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What's Love Got to Do With It?: Understanding and Healing the Rift Between Black Men and Women
Relationships between black men and women in America are in crisis—it's time to figure out what's gone wrong and start the healing process.
The current divorce rates for black couples have quadrupled since 1960 and is now double that of the general population; rates of domestic violence in black marriages are skyrocketing; and nearly half of married black men admit to having been unfaithful. In What's Love Got to Do with It? Donna Franklin, one of the country's leading African American sociologists, speaks out on these painful, complex issues, providing an incisive and riveting analysis of the gender tensions that are the legacy of slavery and its aftermath.
Franklin breaks new ground in explaining why black men and women have trouble relating to each other, and examines their profoundly different starting points, which are influenced by generations of racism and injustice. She shows how black women's strength and self-sufficiency can be used to nurture relationships. Likewise, she teaches black men how to support one another and their relationships with women without excluding women, as has happened with the Million Man March.
The challenge of mending the rift between black men and women is formidable but can be made easier. Understanding is the first step on the path to healing.
The current divorce rates for black couples have quadrupled since 1960 and is now double that of the general population; rates of domestic violence in black marriages are skyrocketing; and nearly half of married black men admit to having been unfaithful. In What's Love Got to Do with It? Donna Franklin, one of the country's leading African American sociologists, speaks out on these painful, complex issues, providing an incisive and riveting analysis of the gender tensions that are the legacy of slavery and its aftermath.
Franklin breaks new ground in explaining why black men and women have trouble relating to each other, and examines their profoundly different starting points, which are influenced by generations of racism and injustice. She shows how black women's strength and self-sufficiency can be used to nurture relationships. Likewise, she teaches black men how to support one another and their relationships with women without excluding women, as has happened with the Million Man March.
The challenge of mending the rift between black men and women is formidable but can be made easier. Understanding is the first step on the path to healing.
256 pages, Paperback
First published September 6, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 9, 2011
"There is a schism which exists between black men and women, and it's really painful and frightening because we were taken together from the African continent. We lay spoon fashion, back to belly, in the filthy hatches of slave ships, and in our own and each other's excrements and urine. We stood up at the auction block together. We were sent to work before sunrise, came back after sunset together. We have been equals and we are in danger if we lose that balance because if women begin to feel, "The black woman is the strongest-," then where is the man? If the man begins to feel, "I have no place in her life," then there's no balance, and all people will have paid all of those dues for nothing." Maya Angelou on Charlie Rose 1996
July 16, 2011
Easy read. Nicely done. An updated version of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman by Michele Wallace
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews