Confessions and Declarations of Multicolored Men

By Frederick Douglass Alcorn

This book is a culturally situated study of the experiences and perspective garnered from of a group of post-secondary Black African American, bi-multi-racial male students aged 19-37. The undergirding interest was to see if there was an awareness of the group's manly inclinations, tendencies and predispositions and understand how such aware

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vernon Art and Science Inc.
• Release date: Oct 17, 2016
• ISBN: 9781622730810

Book preview

Preface

In the study this work is based upon, I set out to explore the function of habitus as it concerns self-actualization regarding learning and academic success among a small group of Black African American, bi-multi-racial males.  There was this undergirding interest to see if there was an awareness among these men of their manly inclinations, tendencies, predispositions relative to their quest and discipline for learning, to academically achieve, to be educated; i.e. in a seamless sense of masculinity amidst a quest for learnedness as a natural part of their sense of manliness and sexuality. Habitus, as the conveyor of dispositions, inclinations, and tendencies, I thought could be the construct with which to shelter and reveal being as man and being educated as the fabric of manliness.

What I discovered was that although the Nigerian born participant was the only one that confessed to being directly aware and embracing of the educated – manly self as one, all the other participants became curious about this, as they reflectively came to realize the presence of manliness in their quest for learnedness, were in fact one.  In other words, as all participants proceeded during their respective interview session they demonstrated astuteness about how their racialized-masculinity and manhood inclination and tendencies were in fact present in their quest for learnedness, education, and understanding.  The perspectives they presented accounted for this, in analytical collaboration and integration with the literature.

I learnt that these men sanctioned their ethnic-cultural heritages as being an important – relevant part of their lives, as part of a diverse society.  Moreover, that they endorsed education as life-long natural part of their lives that was not controlled and mandated via institutional requirements, but believed as essential to their existence and contribution to society.  Education it seems is psychological and social-culturally woven throughout their sense of masculinity, manhood, and sexuality, i.e., one can be learned and sexy at the same time, one does not have to exclude the other, or cancel out the other.  In conjunction, these men of color were concerned about the Stereotype Threat named and evidenced by Hall (1990), not just for themselves but also among their ethnic-cultural brethren.

Courtenay’s (2000) study regarding how constructions of masculinity influenced men’s differentiated approaches to health and well-being, helped me to realize in the analysis of participants’ response, the role that social construction played in the defining, developing, and enactment of their masculinity, manhood, and sexuality, and the influence of factors such as ethnic-cultural, race, social-economic status, and cultural capital, contributed to that social construction.  Very importantly, this included the social construction of world view, and respect for education as being centric in their lives. So, can the social constructions of masculinity influence men’s differentiated approaches to education? Do factors such as race, the persistence of institutional racism, social-economic wherewithal, ethnic-cultural affiliation, attitudes and efforts involving degrees of participation in learning activities, influence the social construction of one masculinity, manliness, and sexuality? 

I would argue yes, that this is not a leap, as literacy regarding the importance of health and well-being is intimately tied to one’s sense, cultivation, and habited accumulation of self, within one’s social-gendered-racialized skin, in a culturally coveted biological and cognitive intra-interactive merger.

Table of Contents

Preface

Prelude

Early Testimony

Definition of Key Terms and Concepts used therein.

Chapter One  Background Script  Layin’ in the cut

Chapter Two  Voices in Related Literature

I.      Social Cultural Sites and Circumstances that Affect the Forming of Habitus

II.      Organizational/Institutional Habitus

III.      Black Masculinity and Manhood in U. S. Society

A.      Racialized Gender

B.      The Body as Socialized and Marked by Racial Phenotype that is Subconsciously and Consciously Contrasted

C.      Black Men, Brown Shaded Skin: Their/Our Conceptualization and Enactment

D.      Performing Black Masculinity

E.      Black Masculinity and Manhood in Educational Context

F.      Bi-Multi-Racial Masculinity and Manhood

Conclusion

Chapter Three  Declarations and Confessions  of Multicolored Men

Interlude

Declarations and Confessions

Cultural Self-Identity as a Response to Social Reality

Performance as a Response to Social Reality

Stereotypes as a Response to Social Reality

Socializing Influences as a Response to Social Reality

Attitudinal and Behavioral Switching as a Response to Social Reality

Conflict and Anger Management as a Response to Social Reality

Awareness of Societal Perceptions, Racialized Physical Features, as a Response to Social Reality

