Black, Male and (Forced to Remain) Silent by Tommy J. Curry

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#5, DEC/2018-FEB/2019

Disciplinary Erasures, Black Male Death, and the Caricatures which Serve as Theory.

Introduction to The Man-Not

I see dead Black male bodies, Black men and boys, in the streets. Dead Niggers made into YouTube sensations. I see their executions on the internet: the corpses of Trayvon, Michael Brown, little Tamir cycled for eternity. I hear Jordan Davis’s music and Sean Bell’s vows. I feel Black male death all around me and I am scared—scared that one day I will be forced to not speak. They shame me when I speak about Black men and boys. They threaten me with the names of white men. I hear: patriarch, sexist, misogynist as they condemn me for identifying the murderers and lynch mobs of Black males. They wear hoods with disciplinary embroidery whispering Nigger under their breaths. These Black and white faces stand guard at the gates of the academy, and I fear they will make me be still; they will kill me. They will force me to remain silent. I write this knowing that my words will not outpace the bullet of another gun transforming living flesh into rotting meat. I know as I write this that another Black man or boy will die. I know as I think about their deaths, the end of their lives, is coming to be. This America makes corpses of Black males. It is simply the reality of our day that Black males die. This death however is shunned, cast out of the halls of the university, and avoided at all costs by disciplines. This reality has not transformed any of the decadent theories that tie Black manhood to the caricatures of the 1970’s. Black men are thought to be latent rapists—the Black Macho of old—violent patriarchs, a privileged Black male, craving the moment he is allowed to achieve the masculinity of whites. These mythologies, of decades long gone, remain the morality of disciplines and the political foundation from which racist caricatures become revered concepts.

I write this book from a 21st century where Black men and boys are still being lynched in America. Otis Byrd was found hanging from a tree March 20th, 2015 in Port Gibson, Mississippi, [1] while Lennon Lacy’s 17 year old body was found on August 29th, 2014, hanging from a children’s swing set in Bladenboro, North Carolina. [2] I write from a 21st century where Black boys playing staring games with white girls in supposedly integrated schools are suspended because their stare was perceived as a threat. [3] While Black men and boys continue to be criminalized, and die at the hands of the state and white vigilantes, disciplinary morality asserts that scholars should resist the urge to theoretically account for these deaths through any serious philosophical or conceptual study. Black male scholars throughout the university have noted the resistance of journals and various disciplines to seriously consider Black male vulnerability beyond Black feminism or other paradigms which assume Black males to be culturally maladjusted and pathologically violent. To study Black men and boys outside of their descriptions as problems is taken to be heresy: any study of Black male vulnerability is taken to be odds with and thereby erasing Black female suffering, and more generally thought to be theoretically irrelevant despite their actual social condition. Conferences are reluctant to accept papers, editors discourage submitting such work for review, and there is a permissible vitriol towards the authors of such work allowing “booing,” ridicule, and intimidation throughout the academy. In my discipline of philosophy, there has yet to be one text written specifically analyzing the life and experience of Black men and boys in America. The at large morality in fact demands that one never be written, because Black males are not thought to be the right subject to/subject of study.

The Subject/Subject Dilemma: The Censorship of Black Man-Not Studies in Liberal Arts

For example, when Chapter 4 (Eschatological Dilemmas) was solicited as an invited contribution to an anthology analyzing anti-Blackness, my choice to focus on Black male death and rape was met with condemnation and dismissal by the editors. Suggesting if I had submitted my work as an article to a journal it was “easily publishable,” for the anthology it was said that analyzing the historical and sociological realities of Black males was claimed to have unjustifiably privileged them as subjects of study and disrupted the overall tone of the volume. I was specifically told in an email that: “[the other editor] believes it comes across as preferring Black men. I think it is a bit fuzzy; [it] could be stated more clearly particularly because I think some readers would find any essay on black men suspect from the start (the 'oh here we go' syndrome). Obviously, this would be something we would want to stay clear of, that is, privileging black men.” [4] Notice the conflation—arguing for the study of the Black male, or in this case the Black male corpse, is taken to mean privileging them. Contending that Black men and boys are subjects worthy of study is such an affront under the gender morality of our day that such works demand the activism of scholars to prevent such writing from seeing the light of day. This censorship of scholarship dealing with Black men and boys both demonstrates and reinforces the unquestioned racist misandry at work within disciplines. While white male and female authors are thought to serve as theoretical guides for various racial projects regardless of their personal and historical racism, and can even become sociologically interesting when they realize and own their white privilege, Black males, who remain oppressed and largely absent from the academy as students and professors, are defined as pariahs despite their progressive politics. While journals, college lectures, and books remain dedicated and composed of endless engagements with white men who supported slavery, and believed in Black inferiority, as well as white women who conspired alongside the mythology of the Black rapist, and held Black people to be of a savage kind, it is only the writing about Black men and boys that is censored and deliberately prevented from being conceptually engaged. Denying Black men and others scholars, who interpret Black masculinity outside of feminist paradigms, access to journals, book contracts, and specializations/employment dedicated to theorizing Black manhood has its origin in a dangerous chauvinism used to rationalize the pathologized accounts of the Black male held within disciplines as undoubtedly true and beyond contestation. The Black male shall not speak—he is silenced not simply by disciplines, but by the at large morality of the scholars which comprise them. It is not that Black men and boys do not actually suffer the greatest societal disadvantage for being Black and male in reality; it is that the intersectional calculus dominating the interpretation of Black masculinity denies Black male disadvantage even when empirically demonstrated. In short, under our current disciplinary regime Black men cannot be recognized as the most disadvantaged, not because facts demonstrate otherwise, but because theory denies such recognition as possible given their gender is male.

Since no counter-evidence or explorations are allowed to challenge the rampant dogmas about Black masculinity, disciplines from philosophy to gender studies are allowed to maintain ahistorical mythologies and self-referential theories about Black males without any need to account for the disadvantage Black male existence has in the world materially, or verify the allege privilege Black males enjoy within America’s social organization—its economy, prison-industry, institutions of higher education, etc. While these inaccuracies should give any serious thinker pause, what is perhaps the most dehumanizing aspect of this exchange is the assumption that writing about Black male life is of no more import than the reporting of Black male death—that the very writing of Black male death, while rampant and more numerous than any other demographic in America, requires no academic engagement; it is simply not important enough such that we need to learn more about it—the “oh, here we go again syndrome.” This is the pathological power of the corpse maintained by Black and white scholars alike; where the over-representation of everything Black and male in the dead body is presented as evidence of his savagery socially, and his irrelevance disciplinarily.

Discouraging theoretical works authored solely for the study of Black males allows for an implicit, but permissible, censorship of discussions and writings directing attention towards Black male vulnerability, be it political, sexual, or economic. This censorship not only discourages new thinking about Black males, but denies that there is a need for new theories beyond the generic language of intersectionality/gender/patriarchy to speak to the death, poverty, and societal dislocation that disproportionately affects Black males. In short, Black men are the only group in academia morally condemned and institutionally excised for attempting to build theories on the experiences and oppression of their own group. Black men are demanded to interpret themselves through the lens of others—coerced into explaining their existence through the theories and biases of white, bourgeois, and (various) feminist lens. Black men are disproportionately affected by violence (homicide is the leading cause of death of Black males from ages 15-34), incarceration, poverty, unemployment, and suicide in this country, yet there is an insistence that the deaths of Black men need not be accounted for beyond “racism” in our current political milieu. [5] This moratorium discourages research into dilemmas peculiar to Black males, ultimately coercing Black men into accepting their erasure as a matter of theoretical advancement. This silence takes advantage of the deaths which make Black men underrepresented throughout society, and the racism making it unlikely that they will matriculate from high school, college, and ultimately be present and considered in the academy. [6] In other words, the deaths and incarceration of Black males in society create the shortage of the actual bodies necessary to constitute a demographic either as student or professor capable of being represented or recognized as needing to be theoretically accounted for within disciplines.

Black male death and suffering is thought to be generic; captured solely by the category of race. Race however is not an efficacious category of analysis under our present intersectional and post-structural arrangement. Race is a category under constant disciplinary surveillance which makes it subject to any myriad of attacks for being over-determined and essentialist, and therefore in need of any combination of experimental anti-essentialist solutions. This dispersion/deconstruction/dismissal of the race category has concrete consequences for Black males attempting to situate and describe their experience and history, because race has been the only category offered by disciplines from which Black men can theoretically articulate their experience. Consequentially, Black males find themselves articulating their concerns through alien theories rooted in this displacement. Because race is accepted as socially constructed, all cultural and experiential products from a racial perspective remain suspect. Race consciousness is problematized and rejected prima facia as narrow and masculine, while gender, as Oyèrónké Oyewúmì reminds us, remains inextricably tied to biological notions of the female despite the performative-cultural-situatedness of the term. [7] Black and female allows for standpoints, histories and experiences asserted to be the moral basis of theory, while Black and male is taken to be the historical perspective that must be disowned to free these othered-gendered-not male voices.

It is routinely insisted that race and gender are socially constructed and illusory, yet it is only race which is displaced, while gender, being synonymous to female, is centered as the dominant theoretical voice of Black subjectivity and vulnerability—a centering technique dependent upon the sustaining anthropological assumptions of white gender categories, not those disfigured within the negation of Black(ness); the non-human/non-being matrices authored within chattel slavery and colonialism. This representation of bodies—and their intent—operate to erase the historical interest in and political position of Black males. They simply do not exist as viable social or reflective entities since they are disfigured beyond repair within the symbolic representations of gendered terms. As Lewis Gordon argues in “Race, Sex, and Matrices of Desire in an Anti-Black World: An Essay in Phenomenology and Social Role,” “It is ironic today that when we say ‘gender studies’ we invariably mean discourses on women…The centered significance of gender has been pushed to a racial paradigm, where gender has begun to function like race.” [8] Rooting gender within the biological confines of the female body makes thinking about gender synonymous to thinking about women. In this bio-mythos, the female is taken to be the taxonomic origin of gender(ed) knowledge and history, where that which is defined as not female can only be outside of these parameters which ground theory. Considering this schema within an anti-Black matrix, Gordon suggests that “If white equals masculine and masculine equals white, then [B]lackness and femininity become coextensive realities in an anti[B]lack world.” [9] Because “male” is only historically thought to be synonymous with power and patriarchy, or white, it has no existential or phenomenological content for the Black male, who in an anti-Black world is denied maleness, and is made synonymous to the female. Maria Lugones similar emphasizes the anachronism of attributing gender to the colonized and enslaved bodies, we know think of through the frameworks of Black masculinity and Black femininity. As she remarks, “Under the imposed gender frame work [of colonial modernity] the bourgeois white Europeans were civilized; they were fully human. The hierarchical dichotomy as a mark of the human also become a normative tool to damn the colonized. The behavior of the colonized and their personalities/souls were judged as bestial and thus non-gendered, promiscuous, sexual and sinful.” [10] The colonized/racialized subject was denied gender precisely to define the boundaries between the content of the human and the deficit of racial speciation. This is not to say there was no sexual differentiation between bodies and the roles assigned to them, but rather to highlight that “colonized people become male and female. Males became not-human-as-not-men and colonized females became not-human-as-not-women.” Black men deprived not only of an identity, but a history and existence that differs from his brute negation, experience the world as a Man-Not.

