Introduction
This is a study of black masculinities produced in two distinct bodies of 1960s
and 1970s texts: ethnographic accounts of black urban families by male social
scientists and black men’s self-narratives. Although there is no indication that
the autobiographers and social scientists read each others’ work, their texts
addressed many of the same problems. They were conceived in the same historical moment marked by discussions of racialized urban poverty, widespread disappointment with the Civil Rights Movement, radicalization of political struggle, and finally, a growing support for black nationalist ideologies among urban
African Americans. Further, those diverse texts are similar in that they anchor
black subjectivities within competing socio-scientific and popular discourses.
Since this study seeks discursive continuities as well as ruptures in the articulation of black masculinity, those seemingly incompatible genres of writing will
be treated on a par, as narrative spaces within which social identities are forged
and negotiated.
Part I of this book offers a critical analysis of social science literature on
the African American community published in the second half of the 1960s.1
For instance, Daniel P. Moynihan’s highly controversial 1965 report The Negro
Family: The Case for National Action (also referred to as the Moynihan Report),
with which I open my discussion, has been center stage of debates about “black
matriarchy,” race relations, ethnicity, as well as social policy.2 Written by an
1
2
W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899) was the first
comprehensive study of the black urban community. For discussions of 1960s ethnographic research on the black community, see Ulf Hannerz, “Research in the Black
Ghetto: A Review of the Sixties” (1975); William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987); Mitchell Duneier, Slim’s
Table: Race, Respectability and Masculinity (1992); and Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s
Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (1997).
See Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of
Controversy (1967); Sydney M. Wilhelm, Who Needs The Negro? (1971); Michelle
Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978); Robert Staples, Black
Masculinity: The Black Male’s Role in American Society (1982); Angela Davis, Women,
Race, & Class (1981); Hortense Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American
Grammar Book” (1987); William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner
City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987); Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: Retreat
from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (1995); William F. Pinar The
Gender Of Racial Politics and Violence in America: Lynching, Prison Rape, and The
Crisis of Masculinity (2001); Sheila M. Littlejohn-Blake and Carol Anderson Darling,
11
Irish-American political scientist, Assistant Secretary of Labor from 1963 to
1965, this internal government report is packed with statistics and graphs,
drawing on research in the area of juvenile crime, education, and un/employment. The remaining works analyzed in Part I are Ulf Hannerz’s 1969 study
Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community, set in Washington,
D.C., David A. Schulz’s 1969 work on St. Louis housing projects Coming Up
Black, and Kenneth B. Clark’s 1965 study of black Harlem, N.Y., Dark Ghetto:
Dilemmas of Social Power. These three social scientists represent different
ethnic backgrounds and disciplines. Hannerz is a U.S.-trained Swedish
anthropologist, Schulz—a white evangelical priest with a background in sociology, while Clark—an eminent African American social psychologist. The four
works discussed in Part I represent a broad spectrum of approaches to black poverty research. I also refer to other landmark studies of the time, including Elliot
Liebow’s Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (1967), Joyce
Ladner’s Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman (1971), Lee Rainwater’s
Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum (1970), and Carol B.
Stack’s All Our Kin: Strategies of Survival in a Black Community (1974).3
Part II of the book sets out to investigate the construction of masculinities
in a diverse body of autobiographical works by black men, ranging from
autoethnographic narratives of success to counter-hegemonic conversion narratives and prison writings. I begin with two autobiographies that follow the paradigm of the American success story: Dick Gregory’s Nigger: An Autobiography
(1964) and Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965). Next, I
move on to a comparative analysis of two autobiographies by the Black Panther
Party leader Bobby Seale, Seize the Time (1970) and A Lonely Rage (1978), the
first written while the author was an active Panther, the second published a few
years after he had left the Party. The final chapter in Part II offers a study of two
politically radical prison autobiographies: Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1967)
and George Jackson’s Soledad Brother (1970). The paucity of critical work
about these autobiographies suggests that so far few literary and cultural studies
scholars have considered them attractive research material. For example,
3
12
“The Strengths of African American Families” (1993); and Charles V. Willie, “Social
Theory and Social Policy Derived from the Black Family Experience” (1993).
Since the 1960s, the continued interest in the ethnographic study of African American
community and masculinity was reflected in such publications as John Langston
Gwaltney’s, Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (1980); Elijah Anderson’s, A
Place On the Corner (1978) and Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban
Community (1990), as well as Mitchell Duneier’s, Slim’s Table: Race, Respectability and
Masculinity (1992).
Seale’s, Cleaver’s, and Jackson’s self-writings have been seen primarily as
“documenting” the Black Power era.4
While some may read The Autobiography of Malcolm X with a similar
focus in mind, this seminal work of 1960s black literature has already been the
subject of many literary analyses, alongside such classics as Frederick
Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) and Richard
Wright’s Black Boy (1945); therefore, it is not included in this study.5 Yet
Malcolm X’s openly confrontational rhetoric and his call for armed self-defense
set the stage for the articulation of black radical voices. His autobiography
documented his personal and political development from a criminal to a black
nationalist leader, a radical transformation which captured the imagination of
urban African Americans, especially men. Black nationalist activists/prisoners
such as Cleaver, Seale, and Jackson identified with Malcolm X’s radical
political message; for them he was the embodiment of manhood, or, as Calvin C.
Hernton observes, “the living flesh of Black Power, the living sexuality of the
Lost Black Patriarch [sic]” (Coming Together 38).
African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook (ed. Nelson, 2002)
reflects the changing treatment of such writers as Brown, Cleaver, and Gregory.
Reviewing the critical reception of their works, the Sourcebook shows that
Brown’s Manchild and Cleaver’s Soul on Ice have largely been passed over by
4
5
This approach is apparent in Margo V. Perkins’s recent book Autobiography as Activism:
Three Black Women of the Sixties (2000), which brings together the narratives written by
the Black Panther Party leaders (Bobby Seale, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver) and
other former Panthers to see how those autobiographies, produced over the span of three
decades, enter into an intertextual dialogue, fill in each others’ blind spots, as well as
offer alternative interpretations of the history of the Black Power Movement.
