The Simon Phoenix Dichotomy on Black Men Protecting Black Women

By:  H.T., Website:  Rogue Black Nerd

Day in and day out, I see black people complain that there are evils in the world and that certain groups refuse to do enough to fix them.  It’s not that there aren’t ways to fix said issues, it’s that people often forget the realities of concepts like revolution, war and simply changing the nature of societal norms on the whole.  It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s that in reality many of the people pushing for these changes often don’t understand nor remember what has happened to people when such changes happened, nor do they care.  One person who personifies the obnoxious need to tell black men to fight for this is Cynthia G.  Cynthia G, a popular pro-black YouTuber, often complains that black men are weak because we refuse to wage a worldwide revolution against white supremacy.  This thought could have some merit if not for the fact that people like her often forget that fighting oppressive systems are not as romantic and heroic as any movie would have you believe.  War leads to death, famine, crimes against humanity that in this day and age would have America labeled a rogue nation and possibly invaded by our allies.

Many black feminists fail to understand the simple fact that it’s not that men don’t want to make a better world, it’s 2 things we see all the time: 

1. To make other men stop being awful savages, every man knows that at some point in telling other men what to do you might not have to resort to violence, but the threat of violence occurring is there.
2. While this does not apply to all women, men often see women who are unrepentantly attracted to men who are shitty human beings.

These two facts matter because if feminists really want men to fight for a world that is not as hostile to women, this goes to a theory that I’ve had for years about most sci-fi utopia movies, call it the “Demolition Man theory” if you will.  In it, we see a future Los Angeles where crime is almost entirely eliminated.  The three things of note to notice, is that for one, the city has gotten so anal retentive with its laws and regulations, people are fined for cursing.  Another is that below the city lie people that tired of the surface life of the futuristic world to be free, albeit unsafe and dirty.  And lastly, when Simon Phoenix hits the scene of this heavily sanitized world, he begins wrecking house with little resistance and even less effort.  I say all this because they fail to see men like him exist, have always existed and will continue to exist because there will always be people that can’t or won’t fit into a future that is less problematic.

The Cynthia Gs of today claim that they are keeping the resistance going, but the reality is, all they’re doing is keeping the conversation going, and to where I’m not sure.  They call black men oppressors yet want us to fight against the very white supremacy many of us see their white objects of lust benefiting from.  Truth is, black men have known for years that armed resistance on a huge scale wasn’t going to work as many of us saw what became of the revolutionaries of the 60s.  We read what they did to Fred Hampton, we saw what happened to Huey, we saw the life Eldridge Cleaver led before he died, we saw what the Philly police did to the MOVE movement.  It’s not that we’re scared, it’s that the women who are in some cases moving for real change by talking to politicians and registering people to vote, say nothing to the women that expect men to likely die fighting a government that already gives military surplus to its paramilitary law enforcement agencies.

But on some level, this is to be expected as frankly these are the same people who are adamant that they don’t want black men telling them what to do but want us to fall on the sword.  Honestly, for as much as I joke about male feminists and my past amongst them, I can say this in all honesty:  if more male feminists did look more like Terry Crews, I do believe they could get shit done in many aspects.  Hell, if Black Lives Matter was trying to create a generation of swole sensitive men to fight for them, I’d get it.  Because frankly, black men lose their desire to want to save the black community, particularly black women when we see how things are set up.  It’s not that men who even try to come back and help or have the means to better a woman’s life are ignored, it’s that black men peep game early more so nowadays.  Women tell us to fight for them, but don’t like when we advise them how they can protect themselves because that’s patriarchal, but we have to tell men to stop being shitty to women.  Again, men know that should we physically confront another man to tell him to stop harassing you or potentially harming you, we know that at some point this will result in us possibly having to fight and maybe die.

I bring up Simon Phoenix because he in a way is an exaggerated example of how black men see ourselves having to stand up in the defense of black women.  It’s not that we can’t, it’s that women often forget that there really are men in our community that have no problem beating us to death or just outright shooting us and then kidnapping them and raping them anyways.  Honestly, if they wanted black men to form trained militias to protect black women, I’d be for it, but on the whole it seems that the “black men are trash crowd” wants us to sit on social media and like all their statuses about how ain’t shit we are and not actually work towards solutions to protecting them.

This is why so many black men just say fuck it and stick to protecting their families and friends.  Because by this narrative, these women would rather black men be yes men than men of action.  It’s why I get mad when I see guys like Derrick Jaxn on the internet caping so hard for black women, not because he capes for black women, but because a guy in as great of shape as he is could easily reach out to other men and teach them to get in shape like him under the goal of being a better protector of women.  But a sizable portion of his female fans don’t want that.  They just want men to somehow go up to other men to tell them to not be shitty to women and think it’s that easy.  For all their talk about how men attack, rape and commit all this violence towards women and many recognizing that these same men respect male authorities with a propensity for violence, none of these women seem to want men to use their male privilege of knowing that men can be on equal ground with other men physically and make a change.  So I ask:  what is the endgame in the argument against men’s violent misogyny if not fighting back against it with equal force?