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Overview
"Sisters decry the shortage of good men and say there is no way she is settling for less than a good Black man. Not just a good one, but the BEST one: Denzel Washington. She, of course, has no idea what that means, what she wants or what a good Black man truly looks like." –from The Denzel Principle
The Denzel Principle is the belief that the perfect man—in the form of Denzel Washington—actually exists off screen and that all Black women can snag a Denzel of their very own.
So what does your very own Denzel look like? Well, he's rich but earthy, handsome but not pretty, doting but not docile, tough but vulnerable, political but not radical, passionate but not hysterical, ambitious but not overbearing, well-read but not nerdy, manly but not macho, gentle but not feminine, Black but not militant, sexy but not solicitous, flirtatious but particular...and all that on cue and in proper measure.
Award winning reporter and cultural critic, jimi izrael offers to set the record straight – from a regular guy's point of view. The Denzel Principle is straight talk on everything from "Ways Women Can Break the Hold of the Dizzle," "Ways to Attract Mr. Right," to "Ten Reasons to Love Ordinary Black Men" and so much more.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429957106 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 02/16/2010 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
JIMI IZRAEL is an award-winning reporter and culture-critic from Shaker Heights, Ohio who currently moderates "The Barbershop" for National Public Radio's "Tell Me More with Michel Martin" and blogs "The Hardline" for the Washington Post's The Root.com.
Jimi Izrael is an award-winning reporter and culture-critic from Shaker Heights, Ohio who currently moderates “The Barbershop” for National Public Radio’s “Tell Me More with Michel Martin” and blogs “The Hardline” for the Washington Post’s The Root.com. He is the author of The Denzel Principle: Why Black Women Can't Find Good Black Men.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Denzel Principle
People talk shit, but numbers don't lie. According to smart white folks who know, two-thirds of all black marriages end in divorce, creating whole neighborhoods of single-parent families, usually headed by single mothers. This statistic really reflects less on black men and more on black women and their inability to make good choices. And it also precipitates the reason why many black women are looking for a man to be the father they never knew. They don't know him well or have never met him, yet expect their prospective mate to be everything the little girl in them imagines him to be. No man alive can measure up to those expectations. It's hard enough just being a stand-up cat in a world where nice guys finish last and assholes get all the pussy. But it doesn't really matter, because women will make a good brother go bad. Because when they meet a good man, they don't really know how to treat him.
See, a lot of sisters had no father growing up; they've spent their lives listening to their mothers argue with their fathers, talking down on that "no-good nigga," disrespecting anyone with a penis and simultaneously running boyfriends with expensive cars through her bedroom like she's a top barber giving half-price cuts. Consequently, years down the road, the daughter wonders why, after all the loud talking, acting out, and badmouthing, she can't keep a man in her unkempt house. Fuck it, she says. Her moms laid the groundwork for her daughter's life of unhappiness simply by being a bad role model. Common sense suggests you treat people how you want to be treated, but it's too easy for women to be like their mothers: angry and single.
Many of them have money of their own, but would rather use their pussy like a credit-card swiper to pay the bills. Not that they're gold diggers, but they are motivated by money. This may sound a lot like just choosing a mate with superior qualifications, but in practical terms, it's as if some women's affection and time can be bought. Most brothers can read that game from the curb, and they know how to play it on the cheap. They run the chick to the Waffle House, the motel, and leave her cab fare on the dresser. Then she's sitting there, talking about "that's cold." It's the man's fault he didn't hang out long enough for her to cash in. She turns to her girlfriends asking for advice, and they tell her to hold out for the gold-plated Mandingo pulling up in a Bentley with a trunk of Godiva chocolate to sweep her off on holiday to the Poconos. On her deathbed, she'll still be waiting.
Black women say they have trouble finding the right guy, but the truth is some of them manage to find a new one every night, and word gets around. Or they find great guys — legitimately good brothers with jobs, benefits, and all their own teeth — and stay happy for about fifteen minutes. Then they wear them out emotionally (rarely sexually), get bored, step out of the relationship, and throw the proverbial dice in hopes of an upgrade. This becomes routine, and they end up spending their golden years with 50 cats and 150 ceramic collectables, trying to lure the mailman inside with a plate of food.
