Play Me A Love Song: The Legacy of Racism-White Supremacy On Black Relationships. . .

Nowhere is the legacy of white supremacy seen more -- and with more of an impact -- than in romantic relationships among Afrikan descendants.

The battle lines are openly drawn -- sometimes consciously, sometimes not -- in every encounter as we play our historically assigned roles in the death march of the functional Black family.

Both Afrikan descendant men AND women feel unheard, disrespected, and unloved and gentleness with each other seems a thing of the past, long relegated to the reject bins like love songs, love poems, and sweet caresses for their own sake -- the kind that don’t necessarily lead to sex (remember those? No? I’m not surprised. . .).

Instead, we leave our own traditions behind -- the traditions of familial yearning and loyalty that even generations of enslavement and Jim Crow could not fully break -- and we rush to claim as our own the pathology of paternalism, sexism, and disrespect of family and family structure.

We embrace the philosophical manifestations of “anything goes”; "superheads"; “baby daddies” littering the urban landscape with their children while thinking that it is enough to take care of them “when I’m able”, as if children don’t need to eat every day; Black women who let them while claiming that they are “strong Black women who do not need a man”, and the like.

We have watched the seeds of our own claim to this pathology grow with every successive generation unthinkingly, uncritically, dispassionately, while ignoring the destructive outcome of such “thinking” in the dead eyes of our children and its impact on our relationships, families, and communities. . .

Now, I do know that there are relationships out there that do work.

But I also know that many times those relationships are not celebrated as anything other than anachronisms, even in our own communities.

Now our concepts of “loyalty”, “commitment”, and “fidelity” are saved not for our families and relationships, but for our “peeps” who have stepped into those places in our lives once reserved for lovers, life partners, and family.

WHAT HAPPENED???!!! What happened between the ending of Jim Crow and now?

And more importantly: how do we get back to who we were?

Destroy the Black family and you destroy the Black world.

And in whose interest, ultimately, is that?


Moving forward,

Adar