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If I could remove any destructive saying from the lips of Black men (and their apologists), then up first for removal: “That Black woman is trying to take another Black man down.”
Every time I hear it, I’m flush with shame as a Black male who can remember when I said it, as a historian who can locate its function and history.
It centers Black male denials and “pain” and dismisses the accusations and pain of Black women survivors, reinforcing the old racist idea of the un-rape-able Black woman popularized by White male slave-owning rapists deflecting blame by demeaning their Black woman victims.
It shows how much White and Black men have in common in their dismissal of survivors as merely “trying to take them down.”
The saying is imagined in Black male logic as a woke or progressive or radical idea even as it conserves the rope of rape culture that also hangs blame on Black male survivors. It conserves patriarchal male power which has conserved White supremacy.
“That Black woman is trying to take another Black man down” is a saying imagined as defending Black men or Black people when it is really defending one man who happens to be Black.
