Super Sapphire Mom

Somehow it touched my super

sapphire nerve. Black women are strong, competent, more assured (behaving) women. Though there is historical background to support this contention, there is also a great, and greatly debilitating (to Black women) myth around this very issue. This is what I call the super sapphire myth.

Because Black women subscribe to and suffer from this syndrome, we carry the guilt for each and every Black failure. Because our communi- ties, in addition to the dominant

culture, subscribes to the notion that Black women are so strong, so capable, and so adept at improvising, we suffer immense emotional abandonment and abuse.

We are taken for granted. We

are raped, beaten, brutalized and treated with the vilest of insensitivities, in part, because we are viewed as strong, and full of stamina da da da da da

It is true that we are strong.

...

The

myth is that our strength is immeasurable and insurmountable. We have character and stamina and substance. The myth is that they are incontrovertibly intrinsic and equally applicable qualities.

We are skillful improvisors.

Not because, as the myth presumes, that we are emasculating, manipulating matriarchs, who want to pull the entire load alone. But, rather, because abject poverty, coupled with spiritual improverishment and motivational deprivation are miserably oppressive, stifling to the human spirit and in need of addressing. We, more than anyone else, have a right to critize Black men. Histori- cally, we've babied our male children because we knew their lives were in constant jeopardy. During times of slavery and immediately thereafter, Black women had greater mobility. This ought not be misconstrued to believe that Black women in any way had a higher social status during this period, or any other period of American history. The opposite of this is true.

Black women were viewed as being so low and powerless as not to pose much of a threat.

Anyway, Black women had

greater mobility, and were, in general considered less of a physical threat. If a Black male "stepped out of line, death was a real possibility, and an ugly gruelsome death was a real probability. So we trained our male children to be seemingly passive, to shuffle and jive, to say what was expected but to do little or nothing.

We raised our female children to be family, personally and communally responsible.

What was then situationally appropriate is now non-germane and no longer applicable. Yet we still raise our daughters to be responsible caretakers, while we spoonfeed our sons, and ask nothing in return.

We've every right to criticize, to ask and demand that they explore, examine and modify inappropriate culturally-defined behavior. We, as Black women, need to seriously evaluate and adjust our childrearing patterns. We make bums of our sons, then hate them because of it!

1982 Yasmin A. Sayyed

georgia

on my mind

green plum bushes the railroad track bare

brown feet,

red dirt

1981 doris davenport