#pan africanism

A list of books for Black men who want to support Black women and gain a better understanding of race tied to toxic masculinity, sexism, male privilege, misogyny and misogynoir (a hatred for Black women). After you finish this list, APPLY THIS KNOWLEDGE- PRACTICE IT. BE GOOD TO BLACK WOMEN. LOVE US BETTER: ✊ We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity by bell hooks This book will change your life. A Black woman took the time to not only explain why Black men can be sexist, she reveals how you are also oppressed and provides strategies on how you can heal. If you are able to heal, then you will be able to truly support Black women. - Here is the PDF: https://feminism.memoryoftheworld.org/Bell%20Hooks/We%20Real%20Cool_%20Black%20Men%20and%20Musculinity%20(449)/We%20Real%20Cool_%20Black%20Men%20and%20Musculinity%20-%20Bell%20Hooks.pdf ✊ Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought by Beverly Guy-Sheftall - check out a series of writings by different Black women ✊ At The Dark End of the Street by Danielle McGuire This is written by a white woman, however, this reveals Black women as the catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement and how (trigger warning) sexual violence was a contributing factor. ✊ Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde -Read all of it for sure, however, please read the essay “The Erotic as Power: Uses of the Erotic as Power.” It’s important that you understand why it is a terrible thing to sexually shame women. Lorde will also teach you that Black women don’t owe you anything romantically or period. We will support you, but we don’t have to be with you. Be ok that you may not be of interest when it comes to our sexuality. “Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.” - Audre Lorde ✊ The Womanist Reader ( a Womanist Anthology) edited by Layli Phillips - A lot of you as Black men only discuss feminism as if it is a dirty word. Learn that [white] Feminism is very different from Black Feminism. BUT now learn that Black women can want to dismantle patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. and not be a Black Feminist. THIS BOOK shows there are a series of Black women who identify as Womanist. There are also Africana Womanist, African Feminist, and Intersectional Feminism. A matter of fact, Black women can actually have all of these beliefs, but not label ourselves as any of these Black women ideologies. ✊ “Womanism” (the essay) by Alice Walker (Yes, the woman who wrote The Color Purple) - This can be found in the a Womanist Reader. In 1979, Walker coined the term Womanism. This is typically the reading that I have found has changed Black men’s perspectives on Black women… Some of you have been brought to tears by it. Get into it. ✊ In Search of Our Mother’s Garden by Alice Walker ✊ “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” (an essay) by Kimberle Crenshaw - In 1991, a Black woman coined a term that was intended to debunk why it’s difficult to be just “race first,” especially as a Black woman when we have various identities that place us at the margins (keep us oppressed just like you and sometimes more so). The term is “intersectionality.” Here is a PDF- http://multipleidentitieslgbtq.wiki.westga.edu/file/view/crenshaw1991.pdf ✊ Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology (an essay) by Deborah K. King If you have heard of W.E.B. Du Bois, double consciousness, imagine reading something as Black men discussing the various identities and intersections that we face as Black women. King shows how socially this keeps Black women in comparison to you and people of other races and genders at the bottom. Here is a PDF- http://web.uvic.ca/~ayh/318King%20Multiple%20Jeopardy.pdf ✊ Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins - It is just important. Period. and gain a better understanding of race tied to toxic masculinity, sexism, male privilege, misogyny and misogynoir (a hatred for Black women). After you finish this list, APPLY THIS KNOWLEDGE- PRACTICE IT. BE GOOD TO BLACK WOMEN. LOVE US BETTER: ✊ We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity by bell hooks This book will change your life. A Black woman took the time to not only explain why Black men can be sexist, she reveals how you are also oppressed and provides strategies on how you can heal. If you are able to heal, then you will be able to truly support Black women. - Here is the PDF: https://feminism.memoryoftheworld.org/Bell%20Hooks/We%20Real%20Cool_%20Black%20Men%20and%20Musculinity%20(449)/We%20Real%20Cool_%20Black%20Men%20and%20Musculinity%20-%20Bell%20Hooks.pdf ✊ Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought by Beverly Guy-Sheftall - check out a series of writings by different Black women ✊ At The Dark End of the Street by Danielle McGuire This is written by a white woman, however, this exposes Black woman as the catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement and how (trigger warning) sexual violence was a contributing factor. ✊ Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde -Read all of it for sure, however, please read the essay “The Erotic as Power: Uses of the Erotic as Power.” It’s important that you understand why it is a terrible thing to sexually shame women. Lorde will also teach you that Black women don’t owe you anything romantically or period. We will support you, but we don’t have to be with you. Be ok that you may not be of interest when it comes to our sexuality. “Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.” - Audre Lorde ✊ The Womanist Reader ( a Womanist Anthology) edited by Layli Phillips - A lot of you as Black men only discuss feminism as if it is a dirty word. Learn that [white] Feminism is very different from Black Feminism. BUT now learn that Black women can want to dismantle patriarchy, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. and not be a Black Feminist. THIS BOOK shows there are a series of Black women who identify as Womanist. There are also Africana Womanist, African Feminist, and Intersectional Feminism. A matter of fact, Black women can actually have all of these beliefs, but not label ourselves as any of these Black women ideologies. ✊ “Womanism” (the essay) by Alice Walker (Yes, the woman who wrote The Color Purple) - This can be found in the a Womanist Reader. In 1979, Walker coined the term Womanism. This is typically the reading that I have found has changed Black men’s perspectives on Black women… Some of you have been brought to tears by it. Get into it. ✊ In Search of Our Mother’s Garden by Alice Walker ✊ “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” (an essay) by Kimberle Crenshaw - In 1991, a Black woman coined a term that was intended to debunk why it’s difficult to be just “race first,” especially as a Black woman when we have various identities that place us at the margins (keep us oppressed just like you and sometimes more so). The term is “intersectionality.” Here is a PDF- http://multipleidentitieslgbtq.wiki.westga.edu/file/view/crenshaw1991.pdf ✊ Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology (an essay) by Deborah K. King If you have heard of W.E.B. Du Bois, double consciousness, imagine reading something as Black men discussing the various identities and intersections that we face as Black women. King shows how socially this keeps Black women in comparison to you and people of other races and genders at the bottom. Here is a PDF- http://web.uvic.ca/~ayh/318King%20Multiple%20Jeopardy.pdf ✊ Black Feminist Thought by Patricia Hill Collins - It is just important. Period. One day I will add more to this list Black men. I just hope that you read it. I love you, but I’m calling you to do better by Black women.