The Man-Not grows from this incongruity I observe between what theory claims to explain and the actual existence of Black men and boys in many ways excluded from its purview. A genre study. Simply stated, analyzing Black males as the Man-Not is a theoretical formulation which attempts to capture the reality of Black flesh marked as male in an anti-Black world. Because Blackness is specified in the colonial formulation by sexual designations, the Man-Not recognizes that maleness cannot and is not coextensive with or synonymous to the formulation of manhood, patriarchy, and gender offered by white reality. The use of Black men and boys merely describes those entities we recognize as such. The Man-Not is not only the denial of Black manhood, but the denial of the possibility to be anything but animal, the savage beast, outside of the civilizational accounts of gender. To suggest that Black males are in fact gendered patriarchs, is an erasure of the actual facts of anti-Black existence and a substitution of the anthropological template at the core of negating Black male existence as its end. Michael Brown’s death, like that of Vonderitt Myers, Oscar Grant, John Crawford, Jordan Davis, and Stephen Watts, represents the accumulation of an intellectual failure to grasp the complexities and the motivations implicated within the genocidal logics of American racism beyond the categories of modern taxonomy. The negrophobia that drove white America to endorse lynching as a technology of murder is the same anxiety and fear that now allows the white public to endorse the murder of Black men and boys as “justifiable homicides.” Black males are often killed by police officers because the officer claims they fear for their lives. This phobia is a normalized and institutional program used to justify police violence, ostracism, and incarceration—it is a fear that is given so much weight in individual cases precisely because it is a fear that both white America and many Americans share as well. The vulnerability of Black men and boys lie in this consensus, and it is one that extends beyond the borders of white psychopathology. It is an American maxim propagated through the mass media and the assumptions of liberal progressive gender politics, and internalized by the populations consuming these mythologies and images be that Black, white, male or female.

While there is tacit agreement amongst American institutions (courts, prisons, the press, etc.) that Black males’ deaths and the individuals responsible for these murders will be ideologically supported in their rationalizations and financially rewarded for their actions, [12] this is not the full scope of Black male vulnerability. Black males also endure societal discrimination, and social ostracism because of their maleness. In their personal lives, the worthlessness asserted throughout society by his unemployment, a position that confirms that he is undesirable and unwanted, his criminalization, and his unacknowledged physical and sexual abuse at the hands of men and women throughout society, manifests itself as depression, various maladjustments across all spheres of relationships, and most notably in the strikingly high rates of suicide. This book is concerned with the sociological, historical, and ontological weight of Black manhood. It explores how the myth of the super-predator is codified within the disciplinary proliferation of theories about Black masculinity making it seemingly impossible to conceptualize the Black male as a victim and disadvantaged to other groups. This book shows how both theory and stereotype converge throughout the multiple exegeses offered to analyze the external conditions and internal motivations of Black men and boys. Academic theory utilizes the same pathological explanations of Black male deviance, violence, and abuse that continue to haunt Black males and justify their murder in society. To advance theory, Black male vulnerability is denied, and his disadvantage is obscured from a full viewing by scholars and the public alike. His is only thought of as a perpetrator, never a victim.

The Man-Not was thought of as a corrective of sorts; as a concept of Black males that could challenge the historical and theoretical accounts of Black men and boys proliferated throughout disciplines and taken to be gospel in academic research. This book is the first philosophical exploration of Black male oppression and aims to synthesize the multiple finds and research concerning his condition across disciplines. Rather than simply reproducing sociological findings highlighting his societal disadvantage, I aim to create a theory, and operational paradigm by which we can understand the intellectual, historical, and sexual diversity of Black men. While such an exploration will never capture the full experience of Black male homosexuality any more than his heterosexual experience, or his denied and condemned polyamory, the Man-Not is an attempt to reflectively engage the conditions that dictate the formation of Black male sexualities and the historical vulnerabilities which obscure our viewing of them as actual realities of Black manhood. This is not a reflection upon “identities,” but rather the historical material—the problems and experiences—which contour how Black men have come to define themselves. This is a book to challenge how we think of and perceive the conditions which actually effect all Black, and why we chose to see somethings, but deny others.

Black Masculinity as Buck Studies: Documenting the Links between Hegemonic Masculinity and the Reality of Black Males

The mimetic thesis has been a central feature of Black feminist ideology since the penning of Michelle Wallace’s The Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman in the late 1970’s. The emergence of the Buck—the heterosexual Black male mythological figure emerging from slavery—as the basis of Black male political aspiration in the 20th century has been a central modality of Black masculinity studies for the last three decades. Wallace reduced the complexities of political economics, racism, history, and class mobility to the genital level. She maintained that Black men had internalized the white man’s obsession with their own penises. As she said, “white men were perversely obsessed with the black man’s genitals but the obsession turned out to be a communicable disease and in the sixties black men came down with high fevers.” [13] More than simply offering one perspective of the Black Power era, Wallace’s text created a bridge between white patriarchy and Black male political aspirations that allowed the racially specific accounts of white patriarchal power isolated to white feminist theories of dominance or hegemony to extend to Black males. The Black Macho, the “male chauvinist that was frequently cruel, narcissistic, and shortsighted,” was birthed by Black men accepting the sexual primitivism of the Black male presupposed by whites. [14] The Black man of the 1960’s lost himself in the image of this brute according to Wallace making “himself a living testament to the white man’s failures.” [15] According to Wallace, the Black man continues to suffer poverty, deprivation, and unhappiness not from racism, but “because his black perspective, like the white perspective, supported the notion that manhood is more valuable than anything else.” [16] Wallace makes a distinction between an organic Black manhood and a mimetic one. “As long as he [the Black man] was able to hold onto his own black-centered definition of manhood, his sense of himself was not endangered.” [17] The longer the Black male stayed in this country, the more “he would get the black and white perspectives confused.” [18]

Largely influenced by the adoption of Freudian psycho-analysis, and the structuralist-categoricalism of the previous era Black gender frames continue to utilize Black masculinity as a categorical representing the Oedipal drive toward masculinity. In this world, the Black male is reduced to his phallic aspirations for self-hood. Phallo-centrism, patriarchy, and Black males’ lacking (be it power, recognition, or a symbolic phallus) became the basis from which Black maleness is understood. Black males are defined by the absence of themselves for each other. Their lack of Black fathers, their lack of power in America, their lack of employment, their lack of manhood—all sociological phenomena—become the markers of their incompleteness, demonstrations of their definitional-ontological failures as Black males, rather than proof of their subordinated male status and existence in a completely different register of sexuality. Black males are not only defined by this lack, but thought only be complete when they stand side by side with white men. Black masculinity is accounted for through its psycho-analytic (unconscious) yearning for the world of the white man, his power and possessions, far too often including the white woman.

By disregarding the historical examples of Black male resistance to white supremacy, as well as the traditional expectations of hegemonic masculinity even supported by Black women at the anthropological level as Christian, capitalist, homophobic, etc., the Black male is attached to patriarchy at a biological level, such that every action of self-defense, politics, or love becomes an exercise of his attempt to realize the patriarchy denied to him. Aaronette M. White summarizes this position in Black gender frames quite well. She says “Though most African American men do not experience the same level of power as most White American men, patriarchy produces pecking orders across different groups of men and within different subgroups of men. Each subgroup of men defines manhood in ways that conform to the economic and social possibilities of that group. However, even marginalized men (e.g., poor men of color) accept the system because they benefit from the “patriarchal dividend,” which is the advantage men in general gain from the overall subordination of women, particularly the women in their subgroup.” [19] Similar accounts to White’s thinking can be found throughout Black masculinity literature, [20] but the evidence that subordinated masculinity is of the same species as hegemonic masculinity such that it can be of the kind that obtains the ideal is sorely lacking. To substantiate the view that Black men benefit from patriarchy despite their inferior social, economic, and racial status, White appeals to Raewyn Connell’s first edition of Masculinities as evidence for the claim that Black men would be rewarded in a patriarchal society as men. [21] This grounding of patriarchy in Black male interest and his desire to be, or be like, the white male is suspicious. It suggests that while Black men can articulate themselves as oppressed subjects to myriads of structures and ideologies from racism to classism, imperialism to colonization, religion to atheism, as subordinated men positioned outside of hegemonic masculinity, gender remains unbeknownst to them.

But why do we find no assumption of this imitative character in Black feminist accounts of Black womanhood despite the vast historical works demonstrating the internalization of various Victorian gender ideals, social Darwinist theories, as well as their support for patriarchy as the basis of racial uplift during the 19th century. Despite Black men and women being subject to the same cultural, ethnological and anthropological theories rooted in racial evolution, only Black males are thought to have internalized these historical views to such an extent that the sociological has been transformed into Black masculine ontology. While much of Black feminism has historically appealed to democratic reform, and continued integration into institutions, or protection and recognition by the law (all attempts to codify Black female vulnerability into societal institutions so that rape, domestic abuse, and discrimination) these are recognized as calls for progressive change, rather than a desire for the positionality and power of white womanhood, despite appeals to the same concepts and apparati which have historically sustain white women’s (and men’s for that matter) economic and political power. There is no scholarship asserting that Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” proves that she aspires to the powers, recognition, and status of white women denied to her. Are only Black males envious of the position of the dominant classes? Take for example, Truth’s famous condemnation of Black men getting the right to vote which has been quoted for years as evidence of the historical worry Black women have had of Black male political advancement. Truth says

There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to got it going again. White women are a great deal smarter, and know more than colored women, while colored women do not know scarcely anything. They go out washing, which is about as high as a colored woman gets, and their men go about idle. [22]

If Truth’s quote remains a reminder of the danger Black male politics has posed since the mid-19th century, then why are we not also suspicious of the allure of the power of white womanhood? What makes one part true and the other part of the same speech false?