Since the early 1970s, critical scholarship on The Autobiography of Malcolm X has flourished. In The Autobiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in TwentiethCentury America (1999), Kenneth Mostern reads Malcolm X’s autobiography as a Bildungsroman that incorporates four narratives, “the presentation of ‘truth,’ sexuality, race,
and education,” and shows how “these narratives ground the politics of ‘black’ ‘masculinity’ today” (143). The text has also been read as a conversion narrative (Ross Miller,
“Autobiography as Fact and Fiction: Franklin, Adams, Malcolm X” [1972]; H. Porter
Abbott, “Organic Form in the Autobiography of a Convert: The Example of Malcolm X”
[1979]); as a neo-slave narrative (Sidonie Smith, Where I Am Bound: Patterns of Slavery
and Freedom in Black American Autobiography [1974]); as a classic American autobiography (Carol Ohmann, “The Autobiography of Malcolm X: A Revolutionary Use of the
Franklin Tradition” [1970]; Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, “Consuming Malcolm X:
Prophecy and Performative Masculinity” [1997]); and a as didactic text (Barrett John
Mandel, “The Didactic Achievement of Malcolm X’s Autobiography” [1972]). For a
bibliography of works on the autobiography, see Joe Weixlmann, “African American
Autobiography in the Twentieth Century: A Bibliographic Essay (1990) and Emmanuel
S. Nelson, “Malcolm X” in African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook (2002).
13
scholars of autobiography.6 Brown’s mainstream autobiography was the subject
of just two critical essays in the 1970s.7 Cleaver’s essays, in turn, received
publicity in the late 1960s as an important contribution to the understanding of
race relations, and again in the 1990s, due to their controversial treatment of
gender and sexuality.8 Along with Cleaver, Jackson has been heavily criticized
by black feminists—Jackson for his sexism (Angela Davis 1974; bell hooks
1992) and Cleaver for both sexism and homophobia (Wallace 1978). Yet other
aspects of their works have received little critical attention. In this respect,
Stephen Butterfield’s Black Autobiography in America (1974) is an exception.
His analysis of 1960s self-writings foregrounded such politically engaged
authors as Malcolm X, Seale, Jackson, and Cleaver. However, Butterfield made
only a few passing references to the mainstream publications by Brown and
Gregory. To the best of my knowledge, no scholarly work has been done on
Dick Gregory’s 1964 autobiography.9
In the past, literature scholars usually referred to the writings of social
scientists only as socio-historical context, not as objects of analysis in their own
right. The recent studies by Carla Capetti (1993) and Roderick A. Ferguson
(2004) are notable exceptions. Capetti documents the intellectual exchange
between Chicago School sociologists and urban racial/ethnic minority writers in
the 1920s and ’30s. She points out that the Chicago sociologists were the first to
incorporate ethnic literature courses into academic curricula and use it as
research material; conversely, many ethnic writers, including Richard Wright,
6
7
8
9
14
Sidonie Smith’s work Where I Am Bound: Patterns of Slavery and Freedom in Black
American Autobiography (1974) seems to be an exception.
Autobiography studies on Claude Brown include: Houston A. Baker, Jr. “The Environment as Enemy in a Black Autobiography: Manchild in the Promised Land” (1971);
Robert M. Goldman and William D. Crano, “Black Boy and Manchild in the Promised
Land: Content Analysis in the Study of Value Change over Time” (1976); Joe
Weixlmann, “African American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century: A Bibliographic Essay” (1990) and Emmanuel S. Nelson, “Claude Brown.” African American
Autobiographers: A Sourcebook (2002). A more recent work on Manchild is Carlo
Rotella’s chapter “The Box of Groceries and the Omnibus Tour: Manchild in the Promised Land” (1998) in which Brown’s autobiography is analyzed as urban literature.
Among the critical works on Cleaver’s Soul on Ice are: Jervis Anderson “Race, Rage, and
Eldridge Cleaver” (1968); Robert Gilman, “White Standards and Negro Writing” (1969);
and Joyce Nower “Cleaver’s vision of America and the New White Radical: A Legacy of
Malcolm X” (1970). See also David L. Dudley’s book My Father’s Shadow: Intergenerational Conflict in African-American Men’s Autobiography (1991). For a more complete
bibliography on Cleaver’s work, see David L. Dudley, “Eldridge Cleaver.” African
American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook (2002). For a masculinity/queer studies analysis of Soul on Ice, see F. Reid-Pharr, “Tearing the Goat’s Flesh: Homosexuality, Abjection, and the Production of a Late-Twentieth-Century Black Masculinity” (1997).
For a review of Dick Gregory’s autobiographical works, see Nikolas Huot, “Richard
'Dick' Claxton Gregory” (2002).
learned to look sociologically at their own communities while studying
sociology in Chicago. Ferguson, in turn, pairs up white-authored texts of
canonical sociology with classic works by Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, and
Morrison to show, among other things, the ways in which sociology works to
maintain the heteronormative gender order while literature undermines it.
By bringing together the “outsider” and “insider” representations of black
masculinities, this study offers a new angle on the understanding of classed,
gendered and racialized identities, as well as the power relations involved in the
production of knowledge about people of color. Historian Robin D. G. Kelley,
writing about 1960s poverty research through the prism of radical anthropology
(Hymes 1969) and post-modern ethnography (Marcus and Fischer 1986,
Clifford 1988), notes that, “many social scientists are not only quick to generalize about the black urban poor on the basis of a few ‘representative’ examples,
but more often than not, they do not let the natives speak” (Yo’ Mama’s 16).
