Salvation: Black People and Love (Love Song to the Nation Book 3)

by bell hooks

Socialized within the context of the United States to believe that men should be dominant and women subservient, the vast majority of African-Americans have held in high esteem a patriarchal vision of family life. Despite the fact that the systematic institutionalization of white supremacy and everyday racism made it impossible for the vast majority of African-Americans to create family life based on the sexist assumption that men should be providers working to sustain the material needs of the family and women nurturers taking care of emotional needs and the concerns of the household, black people have worked hard to conform to this model. Even when our lived experience indicated that the model of communal kinship with gender equality was both more constructive and more realistic in a world where employment was and is hard to find for any black person, most black folks continue to accept patriarchal notions of sex roles as the standard to judge and evaluate black life.