“What’s going on between the Black man and the Black woman is that neither of us understands how white supremacy works. How it is messing with us as individuals. How it juggs with us when we try to get together to establish something that is called a family.
We try to form this thing called family, looking at the magazines and reading how families are supposed to function. But when we can’t duplicate that, frustrations build, which leads to the alienation that exists between Black men and Black women. All because we don’t understand the system. We think we’re living in a democracy and since we’re Americans determining our own destinies, it must be that as individuals we are imperfect. But it’s hard to say that ‘I am the imperfect one,’ so you start to blame the other person.
So it’s the ‘no good Negro male” or the ‘no good Negro female’ and ‘what I need is a white woman.’ Society plays that up. ‘Right, Julia, you don’t need a Black man. All you need is a white man to give you a job.’ Or in the movies, ‘Black man, you don’t want a Sapphire, what you want is a white woman.’ Or, ‘Black man, it isn’t cool being a man, what you really want is to be a woman’…The Black man knows that it is easier to be a Black woman than it is to be a Black man any day, because we are not a threat. The system understands that in order to oppress Black people it has to oppress the men. Let the woman do what they want, within limits. I don’t mean that you are unoppressed as a Black woman, but you are not the prime target.” ~ Frances Cress Welsing