What Achievement Means as a Response to Social Reality

Unexpected Results

Conclusion

Chapter Four  Critical Reflection

Section 1

Intersectionality

Bi-Multi-Racial Masculinity and Manhood

Race

Racialized Gender

Section 2

Racialized Stereotypical Tag of Anger - Conflict Management

Meta-Cognitive/Self-Talk

Learned Effectiveness

Worldview - Locus of Perceived Control or Management

Some theoretical implications

Implications - Learning and Education

Implications - Social-Psychology / Mental Health

Summative Last Words

Risk Assessment

Functionality

Postscript

References

Index

Prelude

What many men today are missing is themselves, the complex and unique experience of self that has been rerouted and suppressed in the name of work, war, and the arduous task of being a man.  This mandate to repress or obliterate anything and everything expansive or off the grid has defined generations, so much so that most men cannot even perceive the extent to which they have been robbed (Walker, p. 5, 2004).

What sista Walker most disturbingly and insightfully declares and points to is the question: when the hell do you get to yourself with all that other social-gendered-manning up this and that stuff, that is already laid out there and for you?  You know you can get in your own way and not even know it, because you are manning up to status quo. Then to there are those unconscious, conscious practices and strategies among those folks who are purposefully trying to do it, that is, intentionally read and status you as some kinda Black African American or racially mixed blended radical, ungrateful thug, or an unpatriotic so and so.  Of course, in all this so-called manly declaration and heterogeneously sanctioned innuendoes there is the need to work on avoiding backfiring in our own face, that includes, most certainly yours truly. Under such historically pressured social ascription, the consideration and pursuit of defining and enacting progressive Black masculinities, manhood, and sexuality (Mutua, 2006), is a moving target among us if you want in.  But get in we must.

Most certainly, this is true in the area of gaining an education that for all intent and purpose should be the fabric of our-self.  What I am talking about is the seamless merger of masculinity, manhood, and sexuality, (the physical, the phrased in maturity, collaborating with the sexual responsibility); like being joined at the hip and the mind.  Put another way, what I am saying is a seamless merger where working on being learned is the fabric of a self-gendered existence that is progressively defined and ethically sustained by multicolored men as: non-sexist, anti-racist, interculturally literate, and not stuck in some heterogeneously old timey shit. Like Isley brothers sang - I… (weeee) got work to do.

Early Testimony

Like professor poet brotherman Sekou Sundiata spoke-sang – Somewhere in America tonight there are those loving the past just so long as it ain’t history.

Among others, un-under-knowingly, my existence was silently and sometime more loudly gendered and racialized after birth as I-we came into the view our history of becoming; and I of course had no words or thoughts for it. (As a side but important note - I do recall my Aunt Bert, in an earnest attempt to warn her son, my 1st cuz Arnett, off from becoming an early daddy, you need to play the field. While my Mama planted some kinda unknown boogie man seed in my head that prompted a reflex action leading to my jumping up, and thus I did not have any kind of you know what intimacy, until I was just past eighteen years of age).

School learning, family and neighborhood life was useless in this regard. Useless in the sense that I was not consciously aware enough to put the two together in both social-cultural - historical proximity; race and gender, that is. But, I did come to sense us and we-ness that I was wrapped in.  I believe that I was acting on inner impulse with sexuality taking the lead.  I fostered roles from my parents who were beautiful dark brown and lighter brown skinned, both worked outside the home, but the cooking was primarily done by my father, while both engaged in cleaning our home, with me learning my chores as responsibility. I sought to emulate social-behavioral roles from older jitter-bug homeboys in my neighborhood and that of my cuz’s north Philly project dwellings. 

