New Black Man

Tenth Anniversary Edition

Mark Anthony Neal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138792586
• eBook ISBN: 9781317646600
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Ten years ago, Mark Anthony Neal's New Black Man put forth a revolutionary model of Black masculinity for the twenty-first century—one that moved beyond patriarchy to embrace feminism and combat homophobia. Now, Neal's book is more vital than ever, urging us to imagine a New Black Man whose strength resides in family, community, and diversity. Part memoir, part manifesto, this book celebrates the Black man of our times in all his vibrancy and virility.

The tenth anniversary edition of this classic text includes a new foreword by Joan Morgan and a new introduction and postscript from Neal, which bring the issues in the book up to the present day.

Chapter 1
there’s a new black man in america today

The Black Man is in crisis. And thus the theme of hundreds of newspaper, magazine and journal articles, and conferences over the last twenty years. This theme was perhaps best articulated in the article, “Who Will Help the Black Man?” the cover feature in the December 4, 1994 edition of The New York Times Magazine. The article featured a cross-generational roundtable discussion moderated by journalist Bob Herbert, who was joined by several prominent black men including then National Urban League President Hugh Price, talk-show host Ken Hamblin, filmmaker John Singleton, and scholar William Julius Wilson, who penned the hugely influential books The Declining Significance of Race (1980) and The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass and Public Policy (1987). Herbert sets the tone of the discussion in his introduction where he suggests that the “plight of the black men in the nation’s inner cities has been widely reported” but adds that it is the crisis of the black male underclass that “remains the preoccupation of many Americans, none more so than successful black men in America.”¹ And on cue, much of the discussion focused on the disaffected and demonized hip-hop generation that we’ve all come to know quite well via MTV, Black Entertainment Television (BET), ESPN, Fox News, and daily newspapers such as the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Though the roundtable discussants disagreed often about responses to the crisis of the hip-hop thug and his various incarnations and even disagreed to the extent that such figures should be viewed with scorn or sympathy, no one captured America’s sense of young black men better than Ken Hamblin’s quip that they were “black trash … people who prey on us and then turn around and encourage us to sit here as intellectual wizards, film makers, columnists, talk show hosts, members of black organizations and talk about what whitey did to us.”²

“Who Will Help the Black Man?” was published at a moment when bookshelves were overrun with autobiographies by “successful” black men, all seemingly part of a veritable cottage industry of black man uplift literature, where black men from poor, deprived, dysfunctional, and single-parented backgrounds described their transition to well-adjusted, productive, upper-middle-class lives. This sudden hunger for black uplift literature by both black and white audiences seemed to mark the change from the “dire” Reagan–Bush years to the Clinton “Big Willie” era and thus many of these tomes helped obscure the reality that the lowest economic tier was continuing to catch hell, despite the presence of high-profile black men like Colin Powell, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, Jesse Jackson, and Kenneth Chenault, to name just a few. Thus books such as Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler and Brent Staples’s Parallel Time were on everyone’s must-read list and America felt good that the civil rights movement had succeeded and there might be a black president in the near future and no one was uncomfortable with the fact that a 6-foot-6 bald-headed black man with a basketball in his hands came into their living rooms on the daily to sell hamburgers, electrolyte beverages, and batteries.

In this environment it was perhaps easy to isolate the Tupac Shakurs, Allen Iversons, “Pookies,” and Nushawn Williamses of the world and make them the reason why the black man has failed. They are “criminals”—trash—who listened to and made violent music, defiled black women, smoked crack, made fun of homosexuals, and had unprotected sex with minors. Hell, even OJ Simpson can roll up on a golf course and get a nod and handshake. Yeah, he might have killed a couple of folk, but at least he had once been a card-carrying member of the “acceptable black man” club and in a world overrun by black rappers, drug dealers, and thugs, that still matters for something. Although I’ll be the first to admit the need to shepherd a generation of under-achieving, under-prepared, under-appreciative black male youth into a twenty-first century black manhood, I contend that a crisis of black masculinity exists not only in the scapegoated, so-called hip-hop generation, but in the legions of well-adjusted, middle-classed, educated, heterosexual black men, whose continued investment in a powerful American-style patriarchy (often remixed as Black Nationalism and Afrocentrism) and its offspring homophobia, sexism, and misogyny, represents a significant threat to the stability and sustenance of black families, communities, and relationships. Moreover, many of these black men rarely get challenged on these investments, often buffered and protected by black institutions that are themselves buttressed by modes of patriarchal privilege that gets obscured in our quest for achievement, power, and economic stability.

