The Wednesday, February 17 edition of Africa400 explored the topic Black Women, Black Love as Mama Tomiko and Baba Ty continued their observance of Black Love Month. Mama Tomiko interviewed Special Guest Dianne Marie Stewart, author of Black Women, Black Love: America’s War on African American Marriage.
Listen to the show here:
The show airs at 2:00 PM on HandRadio, https://www.handradio.org or on the HANDRadio app. The audio from the show ia made available on this post and on our Media Page after the show airs.
Dianne Marie Stewart is an associate professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University specializing in African-heritage religious cultures in the Caribbean and the Americas. She was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in Hartford, CT, USA. She obtained her B.A. degree from Colgate University in English and African American Studies, her M.Div. degree from Harvard Divinity School and her Ph.D. degree in systematic theology from Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where she studied with well-known scholars such as Delores Williams, James Washington and her advisor James Cone. Dr. Stewart joined Emory’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and teaches courses in the graduate and undergraduate programs. Inspired by her pedagogical investment in Black love studies and her widely celebrated courses, The Power of Black Self-Love, (co-taught with Dr. Donna Troka), Black Love and Black Women, Black Love and the Pursuit of Happiness, Dr. Stewart spent four years research and writing Black Women, Black Love: America’s War on African American Marriage, which was published by Seal Press in 2020. Her public scholarship and interviews on the subject of Black love, partnership and marriage have also been published in The Washington Post and other outlets.
According to the 2010 US census, more than seventy percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis.
Dianne Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split up couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north, where the welfare system mandated that women remain single in order to receive government support. And no institution has forbidden Black love as effectively as the prison-industrial complex, which removes Black men en masse from the pool of marriageable partners.
Prodigiously researched and deeply felt, Black Women, Black Love reveals how white supremacy has systematically broken the heart of Black America, and it proposes strategies for dismantling the structural forces that have plagued Black love and marriage for centuries.
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