In this letter, my use of “you” means you, me, all of us.

This letter, sister, is from someone who is sitting, not-so-quietly observing, and taking notes as I look upon angry black men all over the internet making videos and blog posts about how how ugly you are. How unworthy you are of love.  How disgusting you look in your hairstyles and clothes.  How no man in his right mind could stand to tolerate you more than one night (and it better be in the dark, with a bag over your head).

These men are the babies you birthed, the boys you loved and spoiled, the young men you wrangled with, who grew up with you at the helm of the household, mostly without their fathers.

And they hate you for it.

The chickens have come home to roost as the wave of “I can be both mother and father to my son!” has reached it’s peak. It’s the results we’ll continue to see as 80% black women of all social and economic strata are having their first children unmarried and unprotected.

They hate you because you are there. They hate you because you’re the one who stayed and struggled, no doubt made some mistakes (hey, we all do) and found yourselves impotent and incompetent in all things “man” related–an essential and necessary factor for boys to grow into men. The husband you married when he was 15 was probably too late to truly make a difference, and even if he did, your son will always have a hole in his heart for the father who never was.

But because you were there, and shielded him from death and starvation, gave him comfort and kisses, he can’t show his anger towards you. You will always be highly esteemed. He’ll praise and sing odes of “mama” and beat anyone to a pulp if they say anything against you. So what does your son do with all that anger? He takes it out on every single woman that looks like you. He wants to call you fat and ugly and unwanted. He wants to say that you’re too black and nappy headed to be beautiful. You must be all of those things, because if you weren’t maybe his father would have thought you were worth sticking around for. He wants to say you ain’t worth shit, but he can’t, so he says it to us.

Now that the man-boy that you raised has the body of an adult, he has no idea what he wants. He wants to be the man he never saw growing up, and he might as well be eight years old trying on his grandfather’s old suit. He is not equipped. He expresses his manhood in the basest and most primal way, out of instinct and desire for dominance. He will have Herculean expectations of you as a partner–you must work full time, come home and clean and cook, fuck him like a porn star at three in the morning, support him in every decision he makes no matter how idiotic, tolerate gross disrespect. To be a man is to pump and dump the worthless, unlovable and ugly black women he despises, and if he leaves a few babies in his wake, so what? He’ll make claims that he’ll be around for the child, but that bitch ain’t getting his money. He’ll be there for the birth and bring you, the grandmother, along to fawn, and within five years he’ll be gone, and maybe show up for sporadic weekends and day trips to Disneyland. But he’ll leave you to do all the heavy lifting, and that son you raise will grow up and hate you, us, too.

You birthed him, but he hates you, because it’s just easier. These men who hate you and all of us will disguise their venom about how our “attitudes” and “hair hats” and obesity make us undesirable to all races (so don’t even bother going on pages like Beyond Black & White because you’re just a thirsty black bitch and don’t you know nobody wants you?). He’ll tell you that his verbal barbs are done out of love, because he wants you to do better. He’ll even say that while he spits on you, he really only dates and mates with black women so that’s proof that he does, right? Pleasing him will always be a moving target because you are not meant to “win,” only run on that hamster wheel, frenetically and breathlessly, only to go no where. And when the relationship fails, the men who dog you tell you that you needed to choose better, while having no desire themselves to BE better. They want us to make THEM better, all the while knowing that we can not. We can not rebirth was has already been birthed. We can not recreate what has already been created.

And so many of us want so much to please him, because after all, he is our son. The baby we birthed. The boy we comforted and kissed. The young man we wrangled with. We don’t want to believe that we raised a monster.

But we did.

Clearly the damage is done, but what can we do? We can’t undo several generations of black men who despise us. But we can guard our wombs against the another legion of black-woman hating monsters, and yes sisters, we DO have the power. Stop birthing these haters of black women, these fire-breathing soul killers. Demand more, and yes; choose better. But don’t choose from the less rotten of a bushel full of rotten apples and hope it won’t make you sick. Demand to see all the fruit–the apples, the oranges, the plums, the strawberries, and amongst them, pick the ripest and freshest, and sweetest.

And haters, are you mad? Guess how many shits I give.