Think of Stokley Carmichael’s statement “The only position for women in the SNCC was prone,” for instance. This sentence has become representative of not only him, or the ideology of the organization he represented, but evidence of Black male’s patriarchal political inclination throughout the centuries. [23] Mary King, a member of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the author of Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement offers a vastly different account. Stokley’s comment pertained to a position paper circulated for the November 1964 Waveland meeting of the SNCC written by Mary King and Casey Hayden. The position paper spoke to the assumption of male leadership, and the role of male and female workers of SNCC. The position papers were meant to get the leadership to think about foundational questions: “What is SNCC,” “What do we organize,” “Where do we organize.” [24] The position paper on women asked to representatives to think of the role women played in the SNCC’s leadership and decision-making structure. Specifically, the paper asked members to “Consider why it is in SNCC that women who are competent, qualified, and experienced are automatically assigned to the ‘female’ kinds of jobs such as: typing, desk work, telephone work, filing, library work, cooking, and the assistant kind of administrative work but rarely the executive kind.” [25] King fondly accounts that Stokley made fun of everything that crossed his agile mind, and this position paper was no different. When Stokley came to the not so anonymous women’s paper in the meeting, King recounts, “Looking straight at me, he grinned broadly and shouted, ‘What is the position of women in SNCC?’ Answering himself, he responded, ‘The position of women in SNCC is prone!’” [26] According to King, the now infamous statement by Carmichael was a joke. She remembers that “Stokley threw back his head and roared outrageously with laughter. We all collapsed with hilarity…It drew us all closer together, because, even in that moment, he was poking fun at his own attitudes.” [27] Rather than describing Carmichael as some raging patriarchal maniac, King says “Casey and I felt, and continue to feel, that Stokley was one of the most responsive men at the time that our anonymous paper appeared in 1964.” [28] Several years later Casey Hayden’s “In the Attics of My Mind” confirmed Mary King’s recollection of events in SNCC. Even in 2010, Hayden remembers the SNCC as a “womanist, nurturing, and familial” organization. [29] In fact, Hayden goes so far as to state that “Women’s culture and black culture merg[ed] for me in the southern freedom movement, especially in SNCC, free of constraints and the values of white patriarchy…” [30]

What is it that essentially ties Black manhood—its aspirations, ideals, and perceptions—to random statements, or jokes made by Black men throughout history? What makes an individual’s comments stick to the historical consciousness of all Black males? How does one Black man represent the conscious of them all, or the majority of them? Despite the prevalence of arguments to this effect, Black women were no less subject to the sexist and misandrist ideas of the times than Black men were. This is not an issue of masculinity or femininity as much as the ideas and political ideology of their day. Gender differences between Black men and women simply did not produce clear delineations of thought, and attitudes, throughout history. In fact, this is a position articulated by Michelle Wallace herself. She actually argues that the Black Macho is only one side of the gender dynamic created by integration. Wallace plainly states that “In the process of assimilation, integration and accommodation, blacks had taken on the culture and values of whites in regard to sexuality and gender. This did more than make it inevitable that black men would be sexist or misogynistic: it also made inevitable black women's completely dysfunctional self-hatred,” yet there is not one exploration of this self-hatred taken on by Black women under the same conditions which allegedly created the Black Macho. [31] In many ways, academic theory establishes its legitimacy through the profiling of Black males. It criminalizes and polices them as a group, while ignoring the actual conditions which show the behaviors that are used as evidence for the theory actually exceeds Black maleness. They appear to be explained by the theory, because they are simply the target group. Wallace specifically argues that “Black women would define their femininity (or their liberation, which was not, however, a movement) in terms of their lack of these same superficial masculine characteristics precisely because the myth of their inferiority, the black female stereotype, had always portrayed them as oversexed, physically strong and warlike.” [32] The Superwoman, literally the second half of the title to her book, has not generated any discussion in academic gender theory or Black feminism, despite the claim that Black women, if we accept the Black Macho thesis, aspires to the very same end. It is the biological sexual difference that marks Black males and absolves Black women despite being immersed in the same cultural and political conditions which give rise to Black gender problematics.

Hegemonic Masculinity and the Black Male

The similarities to hegemonic masculinity theory and Wallace’s account of the Black Macho is stunning. Sex role theory is heavily dependent on the political economy between men and women founded upon the nuclear family in patriarchal societies, so it seems obvious that Michelle Wallace is not presenting the Black Macho as a sex role historically solidified by the relation between Black men and women. Wallace’s rendering of history and slavery maintains that Black men and women have been denied the roles of white society, since they were prevented from marrying, and accepts there was a Black manhood before the 1960’s that was not Machoistic. As such, it is unlikely this lurks behind her presentation of the Black Macho. Hegemonic masculinity theory, on the hand, resonates with a certain parallel that is beyond coincidence. Hegemonic masculinity was a theory developed by Raewyn Connell in the 1980’s. Connell’s first work, Ruling Class, Ruling Culture was a dense study of the Australian ruling class and their conflicts with the working class population. [33] It is unsurprising then, given her interest in class theory, that Gramsci’s theory of hegemony had some appeal to her evolving thinking about gender. As originally introduced Connell conceptualized hegemonic masculinity as “a single structural fact, the global dominance of men over women.” [34] Hegemonic masculinity asserts itself as a heterosexual practice that seeks to dominate women and subordinated masculinities which challenge its definition like that of homosexuality. [35] Connell is very specific in her deployment of Gramsci’s language. She says:

In the concept of hegemonic masculinity, 'hegemony' means (as in Gramsci’s analyses of class relations in Italy from which the term is borrowed) a social ascendancy achieved in a play of social forces that extends beyond contests of brute power into the organization of private life and cultural processes. Ascendancy of one group of men over another achieved at the point of a gun, or by the threat of unemployment is not hegemony. Ascendancy which is embedded in religious doctrine and practice, mass media content, wage structures, the design of housing, welfare/taxation policies and so forth, is. [36]

Founded as a normative assertion, hegemonic masculinity depends on the socialization of an ideal form. Connell is very clear that “the cultural ideal (or ideals) of masculinity need not correspond at all closely to the actual personalities of the majority of men. Indeed the winning of hegemony often involves the creation of models of masculinity which are quite specifically fantasy figures.” [37] Because hegemonic masculinity is held at the ideological level, there is no need for it to in fact conflict with emphasized femininity of the society—in fact they would complement each other. [38] Connell’s theory asserts that society is always in a “state of play”—dynamic, struggling, and meeting challenges against ideology with reification and new ideological rationalizations to support the desirability of the asserted hegemony. Institutions, individuals, and social forces are in constant interaction within the hegemonic masculine culture. There is no stasis or fixity in this account.

Masculinities begins with a historical and theoretical conscience not easily apparent in Gender and Power. From the outset, Connell is clear that some societies simply do not have the concept of masculinity, much less an ideology hegemonic masculinity. It is simply not universal. Connell recognizes that “'Masculinity' does not exist except in contrast with femininity. A culture which does not treat women and men as bearers of polarized character types, at least in principle, does not have a concept of masculinity in the sense of modern European/American culture.” [39] Masculinity, because it is a gender relation in society, is subject to social forces like any other relational phenomena. Connell outlines a three-tier model to understand the dynamics of masculinity. The first is power, what is usually referred to as patriarchy or the subordination of women and dominance of men in Western/European societies. The second is labor, which includes not only wages but the gendered division of wealth and work in these societies. And last, but not least, cathexis or sexual desire. Extending her Freudian inclinations from Gender and Power, Connell asserts that the “practices that shape and realize desire are thus an aspect of the gender order.” [40] Similar to her reading of Freud in her first book, Connell is fascinated by Freud’s explication of the “psychical and the social.” [41] The motivations which drive how one constructs and participates in the external through the permissions of their internal is central in Masculinities. In 2002, created a fourth category called symbolization to capture what is sometimes referred to as performances of identity or the meanings conveyed by individuals through speech, dress, and behavior to assert their gender meanings. [42]

Unlike the assertions of many scholars who continue to utilize masculinity theory, Connell does not have a fixation on a specific politics as the solution to hegemonic masculinity and structures of patriarchy. As Connell concedes, “The formulation in Gender and Power attempted to locate all masculinities (and all femininities) in terms of a single pattern of power, the “global dominance” of men over women. While this was useful at the time in preventing the idea of multiple masculinities from collapsing into an array of competing lifestyles, it is now clearly inadequate to our understanding of relations among groups of men and forms of masculinity and of women’s relations with dominant masculinities.” [43] In sharp contrast to the biologism operating within the premises of American gender theorists, previously highlighted by Oyèrónké Oyewúmì criticism of feminist gender analysis, Connell recognizes that “dominance in gender relations involves an interplay of costs and benefits, challenges to hegemonic masculinity arise from the “protest masculinities” of marginalized ethnic groups, and bourgeois women may appropriate aspects of hegemonic masculinity in constructing corporate or professional careers.” [44] Though Connell concedes that masculinity has established particular ways of using male bodies for work, there is no specific biological causality where subordinated and subjugated masculinities necessarily aspire to embody hegemonic masculinity any more than women of the dominant classes would seek to utilize the hegemony or emphasized femininity for its own interests. Perhaps more interesting, there is no suggesting that any one politic, be it feminist or otherwise, remedies the societal instantiations of hegemonic masculinity.

In the United States, Robert Staples’s decades long work on Black masculinity and the Black family has been reduced to his debate with Audre Lorde and Michelle Wallace in the Black Scholar in 1979. [45] Connell, however, recognizes his work as a serious challenge to hegemonic masculinity theory as originally proposed alongside James Messerschmidt's work on working class masculinities. [46] Connell utilization of hegemony is meant to draw explain how “gender relations underscored the achievement of hegemonic masculinity largely through cultural ascendancy—discursive persuasion—encouraging all to consent to, coalesce around, and embody such unequal gender relations.” [47] Remember Connell has been developing this theory since 1982 based on her initial study of Australian high school boys. While many if not most gender theories demand specificity to their subjects, citing or emphasizing works by Black women about Black women, or Black gay experience by Black gay men or women, etc., heterosexual Black men are thought to be adequately captured by generic theories of masculinity formulated on male children in colonial societies and upper class settler culture without any hesitation. The asserted closeness Black males, who are among the poorest, most uneducated, and most isolated members of American society, are thought to have to hegemonic masculinity and white patriarchy is evidence, not their actual power or aspirations for it, but the extent to which theorists and scholars have internalized the negative stereotypes about Black males as hyper-masculine, violent, and dangerous. Black masculinity, rather than being a specific inquiry into the attitudes, history, and destiny of Black men, is merely an attempt to read Black men into the legacy established by white masculinity and condemn their political or economic aspirations as patriarchy.

Black Masculinity Theory as Black Male Threat Construction

Despite the mountainous empirical and conceptual ventures identifying and defining multiple notions of manhood and boyhood among Black males which dislodge the essentialist thesis asserted by Wallace, much of gender theory remains dedicated to the paradigm which asserts Black heterosexual masculinity to be the Buck, or Black Macho caricature. Whereas mainstream (white) theories of patriarchy are debated and nuanced so that the theory (like that of Connell) can be tested with empirical research, assertions about Black masculinity are taken as fact, to be complete, and moreover incontrovertible. Challenging prevailing theories that maintain Black men are sexist, patriarchal, and set on domination are met with moral condemnation, while introducing material history challenging the historiography that maintains Black men pursued civil rights and Black Power for the right to dominate women and have sexual access to white women is classified as apologetics and summarily dismissed as “cape-ing for Black men.” In a very real sense, theory mirrors the cultural and social context of its origin, and like the society from which it springs, academic (gender) theory is accepted as true because it rationalizes the accepted stereotypes of Black males held by the general public. There is a comfort found in theory that is not offered by public opinion; a correctness of sorts married to the word despite it being no better founded than personal anecdote or experience. Black masculinity theory gains acceptance through an ideological rigidity equating any disputing of the claim that Black men are patriarchs and sexist to a denial of sexism and patriarchy existing in Black communities. It is actually quite simple to hold that Black men are not patriarchs, but are socialized to accept sexism, just as easy as it is to posit that in a racist society where Black males are criminalized and systematically impoverished, that Black men and women are taught to pathologize that population. Nuance need not constitute denial.

