Black Looks: Race and Representation PDF

Copyright © 1992 by Gloria Watkins. Any properly footnoted quotation of up to 500 sequential words may be used without permission so long as the total number of words quoted does not exceed 2,000. For longer quotations or for a greater number'of total words, authors should write...

Copyright © 1992 by Gloria Watkins. Any properly footnoted quotation of up to 500 sequential words may be used without permission so long as the total number of words quoted does not exceed 2,000. For longer quotations or for a greater number'of total words, authors should write to South End Press for permission. Printed in the U.S.A. on recycled, acid-free paper. Text design and layout by ±e South End Press collective. Cover design by Julie Ault and Gloria Watkins. Cover photo from The Black West by William Loren Katz, Open Hand Publishing Inc., 1987. Used with the kind permission of William Loren Katz. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications for permission to use previously published material: Black American Literature Forum; Z Magazine; and ±e book Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, New York: Routledge, 1992. library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hooks, Bell. Black looks : race and representation / Bell Hooks. p. cm. Includes bibliographic references. ISBN 0-89608-433-7: $12.00 1. Afro-American women. 2. Afro-Americans—Social conditions 1975- 3. Racism—United States. 4. United States— Race relations. 1. Title ’ E185.86.H734 1992 92-6954 305.48’896073—dc20 CIP South End Press, 116 Saint Botolph Street, Boston, MA 02115 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 93 94 95 96 97 98 99  Chapter 6 Reconstructing Black Masculinity Black and white snapshots of my childhood always show me in ±e company of my brother. Less than a year older than me, we looked like twins and for a time in life we did everything together. We were inseparable. As young children, we were brother and sister, comrades, in it together. As adolescents, he was forced to become a boy and I was forced to become a girl. In our southern black Baptist patriarchal home, being a boy meant learning to be tough, to mask one’s feelings, to stand one’s ground and fight—being a girl meant learning to obey, to be quiet, to clean, to recognize that you had no ground to stand on, I was tough, he was not. I was strong willed, he was easygoing. We were both a disappointment. Affectionate, full of good humor, loving, my brother was not at all interested in becoming a patriarchal boy. This lack of interest generated a fierce anger in our father. We grew up staring at black and white photos of our father in a boxing ring, playing basketball, with the black infantry he was part of ill World War II. He was a man in uniform, a man’s man, able to hold his own. Despising his one son for not wanting to become the strong silent type (my brother loved to talk, tell jokes, and make us happy), our father let him know early on that he was no son to him, real sons wanted to be like their fathers. Made to feel inadequate, less than male in his childhood, one boy in a house full of six sisters, he became forever haunted by the idea of patriarchal masculinity. All that he had ques­ tioned in his childhood was sought after in his early adult life in order to become a man’s man—phaUocentric, patriarchal, and masculine. In traditional black communities when one tells a grown male to “be a 87 88 BLACK LOOKS man,” one is urging him to aspire to a masculine identity rooted in the patriarchal ideal. Throughout black male history in the United States there have been black men who were not at all interested in the patriarchal ideal. In the black community of my childhood, there was no monolithic standard of black masculinity. Though the patriarchal ideal was the most esteemed version of manhood, it was not the only version. No one in our house talked about black men being no good, shiftless, trifling. Head of the household, our fa±er was a “much man,” a provider, lover, disciplinarian, reader, and thinker. He was introverted, quiet, and slow to anger, yet fierce when aroused. We respected him. We were in awe of him. We were afraid of his power, his physical prowess, his deep voice, and his rare unpredictable but intense rage. We were never allowed to forget that, unlike other black men, our father was the fulfillment of the patriarchal masculine ideal. Though I admired my father, I was more fascinated and charmed by black men who were not obsessed with being patriarchs: by Felix, a hobo who jumped trains, never worked a regular job, and had a missing thumb; by Kid, who lived out in the country and hunted the rabbits an3 coons that came to our table; by Daddy Gus, who spoke in hushed tones, sharing his sense of spiritual mysticism. These were the men who touched my heart. The list could go on. I remember them because they loved folks, especially women and children. They were caring and giving. They were black men who chose alternative life­ styles, who questioned the status quo, who shunned a ready made patriarchal identity and invented themselves. By knowing them, I have never been tempted to ignore the complexity of black male experience and identity. The generosity of spirit that characterized who they were and,how they lived in the world lingers in my memory. I write this piece to honor them, knowing as I do now that it was no simple matter for them to choose against patriarchy, to choose themselves, their lives. And I write this piece for my brother in hopes that he will recover one day, come back to himself, know again the way to love, the peace of an unviolated free spirit. It was this peace that the quest for an unat­ tainable life-threatening patriarchal masculine ideal took from him. When I left our segregated southern black community and went to a predominately white college, the teachers and students I met knew nothing about the lives of black men. Learning about the matriarchy myth and white culture’s notion that black men were emasculated, I was shocked. These theories did not speak to the world I had most intimately known, did not address the complex gender roles that were so familiar to me. Much of the scholarly work on black masculinity that  Reconstructing Black Masculinity 89 was presented in the classroom then was based on material gleaned from studies of urban black life. This work conveyed the message that black masculinity was homogenous. It suggested that all black men were tormented by their inability to fulfill the phallocentric masculine ideal as it has been articulated in white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Erasing the realities of black men who have diverse understandings of masculinity, scholarship on the black family (traditionally the frame­ work for academic discussion of black masculinity) puts in place of this lived complexity a flat, one-dimensional representation. X The portrait of black masculinity that emerges in this work per­ petually constructs black men as “failures” who are psychologically “fucked up,” dangerous, violent, sex maniacs whose insanity is informed by their inability to fulfill their phallocentric masculine destiny in a racist context. Much of this literature is written by white people, and some of it by a few academic black men. It does not interrogate the conventional construction of patriarchal masculinity or question the extent to which black men have historically internalized this norm. It never assumes the existence of black men whose creative agency has enabled them to subvert norms and develop ways of thinking about masculinity that challenge patriarchy. Yet, there has never been a time in the history of the United States when black folks, particularly black men, have not been enraged by the dominant culture’s stereotypical, fantastical representations of black masculinity. Unfortunately, black people have not systematically challenged these narrow visions, insisting on a more accurate “reading” of black male reality. Acting in complicity with the status quo, many black people have passively absorbed narrow representations of black masculinity, perpetuated stereotypes, myths, and offered one-dimensional accounts. Contemporary black men have been shaped by these representations. No one has yet endeavored to chart the journey of black men from Africa to the so called “new world” with the intent to reconstruct how they saw themselves. Surely the black men who came to the Ammran continent before Columbus, saw themselves differently from those who were brought on slave ships, or from those few who freely immigrated to a world where the majority of their brethren were enslaved. Given all that we know of the slave context, it is unlikely that enslaved black men spoke the same language, or that they bonded on the basis of shared “male” identity. Even if they had come from cultures where gender difference was clearly articulated in relation to specific roles that was