ABSTRACT
More than twenty years have passed since I wrote my first feminist book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Like many precocious girls growing up in a male-dominated household, I understood the significance of gender inequality at an early age. Our daily life was full of patriarchal drama—the use of coercion, violent punishment, verbal harassment, to maintain male domination. As small children we understood that our father was more important than our mother because he was a man. This knowledge was reinforced by the reality that any decision our mother made could be overruled by our dad’s authority. Since we were raised during racial segregation, we lived in an all-black neighborhood, went to black schools, attended a black church. Black males held more power and authority than black females in all these institutions. It was only when I entered college that I learned that black males had supposedly been “emasculated,” that the trauma of slavery was primarily 120that it had stripped black men of their right to male privilege and power, that it had prevented them from fully actualizing “masculinity.” Narratives of castrated black men, humble Stepin Fetchits who followed white men as though they were little pets, was to my mind the stuff of white fantasy, of racist imagination. In the real world of my growing up I had seen black males in positions of patriarchal authority, exercising forms of male power, supporting institutionalized sexism.