Robert Staples’s Black Masculinity: The Black Male’s Role in American Society, though rarely cited today in gender theory, is widely acknowledge as being among the first empirically driven analyses of Black males in American society. It shares this distinction alongside Lawrence E. Gary’s Sage anthology entitled Black Men which was published in 1981. [48] Contrary to the longstanding mythology that all race scholarship during the 60’s and 70’s was dedicated to the plight of the Black male, it became evident in the late 1970’s that social scientists knew very little about Black men and boys empirically. Given the proliferation of texts about Black women and girls in the early 1970’s like Joyce Ladner’s Tomorrow’s Tomorrow, La Francis Rodgers-Rose’s The Black Woman, and The Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Gary noted “Although these publications have added considerably to our knowledge of Black women and their families, to some extent they have created the impression in the minds of many people that the Black community functions primarily as a matriarchal family system. In fact, so little attention has been given to Black men as fathers and husbands that they have been referred to as the ‘phantom of American family studies.” [49] Early depictions of Black males in the social science literature caricaturized him as “street-corner men, pimps, deserters, criminals, hustlers, or ineffective family figureheads.” [50] These depictions were not research, but rather mythologies used to explain the specific racial, sexual, and economic position Black males suffer under as the product of their own cultural deficiencies. Black males were defined as problems, threats. They were “projected as psychologically impotent and castrated, dependent, incredulous, nebulous, irresponsible, and suspicious,” [51] and thereby responsible for their own lowly position in society.

Robert Staples took a different approach in his study of Black men and boys in American society. Staples held that “Institutional racism and its machinations shape the expression of black masculinity,” [52] in America, and that this reality cannot be discounted in seeking to understand both his subjective experiences of manhood, and the objective consequences of being both Black and male. The historical circumstances of Black males in America gave rise to fundamentally different notions of manhood than those of white males. “In the case of black men, their subordination as a racial minority has more than cancelled out their advantages as male in the larger society.” [53] Staples insisted that this precarious position meant that “any understanding of their experience will have to come from an analysis of the complex problems they face as blacks and as men.” [54] Staples named this the dual dilemma. To many readers, this ideas sounds like contemporary theories like intersectionality in that it suggests every subject is both raced and sexed. However, this idea was initially published in 1978 in the Journal of Social Issues. [55] Staples maintained that Black men had few privileges in America, except in relation to Black women who they enjoyed a higher income than in the 1970’s. Staples does attend to the wit of history. In an era that witnessed the “bourgeoning of black nationalism with its attendant elevation of the black male to his rightful and historical role as head of the black family and community,” [56] it was women, mostly white women who gained political and economic ascendency from the civil rights movement.

Staples maintains that the economic and political isolation of Black men and boys gave them a more egalitarian views of sex. It is generally conceded that Black men do not have the power to enact patriarchy to the extent that white men do, but this structural limitation is rarely connected to or thought of as a reason that Black men would formulate fundamentally different notions of manhood all together that resist gender hierarchies not only within the home, but in the larger society as well. Black men are by far the most liberal sex-race grouping in America. “They start dating earlier…have the most liberal sexual attitudes, and are most inclined to have non-marital sex without commitment.” [57] Within the institution of marriage, Black men are more involved than other males in doing house work, tending to children, and the sharing of decision making with their female counterpart. [58] Recent studies actually show that Black fathers are more involved with their children than men of other races, even when they are not married or living with the mother. [59] Black men are not mimetic in the sense that they simply base their life aspirations or behaviors around the precepts established by the larger white society. Sociologists Anthony Lemelle Jr. and Juan Battle show that in the Black community “homophobia and homosexuality are equally stigmatized identities,” and it is religious participation as well as one’s gender, rather than masculinity itself, that indicate the likelihood of Black men or women being homophobic and expressing homonegativity. [60] Black male attitudes concerning sex, love, marriage, and manhood itself differ largely from that of whites. What Black men do—how they actually behave—is more of a sociological than philosophical point, but it is precisely because they live out these perspectives that it has theoretical import.

Academic theory has a passion for Black male mimeticism, so much so, that it is analytic—a property of Black maleness itself. This position is little more than a mythology disproven by the attitudinal studies on Black men since the mid-1980’s. In reality, there is 30 years of data validating Robert Staples analysis in the 1970’s that Black males simply do not share the same definitions, or have the same cultural expectations of white men in America. Black males are socialized to understand manhood in the context of their vulnerability; the dangers their assertiveness and competitiveness are perceived to have in the larger society. Black men do not define manhood based on their ability to dominate others, but rather their vulnerability to America’s racist misandrist regimes. In Claude Franklin’s The Changing Definition of Masculinity (1984), he writes that “Many Black male youth also learn that a lacuna exists between those traits of dominance and competitiveness internalized and their exhibition in the larger society. They are very much aware of the high rate of Black male unemployment, Black male underrepresentation in high-paying, high-prestige occupations, and the generally inferior status of Black males in American society.” [61] It is only within Black sub-culture or inter-personal relationships that Black males can even express a “masculine” role, so their idea of Black manhood is quite distant from that of the dominant white society. [62] In fact, some studies have found Black males’ conceptualization of manhood does not include any reference to the ideas of masculinity. Andrea G. Hunter and James E. Davis’s “Constructing Gender: An Exploration of Afro-American Men’s Conceptualization of Manhood,” asked one question to a group of Black men in New York: “What Do You Think It Means to Be a Man.” The answers and clusters of ideas revealed that “discussions of masculinity were absent from men's definitions of manhood.” [63] Hunter and James explained that this difference in Black male perceptions of masculinity and manhood possibly reflects a cultural awareness of the differences between the physical sexual man and the social man; a distinction first introduced by Nathan and Julia Hare’s Bringing the Black Boy into Manhood. The Hares maintain that Black boys understand the social man as “a moral and jural condition which extends, or should, far beyond the trappings and execution of uncommitted sexuality.” Whereas masculinity was thought of as a reflection of the dominant culture (aggression, power, etc.), for Black males “Manhood emerged as a multidimensional construct that defines being a man in terms of the self, a man's relationship and responsibility to family, and a worldview or existential philosophy.” [65] Manhood was the idea Black men used to frame how they thought of themselves outside of the ills and stereotypes of mainstream society, and allowed a distinction between what they saw as masculine (white) behaviors and those of a Black man. As Hunter and Davis explain, “although masculinity may be a part of being a man, it is not the foundation on which manhood rests.” [66]

Contrary to the biologic ascriptions placed on Black males, Black men and boys have consistently demonstrated that their subordinate (male) racial position has made them more aware of sexual oppression and gender inequality. In 1983, Noel A. Cazenave termed the racial and sexual oppression of Black men the double bind in a study that found middle-class Black men, those thought to embrace the ideals of hegemonic masculinity most readily, to have more progressive gender attitudes than white men and “approve of nontraditional roles for women, women's issues, and egalitarian marital relationships, and believe that men can learn a great deal from the way women act that can be incorporated into their own behavior.” [67] In 1989, Ruby Lee Gooley’s study of race and gender consciousness amongst Black Americans found that “the mean race and gender consciousness levels of Black women are more similar to the mean levels for Black men,” than that of white women. [68] While the early 90’s marked the popularization of intersectionality and the presumed gender consciousness of Black bodies based its biological designation as male or female, multiple empirical studies confirmed the findings of the previous decade maintaining Black men to certainly be more aware of, if not more conscious of, gender inequality than other men and women.

For instance, in 1995 Kathleen Blee and Ann Tickamyer’s “Racial Differences in Men's Attitudes about Women's Gender Roles” utilized National Longitudinal Survey cohorts from 1960-1981 to test the attitudes and racial concepts of gender between white men and Black men. Despite this study using data collected as much as thirty years prior to Hunter and Davis’s study, the results found that “African American and White men differ in their attitudes about women's gender roles, that beliefs about gender roles change across time, and that individual status and life course processes influence gender role attitudes.” [69] Because Black males are socialized to see women as earners in the home, Black males are much more liberal than white males seeing Black women as co-workers and needed for the economic survival of the whole. These attitudinal differences are not simply isolated to how Black men see Black women, they reflect a much deeper understanding of how sexual oppression operates in relation to racism. Andrea Hunter and Sherrill Seller’s “Feminist Attitudes among African American Women and Men,” published in 1998, attempted to respond to the assertions about Black men’s beliefs about gender with empirical findings. The authors were very perceptive in noting, “Despite the body of work on African American women and feminist thought, there have been few empirical investigations or theoretical discussions of feminist ideology or consciousness among Black men.” [70] Hunter and Seller’s study sought to measure three issues they believe were central to feminism: “(1) recognition and critique of gender inequality, (2) egalitarian gender roles, and (3) political activism for the rights of women.” [71] Similar to previous studies, Hunter and Sellers found that “African American women and men…tended to have similar positions on the feminist issues examined.” [72] Additionally, Hunter and Sellers observed “African American men are often cast as having few positive proactive adaptive strategies to handle the "crisis" associated with a diminished primary provider role.” [73] Their analyses show that Black men’s experiences with police brutality and unemployment “may facilitate a recognition of the importance of both women and men inside and outside the home, particularly in difficult times. Hence, one response to a threatened male breadwinner role is a shift in gender role attitudes.” [74]

Evelyn Simien’s Black Feminist Voices in Politics utilizes the National Black Election Studies, the National Black Politics Study, and her own National Black Feminist Study to document the broad support Black men have for women’s issues. Simien’s work dispels the myth that understanding sexual oppression only revolves around a Black and female identity. According to Simien, “black women and men recognize that the problems of racism, poverty, and sexual discrimination are all linked together; black feminists are beneficial to the black community; black women should share equally in the political leadership; black women should take on a more prominent role in the black church; and the overwhelming majority of respondents (black men and women) felt they share a common fate with black women.” [75] What is perhaps the most controversial aspect of Simien’s work is that her studies have found that “black men are equally and, in some cases, more likely than black women to support black feminism.” [76] Several years later, Catherine Harnois used Simien’s National Black Feminist Study to test Patricia Hill Collin’s theory of standpoint epistemology. According to Collins, a Black woman’s standpoint is defined as “those experiences and ideas shared by African American women that provide a unique angle of vision on self, community, and society.” [77] Harnois’s work, like that of Simien, found that Black men are as likely and in many cases more likely to support the values (like the interconnectedness of race, class, and gender) and political behaviors traditionally thought to solely belong to a Black feminist orientation. [78] Harnois again found that Black men are supportive of Black women’s leadership roles in politics, and have wholeheartedly supported gender equality more than any other group of men and more than some women. [79] Contrary to the purported correctness of standpoint epistemology, gender simply does not control the political sentiment or limit the social consciousness of Black males. Black men experience the world alongside Black women, they are abused because of their race and sex like Black women, yet theory holds that because they are not women, they must be opposed to women. These are assertions with little proof or propensity that emerge from specifically tailored historical examples, rather than complete accounts of the activities of the groups described. The reality is that Black males, because of their peculiar race/sex/subordinate position, are able to understand the complexities of social life much better than the academic theories allegedly designed for the same end.