all disrupted in the “new world” context. Transplanted African men, even those who were coming from cultures where sex roles 90 BLACK LOOKS shaped the division of labor, where the status of men was different and most often higher than that of females, had imposed on them the white colonizer’s notions of manhood and masculinity. Black men did not respond to this imposition passively. Yet it is evident in black male slave narratives that black men engaged in racial uplift were often most likely to accept the norms of masculinity set by white culture. Although the gendered politics of slavery denied black men the freedom to act as “men” within the definition set by white norms, this notion of manhood did become a standard used to measure black male progress. Slave narratives document ways black men thought about manhood. The narratives of Henry “Box” Brown, Josiah Henson, Fred­ erick Douglass, and a host of other black men reveal that they saw “freedom” as that change in status that would enable them to fulfill the role of chivalric benevolent patriarch. Free, they would be men able to provide for and take care of their families. Describing how he wept as he watched a white slave overseer beat his mother, William Wells Brown lamented, “Experience has taught me that nothing can be more heart-rending than for one to see a dear and beloved mother or sister tortured, and to hear their cries and not be able to render them assistance. But such is the position which an American slave occupies. ” Frederick Douglass did not feel his manhood affirmed by intellectual progress. It was affirmed when he fought man to man with the slave overseer. This struggle was a “turning point” in Douglass’ life: “It rekindled in my breast the smoldering embers of liberty. It brought up my Baltimore dreams and revived a sense of my own manhood. I was a changed being after that fight. I was nothing before—I was a man now.” The image of black masculinity that emerges from slave narra­ tives is one of hardworking men who longed to assume full patriarchal responsibility for families and kin. Given this aspiration and the ongoing brute physical labor of black men that was the backbone of slave economy (there were more male slaves than black female slaves, particularly before breeding 'became a common practice), it is really amazing that stereotypes of black men as lazy and shiftless so quickly became common in public imagination. In these 19th and early 20th-century representations, black men were cartoon-like creatures only interested in drinking and having a good time. Such stereotypes were an effective way for white racists to erase the significance of black male labor from public consciousness. Later on, these same stereotypes were evoked as reasons to deny black men jobs. They are still evoked today.  Reconstructing Black Masculinity 91 Male “idleness” did not have the same significance in African and Native American cultures that it had in the white mindset. Many 19th- century Christians saw all forms of idle activity as evil, or at least a breeding ground for wrong-doing. For Native Americans and Africans, idle time was space for reverie and contemplation. When slavery ended, black men could once again experience that sense of space. There are no studies which explore the way Native American cultures altered notions of black masculinity, especially for those black men who lived as Indians or who married Indian wives. Since we know there were many tribes who conceived of masculine roles in ways that were quite different from those of whites, black men may well have found African ideas about gender roles affirmed in Native traditions. There are also few confessional narratives by black men that chronicle how they felt as a group when freedom did not bring with it the opportunity for them to assume a “patriarchal” role. Those black men who worked as farmers were often better able to assume this role than those who worked as servants or who moved to cities. Certainly, in the mass migration from the rural south to the urban north, black men lost status. In southern black communities there were many avenues for obtaining communal respect. A man was not respected solely because he could work, make money, and provide. The extent to which a given black man absorbed white society’s notion of man­ hood likely determined the extent of his bitterness and despair that white supremacy continually blocked his access to the patriarchal ideal. Nineteenth century black leaders were concerned about gender roles. While they believed that men should assume leadership positions in the home and public life, they were also concerned about the role of black women in racial uplift. Whether they were merely paying lip-service to the cause of women’s rights or were true believers, exceptional individual black men advocated equal rights for black women. In his work, Martin Delaney continually stressed that both genders needed to work in the interest of racial uplift. To him, gender equality was more a way to have greater involvement in racial uplift than a way for black women to be autonomous and independent. Black male leaders like Martin Delaney and Frederick Douglass were patri­ archs, but as benevolent dictators they were willing to share power with women, especially if it meant they did not have to surrender any male privilege. As co-editors of the North Star, Douglass and Delaney had a masthead in 1847 which read “right is of no sex—truth is of no color...” The 1848 meeting of the National Negro Convention included a pro­ posal by Delaney stating: “Whereas we fully believe in the equality of 92 BLACK LOOKS the sexes, therefore, resolved that we hereby invite females hereafter to take part in our deliberation.” In Delaney’s 1852 treatise The Condi­ tion, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, he argued that black women should have full access to education so that they could be better mothers, asserting: The potency and respectability of a nation or people, depends entirely upon the position of their women; therefore, it is essential to our elevation that the female portion of our children be instructed in all the arts and sciences pertaining to the highest civilization. In Delaney’s mind, equal rights for black women in certain public spheres such as education did not mean that he was advocating a change in domestic relations whereby black men and women would have co-equal status in the home. Most 19th-century black men were not advocating equal rights for women. On one hand, most black men recognized the powerful and necessary role black women had played as freedom fighters in the movement to abolish slavery and other civil rights efforts, yet on the other hand they continued to believe that women should be subordi­ nate to men. They wanted black women to conform to the gender norms set by white society. They wanted to be recognized as “men, ” as patriarchs, by other men, including white men. Yet they could not assume this position if black women were not willing to conform to prevailing sexist gender norms. Many black women who had endured white supremacist patriarchal domination during slavery did not want to be dominated by black men after manumission. Like black men, they had contradictory positions on gender. On one hand they did not want to be “dominated,” but on the other hand they wanted black men to be protectors and providers. After slavery ended, enormous tension and conflict emerged between black women and men as folks struggled to be self-determining. As they worked to create standards for community and family life, gender roles continued to be problematic. Black men and women who wanted to conform to gender role norms found that this was nearly impossible in a white racist economy that wanted to continue its exploitation of black labor. Much is made, by social critics who want to further the notion that black men are symbolically castrated, of the fact that black women often found work in service jobs while black men were unemployed. The reality, how­ ever, was that in some homes it was problematic when a black woman  Reconstructing Black Masculinity 93 worked and the man did not, or when she earned more than he, yet, in other homes, black men were quite content to construct alternative roles. Critics who look at black life from a sexist standpoint advance the assumption that black men were psychologically devastated because they did not have the opportunity to slave away in low paying jobs for white racist employers when the truth may very well be that those black men who wanted to work but could not find jobs, as well as those who did not want to find jobs, may simply have felt relieved that they did not have to submit to economic exploitation. Concurrently, there were black women who wanted black men to assume patriarchal roles and there were some who were content to be autonomous, independent. And long before contemporary feminist movement sanc­ tioned the idea that men could