The Black Man Hater’s Club
After taking a sudden interest in African history, I started to embark on a journey of uncovering issues of social injustice — which led me to join a bunch of pro-Black and feminist groups on Facebook.
There were two feminist groups in particular that I can’t forget. When I read the description of the first group — let’s just call it Anti-Black Man Group #1 — I thought it was going to be the typical banter about how some Black men cheat and don’t pay child support. But this group was different. I started looking at the posts in the group.
“Black men are the cancer of society!”
I thought, “Hmmm.”
So I commented:
“Is this what this group is about? Hating Black men?”
Someone responded:
“We have another one.”
I left that group, but I stayed in another that had some of the same members. The women in this group posted things about Black men’s preference for mixed and White women, how they are holding Black women back and how abusive they are to Black women. The women also emphasized their own preference for dating White men and ridiculed a post they had found emphasizing Black love. I would often see them post pictures of Black women smiling blissfully while being embraced by seemingly kind-hearted White men.
They would comment under these type of photos things like:
“Black women are done with Black men.”
My experiences made me bitter — the world of Black men made me bitter.
I went along with the group because although I didn’t hate Black men, I did agree with them to an extent. I had been conditioned as a little girl to think that Black men had nothing to offer but pain. That I had to prepare myself for getting cheated on, spending nights questioning my husband about the perfume scent on his clothes, or begging him to support the children that he and I had created. I feared that I’d slowly start to resent the man he had turned into after months of charm and good conversation, and when I’d arrived at my most broken state, after years of being mistreated, he’d leave me. In fact, I spent my whole childhood as a girl hearing my mother talk about the affairs my father had.
“Black men treat their women any kind of way.”
or
“Those dark skinned men are evil.”
I use to think she sounded crazy attaching a personality to a skin tone — only doing it because of my father’s dark complexion.
I was determined to escape immature, dead-beat dads and wannabe rappers by dating Black men who weren’t American. So I dated an African and after silent treatment, gas lighting, a million lies and passive aggressive emotional abuse, I realized it didn’t matter where a Black man was from because misogyny was ingrained in Black men of the diaspora. Like my ex, their mothers boosted their egos and gave them the idea that as long as they were educated, personality didn’t matter.
I still remember my mother telling me:
“Girl, don’t you date no African. Those men are crazy.”
Now, I regret not having listened to her. Even after my ex did so much to me, he had the nerve to tell me:
“White women act better.”
Anyway, I could relate to this group of women.
We shared the bond of being abused, sexualized and compared to other races, all by the hands of our own men. And if we became fed up with misogyny or found love with a White man who liked our hair and loved the color of our skin, we would be called:
“A sell-out.”
“Wench.”
or
“A White man’s whore.”
The group and I shared some of that same bitterness towards Black men, because we had seen so few.
I was fed up listening to conscious men tell me that cheating was normal, so polygamy was necessary — that the young men around me only dated Black women for a place to stay. I was fed up listening to my grandfather, who has Alzheimer’s, reminisce about his days of beating his wife, my deceased grandmother. Listening to him brag about his marriage, when he had so many different women and how he would run home from work on a Friday night, just to jump into the shower, put on a nice shirt and go out and boogie. It angered me to hear my grandfather use misogynistic words like:
“You need to crack that whip on these women.”
It angered me to hear my grandfather recount his childhood during which his own father used to beat his mother. That instead of breaking the cycle of abuse, he chose to continue it and produce a daughter who was full of rage, anger and sadness. A woman who, as a child, worried that her mother would be lying dead on the floor when she came home from school, who grew up to be a Black beauty with a sharp tongue, who would fight at the drop of hat.
The women in the group were not that different from my own mother.
We shared stories about our day and laughed at foolish comments. And just like my mother, these women were not only bitter, but entertaining. The typical female conversation in a salon seemed like child’s play. There was a comical flare to the way they called Black women a mammy for making excuses for the intentional cruel acts of Black men — a word I have never heard before in that context. And the longer I stayed in the group, the more I started to believe that their extreme comments had veracity.
It wasn’t until I shared a very lewd post from one of my pro-Black groups that things came to a head.
The post was originally shared by a Black man who expressed his desire to choke a woman while having sex. They were expectedly outraged, but then they started asking me to show his Facebook profile.
“Expose him!”
After many more requests for his profile, I pressed the “leave” button. I had had enough of hate and anger. It was draining. They were draining. But I would never deny these women their right to feel the way they do.
Write a Response below. (Here’s how.)
