Black Masculinity and Sexual Politics

Anthony J. Lemelle, Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781135192167
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi afroamericani

African American males occupy a historically unique social position, whether in school life, on the job, or within the context of dating, marriage and family. Often, their normal role expectations require that they perform feminized and hypermasculine roles simultaneously. This book focuses on how African American males experience masculinity politics, and how U.S. sexism and racial ranking influences relationships between black and white males, as well as relationships with black and white women. By considering the African American male experience as a form of sexism, Lemelle proposes that the only way for the social order to successfully accommodate African American males is to fundamentally eliminate all sexism, particularly as it relates to the organization of families.

1
Black Masculinity as Sexual Politics

RACIALIZED SEXUAL POLITICS

Black males have used the expression “brothers” when greeting one another to refer to the fact of racial conflict. For example, the black revolutionary leader Malcolm X explained that it was not race that made men brothers. According to him, “oppression made them brothers; exploitation made them brothers; degradation made them brothers; … humiliation made them brothers.”¹ Since scholars showed the race concept has little merit as a biological variable, it is important to remember when social scientists refer to it they are referring to a social product.² By this, it means that race has meaning in social life and it partially determines economic, political, and social opportunities and rewards. For this reason, we cannot simply erase race from the vocabulary since it is more than merely a word; one could not delete the word “race” and eliminate its effects. In politics, however, many may come to think in this way. Added to the race-as-social-construct problem, are the references that communicate racial categories. Is it possible to eliminate them merely through choosing different words—would not the metonymic structure of racialization remain? This question is a profound one for citizens interested in social justice.

Race means social designation as a “brother,” according to Malcolm X, and being socially designated as a brother occurs because of the systematic organization of oppression, exploitation, degradation, and humiliation. For sociologist Robert Blauner, the purpose of the social oppression was to grant privileges to a dominant group:

But in a racial or colonial capitalist society where the racially oppressed are a numerical minority, how can racism be overcome when the majority of the population gains from it and presumably will defend these privileges as rational and objective interests? Here even the solution reached by victims of classical colonialism, the ejection of the colonizer and the achievement of national independence, does not seem to be a realistic possibility.³

Blauner is helpful in defining black males as a subordinate group within a dominant patriarchy. In addition, in his analysis we find that African American assimilation was not similar to that of ethnic-group assimilation. “Assimilation meant modifying or giving up certain ethnic institutions and culturally distinct values as the generations followed one another…. Very little of this fits the cultural experience of Afro-Americans.”⁴ For one thing, when blacks entered the U.S. they were largely a “sociolegal category” and their cultural process could not be one that moved from traditional ethnic identification of the entry group to assimilation by the second or third generation. The idea of assimilation is a very powerful ideology and even in its failure for African Americans, many neoliberals felt it was possible to manufacture an image of the success of assimilation that could stand in as a reasonable and convincing representation of progress. Had it not been for the extreme techniques and outcomes of repression needed by certain classes to maintain the image—particularly health disparities and rates of incarceration—the image might have served to wipe out reality.

However, in spite of Blauner’s helpful insights, one of the most significant problems with work on manhood has been the way that masculinity theorists understand sex. There had been some confusion between gender and sex. Toni Lester defines gender as “stereotypes about masculine men and feminine women that are pervasive in mainstream society.”⁵ She continues:

The idea that gender is separate from biology stands in direct contrast to traditional, essentialist notions about the proper roles of men and women embodied in court cases like the 1872 U.S. Supreme Court decision Bradwell v. Illinois … In Bradwell, an all-male Court said that women should be prevented from practicing law because “man is or should be women’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex … of womanhood.”⁶

Ann Oakley deserves credit for the introduction of the term “gender” to sociology. In her conception, sex referred to the biological division into male and female; gender to the socially unequal positioning into femininity and masculinity.⁷ Of course, Lester and Oakley may have made gender problematic in ways that do not correspond to the realities of U.S. racial history: In Lester’s definition she omitted that the Court was not simply all male but was in fact all white male. Now, we may also presume that the Court was all heterosexual—here our observation may become a little more tenuous but we can be certain that even if men were not all heterosexual, they were all passing as heterosexual white males.

Here is nuanced territory for the student of black male gender: In this book, I argue that black masculinity is a particular strain of masculinity in U.S. cultural history that is marked by its social feminization and simultaneously by its stereotyped hypermasculinization. Despite Émile Durkheim’s “rules of sociological method,” this is the case. Durkheim stressed the importance of distinguishing between social facts and biological characteristics.⁸

Masculinity refers to the socially constructed characteristics that society expects for the male sex. For many years, gender theorists did not define these characteristics in sociological studies. One reason is that primarily white males dominated sociology until relatively recently in U.S. history. Earlier studies by them were often male studies. For example, the classic study of Delinquent Boys by Albert Cohen was in fact a study of masculinity.⁹ Second wave feminism brought into focus the relative definition of masculinity. Anthropologist Margaret Mead was a major scholar in this development. She studied several South Pacific tribes—the Arapesh, the Mundugumor, and the Tchambuli—and reported femininity and masculinity differently among them. The Arapesh norm was to shun aggression and promote cooperation by both females and males. Society expected both genders to display aggression among the Mundugumor. The norm among the Tchambuli required that men display passive behaviors and dependency on women.¹⁰

