Read more
"According to the 2010 US Census, more than seventy percent of Black women in America are unmarried today. Sweeping in scope and expansively researched, Black Women, Black Love reveals how four hundred years of the laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis for Black women in America today. Stewart begins her investigative analysis in the earliest years of the slave state, showing that American slavery could only flourish if its stakeholders strategically disrupted and even extinguished Black love. A new wave of violence split up couples once again as millions embarked on the Great Migration to northern cities. There, they found that the welfare system of the twentieth century continued to suppress Black marriage, mandating that women remain single in order to receive government support. Yet no institution has perfected America's project of forbidding Black love with as much methodical precision as the contemporary prison industrial complex. Mass incarceration removed Black men en masse from the pool of marriageable partners, forcing Black women to forge whatever intimacy they could through prison bars, on collect phone calls, and during visiting hours. Revealing these continued assaults on the most precious and powerful of liberties, Black Women, Black Love is a cri de coeur that draws a straight line from generations of oppression to today's crisis of Black companionship. It is at once a compelling accounting of the lasting damage done to black wealth and selfhood, and a stirring call for the cultural and policy changes necessary to unshackle Black love at last"--
About the author
Dianne M. Stewart is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University, where she created the course Black Love. She earned her MDiv from Harvard Divinity School and her PhD in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary in New York City. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Summary
A “powerful, persuasive, and devastatingly haunting” examination of America’s racist, centuries-long oppression of Black love (Carol Anderson, bestselling author of White Rage)
According to the 2010 US census, more than seventy percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis.
Dianne M. Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split up couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north, where the welfare system mandated that women remain single in order to receive government support. And no institution has forbidden Black love as effectively as the prison-industrial complex, which removes Black men en masse from the pool of marriageable partners.
Prodigiously researched and deeply felt, Black Women, Black Love reveals how white supremacy has systematically broken the heart of Black America, and it proposes strategies for dismantling the structural forces that have plagued Black love and marriage for centuries.