remain home and rear children while women worked, black women and men had such arrangements and were happy with them. Without implying that black women and men lived in gender utopia, I am suggesting that black sex roles, and particularly the role of men, have been more complex and problematized in black life than is believed. This was especially the case when all black people lived in segregated neighborhoods. Racial integration has had a profound impact on black gender roles. It has helped to promote a climate wherein most black women and men accept sexist notions of gender roles. Unfortunately, many changes have occurred in the way black people think about gender, yet the shift from one standpoint to another has not been fully documented. For example: To what extent did the civil rights movement, with its definition of freedom as having equal opportunity with whites, sanction looking at white gender roles as a norm black people should imitate? Why has there been so little positive interest shown in the alternative lifestyles of black men? In every segregated black community in the United States there are adult black men married, unmarried, gay, straight, living in households where they do not assert patriarchal domination and yet live fulfilled lives, where they are not sitting around worried about castration. Again it must be emphasized that the black men who are most worried about castration and emasculation are those who have completely absorbed white supremacist patriarchal definitions of masculinity. Advanced capitalism further changed the nature of gender roles for all men in the United States. The image of the patriarchal head of the household, ruler of this mini-state called the “family,” faded in the 20th century. More men than ever before worked for someone else. The state began to interfere more in domestic matters. A man’s time was  BLACK LOOKS 94 not his own; it belonged to his employer, and the teriM of his rule m the family were altered. In the old days, a man who had no^money could still assert tyrannic rule over family and kin, by patriarchal status, usually affirmed by Christian belief systems. Wto a burgeoning capitalist economy, it was wage-earning po^er^^ deter^ned the extent to which a man would rule over a household, and even that rule was limited by the power of die sUte. In BlackBeast, PaulHoch describes the way in whichadvancedcapi a altered representations of masculinity; The concept of masculinity is dependent at its very root on the concepts of sexual repression and private property. Ironica ly, it is sexual repression and economic scarcity that give masculinity its main significance as a symbol of economic status and sexual opportunity. The shrinkage of the concept of man into the nar­ rowed and hierarchical conceptions of masculinity of the vanous work and consumption ethics also goes hand in hand with an increasing social division of labor, and an increasing shrinkage o the body’s erogenous potentials culminating in a narrow genital sexuality. As we move from the simpler food-gathering societies to the agricultural society to the urbanized work and warfare society, we notice that it is a narrower and narrower range of activities that yield masculine status. In feminist terms, this can be described as a shift from emphasis on patriarchal status (determined by one’s capacity to assert power om others in a number of spheres based on maleness) to a phallocentnc model where what the male does with his penis becomes a greater and certainly a more accessible way to assert masculine status. It is easy to see how this served the interests of a capitalist state which was indeed depriving men of their rights, exploiting their labor in such a way that they only indirectly received the benefits, to deflect away from a patriarchal power based on ruling others and to emphasize a masculine status that would depend solely on the penis. With the emergence of a fierce phallocentrism, a man was no longer a man because he provided care for his family, he was a man simply because he had a penis. Furthermore, his ability to use that penis in the arena of sexual conquest could bring him as much status as being a wage earner and provider. A sexually defined masculme ideal rooted in physical domination and sexual possession of women could be accessible to all men. Hence, eveft unemployed Status, could be sSeh as thfe ffil56dilh€rit df phallocen'tric framework. Barba^ fhrenfeich’s The Hedfts of Men  Reconstructing Black Masculinity 95 chronicles white male repudiation of a masculine ideal rooted in a notion of patriarchal rule requiring a man to marry and care for the material well-being of women and children and an increasing embrace of a phallocentric “playboy” ideal. At the end of the chapter “Early Rebels,” Ehrenreich describes rites of passage in the 1950s which led white men away from traditional nonconformity into a rethinking of masculine status:...not every would-be male rebel had the intellectual reserves to gray gracefully with the passage of the decade. They drank beyond excess, titrating gin with coffee in their lunch hours, gin with Alka-Seltzer on the weekends. They had stealthy affairs with secretaries, and tried to feel up their neighbors’ wives at parties. They escaped into Mickey Spillane mysteries, where naked blondes were routinely perforated in a hail of bullets, or into Westerns, where there were no women at all and no visible sources of white-collar employment. And some of them began to discover an alternative, or at least an entirely new style of male rebel who hinted, seductively, that there was an alternative. The new rebel was the playboy. Even in the restricted social relations of slavery black men had found a way to practice the fine art of phallocentric seduction. Long before white men stumbled upon the “playboy” alternative, black vernacular culture told stories about that non-working man with time on his hands who might be seducing somebody else’s woman. Blues songs narrate the “playboy” role. Ehrenreich’s book acknowledges that the presence of black men in segregated black culture and their engagement in varied expressions of masculinity influenced white men: The Beat hero, the male rebel who actually walks away from responsibility in any form, was not a product of middle-class angst. 'The possibility of walking out, without money or guilt, and without ambition other than to see and do everything, was not even imminent in the middle-class culture of the early fifties... The new bohemianism of the Beats came from somewhere else entirely, from an underworld and an underclass invisible from the corporate “crystal palace” or suburban dream houses. Alternative male lifestyles that opposed the status quo^&re to be found in black culture. White men seekiftg alternatives to a patriarchal masculinity turned to black men, particularly black muSiciihs. Norman Podhoretz’s 1963 % BLACK LOOKS essay "My Negro Problem—And Ours” names white male fascination with blackness, and black masculinity: Just as in childhood I envied Negroes for what seemed to me their superior masculinity, so I envy them today for what seems to be their superior physical grace and beauty. I have come to value physical grace very highly and I am now capable of aching with all my being when I watch a Negro couple on the dance floor, or a Negro playing baseball or basketball. They are on the kind of terms with their own bodies that I should like to be on with mine, and for that precious quality they seem blessed to me. Black masculinity, as fantasized in the racist white imagination, is the quintessential embodiment of man as “outsider” and “rebel.” They were the ultimate “traveling men” drifting from place to place, town to town, job to job. Within segregated black communities, the “traveling” black man was admired even as he was seen as an indictment of the failure of black men to achieve the patriarchal masculine ideal. Extolling the virtues of traveling black men in her novels, Toni Morrison sees them as “truly masculine in the sense of going out so far where you’re not supposed to go and running toward confrontations rather than away from them.” This is a man who takes risks, what Morrison calls a “free man": This is a man who is stretching, you know, he’s stretching, he’s going all the way within his own mind and within whatever his outline might be. Now that’s the tremendous possibility for mas­ culinity among black men. And you see it a lot...They may end up in sort of twentieth-century, contemporary terms being also unemployed. They may be in prison. They may be doing all sorts of things. But they are adventuresome in that regard. Within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, rebel black masculinity has been idolized and punished, romanticized yet vilified. Though the traveling man repudiates being a patriarchal provider, he does not necessarily repudiate male domination. Collectively, black men have never critiqued the dominant culture’s