Countering this tendency, Part II of the present study makes room for the voices
of black men who attempt to represent themselves, to intervene in the dominant
disempowering discourses on race, poverty and gender, as well as to address the
power imbalance involved in the ethnographic project.
A common feature of the texts studied in Part I is that they are written by
scholars who were either ethnic outsiders to the black ghetto (Moynihan, Hannerz, Schulz) or academically trained native ethnographers (Clark). They
represent a range of disciplines, from urban anthropology and sociology,
through social psychology, to political science. Despite the methodological
differences inherent in the respective disciplines, what all these texts have in
common is not only the focus on family or community life but also engagement
in the production of black masculinities. I will demonstrate that the ethnographers, black or white, operate within the limitations of specific fields and
their theoretical underpinnings; the fact that they address a specific audience at a
specific historical moment also constitutes a limitation. All of these factors
determine the gender and racial representations validated within particular
discourses and from positions of power. Often supported financially by the local
or state government, those scholars necessarily represent positions of power
which enable them to legitimate their own masculinity in relation to that of the
objects of ethnographic study.
My analysis of black men’s self-writings revolves around the following
questions: Does black men’s agency as speaking subjects lead them to intervene
in the popular and ethnographic representations of underclass black men? As
ethnography’s “others,” to what extent do they contest or subscribe to the dominant narratives of black masculinity? Do the men speaking as the “other” of
ethnography offer insights that are absent from the ethnographies that speak for
15
them?10 (Mascia-Lees, et. al. 245)? To answer those key questions, I first look at
how the generic conventions of autobiographical writings influence the men’s
self-representations. Second, I consider the way those self-narratives articulate a
plurality of masculine identities, both individual and collective, forged at the
intersection of gender, class, race, and sexual orientation. As I am especially
interested in the intersections of race and sexuality, this book endeavors to probe
the extent to which the autobiographies reinforce or undermine patriarchy and
the heterosexual norm, and what consequences this has for the constructions of
black masculinities. Reading the autobiographical texts alongside the ethnographies allows me to identify discursive continuities and recurrent themes that
would not otherwise have been apparent.
The preponderance of ethnographic research on black urban ghettoes in
the 1960s was part of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ renewed interest in poverty as a social problem requiring state intervention. In 1964, under
pressure from the Civil Rights Movement, the federal government launched the
War on Poverty program. As black sociologist William Julius Wilson notes,
after almost three decades of neglect, social scientists re-discovered the poor as
an object of study (166). Since urban poverty was a largely racialized problem,
affecting 15 per cent of the black population compared to only 6 per cent of the
white,11 black ghettoes became a major site of poverty research. Kelley writes:
With the zeal of colonial missionaries, these liberal and often radical ethnographers (mostly white men) set out to explore the newly discovered concrete
jungles. Inspired by Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, a veritable army of
anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, and social psychologists set up camp in
America’s ghettoes. (Yo’ Mama’s 19-20)
Since the mid-1960s, government agencies commissioned social research in
urban communities with the intention of identifying the causes of poverty and
eradicating it by means of social policies. The mass violent protests (Harlem
1964, Watts 1965, Newark 1967, Detroit 1967) coupled with the growing popularity of black nationalist organizations that challenged the American racial
hegemony (e.g. Nation of Islam, Black Panther Party) also motivated the government-sponsored poverty research.12
10 See Frances E. Mascia-Lees, Patricia Sharpe, and Colleen Ballerino Cohen, “The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective” (1993).
11 According to census data for the year 1969 (Wilson 172).
12 The federal government policies on poverty were discontinued by the Nixon and Reagan
administrations, as part of the conservative policy of “benign neglect” with respect to
poverty. For more information about the changing social policy on poverty between 1960
and 1980s, see Ronald L. Taylor “Black Males and Social Policy: Breaking the Cycle of
Disadvantage” (1994).
16
Operating within the dominant sociological post-World War II functionalist paradigm, as well as what Michael Omi and Howard Winant call “the
ethnicity-based paradigm,” the poverty researchers treated African Americans as
a class or sub-group whose role was to assimilate into the mainstream American
culture. Though not all blacks were poor, social scientists tended to treat this
most disadvantaged subgroup of urban blacks, who differed most from the social
norm, as representative of all African Americans.13 By excluding the upwardly
mobile members of the working-class and middle-class who embraced the social
norm, scholars of poverty rendered the entire racial minority as “culturally
maladjusted,” “deviant,” and “pathological.” The black family became a locus
of “pathology.”14 Its structure, socialization patterns, and male-female relationships constituted the major focus of ethnographic studies in the black urban
enclaves characterized by such indicators of social “pathology” as high rates of
illegitimacy, single-headed households, male unemployment and juvenile
delinquency.
The “outsider” (as opposed to “insider”) depictions of the black family in
the 1960s were shaped by debates concerning the origins of African American
culture.15 Thus, in this particular instance, the fields of sociology and urban
anthropology constituted a site of struggle for the competing discourses on
American blacks as a cultural as well as a racial group. The prevailing theories
that shaped the understanding of black urban culture within the functionalist
paradigm were the notions of the “culture of poverty”16 and of “deviant” or
13 Franklin Frazier’s 1957 Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class in the United
States is perhaps the only work that documents the emergence of the black middle class as
a distinct subgroup of the African American community.
14 In The Death of White Sociology, (ed. Joyce Ladner, 1973), radical sociologists Ethel
Sawyer and Joyce Ladner pointed to the implications of the traditional sociology’s use of
the healthy/pathological opposition by arguing that once a researcher sets out to investigate a problem the results are likely to confirm its existence (xxvi, 363).
