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Introduction
[S]ince the dominant view holds prideful self-respect as the very essence of healthy African American identity, it also considers such identity to be fundamentally weakened wherever masculinity appears to be compromised. While this fact is rarely articulated, its influence is nonetheless real and pervasive. Its primary effect is that all debates over and claims to "authentic" African-American identity are largely animated by a profound anxiety about the status specifically of African-American masculinity.
Phillip Brian Harper
In these days of what is referred to as "global culture," the Nike corporation produces racialized images for the world by elevating the bodies of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods to the status of international icons. Hollywood too now takes for granted that black bodies can be used to promote both products and style worldwide, and an increasing number of their "black" films are being produced and directed by black men. But despite the multimillion-dollar international trade in black male bodies, and encouragement to "just do it," there is no equivalent in international outrage, no marches or large-scale public protest, at the hundreds of thousands of black male bodies languishing out of sight of the media in the North American penal system.
Between the time that W. E. B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, discussed in the first chapter, and Danny Glover gained the status of international superstar in the Lethal Weapon series of films between 1987 and 1992, the subject of the lastchapter, there has been a stark reversal in the nature of the visibility of the black male body, if not much of a change in the fortune of most black men. If the spectacle of the lynched black body haunts the modern age, then the slow disintegration of black bodies and souls in jail, urban ghettos, and beleaguered schools haunts our postmodern times.
This book traverses this history and asks questions about the nature of the cultural representation of various black masculinities at different historical moments and in different media: literature, photography, film, music and song. It does not seek to be a comprehensive history of the roles of black men in any one of these cultural forms but considers the cultural and political complexity of particular inscriptions, performances, and enactments of black masculinity on a variety of stages. Each stage is deliberately bounded and limited in its construction.
Ideologies of masculinity always exist in a dialectical relation to other ideologies--I have chosen to focus upon their articulation with discourses of race and nation in American culture. However, rather than analyze these discourses in representations of famous political figures, like Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, or Martin Luther King, Jr., or through the work of established writers of fiction like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, I focus on a variety of artists and intellectuals.
For W. E. B. Du Bois, I have constructed the stage upon The Souls of Black Folk, because his book has become a canonical text in American culture and because its theory of double-consciousness has been so. widely adopted to explain the nature of the African American soul. Though Du Bois led a long and varied intellectual and political life, I have limited his stage to this text because it is so frequently taken to be representative of black intellectual, psychological, and existential reality.
The stage for Paul Robeson, in the second chapter, is limited to the 1920s and 1930s in order to demonstrate the complexities of representations of race and gender within the modernist aesthetic. Robeson came to represent a form of black masculinity against which he eventually rebelled, seeking an alternative political and artistic aesthetic through activism and the Left Theatre Movement in England. (Robeson was perhaps the first internationally acclaimed black icon, and Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and Danny Glover would do well to reflect upon the politics of Robeson's response to this fame.) Whereas Du Bois argued for the importance of recognizing the centrality of black people and black culture to the formation of the United States, Robeson rejected the terms and conditions upon which his acclaim depended and, as a result, was declared a threat to national security.
The third chapter considers the stage of the spirituals and American folk song. Du Bois had argued for the historical significance of the sorrow songs, but interpretations of Robeson's performance of the spirituals repressed the history of exploitation and oppression out of which they grew. John and Alan Lomax's search for a representative of the American folk song led them to invent their own version of the dangerous, if gifted, black male, in the person of Huddie Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly, whose voice, though not his person, could be presented to the national archive.
In chapter four I argue that the cricket pitch is the stage upon which we should begin to understand the work of C. L. R. James. His cricket journalism recreates the world of body lines and color lines and represents the black male body as both autonomous and inspirational. James's descriptions of cricket as the site where lines of class, race, and gender are forged foreshadows his work on the Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint L'Ouverture.
The misogyny of Miles Davis and the world of jazz in the late 1950s and early 1960s provides the stage for a consideration of an alternative black masculinity performed in his music. Interwoven with this analysis of Davis's life and music is the work of Samuel Delany, a writer who consistently challenges his readers to expand their visions of masculinities and femininities through his revolutionary fiction and criticism.
Lastly, I propose that the film career of Danny Glover traces the development of an important Hollywood narrative of black masculinity. This narrative promises to resolve the racial contradictions and crises of the 1980s and 1990s through a revision of the traditional trope of the black male/white male partnership, a partnership which firmly excludes the democratic participation of women in modern public life.
