Searching for the New Black Man: Black Masculinity and Women's Bodies

By Ronda C. Henry Anthony

Using the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass, as well as the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Walter Mosley, and Barack Obama, Ronda C. Henry Anthony examines how women's bodies are used in African American literature to fund the production of black masculine ideality and power. In tracing representations of ideal black masculinities and femininities, Henry Anthony shows how black men's struggles for gendered agency are inextricably bound up with their complicated relation to white men and normative masculinity. The historical context in which Henry Anthony couches these struggles highlights the extent to which shifting socioeconomic circumstances dictate the ideological, cultural, and emotional terms upon which black men conceptualize identity.

Yet, Henry Anthony quickly moves to texts that challenge traditional constructions of black masculinity. In these texts Henry Anthony traces how the emergence of collaboratively-gendered discourses, or a blending of black female/male feminist consciousnesses, are reshaping black masculinities, femininities, and intraracial relations for a new century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jun 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781626744448

Ronda C. Henry Anthony

Ronda C. Henry Anthony, Indianapolis, Indiana, is associate professor of English and Africana studies at Indiana University--Purdue University Indianapolis.

Book preview

Introduction

Searching for the New Black Man? From Masculine Ideality to Progressive Black Masculinities

I WAS FIRST INTRODUCED TO RICHARD WRIGHT’S NATIVE SON IN AN UNDERGRADUATE African American literature course. My professor explained that in 1940, the year Native Son was published, Wright’s novel was considered revolutionary. He asserted that the novel’s greatness resided in several areas: its constructions of black masculinity; its use of naturalism and the sociological insights of Robert Park and the Chicago School; its establishment of the boundaries of protest fiction; and its overall objective to show how Bigger’s humanity was diminished by his impoverished and oppressive environment. While I appreciated the novel’s historical and political significance to American literature, and African American literature in particular, I was disturbed by Wright’s depictions of black women as emasculators and co-conspirators with white men in the oppression of black men. No one had prepared me for the extent of the hate and violence directed at women, especially black women, in Native Son. I had never even conceived that black women could be positioned as complicit with white men to keep black men in bondage. Perhaps naively, I believed that black men and women were natural allies in the fight to overcome racist oppression. Richard Wright’s Native Son offered a far less flattering portrait.

My problems with Wright, and, indeed, my professor’s glorification of his black patriarchal politics, forced me to reconsider my understanding of black community and the importance of sexism, patriarchy, domination, and power to any examination of racism. It also compelled me to think critically about the historical relations of race, power, class, and gender that produced—and produces—such adversarial relations between black men and women. I also wanted to consider the extent to which these same relations existed outside the pages of Wright’s text. I understood even then that such divisions undermined the power of black solidarity and liberationstruggles. With an eye toward identifying and exploring such destructive patterns, my study examines the representations, frameworks, and contexts these structures rest upon and identifies alternative constructions of powerful, liberatory, and nurturing black masculine identities.

Focusing on black male texts from the slave narratives of Henry Bibb and Frederick Douglass to the prose of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Walter Mosley, and Barack Obama, my study addresses the ways women’s bodies are used and misused in African American literature to fund the production of black masculine ideality and power. Through tracing representations of ideal black masculinities and femininities, what I make clear is that black men’s struggles for gendered agency are inextricably bound up with their complicated love-hate relation to (white) normative masculinity. The historical context in which I couch these struggles highlights the extent to which shifting socioeconomic circumstances dictate the ideological, cultural, and emotional terms upon which black men conceptualize their identities. While I ground this analysis in the economies of gendered racism to show how these structures continue to shape contemporary representations of black manhood and womanhood, I also engage texts that problematize traditional constructions of black masculinity to trace how idealized masculinities and femininities are interrogated by black men themselves. The emergence of black male feminist consciousnesses, signified in part by cultural critic Mark Anthony Neal’s concept of the new black man, are reshaping the production of black male and female identities for a new century. Consequently, through examining representations of black masculinity via the lens of black female/male feminisms to distinguish productions of progressive black masculinities, I highlight collaboratively gendered constructions of black identities to further interventions within oppositional intraracial discourses and analyses.