Today, contemporary theories like intersectionality and hegemonic masculinity assume long disproven myths concerning Black male socialization and social aspiration. Many of these empirical studies sought to test the attitudes and worldviews of Black males as a way to address the historical caricatures of Black men as jealous aspirants craving white male power and dominion. These empirical studies capture what have long been denied to Black males in theory—a reflective capacity. Because of their marginalization and oppression, Black men have developed a separate historical conscious of manhood quite distinct from that of (white) masculinity. The oppression of Black males, rather than facilitating an exclusive consciousness of their own oppression in terms of race, is shown to be consistently formulated in terms of their sex—their particular vulnerabilities as Black males who are unemployed, hunted, and discriminated against. Black men share an empathy for women’s sexual oppression beyond the presumed racial register, because they experience the world as economically, sexually, and politically endangered. In other words, Black males are empathetic, because the economic and political obstacles they face are simultaneously experienced in the world as racial and sexual vulnerabilities. Despite this data, many scholars Black and white, male and female, will continue to assert that all Black males are sexist, misogynist, and patriarchs. These stereotypes function not only to condemn and dehumanize Black males, but give communality to the self-selected academic class who find commonality in pathologizing Black men. When these long disproven stereotypes are given the label of theory, these racist generalizations offer the illusion of specialization to the Black men and women building their careers as experts of Black masculinity, and protects whites against charges of racism, since their hate, fear, and discrimination against Black males can be rationalized as theoretical advance. Unsurprisingly, the very same efforts that are morally praised as the decentering Black men (the denial of their deaths and poverty, the ridiculing of panels on these topics, the denial of venues for publication) in the academy are condemned as racist when practiced in society. Like the racist rationalizations which justify stop and frisk, racial profiling, and Black male death, Black masculinity studies construct Black men as a threat to women and others, codifies such constructions through theory, and legitimizes the discrimination and isolation of Black males throughout the academy based on the alleged physical danger they pose to others.

The Need for a Black Male Historiography: Resisting the Mimetic Imposition upon Black Male History.

The biological reduction of Black masculinity to its sexual assignment of “male,” largely built on the vacating of the historical peculiarity of race and the conscious Black men have gained through centuries of racist colonial oppression, allows all sort of evils to be ahistorically ascribed to the aspirations of the Black manhood. The lack of rigorous study and non-fictive exploration of Black male’s particular historical consciousness enables disciplines and theorists alike to erase the specific ontogeny of Black manhood throughout the centuries; preferring his “perceived” sexual designation as male to serve as the foundation of his historical and contemporary psychology. This essentialized-biologically determined sexual consciousness is never questioned as applied to Black males, despite a history where the “feminization of colonized men seems rather a gesture of humiliation attributing to them sexual passivity under the threat of rape.” [80] Whereas Black women are argued to have developed a historical consciousness and various strategies to deal with their marginality and sexual oppression, Black men—even when shown to have been victims of rape, economic marginality, medical experimentation, cannibalism, and castration—are denied the capacity to reflectively engage and respond to these realities. Canonical gender theory asserts that Black males’ only answer to their victimization, even when at the hands of (white) patriarchy, is in fact, (white) patriarchy. How can one historically study Black males denied humanity, Man-nots, in a way not confined to colonial notions of gender?

Over the last decade, there have been several works dedicated to exposing the colonial origin of gender and problematize our casting of gender, the theoretical deployments of the masculine and feminine, upon Black bodies. Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (2010) attempts to capture the conditions of Blackness and the intuitive capacities of the Black abject prior to gender. For Scott, the abject marks “gender in a state of relative undifferentiation, gender as (however momentarily) not-yet-defined.” [81] The abject is the refuses Blackness the label of man. The depriving of Blackness “needs to show itself as not-masculine. But this does not mean that it is necessarily feminine, or only feminine, merely that it cannot be narrated except as the negation of what it exceeds or overruns.” [82] Greg Thomas’s The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire (2007) however attempts to dislodge both the madness of masculinity and femininity upon Blackened flesh. As Thomas writes, “There is no universal man socialized in opposition to a universal woman, or vice versa; there is a white man and a white woman specied over and against Black African “slaves,” who may be described as male and female.” [83]

Blackness distorts gender, making it inapplicable to the condition of Blackness and those sexed bodies within wretchedness or abjection. But what of the study of these sexed bodies? The first chapter, “On Mimesis and Men,” attempts to break the historiography of gender theory which maintains the end of slavery marks the beginning of Black’s assimilation of bourgeois European gender norms as the path toward freedom. This shows that within 19th and 20th century Blackness there was a retreat from many of the foundational modes of gender in the West. As a historiography of Black males, this chapter articulates the breaks in the assumptions that Black and male(d) bodies simply aspire towards patriarchy. I believe there is a tradition of Black manhood erected upon an ethnological foundation in the 19th century that conditioned the anti-imperial, anti-colonial perspectives of the mid-20th century.

The second chapter takes up the question of mimesis from the opposite end of the spectrum—through the analysis of a convicted Black male rapist and nationalist named Eldridge Cleaver. In many academic circles, Eldridge Cleaver is the quintessential Black Macho. He is the rapist, the Buck, and the narcissistic terror of Black women at large. But what if he was something else? What if Cleaver reveals that he was not simply a rapist, but a theorist of the erotics which preceded rape, the homoerotic production of Black men as convicts; the nameless Black male flesh which is sacrificed to the prison industrial complex. Chapter two, “Lost in a Kiss,” attempts to give some context to the sexual violence Black men historically experienced at the hands of white women and by effect white patriarchy during Jim Crow and well into the 1960’s. By situating the rape of Black men historically, I show that the convict-criminal is a category endemic to that of Black maleness that makes Black males sexual vulnerability to repetitive sexual repression, violence and rape. Today, incarceration is thought of as a racist monument, a generally racist institution. Rarely is the prison thought of as formative institution that produces specific kinds of beings, Black male beings, in society. As a consequence, prison rape is thought to simply be the function of male attempts to dominate other men, and not a means of producing these kinds of selves in the world through sexualization.

Cleaver however argues for a very different conceptualization of rape in prison. Cleaver argues that Black male sexuality is thought to be parasitically attached to the quest of Black male politics and resistance against white supremacy. Cleaver traces the obsession with the criminalization of Black male sexuality to slave revolts like that of Nat Turner. Referring to William Styron’s depiction of Nat Turner as a the inevitable rapist of Emmeline Turner in The Confessions of Nat Turner, [84] Cleaver asks: “Why do you think that white boy who wrote a book about Nat Turner turned Nat Turner into a freak? The basic lie of his book was about who Nat Turner wanted to fuck, Nat Turner killed white people, white bitches. And he killed for black people, for black bitches. So who do you think he related to fucking?” [85] Who Black men are charged for fucking is the supposition behind all of his political acts—his defining impulse is thought to be rape, he pursues politics simply for the opportunity to rape more. To conquer and dissuade Black men from resisting white males, the prison was constructed as a homoerotic arena of surveillance and corporealization. Black males’ political resistance is criminalized as the extension of his brutish nature to rationalize this market. Society thereby creates the Black criminal. It produces him as undifferentiated Black flesh, able to be used or killed at the whim of white men and women. The prison simply stores these Black male bodies for later use.

Black Male Vulnerability as a Foundation: Evaluating the Political Economy of Black Male Erasures from Theory.

Black male vulnerability is the term that I use to capture the disadvantages that Black males endure compared to other groups, the erasure of Black males from theory, and the various violence and death that they suffer in society. This term is not meant to simply express the material disadvantages Black males face due to incarceration, unemployment, police brutality, homicide, domestic and sexual abuse throughout society, or his victimhood. This term is also meant to express the vulnerable condition—the sheer fungibility—of the Black male as a living terror able to be killed, raped, or dehumanized at any moment given the disposition of those who encounter him. Black male vulnerability is an attempt to capture the Black male’s perpetual susceptibility to the will of others; how he has no resistance to the imposition of others fears and anxieties upon him. Despite the contemporary intersectional, feminist, and liberal-progressive framings of gender hierarchies which maintain Black men have some privilege based on their maleness, Black men and boys lag behind on practically every population indicator from education and income to health and mortality.

Classrooms are hostile environments for young Black boys. [86] They are often thought of as lazy, disruptive, and in need of the most discipline. [87] Teachers routinely assert that Black boys are less intelligent than whites and Black girls, and treat them less favorably as a result. [88] Some scholars have even shown that parents have assimilated the ideas that Black boys are less academically gifted than Black girls. These lower parental expectations for Black boys academically not only leads to less parental involvement in the education of Black males, but less reward or encouragement for their academic success. [89] The negative experiences Black boys endure from K-12 have very real consequences for college and beyond. Since the dawn of the 21st century, Black men have received less than 40% of the associate, professional, and doctoral degrees awarded to Black Americans. [90] The consequence of Black males earning less bachelor and doctoral degrees is reflected in the number of Black male professors at Title IV institutions throughout the country. According to the most recent American Association of University Professors report, there are roughly 48,000 Black male and about 70,000 Black female professors at Title IV colleges or universities in the United States. [91] Black female professors outnumber Black male professors by a little more than 20,000. Unlike the history of white Americans in higher education, Black men have always been outnumbered by their female counterparts in college enrollment and degree attainment in this country. Anne McDaniel’s “The Black Gender Gap in Educational Attainment: Historical Trends and Racial Comparisons” has convincingly shown that “the historical trend in college completion for blacks is not marked by the reversal of a gender gap that once favored males, as it is for whites, but rather entails a longstanding female advantage.” [92] Similarly Rhonda Sharpe, an economist, notes, “Since 2000, Black women earned twice as many associate’s, bachelor’s and master’s degrees as black men and nearly twice as many professional and doctorate degrees.” [93] The growth of Black women in the university has allowed them, as a group, to attain tenure track employment at rates comparable to their non-Black counterparts over the last two decades, [94] while Black males are still trying to gain sustainable access to colleges and universities at the baccalaureate level. [95] This historical advantage of Black women in education, first remarked upon by W.E.B. DuBois in 1927, brings attention to a stark race-sex inequality disregarded by many, if not most scholars, working on race and gender. [96] If this gender gap in education continues, warns Wilma Henry, “by 2097, all of the baccalaureate degrees earned by African Americans will be bestowed on African American women.” [97] The lower numbers of Black males pursuing college as a first choice drives many into labor intensive blue collar occupations. While these jobs will offer some economic independence in comparison to those years spent in college, Black males in these blue collar occupations rarely climb the economic ladder into the middle class. This lack of class mobility for Black males risks poverty and unemployment.

