http://gcadvocate.org/index.php?action=view&id=230
by Lavelle Porter
November 2007
Back in June, while waiting in O'Hare Airport for a flight back to
New York from Chicago, I picked up and thumbed through the pages of
the Chicago Sun-Times and I was struck by an editorial titled "Pull
up Your Pants, Lift Up Your Head," by one Bill Maxwell. In the
article Maxwell takes aim at the hip-hop fashion phenomenon known as
"sagging," which has been in the news in recent months because
several American cities have begun to pass ordinances making the
style illegal. Maxwell argues that this particular fashion has its
origins in prison, where a low slung waistband is a sign of one's
sexual availability (he cites television's Judge Greg Mathis as the
source of this insightful information). He goes on to suggest that
young black men would cease to wear their pants in this style if they
knew its origins. In effect, Maxwell's argument seems to suggest that
if only black men embraced a more homophobic ethos all our cultural
problems would be solved.
Part of me recognizes this article for what is: just another
disposable piece of reactionary conservative armchair sociology. On
the other hand, I also find it instructive for its attention to
gender in the political discourse on black masculinity, and for its
steep, abiding nostalgia for a stable past when, as Archie Bunker
would say, "goils were goils and men were men."
I mention the Maxwell article because it illuminates three particular
unifying themes in the books reviewed here. For one thing, all three
books reviewed here seek to historicize black manhood to confront
precisely this sort of nostalgia that Maxwell produces. Unlike
Maxwell, however, Ross, Reid-Pharr, and Murray all demonstrate that
ideas about appropriate black manhood (not to mention ideas about
authentic blackness itself) have always been in a constant state of
negotiation and re-negotiation throughout American history. Secondly,
all three books are clearly invested in dismantling homophobic
ideology, but they move beyond the simple platitudes about the black
homosexual's exclusion from the black community to examine how
same-sex desire is a fundamental part of all masculine ideology and
nationalist projects, black or otherwise.
Lastly and most importantly, all three books actively insist on the
idea that black men have been more than just passive victims in their
own presentation. In making that claim these authors recognize they
are tip-toeing through a rhetorical minefield, where conservative
ideologues wield ideas about "personal responsibility," rejecting
victim-hood, and "just getting over" injustices of the past as a way
of trivializing the structural inequalities of American racism and
favoring a pro-corporate, anti-government public policy based on
mythical notions of meritocracy and individual achievement. And yet,
I find it compelling and inspiring that these intellectuals are
willing to take the risk, knowing that any change in the conditions
and representations of black manhood must come from the realization
that black men have had an active hand in those representations.
While Robert Reid-Pharr is the only one of the three who explicitly
(and I believe, appropriately) frames this concept as a
philosophically existential matter, the theme of an existential
reclamation of agency runs throughout all three books. As Reid-Pharr
boldly suggests in the introduction to Once You Go Black: "the Black
American has not only had a great hand in the creation of America and
thus the world but also and importantly…the Black American, quiet as
its kept, has had a substantial role in the creation of himself".
Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era is an
ambitious intellectual history of black manhood reform in the New
Negro Movement, dating roughly from the 1890s to the 1940s. Ross is a
professor of literature, but he goes against the disciplinary grains,
surveying a broad range of intellectual production in this period
including race tracts, photographic race albums, autobiography,
novels and sociological studies. Since it covers such a massive
amount of ground, Manning the Race can be a dense read at times, but
it rewards a patient reading.
Ross examines what he calls the "double paradox of Jim Crow
disentitlement," a concept that explains the particular challenges of
New Negro manhood reform, but also resonates in contemporary
political discourse on black manhood. He writes:
"The more black men attempt to man the race through a fit masculinity
patterned on dominant gender norms, the more they risk emulating the
white ruling men whose Jim Crow racial/sexual codes unman them. At
the same time, the more that African Americans resist the gender
norms set up by the Jim Crow color line, the more they seem to lack
the resources of manhood power and influence to man the race for a
defeat of the very Jim Crow regime that unmans them."
According to Ross the work of modernizing the Negro is dominated by
three genres of writing in particular: 1) new-century race treatises
and anthologies, such as race tracts and race photo albums, 2) New
Negro personal narratives, including autobiography and fiction, and
3) professional sociological studies – most significantly W.E.B.
DuBois's pioneering study, The Philadelphia Negro, and the work of
sociologists Robert E. Park, E. Franklin Frazier and others of the
so-called Chicago School of Sociology based at the University of Chicago.
