Cop: We’re looking for two Negros in a white car.
Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter: Any two will do?
It seems now that Huffington Post, in another of its never ending efforts to placate the grievances of privileged white women, has now enlisted the help of black men. In particular, I am talking about Damon Young.
Someone just sent me the link to his piece entitled, “Men Just Don’t Trust Women – And It’s A Huge Problem.” The article was originally posted at verysmartbrothas.com back in March and spread through other media outlets like it was smallpox.
First, before I even get to the profundity of the fail in this article, I have to say I take exception to the name of the site it came from. Very Smart Brothas? As opposed to what, the idiots they imagine all other black men to be?
It is hard to tell if this kind of thinking stems from very long-term periods of marginalization or if it is just the result of impotent and inane racial politics over the last 40 years from the likes of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, et al. Whatever the reason, that URL screams to me that the authors are convinced that the average black man is stupid; that the Very Smart Brothas are the exceptions – the ones who measure up to white folk.
Now, god help us, let’s get to what Damon Young actually had to say.
True to its title, the article informs us that men don’t trust women when they make claims. The evidence of that? Well, according to Young it starts with all the denial ridden males out there who did not believe the woman who lied through her teeth to Rolling Stone about being gang-raped (not to mention the woman who ran that story without a hint of fact checking).
Well, in fairness, that was the conversation he had with his wife which actually led to the real reason why men are a problem when it comes to not trusting women. In what appears to be a completely understandable segue, the couple went from talking about one really disgusting rape liar to the Bill Cosby case.
According to the article that is the biggest piece of prima facie evidence that men don’t trust women. It is because there are too many of us who won’t convict Bill Cosby in our minds before he is given the benefit of due process. Some of us very stubborn holdouts actually think he is innocent till proven guilty. That is the actual rationale for why men are the problem offered up by this Very Smart Brotha.
Unfortunately, Damon digs the hole deeper, attempting to explain this on a more personal level by using his own marriage as an example:
When the concept of trust is brought up, it’s usually framed in the context of actions; of what we think a person is capable of doing. If you trust someone, it means you trust them not to cheat. Or steal. Or lie. Or smother you in your sleep. By this measure, I definitely trust my wife. I trust the shit out of her. I also trust her opinions about important things. I trusted that she’d make a great wife, and a trust that she’ll be a great mother. And I trust that her manicotti won’t kill me.
But you know what I don’t really trust? What I’ve never actually trusted with any women I’ve been with? Her feelings.”
In other words, the problem with men not trusting women is actually based on the notion that we tend not to interpret their emotionally driven subjective reality as unquestioned fact. Therefore, we are creating a huge problem.
Very Smart Brotha? Nope. Actually, Damon Young should be writing at housenigger.com, because that is exactly what he is.
This particular denizen of what Mumia Ali calls the Negrosphere, offers up little more than poorly parroted postmodern claptrap from his feminist owners. Apparently, this Very Smart Brotha is quick to get cozy and warm with elitism, even if it means playing the drone for a bunch of white girls that would cross the street to avoid passing by him on the sidewalk.
If you think I might be conflating his obsequiousness in the area of sexual politics with racism against blacks, think again. Like any good houseboy, he takes a pretty dim view of field hands and makes work of distancing himself from the same.
I conversed with Ali on this topic and here is what he had to say:
Right in his own backyard out in Pittsburgh, black folks in the lower classes are being sold out by their own upper class betters, including Young himself. He writes/does his thing from the comfort of Panera bread store, on his Google pixel laptop, then goes back home to love and play among his fellow bougie blacks.
Lower and working class blacks in Pittsburgh have no voice, in large part thanks to folks like him. They are ignored; are invisible.”
Ali’s intelligence, by the way, is proven in his writing, not implied in his web address. I have never met him in person, but I am still certain he does not wear t-shirts that say, “Really Smart Black Dude,” or anything else equally reeking of insecurity.
Allow me to dispense a little common sense here that is going to be painfully obvious to most readers of this publication. Feelings are not to be trusted. Period. They can and should be honored, but an honor that simply acknowledges their existence and their importance to the person feeling them.
They may be useful in understanding a person’s frame of mind, but they are useless, and often counterproductive, when stupidly treated like objective reality. Wanna take any bets on how many women felt like the Scottsboro Boys should be strung up without a trial?
Where would the Duke LaCrosse victims be if we just trusted feelings over facts? And should we not also take note that those victims came very close to having those feelings crush them in a much more permanent way.
The call to trust women’s feelings is just another in a long list of shopworn feminist shit tests on men, a ruse to enjoy an insane amount of entitlement. And yes, Damon Young, it is the same basic entitlement whites felt during lynchings but I am sure you won’t spill any of your mocha latte over that since it was so like 20 minutes ago.
We could get into a much larger lesson here, like an examination of the fact that women trust women far less than men do, and over a lot more important things than their feelings du jour. Or, as one black feminist writer observed:
Distrust among women is at epidemic proportions, especially among women of color. I am always amazed at the number of women I encounter who declare proudly, that they don’t hang with other FEMALES, preferring the company of males whom they are quick to assert are less prone to gossip, back-stabbing, and emotionalism.”
We could even start taking a look at the fact that men indeed tend to trust women too much. They assign sugar and spice niceness to women even when confronted by mountains of evidence to the contrary. If Crystal Gale Mangum’s boyfriend had not been chasing a feelings freaking train wreck, is it possible that he might now be slightly less dead?
All of this is tied to why Damon Young is strutting like a banty rooster for women of any race, throwing his fellows under the bus and encouraging children of privilege to believe that the world owes them uncritical belief in whatever they claim to feel.
One other tidbit we might want to consider here is the idea that men don’t trust women is balderdash on its face. Most men spend their entire lives mindlessly following women’s emotions; following and believing in pretty much anything if they imagine it is going to get them a pat on the head for being a good boy. That includes far too common fraudulent damseling that Young is playing the well-trained step-and-fetch for right now.
It would also be remiss to not point out that men have some very sensible reasons to insist that women earn trust, not just grant it to them along with summary acceptance of their feelings as facts.
In the end, though, these things don’t need real explanation to our readers. Efforts to convince the likes of Damon Young are also pointless. He is too self-enamored of being so above all those lesser black men to consider any information that might cause some dissonance.
He does, though, serve as a great historical artifact. The American Civil Rights Movement died with the emergence of gender feminism. Feminists did not just ride in on the coattails of civil rights activism for actual minorities. They demanded that the coat itself be handed to them. They have been wearing it ever since. One look at the politics of black communities will tell you volumes about that.
And now, in the Golden Age of sexual lunacy, they don’t just get to don the couture of the “oppressed.” They now have men like Damon Young following them around like Uncle You-Know-Who, ready to dust off any unsightly lint with a whistle and a smile.
Malcolm X is turning over in his grave. So is the Civil Rights Movement, courtesy of some Very Smart Brothas.
