Visitors arriving at the Englewood, N.J., home of Michele Wallace are greeted by a sun-bleached label on the front door: “This is what a real feminist looks like.”
On a snowy late morning in January, the 63-year-old scholar, who teaches English at City College of New York, sat on a small Bohemian-style couch crammed with colorful pillows. Between careful sips of hot coffee, she recalled the decades since her first book, the controversial Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, burst onto the scene.
Published in 1979, the book altered the trajectory of the women’s movement, giving voice and legitimacy to black feminist politics. A blunt and personal critique of black male sexism and white feminist racism, it catapulted Wallace onto the talk-show and lecture circuit — and made her the most reviled black woman in America, all before the age of 27.
“You weren’t supposed to talk about racial oppression and women’s oppression at the same time,” Wallace said.
Today, Black Macho is finding a new and more receptive audience, particularly among young black feminist scholars drawn to its passion and raw honesty. In June, Verso re-released the book as part of a launch of its feminist classics series. In September, a panel at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History meeting in Atlanta will be dedicated to Black Macho. The third edition includes a foreword from Jamilah Lemieux, a senior editor at Ebony and one of the nation’s leading millennial black feminists.
“The world that received the first edition of Black Macho was very different from the one we know today, where black feminists have demanded more than a seat at a proverbial table, but also a microphone,” Lemieux writes.
Michele Wallace on the cover of “Ms.” in 1979
Speaking with me in January, Wallace cringed as she described having her hair unbraided by a white woman at Ms. Magazine in preparation for a January 1979 cover photo. Ms. was running an excerpt of her soon-to-be-published book, but her braids were considered unpalatable for white readers. Even putting a black woman on the cover of a national magazine was daring.
So was her book. Wallace, the daughter of the celebrated artist Faith Ringgold, had grown up among black female activists. She blasted racist tropes, which depicted black women as fat nannies, wanton sluts, domineering matriarchs, or “superwomen” considered less feminine and vulnerable than others. “We exhaled a little when we read that superwomen only existed in comic books and, in an axis-tilting insight, were not a literal standard to which all black women needed to conform,” says Noliwe M. Rooks, an associate professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University.
And Wallace dared to call out white middle-class feminism for its investment in class and race privilege and disregard for the experiences of the poor and women of color. Black Macho “helped me understand that ‘black woman’ and ‘feminism’ did not have to be an oxymoron,” says Farah Jasmine Griffin, a professor of English and comparative literature and African-American Studies at Columbia University.
Not everyone received the book so warmly. Even more controversial than Wallace’s analysis of white feminists was her critique of black men. Drawing on her own experiences with abusive male relatives and a drug-addicted father, she argued that black men’s sense of masculinity — and in turn the Black Nationalist movement — was dependent on white patriarchy. The slave experience had taught black men that they were “studs,” she wrote. “The most immediately gratifying way young black men of the ’60s could assert their manhood was by having a white woman or oppressing black women.”
She not only aired her own dirty laundry but also pointed out blemishes on the larger community. “I am saying — there is a profound distrust, if not hatred, between Black men and Black women,” she wrote. “It has been nursed along largely by White racism but also by an almost deliberate ignorance on the part of Blacks about the sexual politics of their experience in this country.”
For lines like those, she was considered a traitor. After all, what gave Wallace — a young, middle-class Northerner who had not lived the Jim Crow experience nor been active in the civil-rights movement — the right to speak about the sexual politics of the black freedom struggle?
Wallace “was unapologetically irreverent about race and gender politics at a time when movements demanded reverence and party line,” says Rooks.
The backlash was unrelenting, coming from every direction. Irate readers packed bookstores and campus auditoriums. “Sometimes a thousand people showed up with the book in hand,” Wallace recalled. “They stood up and yelled: ‘Who the hell do you think you are? How dare you write a book like this about black men!’” People walked out of her talks; some called her a “bitch,” “Uncle Tom,” or “mouthpiece of Satan.” Her boyfriend at the time, Cornel West, took to traveling with her to shield her from the vitriol.
She also made enemies among an emerging crop of black feminist scholars, and all these years later, Wallace is still stung by their criticism. bell hooks dismissed Black Macho in her 1981 book Ain’t I A Woman, writing, “It is neither an important feminist work nor an important work about black women.”
