photo by Alex Lear

NO LOVE FOR FREE

Scandal is one of several successful television programs created by Shonda Rhimes, a veteran writer and producer who previously had a major hit with Grey’s Anatomy. Based on the viewership garnered by two of her programs, Scandal and How To Get Away With Murder, the ShondaLand (which is Ms. Rhimes’ production company) tag line could be “we own Thursday nights.” The two programs ran back-to-back and easily beat out all competition for the coveted timeslot.

Both programs feature a strong, socially respected, intelligent, black woman as the lead, and on both shows the black woman’s romantic interest is a white male—indeed, Olivia Pope of Scandal, has two such men, one of whom is the president of the United States. Significantly, both women might be described as post-racial in their social attitudes. Moreover, throughout the run of the two series, whenever racial issues are directly addressed, it is the parents of the leads who focus attention on those issues. The implication is that racial matters is a major concern of the older generation but of negligible importance to the so-called post-racial generation. Judging from the conversations between parent and offspring, we might even conclude that “race” consumes the parents. For the children identifying themselves by race and identifying with the conditions and experiences of other blacks is simply not part of their day-to-day orientation.

Neither one of the strong black women has any black friends or peers whom they relate to. Olivia Pope’s black male gladiator got offed when he hooked up with a woman from the middle east—the ironic politics of that are too obvious to require further explanation. Pope also has a fling with a man whom she believes is a random handsome hunk whom she picked up in an upscale drinking establishment, but he turns out to be an agent working for her spy master father. Ms. Keating had a secret paramour who ends up jailed on suspicion of murder. One dead, one working against women, and one incarcerated, I guess you could call that keeping it real.

Professional black women are presented sans black friends, even on a casual basis. How black can one be if one does not even have any black associates, not to mention if one lives without any black friends and/or significant others? No surprise, both of these leads are childless. Without stating it directly, these programs strongly suggest that if a black woman is successful socially and career wise, she is also isolated and lonely.

A significant subtext is that personal happiness is not a possibility for professional black women. Moreover, with the back stories of the parents, there is also the assessment that happiness never existed for black females. Both leads had traumatic childhoods.

Olivia Pope of Scandal had parents who neglected her. Moreover, as an adult, Ms. Pope discovers she never really knew who are parents actually were and the clandestine activities in which they were engaged. Olivia Pope grew up alienated from both her racial community and from her biological parents.

Anilese Keating of How To Get Away With Murder is a highly respected professor of law who ends up an accessory to the murder of her philandering husband. Moreover, Anilese is revealed to have been the victim of sexual assault as a child—she was raped by a family member. Instead of offering her sympathy when Anilese reveals the sad story, Anilese’s mother bitterly berates her: that’s what men do. The mother knew. And not only knew, the mother had her own experiences of kin-generated sexual trauma. Women in general, black women in particular, most all of them have had sexual trauma, or at least assaults and/or experiences that could easily had slid into outright rape or physical abuse.

Cecily Tyson played Anilese’s mother. How many black women are walking around today bearing internal sexual scars that they hide from others, even hide from themselves. You suffer the abuse and than for sanity’s sake, just to be able to make it day-to-day, you hide your sufferings from yourself. Or ignore it. Who wants to hear another story of another black woman getting raped. Been there. Heard that. Let’s move on.

But how do we really move on and at what cost? How do we move on if we can’t even acknowledge what has happened to us—and make no mistake what happens to black women directly affects all of us, for after all it is black women who birth us, who embrace (or with good reason, decline to embrace) us. You want to know a definition of high maintenance: black women taking care of themselves, their children, their lovers, their friends. Loving black people in America is high maintenance, very high maintenance.

Love costs dollars and in this society we make only pennies a day. So we barter love. We rob Peter and put off paying Paul, just to be able to make a down payment on the mortgage on our hearts, the lean on our souls which the devil daily extracts as the toll for being here and daring to love someone.

And so I ask. Who is to love the professional black woman in modern America, and at what cost? Who can love her? Can she afford to love herself?

This is America. There is no love for free. And, to paraphrase brother Fred D., we may not get all the love we pay for, but we will certainly pay for all the love we get.

