Robin D. Stone

Black Issues NonFiction Reviews (cont.)

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By likening isolated, impoverished neighborhoods to the prisons that incarcerate so many black men, drawing parallels between Sarah Bartmann, the Khoi woman dubbed the “Hottentot Venus’’ in the 19th century, and singer Beyoncé, and even dissecting the 1997 film Booty Call, Hill Collins details how past distortions remain present, despite assertions that we are fast becoming a color-blind society.

In particular, she writes, stereotypes about the oversexed, too-strong black women and the emasculated, hypersexual black man continue to influence our behavior as we challenge, and even channel, those myths in sometimes destructive ways.

Hill Collins also addresses the homophobia found within the black community and argues that black people have to redefine gender roles to reflect the contours of our actual experience, rather than accept strictures set by the larger society and designed in large part to perpetuate oppression. We can then begin to construct innovative, community-driven solutions to such issues as the declining rate of marriage among African Americans, domestic violence and the spread of HIV and AIDS:

What if black men and women stopped resenting one another for not fitting the mainstream model that says men must earn more money than their wives and girlfriends? What if we supported so-called alternative family structures, so long as they provided our children with sustenance?

“If anything, heterosexual African American men and women might consider pooling their resources, no matter who earned them,’’ Hill Collins writes. And, ideally, “any family form that provided economic support for African American children, for example, gay and lesbian families, families that incorporated grandparents…would be valued, not maligned because it failed to measure up to some predetermined gender norms.’’ Scholarly in tone, Hill Collins’s work may seem a bit academic to the lay reader, but its provocative ideas are well worth contemplating.

The traumatic effects of sexual abuse are immediate and long-lasting, devastating the survivor and undermining the bulwark of the family. Racism and rigid ideas about gender and sexuality also corrode our community. Both Stone and Hill Collins have written timely works outlining how in our homes and on a far larger scale, we must talk about the violence being done to our children—be it physical or psychological. By saving them, we ultimately save ourselves.

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