"The myth of the black love deficit"

Great class today! We wrapped our dialogue on Black Love and Beauty. Today we discussed a short essay by Lerone Bennett Jr. called The Roots of Black Love. Bennett challenges "the myth of the Black Love deficit"-- commonly held views that plantation slavery and Jim Crow destroyed black intimacy and led directly to contemporary social challenges in the Black community like single-parent households, high divorce rates, absent fathers and so on. Last week we discussed effeminization, sexuality, hair politics, hyper-masculinity, the "cool pose" and Malcolm X on self love and loving Africa.

You can read the Bennett essay @ Ebony - Google Books

Tags: Black Love, african american, 

Also dig:

• "My Last Will and Testament": A Love Letter to Black People by Mary McCleod Bethune

"How does it feel to be a problem?" W.E.B. Du Bois

dig it!

When you cut through the fluff, the common theme of the essays and videos  below (steve perry is on point tho') is actually "Now that these Negroes have a black president maybe it will improve their low self-esteem and maybe, just maybe, they will start behaving."

The so-called "Obama Effect" is just a subtle version of the "culture of poverty" model which basically says that black urban culture is pathological.  This bogus idea is promoted by scholars like Harvard University sociologist, Orlando Patterson. I don't buy it but, sadly, far too many of us do.  I pass this CNN piece along to my Obama loving friends who go for that sort of thing. [Also see my posts on (1) Obama's disrespect of his black constituents and (2) another Harvard sociologist, William Julius Wilson. Wilson is not as extreme as Patterson but he still basically blames black people for their own oppression].




 [Click here to view essays and videos]

tags: w.e.b. du bois, bamboozled, barack obama, culture of poverty, kool-aid, structural oppression, tough love, farrah gray, steve perry