Continued...
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Or, at least not one that dared venture further than "I bet he's got a white girl" as a gorgeous brother passed by. Our hearts are broken because we are unloved. More than that: Black women are unlovable, or so the world tells us every day. Most often, it's a sucker punch.
Minding my own business recently, I was reading my friend's excellent nonfiction book, "Random Family: Love, Sex and Trouble in the Bronx," which chronicles the intersected lives of a hardscrabble constellation of Latinas. In lamenting the loss of a lover to a rival, one woman was dumbfounded that anyone would prefer a woman "with hair like a black girl's" to her. I am ugly by definition. Usually, though, our degendering and masculinization is pretty easy to see coming. I watch the promos for my hero Chris Rock's new series about his Bed-Stuy adolescence and cringe when his "mother" traumatizes her son with bellowed, emasculating, dehumanizing threats like: "Boy, I will SLAP yo' name out the phone book, then call Ma Bell and tell her I did it." Hilarious, no? He looks about 10 as she terrorizes him with psychotic threats that would make Uday and Qusay proud. Who would want to bed that shrieking harridan? Who'd want to live next door to or hire such a *****? Bets are off on how far into the series it will be before this black harpy (how redundant) is swiveling her neck and reducing a good man to shreds with her razor tongue. I have a 4-year-old son and an almost 2-year-old daughter who would go into cardiac arrest if I spoke to them that way, even in jest. Forgive me, Chris, but your "mother" proves that Zora Neale Hurston nailed it when she noted that black women are "the mules of the world."
She was speaking of how hard most of our lives were in the 1920s and 1930s, she was talking about the patriarchy and misogyny within the black community that keeps so many of us mute chambermaids who are regularly beaten, but perhaps most important, she was talking about what that hardness did to us, or rather, to others in dealing with us. Our ability to survive atrocity, to make something from nothing, to bounce back day after day -- somehow, this makes the world see us as rhino-skinned, never soft. Quadruple-lunged, never asthmatic. Incapable of giggling, blushing or shutting the hell up. Sisters are essentialized as indefatigable, never in need of a door held open, a chair pulled out. A "how are you doing, really?" I have to believe that somewhere in there is also the belief that the niceties are wasted on us, coarse cows that we are. Bears are happy ****ting in the woods and "sistaz" ain't got no time for no nonsense like sweet talk, a man who rises when we do, or a lover to whisper naughty things to in the dark. And we don't need no stinking flowers either, or at least Jamie Foxx's hospitalized mother didn't; in "Collateral," she rejected them and belittled him for his foolishness. The bedraggled dandelions I got for Mother's Day this year will shrivel up and blow away before I'll part with them.
Owen, Vince: We long for those things. It's a misery to black woman why our strength, the strength that kept our people from extinction and which holds the community together yet, makes us seem manly somehow, as if no white woman has ever roughened her pink hands or survived rape for her family's sake. Or been a *****. Why is it so hard to fathom that we can raise our children alone (if need be, rarely by preference), work two jobs and still look good in a miniskirt. Still want to look good in a miniskirt. Sisters are simply not seen as either ladylike or, to put it bluntly, ****able. Rapeable, certainly, as the history of slavery and Jim Crow prove, just not ****able.
I realized this in the 1980s and '90s when, because of my career choices, I was usually the only woman and only black around. I'd say nothing as my office mates, the men I partied with and who backed me to the hilt professionally, would grouse about the lack of women. I was smarter and better-looking than they were. I was, to take a page from my plain-spoken Vince, hot. I wore uncomfortably tight clothing. Makeup and sheer pantyhose. Nail polish. Jane Fonda for daaaaays. My heels were so legendary, my nickname was Spike. Oh, Debra dressed shamefully in the summertime. But to most white men, to the men who occupied the world that my life choices drew me to, I was invisible. When I finally married at 40, it was to the first man who'd asked me out in five years. I had been holding out for a brother but, realizing that was even less likely to happen, finally let that go.
Even when I was a seven-months-pregnant behemoth, I was invisible as I hefted a load of packages to the post office at Christmastime, as I struggled with a pallet of sodas at Costco. I was even invisible in the Tiny Tim confines of the modern airplane. I could hear crickets as I struggled to get my bag into the overhead. Two seats away, an elderly white lady was swarmed by white men helping her with hers. They politely excused themselves as they tried to hurry past my bulk to her. It was all I could do not to cry. I did cry the time two white men "erased" me in a shoebox-size Dunkin Donuts in Logan Airport. One had filled the tiny room with his luggage, his restless kids and a complicated order. I waited politely in line behind him. As he was trying to get organized, he noticed the white man in line behind me and apologized profusely for holding him up. Then he waved him gallantly on to the cashier. White man No. 2 had to step over my luggage to reach the counter. However racist white men may be, a nice rack should be the great neutralizer in an encounter that will only last a minute. You have to give racism its props; it's the only force proven to trump what a hound dog the average man is.
In the '80s and '90s, I reacted to my sexual invisibility vis-à-vis white men with faux feminist sarcasm and wannabe black nationalist contempt. But I'm 46 now and far less full of bull****. I'm not angry. I'm hurt. It's not that I want white men to want me. I want all men to want me. I want to be seen as desirable, if I actually am. As available, if I actually am. As ****able, though you should be so lucky. But, because I'm black, I'm somehow seen as a gender crasher, an imposter fronting as a real woman. Liable to get the sexual bum's rush at any moment. No wonder so many of us are *****es. It protects us from rejection if we make it impossible to get anywhere near us in the first place.
Sitting there in the dark, halfway through the "Wedding Crashers" montage, I realized that I was jealous of those girls just setting out in life and thought I was getting over it. I had made the most of my youth; it was someone else's turn now. I went all Mother Earthy and wise and found myself watching them with something like a maternal respect and approval, like lagging back a pace so my daughter could take her first steps or cheering as she hit her first home run. I was passing the torch, one risk-taking hottie to another. Or so I thought. In the end, all I was allowed to do was watch how "real women" live. Every woman will be able to picture herself in that parade of female pleasure, female power and eternal youth. Every woman but the black ones.
A basically sweet, silly movie has me, late in life, reconsidering my impatience with nitnoy black separatism -- black dorms, Miss Black America pageants, "The Wiz." I still believe that true separatism is not a viable option for a group comprising only 13 percent of the population, but perhaps a psychological one may well be required to maintain our mental health. As with OJ and Michael Jackson, white folks have turned on me when I've been among the most "assimilated" of Negroes, and I went slinking back to the hood. I've been soothing myself, post-"Crashers," with marathon sessions of the Soul Food compilation. What a relief. What a refuge. In that parallel universe, that majority-black fantasy land, sisters can be mere women, just women, any woman. Ones with "hair like a black girl's" or ones with weaves. Light, bright, damn near white, chocolate and everything in between. Straight. Gay. Working-class and multimillionaire. Godless and God-fearing. *****y and sweet. All different, all little concerned with white folks, all getting laid since the brothers there (unlike in the real world) can't take their eyes off us.
For us mules of the world, it's too bad that world doesn't exist either.
Then again, although I'm probably politically and socially liberal for others, I'm personally rather conservative to some extent, so I guess it works? 