Now, men get a lot of the blame for destroying the black family because conventional wisdom suggests they spend all their time beating up women, shooting dice late into the night, stealing watermelon from Ofay the Farmer and being generally useless and unmarriageable. And let's be honest: there are a lot of brothers out there fucking up, but not nearly as many as you think. Normally, those brothers wear their crazy on their sleeves. You can see — and oftentimes smell them — from the curb. Women tend to mask their crazy with lipstick, perfume, Apple Bottoms jeans, and such. Men aren't as smart as women about these kinds of things, and often don't know what they're getting into.
That said, the thing is I know brothers aren't responsible for the high divorce rate because we aren't that particular. Men are not complicated creatures and don't ask for much. All we want is a woman to work, cook, clean, and maybe give up a lil anal on our birthday. Sisters think they aren't asking for the world by just looking for a man to meet their minimum standards. But their minimum is either the bare minimum or over the top. I know, because I see it all the time: black women jumping from knucklehead to knucklehead, chump to chump, hoping to get it right next time by consistently choosing from the bottom. They are in the Internet chat rooms, wearing tight dresses to Big Butt Nite at Da Club, and outside penitentiary gates on parole day waiting to pounce on anything with a pulse.
THIS JUST IN:
There is a movement building on the Internet just for women who like to date incarcerated and fresh-out-the-joint-type brothers. Women meet these guys, trying to help the penal system rehabilitate them, hoping to rebuild a man from the ground up. Not that convicts aren't viable mates, but you can't meet anyone at the coffee house, so you start trolling the prisons for husband material? What the hairy hot fuck is that about? Oh. Probably just a hairy, hot fuck. Jesus Christ on a saltine, that's fucking stupid. But some women are so desperate for a man they can mold and control, it's come to that. Holy shit.
Then there is the other extreme: sisters going out in search of Mr. Moneybags, who is most often an asshole. They try to lure men with spoiled bait and complain about the quality of men they attract. You know you can tell who they are, because they want to know what kind of car you drive just after they tell you to buy them a drink. They have an agenda, and they wear it like fake Louis Vuitton: garish and proud. But this is a good thing for Brother Paid N. Full. Because he can afford to shamelessly keep a stable of hoodrats and wannabe chicken heads eager to be mistreated in exchange for a seafood dinner. And the women? Well, they are more than happy to stand in line.
Strange, that.
Black women's unrealistic standards are probably borne of bedtime stories about handsome, rich men on majestic horses rescuing damsels in distress. Girlfriends often tell similar apocryphal tales about the friend of a friend who nabbed a rich, hung sugar daddy who saved them from a life of dishpan hands and lower-middle-class drudgery. Through the influence of popular media and the misguided advice they give each other, sisters combine these images and presumptions to draw a composite of a perfect black man. No way he could exist, but far be it for something like common sense to stop the average woman from looking. Her friends meetmen who are so close — so close, girl! With just one fatal flaw, like he snores or doesn't get DIRECTV. But girl, she was so close! So as a tribe, they all just keep looking, telling themselves that accepting anything less than perfection would be "settling," because they've been convinced that the perfect man exists. This goes on until this perfect black man becomes like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, with cults of nutjobs trading information, hunting tips, and fish stories about the one that got away, their lives committed to hunting and capturing a creature who could not possibly exist. But wait! — just like Sasquatch and Nessie, Mr. Right is on the cover of every magazine, the star of many movies, and the next guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show ... right?
Of course he is.
This delusion is called the Denzel Principle, or the Dizzle for short. The Dizzle causes black women's standards to be so high as to cause them to be disaffected, disappointed, or deceived. It's an affliction most commonly spread in beauty salons and hen sessions. Many of the infected women will likely only find the kind of love that needs batteries.