What sets Ross's work apart is his attention to matters of sexuality
in the construction of black manhood during this era. The spectacle
of black sexuality has long been a part of racist discourse in
America, and it was often invoked as a sign of inherent difference
and racial inferiority. But a curious thing happened around the turn
of the century as anthropologists began to embrace ideas of cultural
relativism and Freudian concepts began to filter into intellectual
artistic and cultural practice, calling into question the sanctity
and sanity of bourgeois Victorian sexual mores. This became shaky
territory for black intellectuals because it created a space to
celebrate the healthy vitality of black sensuality, but it could also
reinforce stereotypes of black inferiority. The literary work of the
New Negro/Harlem Renaissance certainly illustrated the advantages and
pitfalls that a focus on black sexuality could create for the black
intellectual. Ross looks at the variety of strategies for black
reformers in this era and sees them engaged in what he refers to as
"unsexing, desexing or resexing" the race. At times these various
strategies would overlap, employed by the same individuals in a
simultaneous yet contradictory fashion.
The theme of mobility was among the most important for the New Negro.
No longer would the black majority be located in the American South,
as urban migration to the industrial North began to happen around the
turn of the century. That white supremacist edict that Negroes should
"stay in their place" was not just a figure of speech, but spoke to
the very real anxieties about the New Negro's mobility. That anxiety
wasn't just the province of Negrophobic whites, but was also held by
black race leaders themselves who were trying to make sense of both
the exciting possibilities and potential dangers of this new mobility.
Focusing on the theme of mobility, Ross theorizes from abstractions
about race down to the particularities of the black body. For
instance, he sees a profound anxiety in the founding of interracial
political organizations such as the NAACP where black and white
persons, specifically black men and white women, would share the same
spaces as equal participants in a racial uplift organization.
Certainly the South has its peculiar history of close proximity
paradoxically combined with rigid social strictures, but this New
Negro phenomenon of educated, self-determined Negroes sharing space
on equal footing with whites, and doing so in mass numbers was
something altogether different, and not all were happy about it. Ross
cites a passage in the Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois where Du Bois
writes of his distaste for one of the NAACP's founders Oswald
Garrison Villard, who married a white Southern woman from Georgia,
and adopted her stringent racial codes about not allowing any blacks
(and probably not any Jews either, Du Bois speculates) to set foot in
their home. As DuBois writes, "I knew the reasons for this
discrimination, but I could hardly be expected to be happy over them
or to be his close friend."
This is but one example of the cross-gender and cross-racial tensions
of the period, and there is much to chew on in Manning the Race. Ross
brings fresh analysis to a variety of pivotal moments and statements
of the era such as Booker T. Washington's writings and speeches,
Robert Park's sociological career and his infamous aphorism that the
Negro is "the lady of the races." Ross also makes some interesting
comments on philosopher Alain Locke's self-presentation as an effete
high-brow aesthete and how other intellectuals, namely Langston
Hughes and Claude McKay, responded to his image by trying to assert
their own manhood as artists of "the people."
Ultimately Ross pays close attention to the self-production of black
intellectuals, and this is what sets this work apart as important
scholarship on the study of black manhood. He ends by recounting how
some colleagues of his questioned why a nearly 400 page book on the
topic of black masculinity was necessary when a mere peer-reviewed
article might suffice. He also calls into question the over-reliance
on contemporary pop culture and scandal in discussions of black
manhood. "By insisting on the complexity, intricacy, subtlety and
richness of black manhood's cultural history, I hope – at the least –
that this book also resists this long-standing tendency to reduce
black manhood identity to the shock of the latest fad in clothing or
the prurience of the most recent racial scandal."
One of the great flashpoints in the history of black American
masculinity was the period of the 1960s and 1970s that included the
Black Power Movement and the Black Arts Movement. Rolland Murray
evaluates the literature of this period in a lean, but scrupulous
book, Our Living Manhood: Literature, Black Power and Masculine
Ideology. The title is a reference to Ossie Davis's famous eulogy for
Malcolm X, one of black America's most visible and inspiring symbols
of black manhood.
Murray surveys black literature of the 1960s and 1970s paying
attention to how the assertion of black manhood became the focal
point of the movements of that era. He begins the study with a look
at James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the
Street (1972) in which Baldwin wrote on the Nation of Islam and the
Black Panther Party respectively. Baldwin's relationship to Black
Power is of course one of the most vexing parts of his intellectual
legacy as many feel he acquiesced to the homophobia of the movement
instead of challenging it. However, despite the fact that Murray sees
Baldwin's critique of Black Power as "incomplete" he acknowledges
that "Baldwin allows us to begin telling an alternative story about
the evolution of nationalism, one in which the instantiation of
racial solidarity rooted in the masculine also produced its potential undoing."
