Masculinity Under Construction. LaToya Jefferson-James
still attended church. In those days in my rural town of Centreville, Mississippi, the Black churches of our community still wielded a strong influence and a particular glance from a community grandmother could evoke cooperation from even hardened criminals. Everybody knew everybody and even if a criminal were disrespectful to some sister, she would simply call his grandmother and right the situation.
Geographically, these assemblies and the depiction of Black men through popular media were equally troubling to me. While popular culture screamed at us that “urban” and “Black” were somehow synonymous, we simply did not live that reality. We lived in a small town with yeomen farmers and loggers. We did not even have a traffic light. As “country” students, we were far removed from the innercities of the North, East, and Midwest as were rural Southerners, and we did not understand the urgency or anxiety manifested by our educators. The whole scenario simply irritated me until I began to see the situation as absurdly comical. Because most of us were pet owners or the children of small farmers and avid hunters/fishermen, we understood that Black men are not animals. Period. Again, I was left wondering where this language in reference to people who were my grandfather, father, brothers, uncles, and a plethora of cousins and fictive brothers and cousins was originating. Many of the men in my family were veterans, but they were not animals. Some of them could be stern disciplinarians, but they were not animals. Yes, I admit this: some of the men in our neighborhoods struggled with various addictions, but they were people in need of help and not animals. The boys in our families and neighborhoods were rough and tough—creating new adventures outdoors that sometimes landed them in the emergency room—but they were not animals. They deserved life and life abundantly and not this toe-tag, numerical inventory type language that was being hurled at us from somewhere.
Second, this project is a product of some things I found lacking in my college education. As a college student, this language—the Black man as an animal—whether it stemmed from racism masquerading as a quantitative social science study or misguided (but well-meaning) Black elders and/or even Black academics, continued to irritate me at the least and prompt me to exit class/lecture/events at the most. As a young woman who had seen some of her childhood homies locked away in the penitentiary, who had witnessed domestic abuse, and who was enrolled in college classes with many Black men who were working two jobs, sending money home to help their single and married mothers with younger siblings, I began to internally scream: “Where was this animalistic language coming from and why do we keep repeating it?” I became exhausted by the images of dysfunctional, disrespectful Black men who were deadbeat dads and abusive husbands. I am not negating the fact that there are bad actors in respective Black communities. Yes, there are and those men should be held accountable for their destructive behavior. What makes me cringe, however, is the attention—both academic and popular—these bad actors always receive. At the time, outside of two television shows (created by someone who will not be named here because I do not want the backlash), there were no images like the ones I saw every day. Where were the films and documentaries about regular Black men in college? Those two shows were no longer in production (even their reruns had seemingly disappeared) by the time of my college enrollment: Where were the replacements? Where were the films about my grandfather who had fought in the South Pacific then came home to a life of segregation in the United States, then managed to raise a sizeable family on poor wages? There was Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the American South (1997), by Neil R. McMillen, but I somehow did not feel that Black men were the focal point of that text—only victims. Where was my PaPa’s story? Why was dysfunction the default when speaking of Black men, even if those writers and lecturers were themselves Black men? We read about how the hegemonic discourse (a word I learned by my senior year of college) says about Black men. What did Black men say about Black men?
As an English major, I fell in love with anticolonial/postcolonial texts. As the language of nationalism, regardless of geography, is almost always masculine, I discovered through literature that masculine identity, even subordinate masculine identities, are as nuanced as feminine identity. Whereas social science continued to bestialize Black men one way or the other, writers, particularly creative writers, humanized them. Whereas social scientists used complicated statistical analysis and showered their theories and projections of a world without Black men with infallible “proof” through numbers, the creative writers simply told the stories of what the world was like for Black men and anchored many of their texts with historical allusions and signification. Whereas social scientists accepted the normative nature of Northern European derived, white middle-class masculinity, the creative writers declared that men of color had their own multiplicities of identities and did not always seek to simply mimic white patriarchal supremacy. They were more than, say, mimic men, I discovered. And while I have been greatly influenced by the works of Kimmel, Connell, and Messerschmidt (who are all non-Black), I rejected/reject any notion of masculinity, even Black masculinity, as less than human with all of the complexities and paradoxes that accompany human identity. Not every Black man encountered in the literature is Bigger Thomas.
As a graduate student, I continued to read and study the nuanced portrayals that Black men presented of themselves across all genres of writing: fiction and nonfiction. In reading the secondary literature about Black men, I found it to be rehashed stereotypes of the paramount chief-plantation-chicken-thief-Black beast-nigger-Bigger masqueraded, time and time again, as objective study with only a few stylistic changes as the decades demanded. Very few of these studies took into account the things that Black men had to say about themselves and how Black men painstakingly attempted to define themselves discursively. From Douglass, who used the word “man,” or one of its derivatives eleven times in one paragraph to Roger Mais, whose work is always being analyzed for its violence and not the fact that Mais’s characters felt they were entitled to a certain amount of violence if they were “real” men, to Ishmael Reed who used a voodoo aesthetic to define gender and racial identities in Mumbo Jumbo, to Ousmane who questioned the overtly masculine-leaning interpretation of the Qu’ran in Senegal, Black men were and are concerned with how they are presented and re-presented in texts. The conversation is not only Hegelian with Euro-American men, but intertextual among themselves as they converse locally, regionally, and globally about their identities.
As far as the text that you now hold in your hand or are reading on screen, dear Reader, I would like to say that graduate school classes or research inspired this realization. I would like to credit a wonderful, eccentric graduate school professor. I would like to tell you, Reader, about that moment in class that changed my life. I can tell you about Verner Mitchell, who was always nudging me to publish, even after I left the graduate degree program at his home institution, but I cannot tell you that my epiphany, which birthed this text, was received in the grand ivory tower. A migraine headache produced it. Lying there flat on my back with the tiniest aperture of my Venetian blinds allowing bright, Southern sunlight to exacerbate the pain, I turned my head slightly to the left. On my coffee table was a pictorial history of the long Civil Rights Movement, Freedom: A Photographic History of the African American Struggle (2002), edited by Manning Marable, Leith Mullings, and Sophie Spencer-Wood. On the cover of this book, which spans from slavery to the late 1990s, one picture signifies the entire centuries-long struggle for African American equality. In fact, this one picture or the words contained on the poster of this picture, graces the cover of many narratives about the African American protest tradition. Reader, you know the one. It is that iconic photograph of the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike. The men are holding white posters that read simply: “I AM A MAN.” Questions flooded my mind: Why that picture? Why not a picture of Harriet Tubman? Why not Frederick Douglass? Or Fannie Lou Hamer? And what does economic inequality have to do with manhood? I am sure that the women these men loved knew they were men at home: obviously, these signs did not target women. So, who were these signs targeting? What was the conversation there? Rather, who was on the other end of this one-sided, pictorial representation of a Hegelian dialect?
As a heterosexual African American woman, personally, I married a Black man. His occupation and employment status had nothing to do with my choice: only his character (and being over six feet tall did not hurt, either). I am the only daughter in a house with three (now two, unfortunately) brothers. My maternal grandmother died several years before I was born, so my grandfather was right there to guide my passage from childhood to adulthood. And he was a man. Since he retired by the