This analysis is based within the methodologies of black feminist, black masculinist, and black male feminist critical discourses. And it is through studying the typography of critical discussions of black masculine ideality that this study’s importance emerges. While current studies acknowledge the importance of examining the roles of women within black masculine identity production, few explore the economies and effects of these productions in specific ways. Understanding the specificity of these productions is important to interrogating the centrality of women’s bodies to masculine identity formation and developing more progressive, collaborative, and liberatory alternative gender identities. Mapping the terms of the critical discussions and debates from which conceptions of the economies of black masculine ideality emerge is a crucial first step to developing these alternative gender models.

BLACK MEN’S BODIES FUNCTION AS SITES FOR PROJECTING AND DEPOSITING AMERICA’S worst fears.¹ Critic Thelma Golden argues, One of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century is the African-American male—’invented’ because black masculinity represents an amalgam of fears and projections in the American psyche which rarely conveys or contains the trope of truth about the black male’s existence (19).² Just as Toni Morrison argues about the Africanist presence in Playing in the Dark, the most public social and cultural conceptions of black masculinity represent stereotypes and half-truths that have little to do with the real historical lives, subjectivities, and experiences of black men. They serve more as reflections of a white American psyche afraid to come to terms with the possibilities and challenges implicit in black manhood. As Golden points out, these conceptions are social constructs used to displace the fears and anxieties of the larger American culture. These social constructs play out through homosocial competitions grounded in white masculine power as it comes into contact and interacts with the specter of the black masculine body. Golden maintains, Black males have emerged center stage in American society as metaphorical figures at the center of larger issues (14). Consequently, black male bodies are ciphers for such varied social and cultural monsters as rampant criminality and the proliferation of a kind of glamorous yet dangerous thug life expressed in popular culture and music. Black male bodies also serve as signs of the transgressive sexuality exemplified in the violence of rape (or gang rape), the illegitimacy of the growing number of black female single-parent households, and the irresponsible spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases (Neal, New Black Man 3–7). Black male bodies become ideological boogiemen standing in for the extremes of brutality and bestiality and the general threat of the breakdown of civil order. All of these (and more) symbolize the fear of uncontained or unchecked black masculinities and their power to disrupt the status quo.

Consequently, within American contexts, black men’s bodies have been turned against them. Critic Clyde Taylor points out, With the uneven odds of the game, the world more quickly fastens on Huck’s Jim, Uncle Tom, Friday, Little Black Sambo, or Uncle Remus—the Disneyish gallery of Black malehood—than on home-grown figures like High John de Conquer, Brer Rabbit, John Henry, Shine, or Stackolee (169). And as Patricia Hill Collins argues, these images are much more palatable because they construct black men as dominated and weak: As domesticated Negroes, representations such as Sambo, Uncle Tom, and Uncle Ben signify castrated, emasculated, and feminized versions of black masculinity whose feminization associates them with weakness. Once this connection is made, men can no longer be considered real men (75). Thus, the Disneyish gallery of Black malehood allows white Westerners to assert cultural ideologies of containment that maintain the exclusivity and privilege of white masculine power, manhood, and strength.

Even though Taylor argues that the game is stacked against black men, he also shows that black men still have agency within the processes of creating, revising, and circulating the terms of black male identity and power. Within the interstices of black men’s interventions within these mythmaking processes, revolutionary power resides for creating liberatory black identities. We know that black masculinities can and do influence all men’s conceptions of self in profound ways, within both American and global contexts. And it is within the space and power of this ability to revise, redefine, and re-envision black masculinity that this study is most concerned. The means by which black men intervene within these mythmaking processes has only come to the fore of critical discussions within recent years.

