Books by Marvin X

Love and War: Poems  / In the Crazy House Called America / Woman: Man's Best Friend /  Beyond Religion Toward Spirituality

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Books by Julia Hare

The Miseducation of the Black Child (1991) / Crisis in Black Sexual Politics (1989)

 Bringing the Black Boy to Manhood (1985)  /  The Endangered Black Family (1984)

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Marvin X Reviews

How to Find and Keep A BMW (Black Man Working)

By Julia Hare

Black Think Tank Publisher, 1995 / 151 pages

Reviewing Julie Hare is like reviewing my aunt's peach cobbler. It's so good I can't say anything bad and wouldn't say nothing bad if my life depended on it. But the title is enough to contemplate for one hundred years, How to Find and Keep A BMW. Of course, I have a question with the title, working for self, working for whom? If he got a slave, then I don't want to discuss how to find a slave, or a Negro with a slave because they say in the game you end up where you start out: if you got a job with the white man, you start with nothing and most likely end with nothing, unless you are fortunate enough to jump ship and land in the water of Elijah's do for self. Or Marcus Garvey's do for self. 

Take your pick, but you can't talk to me about a BMW with the white man. To hell with him and his job. As far as I'm concerned, if you have a job you are a collaborator, black man or black woman because first of all, you are a victim of wage slavery, then you subject your man to the same insanity and want him to love you and appreciate you because you are blind and he is blind as well, so you both jump in the ditch together. Love have mercy.

Julia opens with an overview of the problem: the black woman's lack of a mate, working or non-working, but the ideal mate will have a JOB. Ideally, she tells us, he will have a job working for self in the tradition of Elijah and Marcus, doing for self rather than a wage slave, but Julia doesn't suggest turning down a nigguh working for The Man-alas, if the white man is the man, who is the black man?

She details other forces after the black man, the most important commodity of the western world: the white woman, white man, bisexual and gay brothers, all snatching a piece of the action of Captain Black Man. Julia then asks how do you keep him if you just happen to win the prize, how do you not run him away with ever pressing demands for commitment, following the Christian, Muslim, or Yoruba agenda, whether monogamy, polygamy, or polyandry. How does sister meet her challenge without dropping the pot of stew on her fine dress. If she's a strong sister, will that spook the brother? How does she deal with a mate not having processed all the issues from childhood, puberty and young manhood  in racist America? And how can she help him when she  herself is without a clean bill of mental health?

Why can't she snatch a man her equal when miss ann can cop the best of the black men with a pull of her goldie locks, a glance of her blue eyes, although sistuh may have graduated from Yale, Harvard and Stanford while the white woman ain't got a GED.

Without going farther in our critique, we must applaud Julia and Nathan Hare for staying together over the decades, so we know Julie is an authority on the subject of  black male/female relations, although longevity is not the only criteria in such relations. We know couples who have been together decades in a living hell. On the surface they are model couples, but in reality they should have been committed to the mental hospital years ago. But let us return to Dr. Julia's prescription for netting our black shining prince or king, or god, depending on your ideology, philosophy, religion or form and degree of insanity.

What about the suggestion we should forestall mating and marriage until liberation, after which we will have a better mental equilibrium, since liberation is the only way we can solve the many conundrums stifling male/female unity and a host of other problems too numerous to catalogue. As in the Greek myth, maybe our women should withhold sex and the men too until we've done the right thing by our ancestors, liberated ourselves from the addiction of white supremacy, so we can indeed mate with a semblance of sanity.

Enough of my ranting, back to Dr. Julia's treatise. She discusses the Successful Black Woman Syndrome, describing a war between black men and women. Alas, some black men feel we are in a two front war, with the white man and the black woman, an external battle and a battle in the bed, although what warrior would sleep with his enemy, and imagine the enemy is the mother of your children!

"And so, instead of confronting the white man, the black woman reaches out to share what the black man has, while the black man squabbles with the black woman over what she gets. Rather than confront the white man, or the white woman for that matter, the black man directs his resentment toward the black woman. The black woman should confront the powers-that-be for more of the jobs that white women get, and the black man should be fighting the white man, demanding more jobs for the race instead of fighting with the black woman over token positions."

I totally disagree with demanding more jobs for the race. It is time out demanding anything from the white man. Take whatever we feel we deserve or close the sucker down, as in general strike. But no more begging for jobs-after 400 years why are we still begging the slave master for a job he doesn't have for his own kind? Are we seriously mentally retarded? Elijah told us the white man's last weapon would be his woman, and so it is, yes, she is block woman for the black woman and black man. She is suddenly the pseudo minority used to delay the day of justice and equality for black man and woman. 

Connect the dots and prepare to do for self or suffer the consequences of more black men and women going to prison because they see crime as the only way out of our morass with capitalist America, now out sourcing to China, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, Philippines or anywhere to avoid paying high wages to white or black Americans-capitalism does not discriminate, contrary to general opinion. Do you really think these dirty, capitalist swine care more about white workers than black workers? They only care about cheap labor, cheap labor, cheap labor-of course prison labor is even cheaper than out sourcing, so Tommy Hilfiger is having a field day with prison labor, along with a host of other manufacturers too numerous to list-and Tommy is such a racist he announced he didn't want blacks buying his garb although it was fine for prisoners to make it.

And while on the point of prisons, Julia informs us:

And now we enter the "Brown-bag chapter." When W.E.B. Du Bois talked about the problem of the 20th Century was the color line, I don't think he was talking about the internal color line, even though he and Garvey had clashed on this issue. 

But Julia goes there in "Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall…."

