Masculinity Under Construction. LaToya Jefferson-James
Yet, they have the biggest soft spot for children and family (only do not tell them I told you all about the soft spot). They helped shape my perceptions of positive Black masculinity identity formation.
Of course, I must thank the women who raised me. Feminist colleagues, do not take me to task for acknowledging and thanking my mothers after the men. The project is on Black masculinity, after all. The women who I owe my life and livelihood to include my mother and all of the extended mothers whose job, they felt, “was to make sure’” I was always “right.” Now, I have not figured out what my “rightness” looks like, but I do strive. They encouraged my studies, forced me to participate in church programs at Centreville Baptist Church and Winans Chapel CME Church, gave me long speeches that I had to memorize, taught me to carry myself with dignity, would not tolerate any laziness, made me start over when I would “half-do” any task, blended my academic training with a great deal of woman-sung Blues and woman-centered folk wisdom, and taught me that a woman is enough. My mother exposed me to the majesty of Black woman—from Harriet Tubman to Bessie Coleman to Aretha Franklin to Fannie Lou Hamer to Shirley Chisholm to Margaret Walker Alexander to Denise LaSalle to Leontyne Price—and I do not believe I could ever thank her enough.
I would like to thank everyone in my home community of Centreville, Mississippi who has ever prayed for me, given me quarters for my laundry, or wished me well. I am grateful to my parents who have spent many hours with my children either watching the baby or driving my son to and from school while I completed this manuscript. I have watched my father become a doting grandfather who simply cannot refuse a grandbaby’s request for another truck ride or another trip to the store for sugary snacks. It has been amazing.
Academically, I owe several professors a debt of gratitude: Verner Mitchell for his patience and unofficial adoption of me as a mentee, the late Reginald Martin whose enthusiasm about my unconventional way of thinking forced me to keep going when this project started out as a typo-riddled paper in one of his seminar classes, and Adetayo Alabi, who first introduced me to the concept of an African Diaspora by taking his undergraduate and graduate classes and insisting that I attend a lecture by Opal Palmer Adissa and a dinner with Derek Walcott.
This project would not be possible without the Interlibrary Loan staff at the J. D. Williams Library of the University of Mississippi.
Introduction
Masculinity and Mutability
When James Baldwin wrote of racism, he wrote of it as more than a violent repression of people. In Baldwin’s nonfiction essays, racism is a discursive practice that shapes the nonhumanity of the people suffering under its regime. It is a social control mechanism with economic results. It is a system of social proscription designed to extract goods and exploit services from populations with their own consent. The efficacy of racism is its persistent pervasiveness, begun in childhood, that causes it to feel natural. The “natural,” begun in childhood ensures that the adults who wield its power and wither beneath its cruelty never questions and never challenges its seemingly immutable, ahistorical existence. In the essay, “Down at the Cross,” Baldwin writes: “White Americans find it as difficult as white people anywhere else do to divest themselves of the notion that they are in possession of some intrinsic value that black people need, or want.”[1] Here, Baldwin links white Americans with other white populations. The point of continuity during Baldwin’s time is a “natural” assumption by Euro-Americans of cultural superiority based upon the absence of melanin, and the “natural” inferiority of Black people. An astute cultural critic, voracious reader, and prolific writer, Baldwin’s analysis of the fallacy of the “Negro problem” in America went beyond race and into gender.
For example, read Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden.” It is a call for European men to leave their home countries in order to explore other territories away from the familiarity of home. Dive into the strange, the exotic, the barbaric, and the truly bizarre, the poem says. It challenges European men to spread the Enlightenment and superiority of European culture to the teeming, ignorant brown peoples of the world. Read Rudyard Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” again, particularly the last stanza. It is a challenge for European men to leave boyhood and enter manhood. Boyhood is for those who would rather remain in the mother country and pursue careers within the safe boundaries of Europe. Manhood, on the other hand, is for British men who would leave their homelands, explore and conquer other countries, and truly dominate people of color, uniting the world under the banner of the British flag. Manhood belongs to the colonialist. Yes, indeed, colonialism is a man’s venture, written in masculine terms.
When European men decided to leave their home countries and conquer other people in other places, at first their metropoles explicitly stated that their exploration was for new goods and markets. Then, the reasoning became something else: to spread the civilization and “advancements” of Europe to the backwards people of the world. This meant wielding and spreading a particular form of masculinity. In European historical, economic, and philosophical discourse, masculinity was the highest form of civility even in many Enlightenment tracts when the rights of the individual were celebrated, gender and racial biases remained. Furthermore, a burgeoning system, mercantile capitalism, demanded a suppression of the acknowledgment of the rights of some individuals. Capitalism, which undergirded colonial empires, was a machine that needed its human components/cogs in order for it to successfully function. Capitalism, a relatively new economic system at the time (before capitalism, the economic system of Europe was mostly driven by feudalism), was made possible by slavery and philosophy: the economic system dehumanized others while leading philosophers argued for its necessity in order to support the humanity and freedom of Europeans.
And exactly who would undergird the activities of the machine as Europe spread its Enlightenment? The empires of Europe found that there were millions of people of color across the globe. Who would be the cogs of this machine? Who were these nameless, faceless brown people who needed European Enlightenment? Who would be there to speak for those nameless, faceless, teeming nations in such dire need of European manhood/civility? Furthermore, who would help a ragged, new nation evolve from being a British colonial holding to an economic behemoth?
Baldwin, like Kipling, links white Americans to Europeans, but Baldwin writes after Kipling’s challenge to America. Baldwin was writing during a time when slavery had ended 100 years prior and African Americans existed in an almost colonial state within the borders of a free nation. He explicitly states that America equates Europe with civilization and that white civilization, in America and Europe, was the standard that all the nonwhite people of the world must mimic in order to be recognized by whites, who are in power, as “civilized,” though the gift of civilization came with an extreme degree of brutality in some cases and that civilization had not benefitted everyone in Europe, either. I agree with Baldwin when he writes, “White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and pace him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being.”[2] Where did the notions of Euro-American white male superiority begin? What are these standards? And who set them? A quick glimpse of late Victorian-era literature, for example Charles Dicken’s shortest novel, Hard Times (an earlier view of British poverty and harsh life for the lower classes is also included in William Blake’s Songs of Experience), reveals that not all European men were living within these high standards of civilization. Many of the lower classes of Britain were living in squalor and poverty, and policies of emigrations were used to alleviate overcrowding and poor sanitation. With class differences deeply entrenched in many European nations, how did European civilization become the standard by which to judge others?
Chattel slavery and the Enlightenment irrupted onto the world stage roughly simultaneously and existed in seemingly perfect contradiction to one another. It was scientific racism, completely validated by philosophical tracts from the best Enlightenment minds, which justified and sanctioned the use of Africans as slaves. Africans were introduced to the New World as chattel slaves, and this workforce, in the very beginning, was overwhelmingly composed of African men. Placed outside of humanity by social reformers, clergy, and philosophers, and legally created as a nonhuman object to be possessed and punished