Both Mama and Daddy spent quality time-tending to my Grandma Agnes, Daddy’s mama, who was home-bound. Daddy was a boarding house baby resident from Baltimore at one time.  But, to announce, from segregated neighborhoods of North, South, West Philly, and Germantown, I witnessed, felt, and socially-psychologically digested the ritual of everyday working woman/man; to include church-going, strong civic manners, neighborhood-community compassion - street and police alertness, a respectful cooperation. For instance, my Mama was a neighborhood block chairperson. "Hello Freddy, Hello Mr. Wellman; Hi Mr. Knox, Freddy, how you doing; Hey Ms. Highsmith, Hi Freddy, How’s your Mama doing? Good x-cross country running the other day Freddy, Thank you, Mr. Highsmith. Fred Alcorn, I know your Mama would want you to keep up on your grades better than this, Yes Mr. Young, she would. (Mr. Young was one of two physical educational - health teachers, and athletic team coaches. They lived in the same segregated neighborhoods of West Philly that we did).

My evolving discovery of being raced and gendered simultaneously, was initially more sharply brought into focus and awareness during my very brief hiatus down south at a Black traditional college; where ROTC was mandatory for two years during early years of the Vietnam War, along with a standing threat that if you fell before a C/2.0 GPA average you would be drafted right off campus. This was in writing and told to me verbally in a one on one meeting with the ROTC commandant.  I had a number of these one on one meetings because I refused to go to military ROTC classes and scheduled formations in uniform. I was one trifling student, I have always been unsettled and resistant to organizational cultural systems and standard operating procedures. (My best friend homeboy, who is presently a teacher coach in the Baltimore school district, informed me that not long after my departure a series of campus protests occurred against mandatory ROTC among traditional Black colleges, as we socially referred to them during that time).

The educational experience at Norfolk State College, the fall of 1967, in a setting of predominately Black educators, administrators, military instructors, and students of all shades, inaugurated my senses with all kinds of wonderment about possibilities that I was not yet ready to process nor recognize. But unbeknownst to me the social-cultural construction of self and reality sent me off on a totally different trajectory where I began to realize the racial-gendered particularities of me and my home-boy’s existence. (And by the way, as a side note just so you know, a number of Historical Black Colleges and Universities are conservatively toned, particularly when it comes to the intersected topic of race/ethnicity/gender, social-economic inequities, and social justice, Dr. Boyce Watkins, 2015). 

This episode in my social realty, launched the quest to deconstruct my existence while still experiencing it in relationship with self and others. I began to do, think, critique, wonder and be anxious about, and perform while being more purposefully cognize about myself as a Black man becoming; regarding forward directional thought and imagination in contemplation and study for enhanced learnedness and purpose. I did this in view and pursued understanding based upon what historian John Hope Franklin declared as, America’s false start. A false start that a great number of European Americans, people of color among them, believe and when surveyed pooled, indicated, and thereby denied, the advent of any tampered with conditions and returns for themselves.

With the Vietnam experience among my brotha’s self-declared and recognized themselves as Bloods, I began to say out loud with others, and critique my existence, observations, and experiences in the historical-contemporary context of my ethnic-cultural point of reference group regarding our psychohistorical and materialistic circumstance, and peculiarities. All this was under the public perceptions of how I/we were being looked upon, and how we looked upon ourselves. My emotions, anger, and intuitive mind, became newly attuned to social-political contradictions and rights to self-empowerment beyond sexual and physical prowess, and male-centered tantrums such as I didn’t get my way.  (Perhaps in youth the informed good-lookin’ out up-bring that my parents, family elders, adult neighbors, and extended significant others, engaged in with me was their attempt to give me a calmer place at figuring things out on the run as was needed.  Asante (thank you) for that). 