Here Murray's critique builds upon the controversial and
ground-breaking work of Michele Wallace, whose 1978 book Black Macho
and the Myth of the Superwoman was a scathing and scandalous airing
of dirty laundry. In it Wallace suggested that the black power
movement was more about the reclamation of the black man's rightful
place atop the patriarchal black family and the black man's revenge
on the sanctity of white womanhood than it was about the uplift and
self-determination of the black community. As she infamously put it,
the objective of the male-dominated movement seemed to be "a white
woman in every bed and black woman under every heel."
Murray seeks to add to Wallace's work by emphasizing that there was
perhaps more of a critique of the masculine ideology of mid-century
black nationalism going on during the movement than we previously
believed. Naturally, Murray had to address Eldridge Cleaver's nasty
depiction of James Baldwin in Soul on Ice. He points to Baldwin's
response to Cleaver in which he tries to distinguish between his own
homosexuality and the forced homosexuality of the prison experience.
Baldwin wrote in No Name in the Street, "I was confused in his mind
with the utter debasement of the male – with all those faggots, punks
and sissies, the sight and sound of whom, in prison must have made
him vomit more than once." Murray sees Baldwin's formulation here as
an attempt to reassert his own masculine authority to speak for the
race, albeit a faulty and evasive one.
Murray goes on to survey some novels of the 1960s and 1970s that
interrogated masculine ideology in Black Nationalist politics. His
choice of genre is significant. The Black Arts Movement privileged
the genres of drama and poetry as more authentic forms of black
resistance and more effective means of getting the message to the
people than novels. Thus, Murray finds that some black male writers,
particularly John O. Killens, John Edgar Wideman, and Hal Bennett
among others, used the longer sustained form of the novel to carry
out a critique of the masculine excesses of Black Nationalism. Hal
Bennett's Lord of Dark Places (1970) provides one of the most damning
critiques of an overemphasis on patriarchal domination in Black
Nationalist politics and the black church, as well as an astonishing
critique of the culture of racism in America as a whole. (In fact, I
stumbled on to Murray's book while Googling for more information on
Lord of Dark Places.) I was delighted to see that Murray paid
attention to what I believe to be one of the more important and
underappreciated satirical novels in black literature. The main
character of the novel, Joe Market, is the best embodiment of James
Baldwin's idea (quoted earlier in Murray's discussion of Baldwin and
Cleaver) that "straight cats invent faggots so that they can sleep
with them and not become faggots themselves." Market is a hustler in
the classical gay sense of the term, pimping himself out to men for
money, all the while maintaining his own staunch heterosexuality. The
pornographic satire that Hal Bennett creates includes a critique of
the sexual hypocrisy and economic corruption of the black church, the
condescending fascination of white liberals with black sexuality, and
the sexually charged nature of the culture of racial segregation in
general. Unfortunately, Murray's analysis of Lord of Dark Places is
too brief (for my tastes at least), but it is encouraging to see the
novel slowly being reappraised by literary critics.
Last, but certainly not least, is Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire
and the Black American Intellectual by the GC's own Robert
Reid-Pharr. In Imagined Communities, his famous study of nationalism,
Benedict Anderson suggested that a "Copernican spirit" is necessary
to disrupt and dismantle nationalistic thinking. Reid-Pharr takes up
that challenge with Once You Go Black by taking aim at some of the
most sacrosanct notions in Black Nationalist thought. Chief among
Reid-Pharr's interventions is a direct confrontation with the idea
that modern black Americans are essentially the same persons as those
black Americans who were enslaved under chattel slavery. Instead,
Reid-Pharr insists upon his own modernity as a black intellectual, as
well as the modernity of the contemporary black American community as
a whole. Suffice to say you won't find appeals to reparations or
"post-traumatic slave disorder" in this book.
One of the most provocative chapters in the book is "Saint Huey" an
evaluation of the life and career of Huey Newton, co-founder of the
Black Panther Party. The cover of Once You Go Black is adorned with a
striking domestic photo of Huey Newton standing in his apartment,
shirtless and looking well-chiseled and buff, wearing white pants,
holding a copy of Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. The photo is
meant to be a jarring juxtaposition to the more famous image of Huey
Newton (one that has adorned many a black college dorm-room wall)
seated on a huge wicker chair decked out in black leather jacket and
beret with a spear in one hand and a rifle in the other. In the
chapter Reid-Pharr effectively argues that any serious analysis of
the Black Panther Party's significance must take into account the
carefully crafted self-presentation and images of the organization.