norms of masculine identity, even though they have reworked those norms to suit their social situation. Black male sociologist Robert Staples argues that the black male is “in conflict with the normative definition of masculinity,” yet this conflict has never assumed the form of com­ plete rebellion. Assuming that black men are “crippled emotionally”  Reconstructing Black Masculinity 97 when they cannot fully achieve the patriarchal ideal, Staples asserts: “This is a status which few, if any, black males have been able to achieve. Masculinity, as defined in this culture, has always implied a certain autonomy and mastery of one’s environment.” Though Staples suggests, “the black male has always had to confront the contradiction between the normative expectation attached to being male in this society and proscriptions on his behavior and achievement of goals,” implicit in his analysis is the assumption that black men could only internalize this norm and be victimized by it. Like many black men, he assumes that patriarchy and male domination is not a socially con­ structed social order but a “natural” fact of life. He therefore cannot acknowledge that black men could have asserted meaningful agency by repudiating the norms white culture was imposing. These norms could not be repudiated by black men who saw nothing problematic or wrong minded about them. Staples, like most black male scholars writing about black masculinity, does not attempt to deconstruct normative thinking, he laments that black men have not had full access to patriarchal phallocentrism. Embracing the phallocent- ric ideal, he explains black male rape of women by seeing it as a reaction against their inability to be “real men” (i.e., assert legitimate domination over women). Explaining rape. Staples argues: In the case of black men, it is asserted that they grow up feeling emasculated and powerless before reaching manhood. They often encounter women as authority figures and teachers or as the head of their household. These men consequently act out theif feelings of powerlessness against black women in the form of sexual aggression. Hence, rape by black men should be viewed as both an aggressive and political act because it occurs in the context of racial discrimination which denies most black men a satisfying manhood. Staples does not question why black women are the targets of black male aggression if it is white men and a white racist system which prevents them from assuming the “patriarchal” role. Given that many white men who fully achieve normal masculinity rape, his implied argument that black men would not rape if they could be patriarchs seems ludicrous. And his suggestion that they would not rape if they could achieve a “satisfying manhood” is pure fantasy. Given the context of this paragraph, it is safe to assume that the “satisfying manhood” he evokes carries with it the phallocentric right of men to dominate women, however benevolently. Ultimately, he is suggesting that if 98 BLACK LOOKS black men could legitimately dominate women more effectively they would not need to coerce them outside the law. Growing up in a black community where there were individual black men who critiqued normative masculinity, who repudiated patriarchy and its concomitant support of sexism, I fully appreciate that it is a tremendous loss that there is little known of their ideas about black masculinity. Without documentation of their presence, it has been easier for black men who embrace patriarchal masculinity, phallocentrism, and sexism to act as though they speak for all black men. Since their representations of black masculinity are in complete agreement with white culture’s assessment, they do not threaten or challenge white domination, they reinscribe it. Contemporary black power movement made synonymous black liberation and the effort to create a social structure wherein black men could assert themselves as patriarchs, controlling community, family, and kin. On one hand, black men expressed contempt for white men yet they also envied them their access to patriarchal power. Using a “phallocentric” stick to beat white men, Amiri Baraka asserted in his 1960s essay “american sexual reference: black male”: Most American white men are trained to be fags. For this reason it is no wonder that their faces are weak and blank, left without the hurt that reality makes—anytime. That red flush, those silk blue faggot eyes...They are the ‘masters’ of the world, and their children are taught this as God’s fingerprint, so they can devote most of their energies to the nonrealistic, having no use for the real. They devote their energies to the nonphysical, the nonreal­ istic, and become estranged from them. Even their wars move to the stage where whole populations can be destroyed by pushing a button...can you, for a second imagine the average middle class white man able to do somebody harm? Alone? Without the tech­ nology that at this moment still has him rule the world: Do you understand the softness of the white man, the weakness... This attack on white masculinity, and others like it, did not mean that black men were attacking normative masculinity, they were simply pointing out that white men had not fulfilled the ideal. It was a case of "will the real man please stand up.” And when he stood up, he was, in the eyes of black power movement, a black male. This phallocentric idealization of masculinity is most powerfully expressed in the writings of George Jackson. Throughout Soledad Brother, he announces his uncritical acceptance of patriarchal norms, especially the use of violence as a means of social control. Critical of nonviolence as a stance that would un-man black males, he insisted:  Reconstructing Slack Masculinity 99 The symbol of the male here in North American has always been the gun, the knife, the club. Violence is extolled at every exchange: the TV, the motion pictures, the best-seller lists. The newspapers that sell best are those that carry the boldest, bloodiest headlines and most sports coverage. To die for king and country is to die a hero. Jackson felt black males would need to embrace this use of violence if they hoped to defeat white adversaries. And he is particularly critical of black women for not embracing these notions of masculinity: I am reasonably certain that I draw from every black male in this country some comments to substantiate that his mother, the black female, attempted to aid his survival by discouraging his violence or by turning it inward. The blacks of slave society, U.S.A., have always been a matriarchal subsociety. The implication is clear, black mama is going to have to put a sword in that brother’s hand and stop that “be a good boy” shit. A frighteningly fierce misogyny informsJackson’s rage at black women, particularly his mother. Even though he was compelled by black women activists and comrades to reconsider his position on gender, particularly by Angela Davis, his later work, Blood In My Eye, continues to see black liberation as a "male thing,” to see revolution as a task for men: At the end of this massive collective struggle, we will uncover a new man, the unpredictable culmination of the revolutionary process. He will be better equipped to wage the real struggle, the permanent struggle after the revolution—the one for new relation­ ships between men. Although the attitudes expressed by Baraka and Jackson appear dated, they have retained their ideological currency among black men through time. Black female critiques of black male phallocentrism and sexism have had little impact on black male consciousness. Michele Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the SuperWoman-^ecs the first major attempt by a black woman to speak fro.m a feminist standpoint about black male sexism. Her analysis of black masculinity was based primarily on her experience in the urban northern cities, yet she wrote as if she were speaking comprehensively about collective black expe­ rience. Even so, her critique was daring and courageous. However, like 100 BLACK LOOKS other critics she evoked a monolithic homogenous representation of black masculinity. Discussing the way black male sexism took prece­ dence over racial solidarity during Shirley Chisolm’s presidential cam­ paign, Wallace wrote: The black political forces in existence at the time—in other words, the black male political forces—did not support her. In fact, they actively opposed her nomination. The black man in the street seemed either outraged that she dared to run or simply indifferent. Ever since then it has really baffled me to hear black men say that black women have no time for feminism because being black comes first. For them, when it came to Shirley Chisholm, being black no longer came first at all. It turned out that what they really meant all along was that the black man came before the black woman. Chisholm documented in her autobiography that sexism stood in her way more than racism. Yet she also talks