My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 64

Sensible reviews would have paid
tribute to black women on the basis of
their excellence instead of asserting
that they were good because black men
were bad. But this became the line.
That in order for some to advance,
black male writers had to be denied.
The second phase of the hit occurred
when the then feminist editor of the
Times Book Review, Rebecca Penny
Sinkler, gave Henry Louis Gates, Jr. the
go-ahead to respond to Mel Watkins’s
farewell article upon leaving his post as
book reviewer.5 It was a prophetic note
of caution. He predicted that publishers
would exploit a trend in fiction at the
time, which had black men shown in a
“one dimensional” manner. It was not
“hysterical,” but a calm recitation of the
facts. Writing in the same newspaper,
the great novelist Diane Johnson
predicted that this kind of fiction
would appeal to “largely white audiences.”
She was talking about fiction, but she
may as well have been speaking of film
and theater.

Gates’s being under pressure from black
feminists, many of whom wanted in
on the Women’s Studies bankroll, gives
the article the tone of having been
written by someone under duress —
like someone being held hostage and
coerced into signing a confession.
The black woman’s literary movement,
it seems safe to say, already has
taken its place as a distinct period
in Afro-American history, and could
very well prove to be one of the most
productive and sustained. There are
three peculiarities about this literary
movement that make it anomalous in
black literary history. First, it has
unfortunately generated hysterical
attacks by other blacks against its
existence and direction in a manner
rare in the tradition. Second, despite
the very public and bitter rows about
the political implications of black
women writing about black male
sexism and lesbianism, this movement
has not promoted itself as bombastically
or self-consciously as, say, did the
Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s or
the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s.
Third, black female authors claim other
black women as their literary ancestors
(such as Zora Neale Hurston and
Ann Petry) whereas most older black
male writers denied any black influence
at all — or worse, eagerly claimed
a white paternity. No, the writers in
this movement have been intent upon
bonding with other women. And
the patricide that characterized Mr.
Baldwin’s and Mr. Ellison’s declarations
of independence from Richard Wright
has no counterpart in matricide.

BLACK RENAISSANCE NOIRE

Ms. Steinem’s intention became clear
in 2008 when she wrote an ugly and
sour piece about the candidacy of
Barack Obama in which, using the late
Mrs. Chisholm’s remark, she said that
gender was “the most restrictive factor
in American life.”4 It became clear
then that she’d used Alice Walker to
evict black men from their place in the
hierarchy of American exploitation
and oppression and replaced them
with her people — “Privileged and
educated women” like herself and
gender firsters like Comcast feminist
Melissa Harris-Perry who batters the
brothers on her weekly msnbc show.
Ms. Harris-Perry has said that there
are a “lot of things she likes” about
the racist Tea Party and that Jazz
is “deeply misogynistic.”

Last I heard black musicians were
struggling and Diana Krall was making
all of the bread. For these educated
and privileged women, racism became
a black male problem. Weekly on Ms.
Harris-Perry’s show, women who might
be pulling down 100k or more per year
complain about their triple oppression.

63

This was a serious blow to black male
writers since Ms. Steinem has more
power than all of the black male
writers in history combined and in
2016 will be in a position to deliver
her vast constituency to a president if
Hillary Clinton runs and is elected.
Ms. Steinem felt that she had a
mandate to denounce black men on
the basis of a remark made by the late
Shirley Chisholm who said that she
had more problems as a woman than
as a black person. Yet, Ms. Steinem
and others supported then presidential
candidate Mrs. Chisholm until the
convention, when they supported
Mondale, leaving Mrs. Chisholm
betrayed and in tears.