Black masculinity is always something extraordinary; it is also always something extra ordinary. Whatever it may turn out to be, in any given context or situation, however it is defined or refined, it is never unremarkable, least of all for those living and dying under its heading. It is, from most every vantage, foreign and domestic, the site and sign of ravage and ruin, and of revelation too. Insofar as it signifies the greatest exception to the rule and the furthest deviation from the law, it returns no less to claim or to be claimed by a proof of the rule and an institution of the law. Hyper-masculinity, one supposed characteristic of the forms of life in question, is both abandonment and recuperation of the desire for dominant masculinity, for masculinity as dominance. It misses the mark by overshooting or overwhelming it. Likewise, though, black masculinity is often enough figured as hypo-masculinity, as lacking, as wanting; it would seem to represent a certain failure of masculinity as well. In either case, we find masculinity in and as permanent crisis.

We might wonder how this can be so: a phenomenon seemingly too much and too little of itself by virtue of its most controversial qualification—black. Would it make a difference to describe black masculinity as an oscillation between surplus and deficit, or even a paradoxical insistence of both less and more at once, or neither? If black masculinity suggests a limit-case, we must ask, what is masculinity at all that one can have too much or too little of it, in turn and in tandem? Is there, by contrast, really such a thing as masculinity that is necessary or needed, one that is indeed proper to anybody? Is black masculinity , then, not a negative instance of the very masculinity to which it lays an illegitimate, even illegal, claim and by which it is claimed, imperiously, as too-much-too-little? What better way to outline its conditions of emergence and contestation than through a figure of ambivalent value?

I borrow that last phrase from Jonathan Munby’s (2011) survey of “criminal self-representation in African American popular culture,” Under a Bad Sign. There, Munby is interested in how depictions of the “badman” have permeated black popular cultural production throughout the twentieth century (and indeed for much longer) as a strategy for registering and resignifying the tropes of race, class, gender, and sexuality hierarchically organizing the larger society. The broad appeal of the badman’s resistance, Munby suggests, is soldered to equally strong concerns about his liability to the well-being of the good people of the neighborhood:

As a figure of ambivalent value to the community that both venerates and fears him, the badman-pimp-hustler-trickster of black folklore clearly violates the doctrine of racial uplift that is meant to pave the way to equality. He is antithetical to that which the leaders of the struggle against racial subordination have required and invoked to legitimate their cause: the idea of a unified and virtuous black community. He claims a name (possession of a reputation) through the disrespecting of other’s names (bragging and besting others through superior insult exchanges—leading more often than not to murder) (Munby 2011, 9).

The sense of fear, however, is not restricted to those committed to the accommodationist doctrine of racial uplift, those promoting middle-class mores for a narrow politics of respectability. This is not only a worry about fueling racist myth and stereotype. Nor is it a fear confined to the badman per se, but rather to the actual or potential elements of the badman within any black man whatsoever. For as we see already in the symbolic amalgamation of the trickster with the pimp and the hustler, the badman is, as well, one who can and does exploit those within the community more vulnerable than himself—principally women and children, but also weaker men of any age. The badman surely flouts bourgeois social norms and breaks the white man’s law, but he also attenuates or undermines the prospect of any radical transformation initiated by black collectivities themselves. Legendary blues guitarist Albert King sang the eponymous 1971 track, “Born Under a Bad Sign,” declaring in a late verse: “Wine and women is all I crave/A big legged woman is gonna carry me to my grave.” King’s downtrodden illiterate protagonist, whose only luck is “real bad luck,” raises the question of how black masculinity can serve the cause of an unlawful and unseemly freedom without retaining or resorting to generational, gender, and sexual violence, at home or on the street, and thereby contributing to the reproductive oppression of black communities. Put the other way around, the question is raised whether there can be a black feminist reconstruction of black masculinity without retaining or resorting to law enforcement and thereby contributing to the reproductive oppression of black communities.