about the support she received from her father and her husband for her political work. Commenting on the way individuals tried to denigrate this support by hinting that there was something wrong with her husband, Chisholm wrote: “Thoughtless people have suggested that my husband would have to be a weak man who enjoys having me dominate him. They are wrong on both counts.” Though fiercely critical of sexism in general and black male sexism in particular, Chisholm acknowledged the support she had received from black men who were not advancing patriarchy. Any critique of “black macho,” of black male sexism, that does not acknowledge the actions of black men who subvert and challenge the status quo can not be an effective critical intervention. If feminist critics ignore the efforts of individual black men to oppose sexism, our critiques seem to be self-serving, appear to be anti-male rather than anti-sexist. Absolutist portraits that imply that all black men are irredeemably sexist, inherently supportive of male domination, make it appear that there is no way to change this, no alternative, no other way to be. When attention is focused on those black men who oppose sexism, who are disloyal to patriarchy, even if they are excep­ tions, the possibility for change, for resistance is affirmed. Those representations of black gender relationships that perpetually pit black women and men against one another deny the complexity of our experiences and intensify mutually destructive internecine gender conflict. More than ten years have passed since Michele Wallace encour­ aged black folks to take gender conflict as a force that was undermining  Reconstructing Black Masculinity 101 our solidarity and creating tension. Without biting her tongue, Wallace emphatically stated: I am saying, among other things, that for perhaps the last fifty years there has been a growing distrust, even hatred, between black men and black women. It has been nursed along not only by racism on the part of whites but also by an almost deliberate ignorance on the part of blacks about the sexual politics of their experience in this country. The tensions Wallace describes between black women and men have not abated, if anything they have worsened. In more recent years they have taken the public form of black women and men competing for the attention of a white audience. Whether it be the realm of job hunting or book publishing, there is a prevailing sense within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that black men and women cannot both be in the dominant culture’s limelight. While it obviously serves the interests of white supremacy for black women and men to be divided from one another, perpetually in conflict, there is no overall gain for black men and women. Sadly, black people collectively refuse to take seriously issues of gender that would undermine the support for male domina­ tion in black communities. Since the 1960s black power movement had worked over-time to let sisters know that they should assume a subordinate role to lay the groundwork for an emergent black patriarchy that would elevate the status of black males, women’s liberation movement has been seen as a threat. Consequently, black women were and are encouraged to think that any involvement with feminism was/is tantamount to betraying the race. Such thinking has not really altered over time. It has become more entrenched. Black people responded with rage and anger to Wallace’s book, charging that she was a puppet of white feminists who were motivated by vengeful hatred of black men, but they never argued that her assessment of black male sexism was false. They critiqued her harshly because they sincerely believed that sexism was not a problem in black life and that black female support of black patriarchy and phallocentrism might heal the wounds inflicted by racist domination. As long as black people foolishly cling to the rather politically naive and dangerous assumption that it is in the interests of black liberation to support sexism and male domination, all our efforts to decolonize our minds and transform society will fail. Perhaps black folks cling to the fantasy that phallocentrism and patriarchy will provide a way out of the havoc and wreckage wreaked 102 BLACK LOOKS by racist genocidal assault because it is an analysis of our current political situation that places a large measure of the blame on the black community, the black family, and, most specifically, black women. This way of thinking means that black people do not have to envision creative strategies for confronting and resisting white supremacy and internalized racism. Tragically, internecine gender conflict between black women and men strengthens white supremacist capitalist patri­ archy. Politically behind the times where gender is concerned, many black people lack the skills to function in a changed and changing world. They remain unable to grapple with a contemporary reality where male domination is consistently challenged and under siege. Primarily it is white male advocates of feminist politics who do the scholarly work that shows the crippling impact of contemporary patri­ archy on men, particularly those groups of men who do not receive maximum benefit from this system. Writing about the way patriarchal masculinity undermines the ability of males to construct self and iden­ tity with theirwell-being in mind, creating a life-threatening masculinist sensibility, these works rarely discuss black men. Most black men remain in a state of denial, refusing to acknowledge the pain in their lives that is caused by sexist thinking and patriarchal, phallocentric violence that is not only expressed by male dominatinn over women but also by internecine conflict among black men. Black people must question why it is that, as white culture has responded to changing gender roles and feminist movement, they have turned to black culture and particularly to black men for articulations of misog­ yny, sexism, and phallocentrism. In popular culture, representations of black masculinity equate it with brute phallocentrism, woman-hating, a pugilistic “rapist” sexuality, and flagrant disregard for individual rights. Unlike the young George Jackson who, however wrong- minded, cultivated a patriarchal masculinist ethic in the interest of providing black males with a revolutionary political consciousness and a will to resist race and class domination, contemporary young black males espousing a masculinist ethic are not radicalized or insightful about the collective futufe of black people. Public figures such as Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Chuck D., Spike Lee, and a host of other black males blindly exploit the commodification of blackness and the concomitant exotification of phallocentric black masculinity. When Eddie Murphy’s film Raw (which remains one of the most graphic spectacles of black male phallocentrism) was first shown in urban cities, young black men in the audience gave black power salutes. This film not only did not address the struggle of black people  Reconstructing Black Masculinity 103 to resist racism, Murphy’s evocation of homosocial bQnding with rich white men against “threatening” women who want to take their money conveyed his conservative politics. Raw celebrates a pugilistic eroti­ cism, the logic of which tells young men that women do not want to hear declarations of love but want to be “fucked to death.” Women are represented strictly in misogynist terms—they are evil; they are all prostitutes who see their sexuality solely as a commodity to be exchanged for hard cash, and after the man has delivered the goods they betray him. Is this the “satisfying masculinity” black men desire or does it expose a warped and limited vision of sexuality, one that could not possibly offer fulfillment or sexual healing? As phallocentric spec­ tacle, Raw announces that black men are controlled by their penises (“it’s a dick thing”) and asserts a sexual politic that is fundamentally anti-body. If the black male cannot “trust” his body not to be the agent of his victimization, how can he trust a female body? Indeed, the female body, along with the female person, is constructed in Raw^s threatening to the male who seeks autonomous self-hood since it is her presence that awakens phallocentric response. Hence her personhood must be erased; she must be like the phallus, a “thing.” Commenting on the self-deception that takes place when men convince themselves and one another that women are not persons, in her essay on patriarchal phallocentrism “The Problem That Has No Name,” Marilyn Frye asserts:’ The rejection of females by phallists is both morally and concep­ tually profound. The refusal to perceive females as persons is conceptually profound because it excludes females from that community whose conceptions of things one allows to influence one’s concepts—it serves as a police lock on a closed mind. Furthermore, the refusal to treat women