The Hip-Hop Thug versus the New Talented Tenth

Perhaps no one black man captured America’s fears and scorn for black men in recent years more than Nushawn Williams. Embodying the confluence of historic fears among white Americans about black male sexuality, interracial relationships, and sexually transmitted diseases, Williams infected over thirteen young women and girls in Jamestown, New York with the HIV virus between 1996 and 1997. At least half of the women were infected by Williams after he was notified by Chautauqua County health officials that he had contracted the virus. One of the girls infected by Williams, who was twenty years old when the story broke in October of 1997, was thirteen years old when she had sex with him. During their investigation of the HIV outbreak, Williams admitted to county health officials that he had sex with forty-eight women in the county during the eight-month period he lived in Jamestown, New York. A drug dealer who had relocated to Jamestown from New York City, some of Williams’s victims were infected in “sex for drugs” transactions. There is evidence that some of the women and girls weren’t simply infected by unprotected sex, but likely also by the sharing of the dirty needles they used to take drugs.³ Jamestown, New York is a small city of 35,000 residents with decidedly rural and socially conservative sensibilities, thus the news of these thirteen women (the thirteen new HIV cases represented roughly a quarter of all HIV cases reported in the county over a twenty-year period) was perceived as an epidemic—literal fear of a viral predator that was threatening the city’s very way of life. That predator was not the disease itself, but its distributor, Nushawn Williams.

There isn’t a shred of ground on which Williams’s actions can be defended (save the fact he was likely as ignorant about how the HIV virus is spread as the average American) and thus I have no interest in examining the broader social and cultural contexts that could even remotely explain Williams’s actions.⁴ What I am interested in is examining the media coverage of Nushawn Williams and how that coverage was informed by and reproduced historical myths about black men, particularly black male sexuality. In a culture that has both openly and privately expressed fear of black male sexuality, whether via mythic fascination with the black male sexual organ and purported black male desire for white women, Nushawn Williams was indeed a giant, diseased, black penis slithering through Smalltown, USA in search of young, nubile white girls.

In the mainstream press, Williams was depicted in ways that consciously and unconsciously referenced common myths about black male sexuality. In a somewhat sympathetic story in the Washington Post, Jennifer Frey repeatedly referred to Williams’s victims as “Nushawn’s Girls,” as if he was a pimp who forced these young women and girls out on the street to have unprotected sex.⁵ Another portrayed Williams as a “charmer” who through the “apparent lure of drugs and adventure he offered enticed young women into his seedy lair.”⁶ Newsweek made the inevitable link between Williams’s appeal and hip-hop culture, stating that “Nobody knows exactly what brought Nushawn Williams to the town, but it is clear that he soon established himself as a relentless seducer of women. He had charm and, to a generation mesmerized by gangsta rap, a menacing form of glamour.”⁷ In that same story one of the girls admitted that she liked dating “thugs.”⁸ Chautauqua County health commissioner Dr. Robert Berke told reporters at the Buffalo News that Williams was a “score keeper and a very, very good historian,” suggesting that his recordkeeping made it easier for officials to track down some of his potential victims.⁹ Though many of these comments are innocuous on the surface, it is only when the racial context of Williams’s relations with these young women is exhumed that these comments seem to invest in the image of Williams as an oversexualized black man who, endowed with a potent sexuality, had the power to charm even the most innocent of young women and kept a record of his conquests as if he were on some mission to conquer as many white women as possible. As Berke was quoted in a news conference, “he liked to lurk around the edges of school and parks … picking out young ladies who may, for one reason or another, be in a risk taking mode.”¹⁰

The racial dynamic of Nushawn Williams was not lost on some commentators. Writing in USA Today, Saundra Smokes acknowledges that “If Williams, who is African-American, were accused of infecting African-American teen age girls from urban America rather than white girls from a small, rural town, the story simply would not have been as prominent … And if Williams were white, he might not be portrayed as a crazed, HIV-positive ‘predator’ purposely preying on innocent, troubled young girls, as much as a troubled young man himself.”¹¹ Although she didn’t make specific mention of the significance of Williams’s race, Ellen Goodman noted in the Boston Globe that more attention was given to the “most extreme, deliberate, menacing, even maniacal individual than to the menace itself,” later querying, “Do we think that corralling one mad/bad man or two, or two dozen, who maliciously infect unsuspecting partners is an effective public health policy?” Left unspoken in Goodman’s analysis of course is the fact that Williams’s race made all the difference in the world: it was the reason why everyone was fixated on capturing that one bad man, that one bad nigger. According to political scientist Thomas Shevory, “That Williams was African-American, having sex with teenage white girls, probably transmitting HIV to some of them, in a small town subculture that was infected with drugs, was simply irresistible given the narratives, symbolisms and representations that were (and are) in place. The results were perhaps entirely predictable in terms of the framing of the case.”¹²