Understand that things about race in my growing up time and even years after were not audible nor cognitive to me. I don’t remember hearing it directly as it was concealed relative to in the group term Negro, the unspoken social taboos and socially cultural awkward interactions (the emphasis not placed on the action), in so-called school integrated space. Here we meant one another daily for school hours then went back to our racial-social and class segregated neighborhood enclaves. So race to me was this under named presence, (like James Baldwin said No Name in the street) that was experienced-perceived via differentiation marked by phenotype, clothing, language-behavioral styles, temperament, your assigned - associated academic track frame of mind and reference, and construed social reality, that you carried around with you. (Habitus)? In other words, race-gender-sexuality, and social economic class differentiations, were viewed in relationship and in association with other things, relative to physical and social proximity to sources and people of authority and power, and sources sought and found to experience self-empowerment. 

Certainly, I others of my friends and peers experienced male unspoken pressure and anxiety about manning up that was emotionally laden and time consuming, along with sexual harassment bullying, particularly, in jr. high school space, if you attempted to help one be any kind of a serious student.  The social assumption floating around was that you were a punk, sissy, or some kinda smart guy if you engaged in study. In a capitalistic heterogeneous dominated society, there has been the psychological pressure for manliness to connect economic wherewithal with social persona; the dollar and materialistic got-ness of it.  I mean manliness, masculinity, and sexuality are literally wore like a suit tailored to meet the scope and nature of racialized-gendered; assimilatory heterogeneous demands and taunts of expectations. Then to there is the advent of experiencing confidence and trust that you can compete, struggle, succeed, work through it…the racialized gendered contradictions. Eventually, many who turned out to be my closet friends, wondered into organizing themselves (I among them) into an all-male home-made Black fraternity called Kappa Phi Delta, (K, Phi, D), as did others to include the sista’s. This I believe in retrospect somewhat warded off social demons of Jim Crow segregation - racialized gendered societal social differentials, neighborhood gitter-bugging, public school academic tracking.  Black African American culture it seems formed degrees of social-cultural insularity. I do believe, in some ways social-cultural development and outlook as Black African American, bi-multi-males, among folks of people of color, can liked to being situated on a diving board extended out-over a pool of assimilatory racialized-gender-class and stereotyped, body scripted expectations/demands, via mainstream culture in this country. I contend that our persona, socialized development, and world view, are trespassed upon by race, intersecting with phenotype, gender, masculinity, manhood, and social-economic circumstance. As Jackson, II, (2005), explained/asserted,

Socially, the body facilitates the perpetuation of ascriptive devises used to assign meanings to ingroups and outgroups; it serves to jog the personal memories of cultural interactants, to remind them visually of the constitutive (power to assign) discourses that provide form and structure to their social cognitions about racialized bodies.

Jackson went on to comprehensively explain how the action of ascription is applied and supplied by body during intra-interpersonal interactions, which is treated discursively like text, interpreted and read by interactants.  Put another way, the racialized gendered body phenotype, social-cultural in-group and out-group’s experiences, and frame of reference, act collaboratively in pronounced and subtle meaning making ways through the ascription of body type, that is used discursively from topic to topic, situational setting to setting. A key point here is the power, i.e., the financial wherewithal, knowledge and news making-presentation, and political-legal clout, relative to the historical precedence of dominant intergroup power relations in U.S. society, and among historically western dominate nations period. In other words, to make things stick in people minds that forge habits, frame of reference rationalizing, about what is being said, claimed, of eventful occurrence by whom about who - among what ethnic-culture group(s) of people concerned. In this case I am speaking to and about multicolored men, brown, black, bi-multiethnic, of varying shades of complexions, orientations and experiences, relative to their social-cultural reality, with respect to their equality of rights.

I came to know that, and as did my cousin, homeboys, other kinfolks and among peers, that we lived and moved back and forth in and out of primarily Black folk’s neighborhoods, in Philadelphia, while witnessing European American ethnics, Jewish, Italian, German, Polish inter-ethnics owning the stores in my neighborhood, and the supermarket directly behind my row house home. (No ill thought in mind or intended). For instance, we knew to stay out of or moved quickly through the neighborhood called Little Italy off of Gerald Ave. It was just where our heads were at in those days. 

