Minna Salami

When women speak in their own interests, about their lives, about the established ways women are treated, men would do well to listen. We all should. Women supporting patriarchy, the dominance of society by men, especially old, white men, maintaining the establishment, status quo, is objectively against female self-interest, against female empowerment.

Feminism has never reductively meant turning men into eunuchs. Why are many men against female empowerment–women being strong, women being powerful, women being leaders, none of that weakens men. Gender equality is not implicitly anti-male, yet somehow many man are led to believe that women in charge inevitably leads to the disempowerment of man, instead of the factual and realistic situation of supporting gender equality by the elevation of woman.

Especially in the Black community, where a significant percentage of women are “the man of the house”, such women are active supporters of Black manhood, especially in their sons. The hardest reality for many of us to grasp is that supporting feminism, that being anti-patriarchal does not mean being anti-men. Anti-patriarchy does not reductively mean anti-male; anti-patriarchal means being anti-oppression.

The social reality and intellectual understanding of feminism is generally misunderstood or outright rejected without any understanding or even debating of the spectrum of feminist advocacy and analysis. Enter Minna Salami who is an advocate and major intellectual in terms of explaining feminism, both its historic foundation and her contemporary advocacy of feminism.