The Love Experience: “Black Love” History Part 1

Warning: This will be a tough read for some.

Before you ask a silly question like, “What does it matter?” or “Isn’t love color blind?” Read. Read why we shout “black love” to each other and why we have been trying for years to undo the damage done to the unity of black love and black families. I mean after all, it’s American and World History. America and the World by enlarge has a culture of negativity, lies, and unnecessary fears surrounding people of African descent. Here is a Part 1 of an article written by Koritha Mitchell.

For instance, when Black men publicly explain why they find Black women unattractive, the reasoning is not ignored but gains traction as a story. Especially for those who extol the virtues of Asian American or “exotic” women, African American women are “not feminine or submissive enough.” The men making such declarations do not constitute a majority, but their insistence upon offering unsolicited negative assessments must be seen for what it is: the American way. It aligns with the contours of mainstream American culture, which is invested in the erasure of Black people choosing each other.

This erasure has roots in slavery. Knowing their captives were human and maintained human agency, enslavers tried to brutalize it out of them. Although United States law did not recognize sexual violence against Black women as rape, they were forced to have sex with enslavers or with other captives. This practice did not simply enrich white people because children inherited the mother’s slave status; it also attempted to make the bondswoman’s feelings irrelevant. Nevertheless, the historical record is full of testimony from Black women who enraged white “masters” because they loved partners of their choice.

Not surprisingly, then, many African Americans celebrated Emancipation by reassembling their families and making their marriages legal. As Black people invested in the legal protections of marriage, white Americans disregarded those bonds by asserting that Black men were rapists obsessed with white women. These claims worked to obliterate the image of Black men happily paired with Black women; it was a form of discursive violence that emerges as a response to African Americans’ success at loving each other against the odds. Even if historians haven’t found much archival evidence, queer intimacies and domesticities no doubt existed and attracted violence. In those cases, people were punished for the victory of knowing that their right to belong did not rely on sexual conformity. In all instances, discursive violence was accompanied by physical aggression. As historian Hannah Rosen documents, even while declaring that Black coupling was nonexistent and that white women were in danger, mobs “ku-kluxed” black homes, often raping the wives of accomplished Black men. White terrorists destroyed Black domestic and intimate success while insisting it never existed.

Several decades after Emancipation, distorting Black love was no less meaningful in shaping American culture. Between 1890 and 1940, Progressive Era reforms lifted European immigrants out of poverty with education and employment opportunity, but African Americans were treated as irredeemable. As Khalil Muhammad has shown, Black Americans’ financial struggles were criminalized rather than addressed with community investment. 

Denying Black people’s right to public resources that typically accompany citizenship required casting them out of the nation’s family portrait. As a result, African American mothers were said to produce natural criminals. Crime became “Black,” so its existence among whites was deemed an aberration. The pathologizing of Black families in the 1965 Moynihan Report may be better known, but its depiction of Black women as matriarchs who damage Black men and boys was a continuation of earlier assertions, including those of Black sociologists like E. Franklin Frazier. If Black love existed, it was pathological—not empowering. It did not create households that functioned as safe havens but rather as dens of delinquency and dysfunction. 

All of these portrayals erased the truth about the love that had sustained African Americans through the horrors of slavery and beyond. As Tera Hunter’s Bound in Wedlock makes clear, African American men and women went to extraordinary lengths for family, including returning to bondage after securing freedom in order to be with loved ones. The refusal to highlight how routinely Black people choose each other advances assumptions about a lack that, if true, would have already obliterated the race.

Most representations of African Americans throughout American history have downplayed bonds of affection, and have purposefully avoided presenting them as defining characteristics of their families and communities. Whether the loveless impression emerges in mainstream depictions or in casual remarks about not dating Black women, it fits the pattern of erasure too neatly to be incidental. Not surprisingly, then, the tendency to denigrate Black women has a parallel. As Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it, “the crude communal myth about Black men is that we are in some manner unavailable to Black women—either jailed, dead, gay, or married to white women.”

Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.

Source: https://www.aaihs.org/the-resilience-of-black-love-in-black-history/

Koritha Mitchell

Koritha Mitchell is author of the award-winning book Living with Lynching and the new book From Slave Cabins to the White House: Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture. She is also an associate professor of English at Ohio State University and a Society of Senior Ford Fellows (SSFF) board member. Follow her on Twitter @ProfKori.

~Nikki