The masculine tradition within African American literature traces the difficult and complex history of black men’s efforts to be counted fully human as they struggle to gain the same rights and privileges white men claim for themselves. These struggles have been waged through the conceptual terms of ideal white masculinity, for this set of ideologies and characteristics establishes the universal standards men must measure up to. As such, these ideologies profoundly impact the avenues available to black men for generating the power necessary to fight subordination. All pathways to ideal masculine power are policed by the racially gendered hierarchies circumscribing the arrangement of signs, acts, and performances that can be interpreted as masculine. Critic Maurice Wallace discusses the specular myths and tropes that shape or enframe perceptions and interpretations of black masculinity. Focusing on making visible the ways in which black masculinity constitutes itself, Wallace argues, Yet, in spite of the historical saliency of race in the evolution of gender in the United States, the exact manner in which racial difference exacerbates an already contentious homosocial rivalry over patriarchal prerogatives (e.g., freedom, power, history, wealth) remains, for the most part, a mystery (2). Wallace argues that the ways black masculinities are constructed against and in relation to the larger Western, American culture’s conceptions of white masculine ideality remain elided: "Just how black masculine subjectivity constitutes itself relative to the masculine hegemony, in other words, or recognizes black masculine subjects as men, in opposition to the putative sociohistoric record … is a feat of social and psychic wonder that has yet to be definitively named (2). Wallace draws attention—particularly in the realm of the visible or spec-tragraphic—to the ways black men attempt to combat demonized or degenerative mythologies of themselves by creating counter-myths. Black men battle against a fixing or enframing of racist images and stereotypes of themselves that project for all time the boundaries and limits of what they can be. Wallace states, The trace of the black male body, its doubly spectral and spectacle perceptibility in the public eye, is an evolutionary consequence of the simultaneous ‘overabundance and … failure [defailance] of the visible,’ as Jacques Derrida would have it, ‘the too-much and the much-too-little, the excess and the default [faillite]’ of vision in (post)modernity (6). The fixing of black male identity oppositionally as both spectacle and specter stands at the heart of the problem of the limited representations of black masculinity in America. This then becomes the central issue that black men must deal with as they battle to wrest control and dominance of interpretations and definitions of their bodies from the monocularistic gaze of Western racialism, which Wallace poses as the signal menace to the coherence of the black masculine corporeal ego" (6). Wallace traces the ways black men have resisted racialized entrapment through the specificity of the American gaze or visual representational field—which he ties to cultural and discursive spaces—as black men interact with and appropriate the white masculine ideal. This ideal is then integrated into constructions of black masculinity to generate political, cultural, and social power for black men in America.

However, while creating their own inventions of black masculine ideality enabled black men to fight white masculine power, it also reiterated its influence on the Other. Neal makes clear the terms of black masculine ideality, or conceptions of strong black manhood, and the consequences to black men and black communities of adhering to structures almost exclusively determined by ideal white masculinity. Neal argues that the strong black man is a product of the imaginations of both the talented-tenth and rabid black nationalists and Afrocentrists alike (New Black Man 21). Examples of strong black manhood abound within salient productions of black masculinity as exemplified by the most visible black male historical bodies and philosophies of the time. These include such men as Prince Hall, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, and twentieth-century leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. Du Bois consolidated a framework of strong black masculinity characterized by honor, respectability, middle-class intellect, and talented-tenth leadership that later black men could build on. These figures make up a sacred assemblage of powerful black men who are forever harkened back to as exemplars of strong black manhood. Indeed, these men have acquired cult-like status in black cultural, social, political, and intellectual spaces, for they represent not only black power in the nationalistic sense, but the hope and possibility of challenging the racial status quo. While these nineteenth- and twentieth-century, talented-tenth conceptions of leadership and respectability were challenged and interrogated in texts like Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) and with increasing vehemence in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Chester Himes’s If He Hollers, Let Him Go (1947), they remain influential vessels for asserting the power and potential of black men.

Neal goes on to argue that the myth of the strong black man has its constructive uses for black men who in the process of resisting enslavement, economic exploitation, random and calculated violence, and a host of other afflictions … created a functional myth on which the black nation could be built (21). In this way Neal highlights the sacred but insidious power of the myth of strong black masculinity to mesmerize and attract. The myth remains relevant in its power to speak to, represent, and translate black men’s racially gendered experiences of subordination and oppression within the larger culture. This myth also funds the production of powerful assertions of black masculinity that serve as the framework for productions of black nationalism (Wallace 53–81). Black nationalism functions as a key philosophical and political rallying cry allowing black men to forcefully express the need for self-determination, independence, leadership, and power. This is why the myth of strong black manhood stubbornly refuses complete eschewal as the terms of black masculine ideality were established to generate the power black men needed to fight racism and oppression.

