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Deals With the Devil: And Other Reasons to Riot
Reflecting an African-American feminist point of view, a collection of essays and articles explores such topics as politics, culture, mass media, male-female relationships, rap music, Spike Lee, and emotional and physical survival. Reprint.
207 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
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About the author
Pearl Cleage
43 books590 followersPearl Cleage is an African-American playwright, essayist, novelist, poet and political activist. She is currently the Playwright in Residence at the Alliance Theatre and at the Just Us Theater Company. Cleage is a political activist. She tackles issues at the crux of racism and sexism, and is known for her feminist views, particularly regarding her identity as an African-American woman. Her works are highly anthologized and have been the subject of many scholarly analyses. Many of her works across several genres have earned both popular and critical acclaim. Her novel What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day (1997) was a 1998 Oprah's Book Club selection.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
January 29, 2019
This is my first time reading anything by Pearl Cleage and I am floored! She was so honest, so forthright, so beautiful, so pissed off and so candid in how she wrote about any and everything facing black women and black people in America. The fact that this book was published during the Regan/Bush/Clinton years but still resonates today is both amazing and disturbing. She speaks truthfully about violence and discrimination against black women, and it's sadly still happening today. She fervently goes after black men who are either disingenuous about their surface love for our community or are deliberately harming their women, and it's still going on today. The sign of a great writer is if they can piss you off, challenge you, make you uncomfortable and make you think all in one setting. Cleage did that and more for me in this book. From politics to pop culture to relationships to motherhood to black sisterhood, she made such an emphatic and desperately needed statement with this book. She essentially slaps all of black people across the face and tells us not only to wake up, but to tool up, think up and speak up. And to do it with feeling.
September 19, 2009
"Mad at Miles" is one of the best pieces on domestic violence and community, any community, accountability ever. This is a tremendously important book, one that inspired to think about sex and race oppression in new ways. But that one essay is burned into my brain, and I'm glad of it. Highly recommended.
December 28, 2017
Great book that explores what it means to be black and woman and having to navigate through society as a black woman, a feminist at that. Although published in 1993, the themes in Deals with the Devil, and Other Reasons to Riot are still very much relevant today. Deals with the Devil is comparable to Roxane Gay's (2014) Bad Feminist, but for whatever reason I could stomach Pearl Cleage a bit more easily than Gay's book though they deal with the same themes.
June 11, 2008
This book changed my life.
December 1, 2010
This book gave me some insight into the mind of Pearl Cleage and her opinions on a variety of topics. The topics ranged from rape and prevention, domestic violence, AIDS/HIV, Black Nationalist, Feminisim, education, child rearing, relationships between Black men and women, and Black men in general.
Pearl has a somewhat skewed perspective of Black men, and their duties to Black women and to the race. I believe, in my humble opinion, that she expects more from Black men and has been disappointed in what they have been doing for their race and for their women. She has a distaste for them, and is not ashamed or quiet about how she feels about Black men in general.
She is also a feminist, and stands up for the rights of women, and more importantly for the rights of women of color. She loves her sisterhood, and stands up for them in all ways. She has no qualms about the importance of how women should be treated, and will give step by step instruction on how to love a Black woman.
I did enjoy this book and her opinions, however, she was very fierce on many subjects involving Black men, and I did not think she gave them the benefit of the doubt in many examples. She groups them all together as if there are not many successful or well-behaved Black men who do not participate in domestic violence or some other self-hate activities.
Her book read like a scattered stream of thought, and did not have a plain direction to each chapter, but each chapter was full of important ideas and examples for the Black race to take heed to.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. However, I would rate this book a 3.5, and recommend it to others, especially Black Nationalist and Feminists.
Pearl has a somewhat skewed perspective of Black men, and their duties to Black women and to the race. I believe, in my humble opinion, that she expects more from Black men and has been disappointed in what they have been doing for their race and for their women. She has a distaste for them, and is not ashamed or quiet about how she feels about Black men in general.
She is also a feminist, and stands up for the rights of women, and more importantly for the rights of women of color. She loves her sisterhood, and stands up for them in all ways. She has no qualms about the importance of how women should be treated, and will give step by step instruction on how to love a Black woman.