Stacia Brown’s (2014) above elegy, written in the immediate aftermath of Michael Dunn’s mistrial for the 2012 murder of Jordan Davis in Jacksonville, Florida (he was later convicted at retrial and sentenced to life without parole), spoke about the communal hope that black boys be allowed to grow up, “reaching bullet-free adulthood,” but, as she was quick to add, this requires their “outreaching everyone’s fear” (emphasis added), not only that of white police and vigilantes. If black men live in the shadow of the badman, as figures of ambivalent value—loved/hated, desired/feared, embraced/rejected, and so on—then any (real or imagined) promise they hold or (real or imagined) threat they pose would invariably contaminate one another as its obverse or underside. So too would any support for and defense of that promise or any opposition of and defense against that threat. This is just another way to say that if black masculinity is riven by a certain structural ambivalence, and by ambiguity no less, then any black feminist critique of its impetus, source, aim, and object cannot help but be similarly torn. Developing habits of language adequate to address the resultant complexity—the permanent destabilization of our ideas of moral clarity, ethical certainty, political direction, and conceptual rigor—remains the pressing task at hand.

Lucifer’s Nocturne is not, however, a critique of black feminism , nor is it an attempt to contribute to black feminist thought. It is a commentary on some examples of black men’s attempts to take up and take on black feminism , for better or worse, and, more specifically, some of the basic assumptions that have guided, or misguided, those efforts in the last generation. In what follows, we interrogate some of the more taken-for-granted intellectual postures adopted by black men writing about black feminism and highlight those who have written from other, perhaps more critical vantages in order to depart from a prevailing discourse on “black male feminism” (Awkward 1995, Lemons 2008, Neal 2015) that has likely left many black readers—across the range of genders and sexualities—unsatisfied, unenlightened, or uninspired. This text should be read, then, as a respectful disagreement with, or dissensus within, the project of raising “black feminist consciousness for black men and boys,” as one recent initiative put it (AAPF 2017).¹ Not because there is a problem with “a vision of racial justice rooted in a Black feminist ethic of liberation.” Indeed, the thrust of this short book is to sustain that point and even to draw out how some of black men’s best efforts to participate in such an ethic are themselves shot through with false humility and resentment.

Rather, the inquiry pursued here is prompted by the unremarked, if unavoidable, tension between, on the one hand, reclaiming “a vision of racial justice that centers the concerns of all Black lives” by displacing the exclusive focus on the concerns of black men and boys and, on the other, “acknowledging and advancing the need to center the concerns of Black women and girls at the heart” of that vision. These may be two sides of the same coin, but the relation between these twin political moves nonetheless remains hazy. If we can see the manifest problems with an exclusive focus on the concerns of black men and boys, and if we can note as well that centering the concerns of black women and girls is not only a critical improvement but also a crucial precondition for true racial justice, it is not, for all that, apparent how the concerns of black men and boys (or black women and girls, for that matter) should be most productively reframed in the process. What happens after the space-clearing gesture, in the wake of the intervention?

Legal scholar Paul Butler (2017a) writes in Chokehold: Policing Black Men: “The challenge for any project that focuses on African American men … is to highlight the particular ways in which black men are stereotyped without marginalizing the experiences of African American women in the process” (Butler 2017a, 8). The problem, of course, is that this gendered particularity is precisely what is in question. Black feminist scholars and activists have long argued that black women and girls are in no ways spared from forms of state-sanctioned racial violence that predominantly target black men and boys, even if they experience them at varying rates. Additionally, black women and girls must combat forms of state-sanctioned racial violence that predominantly target them, including violence committed against them by black men and boys (Richie 2012; Ritchie 2017). Which is to say that black women and girls most certainly have it worse in an antiblack world because they inhabit the social locations at which racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism (among other systems) intersect with and powerfully augment the ravages of life under capitalism, and vice versa. But does this imply, in turn, that black men and boys necessarily have it better? Is it not possible to conceive of antiblackness in such a way that black women and girls are uniquely positioned by its operations and, at the same time, share with black men and boys what Angela Davis termed “the deformed equality of equal oppression” (Davis 1972, 89) forged under the slave regime and permutated in our ostensibly post-emancipation society?² Is there not a way to talk, in this case, about topological figures of difference without boundary?³

Butler glosses the logic of the police power in what he claims is its formative encounter with black men, a logic encapsulated in dynamics of a literal chokehold:

A chokehold is a process of coercing submission that is self-reinforcing. A chokehold justifies additional pressure on the body because the body does not come into compliance, but the body cannot come into compliance because of the vice grip that is on it. This is the black experience in the United States. This is how the process of law and order pushes African American men into the criminal system. This is how the system is broke on purpose (Butler 2017a, 4).

He continues, in anticipation of those who would restrict the implications of his study to some criminal element within black communities (i.e. to the ba...