In Beirut’s Palm Beach Hotel, I luxuriated in my first long sleep since I had left America. Then, I went walking-fresh from weeks in the Holy Land: immediately my attention was struck by the mannerisms and attire of the Lebanese women. In the Holy Land, there had been the very modest, very feminine Arabian women-and there was this sudden contrast of the half-French, half-Arab Lebanese women who projected in their dress and street manners more liberty, more boldness. I saw clearly the obvious European influence upon the Lebanese culture. It showed me how any country’s moral strength, or its moral weakness, is quickly measurable by the street attire and attitude of its women-especially its young women. Wherever the spiritual values have been submerged, if not destroyed, by an emphasis upon the material things, invariably, the women reflect it. Witness the women, both young and old, in America-where scarcely any moral values are left. There seems in most countries to be either one extreme or the other. Truly a paradise could exist wherever material progress and spiritual values could be properly balanced.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

OSSIE DAVIS ON MALCOLM X

[Mr. Davis wrote the following in response to a magazine editor’s question: Why did you eulogize Malcolm X?] You are not the only person curious to know why I would eulogize a man like Malcolm X. Many who know and respect me have written letters. Of these letters I am proudest of those from a sixth-grade class of young white boys and girls who asked me to explain. I appreciate your giving me this chance to do so.

You may anticipate my defense somewhat by considering the following fact: no Negro has yet asked me that question. (My pastor in Grace Baptist Church where I teach Sunday School preached a sermon about Malcolm in which he called him a “giant in a sick world.”) Every one of the many letters I got from my own people lauded Malcolm as a man, and commended me for having spoken at his funeral.

At the same time-and this is important-most of them took special pains to disagree with much or all of what Malcolm said and what he stood for. That is, with one singing exception, they all, every last, black, glory-hugging one of them, knew that Malcolm-whatever else he was or was not_Malcolm was a man_!

White folks do not need anybody to remind them that they are men. We do! This was his one incontrovertible benefit to his people.

Protocol and common sense require that Negroes stand back and let the white man speak up for us, defend us, and lead us from behind the scene in our fight. This is the essence of Negro politics. But Malcolm said to hell with that! Get up off your knees and fight your own battles. That’s the way to win back your self-respect. That’s the way to make the white man respect you. And if he won’t let you live like a man, he certainly can’t keep you from dying like one!

Malcolm, as you can see, was refreshing excitement; he scared hell out of the rest of us, bred as we are to caution, to hypocrisy in the presence of white folks, to the smile that never fades. Malcolm knew that every white man in America profits directly or indirectly from his position vis-avis Negroes, profits from racism even though he does not practice it or believe in it.

