Taking Cues from Womanists to Break Rank with Toxic Masculinity

More than four decades ago, Alice Walker coined the term “womanist” to name a space for Black feminists in a movement that centered white women’s striving to be equal to white men. In this retreat, men will let down together and learn from the voices and experiences of Black women to re-member the wholeness, mutuality, abundance, joy, tenderness, nurture, playfulness, awe, wonder, open-heartedness and emotional expressiveness that has been atrophied by the forces that bell hooks famously called imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.   

On the opening pages of her book on masculinity, bell hooks wrote that men long for love and are homesick for the truth. The truth is that real love does not come from being the main character on a mission, but from belonging to a beloved community that roots identity and worth in the well-being of others and commits to building a world that works for everyone. Together. 

In a world that surrogates and leeches on the labor and lives of black women at every turn, this retreat resists these modes of objectification by engaging black women’s wisdom on its own terms. As we bear witness to the intramural care black women provide each other through womanist framings and the liberation emergent from those practices, we will fix our eyes on the truth that our healing from supremacy stories like settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, and hetero-patriarchy is inextricably connected to collective liberation.