Why I Love Black Women
by Michael Eric Dyson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael Eric DysonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-01-08
ISBN: 0465017649
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Basic Civitas Books
Book Reviews of Why I Love Black Women
Book Review: Dyson's Answer to the Misogyny of the Hip-hoppers
Summary: 2 Stars
Although I am an avid reader and lover of most of Mike Dyson's books and especially his cultural ways of thinking, I was disappointed in this one. It was too easy and too much of a cleverly fawning and pandering piece: too clever by half. And being such, it smelled too much like a mercenary effort. But even more importantly, it strategically ignored the very serious ongoing issues within the race between black men and black women. (How can one of our few remaining progressive public intellectuals with a straight face do that?)
It is one thing to endear oneself to all black women by paying sincere homage to them as the author has done here for the many things some of them have done to uplift the race and help steer the ship of black culture to safer shores. It is quite another to imply that they all have done these things, or to allow the things others of them have done (and continue to do) at the same time to undermine it go completely unacknowledged. If no one but me has noticed, the black ship of state, with black women at the helm, is currently tethering on the brink of disaster? And while this review is of course not the right place to rehearse our many internal tribal differences, suffice it to say that we cannot allow our remaining handful of progressive public black intellectuals such as Dyson (and his mentor, Dr. Cornel West) to get a free ride (sail under the radar as it were), by publishing easy pandering books that "paper over" the many difficult black issues and problems.
This Dyson valentine to black women, is not unlike all of the writings of his chief rival within our ranks, Bill Cosby: They both leave the impression in the subtext that, except for black men (the real problem in our race and the racists would say, in the larger American culture), all is well within our tribe.
No one knows more than Dyson -- a black man himself-- that leaving such an impression is so much a crock. There are reasons why the hip-hoppers have reserved their venom for, and have zeroed-in on, black women. And while most of it revolves around mindless chest-beating male insecurities and other misogynous issues, Dyson would know more than most of us that not all of it is. To leave the impression that the hip-hoppers rumblings are all mindless misogyny (and worse, that the hip-hoppers attitudes represent most black men) is at least disingenuous and at worse clever academic dishonesty.
It is not like Dyson is unaware of the 800-pound gorilla in the back of the room - racism -- through which all black life (including that of the hip-hoppers and especially that of all black women) gets mediated. There is a reason why Dyson, Oprah and Barack Obama, were once all members of The Reverend Jeremiah Wright's church: Because they knew that his message about the role continued racism and white supremacy has played and continues to play in screwing up the black race, was (and still is) the correct message.
Head fakes such as this book do not move the ball of black culture down the field closer to our goal of universal respect, dignity and humanity. How about a book that deals straight up and honestly with what is really going on between black men and black women?
Two stars
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