In the vicinity of my neighborhood in the Northern part of West Philly, eventually we had one African American grocery store deli – owned and operated by Mr. Cane and family, down the street and around the corner.  Prior to that in the fifties there were Black barbershops intimately dug into the lower part of a row house but mostly on street corners. Very importantly, there were Black women owned beauty parlors in my neighborhood at main street locations, and in backrooms off kitchens. I recall spending time with my Mama at her beauty appointments, as they were called when I was younger. I do recall a Chinese family who had a laundry in the lower part of their home, there was a beaded covered door entrance inside the store that someone would emerge from when you entered the store; an intercultural encounter.  You could look through and see into some of their living space. Things were so intimate and face to face back then.  There was this constant experiencing of one another’s presence. I learned and enjoyed making runs there for the short time I got to know my Daddy to get his shirts, before he passed.  (My eyes cloud with the fog of tears).

Integration back then essentially amounted to passing through European American neighborhoods on the way to another segregated Black neighborhood South or North Philly to visit relative and friends. Integration occurred for me when I visited Dr. Louis A. Chase, the interculturally astute Jewish doctor who delivered me and was our home/office visit family doctor, or when we went to Gimbel Brothers, Lit Brothers, or Strawbridge and Clothier department stores, all European American owed. (Where at one-point Mama could not try on the clothes for fitting and by my birthright I as well).  Then there was the street market in South Philly full of fresh fruit, meat, bread, etc. vendors, European American owed.  None of this, to repeat, none this was even hinted to me and other of my friends, and cousins of my age. And that to me is the scary thing about this thing called integration, segregation, and of course at the top of the A list, assimilation, you subconsciously associate these things in forming your view of social reality relative to your place in it.  The ability, motivation, and urgencies to critique and respond to issues of what was going on around me, before I came in direct contact with the physical, cultural, and spiritual world beyond where I was, and of course the dominant political power relations of it all, did not start to emerge, or I should say dribbled out of me, as noted previously, upon my departure from the neighborhood.

In October 1963, my first year at Overbrook High School in West Philly, James Baldwin, writer and social activist had a talk with teachers and he said this: "The paradox of education is precisely this – that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated". In direct view of this I argue that  --- an assimilated education and process of schooling does not prompt nor help you to become critically conscious of the society in which you are being educated about until you start tripping over societal contradictions about your existence, in this case I’m referring to Black African American, bi-multi-racialized males.

This to me most certainly includes the intimate and needed cultivating merger of one’s social gendered existence and sense of sexuality with becoming progressive and learned. Hence, the more I and among my friends and peers became aware of manly pursuits, in heterogeneously ascripted gendered self-awareness, the more to some degrees, education and classroom learning and academic achievement became disconnected from our-my daily view in the construction who we were being and becoming at this point in our lives. Very importantly, there was the social-political, perceptional, and behavioral overt and subtleties of segregation – integration struggles occurring all around us.

Let me be clear, I am not saying that education, classroom learning, and academic achievement were misnomers, as it concerns having no place in our lives. I/we knew and felt (I think old schoolers get my drift), the seriousness of education and attentive participation in schooling to engage in self-opportunities to learn and grow early on. For instance, throughout segregated Black neighborhoods I frequented in West Philly and among North Philly row house streets and projects, from elementary through jr. high school, I witnessed-heard parent-extended family member homework calls and yells, from porches, along with street hunt and find walks and authoritative struts, and siblings carriers of get your butt home now, with I’m gonna tell Mama, Daddy, or who-ever was in care-charge, warning messages. What I am saying is that as one begins to realize (become conscious as Mr. Baldwin may put it) existence in societal experiences, there is the critical need for cultivating attitudes and understanding relevant to the seamless merger of masculinity, manhood, and sexuality and learnedness. 