When a New York Daily News editorial described Williams as a “disturbing assortment of social pathologies”—promiscuity, underage sex, unprotected sex, and drugs—it was clear that these attributes were not just inscribed on the body of Williams but on every young black male who could be perceived as the next “Nushawn.”¹³ If the increased incidence of racial profiling by police and retail outlets has taught us anything, it’s that America has rarely been nuanced in its demonization of black men of all ages, ethnicities, and economic status. Many Americans, particularly those whose perceptions of black masculinity are colored by media portraits, comfortably believe that a significant number of young black man engage in “sexually perverse, predatory behavior (towards) unsuspecting and defenseless victims.”¹⁴ Toward the close of the aforementioned Daily News editorial, the editors make an effort to position Williams in opposition to former Joint Chief of Staff and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was quoted from his book My American Journey, stating that “We seem to have lost our sense of shame as a society…. Nothing seems to embarrass us; nothing shocks us anymore.”¹⁵

The reality is that for men like Powell and those who gathered for the “Who Will Help the Black Man?” session, as well as a good many middle-class, upper-middle-class, and elite black men, the so-called hip-hop thugs and Nushawn Williamses of the world threaten to pull us all back into the abyss of black male demonization. As stories of the racial profiling of “successful” black men such as Hall of Fame baseball player Joe Morgan, publishing executive Earl Graves, Jr., and former NBA player Dee Brown evidence, many black men are all too aware how slippery the slope is from black man to “thug-nigga.”¹⁶ The point was powerfully depicted by then-Harvard Law student Bryonn Bain, who gave a first-hand account of racial profiling in The Village Voice. The experience led Bain to acknowledge a never-ratified, but “self evident,” Bill of Rights for black men in which “Congress can make no law altering the established fact that a black man is a nigger,” “The fact that a black Man is a nigger is sufficient and probable cause for him to be searched and seized,” and “Wherever niggers are causing trouble, arresting any nigger at the scene of the crime is just as good as arresting the one actually guilty of the crime in question.”¹⁷ It shouldn’t be surprising then that many black men protect the relative privilege of being black, male, educated, and financially comfortable with a voracity that, in its worst form, creates an animosity toward the image of the hip-hop thug that rivals the animosities expressed by white racists toward blacks.

Given the fact that hip-hop culture has always been male-centered, it is expected that criticisms of it are naturally conflated with criticisms of young black males. In an interview, long-time hip-hop antagonist C. Delores Tucker suggests that the “white music industry has always denigrated the black community. White corporate America has always feared the black male. It wants to suggest black males are inhuman thugs.”¹⁸ Tucker also argues that “America is killing off the black male and gangsta rap is one of the weapons.”¹⁹ Other commentators cite the negative influence that hip-hop has on the middle-class aspirations of young black men. In their examination of the generational battle within hip-hop culture Newsweek noted in passing that as the “number of young black men attending college steadily dwindles … the piles of unsolicited demo tapes get higher in record-company offices,” a clear indication (in their minds) that many young black men see the road to MTV regular rotation as a more viable route to middle-class success than a college education.²⁰ Even more explicit is Dr. M. Rick Turner’s claim that hip-hop’s culture is eroding the numbers of the next generation of the “The Talented Tenth.”²¹

The term “talented tenth” was of course posited at the beginning of the twentieth century by noted black scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois to describe the formation of an elite, educated, middle-class cadre of folk—black men, essentially—charged to lead the race.²² Turner, dean of African-American Affairs at the University of Virginia, voices concern that black male students at the university—part of a future “talented tenth”—who “come from affluent backgrounds” and are “increasingly second-generation college students … often fail to become involved in many aspects of university life.”²³ Turner adds that “Our young black men haven’t always behaved this way.” He later comes to the conclusion that he suspects that those young men “lack incentives to get involved. But could it be that the consumption of music—particularly hip-hop—has taken too many of our black boys away from the realities of life?”²⁴ Of course Turner’s assessment has some validity, though there are myriad reasons why black students recoil from campus activities, including some discomfort with the lily-whiteness of some campuses or the recognition as second-generation college students (in those cases), privy ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction to the Tenth Anniversary Edition
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction walking like a natural man
• Chapter 1 there’s a new black man in america today
• Chapter 2 what the hell is a black male feminist?
• Chapter 3 queers in a barrel
• Chapter 4 bringing up daddy: a black feminist fatherhood
• Chapter 5 “ms. fat booty” and the black male feminist
• Afterword
• Postscript finding tea cake: an imagined black feminist manhood
• Endnotes
• Index