The Oppression of Black Women

In Elaine Brown's autobiography A Taste of Power, we move with Brown through a number of conflicts with the Black Panthers and other activist groups, conflicts that include gender struggles that were a fact as much within the Panthers as within society overall. Initially, Brown was strongly attracted to the powerful leaders of the Black Panthers, a reliance on the power of men. She basically rose to the top of the Panthers by penning songs honoring the male leaders she admired, from Eldridge Cleaver and John Huggins to Jonathan Jackson and Huey Newton. After experiencing the subjugation of black women by black men, however, Brown wonders what her songs suggested about her dependence on men for her own power and liberation. She discovers her attraction was based on loneliness and fear of death but these were aspects of existence she realized none of the males she admired could remove from her life. As she writes, "Life was the shadow of death. And I was still alone in that. There was no father, no God, no man to stand between me and death, or me and life, if I wrote psalms to them forever" (Brown 310). This analysis will discuss how the ideology of black liberation offered by Malcolm X actually represented a prescription for the oppression of black women.

We see in a great deal of Malcolm X's rhetoric that language is primarily masculine and excludes acknowledgement of the female. In his "Message to the Grass Roots" Malc

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s always the recognition that the men had the ability to silence or control a woman who would not play a secondary role. This is similar to Collins' contention about Malcolm X's views on women. As Collins (75) writes of Malcolm's view, "To him, women needed and admired a man who was strong. He forwarded a version of strength grounded in control and domination, even though it often came masked by love." Collins also maintains that black women were largely "invisible" in the Black Nationalist movement led by Malcolm X, primarily because it was through the concerns of black men that Malcolm and others thought would resolve any issues related to black women. As Collins (77) writes, "The invisibility of black women in Malcolm X's black nationalist philosophy fosters the view that issues unique to black women will be addressed by strategies aimed solely at black men." However, in Brown's book we see that her eventual rise to power does not help her resolve issues related to black women or their oppression from black men. Quite the contrary, Brown comes to realize that power is equally corrupting for both men and women. We see that far from helping her establish love and security, her rise to power includes a level of violence tha

Category: Psychology - T