15 To reconstruct the scholarly debates on the black culture in the 20th century, see Franklin
F. Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (1939); Melville Herskovits, The Myth
of the Negro Past (1941); Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem
and Modern Democracy (1944); Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the
Melting Pot (1963); Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 17501925 (1976); Norman E. Whitten Jr. and John F. Szwed, eds., Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives (1970); John F. Szwed, ed., Black America (1970);
Roger D. Abrahams and John F. Szwed, eds., Discovering Afro-America (1975); Robert
Staples, Introduction to Black Sociology (1976); and Lee Rainwater, ed., Soul (1970).
16 The concept of the “culture of poverty” was coined and developed by anthropologist
Oscar Lewis based on his research among Mexican families in the late 1950s and Puerto
Rican families mid-1960s. While Lewis’s original concept referred to poor people’s cultural adaptations to the persistence of poverty, it was misused in the public discourse.
Hannerz notes that “in some circles—journalists, educators, and policymakers more often
than social scientists—there was some tendency to focus narrowly on ‘culture’ as this
17
“anomic” culture. Both concepts measured the poor blacks’ behavioral patterns
against the normative benchmark of white middle-class culture17; still,
functionalist scholars insisted that African American culture be understood as a
necessary adaptation to the group’s environment, and a system of coping
mechanisms. Contemporary black sociologist Rod Bush summarizes the major
theoretical current in poverty research in the following terms:
The conception of a Black community brimming with deviants seems to have
suffused white America, including the academic community, which should
know better. Rather than ask, why do we have the poor, they asked how are the
poor different from you and me. This manner of posing the questions leads in
short order to a rather self-evident answer. They are poor because they are different from you and me. They operate within a different cultural framework,
one that is inferior to the culture of white middle-class America. They are poor
and they are culturally deficient. (34)
Those dominant approaches were challenged in the mid-1960s by an oppositional discourse within the social sciences, which highlighted the pertinence of
racial oppression and cultural conflict to the understanding of the cultural behavior of poor urban blacks, mainly by drawing on the “colonial” metaphor. The
oppositional discourse of radical sociology,18 influenced by the Black Power
Movement and black nationalist ideologies questioned the objectivity of “white
sociology” (traditional sociological research) on the grounds that the then
prevalent model of structural-functional analysis, as black sociologist Robert
Staples explained, “saw society as composed of mutually dependent and harmonious elements . . . based on collective tendencies toward consensus . . . [where]
individual members of the society share similar value orientations that undergird
the normative structure” (“What is Black Sociology?” 166). The underlying
assumption of the so-called “consensus” paradigm was that African Americans
shared no distinctive culture or African heritage. In line with the black
learning process within a relatively autonomous group. The poor thus were themselves to
blame for their behavior” (“Research in the Black Ghetto” 17-18). For a broader discussion about the “culture of poverty,” see Oscar Lewis, “The Culture of Poverty” (1966);
Stephen Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth: Race, Ethnicity, and Class in America (1981); and
Seymour Parker and Robert J. Kleiner, “The Culture of Poverty: An Adjustive
Dimension” (1970).
17 The concept of “anomie” was originally formulated by Emile Durkheim in The Division
of Labour in Society (1893). For the discussion of the contemporary application of the
discourse of “anomie,” see Chapter 3 of the present study.
18 For a broader critique of traditional sociology and anthropology, see Dell Hymes, ed.,
Reinventing Anthropology (1969/1974); Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America
(1972) and Joyce Ladner, ed., The Death of White Sociology (1973). Kenneth B. Clark‘s
Dark Ghetto (1965) and Ladner’s Tomorrow’s Tomorrow (1971) are ethnographic
applications of the radical sociology.
18
sociologist Franklin Frazier and his followers, most scholars believed that
slavery had eradicated all traces of African survivals and the descendants of
slaves and ex-slaves were essentially American.19 Anthropological data proving
the reverse, collected by the Jewish American Melville Herskovits in the Myth
of the Negro Past (1941), was largely ignored until the 1970s, when Black
Studies were institutionalized.20 Until then, social scientists treated black culture
as purely American. They interpreted the persistent cultural differences in the
black urban communities as the group’s failure to assimilate into the mainstream
culture.
Regardless of their background, research methodologies, and subsequent
theorizations of African American culture, the ethnographers all invoked the
discourse of “black matriarchy.” Frazier’s seminal study on The Negro Family
in the U.S. (1939) set the course for theorizations of the black family as
“matriarchal” and was used by succeeding generations of social scientists to
legitimate the “pathologization” of the black urban communities. The discourse
of matriarchy rendered black men as dominated by overbearing black women
and, thus, unable to achieve normative masculinity. My analysis shows that,
despite giving primacy to racialized gendered power relations as constitutive of
African American masculinities, 1960s ethnographic accounts were in an intertextual dialogue with each other on the nature and the workings of the alleged
“black matriarchy.” While some scholars uncritically reproduced the discourse,
others destabilized it by reformulating gendered power relations within the black
family. Thus it can be said that the ethnographies create a space for competing
representations of African American masculine and feminine identities.
Authored by black and white scholars, those texts belie contentions grounded in
racial stereotyping that the discourse of “black matriarchy” was created and perpetuated by white sociologists alone. I am specifically referring to statements
19 For an overview of Frazier’s scholarship on the black family and the controversies it
caused, see Vernon J. Williams, Jr. “E. Franklin Frazier and the African American Family
in Historical Perspective” (1999). To read about African retentions in the black family
structure, see Niara Sudarkasa, “Interpreting the African Heritage in Afro-American
Family Organization” (1988).
20 To follow the debate between the two schools of thought, the Chicago School of Sociology and the Boasian School of Anthropology at Columbia University, see John F. Szwed,
“An American Anthropological Dilemma: The Politics of Afro-American Culture (1969);
and Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race
1896-1954 (1998). For a critique of Boasian anthropology’s failure to theorize race and
the material consequences of racism, see Kamala Visweswaran’s essay “Race and the
Culture of Anthropology” American Anthropologist” (1998). To trace various the
approaches to black culture within the field of Black Studies, see Talmadge Anderson,
“Black Studies: Overview and Theoretical Perspectives”(1990); Ronald L. Taylor, “The
Study of Black People: A Survey of Empirical and Theoretical Models” (1990), and Terry
Kershaw, “The Emerging Paradigm in Black Studies” (1990).
