“We Shall Have Our Manhood”: Black Macho, the Black Cultural Pathology Paradigm, and the Million Man March

Abstract

Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman was released in 1978 amidst a storm of controversy. Academics, political commentators, feminists and non-feminists, and even Faith Ringold, the author’s mother, criticized it.¹ Darryl E. Pinckney’s review in the Village Voice is suggestive of the tenor of most commentators on the book. While Pinckney credited Wallace with bringing sexism to light in the Black community in the broadest sense, he nevertheless dubbed Black Macho “an elusive work … [whose] pages offer autobiography, historical information, sociology, and mere opinion dressed up to resemble analysis. It is a polemic, seriously felt, sometimes scathing, often repetitious. ”² It was criticized, not only in the Voice, but also in the pages of the New York Times, Freedomways, the Black Scholar, and other leading public forums.³ In 1979, in fact, The Black Scholar dedicated an entire issue to a discussion of Black Macho and Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow was enuf, that featured over twenty prominent African American scholars, political commentators, and activists, including June Jordan, Maulauna Karenga, Audre Lorde, Julianne Malveaux, Alvin Poussaint, Robert Staples, and Kalamu ya Salaam, among others.⁴