Black Cultural Production after Civil Rights by Robert J Patterson

Author:Robert J Patterson [Patterson, Robert J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252084607
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2019-08-06T00:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: “Into the Revolution”

Kay Lindsey’s call for black women to “project [them]selves into the revolution,” encapsulates the emphasis on agency, militancy, and self-assertion affirmed by the cultural workers of the 1970s.60 As a final example, June Jordan’s His Own Where (1971) imagines more sustainable models of equality and mutually constitutive support within black communities. His Own Where presents—without shame or censoriousness—the sexually active romance between Buddy and Angela, two teens left to fend for themselves as a result of absent or abusive parenting. Their relationship is romantic, mutually supportive, and far more stable than any adult interaction in their lives. The novel celebrates black vernacular and emphasizes the importance of self-empowerment even as it also participates in the larger cultural conversations about domestic abuse within black families, methods of black activism, and the limits of militancy. Militancy infuses even their playful navigation of the city, as Buddy “seem[s] like a commando on the corner. … Arms like a rifle in rotation.”61 But, damningly, militancy does Angela no good when she is at home and her father beats her: “Angela struggle her hand under the pillow where to protect herself she hide a kitchen knife not to be beaten like she is. Seize the handle, ship the knife into his view and tell him ‘Leave me alone’” (28). Nevertheless, her father quickly disarms her and abuses her so terribly that she is hospitalized. Though Angela is admirable for her attempted self-defense, her inability to single-handedly combat patriarchal force convinces her to develop a cooperative and nonviolent bond with Buddy.

Buddy is a role model for a new, progressive, and cooperative black male partner. He takes Angela to the hospital after her father’s beating and helps her to obtain legal protection. At school, he organizes a protest to demand sex education. His platform—“Want to learn anatomy … contraceptives … sex free and healthy”—could come from the women’s sexual liberation movement (37). In the dining hall, he organizes another protest against the poor food and dehumanizing conditions: “You pack us in like animals, and then you say, they act like nothing more than animals. To hell with your control” (41). Here Buddy is thoroughly disruptive, yet brilliantly nonviolent: he organizes a dance between 700 students and the four matronly lunch ladies, who have the time of their lives. The police, called to rush the lunch room, are loathe to end the women’s fun and refuse to find fault in the situation. In short, Buddy models a black activism that is more attentive to black women’s endangerment and respectful of black women’s pleasures—social as well as sexual—as a corrective to the misogyny and regressive patriarchal demands of much Black Power discourse about gender relations.

Simultaneously charmingly immature and adult beyond his years, Buddy devotes himself to Angela and espouses the importance of respecting—and loving—women, in stark contrast to the “hostility” in black men’s approach toward black women that Fran Sanders excoriated in “Dear Black Man.” As part of his ability to forge a black activism that

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