In a 2013 Baller Alert (yes, that's a real website) article, tech billionaire Ben Horowitz is quoted saying, "Black wives are for grown ups." Listing examples of wealthy white men with black woman partners such as the dude who made the original Star Wars and Melanie Hobbs, the Nortons of Norton Security, and David Bowie and Iman, the writer equates grownness with wealth, whiteness, and manhood. Stevona Elem Rogers, a New Orleans-based writer who identifies as a womanist, appropriated and tweaked the quote to build her brand Black Women Are for Grown Ups, or BWAFGU (pronounced phonetically). Rogers' slogan asserts that this same grownness, seemingly a class-based ackright, makes someone eligible to own a black woman. And lots of black women agree with her. The statement shirts and chapbook sell. Two Dope Queens named an episode after the brand when Lavar Burton wore the shirt as a guest on the show. Refinery29 listed Rogers as one of their 20 black women to follow in 2018, along with Yvonne Orji (and some questionable people who work for pretty neoliberal, pro-gentrification ass institutions like Teach for America and Airbnb).
I'm all for exiling ain't-shit lovers to yesteryear. But... Black women are for? Grown ups? Seriously?
Capitalism, patriarchy, and racism go way back. European men disabled European women from competing in the market by subjecting them to male relatives and husbands on the basis of being child-like and, later, similarly disabled the native peoples of what came to be the Americas and Africa on the basis of them, the men specifically, being feminine insofar as they did not privatize land or paternalize women (while expanding the market through the theft of their lands, resources, bodies, and labor).
To be "grown" one had to be a white man, made wealthy through colonization. To be a white man meant to be uniquely capable of the possession of self and others. It was the white man's burden to take care of us all and to benefit from all of our labor and the wealth of our resources. Poor guy(s).
Early portraiture consecrated the idea of manhood as a result of one's possessions, with wealthy patrons sitting for commissioned artists surrounded by the things that mattered to them and that represented what made them matter: globes, books, travel logs, children, wives, and the occasional black servant.
[Brief aside to muse on the Obama portraits: what does it mean that President Obama is seated in front of plants and Michelle in front of a sky blue backdrop given the ecological terror that continues to shape black people's relationships to this country - before, during, and after the presidency of the first black commander-in-chief?]
To be anything other than a white man of means - a woman, a person of color, a child - was (is?) to be inherently possessible and violable. The ideologies of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy evolved each other in the colonial context, creating the matrix of domination of which Patricia Hill Collins writes, a web of simultaneous oppressions and intersecting, inextricable identities. In the age of #MeToo, shouldn't we want to subvert the power dynamics, this matrix of domination, that suggests that black women need to be surveilled, controlled, manipulated, and for anyone (including ourselves)? Can we exist without belonging to anyone, as part of complex ecologies that support mutual growth, love, health, wealth, etc?
Here's a brief list of things that, unlike black women, are "for grown ups" (warning: they're not particularly fun, cute, or glamorous):
(1) Student loan debt.
(2) The blame for gentrification.
(3) The responsibility of making the world a safer, more just place for everyone by challenging and projecting ourselves beyond white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist ideals of owning (e.g. Cardi's "I'm a boss; you a worker") or assenting to being owned (e.g. BWAFGU).
I had trouble brainstorming more cause, well, most things don't lie squarely on the shoulders of any one age group. There are exceptions, even to these rules.
UPDATE (3/6/2018, 9:28 PM CST): The author has responded with a request that I remove this post. I choose not to do so in favor of open critique within arts communities.