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gabsi77's review
4.0
Having grown up in a predominately black country/society, the perspective of black America is one of which I am almost completely ignorant. February is Black History Month and so lately I have been thinking more about this part of my heritage. I began reading The Future of the Race by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West at the beginning of the year; I haven’t finished it yet but up to where I had reached was very thought provoking.
Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues was such a good book. The book comprised of essays by Black women writers on the topics of love, sex and men. Technically I am a black woman but reading this book it hits home more strongly that the Black American culture is vastly different from the Black culture that I live in. Many of the issues faced and dealt with in the book are somewhat universal, the loss of loved one, finding the right guy, and so on.
But some of the issues are specifically race based and limited to the United States. Why Black women can’t find a good black man? The topic of prison wives, Black women with incarcerated husbands, is not so much of a race issue, if an issue at all in Jamaica simply because we are a Black country.
In Jamaica, race is not an overt issue. Few people are exposed to outright racism and so I think we grow up not having an appreciation for the struggles that others have to go through even today, this applies especially to my generation. We all know about our heroes and their fight for freedom from slavery and Jamaica’s independence, and of course more recently Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement but all of this is more of an abstract knowledge of history, rather than something applicable to our lives right now.
Books like these help to make people conscious that the fight for racial equality isn’t quite finished. Someone I had a discussion with the other day pointed out that in the café we were at, the customers were predominantly of a lighter complexion than the servers and as long as that is the case and all the people working behind the counter are of a darker hue then equality has not been achieved.
Rather than being a book filled with the writing and rants of bitter Black women on love, sex and men, the book was predominantly a celebration of the resilience of these women, who have faced things like rape, racial prejudice, family rejection and other tribulations and they have emerged stronger for it all. Books like these make me a little prouder of my heritage and myself; and make me more aware of those that have come before me and paved the way to allow me to be where I am today.
Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues was such a good book. The book comprised of essays by Black women writers on the topics of love, sex and men. Technically I am a black woman but reading this book it hits home more strongly that the Black American culture is vastly different from the Black culture that I live in. Many of the issues faced and dealt with in the book are somewhat universal, the loss of loved one, finding the right guy, and so on.
But some of the issues are specifically race based and limited to the United States. Why Black women can’t find a good black man? The topic of prison wives, Black women with incarcerated husbands, is not so much of a race issue, if an issue at all in Jamaica simply because we are a Black country.
In Jamaica, race is not an overt issue. Few people are exposed to outright racism and so I think we grow up not having an appreciation for the struggles that others have to go through even today, this applies especially to my generation. We all know about our heroes and their fight for freedom from slavery and Jamaica’s independence, and of course more recently Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement but all of this is more of an abstract knowledge of history, rather than something applicable to our lives right now.
Books like these help to make people conscious that the fight for racial equality isn’t quite finished. Someone I had a discussion with the other day pointed out that in the café we were at, the customers were predominantly of a lighter complexion than the servers and as long as that is the case and all the people working behind the counter are of a darker hue then equality has not been achieved.
Rather than being a book filled with the writing and rants of bitter Black women on love, sex and men, the book was predominantly a celebration of the resilience of these women, who have faced things like rape, racial prejudice, family rejection and other tribulations and they have emerged stronger for it all. Books like these make me a little prouder of my heritage and myself; and make me more aware of those that have come before me and paved the way to allow me to be where I am today.
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