I did enjoy this book and her opinions, however, she was very fierce on many subjects involving Black men, and I did not think she gave them the benefit of the doubt in many examples. She groups them all together as if there are not many successful or well-behaved Black men who do not participate in domestic violence or some other self-hate activities.
Her book read like a scattered stream of thought, and did not have a plain direction to each chapter, but each chapter was full of important ideas and examples for the Black race to take heed to.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. However, I would rate this book a 3.5, and recommend it to others, especially Black Nationalist and Feminists.
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August 11, 2011The book is a collection of essays written in the late 80's and early 90's. While I generally enjoy Pearl Cleage's writing, this is book is not a favorite. I don't enjoy rant-as-book, regardless of the writer. Again, I note the essays were written a while ago, so while I can understand some of the arguments made, I cannot say that Ms. Cleage's statements describe my life either as a woman, or an African American. The essays are prone to overgeneralizations, and includes Mad at Miles, which is the title of a another book here. It is possible to find supportive black men who lift you up rather than beat you down; it is possible to celebrate your feminism without broadly describing men as abusive, ignorant, insensitive brutes. Such stereotypes are harmful, not helpful. While some of her arguments made sense, many of them sounded like bourgeois benevolence to me. Ms. Cleage's upbringing: middle class; educated parents, two-parents leads her to suggest Utopian solutions like, instead of moving your family out of the ghetto where there are no decent supermarkets, stay in the ghetto and open your own supermarket. If you're in the ghetto, chances are, fresh vegetables are not the worst of your complaints, and by moving, you are solving a lot more of the problems.
April 3, 2025
“I understand that nothing they do means we can’t go out and celebrate our existence” ~ Pearl Cleage
I have this written on a white board propped up on my desk that I look at every day. Pearl Cleage explores essential ideas that I am thankful to have heard about as a young black woman in college. I hope to hold the love, solitude, and amazon warrior strength she talks about in her book. Her 3-4 page chapters remind me of Oprah’s “What I Know For Sure” with how heavy hitting each chapter is despite being so short. I adore her descriptive style. I wonder how her work was received in 1993, especially knowing that her words are truly everlasting by being relevant today.
Shoutout to Dr. Tikenya Foster-Singletary’s “Pearl Cleage and Free Womanhood” for giving me the push I needed to pick up this book.
I have this written on a white board propped up on my desk that I look at every day. Pearl Cleage explores essential ideas that I am thankful to have heard about as a young black woman in college. I hope to hold the love, solitude, and amazon warrior strength she talks about in her book. Her 3-4 page chapters remind me of Oprah’s “What I Know For Sure” with how heavy hitting each chapter is despite being so short. I adore her descriptive style. I wonder how her work was received in 1993, especially knowing that her words are truly everlasting by being relevant today.
Shoutout to Dr. Tikenya Foster-Singletary’s “Pearl Cleage and Free Womanhood” for giving me the push I needed to pick up this book.
March 26, 2013
There is often a tangled, thorny forest within American society that women of African descent have to struggle through on a regular basis as it pertains to the stereotypes, insensitivity, and even abuse that they encounter, even with African-American men, and Cleage's words of passion and dissent cut through the weeds like a chainsaw through a tree trunk. Born into an African-American home that embodied and treasured advocacy for the rights of the Black community, Pearl Cleage grew up seeing life from a unique vantage point: her heart and intellect was squarely ensconced in a place of Afrocentrism and focused activism, but her appearance was of that of those who created the laws she and her family struggled against. An interesting position to be sure and one I can certainly relate to as a white-appearing woman of African descent. However, the cultural reinforcement of her family and friends and fiery, admirable dedication to a life of social justice prevented her from falling into any type of confused/self-loathing predicament. As she describes this unique experience:
"I tell this story here for two reasons. One, to show that I understand the complexity of being part of a racial sub-group that is both punished and rewarded for the genes it shares with its former masters, and two, because my mother was right. Being a light-skinned black American isn't necessarily cause for condemnation, but it must bring with it a recognition that the only way to repay the debt owed for the unearned privilege afforded by the strange circumstances of racism is to understand that to whom much is given, much is expected."
Meaningful words.