In the rapture of what could only be groupthink or mass hypnosis, black people seem particularly easy to seduce with fabricated role models and messianic figures. It probably started with slaves' indoctrination into Christianity and the story of the mortal son of God performing miraculous things while in human form: promising — and delivering — all things to true believers. Slave women probably turned to their men in disgust, wondering why they were not brave enough or holy enough to protect them from slave masters. They began envisioning a messianic black man who would stand against the white man and protect his women and children and uplift his race.
Men like Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and Marcus Garvey were wise men with strong ideas who were elevated to icon status merely by feeling free enough to speak up and be counted. In an age when the wrong look or intonation could get a black man killed, these men appeared nearly supernatural. They were either fortified by large constituents of influential blacks or cosigned by important whites: they were average men with above-average cachet. They became role models not just because they were iconoclasts intent on flouting the rules of conventional thinking. They were lauded largely because they set a nearly unattainable bar for their time. They had mastered the art of the "double consciousness," enabling them to navigate the worlds of whites and blacks without missing a step in either. Being loved and admired by all was an enviable talent.
Years later, with the advent of vaudeville and popular cinema, the minstrel and his various "coon" incarnations came into vogue. D. W. Griffith's silent film Birth of a Nation (adapted from Thomas Dixon's novel The Clansman and his play of the same title which glorified the exploits of the Ku Klux Klan) famously introduces the audience to Gus — a newly freed slave and evil black stud intent on raping and/or marrying white women — as well as a host of other black male criminal types. This is how most of America meets black men.
Birth of a Nation is one of the highest-grossing silent films of all time, but because its black male antagonist validated the worst fears of white audiences and typified the personification of evil and everything wrong about Reconstruction-era America, it was criticized in its time by blacks for stirring up hate and provoking white audiences to commit hate crimes (i.e. lynching). The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) protested the film, and the furor embarrassed the filmmakers. The NAACP would go on to discourage, but not eliminate, films and other media that blithely demonized black people.
Five common caricatures of black Americans emerged onscreen, having evolved from literature and radio plays:
• Uncle Tom (from Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin: male, loyal, hard-working, and deferential)
• Mammy (female, hard-working, sassy, and wise)
• The Mulatto (mostly female, tragic, and confused)
• The Coon (male, goofy, shiftless, and/or lazy)
• The Buck (male, brutish, and wanton)
The black buck (or brute) is the character that excites and titillates moviegoers and aside from Zip Coon the clown (Dewey "Pig-meat" Markham and Stepin Fetchit come to mind as Zip Coon–type comedic talents who rose to some prominence years later) is the character most often seen in early films like House-Rent Party, Walt Disney's Song of the South, and television shows like Amos 'n' Andy. Tap dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson (who co-stars with white child star Shirley Temple in a number of films) is a good example of the singing, dancing, grinning comedic Zip Coon that became popular. But Buck was the coon loved and feared by Hollywood as the perfect villain who got to the root of pre-integrated America's fears about widespread crime and race-mixing.
The NAACP cast themselves as the arbiters of race, the keeper of the black image. They encouraged all black Americans to put the best face on the race, and Stepin Fetchit, "Pigmeat" Markham, and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson were not helping the cause. But asking any one person to carry all the baggage of his people and undo the prejudices of ignorant people is not a reasonable expectation. During this time is when we see the emergence of what some would call the paradigmatic negro façade: the deferential, well-appointed black man for all seasons who was just black enough, but not so you'd notice.
Enter actor Sidney Poitier. He fit the bill exactly.