Incarceration has also had a devastating impact on Black males’ lifelong economic prospects. At the end of 2014, there were 516,000 Black men and 22,600 Black women in state or federal prison alone. [98] According the Bureau of Justice report on prisoners, “On December 31, 2014, black males had higher imprisonment rates than prisoners of other races or Hispanic origin within every age group.” [99] Economists Derek Neal and Armin Rick found that “The growth of incarceration rates among black men in recent decades combined with the sharp drop in black employment rates during the Great Recession have left most black men in a position relative to white men that is really no better than the position they occupied only a few years after the Civil Rights Act of 1965.” [100] The impact of incarceration is not simply rooted in the removal of these Black males from society. Incarceration also marks Black men for years after they are released, making employment and basic sustenance near impossible. Evelyn Patterson and Christopher Wildeman’s recent study, “Mass Incarceration and the Life Course Revisited,” found that imprisonment has even more devastating impacts on Black males’ economic condition and quality of life than previously thought, since incarceration robs Black males of disproportionately more years that they are capable of work. Patterson and Wildeman conclude that “the total amount of time black men on average spend marked—not in prison but an ex-prisoner and felon—is far larger (at 11.14 years, corresponding to roughly 27 percent of their working lives)…this means that black men spend on average 31 percent—roughly one-third—of their working lives either locked in a state prison or struggling to overcome the negative outcomes that result from their marked status.” [101] As Becky Petitt argues in Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, “high rates of incarceration among black men—and black men with low levels of education in particular—have profound implications for accounts of their social standing and that of their children, families, and communities where they live prior to and following incarceration.” [102] Incarceration then is more than simply an institution; it is a socially invigorated stigma marking poor uneducated Black males throughout their lives, and is far too often related to their impending deaths. But what if society is so dangerous for Black men and boys that prison, despite it deleterious consequences, is preferable? Evelyn Patterson’s “Incarcerating Death: Mortality in U.S. State Correctional Facilities, 1985-1998” points out that Black men are actually safer in prison that in American society. She writes: “For black males at every age, death rates were higher for the population outside of prison compared with their same-race counterparts in prison.” [103] What are scholars to make of this paradoxical social reality?

Historically, the prison has been explained as an institution that deprives the criminal of freedom. Incarceration is thereby linked to slavery and America’s history of racism by the extent to which Black men are criminalized and then made into prisoners, but rarely do these analyses explore the sexual aspects of imprisonment. Like our notions of racism, and even American slavery, Black males are imagined only in terms of their confrontation with white male power, never their vulnerability to rape or sexual violence at the hands of white men and women. Regardless of race, we live in a culture that denies the vulnerability of men to rape generally. Rape, when it does happen to men, is thought only to be perpetrated by other men. Women are never thought of as rapists, or perpetrators of sexual violence. Even with the change of the FBI definition of rape from “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will” to “the penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim,” there has been little change in the public’s perception of male rape. [104] “Although the new definition reflects a more inclusive understanding of sexual victimization, it appears to still focus on the penetration of the victim, which excludes victims who were made to penetrate.” [105] Despite the change in the actual law, data collection still operates on the idea that males are perpetrators rather than victims of rape. Because male victims “who are made to penetrate” are classified under sexual victimization in FBI reports, the actual number of non-consensual sex acts forced upon males are not classified as rape. This means the number of males actually raped not only remain invisible to the public, but scholars reporting the data as well. According to Stemple and Meyer, the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey’s “12-month prevalence estimates of sexual victimization show that male victimization is underrepresented when victim penetration is the only form of nonconsensual sex included in the definition of rape. The number of women who have been raped (1, 270,000) is nearly equivalent to the number of men who were ‘made to penetrate’ (1,267,000). [106] The authors continue:

This striking finding—that men and women reported similar rates of nonconsensual sex in a 12-month period—might have made for a newsworthy finding. Instead, the CDC’s public presentation of these data emphasized female sexual victimization, thereby (perhaps inadvertently) confirming gender stereotypes about victimization. For example, in the first headline of the fact sheet aiming to summarize the NISVS findings the CDC asserted, “Women are disproportionally affected by sexual violence.” Similarly, the fact sheet’s first bullet point stated, “1.3 million women were raped during the year preceding the survey.” Because of the prioritization of rape, the fact sheet failed to note that a similar number of men reported nonconsensual sex (they were “made to penetrate”). [107]

Such definitions serve as the cultural foundation for how we understand rape generally throughout society, but perhaps even more consequential is the role these definitions play in the disregard for rape in prisons. This heteronormative lens which limits rape and the desire to rape exclusively to the power of men over women has severely overdetermined how scholars have come to understand incarceration and blinded many to the history of sexual violence and rape which occurs within the prison.

Prisons are routinely excluded from household crime surveys. [108] As such prisoners, who are frequently victimized by staff and other prisoners are not considered in various publically reported measures of rape and sexual coercion. Currently, “Prison rape discourse focuses almost exclusively on sexual abuse perpetrated by men.” [109] The popular notion is that prisoners rape prisoners, when in reality there are significant numbers of staff, both male and female, who are reported to rape inmates. The dominant perception is that male staff rape female inmates, in reality however we find varying expressions of rape that are not only homosexual, but heterosexual and female perpetrated. Even when the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 69% of male prisoners report sexual misconduct by female perpetrators, the impact and trauma caused by such victimization is deemphasized and made to conform with traditional gendered assumptions about sex, specifically who can be the victim in forced sexual interactions. [110] This denial is particularly worrisome for our knowledge of incarceration and its effects on Black males. As Kim Buchanan explains, “The notion that black male criminals—stigmatized inside and outside prison as hyper-masculine rapists—might be sexually abused by law-enforcing women contravenes every intuition race and gender stereotypes have to offer.” [111] As such, scholars are blind to white men’s homoerotic coercion of Black men, and willfully deny that Black males are victims of white women’s sexual power and violence within the prison.

Whereas multiple social scientists are alerting scholars to the incompleteness of information we have about Black males to understand their disadvantages in health, income, and mortality because of policing and incarceration, scholars in English, women and gender studies, and various assortments of liberal arts assert that we not only have enough knowledge about Black men to justify not studying them, but that our present knowledge of Black males is complete and uncontestable. These scholars hold that Black men have an enduring ontological advantage over Black women, because they are male despite the aforementioned disadvantages they have not only to whites but Black women as well. These realities, facts so to speak, are unmoving to theorists, since there is a moral right(eous)ness asserted in deemphasizing Black male vulnerability. Chapter three, “Racist Misandry as Class Warfare,” attempts to examine this phenomena as a function of political economy, though it may be the case that the erasure of Black males from disciplines may be the function of somewhat metaphysical rather than ideological structures of thought. While an analysis of the super-predator, domestic and sexual violence, and the presumption of Black males as only perpetrators of violence and not victims may expose the limitations of academic scholarship, the consequence of such an examination may entail confronting the reality that Black maleness is cemented semiotically, and thereby ontologically, as a category of death and disregard within the symbolic order of America.

The Death of Black Men: The Race-Sex Nexus of Black Male Existence

In not being man, there is a negation of the humanity and personhood of the Black male. Man-Not-ness names this vulnerability that Black men and boys have to having one’s self substituted/determined by the fears and desires of other individuals. He stands in relation to others as always vulnerable, since his personhood, who he actually is to himself is not only denied, but negated by society. Social contact is perilous as the nature of the Black male is over-determined by the encounter he has with other individuals, or the power others have to define him when encountering his body. He is denied sociality, because every encounter a Black male has with others holds the potential for accusation. In a racist society, the Black male body has a logics all its own. To merely see the body of the Black male differentiates it from that of a white man (humanity) and separates it in kind from the phylogeny of the human. Because the Black male is defined by this distance to man, his nature being replaced with that of the brute and savage; he is made into horror. He literally is met with death, the effect of disposability and fungibility, because in the mind of others who see him, he represents death—imagined to be their greatest fear. This terror is not solely racial antipathy, but includes a very real sexual appetency.

Frantz Fanon argues in Black Skin, White Masks that the “Negrophobic woman is in fact nothing but a putative sexual partner—just as the Negrophobic man is a repressed homosexual.” [112] Fanon is clear that the substance of his analysis is not the Negro in general, but specifically the Black male, since he refers to the homoerotic nature of the white man’s desire for Black men. This is important for understanding the implication of Fanon’s assertion that “In relation to the Negro, everything takes place on the genital level.” [113] This sexual dimension of violence is there for a substantial intervention into our categorical assumptions about “race.” Fanon is arguing that in racism towards the Black male, there is a psychosexual oppression, a death driving fear which stimulates the sexual desires of white men and women towards the Black male. Or as Fanon says, “…when a white man hates [B]lack men, is he not yielding to a feeling of impotence of a sexual inferiority? Since his ideal is an infinite virility, is there not a phenomenon of diminution in relation to the Negro, who is viewed as a penis symbol? Is the lynching of the Negro not a sexual revenge? We know how much of sexuality there is in all cruelties, tortures, beatings.” [114] The satyriasis motivating what Black males are substituted for in the minds of white men have consistently received less attention than perhaps deserved. While the nymphomania of the white woman is suggested as the basis of her heterosexual obsession with the Black phallus, the homoerotic manifestations of anti-Black racism—the disgust towards but lust for the Black male body—are rarely theorized as fundamentally linked to the violence Black men and boys suffer. Chapter four, “Eschatological Dilemmas,” attempts to diagnosis the satyriasis which manifests as the homoerotic for a more accurate diagnosis of this problem—the drives and erotic motivations behind white society’s desire for Black male death. What needs are satisfied by killing Black males; looking upon his corpse? Black men are rarely thought of beyond their dead bodies. What makes them that, the corpse, is relatively unknown. The cause of their death is thought to simply be racism, and rarely proceeds beyond literally stating this. The process by which Black male life is lost is inconsequential to theory so to speak. This chapter attempts to name this problem, but when confronting the preference current academic theory has theory has to speak of Black men only as their corpses, we are forced to engage the very real and unshakable bias the numerous deaths of Black men and boys imprints upon our conceptualizations of the Black male. Because he is literally absent/non-existent/dead, he is not thought to need new theoretical accounts. In short, his existence is thought to be fully accounted for within our preexisting theories, despite the incompatibility these theories have with his actual life and his specific embodying of Black manhood.

Death seems to seek out the Black body indiscernible as (hu)man. It has become so normalized in our society that it is expected. It is part of the social order of policing, white vigilantism, and the presumed outcome of a Black man’s involvement with whites, specifically white women. The dead Black male body is so common that we are not shocked by seeing his dead body lying in a pool of blood like Michael Brown, or founding hanging from trees like Frederick Jermaine Carter. [115] Black male death, despite its horror and gruesomeness, is tolerated within America. Whereas the violation of other bodies are thought to be too unsightly to be seen, the dead bodies of Black males are circulated, shared, and meme-d with little hesitation. This reality is accepted as norm to many in our society, but what effect does death have on the lives, the mental concept of the self, that Black males formulate in this violent world? How do Black males regard the future given their world is so limited by the present?