Newton's dashing good looks were a cultural currency utilized by the
Party, as were their famous images of defiant blackness represented
by black sunglasses, black berets, black leather jackets and afros.
This emphasis on "style" in Black Nationalist politics became even
more prevalent in the 1970s when "black consciousness" entered the
American mainstream. Nowhere was the power of style seen more clearly
than in the so-called blaxploitation films of the 1970s. In the last
chapter, "Queer Sweetback," Reid-Pharr analyzes Melvin Van Peebles's
groundbreaking film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971). This
film, like much of the blaxploitation cinema that followed it, was
all about style and spectacle, and Reid-Pharr makes much of the fact
that the main character, Sweetback, only speaks six lines throughout
the whole movie. While Reid-Pharr doesn't spend much time discussing
contemporary hip-hop, one can see how hip-hop's defiant posture
evolved out of blaxploitation era film by way of the black power
movement, and thus we end up with a popular cultural art-form that is
almost all style and emptied of much of its political substance.
Perhaps my favorite representation of this phenomenon was Public
Enemy's quick-stepping drill team which adopted the look of the
Panthers (sunglasses and berets) and the intimidating pose of the
Nation's Fruit of Islam, but with none of the actual self-defense
skills and training. They are clearly trained dancers on stage for
show. While I find some genuine creativity in Public Enemy's sound
and I respect Chuck D's political sincerity in recent years, it's
hard to take "Fight the Power" seriously when one knows the rights to
such a song are owned and distributed by some multinational media
conglomerate. (And, needless to say, the embarrassment that is Flavor
Flav pretty much speaks for itself these days.)
It is worth noting that two of the reviewed authors here, Reid-Pharr
and Ross, are self-identified gay men who have announced themselves
as such in their work. (I can assume that Rolland Murray is straight,
from the acknowledgements to his wife and children in the book, but
that is only an assumption.) Readers familiar with other works on
black masculinity studies will notice a preponderance of works in the
field by and about gay men. The GCs Africana Studies Group recently
hosted a successful conference on Black Masculinity in 2005, and I
heard through the gossip grapevine that the overwhelming presence of
openly gay men in the conference did not go unnoticed by some
detractors. This brings up one of my own pet peeves about the
political discourse around black masculinity, that it seems no black
achievement is considered legitimate unless it is carried out by
heterosexual black men. Sure, there is concern when we see high
incarceration rates and lackadaisical attitudes toward black
fatherhood. But too much of the rhetoric around the statistics that
more black women graduate from college than black men strikes me as
so much Moynihanism, and it unfortunately trivializes the genuine
achievements of black women. Likewise, we would also do well to
acknowledge that the black pool of genius has been populated with
many lesbians and gay men and that their contributions shouldn't be
marked with an asterisk.
Near the end of Once You Go Black, Robert Reid-Pharr writes, "We
should not continue with the logic in which there is no distinction
between the enslaved body and the body that now participates in the
writing of these lines." Clearly, such a statement is fraught with
troubling implications and I suspect it will be met with a great deal
of resistance as the book makes its way through academic circles. One
of the real challenges of the book is that Reid-Pharr's rejection of
victim-hood sounds dangerously similar to the rhetoric of cultural
conservatism. (Case in point, the title of Bill Cosby's latest
screed: Come On People: On the Path from Victims to Victors.) Yet,
what I find most compelling about Once You Go Black is that it is a
deeply local and deeply ethical book and Reid-Pharr is willing to
risk the misunderstanding in order to insist on the importance of
black political agency. There is a refreshing honesty in the way
Reid-Pharr directs his comments toward readers who are most likely to
pick up the book – academic and non-academic intellectuals who are
concerned with black and queer studies – rather than posturing toward
some mythical mass audience of street-corner readers. Likewise,
Reid-Pharr is concerned with announcing his own position – as a
professional academic intellectual, as a black gay man, as an
American citizen – as honestly as possible. Reid-Pharr uses the
particularities of the black American intellectual condition to
suggest possibilities for a more progressive intellectual practice at
this critical political moment. Once You Go Black is very much a
post-9/11 book, particularly in Reid-Pharr's analysis of "innocence"
in political discourse, considering that "America's fascination with
its own presumed innocence has become part and parcel of the many
apparatuses with which our country justifies and enacts its dominance
and violence." What is at stake in his book, and in the others
reviewed in this essay, is a reevaluation not just of the history of
black masculinity and Black Nationalist politics, but of the ethics
of intellectual practice itself.
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