They’re starting to think .I’ve got a touch of the tarbrush down on Broadway and 96th. Every month since last May now, I’ve bought five or six black magazines. They provide instructive reading—if only because they’re so similar to the correlative white publications. Some difference, of course, is inescapable. Black men get razor bumps when they shave. Black women wear nut and cocoa brown base makeup. Both sexes are, to a white reader, concerned excessively with hair kink and how you cool it out. Still, for white and black, yuppie and buppie, for Essence magazine and, say, Redbook, the Jeffersonian pursuit of upscale Scotch, audio equipment, and tight inner thighs is separate but equal. Most text has been written by women to women (no men whatever appear on the Essence masthead). And yet, despite this thorough equivalence, one urgent and disturbing matter has, for pure intensity, engrossed all black magazines and set them somewhat apart.
Which is to say: black men and black women seem intent on destroying each other. No less than that. The bitterness of their antagonism is brilliant and deep: it makes any parallel white gender clash look like video badminton by comparison. A woman has this to say in Essence: “My basic assumption is that men are damaged. In their own way they’re mutants like a species that’s got something missing.” Black gender debate has, more or less, that sort of elevated tone. A man writes in Ebony. “I have found myself and other Black men who are fed up with the attitude of Black women and their money-hungry games.” There is historical and cultural precedent for that rancor. It must be seen as inveterate to some degree. Yet this habitual friction has been exacerbated decisively now by the Great Male Drought.
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