19
made by bell hooks and Charles V. Willie, both of whom draw generalizations
relying on a single work: the controversial Moynihan Report (1965).
In one of her early essay collections, Ain’t I a Woman (1981), hooks made
all white sociologists complicit in the production of the “black matriarchy.”
Referring to them as “present-day scholars,” “white sociologists,” “male social
scientists,” “racist scholars,” or just “sociologists,” hooks fails to mention their
names (71-82). Their presumed whiteness can be deduced from the book’s
index—the only name entry that corresponds with the topic “matriarchy” is
Moynihan’s.21 A decade later, in a manner similar to hooks’s generalizations,
Willie pointed to the Moynihan Report as pathologizing the African American
family: “a classic case in the journalistic approach that prevails in contemporary
sociology” (451). Willie makes this particular work by the white political scientist representative of all white research on the black family.22 By claiming that it
is white social science that creates racialized “pathology” through the myth of
“black matriarchy,” the black/white dichotomy hooks and Willie set up can easily be undermined when we look closely at the black- and white-authored texts
on the ghetto produced in the 1960s. hooks and Willie overlook the fact that
certain white sociologists fought the pervasive racist stereotypes of black men
and women while others endorsed “black matriarchy” by authorizing their
accounts with the work of black male sociologists.
At the height of the government-sponsored poverty research, black leaders
and activists challenged social scientists’ monopoly on representing African
American ghettoes to the general public and the political establishment. They
offered counter-hegemonic interpretations of American race relations, shifting
the debate on racism from the realm of individual attitudes to that of systemic
racism. Categorized by white sociologist Stephen Steinberg as “the scholarship
of confrontation” (Turning Back 68), this body of writing provided complex
explanations for the growing racial conflict in the post-Civil Rights era unlike
the work of social scientists who
are chronically slow to respond to social change, when it occurs suddenly. . . .
Perhaps for this reason, much of the early writing on the intensifying racial
conflict came from the movement. A score of books were written by movement
leaders and activists who suddenly found themselves with a white audience.
(Steinberg, Turning Back 69-70)
21 hooks modified her views somewhat in the essay “Reconstructing Black Masculinity”
(1992).
22 Willie writes that “many Black social scientists opposed Moynihan’s policy-formulationwithout-theory which was based on his examination of selected family practices; but their
views were ignored in favor of white social scientists who endorsed the Moynihan policyformulations-without-theory as ‘not wholly irresponsible’” (Willie 453, emphasis mine).
20
Among the most influential works of the period he lists the personal accounts of
Malcolm X, Bobby Seale, George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, H. Rap Brown,
Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis. Writing about their experience of race in
America, those leaders and activists, challenged the dominant representations of
African Americans. They located the source of “pathology” in the racial
hierarchies of exploitation and control rather than in the black community or
family.
Four of the autobiographers enumerated by Steinberg—Newton, Seale,
Cleaver, and Jackson were either founders or leading members of the Black
Panther Party. The works of these activists, except for Newton’s Revolutionary
Suicide and Angela Davis’s Angela Davis: An Autobiography, are discussed in
Part II of the present study. Although Cleaver’s Soul on Ice was written before
he joined the Black Panthers, as was much of Jackson’s Soledad Brother, both
writers shared with Newton and Seale decidedly left-wing, postcolonial views
shaped by the reading of Franz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Mao Tse Tung. Their
combined writings became the staple reading of the BPP and had a formative
influence on radical African American youth in the 1960s and 1970s. An
overview of the Party’s ideology and its grassroots initiatives is, therefore,
necessary for our understanding of how the intersection of the autobiographical
and the political shape the radical black male subjectivity.
Influenced by Fanon’s analysis of the colonial system,23 the BPP, established by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in October 1966, likened black communities to spaces colonized by the American state, “a nation within a nation”
(Seale, Seize the Time 92). By pointing to the class and racial hierarchies of
power sustaining the American nation-state, the Panthers disavowed the rhetoric
of integration as a tool of control with which the state “obscures the [class]
struggle with ethnic differences” (92). Invoking the Declaration of Independence
and citizens’ rights, they spoke publicly of seizing control of the black
communities inhabiting the northern ghettoes of urban America. Like Fanon,
they saw revolutionary potential in the lumpenproletariat, the economically
marginalized segment of the society, the politically unaware, un/employable
masses. While the Party’s activity can be divided into two categories—the
political and the social—it is the Panthers’ visible intervention in the public
sphere in the early days of the Party’s existence, especially in the criminal justice system, that constitutes a landmark of the Party’s political activity. Monitoring the police in the black neighborhoods to put an “immediate end to
POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of black people” (88), was the strategy
with which the Panthers set out to implement community control of the public
space in segregated black neighborhoods.
23 See Franz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks (1967) and The Wretched of the Earth (1963).
21
As regards social welfare, the Panthers initiated a series of so-called “survival programs,” whose significance the media downplayed or passed over in
their accounts of the organization. Defining of the Party’s social activity, the
little-publicized community programs were devised to deal with the immediate
needs of the poor by offering free food, clothing, medical treatment, educational
facilities, bussing to prisons and legal support.24 In addition, the Party set out to
educate the ghettoized black people on how to self-organize and use communal
resources to implement long-term social change without reliance on government
support. Regrettably, the BPP was perceived by the establishment mostly as the
“the greatest threat to the internal security of the country” (“What was the Black
Panther Party?”), and thus subject to political and physical decimation by the
FBI’s Cointelpro program by the mid-1970s. This harrowing experience,
including the terminal loss of many colleagues, underpinned the Panthers’
ideological shift away from revolutionary nationalism, through internationalism,
to what Newton called “revolutionary intercommunalism.” The Party’s revised
ideology assumed that black communities, as well other groups or whole nations
entangled in the colonial relationship would become “liberated zones”—selfsustaining and self-governing political and spatial bodies independent of
America’s ideological and economic hegemony (Newton, To Die for the People
20-38; Rod Bush 198-200).