Her book "Deals With The Devil" covers a wide range of topics--everything from her personal inspirations growing up as a child in 1950's Detroit, Michigan, the physical and emotional abuses African-American women run up across within their own community, to famed jazz musician Miles Davis's appalling treatment of his wife Cicely Tyson. This specific anecdote is recounted by Ms. Cleage via the man's own autobiography, in a chapter called "Mad At Miles", and includes a chilling scene of the legendary actress trembling with fear in her own basement while her husband laughs and jokes with the policeman above her head. Pearl calls for Black women to in her words, "break his albums, burn his tapes and scratch up his CDs until he acknowledges and apologizes and agrees to rethink his position on The Woman Question".
As far as I know, Miles didn't do any of those things before his death in 1991, and usually I don't let people's personal lives interfere with my enjoyment of their art/performance, but the sheer aspect of his contempt for his wife's feelings, and the sheer passion of Pearl Cleage's 'call to action' to NOT respect men who DON'T respect women, has me nodding in agreement with her and beginning to understand just what kind of change Cleage is demanding.
Cleage continues to dig deeply into the recesses of the misogyny facing African-American women within their own community and takes a hard look at the attitudes she feels certain African-American men hold towards the women in their lives.
Domestic violence and rape are two issues that are extensively discussed in the book with heart-breaking accounts of Black women she personally encountered and in certain cases helped, who were the victims of violence. Her book opens with stories of her fellow sisters in both gender and culture having horrifying acts of violence inflicted on them by their husbands and boyfriends...from a woman threatened to be set on fire to a woman having to flee abduction with a gun held to her head. In her own words, Cleage comments that "Domestic violence is the front line of the war against women". And if there was any opposing warrior in the front lines against this war, Cleage would be it. With her pen, she rips apart the mentalities that feed into an abuse of women, accepting no excuses of victimhood from any man who victimizes women of color, and she makes a passionate cry for understanding, respect and mutual cooperation between Black men and women in her own efforts to decry the gender conflict that she perceived was occurring with alarming frequency within the Black community. There are other topics she tackles, and superbly so, such as sexual freedom regarding Black women and the responsibility that goes along with that freedom and her personal commitment to pan-African advocacy, but the real crux of the book falls along the path of Black women's struggle against abuses stemming inward and outward, how they can liberate and empower themselves, as well as extend this empowerment in a demonstration of advocacy for self and community. It is also what I feel can be described as a crucial part of the larger, INTERNATIONAL bond of sisterhood and INTERNATIONAL liberation from all manner of suppression, oppression, and degradation in which women endure.
I highly recommend this book, for although it is a bit dated in its early 1990's references (Magic Johnson, Arsenio Hall, Robin Givens & Mike Tyson), the message of empowerment and cultural pride spans across ALL generations and is both brutally and refreshingly honest in its brave approach.
"I tell this story here for two reasons. One, to show that I understand the complexity of being part of a racial sub-group that is both punished and rewarded for the genes it shares with its former masters, and two, because my mother was right. Being a light-skinned black American isn't necessarily cause for condemnation, but it must bring with it a recognition that the only way to repay the debt owed for the unearned privilege afforded by the strange circumstances of racism is to understand that to whom much is given, much is expected."
Meaningful words.
Her book "Deals With The Devil" covers a wide range of topics--everything from her personal inspirations growing up as a child in 1950's Detroit, Michigan, the physical and emotional abuses African-American women run up across within their own community, to famed jazz musician Miles Davis's appalling treatment of his wife Cicely Tyson. This specific anecdote is recounted by Ms. Cleage via the man's own autobiography, in a chapter called "Mad At Miles", and includes a chilling scene of the legendary actress trembling with fear in her own basement while her husband laughs and jokes with the policeman above her head. Pearl calls for Black women to in her words, "break his albums, burn his tapes and scratch up his CDs until he acknowledges and apologizes and agrees to rethink his position on The Woman Question".
As far as I know, Miles didn't do any of those things before his death in 1991, and usually I don't let people's personal lives interfere with my enjoyment of their art/performance, but the sheer aspect of his contempt for his wife's feelings, and the sheer passion of Pearl Cleage's 'call to action' to NOT respect men who DON'T respect women, has me nodding in agreement with her and beginning to understand just what kind of change Cleage is demanding.
