“…I wanted to point out what is problematic about black women stopping at the gender question. Because the refusal of certain gender privileges to black women historically was part of the problem. At the same time, that you have to sort of see that and get beyond it and get to something else, because you are trying to go through gender to get to something wider. And I think that’s why men were in ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.’ That is what I was trying to suggest about certain performances of maleness on the part of black men, and what I was hoping to suggest is that black men can’t afford to appropriate the gender prerogatives of white men because they have a different kind of history; so you can’t just simply be patriarchal. You have to really think about something else as you come to that option. You have to really think about something else as you come to that option. If there is any such thing as a kind of symbiotic blend or melding between our human categories, in this case of the diasporic African, then this is the occasion for it. Men of the black diaspora are the only men who had the opportunity to understand something about the female that no other community had the opportunity to understand, and also vice versa.”
- Hortense Spillers, “‘Whatcha Gonna Do?’—Revisiting ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” A Conversation with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, and Jennifer L. Morgan.