Masculinity social scientists thought there was a need for more emphasis on comparisons of masculinity across nations and across subcultures within nations. Therefore, an increasing number of scholars began to focus on issues like heterosexism, patriarchy, and power. This resulted in an increased number of studies that focused on black masculinity. However, the rigid distinction between sex and masculinity may have made unclear the power relations associated with masculine gender expectations and race. This book asks questions about this relationship in an effort to highlight the history of U.S. masculinity and to compare and contrast similarities and differences among the black subculture and dominant culture. Added to this, it is important to consider how male subordination likely globally exports—including exporting it through the mainstream media. In this sense, lessons learned in the U.S. have global implications. The purpose for asking questions about the relationship between expected gender roles and race is not to find out how powerful agents produce and spread the image of black males throughout the world. Rather, the primary concern is with how the typical black male image sorts and excludes black men from goods, resources, and services while they go about their everyday living. In other words, the major concern is not about disorganization in black male and female relationships or the need for black men to play expected roles for moral reasons. This may upset some theorists since the most important ideology starting in the mid-nineteen hundreds has been describing black male pathology as remaining absent from their families. The significance of this book is to reveal whether black males are capable of being included in mainstream U.S. society in terms of its patriarchy. I do not mean patriarchy simply in the sense of the authority of male heads of households. However, characteristics of male heads of households are an index of patriarchy. In this book, patriarchy means the group of men able to dominate society. Such men would more readily achieve their individual pursuit of happiness free from the tyranny of powerful groups that might not share all their values. Yet, there is a nuanced concern; the question is not one about individuals achieving happiness. The question is about the likelihood of different aggregates and sectors of the population having advantage to dominate.

RACE AND SEX

Contact between groups often influences social change. Prior to the era of mass communication, it was possible for events to happen on one part of the earth and only slowly or never become available knowledge in other parts of the world. In postindustrial and cybernetic societies, this is now highly unlikely; communication is increasingly possible in real time. In addition, meanings and understandings of events can quickly embed, nest, and saturate cultural products, particularly those cultural products produced by dominant groups. This has importance for international gender relations. Philosopher Etienne Balibar and social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein discussed this problem in their book Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities.¹¹ In a chapter that glossed the history of racism and nationalism, Balibar offered a unique theoretical perspective:

The phenomenon of ‘depreciation’ and ‘racialization’ … [is not an] indefinite series of objects independent of each other, but a historical system of complementary exclusions and dominations which are mutually interconnected … ‘ethnic racism’ and a ‘sexual racism’ exist in parallel … racism always presupposes sexism…. [We need] a more concrete notion of taking into account the necessary polymorphism of racism, … [study] … the ‘Arab (as) junky’ or ‘delinquent’ or ‘rapist’ and so on, or equally, rapists and delinquents as ‘Arabs’ and ‘Blacks’ [italics in the original].¹²

By recognizing Balibar’s distinctions, much of the focus in this book is on the organization of hierarchy based on the simultaneity and “polymorphism” of gender, race, and sex depreciation. An intersectional approach explains aggregate status positioning in U.S. society. The intersectional approach has been of particular concern among scholars that study inequality; and the empirical historical evidence is overwhelming indicating the intersectional “historical system of complementary exclusions and dominations which are mutually interconnected.” One sociologist who applied aspects of Max Weber’s concept of status in writing about race and sex context as it related to the organization of U.S. racialization was Oliver Cromwell Cox.

OLIVER COX: RACE, GENDER, CLASS, AND SEX

One of the most enduring and time-related aspects of Cox’s social science is his observation about sex and marriage that he analyzed in the context of caste, class, and race relations. Few other theories of racialized dating, sex, and marriage will help us understand the historical organization of black masculinity. The problem for Cox was that there had been a long desire to maintain the purity of the U.S. “white race”; this was codified as law through initial miscegenation policy, and later, miscegenation legislation. Gunnar Myrdal had discussed this in his distinguished work An American Dilemma.¹³ In short, the law denied intermarriage and sexual intercourse with a white woman to most black males. In contrast, blacks did not seem to view racial intermarriage and intersexual intercourse as a major concern in their struggles for civil rights. Cox rejected the conclusions of Myrdal that fear of miscegenation and sexual intercourse between the two races was why white society permanently segregated blacks. In Caste, Class, and Race, Cox showed that occupational employment was the central concern of black interests and interracial sex was relatively unimportant for blacks when it came to civil rights concerns. For this reason, Cox wrote, “both the Negroes and their white exploiters know that economic opportunity comes first and that the white woman comes second; indeed, she is merely a significant instrument in limiting the first.”¹⁴

In Cox’s view, marriage and sex stratification was not part of some essential category. In contrast, it was part of the larger system of gender and race hierarchy where whites required blacks to hold subordinated positions—this was in the context of patriarchy. According to Cox, subordination allowed whites freely to exploit blacks and for this reason, Cox argued, whites could not permit black males to marry white women and white men were not to marry black women. If racial intermarriage happened in large enough numbers, it would have disrupted the social order where it was necessary to direct mass antipathy, if not full-blown hate, toward black citizens. Maintaining an ideology and practice of hate was the linchpin for the exploitation of blacks in terms of employment, job status, salary and wage, and income in Cox’s explanation. However, “economic opportunity” also included full participation in the economy, including owning businesses, participating in stock exchanges, acquiring loans, and engaging in other commercial ventures that make communities economically viable. Therefore, Cox argued, “Sexual obsessions function in the fundamental interest of economic exploitation.”¹⁵ By insisting that black males only marry black women, the controlling political class and its state could then insist that blacks be required to do the most “dirty and menial work” while being paid the lowest wages.¹⁶ Society eliminated most of this old thinking about interracial marriage and segregation.¹⁷ However, we should expect more intermarriage by now, not just related to race, but across class and religious groups. The point is that the social control of gender and race may still have some association with what anthropologist Gayle Rubin referred to as the “traffic in women.”¹⁸ Among blacks, for example, most of the large increase in intermarriage happened betwee...