The “culture industry” is working overtime to reach African American women with movies like Soul Food and books like The Sistahs’ Rules to drive their message home: real women have husbands.

What do Doris Day, Katherine Hepburn and Vivica Fox have in common? They are each icons for a generation of women struggling to sort out the primacy of men and matrimony in their lives.

Of course, icons don’t just happen. They are created by repetition and a great distribution deal. And as in the days of Hepburn and Day, the “culture industry” is working overtime to reach African American women with movies like Soul Food and books like The Sistahs’ Rules to drive their message home: real women have husbands -- and will do anything to get and keep them.

New Image?

The Sistahs’ Rules is the trite, “black” version of The Rules, an insipid book on dating and duplicity that got lots of publicity last year. The Sistahs’ Rules is one of a number of best-selling books seeking to capitalize on the insecurity of single black women in search of companionship. The book features advice like “the way to a man’s heart is through a great plate of greens,” and encourages women to learn sports, not be “too independent,” and “let a man be the man.”

Soul Food (which virtually swept the NAACP Image Awards for its “realistic and sensitive” portrayal of the black family) is the story of three black women -- sisters grappling with marriage and family in the wake of their mother’s untimely death. The film is mostly a cautionary tale for black women designed to reinforce the importance of patriarchy to the black community. The happy sister is an adoring housewife satisfied with quietly using her power in ways that do not upset her husband. The miserable sister is an accomplished lawyer whose need for independence and control ruins most of her relationships. The youngest sister struggles with how independent she should be. Of course, by the end of the movie, she learns that smiling domesticity is the way to go.

Scapegoating

Both the book and movie are reminiscent of films from the 1950s and early 1960s, when the film industry was recruited to convince working white women who joined the workforce during WWII to quit their jobs, get married and have babies. And as white women were metaphorically tamed through the exploits of Hepburn, Day and Lucille Ball, black women are “put in their place” by this latest cinematic and literary redux of the tragic woman with “everything but the guy.” However, these trends are more than just fodder for plot lines. They help solidify African American women as the new scapegoats in the war against affirmative action by promoting the perception that African American women professionals “occupy” jobs that should be held by men.

For some, this means white men. There are plenty who say they’ve lost their jobs to African American women due to company affirmative action policies. Black women, they say, are hired for these professional jobs because, being both black and women, they count as a “two-fer” toward an institution’s diversity goals. Challenges by white men in these cases have been vicious and one high profile case even ended in suicide. High-powered black executive Dianna Green killed herself after being harassed by a white male colleague who thought she got “his job” as a result of affirmative action. Of course, African American women still hold very few managerial positions compared to white men. The higher up the corporate ladder, the fewer black women there are on the payroll.

Gender Gap

Then there are those in the black community who think black women are taking the good jobs from black men. It is true that African American women are much more likely to attend college than black men, but it has little to do with competition. In 1965, black men and women went to college at roughly the same rate. However, in 1980, that gap began to widen and in 1994 (the most recent data available), the number of black women enrolling in college outpaced black men by more than 180,000.