To be a Black male is to live in constant fear of being accused of some offense against another. Black men live in a world where any accusation against him is thought to be evidence of his guilt. Imagine a world where any individual, who can be thought of as a victim to a Black male, has the power to define him as a criminal. This is the world many Black males find themselves imprisoned within, too often defined by the accusations of others against them rather than their actual character. Take the case of David Owens for instance. In 2012, he was stopped by police officers and asked for identification as he returned home from a long day working at New York’s flagship Macy’s store. The officers demanded his identification, and then began arresting him. Despite multiple pleas, the officers refused to tell Mr. Owens why he was being arrested. That is until they walked him to a “hysterical and possibly intoxicated white woman,” who identified him as the “Black man with a hoodie” that stole her backpack. Despite having no previous criminal record, a time clock receipt showing he was at work, and providing the number of his supervisor to corroborate his story, he was arrested and served six weeks in prison at Riker’s Island. In some case, Black men are locked away without trial. Two years earlier, Kalief Browder was arrested for allegedly stealing a backpack. He was imprisoned at Riker’s Island for three years without trial. For over two years, Kalief was held in solitary confinement. Despite being a minor, He was routinely brutalized, beatened, and starved by guards. Mr. Browder emerged from prison a broken man and suicidal. His first failed attempt at suicide was November of 2013, his second in June of 2015 was successful. What possibilities exist for a Black man treated as a non-person; as a Blackened thing robbed of moral character? What possibility for life do Black males have when they are reduced to their bodies and determined to be little more than the fear elicited in others? Chapter five, “In the Fiat of Dreams,” tries to make sense of this problem. Our present conceptualization of Black maleness lacks an account of the vulnerability he has in relation with others. As a phobogenic entity, Black males are liable for the anxiety other individuals experience be they white or Black, male or female. He is culpable for the violence these groups imagine, their delusions, as if they are actual. This shared neurosis often leads to the rationalization of Black male death in America.

In April 2015, the New York Times ran a story reporting that 1.5 million Black men were missing (when compared to Black women between the ages of 25-54) from daily life due to death and incarceration. [120] This report resurrected charges that America is deliberately and indiscriminately enacting a program of genocide against Black men and boys, [121] but what it did not include was that Black males between the ages of 18-24 suffer homicide victimization rates double that of Black men ages 25-34. [122] Imagine being a young Black male and knowing that you belong to a group where in your prime-age years, years usually associated with thriving and growth, you may not survive. How would you feel to know that homicide and imprisonment define your transition from boyhood to manhood? The violence that Black males suffer at the hands of police, the prison industrial complex, and other Black Americans in impoverished neighborhoods, create an extraordinary psychological burden to often ignored in academic literature. Society continues to pretend the death of Black men, because it remains so normalized or inconsequential in the minds of others, has no effect on the mental health of Black males generally. Black boys are committing suicide at rates much higher than previous decades and their Black female counterparts, [123] while poor and unemployed adult Black men consistently report higher daily encounters with racism and depression than Black women. [124] Witnessing other bodies who look like you slaughtered in streets; seeing young Black boys executed and broadcast for the world to see, observing the continuing extinguishing of the life, the persons, that are Black and male—has real consequences. The present theories offered to explain Black male identity like intersectionality have no explanation for the grotesque—the disproportionate death and dying of Black men—the display of his corpse. This chapter attempts to theorize Black males as subordinate males in a white patriarchal society targeted for their racialized sexual relation to white males. By historicizing the increased rates of suicide among Black males, as well as their selective targeting in America, I aim to attain a new formulation of ethics to truly understand the conditions antecedent to his death. Rather than the rhetoric(s) of shaming which focus on Black males as problems, deviants within society, I argue we need a paradigmatic analysis of the world he endures. A viewing of the world which exposes its brutish reality and effects on Black males, even if this realization comes at the expense of the cherished hope many theorists insist should serve as the foundation of inquiry into race. I suggest that anti-ethical thought is the only way for scholars and activists alike to move towards a more accurate study of Black men and boys, because it is only in the recognition of the incompatibility between Black (male) life and the supposed civility of American society that we truly understand how institutions, policies, and dehumanization function to concretize the caste status of Black men and boys, and by consequence the larger Black community.

This book will not be accepted within this generation of scholars. It will be rejected simply because it dares to theorize Black males as victims and in some cases more disadvantaged than his female counterpart, and ridiculed for not adopting the theories it points to as inadequate. The evidence showing the Black male’s victimization to rape, to sexual violence, to homoeroticism will be regarded with suspicion, not because it is not true, but because it is not the right politics. This book will be condemned because it cares for Black men and boys, despite theory’s insistence that they are not the right body, not the right story. It is (racial) chauvinism tells scholars, students, and the public that Black men and boys are not worthy of study—that they have no perspective worth considering as intrinsically valid and true about the world—but it is (racist) misandry, the visceral hate this society has for Black males, that celebrates his death, finds humor in his rape, and exhibits indifference to his suffering. It is this same hate of Black men and boys that allows scholars to deny Black male suffering because they prefer other lives to his. In this regard, this book is not written for this time, those politics, or those scholars. This book is written to serve as a basis for a new kind of study, one that engages Black males beyond the threats they are assumed to be and the phobias imposed upon them. This book is not only an attempt to think differently about Black men and boys; it is an attempt to found a genuine theoretical orientation to his study, and as such it is an attempt to escape—to reach beyond—the thinking and thinkers of this time.

excerpted from Tommy J. Curry, The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood, (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2017)pp.1-38.

[1] Campbell Robinson, “Black Man’s Body Found Hanging from Tree in Mississippi,” The New York Times, March 19, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/us/black-mans-body-found-hanging-from-tree-in-mississippi.html.

[2] Todd C. Frankel, “FBI investigates suspicious death of North Carolina teen Lennon Lacy,” The Washington Post, December 19, 2014, http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/fbi-investigates-suspicious-death-of-north-carolina-teen-lennon-lacy/2014/12/19/02499522-8609-11e4-a702-fa31ff4ae98e_story.html.

[3] Michael Baldwin, “12-year-old Boy Suspended for Staring at Girl,” Fox19.com, September 30, 2015, http://www.fox19.com/story/30158100/12-year-old-boy-suspended-for-staring-at-girl#.Vg7o2xhAIis.facebook.

[4] From the editor, email message to Tommy J. Curry, February 7, 2014.

[5] Black men and boys are at the bottom of every demographic of study. See James B. Stewart and Joseph W. Scott, “The Institutional Decimation of Black American Males,” Western Journal of Black Studies (1978):82-92 for the relationship between Black male incarceration and societal viability. For a discussion of how stereotypes about Black males being criminals and dishonest effect employment, see Ronald B. Mincy, eds., Black Males Left Behind (Washington D.C.: The Urban Institute Press, 2006). For a discussion of how Black male incarceration and unemployment not only show that Black males have lower income than their female and racial counterparts, but also how incarceration creates sample bias across all datasets used to understand Black men and boys, see Becky Pettit, Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2012). For Black male vulnerability to domestic abuse, see Carolyn M. West, “Partner Abuse in Ethnic Minority and Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Populations,” Partner Abuse 3.3 (2012): 336-357.

[6] Historically, Black men have been the most disadvantaged in education, see Anne McDaniel et al., “The Black Gender Gap in Educational Attainment: Historical Trends and Racial Comparisons,” Demography 48 (2011): 889–914.

[7] Oyèrónké Oyewúmì, “Visualizing the Body: Western Theories and African Subjects,” in The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1-20.

[8] Lewis Gordon, “Race, Sex, and Matrices of Desire in an Anti-Black World: An Essay in Phenomenology and Social Role,” in Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (Lanham:Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 73-88,77.

[9] Gordon, “Race, Sex, and Matrices of Desire,” 77.

[10] Maria Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25.4 (2010): 742-759, 743.

[11]Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” 744.

[12] See Becky Bratu, “After Zimmerman's Website Raises More than $200,000, Prosecution Asks Judge to Raise Bond,” MSNBC.com, April 27, 2012, http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/04/27/11427416-after-zimmermans-website-raises-more-than-200000-prosecution-asks-judge-to-raise-bond. Also see Natalie DiBlasio, “Cash raised for Mo. Cop Surpasses Brown Donations,”USAToday.com, August 24, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/23/support-darren-wilson-rally/14495459/.

[13] Michelle Wallace, The Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: The Dial Press, 1979), 73.

[14] Michelle Wallace, The Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, 73.

[15] Ibid., 79.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Aaronette M. White, Ain’t I a Feminist? African American Men Speak Out on Fatherhood, Friendship, Forgiveness, and Freedom (New York: SUNY Press, 2008), xv.

[20] Gary Lemon’s memoir Black Male Outsider: Teaching as a Pro-Feminist Man suggests Black male gender progressivism begins with a questioned posed by Aaronette White in Ain’t I a Feminist? “[W]hy would a Black man advocate for change that would deny him his patriarchal piece of the pie?” It is a question with personal and political resonance for every black man in a culture of male supremacy, where all men (in spite of race, ethnicity, and/or class) benefit from being a ‘man’” (New York: SUNY Press, 2008), 14. We find a similar call in David Ikard’s Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism which makes a distinction between patriarchy as a system and practices of inequality, but nonetheless asserts Black males to be patriarchs by definition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2007), 1-28.

Raewyn Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995/2005).

Sojourner Truth, Address to the First Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, 1867.

The rumor began in the late 1970’s with the publication of Michelle Wallace’s The Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. She argues that “Ruby Doris Smith Robinson…participated in and perhaps led a sit in earlier that year in SNCC offices protesting the relegation of women to typing and clerical work. She is said to have written a paper on the position of black women in SNCC. The paper was lost and no one is quite certain of its content…but it prompted Stokley Carmichael to respond, ‘The only position of women in SNCC is prone’” (6-7).
From this quote Wallace extrapolates: “With freedom presumably on the horizon, black men need a movement that made the division of power between men and women clearer, that would settle once and for all the nagging questions black women were beginning to ask: ‘Where do we fit in? What are you going to do about us? It was the restless throng of ambitions black female civil rights workers—as much as any failure of the Civil Rights Movement—that provoked Stokely Carmichael to cry ‘Black Power’” (7).
Peniel Joseph notes that the quote “shorn of context…damaged his personal reputation, cost him politically credibility in feminist circles, and unfairly minimized SNCC’s democratic culture” (Stokley: A Life [New York: Basic Civatas Books, 2014], 80).

[24] Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1987), 446.

[25] Mary King, Freedom Song: A Personal Story of the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement, 452.

[26] Ibid., 452.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Casey Hayden, “In the Attics of My Mind,” in Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, ed. Faith S. Holbert et al.(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 381-387, 385.

[30] Casey Hayden, “In the Attics of My Mind,” 385.

[31] Michelle Wallace, “How I Saw It Then, How I See It Now,” in The Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Verso, 1990), xxvii-xxxviii, xix.

[32] Michelle Wallace, “How I Saw It Then, How I See It Now,” xx.

[33] Raewyn Connell, Ruling Class, Ruling Culture (London: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

[34] Raewyn Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1987), 183.

[35] Raewyn Connell, Gender and Power, 186.

[36] Raewyn Connell, Gender and Power, 184.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Connell defines emphasized femininity as a form of femininity “defined around compliance with this subordination and is oriented to accommodating the interests and desires of men” (Gender and Power, 183.)

[39] Raewyn Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 68.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Raewyn Connell, Gender and Power, 197.

[42] Raewyn Connell, Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 84.

[43] Raewyn Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender &Society 19 (2005): 829-859, 847.

[44] Raewyn Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” 848.

[45] Robert Staples, “The Myth of Black Macho: A Response to Angry Black Feminists,” The Black Scholar 10.6-7 (1979): 24-33.

[46] Connell actually says “Economics and ideology were equally emphasized in Robert Staples's Black Masculinity, a pioneering study of ethnic difference. Staples connected the social situation of black men within American racism to the dynamic of colonialism in the third world, an insight which has rarely been followed up (Raewyn Connell, Masculinities [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995], 36).