There remains the question, what is a race man? Clearly, I think that it is a concept that encompasses all of the above, but is also much more than that. For a century, the figure of the race man has haunted black political and cultural thought, and this book seeks to conduct a feminist interrogation of this theme and of other definitions of black masculinity at work in American culture.
In 1945, in Black Metropolis, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton attempted to account for the emergence of the idea of a race man. "Race consciousness," they asserted, "is not the work of 'agitators,' or 'subversive influences'--it is forced upon Negroes by the very fact of their separate-subordinate status in American life." Since emancipation, Drake and Cayton argue, black people have had to prove, actively and consistently, that they were not the inferior beings that their status as second-class citizens declared them to be: hence an aggressive demonstration of their superiority in some field of achievement, either individually or collectively, was what established race pride: "the success of one Negro" was interpreted as "the success of all." The result of the pursuit of "race consciousness, race pride, and race solidarity" was the emergence of particular social types, among which was the Race Man. Drake and Cayton add this cautionary note, however: "People try to draw a line between 'sincere Race Leaders' and those Race Men who are always clamoring everything for the race, just for the glory of being known." The issue of acting as a race man for particular audiences is still relevant in a society where the mass media all too eagerly assign to a few carefully chosen voices the representation of the racialized many, and the chosen rarely reject their designation and transient moment of glory. What a race man signifies for the white segments of our society is not necessarily how a race man is defined for various black constituencies.
While Drake and Cayton effectively situate the subtleties and complexities produced by and through processes of racialization in the United States, they, along with most contemporary black male intellectuals, take for granted the gendering at work in the other half of the concept "race man"--the part that is limited to man. What we have inherited from them and from others is a rarely questioned notion of masculinity as it is connected to ideas of race and nation.
In 1897, eighteen black men, under the leadership of Alexander Crummell, formally inaugurated the American Negro Academy. In his address to this august assembly, W. E. B. Du Bois declared: "For the development of Negro genius, of Negro literature and art, of Negro spirit, only Negroes bound and welded together, Negroes inspired by one vast ideal, can work out in its fullness the great message we have for humanity." But only black men were to be "bound and welded together." Nothing was done to recruit black women into the Academy.
Nevertheless, Crummell and the Negro Academies continue to stand as emblematic figures for the designation of black intellectual. The historian Wilson J. Moses has recently asserted that the life of Alexander Crummell "symbolizes the intricacy of the experience of black American intellectuals: their conflicting emotions with respect to the Western world, their discontent with 'civilization,' and their dependency on it, as they have labored to impose order on their existence both as racial beings and as individuals." My position in this book is an outright rejection of the male-centered assumptions at work in such claims of representativeness.
In the late 1990s the work of black women intellectuals is still considered peripheral by the black male establishment. It is true that, superficially, the situation appears to have improved. The words "women and gender" are frequently added after the word "race" and the appropriate commas, and increasingly the word "sexuality" completes the litany. On occasion a particular black woman's name will be mentioned, like that of Toni Morrison. But the intellectual work of black women and gay men is not thought to be of enough significance to be engaged with, argued with, agreed or disagreed with. Thus terms like women, gender, and sexuality have a decorative function only. They color the background of the canvas to create the appropriate illusion of inclusion and diversity, but they do not affect the shape or texture of the subject. Indeed, we have recently been told by one of America's leading intellectuals that unless black intellectuals affect the demeanor and attire of the Victorian male in his dark three-piece suit, they will remain marginal and impotent!
While contemporary black male intellectuals claim to challenge the hegemony of a racialized social formation, most fail to challenge the hegemony of their own assumptions about black masculinity and accept the consensus of a dominant society that "conceives African American society in terms of a perennial 'crisis' of black masculinity whose imagined solution is a proper affirmation of black male authority." This apparent solution was at work in the Million Man March, but it is also at work in contemporary black intellectual life. On the contrary, rather than continue to dress ourselves in what Essex Hemphill calls "this threadbare masculinity," it is necessary to recognize the complex ways in which black masculinity has been, and still is, socially and culturally produced.
I am eager to burn
this threadbare masculinity
this perpetual black suit
I have outgrown.
ESSEX HEMPHILL