The myth exacts a high cost in its inevitable creation of detrimental consequences for black men, women, and communities (Collins 73–97). As Neal posits, the figure of the ‘Strong Black Man’ can be faulted for championing a stunted, conservative, one-dimensional, and stridently heterosexual vision of black masculinity that has little to do with the vibrant, virile, visceral masculinities that are lived in the real world (24). The destructive outcomes made possible by adherence to ideal white masculinity as the grounds for formations of strong black manhood are exemplified most clearly in the masculinist ideologies, philosophies, and supposedly subversive, revolutionary political activisms that ground Bigger Thomas’s and Eldridge Cleaver’s representations in Soul on Ice (Williams 394–415; Harris 63–84; Neal 23–24).

Within critical discourses, Wallace’s study proves Neal’s assertions of the insidious quality of ideal masculinity. Wallace critiques the production of ideal black manhood but then uncritically transfers the same hegemonic, patriarchal white power to his text. From the first sections, in which Wallace discusses the photographic narrative produced by white photographer Albert Watson and Lyle Ashton Harris’s re-visioning of it, to the later sections, where he writes of the important role of the black Masonic tradition in creating visual (and mythic) tropes of powerful black masculinity, Wallace provides little analysis of the consequences of black reproductions of traditional masculinity. Only one section of Wallace’s book shows an awareness that producing black manhood on the grounds of ideal white heteronormative masculinity might be problematic—the chapter on Melvin Dixon’s Vanishing Rooms. In this section, Wallace argues that dance becomes a medium through which the black male subject might strongly intervene within the racially gendered and sexualized structuring devices used to keep him in his place. Nevertheless, this challenge remains couched within extremely masculinist and, in many ways, white patriarchal terms (Wallace 147–69). Accordingly, while black male agency is important to intervening in and fighting white racial dominance, if it is only used to reiterate white masculine ideality, it keeps in place the very forces and systems that oppress black people.

Extending Wallace’s insights into literature, critic Jeffrey Leak argues that the ultimate point of the African American masculinist tradition is the production of a powerful, legitimizing myth of black masculinity. Leak’s Racial Myths and Masculinity in African American Literature makes clear that the African American man’s need to produce this powerful myth of black manhood is established simultaneous to the beginnings of the African American historical, literary, and critical traditions. And this need remains a defining force in African American cultural, social, and political discourses even today. Leak’s examination of black masculine ideality differs from Wallace’s in his recognition of the hegemony of ideal, heteronormative masculinity. He points to literature written by African American men that (re)views or revises previous formations of black masculine identity and power. Leak argues that it is important to trace the ways both hetero-and homosexual black men engage in counter-mythmaking, as well as how representations of black women fit within these processes. Leak maintains that studying the ways in which many black male novelists render black women characters—which for [him] speaks volumes about their conceptions of masculinity—is critical to any study of black masculinity" (135). Consequently, representations of black male sexuality and black womanhood are important aspects of the production of black masculinity and ultimately determine whether these constructions are actually progressive. Without this examination, the economies and agendas of power informing productions of black masculine identities remain hidden. Nonetheless, in the case of representations of black women, Leak’s text only gestures toward this goal. The text never fully engages the importance of representations of black female bodies to African American male mythmaking processes.³ Leak’s book establishes the grounds and necessity for this important work, bridging the gap between the analyses of Taylor and Wallace and more straightforwardly black female and male feminist scholarship.

My study builds on and extends the work of Wallace and Leak as I analyze how black feminist critiques can be used to trace more liberatory formations of black masculinities through exploring the following questions: Are black men a priori trapped or destined only to be reactive within the options available for formations of liberatory black masculinities? Is there no way that black men can move beyond Wallace’s conception of enframe-ment—the architectural and structural limitations metaphorically embodied by the picture frame, the Masonic lodge, the traditional home, or the underground? Are there other avenues through which to construct black masculine identities that can disrupt the goals of ideal masculinity without sacrificing themselves to lethal forms of control and recontainment? Are there constructions of black masculine identity that challenge the exclusion or peripheral positioning of black women to uncover their importance to black masculine counter-mythmaking and resistance? And if so, how are women’s bodies functioning within these processes and to what ends?