As I have worked and talked among Black African American, bi-multi-racial males, there is seemingly this same unknowingness and more pronounced disconnect, regarding manly or gendered inclinations and dispositions regarding how they self-actualize as males specific to working on the seamless merger between becoming learned and working to academically achieve, as one with evolving self-masculinity, manhood, and sexuality.  For me and others among my friends and peers, one piece of masculinity, manhood, and sexuality, was in the gym, on sports teams, in competition, and running the streets with swagger, which got traded-off each and every time I entered the classroom.  Manhood was self-consciously checked at the door of the classroom period as it became a predisposition that needed to stay with me. (I carried this attitude with me to college on a sports scholarship and lasted as long as two-cents. At one point my track coach walked into my health education class and asked the professor how my homeboy and I were doing.  To this she stated well, "Jackson is doing alright, Alcorn is just occupying space").  It has taken me over thirty years to really initiate working on undoing this fragmentation and disconnect. When it comes to being a man, establishing your gender orientation period, the seamless merger with creating the educated self, in the broadest sense of the word, as part of the human fabric of who we are, there are those among who are simply punking out or, too frustrated and disaffected to try, or is it simply not being put out there in cultural context?

In general, I contend that this is not part of Western societal cultural orientation and approaches in the process of schooling and education, i.e., a seamless merger with masculinity, manhood, and sexuality within group ethnic-cultural context and within the structuring of social reality.  Very saliently, let me preface all of the preceding discussion by this thesis caveat:  It is within a societal pressure cooker-comfort zone assimilatory process, that Black African American, bi-multi-racial males have to negotiate.  It is like we have to lower our cultural profile in public sphere. You know, when growing up in Philly my parents and among my friends and peer parents, significant adult relative others, and neighborhood elder’s period, that there was always this concern about us young boys keeping a low profile in the streets, and in public sphere. This was a major testy stressful bone of contention socializing point, for my Mama, Daddy, Ms. Helen, Mama-best girlfriend, and my second Mama, and Black elder’s period.

In a racialized gendered society among whose citizens there are those who are still instinctively susceptible to identifying with pathological and assimilated stereotypes and the profiling amongst Black African American, bi-multi-racial males, the implication can prove to tantamount to intellectual, cognitive, and physical suicide, if I may be so dramatic. There is, for instance, this hegemonic bad dude archetype that is still pervasively alluring among a heterogeneous European American culturally dominant society, that is old-school and non-progressive.

In this book voices speak unapologetically about grappling with the psycho-historical complexity and issues of racialized masculinity and ethnic-cultural heritage among Black African American, bi-multi-racial males relative to the norming and storming of masculinity, manhood, and sexuality. The multicolored young adult men in this book were part of a generation born post-civil rights overt struggle/protest, coming of age during the so-colorblind anti-affirmative action anything, and conservative blown back response under Reagonomics and Bush Era. From these presidential administration’s, there was and continues to be in complex ways, and coached in innocent patriotic stances, a debunking of social-economic-liberatory civil and legislative advocacy. (You know what is said about assumptions).  That along with the racial-gendered coded fear mongering rehetoric, and I must say, a privatizing push of higher education learning that contributed to today’s student ill-affordability - debt crisis issues.

The men in this book are on a similar path of thoughts, experiences, and perceptions about race-gender in their lives and the world around them, join others of similar mindset and body of experiences.  I heard hurt, pride, love of la familia and the pursuit of learnedness in their voices while simultaneously critiquing the multiculturally complex society that they are imbued in, which among who members for the most part, perceive and believe the state and articulation masculinity, manhood, and sexuality is simply……. gender-universal.

Say What!?

As Vershawn Ashanti Young (2007) most forthrightly stated, the full achievement of Brown (1954 decision striking down school segregation), was deferred because the progress toward making race not matter stopped when the focus shifted from color to performance.

With the introduction of civil rights laws, the integration of theirs, mine, and other multicolored men’s - masculinity, manhood, and sexuality came under wider public eyeballing via various societal institutions, and intimate social circumstance. This can be contrasted to the physical-psychologically overt cultural cleansing conditions under chattel - caged slavery, and further oppressive and suppressive conditions under Jim Crow segregated social-racialized society de jure and de facto contractual arrangements. (I invite you to read the work by Scott Poulson-Bryant entitled: Hung, A Meditation on the Measure of Black men in America, (2005).

In others words, race, racialized unconscious/conscious perceptions and judgments were/are no longer confined to our phenotypical markings, alerting folks