How a Bad Zoom Date Led Me to the 'Black Manosphere'

[Nevilledog]

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Amanda Marcotte
@AmandaMarcotte
There's been a lot of deeply unconvincing speculation from male pundits about why Trump got a slightly higher share of the Black male vote in 2020 than in 2016. I think this, however, is the likely answer.

elle.com
How a Bad Zoom Date Led Me to the 'Black Manosphere'
After an ill-fated Zoom date, I wandered down an online rabbit hole into a hyper-masculine space for “red-pilled” Black men.
11:06 AM · Jan 26, 2022

https://www.elle.com/life-love/a38819237/black-manosphere-online-dating/

*snip*

The content creator Mad BusDriverX1 (MBD for short), who films his YouTube videos wearing a helmet, would only consent to being interviewed over email. He’s a founder of the Save Yourself Black Men, or SYSBM, community, but insists the group is not a part of the Black Manosphere, claiming that space has “different goals and objections” than SYSBM. In his videos, he spends hours describing the ills of Black women, the deterioration of the Black race, the importance of travel for Black men, and the virtues of dating and marrying anyone but American Black women.

In one video, titled “protect your seed black men invest it into white Asian or Latina,” MBD’s language veers close to eugenics as he addresses the Black men listening, saying, “There’s going to be two types of Black people in the future and one’s going to be Black-ish and one’s going to be traditionally Black...the permanent underclass, you know what that’s going to be. No disrespect, if you’re a Black man who needs to save himself go on ahead...because you can’t save it, it’s ingrained, you’ve got to let it [the Black race] die out because they don’t want to change.” When asked if this use of eugenics language was intentional or if he was at all concerned about the historic weaponization of eugenics language against Black men and women, MBD responded that SYSBM is about freedom for Black men, rooted in their ability to choose better for themselves.

While SYSBM’s philosophy is deeply alarming, its foundation—the perception of Black people as pathologically violent, lazy, and unintelligent—is hardly new. The language of Black respectability and the “betterment” of the Black race has existed for generations; its most prominent proponents range from the scholar W.E.B. DuBois to pop culture figures like Bill Cosby. The Black Manosphere is fueled by this presumed cultural deficiency and shades of Black respectability politics. According to Fountain, the 1965 “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” is a regularly quoted text in the Black Manosphere. Often referred to as the Moynihan Report and commissioned by then President Johnson, this report has for decades created a pseudo-anthropological argument claiming that Black people and their culture were at fault for their own second-class citizenship in America.

If you’re wondering how a 60-year-old, oft-debunked government report holds so much weight among some Black men, whom it also seems to disparage, the answer seems to be, in part, its enduring place in white conservative talking points about Black families and communities. But even more critically for the Black Manosphere, the Moynihan Report places the responsibility for a stated Black pathology squarely on the shoulders of Black women. It was the Moynihan Report that propelled generations of ire toward Black woman-led households and served as the basis for the Reagan-era Black “welfare queen” stereotype. Its author, then-Assistant Labor Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan, admonished, “Given the strains of the disorganized and matrifocal family life in which so many Negro youth come of age, the Armed Forces are a dramatic and desperately needed change: a world away from women, a world run by strong men of unquestioned authority...”

*snip*

[bucolic_frolic]

1. There are zoom dates? who knew

[chowder66]

2. My god, that is a lot of fucked up shit to take in.

[wryter2000]

3. Good Lord

I don't suppose it's occurred to this genius that the same sorts of arguments could be made in a case for Black women (or all women, for that matter) to avoid Black men?

Eugenics and social Darwinism will never go away, apparently.

Edited to add: Fuck Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his "report."