Zana’s Reviews > Black. Single. Mother.: Real Life Tales of Longing and Belonging > Status Update

I was having a good time with this but I'm gonna DNF bc the author crashes out on negative reviews and any perceived slights against her book and that's just weird behavior

‘...Frustrated as I may be with dating, I’ve never become cynical or embraced a “niggas ain’t shit” way of thinking. I mean, a good number of them ain’t shit, this is a fact. But what can I say?’

Lmao

“It was also around fifth or sixth grade, during puberty, that grown men began making it known that they found me attractive. [...] I began to feel responsible for the way men (people in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties…) looked at me. Didn’t I choose to wear the shortest skirts my mother would allow me to get away with? Wasn’t I tall? And busty? And leggy? What else were guys to think?”

“...everyone has got to recognize that Black men can be both the victims of racism and the benefactors of sexism, and sometimes they do great harm with the power that sexism offers.”

‘The slavery system changed how Africans in the United States, and other slaveholding nations, experienced patriarchy because the enslaved Black man lost his ability to serve as a patriarch. Consequently, Omolade charged, “Black women lose recognition and status as ‘women.’ The only ‘women’ are those whose men have ultimate control and domination over people of color.”’

‘“Moynihan’s conclusions granted two generations of conservative policy makers permission to imagine poor Black women as domineering household managers whose unfeminine insistence on control both emasculated potential male partners and destroyed their children’s opportunities,” Harris-Perry continues.’

“How could people ever believe that sisters were just pushing out babies in order to get checks (that wouldn’t be enough to care for them in the first place)?”

This never made sense to me smh

‘The [Moynihan] report also helped conjure the 1980s “Welfare Queen” image that Ronald Reagan would eventually wield as a scapegoat for all that was wrong with the Blacks: Trifling, lazy, scamming Black women prefer to live off the government than to work, and they’ll make baby after baby to pad their checks....’

‘While Moynihan acknowledged that racism persisted and that “three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment have taken their toll on the Negro people,” it wasn’t the misdeeds of the government, nor white citizens, that could be blamed for Black plight. Instead, it was the makeup of our households: “At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family...’

“Unlike the excitement I had when I had learned about my sisters, I struggled with my feelings upon finding out about my father’s other family (his third one, for anyone who’s counting)....”

Nooooo