Many years ago a light skinned Garveyite asked me why Negroes loved to follow light skinned Negroes like Farrakhan. And another Negro noted how superblack lightskinned Negroes were, Malcolm X, for example. So Julia has stepped into high cotton with this chapter.  

In my life I've had women blue black and white as snow, yet black in every sense of the word. I've had blue-black women who were super smart and yellow women just as smart, so why is this old trip still going on? The only sensible answer is the addiction of white supremacy. Imagine the origin of the Jack and Jill organization as Julia relates, a black organization based on a white myth. And then I wondered why my brown skinned daughter joined the Yale Deltas.

But we might as well cut to the chase-light skinned ain't the thing now, you got to be Asian, forget the skin game, it's eyes now, or maybe it's Asian submission, after all, the black woman was submissive at one time, the yellow woman arrogant, but after a stay in  Japan,  my son informed me the Asian woman is taught to say three things: yes, thank you and I'm sorry, something a black woman would die before saying. So as we enter the fourth year of the new century, welcome the new woman on the block, Miss Asia, thanks to BET and MTV and the capitalist desire for the Asian market. Both the black woman and the white woman are dinosaurs. 

Of course this has dire implications for black male/female relations. Multiculturalism is the new term for failed integration, Julia informed us at the Kings and Queens of Black Consciousness concert. After a stay in Seattle, I was never so happy to arrive in segregated New York City just to see black on black couples again in great numbers.

Truth is, the majority of black women and men shall find each other, albeit in a myriad  conditions and suffer the love of each other to the end of time, although elite professional males found that after the fall of Jim Crow, "they no longer needed to settle for the light skinned black woman, the imitation white woman, but could go straight to the real thing."

Indeed, why should a black man want a fake white woman with fake blond weave, fake blue eyes and a fake white mind? But a little bird is telling me things have reversed: the white woman is the black woman and the black woman is the white woman. The more the black woman desires and attires herself in whiteness, the more the white woman desires and attires herself in blackness. 

While the black woman grapples with the conundrum in her midst, in her bed, in her womb, in her heart, the white woman knows the black man is god,  superman, the real power source in the universe, while the black woman, in disgust and lack of faith, after suffering too long the ordeal by fire, seeks the pseudo powers of the white man because of the momentary appearance of things, the political, economic and military realities-but universally speaking, the black man is soon to have his day in the sun while the white man's days are numbered-the white man knows the future world powers will be in Asia and Africa, despite all his attempts to recolonize Africa and gain an economic foothold in the vast markets of Asia. Shall we remind him the spirit of the people is greater than all his technology and military might.

Consciousness is the mighty weapon of the people, and in the final analysis this entire discussion if not about color, superficial kindergarten notions, but about deep structure matters of consciousness in the hearts of all humanity willing to conjure the energy to rise above the superficial racial myths that have us leaping headlong into the precipice of madness and racial conflict.

Today the black man may be powerless, but the white woman knows even in his powerlessness, he is the natural man, the man of truth, while she knows the white man is a liar and murderer, without shame or mercy. She has and will continue to enjoy the benefits of white privilege, but if she has been with the black man, she will never go back to a white man, as any white woman will readily admit. She may be, as Nathan Hare says, the white man in drag, but women seek power, always, and in the final analysis, Black Power shall be around when white power has gone into the dustbin of history.

As Julia said at the outset, everybody is after a piece of the black man, especially the white woman who is in a bio-social struggle for the cream of the crop, the stone the builders rejected that shall become the corner stone. Think about it, the black man's rhythms and beats control the universe, the entire world is dancing to his music or bastardized and diluted forms of his music. If the black man doesn't periodically energize the English language as he has done with rap, the English language would be the weak bastard tongue it is minus the African linguistic infusion. And with rap he has revolutionized the structure, syntax and rhetoric of spoken word, poetry and  the lyrical expression of Japanese, Spanish, French, Arabic and other world languages. The rap genre is the universal expression of youth culture, emanating from the black man's creativity and originality.

The only way the black woman can get and keep her man is by firstly recognizing who he is as others do, then encouraging  him to exercise  the human right of free thought, free speech and freedom of action to configure his life according to his dictates, not some Euro-centric design. Of course the black woman can, should and must  have a voice in the black man's agenda, but he must exercise leadership, otherwise he turns into a weak, passive punk following some feminine agenda. Would you turn a rooster into a hen? Would you turn a bull into a cow? 

Marvin, have you ever heard it takes two to tango? Yes, so dance together and make movement into a new universe, a new world where we are not afraid of our own kind, do not hate ourselves, our mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers. Dance until we synthesize the sometimes diametrical agendas of black males and females that have us at each other's throats rather than working together in understanding, tenderness and love. 

Mama wasn't always right and Dad wasn't always wrong, no matter what he did or didn't do. Search hard for the truth both taught by their lives and see if we can do better. Total condemnation and hatred of their values and  habits which are determining much of our behavior in male/female relations must be processed into a mentally healthy diet of human interaction.

Dr. Julia Hare mentions that mulatto women, more than males, are calling for a new racial category of mixed blacks in the US, similar to Brazil and South African coloreds.

Well, the progeny of white/black sex should study the example of Haiti regarding how Desselines handled Mulatto treachery during the revolution. They can be either part of the problem or part of the solution. We know the story of the tragic mulatto, but their indecision and identity confusion must be processed in the fire of revolution, otherwise we know they tend to side with their white fathers and/or mothers, against the black parent and his/her people. Chancellor Williams told us about their behavior way back in Egypt when the whites invaded, the mulattoes were a fifth column in the destruction of African civilization. ( To be continued)

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posted 12/23/03 / updated 28 March 2008