Cleage continues to dig deeply into the recesses of the misogyny facing African-American women within their own community and takes a hard look at the attitudes she feels certain African-American men hold towards the women in their lives.
Domestic violence and rape are two issues that are extensively discussed in the book with heart-breaking accounts of Black women she personally encountered and in certain cases helped, who were the victims of violence. Her book opens with stories of her fellow sisters in both gender and culture having horrifying acts of violence inflicted on them by their husbands and boyfriends...from a woman threatened to be set on fire to a woman having to flee abduction with a gun held to her head. In her own words, Cleage comments that "Domestic violence is the front line of the war against women". And if there was any opposing warrior in the front lines against this war, Cleage would be it. With her pen, she rips apart the mentalities that feed into an abuse of women, accepting no excuses of victimhood from any man who victimizes women of color, and she makes a passionate cry for understanding, respect and mutual cooperation between Black men and women in her own efforts to decry the gender conflict that she perceived was occurring with alarming frequency within the Black community. There are other topics she tackles, and superbly so, such as sexual freedom regarding Black women and the responsibility that goes along with that freedom and her personal commitment to pan-African advocacy, but the real crux of the book falls along the path of Black women's struggle against abuses stemming inward and outward, how they can liberate and empower themselves, as well as extend this empowerment in a demonstration of advocacy for self and community. It is also what I feel can be described as a crucial part of the larger, INTERNATIONAL bond of sisterhood and INTERNATIONAL liberation from all manner of suppression, oppression, and degradation in which women endure.
I highly recommend this book, for although it is a bit dated in its early 1990's references (Magic Johnson, Arsenio Hall, Robin Givens & Mike Tyson), the message of empowerment and cultural pride spans across ALL generations and is both brutally and refreshingly honest in its brave approach.
June 18, 2018
Sorrow, rage, lightness, and biting insight, this collection of essays is good reading and great writing. In feeling what catharsis this must have been for its author, the damning political and historical content spreads fire to the reader.
April 24, 2018
Excellent!
September 13, 2018
A very good book on Black feminism.
July 27, 2020
Powerful!! Looking forward to reading it again.
February 18, 2021
this should be required reading for black female identifying individuals!!! so good so insightful so eye opening!!!!!
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March 28, 2010This Book Taught Me Many Important Things About Life and How Important It Is To Treat Black Women Very Carefully We As Black Men Will Not Raise Out Voice At A Black Women Not Matter How big The Misunderstanding Is We As Black Men will not Raise Our Hand To A black Woman not matter what She Says Or Does...We As Black Men Will Not Look At Black Women As Sex Objects No Matter How Big Our Sex Drive May Be...We As Black Men Will Treat Black Women With Respect Always We As Black Men Will Ask Permission Before We Assume That Its Ok To Put Our Hands On A Black Woman ...We As Black Women Will Protect Black Women From Men Who Beat Other Black Women...Whether It Be We Call The Police or Beat Their Ass Down In The Moment With Out Bare Fist I have that Is important to encourage enlighten and to help build up our black women where black men from their past dragged them down dis encouraged them and left them alone and scared full of fear in a dark world...We As Black man have a responsibility to break our damn necks if needed to help black women in any shape form and fashion....if we don't be prepared to suffer consequences..
October 27, 2020
Pearl Cleage’s “Deals with the Devil” is a brilliant collection of essays. Printed in ‘93 but VERY relevant. She tackles feminism, intersectionality, poverty, police brutality, education, domestic violence, environmentalism & more.
My favorite quote: “There is nothing more politically charged & motivated than public education. This is the place where the State teaches its citizens how to think about themselves, about their country & about their future possibilities & responsibilities”
My favorite quote: “There is nothing more politically charged & motivated than public education. This is the place where the State teaches its citizens how to think about themselves, about their country & about their future possibilities & responsibilities”
May 5, 2009
Life changing...
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December 4, 2008Deals With the Devil: And Other Reasons to Riot by Pearl Cleage (1994)
August 23, 2015
Thus, began my love of Pearl Cleage.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews