In politics, as in life, when someone has a stick they’re going to try to beat you with, the best thing to do is to find a way to take it from them. That’s what Willie Brown did, not for himself, but for his former paramour V.P. candidate Kamala Harris.
Knowing that the right-wing media would try to make political hay out of the fact that when the unmarried Harris was first starting out in San Francisco politics she was romantically involved with Brown (hell, which fine black politically ambitious female in California hasn’t the married Brown bedded?), he had a piece published in the San Francisco Chronicle in which he urged her to “politely decline” the offer to be Biden’s running mate and instead shoot for the attorney general’s job. He then went on Fox News to assure that the right got the message.
His stated logic was that being V.P. was a dead-end job. But this really wasn’t about which slot would be best for her career, this was about getting the well-known fact of their long-ago relationship out in the open so the Republicans couldn’t use it as a campaign issue later.
Of course, some Democrats of lesser political astuteness were initially outraged by Brown seemingly dredging up old news, until it finally dawned on them what the wily old political mastermind was up to. As for the dunderheads at Fox, they still haven’t figured out they had been had, snookered by an 86-year-old political genius.
And make no mistake — Harris is going to turn into Biden’s political pitbull, taking a bite out of every Republican backside in sight. Right-wing pundits are trying to make political hay out of how Harris tore into Biden during the Democratic debates, but they ain’t seen shit yet. Just wait until she clamps her fangs on Mike Pence’s britches. And all the while Brown will be laughing his ass off.
Nonetheless, this is not to say there isn’t, unfortunately, a virulent strain of misogyny coursing through the veins of some black men and it’s showing in some of the negative comments some of my brothers are making about Kamala Harris. Knowing where this misogyny emanates from as I do — its root cause — still doesn’t make it any more palatable or less odious.
Like many other negative characteristics black men (and some women too) are freighted down with, carrying around like anchors holding them back from being all they can be, misogyny’s roots are embedded in the period of 400 years of black enslavement. However, knowing its origins still in no way excuses it.
When enslaved men of African descent dared not to look a white man in the eye on pain of ending up on the business end of a lash, all they could do was pick the cotton, shine the shoes and pretend to be happy while carrying out the menial tasks. Meanwhile, his mate (legally he couldn’t make her his wife) received better treatment since slavemasters were often engaging in sexual congress with any black female he so desired. The sick level of concupiscence exhibited by slaveholders was, to a large extent, what caused the Confederacy to be born and what caused over 600,000 men to die in a destructive Civil War.
So the black man, not being able to truly be a man in the face of fierce white oppression, became jealous of — and then eventually in some cases came to despise — his mate. And since he was physically stronger, the less intelligent of the enslaved men beat and dominated their mates similarly to how they were being beat and dominated, and all too often she in turn took it out on the children — something that is still all too prevalent in the black community.
But, alas, knowing the root cause of a problem is only the beginning. Now we have to try to go about fixing it. And a great place to start would be for black men to quit this hating on Kamala Harris. Indeed, some black men claim to favor tRump because they see him as the alpha male (a view they would like to have of themselves) but how they should be viewing him in reality is the reincarnation of the slavemaster, because that’s what he really desires to become, and if he is reelected, he will have achieved his goal.
One Response to “MANSFIELD: Willie Brown & Black Misogyny”
Marv Bremmers
I hope they don’t follow this fool: Trump. He is far from an alpha male. He’s a con artist, that’s it. He has no use for you or me. His followers are basically useful idiots for him. The sooner they figure this out, the better.