Although the black men’s self-narratives, both radical and mainstream,
can be looked at as products of “interpellation” (Althusser), they also have the
potential to counter the hegemonic renditions of race, poverty, and gender
(Gramsci). Similarly, the male-authored ethnographic accounts, no less immersed in cultural discourses producing “truths” and knowledges (Foucault), can
engage in an oppositional practice which Gramsci calls a war of position, an
intellectual struggle over the contested notion of “black masculinities.” Further,
the social science texts and self-writings under scrutiny here can be usefully
interpreted through Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s work on articulation.
Laclau and Mouffe claim that cultural hegemony “supposes incomplete and
open character of the social, that it can take place only in a field dominated by
articulatory practices” (135). In line with this claim, the two bodies of texts can
be thought of as moments (97) of popular and social-scientific discourses, as
diverse articulations or “nodal points which partially fix the meaning” (113) of
black male subjectivity.
The present study of black masculinities draws on masculinity studies
theories25 developed in the 1990s under the influence of feminism,26 post24 For a detailed discussion of the Panthers’ community programs see Rod Bush’s chapter
on “The Crisis of U.S. Hegemony” (1999).
25 I also found the following useful: Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, eds.,
Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (1994), and Maurice Berger, Brian
Wallis and Simon Watson, eds., Constructing Masculinity (1995); Lynne Segal, Slow
22
structuralism,27 and queer studies, which challenged the heterosexual norm and
homophobic discourses (Butler 1990, 1993; Sedgwick 1990). Among the texts
that constitute the theoretical underpinnings of my analysis are R. W. Connell’s
Masculinities (1995), Stephen M. Whitehead’s Men and Masculinities (2002), as
well as the essay collections: The Making of Masculinities (1992) edited by
Harry Brod; Theorizing Masculinities (1994) edited by Harry Brod and Michael
Kaufman; and The Masculinities Reader (2001) edited by Stephen M.
Whitehead and Frank J. Barrett.28 My work is also informed by Robert Staples’s
study of Black Masculinity (1982); Richard G. Majors and Jacob U. Gordon’s
edited volume The American Black Male (1994); Representing Black Men
(1996) edited by Marcellus Blount and George P. Cunningham; Philip Brian
Harper’s Are We Not Men: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of AfricanAmerican Identity (1996); William F. Pinar’s The Gender Of Racial Politics and
Violence in America (2001); bell hooks’s “Reconstructing Black Masculinity”
(1992); Cornel West’s “Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject” (1993); Kobena
Mercer and Isaac Julien’s “Black Masculinity and the Sexual Politics of Race”
(1994); and Robert F. Reid-Pharr’s “Tearing the Goat’s Flesh: Homosexuality,
Abjection, and the Production of a Late-Twentieth-Century Black Masculinity”
(1997).29
26
27
28
29
Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (1990); John Beynon, Masculinities and
Culture (2002); and Haki Madhubuti’s Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous? (1991).
As for the article-length contributions, the work of the following authors was also helpful:
Andrea Hunter and James Earl Davis’s “Hidden Voices of Black Men: The Meaning,
Structure, and Complexity of Manhood” (1994); Marlon B. Ross’s “In Search of Black
Men’s Masculinities” (1998); Lawson Bush’s “Am I a Man?: A Literature Review
Engaging the Sociohistorical Dynamics of Black Manhood in the United States” (1999).
For a contemporary overview of the influence of the feminist thought on the critical study
of men, see Judith Kegan Gardiner, “Introduction,” Masculinity Studies & Feminist
Theory: New Directions (2002).
Michel Foucault’s work on power and the discursive subject has been a major influence
on the contemporary theories of masculinity.
An exemplary work applying the post-structuralist notions of identity is Gail Bederman’s
Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States,
1880-1917 (1995). The study deals with, among other things, the ideological formations
of “manliness” and “the Negro rapist” by the dominant discourse of civilization.
Bederman writes that “‘Civilization’ positioned African American men as the antithesis
of both the white men and civilization itself. As such, the black men embodied whatever
was most unmanly and uncivilized, including a complete absence of sexual control. . . .
because ‘the Negro rapist’ represented the opposite of civilized manliness, he also
represented primitive masculinity in its purest, most primal form. The male sex drive
itself was widely considered a masculine trait – all men, regardless of race and moral
status, had it” (49).
Popular publications of the Black Power era, such as Calvin C. Hernton’s Sex and Racism
in America (1965), Coming Together: Black Power, White Hatred, and Sexual Hang-ups
23
In my discussion of black masculinity, I adopt a constructivist approach to
identity as a fluid and situational configuration of multiple subject positions that
black men occupy at the intersection of such social divisions as gender, race,
class, and sexual orientation. Therefore, this study investigates a plurality of
masculinities rather than a single and stable category of male gender. Men
should not be thought of as a homogenous “gender class” but as “the aggregation of subclasses” (Hearn and Collinson 106). I understand gender identity as
something that one does, “an ongoing identity embedded in interaction” (West
and Zimmerman 130), as “configurations of gender practice” (Connell 72), and
a performance, an acting out of masculine scripts or discourses that enable one’s
gender identity (Butler 1990; Messerchmidt, 1993; Gutterman 2001).
Masculinities are powerful discourses in themselves, that is “they contain social
and cultural assumptions which . . . are presented as ‘truths’ . . . have identityenabling properties . . . suggest strongly what can and cannot be spoken at a
given time or in a given cultural setting” (Whitehead and Barret 21).