He also knew that every Negro who did not challenge on the spot every instance of racism, overt or covert, committed against him and his people, who chose instead to swallow his spit and go on smiling, was an Uncle Tom and a traitor, without balls or guts, or any other commonly accepted aspects of manhood!

Now, we knew all these things as well as Malcolm did, but we also knew what happened to people who stick their necks out and say them. And if all the lies we tell ourselves by way of extenuation were put into print, it would constitute one of the great chapters in the history of man’s justifiable cowardice in the face of other men.

But Malcolm kept snatching our lies away. He kept shouting the painful truth we whites and blacks did not want to hear from all the housetops. And he wouldn’t stop for love nor money.

You can imagine what a howling, shocking nuisance this man was to both Negroes and whites. Once Malcolm fastened on you, you could not escape. He was one of the most fascinating and charming men I have ever met, and never hesitated to take his attractiveness and beat you to death with it. Yet his irritation, though painful to us, was most salutary. He would make you angry as hell, but he would also make you proud. It was impossible to remain defensive and apologetic about being a Negro in his presence.

He wouldn’t let you. And you always left his presence with the sneaky suspicion that maybe, after all, you _were_ a man!

But in explaining Malcolm, let me take care not to explain him away. He had been a criminal, an addict, a pimp, and a prisoner; a racist, and a hater, he had really believed the white man was a devil. But all this had changed. Two days before his death, in commenting to Gordon Parks about his past life he said: “That was a mad scene. The sickness and madness of those days! I’m glad to be free of them.”

And Malcolm was free. No one who knew him before and after his trip to Mecca could doubt that he had completely abandoned racism, separatism, and hatred. But he had not abandoned his shock-effect statements, his bristling agitation for immediate freedom in this country not only for blacks, but for everybody. And most of all, in the area of race relations, he still delighted in twisting the white man’s tail, and in making Uncle Toms, compromisers and accommodationists-I deliberately include myself-thoroughly ashamed of the urbane and smiling hypocrisy we practice merely to exist in a world whose values we both envy and despise.

But even had Malcolm not changed, he would still have been a relevant figure on the American scene, standing in relation as he does, to the “responsible” civil rights leaders, just about where John Brown stood in relation to the “responsible abolitionists in the fight against slavery. Almost all disagreed with Brown’s mad and fanatical tactics which led him foolishly to attack a Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, to lose two sons there, and later to be hanged for treason.

Yet today the world, and especially the Negro people, proclaim Brown not a traitor, but a hero and a martyr in a noble cause So in future, I will not be surprised if men come to see that Malcolm X was, within his own limitations, and in his own inimitable style, also a martyr in that cause.

But there is much controversy still about this most controversial American, and I am content to wait for history to make the final decision.

But in personal judgment, there is no appeal from instinct. I knew the man personally, and however much I disagreed with him, I never doubted that Malcolm X, even when he was wrong, was always that rarest thing in the world among us Negroes: a true man. And if to protect my relations with the many good white folk who make it possible for me to earn a fairly good living in the entertainment industry, I was too chicken, too cautious, to admit that fact when he was alive, I thought at least that now when all the white folks are safe from him at last, I could be honest with myself enough to lift my hat for one final salute to that brave, black, ironic gallantry, which was his style and hallmark, that shocking _zing_ of fire-and-be-damned-to-you, so absolutely absent in every other Negro man I know, which brought him, too soon, to his death.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

My hotel’s dining room, when I went to breakfast, was full of more of those whites-discussing Africa’s untapped wealth as though the African waiters had no ears. It nearly ruined my meal, thinking how in America they sicked police dogs on black people, and threw bombs in black churches, while blocking the doors of their white churches-and now, once again in the land where their forefathers had stolen blacks and thrown them into slavery, was that white man.

Right there at my Ghanaian breakfast table was where I made up my mind that as long as I was in Africa, every time I opened my mouth, I was going to make things hot for that white man, grinning through his teeth wanting to exploit Africa again-it had been her human wealth the last time, now he wanted Africa’s mineral wealth.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“In your land, how many black people think about it that South and Central and North America contain over _eighty million_ people of African descent?” he asked me.

“The world’s course will change the day the African-heritage peoples come together as brothers!”

I never had heard that kind of global black thinking from any black man in America.

From Lagos, Nigeria, I flew on to Accra, Ghana.

I think that nowhere is the black continent’s wealth and the natural beauty of its people richer than in Ghana, which is so proudly the very fountainhead of Pan-Africanism.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X