Masculinity Under Construction. LaToya Jefferson-James
commerce and production in Enlightenment discourse; the slave was an ultimate factor in Europe’s politico-economic campaign to establish itself as culturally superior to the rest of humanity. Cast in the shadows of the Enlightenment, the African slave who was without legal recourse or voice became the ultimate subaltern “Other.” And unlike any other slave force in history, this “Otherness” was based strictly upon the amount of melanin in the skin: the darker the skin, the closer to the animal kingdom, according to the “science” and philosophy of the time.
A closer study of the Enlightenment shows that philosophers’ writings about slavery add another dimension to its justification heretofore under-explored in academe and elsewhere. Enlightenment writings show well-defined European ideals of gender inequality that Europeans imposed on other cultures. According to Enlightenment philosophers, African men should be made to serve European men because they are not real men, and if they possess any sort of maleness, it certainly is not a masculinity which would render them human in the same way European men are human. Enlightenment and slavery, when viewed through the lens of masculinity, is not in opposition. They each rest upon this one premise: European masculinity (thereby, European civility) depended upon African men’s supposed femininity (and thereby, their barbarism). Theories surrounding African men simultaneously hypermasculinized Black women and effeminized African men; though Black men were in possession of penises, and later, animalistic, insatiable desires for white female flesh, they lacked the intelligence of truly “civilized” men. They were driven by violent, base desires for sex and the violence of war (not the strategy involved in victory) only. In much of the philosophical writings at this time, African men became some kind of faux men: subhumanoid beasts fit only to serve real men.
Alongside the rhetoric of freedom and universal humanism espoused by the Enlightenment philosophers existed several intercalated textual justifications, with the authority of “objective” science, for slavery. Shouts for democracy and liberty rang the loudest when the burgeoning mercantile capitalist system demanded the most chattel slavery. It was not uncommon to find that the same champions of freedom and liberty for Europeans held stock in African slave trading companies. While Bartolomè de las Casas argued the humanity of Indians, he used fictional examples that read like travel narrative exotica to highlight the “barbarity” in Africans in order to keep the plantation systems of the Caribbean and South America running smoothly; while Hegel’s writings argue for the freedom of individual, his “Thesis on Africa” explicitly states that sub-Saharan Africans made no contributions to the history of mankind and that the gender roles were “backwards” in relation to European gender roles; as historians work to include Jefferson among Enlightenment philosophers, they often gloss over his blatant racialized sexism when critiquing Phyllis Wheatley’s poetry in Notes on the State of Virginia; the French philosopher, Condorcet, while creating the documents which embody the Age of the Enlightenment and some of its most tolerant views on women, also rationalize slavery based upon his belief in the intellectual inferiority of Black men; while Carlyle did not champion the causes of oppressed Europeans in his writings and disagreed with the Enlightenment philosophers, he freely dehumanizes Black Africans in the Western Hemisphere in his pro-slavery tract, “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” perpetuating Enlightenment racialized degendering.
When referring to the sexist brand of racism used to justify enslavement and exploitation of African men, I use a term borrowed from Abby Ferber, in her text White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy (1998). In this text, Ferber posits that race and gender are linked and that white supremacy is a masculine undertaking. She writes that bodies are often “racialized and gendered.”[3] Racialized, gendered bodies populate white supremacist discourse. On the one hand, in defining white men as the ultimate form of European civilization, the writers of these texts often erased the gender identities of African people. One glance at their caricatures shows African women who are masculine, in opposition to Northern European women, who are cast as the epitome of feminine beauty and charm. Photographs from the height of colonization of Africa/mining shows white men in the foreground fully-dressed flanked by partially dressed African men, many of them shorter than the European man. This signifies that only European men were real men and African men were somehow faux men at their service as they tame an ever-present, dangerous wilderness in the background. In white-authored texts, African men and bodies are part of the backdrop of the jungle. They are not allowed to speak, and if they are given utterance, it is monosyllabic and childlike. For example, the one line that an African speaks in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a canonical colonial text, is infantile: “Mr. Kurtz, he dead.”[4] On the other hand, the calculated mis-presentation of African men and women in white supremacist discourse represents a complete erasure of gender. I label this performative act of white supremacist discourse, the act of erasing biological gender differentiation, and even sometimes subverting them with a complete lack of understanding/familiarity with complex African gender roles, racialized degendering.
Not only was it an insipid justification for the enslavement of African people, it is also a recurring theme in white supremacist discourse and contemporary racist American thought. For example, as recently as the Obama presidency, white supremacist and conservative commentators routinely commented on First Lady Michelle Obama’s “manly” physique. Sports commentators frequently question Serena Williams’s femaleness. Cartoonists over-emphasize her muscular physique, and on the cover of GQ magazine, the word “woman” was placed in quotation marks. I am not sure if this was an act of liberal thought, but Bruce Jenner, a white male Olympic athlete who recently transitioned to a woman named Caitlyn Jenner, was named “woman of the year.” One can see how Black women would be offended by GQ’s quoting of the word, “woman,” as if to question Williams’s gender.
I use the term Euro-American interchangeably with “white.” In the publication Nations & Race: The Developing Euro-American Racist Subculture, editors Jeffrey Kaplan and Tore Bjorgo use the term “Euro-American” instead of “white” to signify a global system of oppression by racist white males. Kaplan and Bjorgo recognized that racialized violence did not and does not stop at the edge of the United States.[5] Writers of primary texts, such as Paule Marshall, comfortably link systems of oppression from one European country to America. Though African Americans are not considered “postcolonial,” many writers outside of the United States consider American policies of interference and imperialism, particularly those that aim to subdue African American political protest, as oppressive as those of other European countries. The writers involved in this study consider America’s history of racial segregation as destructive as South African Apartheid.
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Though James Baldwin is taught and analyzed for his creative writings (when he is taught at all), I use his nonfiction as theory in this book. His clarity concerning the problems of European superiority and denial of Black masculinity are akin to other philosophers of the African Diaspora. In one of Baldwin’s most famous nonfiction pieces, The Fire Next Time, he explains to a nephew, his namesake, that things may be scripted onto his Black male body before he utters one word. Because of his Black male body, white Americans assume negative things about his intellectual capacity, harbor foreboding images about his sexuality in relation to white women, and nurture and enact iniquitous policies in order to squelch his desire for vertical economic advancement in a supposedly meritocratic society. In this collection of essays, the Black man is always-already constructed, configured as a subhuman in the white imagination, and that the Black man must “snatch his manhood”[6] away from those white assumptions in order to reclaim some sort of human identity. Human identity can only come, Baldwin asserts, for Black men when they free themselves of the reactionary impulses to white oppression that begins in childhood.
Before Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1976), Frantz Fanon elaborated upon this always-already, ubiquitous nature of discourse in his seminal text Black Skin White Masks (1967). However, Fanon, like Baldwin, discusses prescriptive discursive strategies that originated from Euro-American thought as they relate to the Black male body specifically. As it pertains to the Black male body, discourse is both the creator and the instrument of oppression. I begin with Fanon’s assessment from his famous essay “The Fact of Blackness,” which posits that the Black man is predetermined. The Black man is made