Masculinities are also socially constructed categories subject to the workings of
multiple discourses at a particular historical moment and location. The
discussion of black masculinities, in particular, requires an analysis of power
hierarchies among men. Hegemonic masculinity is “the ability to impose a
particular definition on other kinds of masculinity.” It determines the way
“particular groups of men inhabit positions of power and wealth and how they
legitimate and reproduce the social relations that generate their dominance. . . .
the most important feature of this masculinity, alongside its connection with
dominance, is that it is heterosexual” (Carrigan et al. 179-180).
While my belief is that any complex study of black masculine identities
should include works written from a queer perspective, I was unable to find a
suitable book-length queer text from the period. Given the persistence of homophobia, it is not surprising that African American writer James Baldwin, whose
career began in the 1950s, did not write autobiographically about his own homosexuality until the mid-1980s,30 though he did engage nonnormative male
(1971); and William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs’ Black Rage (1968), have also provided
insights into the then-current debates on race and sexuality.
30 See Baldwin, “Here Be the Dragons” (1984), “Freaks and The American Ideal of
Manhood” (1985) and an interview with Richard Goldstein, “Go the Way Your Blood
Beats” (1985). For a discussion on Baldwin’s writing about race and homosexuality, see
Cora Kaplan, “‘A Cavern Opened in My Mind’: The Poetics of Homosexuality and the
Politics of Masculinity in James Baldwin” (1996); Kendall Thomas, “‘Ain’t Nothing Like
a Real Thing’: Black Masculinity, Gay Sexuality, and the Jargon of Authenticity” (1996);
Douglas Field, “Looking for Jimmy Baldwin: Sex, Privacy, and Black Nationalist Fervor”
(2004); and David Bergman’s chapter on “Gay Black Literature” in Gaiety Transfigured
(1991).
24
sexuality in his fiction.31 Similarly Samuel R. Delany, the celebrated black
science fiction writer who came of age in the early 1960s, dealt with his sexual
“otherness” only in the late 1980s. In his autobiography The Motion of Light in
Water (1988) he recalls how his gradual development of a gay consciousness
paralleled his search for a new language with which to articulate his male
subjectivity: “The political consciousness that was to form by the end of the
sixties had not been part of my world. There were only Negroes and
homosexuals, both of whom—along with artists—were hugely devalued in the
social hierarchy” (242). Delany makes it clear that a language for defining a
black gay male subjectivity simply did not exist “before the ‘sexual revolution’
began to articulate itself” (175).
This preemancipatory silencing of nonnormative masculine subjects does
not preclude the study of masculinity as homophobia. This definition was
penned by sociologist Michael Kimmel to investigate homophobia as “a central
organizing principle of our cultural definition of manhood. . . . a fear that other
men will unmask us, emasculate us, reveal to us and the world that we do not
measure up, that we are nor real men” (“Masculinity as Homophobia” 277). To
dispel any suspicion of being unmanly or gay, Kimmel suggests, American men
construct their subjectivities relationally through a refutation of the feminine and
the fear of the homosexual (278-9). Insights offered by Kimmel reveal the
hierarchical nature of male subjectivity, namely the dominant form of
masculinity defines all other masculinities, including subordinate masculinity
(homosexual men), and marginalized masculinity (men from lower classes or
ethnic groups). In light of those divisions, black men are collectively
marginalized by white middle-class masculinity, whereas black gay men are in a
subordinate relation to black (heterosexual) masculinity. Thus, heterosexual
black men who marginalize gay men are complicit with the white, middle-class
masculine norm. Yet, according to R. W. Connell, all men “benefit from the
patriarchal dividend” which constitutes an entitlement to “honor, prestige, right
to command” and “material dividend”; all men are, to some extent, complicit
with hegemonic masculinity (78-81).
In Chapter 2, I rely on another conceptualization of masculinity launched
by Connell, that of “protest masculinity.” It refers to the collective enactment of
masculinity by men in a position of powerlessness, who make “a claim to the
gendered position of power, [with] a pressurized exaggeration of masculine
conventions” (111). Chapter 7 is informed by the collection of critical essays
Prison Masculinities (2002) edited by Don Sabo et al., and Brigitta Svensson’s
essay “The Power of Biography: Criminal Policy, Prison Life and the Formation
of Criminal Identities in the Swedish Welfare State” (1997). I also draw on
31 See Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), Another Country (1962), Tell Me How Long the
Train’s Been Gone (1968), and Just Above my Head (1979).
25
Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist (1978) by
Bruce Franklin, the first literary study to pay attention to prison literature as a
coherent body of texts.
While the theories of masculinity are applied throughout the book, Part II
also relies on recent approaches to autobiography, which are as firmly grounded
in the poststructuralist understanding of subjectivity as are the studies of masculinity. Rather than speak about a pre-discursive, universal and transhistorical
subject of autobiography, contemporary critics theorize the self as bound up
with a particular act of narration. Along with Betty Bergland, I view the autobiographical “self” as an agent of discourse, “a dynamic subject that changes
over time, is situated historically in the world and positioned in multiple discourses” (134). I also find revealing Sidonie Smith’s argument that “narrative
performativity constitutes interiority. That is, the interiority or self that is said to
be prior to the autobiographical expression or reflection is an effect of autobiographical storytelling” (“Performativity” 109).
Between the 1970s and 1990s, there occurred a shift from thinking about
autobiography as a genre to analyzing it as “autobiographical acts” (Smith and
Watson), “autobiographical voices” (Fischer), or “autobiographical performativity” (Smith, “Performativity” 109). Traditionally, the genre of “autobiography” would reproduce the Western ideologies of individualism, male genius,
patriarchal power and whiteness. As Leigh Gilmore notes, classic autobiographies participate “in the cultural production of a politics of identity, a politics
that maintains identity hierarchies through its reproduction of class, sexuality,
race and gender as terms of ‘difference’ in a social field of power” (5). In this
respect, black men’s autobiographies in general create a narrative space for the
articulation of racialized gender identities (among other non-hegemonic identities) that the genre of “autobiography” excluded with its “politics of identity.”