“You weren’t supposed to talk about racial oppression and women’s oppression at the same time.”
Critics often focused on Wallace’s lack of academic credentials, says Beverly Guy-Sheftall, director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman College. “The number of black feminist scholars was small,” she says, and here was a “courageous and hard-hitting and personal polemical black feminist text written from a journalistic perspective.” Other black women were making similar arguments, and getting their share of rebukes: Ntozake Shange with For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, which had begun its Broadway run in 1976; Alice Walker for The Color Purple, published in 1982. “Yet Michele may have got it the worst,” says Guy-Sheftall, “because she wasn’t creating a literary narrative.”
Today, a new generation of black feminists are taking up Black Macho. At a time when “Black Lives Matter” has become a rallying cry, these critics say the experiences of black women are still too often neglected. Pointing to the heat that’s generated whenever Michelle Obama dares to talk about race, or the controversy over the incoming Boston University professor Saida Grundy’s tweets about white male college students, they argue that the voices of intellectually provocative black women are still problematic. But they refuse to be muted. They see Black Macho as a template for a personal, in-your-face tone they are inclined to use, especially on social media.
“I felt empowered by her work, as someone who bore witness to both racism within my feminist circles and sexism within my Black racial justice communities,” says Treva B. Lindsey, an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Ohio State University. “Her unapologetic voice echoed and foreshadowed an emergent hip-hop narrative.”
Shanté Paradigm Smalls, an assistant professor of African American literature and culture at St. John’s University in New York, remembers first reading Black Macho in her teens or early 20s. “I found the work shocking and delicious. It engaged a nascent critique I felt but couldn’t name. A writer like Wallace made me feel like I could survive the world.”
Older black feminists have expressed concern about the tone and trajectory of research being done by younger scholars, as well as their lack of decorum on social media and at scholarly conferences. They point to scholars like Brittney Cooper, an assistant professor of women’s and gender studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University. This spring, Cooper wrote a Holy Week essay in Salon accusing members of the right wing of inventing a white-supremacist Jesus that discriminates against LGBTQ people. “The Jesus I know, love, talk about and choose to retain was a radical, freedom-loving, justice-seeking, potentially queer (because he was either asexual or a priest married to a prostitute), feminist healer,” Cooper wrote, “unimpressed by scripture-quoters and religious law-keepers, seduced neither by power nor evil.”
At a conference Wallace attended in May in Italy on “Black Portraitures” — representations of the black body in literature, music, and visual art — “there were a number of panels on pleasure,” she recalled, including one presentation challenging the portrayal of black women as mere victims by arguing that they experienced orgasms during slavery. Such arguments, Wallace said, were “irritating to the older generation.”
That focus on sexuality not documented by traditional archival evidence bothers senior scholars who say the lives of important black women in history remain understudied. “A lot of the work being done by younger black feminist scholars is grounded in nothing more than their pussies,” said one scholar, who asked not to be named for fear of being impolitic.
Hearing that assessment, Wallace folded her arms across her chest and threw a disgusted side-eye. “What’s wrong with writing from your pussy?” she said. “It’s a real place.”
Wallace’s own views about Black Macho have changed over time. “I’m embarrassed by the book’s reductiveness,” she told me. In a new introduction to the book, Wallace describes rereading it for the first time. “My immediate gut response was to destroy the book so that no one would ever read it again,” she writes. “I wanted to destroy [it] because my desire for something more from life than my marginal status as a black woman writer could ever offer was so palpable in its pages. In obsessively repeating the stereotypes of black women and black men, I wanted to burst free of them forever.”
She says she hopes that the reissue of Black Macho gives younger scholars “the authority to have a feminist movement in which the leadership is not manufactured or controlled by Ivy League degrees.” Wallace is optimistic about the direction of feminism. “It’s something that ordinary women are now embracing. Whether it’s Beyoncé or women in Congress, it has become more of an everyday practice,” she said. At the same time, it doesn’t seem to her that black women are making advances in their relationships with men. “Feminism has not won,” she said. “We can’t relax.”
Stacey Patton is a senior reporter at The Chronicle.