The pursuit of these questions led me to discover a body of scholarship collaboratively produced by both black female and black male feminists as they seriously engaged not only African American literature and discourse but also the work of feminist scholars. And it is these texts that provide the critical frameworks and approaches shaping this study. This body of scholarship includes Manning Marable’s Groundings with My Sisters: Patriarchy and the Exploitation of Black Women (1983); Michael Awkward’s A Black Man’s Place(s) in Black Feminist Criticism (1996); Devon Carbado’s Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality (1999); Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Rudolph Byrd’s anthology Traps (2001); and Gary Lemons’s Remembering Our Feminist Forefathers. Critical insights gained from these texts are reinforced in later work such as Athena Mutua’s edited volume, Progressive Black Masculinities (2006), which includes her essay Theorizing Progressive Black Masculinities, Patricia Hill Collins’s A Telling Difference: Dominance, Strength, and Black Masculinities, and Guy-Sheftall’s Remembering Our Feminist Forefathers; Mark Anthony Neal’s New Black Man (2006); and David Ikard’s Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism (2007). These texts inform the black female/male feminist critical approach grounding this book.

Therefore, instead of approaching this problematic through black feminist and womanist critiques posited exclusively by female critics, I position this book vis-à-vis scholarship that redefines exchanges between black female and black male critics relative to black feminist scholarship. Thus, I explore the central questions posed earlier through the feminist work of both black men and black women to further elucidate, construct, and set a tone for collaboration. My study prioritizes furthering discussions of black, gendered, sexualized identities and representations within black male feminist, collaborative, intraracial discursive spaces.

For instance, following from Leak’s text, Ikard’s Breaking the Silence more fully articulates a black male feminist practice, carrying it forward to identify progressive ways of constructing, representing, and performing black masculinities. In examining what can be gained by engaging black male feminist critique, Ikard acknowledges the divisive state of intraracial relations between black feminists and some black male critics. This context serves as backdrop for any study of racially gendered identities within the African American literary and critical traditions:

Unfortunately, many black male scholars are partly to blame for impeding the institutional success of black female feminist methodology. Threatened by critiques that implicated black men in the oppression of black women, they either disparaged black feminist criticism as culturally divisive or ignored its existence altogether. Even as they lacked the political and economic power of their white male counterparts, they were still able to rely on gendered cultural taboos against black male criticism to silence many would-be detractors. While this resistance to black feminist criticism has lessened significantly over the past decade, there are many black male scholars who are still hostile toward black feminism. (Ikard 174)

Ikard’s articulation of the threat black feminist methodologies represent to some black male scholars and the need to take seriously the insights of black feminism is important not because it is the first time that a black male critic has said something of this nature, but because it comes at an important juncture in the forward progression of black masculinist and feminist studies.⁴ Barack Obama’s meteoric rise and unprecedented political successes are grounded in his construction of a powerful brand of black masculinity and leadership that draws on feminist insights. Analyzing the complexities and contradictions of Obama’s performance of black masculine identity requires bringing together masculinist and feminist insights. Thus, the time has passed when critics could dismiss or elide black feminism’s import to the study of constructions of black masculinity. Ikard’s text and others point to the need to seriously engage feminist critical inquiries to forward the aims implicit within black liberation struggles. Having gained some momentum in the 1990s, black male feminism is currently at the fore of critiques that heighten the ability to further alternative understandings and constructions of black identities.

Ikard posits the value of furthering such critical spaces and stances in the following way:

The black male feminist project is most useful because it strives to establish viable notions of black manhood that are not premised on black female subjugation. This is an important endeavor, considering that most cultural-gender criticism focuses almost exclusively on identifying the problems of black male identity. Even as this focus is understandable given the real social need to validate black female victimization, it provides few opportunities