Black men pursued patriarchal control to compensate for the weak Black male stereotype

Evidence

While splitting on colonization in the 1850s, Black male activists seemingly united in their distaste of Uncle Tom for disseminating the stereotype of the weak Black male. For some time, racist Black patriarchs had been measuring their masculinity off of the perceived controlling masculinity of White men, and they found Black masculinity to be lacking. They demanded control of Black women, families, and communities to redeem their masculinity from the “weak Black male” stereotype. As antislavery Black patriarchs petitioned in 1773, in Massachusetts, “How can the wife submit themselves to [their] husbands in all things” if Blacks remained enslaved? And then, at the male-dominated National Convention of Colored Citizens in Syracuse in 1864, they complained, “We have been denied ownership of our bodies, our wives, home, children and the products of our own labor.” These Black men resolved to “vindicate our manhood,” as if it needed any vindication. It could not have been a coincidence that while women like Sojourner Truth were asserting their right to gender equity in the 1850s and early 1860s, Black (and White) men were asserting their right to rule women. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 522

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The 1773 petition framing wives’ submission to husbands as an argument against slavery is a striking irony that could anchor a piece of historical fiction or an essay on the entanglement of freedom and patriarchy.
• ADDENDUM: Directly extends the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ theme: gendered control of bodies surfacing within freedom movements themselves.
• XREF: Shows racist ideas operating inside the antiracist movement — men of the oppressed group buying into colonial gender hierarchy, echoing how assimilationist logic infects even resistance. — connects to: Black family patriarchy was a lived reality that scholarship on black male emasculation denied — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 219; The claim of black male emasculation contradicts lived black patriarchy under segregation — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 219; Black intellectuals reworked feminized racial stereotypes into a defiant positive self-image — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 669 (+1 more)