I have to say, I am sick to death of people making derogatory comments about black women. As a student on a college campus put it, “Black women are the bottom of the food chain”, and yet people have the audacity to take offense at our every effort to come up.

“Black women don’t take into consideration the suffering of others”? Are you serious? It may be because we don’t see anyone who is getting it quite as bad as us. Don’t forget, you still have the good fortune of being born male, and there are real privileges that come with that. So we do consider your suffering, it’s just that it is dwarfed by our own. Everyone is going to have their own story, and some people’s troubles will far outstrip others even those in ‘more disadvantaged’ categories, but on a general level it is a social disadvantage to be black. We both suffer that. It is also a social disadvantage to be a woman. You don’t suffer that. So unless you’re disabled or old, quit dismissing our coping with a very real dual social disadvantage as us simply ‘competing for who suffered the most’.

That’s about 20% of the answer.

The other 80% is that no-one helps us. I’m saying this as a working woman who pays the bills, pays school debt and rent, helps out my family, etc., not as someone on welfare. It’s the truth, ask any self-supporting black woman: no-one helps us. We’re expected to get an education (despite being shunned at college as undateable – if you went to a mostly-white school where even the black guys prefer their cup of joe with lots of sugar and cream but no black coffee – which makes our college experience very different from “average”). We’re expected to hold down jobs (where our colleagues express surprise when they find out we’re not just secretaries or receptionists but actually have our own offices). Corporate America is still white, so we’re expected to do our bit to please the white people (such as getting our hair done every week lest it look “too black”, not complaining about our boss bringing us along when he’s meeting black clients but never when he isn’t, being allowed to be offended when a colleague says something racist but being expected to forgive him immediately upon the weakest of apologies which sometimes aren’t even apologies just carve-outs i.e. ‘I didn’t mean *you*’ or ‘you’re different’). Maybe we have a client dinner that night after work and if it’s not bad enough being the only black in the whole restaurant much less at the table, some random person does something humiliating like ask when we’re going to take their order, assuming we’re part of the staff even though we just walked in with our nicely straightened hair and our i’ll-forgive-your-racist-hatred smiles and asked for a table in our persecuted-childhood-but-ebonic-free english. We tried so hard our whole lives to get to this point, and some fool tore it all down with a few careless words (he might as well have said, “yer still a n*gger to me”) and now even our colleagues are embarrassed for us.

So after a hard and humiliating day when we’ve been nothing but stepped on and over, we come home to you and you’ve had an equally grueling day because you’re dealing with the same sh*t we are, but then, all of a sudden, you pull the male privilege card out of your back pocket, and your needs are expected to be catered to over ours! Your grueling day is over, but our night shift of cooking, cleaning, laundry, watching sports without complaint and attending to your libido has only just begun! I understand *mutual* support, we’ve both had a rough day struggling against the world, so we need comfort from each other at the end of it. But the number of times I’ve heard black men make allusions to “white women treat us better” and when I ask for clarification I find out what they really mean is “white women put our needs above their own”. Why would your needs belong above my own when I’ve just been through the same sh*t you did?! Aren’t our experiences equal? Why are you supposed come first?! Ah, because you’re a man. And it’s part of your male privilege to expect catering at home regardless of whatever trauma the caterer herself has just been through. So what those men REALLY mean is “white women respect our male privilege and never question it’s integrity”.

Well, we black women have the same ancestors you do, so we know the battle our ancestors fought and won (with help) to secure the rights we enjoy today. So, as children of slavery who know how our people suffered under “white privilege”, we get real antsy about the assertion of any kind of privilege, period, and that includes male privilege. As black people, in our collective experience we’ve been told that person X is better than us, just ’cause (they’re white). And now as black women, we’re told that the needs of person XY have to come before our own, just ’cause (they’re male). Anything less than our full and unqualified acknowledgment of male privilege is deemed “not knowing how to treat a man.”

I can tell from the article and the comments that you lot are working from a caricature of a stereotypical rabid man-hating black woman who is secretly a ball-busting lesbian, and drawing all of your conclusions from this illusory type. I challenge you: get to know the women you’re talking about this way. Because they each come with a story and maybe if you knew the particulars, you would be appalled by the unequivocal assumption of privilege by the men who did them dirty. I hear about it all the time, the law student who works 9-5 to help pay the bills then takes night classes for her law degree and when she finally gets home at 10:30pm, her husband expects her to cook something so he can eat it for lunch the next day, oh and iron his light blue shirt, the one with the stripes, so he can wear it to work tomorrow. But that’s totally reasonable, right? I mean, she’s his wife, she needs to treat her man right. Besides, I’m sure she’s blowing the whole situation out of proportion by having a breakdown, you know what these angry black women are like…

But on the issues with black women and black men, I have to admit that black women don’t take into consideration the suffering of others. Sometimes I feel like we’re always trying to one up each other on who’s struggled the most, which is just plain ridiculous. I think we’ve created a false equation where struggling = strength. The problem with this equation is that there are about 6 Billion people on this planet and out of that six, there are probably 5.9 billion who can say that they’ve experienced some form of struggle/pain. I think sometimes we forget that struggling is a world wide phenomenon, not something that’s exclusive to black women.

It’s things like this that make me wonder for a brief moment if Republicans are right about government help. I don’t think people would try to play up their victim status or belittle the suffering of others if they didn’t think they had to compete for the sympathy of the government. we would probably have more compassion for each other if we didn’t feel like competing for the compassion of others was a possibility.

Its a lot like what happened in the Garden of Eden. Instead of Adam and Eve just admitting to God that what they did was wrong, they tried to place blame on other people. Adam tried to blame Eve, and Eve tried to blame the snake. And in the same way, Black women try to blame black men and black men blame the system. Perhaps if Adam and Eve would have just admitted their wrongdoing and take responsibility for it, maybe God would have allowed them both to stay in the Garden. But because they were trying to compete for God’s sympathy, they both got kicked out.