He was neither shuck and jiver nor highfalutin: he was a black man who knew his place in America, and he chose parts that reflected it. Poitier's various turns as the dignified assimilated black man in films like A Patch of Blue and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner seemed to sate both audiences. Poitier became an icon by making it more socially acceptable for black men to be occasionally assertive (as bulldog detective Virgil Tibbs in In the Heat of the Night), but mostly deferential (Guess Who's ...), defeated (A Raisin in the Sun), docile (A Patch of Blue), and eager to help (To Sir, With Love). He was new, exotic ... and acceptable. In the face of America's hostile Jim Crow politics and general inequitable treatment of blacks, his affability trumped his blackness so much so that most of black America rejected him (reading him as an "Uncle Tom" in the midst of a social revolution), much to the bewilderment of whites: why can't black Americans be more like Sidney Poitier? His Bahamian patois mellifluously masked any hint of post-colonial bitterness or the Angry American Black Man–ism, with all his demands and aggressive resistance to assimilation. He didn't wear dark glasses under a poltical hairstyle. He became white America's best black friend, and the measure to which all other black men were compared. His evident employability and role as the Next Evolution in black Masculinity made women of all colors swoon. But there was no way any black man could afford to be that cool and apolitical in those times. Still, everyone wanted to know ... why can't you be more like Sidney?
Every few years, the public latches onto some poor brother who seems to exude all things warm, wise, and wonderful and he becomes the perceived model black man. These brothers are most often sports figures, ideologues, or micro-pundits. Athletes seem particularly ripe for canonization: Paul Robeson, Jack Johnson, and Muhammad Ali were at one time all portraits of black manhood. But they were dealt with similarly.
Paul Robeson was a renaissance man: an athlete and scholar with a brilliant bass voice and distinguished demeanor that endeared him to the mainstream. He was lauded as a great man and credit to his race. He walked, talked, and behaved like no other brother in his time, and white folks loved him. This was a black man they could trust. Of course, when he began voicing his political thoughts and raising consciousness about racial discrimination, he was vilified. He died an outcast.
Jack Johnson was the boxer whites loved to hate. His style and finesse in the ring made him a star: his swagger and refusal to play by anyone else's rules made him a pariah, even among black people. He embodied everything America loved and hated about black men: he was brutish and unrepentant, flaunting and stunting in his wealth and fame. He dated white women. He thumbed his nose at Booker T. Washington and the black leadership of his time, instead being man enough to be a man on his own terms. But it all came at a price, as he was harassed and eventually beaten down. His excesses were his downfall and America reveled in the demise of this once great black man who took his freedom and proudly thought for himself.
Muhammad Ali was also much a man like Johnson, daring to defy the government by refusing to be drafted and declaring himself "The Greatest." Famously called "The Mouth" by sportscaster Howard Cosell, he was well-respected but not well liked. But once his crusade became his undoing as the beatings he gave and the beatings he took disintegrated his mental capacity — and quieted his voice — then, he became a national treasure.
So, examining the lives of these three men, considered by some to be important black male role models, the take-home lesson seems to be that if you dare to step outside of conventional thinking, dare to exercise your freedom in a way that offends conservative sensibilities, you will be destroyed by one means or another. White America only cosigns docile, wounded black men for hero status. True iconoclasts must be quashed. Middle-class black Americans share this sentiment.
In post–civil rights America, it seems like everyone wanted black men to be Martin Luther King Jr. Not the womanizing, chain-smoking party boy he was in real life, but the nonviolent, well-spoken vessel for change. The messianic Martin is a legacy far too luminous to contend with. He is worshipped by whites and blacks as the second coming of Jesus himself. Blacks and whites alike quote his speeches and cast him as a superhero, never acknowledging the inherent unfairness of casting a dead man as a viable role model, and his "dream" as an attainable goal, only to fortify the folktale by commercializing it. Young black men for years (and some still today) grew up with pictures of Jesus and Martin in the living room on the mantel. The message being: Dad is obviously too human to be a role model, son. So strive to live up to the impossible. Again, white America cosigns a wounded leader. Later, they would annoint two others with the mantle of leadership.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Denzel Principle"
by .
Copyright © 2010 James Bernard Izrael.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments and Such,
Introduction,
The Denzel Principle,
Demonizing Black Machismo,
The Exhale Years,
Pimpology,
She Hate Me,
The Case for and Against Marriage,
Her Peeps,
Baby-Mama Dreams,
Confessions of a Former Sellout,
Return of the Good Guy,
Living with the Dizzle,