereotype — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 522 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Black Power masculinity internalized the racist myth of the emasculated Black man #corroborates (0.85) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1015
• Black men pursued patriarchal control to compensate for the weak Black male stereotype #corroborates (0.85) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 522
• Black men asserted patriarchy to compensate for losing status to white men #complicates (0.80) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 269