2.

One of the main mantras of the American dream is “get a good education so you can climb up the economic ladder.” But for the professional Black woman, education is in and of itself no guarantee of personal success; indeed, the paradox is that higher education is a barrier to personal success if the measure of personal success is a co-equal mate and two or three children.

The way professionalism operates in this society requires a major investment of time and resources to ascend to the upper reaches. The gender structure of this society makes it possible for a man to have a wife, a helpmate who takes care of the home front, i.e. the house, the children, the myriad of minor social obligations from shopping for groceries, to cleaning the house and clothing, to church and school functions for the children, not to mention being a hostess for visitors and arranging the family social calendar. In this society a professional woman doesn’t get a wife. Nor does she get the emotional pillow of someone who is socially viewed as the sidekick who has your back and provides succor and relief during inevitable moments of stress and strain. Again, the professional woman does not get a wife.

When we add the racial factors both on the job and on the home front, well, it is overwhelming, a chasm too deep and too wide for most individuals to clear in a single bound, a chasm that the majority of professional black women not only can’t cross but also a chasm that will swallow you whole if you fall in it. What’s a professional black woman to do?

The problem is not a gender problem although there is an undeniable gender element involved in this conundrum. Women not only give birth but are also the primary nurturers of infants. A male need not be present at the birth of babies he participated in producing, except in rare cases, the mother is present at the moment of birth. Moreover, even if he wants to, the male is not physically equipped to feed the infant. Biological necessity dictates that most women develop nurturing skills, while most men never even think about developing those skills.

Of course, the deeper truth is that although biology may provide a condition, biology is not necessarily a social determinant. Men can be nurturers, indeed, they ought to be trained to nurture but that is not the society we live in. That is not the world that the professional woman strives to succeed in. What we have is a social structure that is not only unequal, the social structure is actively anti-female in terms of climbing the economic ladder as a professional.

But it is the extra-biological aspects that I believe are most harmful to black professional women. The fact that so many black men are in prison creates an imbalance if not an outright shortage of available male peers. To put it bluntly, who is a professional black woman to marry, especially if she is seeking someone who is her educational equal?

A society that condemns the broken black family and at the same time incarcerates and makes a felon out of black males for non-violent offenses is the height of social evil. The felon finds it near impossible to get a decent job. In most states a convicted felon cannot vote and is generally socially stigmatized.

This is not new news but it is extremely bad news: black professional women have a long and lonely road to trod. We need to acknowledge the difficulties they face. Second, we need to clearly understand the systemic circumstances engendering and engulfing the social and personal conditions that professional black women face. We need to clearly critique those social conditions. And then we can possibly set about the hard but not impossible task of confronting, challenging and changing this society into a different paradigm of human existence.

Declaring women the equal of men while keeping the current social order in place is not the answer, anymore than simply putting black people in charge of some aspects of society is an adequate answer. The system itself, the social order, the beliefs and behaviors engendered and encouraged in the American dream is more the problem than any particular or individual action. Role reversal doesn’t work because the problem is not the roles we play but the system that dictates what roles are possible and how the hierarchy of those roles is determined and manifested.

The question is not our lack of power within the system but rather the system itself and the human relationships that the system encourages as well as discourages. Yes, who is president matters but ultimately what really matters at the fundamental social level is the nature of the society a person becomes president of.

Meanwhile, back on the home front, in route to getting to where we need to be, we should, at the very least, learn to be more understanding of where we are and what it costs to be who we are. We need more understanding of each other as we struggle to become better. The key is not simply the understanding. The key is the struggle, and what it will take for us to successfully struggle.

Olivia Pope, stylish as she wants to be and as effective as she is solving other people’s problems is not the answer. Anilese Keating as brilliant as she is as professional, a scholar and mentor, is no answer to the personal problems of trauma and loneliness affecting professional black women. No doubt these shows are entertaining; that’s not the question. Or, as we used to say back in the day: alright the system is the devil, so what are we going to do about it?

And that’s the question we all have to answer, the question that ultimately we all do answer through our actions and inactions: what are we going to do about this mess in which we are mired?

—Kalamu ya Salaam