with the respect due to persons is in itself a violation of a moral principle that seems to many to be the founding principle of all morality. This violation of moral principle is sustained by an active manipulation of circumstances that is systematic and habitual and unac­ knowledged. The exclusion of women from the conceptual com­ munity simultaneously excludes them from the moral community. Black male phallocentrism constructs a portrait of woman as immoral, simultaneously suggesting that she is irrational and incapable of reason. Therefore, there is no need for black men to listen to women or to assume that women have knowledge to share. It i§ this fepf^sentation of womanhood that is graphically evoked in Murphy’s film Harlem Nights. A dramatization of black male patriar- 104 BLACK LOOKS chai fantasies, this film reinvents the history of Harlem so that black men do not appear as cowards unable to confront racist white males but are reinscribed as tough, violent; they talk shit and take none. Again, the George Jackson revolutionary political paradigm is displaced in the realm of the cultural. In this fantasy, black men are as able and willing to assert power “by any means necessary” as are white men. They are shown as having the same desires as white men; they long for wealth, power to dominate others, freedom to kill with impunity, autonomy, and the right to sexually possess women. They embrace notions of hierarchal rule. The most powerful black man in the film. Quick (played by Murphy), always submits to the will of his father. In this world where homosocial black male bonding is glorified and celebrated, black women are sex objects. The only woman who is not a sex object is the post-menopausal mama/matriarch. She is dethroned so that Quick can assert his power, even though he later (again submitting to the father’s will) asks her forgiveness. Harlem Nightsis a sad fantasy, romanticizing a world of misogynist homosocial bonding where everyone is dysfunc­ tional and no one is truly cared for, loved, or emotionally fulfilled. Despite all the male bluster. Quick, a quintessential black male hero, longs to be loved. Choosing to seek the affections of an unavail­ able and unattainable black woman (the mistress of the most powerful white man). Quick does attempt to share himself, to drop the masculine mask and be “real” (symbolized by his willingness to share his real name). Yet the black woman he chooses rejects him, only seeking his favors when she is ordered to by the white man who possesses her. It is a tragic vision of black heterosexuality. Both black woman and black man are unable to respond fully to one another because they are so preoccupied with the white power structure, with the white man. The most valued black woman “belongs” to a white man who willingly exchanges her sexual favors in the interest of business. Desired by black and white men alike (it is their joint lust that renders her more valuable, black men desire her because white men desire her and mce versa), her internalized racism and her longing for material wealth and power drive her to act in complicity with white men against black men. Before she can carry out her mission to kill him. Quick shoots her after they have had sexual intercourse. Not knowing that he has taken the bullets from her gun, she points it, telling him that her attack is not personal but “business.” Yet when he kills her he makes a point of saying that it is “personal.” This was a very sad moment in the film, in that he destroys her because she rejects his authentic need for love and care.  Reconstructing Black Masculinity 105 Contrary to the phallocentric representation of black masculinity that has been on display throughout the film, the woman-hating black men are really shown to be in need of love from females. Orphaned. Quick, who is “much man” seeking love, demonstrates his willingness to be emotionally vulnerable, to share only to be rejected, humiliated. This drama of internecine conflict between black women and men follows the conventional sexist line that sees black women as betraying black men by acting in complicity with white patriarchy. This notion of black female complicity and betrayal is so fixed in the minds of many black men they are unable to perceive any flaws in its logic. It certainly gives credence to Michele Wallace’s assertion that black people do not have a clear understanding of black sexual politics. Black men who advance the notion that black women are complicit with white men make this assessment without ever invoking historical documentation. Indeed, annals of history abound that document the opposite assump­ tion, showing that black women have typically acted in solidarity with black men. While it may be accurate to argue that sexist black women are complicit with white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, so are sexist black men. Yet most black men continue to deny their complicity. Spike Lee’s recent film Mo' Better Bluesis another tragic vision of contemporary black heterosexuality. Like Harlem Nights, it focuses on a world of black male homosocial bonding where black women are seen primarily as sex objects. Even when they have talent, as the black female jazz singer Clarke does, they must still exchange their sexual favors for recognition. Like Quick, Bleek, the black hero, seeks recog­ nition of his value in heterosexual love relations. Yet he is unable to see the “value” of the two black women who care for him. Indeed, scenes where he makes love to Clarke and alternately sees her as Indigo and vice versa suggest the dixie cup sexist mentality (i.e., all women are alike). And even after his entire world has fallen apart he never engages in a self-critique that might lead him to understand that phallocentrism (he is constantly explaining himselfby saying “it’s a dick thing”) has blocked his ability to develop a mature adult identity, has rendered him unable to confront pain and move past denial. Spike Lee’s use ofMurphy’s phrase establishes a continuum of homosocial bonding between black men that transcends the cinematic fiction. Ironically, the film suggests that Bleek’s nihilism and despair can only be addressed by a rejection of a playboy, “dick thing” masculinity and the uncritical acceptance of the traditional patriarchal foie. His life crisis is resolved by the reinscription of a patriarchal paradigm. Since Clarke is no longer available, he seeks comfort with Indigo, pleads with 106 BLACK LOOKS her to "save his life.” Spike Lee, like Murphy to some extent, exposes the essential self-serving narcissism and denial of community that is at the heart of phallocentrism. He does not, however, envision a radical alternative. The film suggests Bleek has'no choice and can only repro­ duce the same family narrative from which he has emerged, effectively affirming the appropriateness of a nuclear family paradigm where women as mothers restrict black masculinity, black male creativity, and fathers hint at the possibility of freedom. Domesticity represents a place where one’s life is “safe” even though one’s creativity is contained. The nightclub represents a world outside the home where creativity flour­ ishes and with it an uninhibited eroticism, only that world is one of risk. It is threatening. The “love supreme” (Coltrane’s music and image is a motif throughout the film) that exists between Indigo and Bleek appears shallow and superficial. No longer sex object to be “boned” whenever Bleek desires, her body becomes the vessel for the reproduction of himself via having a son. Self-effacing, Indigo identifies Bleek’s phallocentrism by telling him he is a “dog,” but ultimately she rescues the “dog. ” His willingness to marry her makes up for dishonesty, abuse, and betrayal. The redemptive love Bleek seeks cannot really be found in the model Lee offers and as a consequence this film is yet another masculine fantasy denying black male agency and capacity to assume responsibility for their personal growth and salvation. The achievement of this goal would mean they must give up phallocentrism and envision new ways of thinking about black masculinity. ' Even though individual black women adamantly critique black male sexism, most black men continue to act as though sexism is not a problem in black life and refuse to see it as the force motivating oppressive exploitation of women and children by black men. If any culprit is identified, it is racism. Like Staples’ suggestion that the explanation of why black men rape is best understood in a context where racism is identified as the problem, any explanation that evokes a critique of black male phallocentrism is avoided. Black men and women who espouse cultural nationalism continue to see the struggle for black liberation largely as a struggle to recover black manhood. In her essay “Africa On My Mind: Gender, Counter Discourse and African- American Nationalism,” E. Frances White shows that overall black nationalist perspectives