in people’s ability to understand anything that makes sense has always been justified, finally, by their behavior. In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.
Your sister, Alice
1986
Postscript
In my response to Mpinga I did not touch on what I consider the egregious hypocrisy of many of the critics of the novel and the movie. In letters sent to the producers of the film while it was being shot (letters threatening picket lines, boycotts, and worse if the script was not submitted to them, prior to filming, for approval), members of the group Blacks Against Black Exploitation of Blacks in the Media made it clear that a primary concern of theirs was not merely the character of Mister but a fear of the “exposure” of lesbianism “in the black community.” One of the letters expressed the fear that, just as the use of cocaine skyrocketed in the black community after the showing of Superfly , a movie about a racially mixed, black-ghetto hustler, pimp, and dope dealer that many black audiences identified with in the seventies, lesbianism, apparently in their view another “plague,” would race through the black community in the eighties. It was also stated that homosexuality was “subject to control” by the community, and that love between black women was okay as long as it wasn’t publicly expressed. (This brought to mind the sentiment of white supremacists that they don’t mind black people being free, as long as they confine their freedom to some other planet.)
If the concern of critics had sincerely been the depiction of the cruel black male character Mister, as played by Danny Glover (in a film that is, after all, about a black woman, whose struggle is precisely that of overcoming abuse by two particularly unsavory men), they were late in sounding the alarm. What of black actors, men and women, who play CIA agents? U.S. spies? Members of Cointelpro? These characters are used to legitimize real organizations that are involved in assassinating our leaders and heroes around the world and destabilizing and destroying whole Third World countries besides. Yet, because they’re middle-class, speak standard English, are never permitted to sleep with anybody at all, they are considered decent models for us to have.
In my opinion, it is not the depiction of the brutal behavior of a black male character that is the problem for the critics; after all, many of us have sat in packed theaters where black men have cheered (much as white racists have cheered at images depicting blacks being abused) when a black woman was being terrorized or beaten, or, as in one of Prince’s films, thrown in a garbage dumpster. Rather, it is the behavior of the women characters that is objectionable; because whatever else is happening in the novel and the film (and as is true more and more in real life), women have their own agenda, and it does not include knuckling under to abusive men. Women loving women, and expressing it “publicly,” if they so choose, is part and parcel of what freedom for women means, just as this is what it means for anyone else. If you are not free to express your love, you are a slave; and anyone who would demand that you enslave yourself by not freely expressing your love is a person with a slaveholder’s mentality.
Rather than be glad that the ability to love has not been destroyed altogether in us, some critics complain about the “rightness” of its direction, hiding behind such shockingly transparent defenses as “but what will white people think of us?” Since “white people” are to a large extent responsible for so much of our worst behavior, which is really their behavior copied slavishly, it is an insult to black people’s experience in America to make a pretense of caring what they think.
Much of the criticism leveled against me and my work by black men
Your sister, Alice
1986
Postscript
In my response to Mpinga I did not touch on what I consider the egregious hypocrisy of many of the critics of the novel and the movie. In letters sent to the producers of the film while it was being shot (letters threatening picket lines, boycotts, and worse if the script was not submitted to them, prior to filming, for approval), members of the group Blacks Against Black Exploitation of Blacks in the Media made it clear that a primary concern of theirs was not merely the character of Mister but a fear of the “exposure” of lesbianism “in the black community.” One of the letters expressed the fear that, just as the use of cocaine skyrocketed in the black community after the showing of Superfly , a movie about a racially mixed, black-ghetto hustler, pimp, and dope dealer that many black audiences identified with in the seventies, lesbianism, apparently in their view another “plague,” would race through the black community in the eighties. It was also stated that homosexuality was “subject to control” by the community, and that love between black women was okay as long as it wasn’t publicly expressed. (This brought to mind the sentiment of white supremacists that they don’t mind black people being free, as long as they confine their freedom to some other planet.)
If the concern of critics had sincerely been the depiction of the cruel black male character Mister, as played by Danny Glover (in a film that is, after all, about a black woman, whose struggle is precisely that of overcoming abuse by two particularly unsavory men), they were late in sounding the alarm. What of black actors, men and women, who play CIA agents? U.S. spies? Members of Cointelpro? These characters are used to legitimize real organizations that are involved in assassinating our leaders and heroes around the world and destabilizing and destroying whole Third World countries besides. Yet, because they’re middle-class, speak standard English, are never permitted to sleep with anybody at all, they are considered decent models for us to have.
In my opinion, it is not the depiction of the brutal behavior of a black male character that is the problem for the critics; after all, many of us have sat in packed theaters where black men have cheered (much as white racists have cheered at images depicting blacks being abused) when a black woman was being terrorized or beaten, or, as in one of Prince’s films, thrown in a garbage dumpster. Rather, it is the behavior of the women characters that is objectionable; because whatever else is happening in the novel and the film (and as is true more and more in real life), women have their own agenda, and it does not include knuckling under to abusive men. Women loving women, and expressing it “publicly,” if they so choose, is part and parcel of what freedom for women means, just as this is what it means for anyone else. If you are not free to express your love, you are a slave; and anyone who would demand that you enslave yourself by not freely expressing your love is a person with a slaveholder’s mentality.
Rather than be glad that the ability to love has not been destroyed altogether in us, some critics complain about the “rightness” of its direction, hiding behind such shockingly transparent defenses as “but what will white people think of us?” Since “white people” are to a large extent responsible for so much of our worst behavior, which is really their behavior copied slavishly, it is an insult to black people’s experience in America to make a pretense of caring what they think.
Much of the criticism leveled against me and my work by black men
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