Please don't misunderstand. I hate those Negroes who would bean count for black faces in Antarctica so they can get airtime whining about "the lack of diversity" blah blah. Start a school! Take in some foster kids! Run for office! If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, cheap race-mongering is the last refuge of an idiot. "Niggardly," indeed. Anytime you want someone with a ghetto pass to tell them to shut up for you, give a sister a call. I'm talking about something else, something more than "gotcha, white folks," something y'all won't be able to dismiss as easily as all that. I'm talking about something that grieves black women, that breaks our hearts so much I have never had a conversation with another black woman about it. Or, at least not one that dared venture further than "I bet he's got a white girl" as a gorgeous brother passed by. Our hearts are broken because we are unloved. More than that: Black women are unlovable, or so the world tells us every day. Most often, it's a sucker punch.

Minding my own business recently, I was reading my friend's excellent nonfiction book, "Random Family: Love, Sex and Trouble in the Bronx," which chronicles the intersected lives of a hardscrabble constellation of Latinas. In lamenting the loss of a lover to a rival, one woman was dumbfounded that anyone would prefer a woman "with hair like a black girl's" to her. I am ugly by definition. Usually, though, our degendering and masculinization is pretty easy to see coming. I watch the promos for my hero Chris Rock's new series about his Bed-Stuy adolescence and cringe when his "mother" traumatizes her son with bellowed, emasculating, dehumanizing threats like: "Boy, I will SLAP yo' name out the phone book, then call Ma Bell and tell her I did it." Hilarious, no? He looks about 10 as she terrorizes him with psychotic threats that would make Uday and Qusay proud. Who would want to bed that shrieking harridan? Who'd want to live next door to or hire such a bitch? Bets are off on how far into the series it will be before this black harpy (how redundant) is swiveling her neck and reducing a good man to shreds with her razor tongue. I have a 4-year-old son and an almost 2-year-old daughter who would go into cardiac arrest if I spoke to them that way, even in jest. Forgive me, Chris, but your "mother" proves that Zora Neale Hurston nailed it when she noted that black women are "the mules of the world."

She was speaking of how hard most of our lives were in the 1920s and 1930s, she was talking about the patriarchy and misogyny within the black community that keeps so many of us mute chambermaids who are regularly beaten, but perhaps most important, she was talking about what that hardness did to us, or rather, to others in dealing with us. Our ability to survive atrocity, to make something from nothing, to bounce back day after day -- somehow, this makes the world see us as rhino-skinned, never soft. Quadruple-lunged, never asthmatic. Incapable of giggling, blushing or shutting the hell up. Sisters are essentialized as indefatigable, never in need of a door held open, a chair pulled out. A "how are you doing, really?" I have to believe that somewhere in there is also the belief that the niceties are wasted on us, coarse cows that we are. Bears are happy shitting in the woods and "sistaz" ain't got no time for no nonsense like sweet talk, a man who rises when we do, or a lover to whisper naughty things to in the dark. And we don't need no stinking flowers either, or at least Jamie Foxx's hospitalized mother didn't; in "Collateral," she rejected them and belittled him for his foolishness. The bedraggled dandelions I got for Mother's Day this year will shrivel up and blow away before I'll part with them.

Owen, Vince: We long for those things. It's a misery to black woman why our strength, the strength that kept our people from extinction and which holds the community together yet, makes us seem manly somehow, as if no white woman has ever roughened her pink hands or survived rape for her family's sake. Or been a bitch. Why is it so hard to fathom that we can raise our children alone (if need be, rarely by preference), work two jobs and still look good in a miniskirt. Still want to look good in a miniskirt. Sisters are simply not seen as either ladylike or, to put it bluntly, fuckable. Rapeable, certainly, as the history of slavery and Jim Crow prove, just not fuckable.

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