on gender are rarely rooted purely in the Afrocentric logic they seek to advance, but rather reveal their ties to white paradigms:  Reconstructing Black Masculinity 107 In making appeals to conservative notions of appropriate gender behavior, African-American nationalists reveal their ideological ties to other nationalist movements, including European and Euro-American bourgeois nationalists over the past 200 years. These parallels exist despite the different class and power base of these movements. Most black nationalists, men and women, refuse to acknowledge the obvious ways patriarchal phallocentric masculinity is a destructive force in black life, the ways it undermines solidarity between black women and men, or how it is life-threatening to black men. Even though individual black nationalists like Haki Madhubuti speak against sexism, progressive Afrocentric thinking does not have the impact that the old guard message has. Perhaps it provides sexist black men with a sense of power and agency (however illusory) to see black women, and particularly feminist black women, as the enemy that prevents them from fully participating in this society. For such fiction gives them an enemy that can be confronted, attacked, annihilated, an enemy that can be conquered, dominated. Confronting white supremacist capitalist patriarchy would not provide sexist black men with an immediate sense of agency or victory. Blaming black women, however, makes it possible for black men to negotiate with white people in all areas of their lives without vigilantly interrogating those interactions. A good example of this displacement is evident in Brent Staples’ essay “The White Girl Problem.” Defending his “politically incorrect taste in women” (i.e., his preference for white female partners), from attacking black women. Staples never inter­ rogates his desire. He does not seek to understand the extent to which white supremacist capitalist patriarchy determines his desire. He does not want desire to be politicized. And of course his article does not address white female racism or discuss the fact that a white person does not have to be anti-racist to desire a black partner. Many inter-racial relationships have their roots in racist constructions of the Other. By focusing in a stereotypical way on black women’s anger. Staples can avoid these issues and depoliticize the politics of black and white female interactions. His essay would have been a needed critical intervention had he endeavored to explore the way individuals maintain racial solidarity even as they bond with folks outside their particular group. Solidarity between black women and men continues to be undermined by sexism and misogyny. As black women increasingly 108 BLACK LOOKS oppose and challenge male domination, internecine tensions abound. Publicly, many of the gender conflicts between black women and men have been exposed in recent years with the increasingly successful commodification of black women’s writing. Indeed, gender conflict between sexist black male writers and those black female writers who are seen as feminists has been particularly brutal. Black male critic Stanley Crouch has been one of the leading voices mocking and ridiculing black women. His recently published collection of essays. Notes ofA Hangingjudge, includes articles that are particularly scathing in their attacks on black women. His critique of Wallace’s Black Macho is mockingly titled “Aunt Jemima Don’t Like Uncle Ben” (notice that the emphasis is on black women not liking black men, hence the caption already places account­ ability for tensions on black women). The title deflects attention away from the concrete critique of sexism in Black Macho by making it a question of personal taste. Everyone seems eager to forget that it is possible for black women to love black men and yet unequivocally challenge and oppose sexism, male domination, and phallocentrism. Crouch never speaks to the issues of black male sexism in his piece and works instead to make Wallace appear an “unreliable” narrator. His useful critical comments are thus undermined by the apparent refusal to take seriously the broad political issues Wallace raises. His refusal to acknowledge sexism, expressed as “black macho,” is a serious prob­ lem. It destroys the possibility of genuine solidarity between black women and men, makes it appear that he is really angry at Wallace and other black women because he is fundamentally anti-feminist and unwilling to challenge male domination. Crouch’s stance epitomizes the attitude of contemporary black male writers who are either uncer­ tain about their political response to feminism or are adamantly anti­ feminist. Much black male anti-feminism is linked to a refusal to acknowledge that the phallocentric power black men wield over black women is “real” power, the assumption being that only the power white men have that black men do not have is real. If, as Frederick Douglass maintained, “power concedes nothing without a demand, ” the black women and men who advocate feminism must be ever vigilant, critiquing and resisting all forms of sexism. Some black men may refuse to acknowledge that sexism provides them with forms of male privilege and power, however relative. They do not want to surrender that power in a world where they may feel otherwise quite powerless. Contemporary emergence of a conservative black nationalism which exploits a focus on race to both deny the importance of strug-  Reconstructing Black Masculinity 109 gling against sexism and racism simultaneously is both an overt attack on feminism and a force that actively seeks to reinscribe sexist thinking among black people who have been questioning gender. Com­ modification of blackness that makes phallocentric black masculinity marketable makes the realm of cultural politics a propagandistic site where black people are rewarded materially for reactionary thinking about gender. Should we not be suspicious of the way in which white culture’s fascination with black masculinity manifests itself? The very images of phallocentric black masculinity that are glorified and cele­ brated in rap music, videos, and movies are the representations that are evoked when white supremacists seek to gain public acceptance and support for genocidal assault on black men, particularly youth. Progressive Afrocentric ideology makes this critique and interro­ gates sexism. In his latest book. BlackMen: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous, Kaki Madhubuti courageously deplores all forms of sexism, particularly black male violence against women. Like black male political figures of the past, Madhubuti’s support of gender equality and his critique of sexism is not linked to an overall questioning of gender roles and a repudiation of all forms of patriarchal domination, however benevo­ lent. Still, he has taken the important step of questioning sexism and railing on black people to explore the way sexism hurts and wounds us. Madhubuti acknowledges black male misogyny: The “fear” ofwomen that exists among many Black men runs deep and often goes unspoken. This fear is cultural. Most men are introduced to members of the opposite sex in a superficial manner, and seldom do we seek a more in depth or informed understanding of them...Women have it rough all over the world. Men must become informed listeners. Woman-hating will only cease to be a norm in black life when black men collectively dare to oppose sexism. Unfortunately, when all black people should be engaged in a feminist movement that addresses the sexual politics of our communities, many of us are tragically investing in old gender norms. At a time when many black people should be reading Madhubuti’s Black Men, Sister Outsider, The Black Women's Health Book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, and a host of other books that seek to explore black sexual politics with compassion and care, folks are eagerly consuming a conservative tract. The Blackman’s Guide To Understanding The Blackwoman by Shahrazad Ali. This work actively promotes black male misogyny, coercive domination of females by males, and, as a consequence, feeds 110 BLACK LOOKS the internecine conflict between black women and men. Though many black people have embraced this work there is no indication that it is having a positive impact on black communities, and there is every indication that it is being used to justify male dominance, homophobic assaults on black gay people, and rejection of black styles that empha­ size our diasporic connection to Africa and the Caribbean. All’s book romanticizes black patriarchy, demanding that black women “submit” to black male domination in lieu of changes in society that would make it possible for black men to be more fulfilled. Calling for a strengthening of black male phallocentric power (to be imposed by force if need be). All’s book in no way acknowledges sexism. When writing about black men, her book reads like an