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The Black Manosphere is Not An Ally To Black Women
In chat rooms and YouTube channels, Black men parrot conservative talking points and bunk social science to demonize Black women
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
“White stuff.” That’s how Skyler describes his interests by the time he got to college. As a preteen, he had moved with his family from the entirely Black neighborhood he’d grown up in to a predominantly White suburb; the next few years were an exercise in cultural assimilation. In college, he even joined a majority-White fraternity.
But after the 2016 presidential election fueled racial tensions on campus, Skyler began distancing himself from his frat brothers — and seeking out the culture he had drifted from. Eventually, music and reading led him to YouTube, where he came across Red Pill Table Talk, run by a creator calling himself Angryman. Through Angryman, Skyler descended into a YouTube rabbit hole he never even knew existed.
The men he watched discussed a variety of topics, but seemed preoccupied with women. Some showed their faces. Others remained anonymous. Few used their real names. At first he thought they were harmless — but things changed, and changed quickly. Prompted by his interest in dating White women, Skyler visited a now-defunct site devoted to the topic, and was deeply discomfited by what he’d found. “It was filled with so many stereotypical images of Black women you’d think you were watching a minstrel show,” he says.
His disenchantment began to snowball. One YouTuber he followed blocked him on a Discord chat room because he couldn’t recite the pillars of Save Yourself Black Men (SYSBM), an online subculture that demonizes Black women and urges Black men to find interracial relationships. The whole thing, Skyler realized, felt a lot like a cult: welcoming until you challenged the teachings, at which point the whole system — self-styled gurus, forum moderators, and even the other followers — turned on you.
Skyler is just one of many young Black men (thousands, he claims) in a loosely affiliated, anti-feminist online community called the Black Manosphere. Like Skyler, many…
