So my mind has been heavy lately as I have been contemplating the relationships that I see  within my community, and I cannot deny the ties that I see between the treatment of black people during slavery and the current state of relationships and family building now.  As a black woman I have a vested interest in seeing the success of the black family, but I cannot deny certain toxic attitudes that I see prevail, which I believe stem directly from slavery and the subsequent subjugation and mistreatment thereafter.  During slavery, black men saw the black woman defeminized as she was put in place as the white mistresses mamie and wet-nurse, and as the white man’s bed winch (essentially unwilling, unacknowledged, illegitimate side chick), and nanny to the white child with her mothering nurture of the white child being given precedence over the rearing and nurturing of her own children.  Subconsciously I think this subjugation of the black woman magnified the inadequacy and inferiority that black men felt, so they offset the negative feelings by placing the burdens of that trauma onto their perspectives of black women.  This toxicity was conflated as black men experienced false imprisonment post slavery: although they expected black women to be understanding of the hardships that they faced, and “hold them down” during their times of turmoil, I believe that they likewise developed a negative attitude of black women due to their acceptance of less because of their own perceived lack of value, and blamed their mothers and partners for creating them and offspring that have a phenotype that is deemed inferior.  As black men witnessed the degradation of black women in a state where they were powerless to change the condition they began to believe that the treatment enacted was deserved based on intrinsic qualities and thus black women are less deserving and “beneath” gentle, caring, protective treatment.

        So how does this manifest in current society?  We see men within the black community who view black woman as having little value and expect them to make themselves easily available to black men while being fully submissive and accepting of their desires, or seek to devalue a black woman who believes that she is of value through game playing and orchestrating toxic scenarios that reinforce that the woman cannot find and is not entitled to a man who is operating on a higher playing field; that black women should not expect positive, encouraging building behaviors from black men, and furthermore black women should accept a black man regarding them as items whom are not worthy as humans…it’s tough.  Likewise, some black men view the children that they create as subsequent, and that is not to say that there are not positive black men, I was raised by one so I know they exist, I am just speaking to a specific demographic within this post, and I will speak to women in a separate post.  Yet I see a community of black men subscribing to this mentality and it is toxic and it needs to be addressed 

          Specifically men who view women as the sole proprietors and sole raisers of the children.  These men have perpetuated the mentalities from slavery where the women were separated from the men, and post slavery the women have raised the children with minimal male influence be it due to separation, incarceration, etc. so they came to recognize that women could successfully nurture children into survival with her action and his minimal input, therefore they may have overvalued minimal input or a woman’s capacity, and based off of limited expectations they viewed their offspring as successful despite various psychological imbalance, because their children were able to achieve certain minimal achievements despite the absence of a father during certain pivotal developmental periods.  Low expectations prevailed.  Additionally, some black people adopted reduced expectations of success, therefore they attributed minimal access to making it and made substantial success the rarity, as though they were not inherently expected to access it or be  able to access it.  It became some special gift versus the norm, and so many black people became accustomed to mediocrity, and viewed typical success as a goal worthy of deep sacrifice, with an emphasize on black women accepting extraordinary pain from their men to be attached to a man that could achieve that success.  Thus successful men became a commodity instead of a community lynch pin that elevates the community.  Black men began to expect black women to bear all kinds of dishonesty and psychological burdens, and manipulations in order to be aligned with a specific kind of black man, and her characteristics and qualifications were irrelevant because she is supposed to feel lucky to be aligned with a specific type of black man because he is rare; thus the black woman is further devalued.