infantile caricature of the Tarzan fantasy. Urging black men to assert their rightful position as patriarchs, she tells them: “Rise Blackman, and take your rightful place as ruler of the universe and everything in it. Including the black woman.” Like Harlem Nights, this is the stuff of pure fantasy. That black people, particularly the underclass, are turning to escapist fantasies that can in no way adequately address the collective need of African Americans for renewed black liberation struggle is symptomatic of the crisis we are facing. Desperately clinging to ways of thinking and being that are detrimental to our collective well-being obstructs progressive efforts for change. More black men have broken their silence to critique All’s work than have ever offered public support of feminist writing by black women. Yet it does not help educate black people about the ways feminist analysis could be useful in our Kves for black male critics to act as though the success of this book represents a failure on the part of feminism. All’s sexist, homophobic, self-denigrating tirades strike a familiar chord-because so many black people who have not de-colonized their minds think as she does. Though black male critic Nelson George critiques Ali’s work, stating that it shows “how little Afrocentrism respects the advances of African-American women,” he suggests that it is an indication of how “unsuccessful black feminists have been in forging alliance with this ideologically potent community.” Sutements like this one advance the notion that feminist education is the sole task of black women. It also rather neatly places George outside either one of these potent communities. Why does he not seize the critical moment to bring to public awareness the feminist visions of Afrocentric black women? AU too often, black men who are indirectly supportive of feminist movement act as though black women have a  Reconstructing Black Masculinity 111 personal stake in eradicating sexism that men do not have. Black men benefit from feminist thinking and feminist movement too. Any examination of the contemporary plight of black men reveals the way phallocentrism is at the root of much black-on-black violence, undermines family relations, informs the lack of preventive health care, and even plays a role in promoting drug addiction. Many of the destructive habits of black men are enacted in the name of “man­ hood.” Asserting their ability to be “tough,” to be “cool,” black men take grave risks with their lives and the lives of others. Acknowledging this in his essay “Cool Pose: The Proud Signature of Black Survival,” Richard Majors argues that “cool” has positive dimensions even though it “is also an aggressive assertion of masculinity.” Yet, he never overtly critiques sexism. Black men may be reluctant to critique phallocentrism and sexism, precisely because so much black male “style” has its roots in these positions; they may fear that eradicating patriarchy would leave them without the positive expressive styles that have been life-sustaining. Majors is clear, however, that a “cool pose” linked to aggressive phallocentrism is detrimental to both black men and the people they care about: Perhaps black men have become so conditioned to keeping up their guard against oppression from the dominant white society that this particular attitude and behavior represents for them their best safeguard against further mental or physical abuse. However^ this same behavior makes it very difficult for these males to let their guard down and show affection... Elsewhere, he suggests “that the same elements of cool that allow for survival in the larger society may hurt black people by contributing to one of the more complex problems facing black people today— black-on-black crime.” Clearly, black men need to employ a feminist analysis that will address the issue of how to construct a life-sustaining black masculinity that does not have its roots in patriarchal phallocentrism. Addressing the way obsessive concern with the phallus causes black men stress in No Name in the Street, James Baldwin explains: Every black man walking in this country pays a tremendous price for walking: for men are not women, and a man’s balance depends on the weight he carries between his legs. All men, however they may face or fail to face it, however they may handle, or be handled by it, know something about each other, which is simply that a man without balls is not a man... 112 BLACK LOOKS What might black men do for themselves and for black people if they were not socialized by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to focus their attention on their penises? Should we not suspect the contemporary commodification of blackness orchestrated by whites that once again tells black men not only to focus on their penis but to make this focus their all consuming passion? Such confused men have little time or insight for resistance struggle. Should we not suspect representations of black men like those that appear in a movie like Heart Condition, where the black male describes himself as “hung like a horse" as though the size of his penis defines who he is? And what does it say about the future of black liberation struggles if the phrase “it’s a dick thing” is transposed and becomes “its a black thing?” If the “black thing,” i.e., black liberation struggle, is really only a “dick thing” in disguise, a phallocentric play for black male power, then black people are in serious trouble. Challenging black male phallocentiism would also make a space for critical discussion of homosexuality in black communities. Since so much of the quesrfor phallocentric manhood as it is expressed in black nationalist circles rests on a demand for compulsory heterosexuality, it has always promoted the persecution and hatred of homosexuals. This is yet another stance that has undermined black solidarity. If black men no longer embraced phallocentric masculinity, they would be em­ powered to explore their fear and hatred of other men, learning new ways to relate. How many black men will have to die before black folks are willing to look at the link between the contemporary plight of black men and their continued allegiance to patriarchy and phallocentrism? Most black men will acknowledge that black men are in crisis and are suffering. Yet they remain reluctant to engage those progressive movements that might serve as meaningful critical interventions, that might allow Jhem to speak their pain. On the terms set by white supremacist patriarchy, black men can name their pain only by talking about themselves in crude ways that reinscribe them in a context of primitivism. Why should black men have to talk about themselves as an “endangered species” in order to gain public recognition of their plight? And why are the voices of colonized black men, many of whom are in the spotlight, drowning out progressive voices? Why do we not listen to Joseph Beam, one such courageous voice? He had no difficulty sharing the insight that “communism, socialism, feminism and, homosexuality pose far less of a threat to America than racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and ageism.” Never losing sight of the need for black men to name their realities, to speak their pain and their resis-  Reconstructing Black Masculinity 113 tance, Beam concluded his essay “No Cheek To Turn” with these prophetic words: I speak to you as a black gay pro-feminist man moving in a world where nobody wants to know my name, or hear my voice. In prison, I'm just a number; in the army. I’m just a rank; on the job and in the hospital. I’m just a statistic; on the street. I’m just a suspect. My head reels. If I didn’t have access to print, I, too, would write on walls. I want my life’s passage to be acknowledged for at least the length of time it takes pain to fade from brick. With that said I serve my notice: I have no cheek to turn. Changing representations of black men must be a collective task. Black people committed to renewed black liberation struggle, the de-colonization of black minds, are fully aware that we must oppose male domination and work to eradicate sexism. There are black women and men who are working together to strengthen our solidarity. Black men like Richard Majors, Calvin Hern.ton, Cornel West, Greg Tate, Essex Hemphill, and others address the issue of sexism and advocate feminism. If black men and women take seriously Malcolm’s charge that we must work for our liberation “by any means necessary,” then we must be willing to explore the way feminism as a critique of sexism, as a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression, could aid our struggle to be self-determining. Collectively we can break the life­ threatening choke-hold patriarchal masculinity imposes on black men and create life sustaining visions of a reconstructed black masculinity that can provide black men ways to save their lives and the lives of their brothers and sisters in struggle.