[47] James W. Messerschmidt, “Engendering Gendered Knowledge: Assessing the Academic Appropriation of Hegemonic Masculinity,” Men and Masculinities 15 (2012): 56-76.

[48] Lawrence E. Gary, ed., Black Men (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications Ltd., 1981).

[49] Lawrence E. Gary, “Introduction,” in Black Men, 1-17, 10.

[50] Lawrence E. Gary, “Introduction,” 11.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Robert Staples, Black Masculinity: The Black Male’s Role in American Society (San Francisco: The Black Scholar Press, 1982), 135.

[53] Robert Staples, Black Masculinity, 7.

[54] Ibid.

[55] See Robert Staples, “Masculinity and Race: The Dual Dilemma of Black Men,” Journal of Social Issues 34.1 (1978): 169-183.

[56] Robert Staples, Black Masculinity, 135.

[57] Ibid., 14.

[58] Ibid., 13-16.

[59] Jo Jones and William D. Mosher, “Fathers’ Involvement with Their Children: United States, 2006-2010,” National Health Statistics Reports 71 (2013): 1-22.

[60] Anthony Lemelle Jr. and Juan Battle, “Black Masculinity Matters in Attitudes toward Gay Males,” Journal of Homosexuality 47.1 (2004): 39-51, 46; and Charles Negy and Russell, “A Comparison of African American and White College Students' Affective and Attitudinal Reactions to Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Individuals: An Exploratory Study,” The Journal of Sex Research 42.4 (2005):291-298.

[61] Clyde Franklin, The Changing Definition of Masculinity (New York: Plenum Press, 1984), 53.

[62] Clyde Franklin, The Changing Definition of Masculinity, 53-54.

[63] Andrea G. Hunter and James Earl Davis, “Constructing Gender: An Exploration of Afro-American Men’s Conceptualization of Manhood,” Gender & Society 6.3 (1992): 464-479,475.

[64] Nathan Hare and Julia Hare, Bringing Black Boys into Manhood: The Passage (San Francisco: Black Think Tank, 1985), 20.

[65] Andrea G. Hunter and James Earl Davis, “Constructing Gender,”471.

[66] Ibid., 475.

[67] Noel A. Cazenave, “A Woman’s Place: The Attitudes of Middle-Class Black Men,” Phylon 44.1 (1983):12-32,21.

[68] Ruby Lee Gooley, “The Role of Black Women in Social Change,” The Western Journal of Black Studies 13.4 (1989):165-172, 169.

[69] Kathleen M. Blee and Ann R. Tickamyer, “Racial Differences in Men's Attitudes about Women's Gender Roles,” Journal of Marriage and Family 57 (1995): 21-30, 29.

[70] Andrea G. Hunter and Sherrill L. Sellers, “Feminist Attitudes among African American Women and Men,” Gender & Society 12.1 (1998):81-99, 97.

[71] Andrea G. Hunter and Sherrill L. Sellers, “Feminist Attitudes among African American Women and Men,” 82.

[72] Ibid., 94.

[73] Ibid., 95.

[74] Ibid.,95.

[75] Evelyn Simien, Black Feminist Voices in Politics (New York: SUNY Press, 2006), 54.

[76] Evelyn Simien, Black Feminist Voices in Politics, 55-56.

[77] Patricia Hill Collins, ‘‘Defining Black Feminist Thought,’’ in The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory, Vol 1, ed., Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1997), 241-260, 243.

[78] Catherine Harnois, “Race, Gender, and the Black Women’s Standpoint,” Sociological Forum 25.1 (2010): 68-85 82-84.

[79] Catherine Harnois, “Complexity Within and Similarity Across: Interpreting Black Men’s Support of Gender Justice, amidst Cultural Representations that Suggest Otherwise,” in Hyper Sexual, Hyper Masculine?: Gender, Race and Sexuality in the Identities of Contemporary Black Men, eds., Brittany C. Slatton and Kemesha Spates (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 85-102.

[80] Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” 744.

[81] Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination (New York: NYU Press, 2010),19.

[83] Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 19.

[84] Greg Thomas, The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 42.

[84] William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York: Random House, 1967).

[85] Eldridge Cleaver, The Book of Lives, undated, “Bitches,” 1, Series 13, Box 2, Folder 26, The Eldridge Cleaver Collection, 1959-1981. Texas A&M University Cushing Library.

[86] Tyrone C. Howard, Black Male(d): Peril and Promise in the Education of African American Males (New York: Teacher College, 2014).

[87] Carla R. Monroe, “African-American Boys and the Discipline Gap: Balancing Educators Uneven Hand,” Educational Horizons 84.2 (2006): 102-111.

[88] Sandra I. Ross and Jeffrey M. Jackson, “Teacher’s Expectations for Black Males’ and Black Females’ Academic Achievement,” PSPB 17.1 (1991):78-82; Valora Washington, “Racial Differences in Teacher Perceptions of First and Fourth Grade Pupils on Selected Characteristics,” The Journal of Negro Education 51.1 (1982): 60-72; Seth Gershenson, Stephen B. Holt, and Nicholas Pagageorge, “Who Believes in Me? The Effect of Student-Teacher Demographic Match on Teacher Expectations,” Upjohn Institute Working Paper 15-231 (Kalamazoo: W.E. UpJohn Institute for Employment Research, 2015).

[89] Scott Graves, “Are We Neglecting African American Males: Parental Involvement Differences Between African American Males and Females During Elementary School,” Journal of African American Studies 14 (2010): 263-276.

[90] National Center for Education Statistics, The Condition of Education 2012 (Washington D.C: U.S. Department of Education, 2012), https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72.

[91] John W. Curtis, The Employment Status of Instructional Staff Members in Higher Education, Fall 2011 (Washington D.C.: American Association of University Professors, 2014), 54-55.

[92] Anne MacDaniel, “The Black Gender Gap in Educational Attainment: Historical Trends and Racial Comparisons,” Demography 48 (2011): 889-914, 891.

[93] Rhonda V. Sharpe and Omari H. Swinton, “Beyond Anecdotes: A Quantitative Examination of Black Women in Academe,” Review of Black Political Economy 39 (2012): 341-352, 344.

[94] Rhonda V. Sharpe and Omari H. Swinton, “Beyond Anecdotes: A Quantitative Examination of Black Women in Academe,” 352.

[95] Richard R. Verdugo and Ronald D. Henderson, “The Demography of African American Males in Higher Education,” in Diversity in Higher Education 6 (2009): 67-82. Also see Rhonda V. Sharpe and William Darity, “Where are All the Brothers? Alternatives to Four-Year Colleges for Black Males,” Diversity in Higher Education 6 (2009): 135-153; and James R. Dunn, “The Shortage of Black Male Students in the College Classroom: Consequences and Causes,” The Western Journal of Black Studies 12 (1988): 73-76.

[96] W.E.B. Du Bois, “Boys and Girls,” The Crisis 34:6 (1927): 69.

[97] Wilma J. Henry et. al., “Things Are Not as Rosy as They Seem: Psychosocial Issues of Contemporary Black College Women,” Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory, and Practice 13.2 (2011): 137-153; and “College Degree Awards: The Ominous Gender gap in African American Education,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 23 (1999): 6-9.

[98] E.Ann Carson, Prisoners in 2014 (Washington D.C: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2015), 15, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p14.pdf.

[99] E. Ann Carson, Prisoners in 2014, 15.

[100] Derek Neal and Armin Rick, “The Prison Boom and the Lack of Black Progress after Smith and Welch,” NBER Working Paper No. 20283 (2014): 1-44, 42.

[101] Evelyn Patterson, “Mass Incarceration and the Life Course Revisited: Cumulative Years Spent in Imprisoned and Marked for Working-Age black and white men,” Social Science Research 53 (2015): 325-337,335.

[102] Pettit, Invisible Men, 18.

[103] Evelyn Patterson, “Incarcerating Death: Mortality in the U.S. State Correctional Facilities, 1985-1998,” Demography 47 (2010): 587-607.

[104] FBI Uniform Crime Report, “Rape,” Crime in the United States 2013, https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/violent-crime/rape.

[105] Lara Stemple and Ilan Meyer, “The Sexual Victimization of Men in America: New Data Challenge Old Assumptions,” American Journal of Public Health 104.6 (2014): e19-e26, e21.

[106] Lara Stemple and Ilan Meyer, “The Sexual Victimization of Men in America,”e21.

[107] Ibid.

[108] Ibid., e23.

[109] Kim Shayo Buchanan, “Engendering Rape,” UCLA Law Review 59 (2012): 1630-1688, 1633.

[110] See M. Dyan McGuire, “The Empirical and Legal Realities Surrounding Staff Perpetrate Sexual Abuse of Inmates,” Criminal Law Bulletin 46.3 (2010): 428-451. It is worth reading Kim Shayo Buchanan’s discussion of McGuire’s article in “Engendering Rape” (1675-1676).

[111] Ibid., 1668.

[112] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, white Masks (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967), 156.

[113] Fanon, Black Skins, white Masks, 157.

[114] Ibid., 159.

[115] Dexter Rogers, “Death in Mississippi: Lynching or Suicide?,” HuffingtonPost.com, February 28, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dexter-rogers/frederick-jermaine-carter_b_827970.html.

[116] Desire Thompson, “Black Man Sues NYPD After Spending Six Weeks in Jail for Wearing a Hoodie,” NewsOne.com, October 21, 2015, http://newsone.com/3218096/black-man-arrested-jail-for-wearing-hoodie-sues-nypd/.

[117] Laura Bult, Rocco Parascandola, and Nancy Dillon, “Transit Cop who Busted Innocent Subway Rider for Stealing Backpack has been Accused before of False Arrest,” NYDailyNews.com, October 21, 2015, http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-transit-faces-claim-false-arrest-article-1.2404953.

[118] Eyder Peralta, “Kalief Browder, Jailed for Years without Trial, Kills Himself,” NPR.org, June 8, 2015, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/08/412842780/kalief-browder-jailed-for-years-at-rikers-island-without-trial-commits-suicide.

[119] Jennifer Gonnerman, “Kalief Browder: 1993-2015,” NewYorker.com, June 7, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/kalief-browder-1993-2015.

[120] Justin Wolfers et al., “1.5 Million Missing Black Men,” NyTimes.com, April 20, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/20/upshot/missing-black-men.html.

[121] David A. Love, “America’s 1.5 Million Missing Black Men is Nothing Short of Genocide,” TheGrio.com, April 24, 2015, http://thegrio.com/2015/04/24/million-missing-black-men-genocide/.

[122] Alexia Cooper and Erica L. Smith, Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008 (Washington D.C.: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2011), 1-35, 14, http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf. Also see Erica L. Smith and Alexia Cooper, Homicide in the U.S. Known to Law Enforcement, 2011 (Washington D.C: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2013), 1-17, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hus11.pdf.

[123] Jeffrey A. Bridge et al., “Suicide Trends Among Elementary School–Aged Children in the United States From 1993 to 2012,” JAMA Pediatrics 169.7 (2015): 673-677.

[124] Earlise Ward and Maigenete Mengesha, “Depression in African American Men: A Review of What We
Know and Where We Need to Go From Here,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 83.2-3 (2013): 386-397.