However, by analyzing the texts of a marginalized group of men, I do not intend
to make the African American men’s self-narratives of the 1960s and ‘70s
representative of a collective, unified and coherent racialized and gendered
identity. Rather, I treat autobiographies as sites of struggle where the competing
discourses of masculinity bring about a diversity of black male subjectivities at a
given historical moment.
Especially Chapter 6, which is a comparative study of Bobby Seale’s constructions of gender identity in his two autobiographies, Seize the Time (1970)
and A Lonely Rage (1978), raises questions about how authorial intentionality,
intended audience, and the historical moment affect the production of autobiographical “truths.” The analysis also reveals the way the speaking subject resorts
to silences, omissions, and shifts of emphasis to project a desired narrative self.
In line with Paul Eakin who problematized feminist critics’ insistence on the
collective and relational character of women’s autobiographies vs. the individual
and autonomous self of men’s autobiographies (48-9), I analyze black men’s
26
constructions of the self as relational, always connected to the lives of
autobiographical others, such as political leaders, family members, or friends.
According to William L. Andrews, it was the revolutionary narratives of
the Black Power era, including those by Seale, Cleaver and Jackson, that
generated questions about the “unprecedented works of black rage and radical
political tradition” (Andrews, “African-American Autobiography” 197) and
spurred research on black autobiography, especially the antebellum slave narratives. The 1980s and ‘90s saw the beginning of “the most extensive excavation
of the history of the genre ever attempted” (Andrews, “Introduction” 2) which
led to a gradual canonization of exemplary texts of black autobiography, such as
Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Booker T.
Washington’s Up From Slavery, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of
an Ex-Colored Man, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn, and Richard Wright’s
Black Boy. Simultaneously, the autobiographies of Zora Neale Hurston, Ida B.
Wells, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Audre Lorde were taken up by
feminist scholars as the subject of critical inquiry. In the fervor of this
“excavation” process, the revolutionary narratives of the Black Power era, as
well as the mainstream bestsellers Brown’s Manchild and Gregory’s Nigger,
were largely overlooked by the contemporary critics of black autobiography.
Throughout this study, I use the term “black” interchangeably with the
category “African American” although I am aware that in the 1960s and 1970s
“black” was the most widespread signifier of a positive racial identity, and it
continues to embrace those who are Afrocentric, share the Pan-Africanist
ideology and distance themselves from mainstream American culture. By
extension, my use of the term “black ghetto” connotes racially segregated and
internally stratified urban communities. Unfortunately, the ethnographic
application and significations of “black ghetto” have been delimited to the most
economically marginalized—a fact that would stigmatize all African Americans
as the ghettoized “underclass” (Wilson).
Chapter 1 focuses on the production of black masculinity in Daniel P.
Moynihan’s highly controversial 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for
National Action. I discuss how Moynihan’s assumptions about ethnic cultures in
America, as well as his overt reliance on Franklin Frazier’s reified “matriarchy,”
led him to pathologize gender identities within the black family. Ignoring the
impact of racist and economic oppression on the lives of poor African Americans, Moynihan makes “black matriarchy” the cause of black men’s nonnormative gender performance. What links Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 is the concept of
“culture of poverty.” Ulf Hannerz’s Soulside draws on the theory of poverty to
show how the African American’s bicultural (mainstream and “ghetto-specific”)
socialization within the family and the peer group determines the fluid and situational character of lower-class subjectivity. In the public space, black men collectively perform the “ghetto-specific” masculinity, which I re-interpret using
27
Connell’s concept of “protest masculinity.” Hannerz indirectly undermines
Moynihan’s claim about the existence of “black matriarchy” by depicting the
black family as “matrifocal,” and highlighting the complexity of male-female
power relations as mediated by economic deprivation and racism.
Chapter 3 looks at David A. Schulz’s Coming Up Black, a study of socialization in poor black families. Locating the ethnography in the discourse of
“anomie,” I show that Schulz constructs black masculinity along two main
trajectories: “man as a husband” and “man as a socializing agent.” Discussing
those two roles separately, Schulz ends up contesting the existence of “black
matriarchy” and its alleged influence on the production of adult masculinities;
yet, he reinscribes Moynihan’s arguments in the context of adolescent masculinity. Despite this ideological incoherence, Schulz’s typology of male marginality is a valuable contribution to our understanding of black male subjectivity.
Not only does the typology challenge the notion that black men are “emasculated” by “black matriarchy” but it also elucidates the way racism and poverty
condition the enactment of gender. Schulz demonstrates that instead of conceptualizing lower-class black masculinity as singular and homogeneous, we should
think of a plurality of fluid masculine identities among poor black men.
The next chapter is a discussion of Kenneth B. Clark’s application of radical
sociology in Dark Ghetto. I set out to determine whether Clark’s attempt at
destabilizing the power relations involved in traditional ethnographic research,
as well as his “insider” perspective, translate into new articulations of black
male subjectivity. Foregrounding interracial conflict, Clark challenges the
consensus paradigm as a feasible framework for the study of black poverty. This
challenge comes from poor black masculinity in terms of power relations among
men along racial and class lines. Yet, notwithstanding his innovative and
perceptive approach, Clark’s study blatantly reproduces the discourse of “black
matriarchy,” pathologizes poor black women, and makes them complicit with
white men’s “emasculation” of black men.
After exploring black masculinity in social science, in Part II I turn to
autobiography. Chapter 5 is a reading of two narratives of success and bestsellers of the 1960s, Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land and Dick
Gregory’s Nigger. By reading them through the theories of autoethnography,
especially Mary Louise Pratt’s articulation of the concept, I try to uncover the
subversive potential of those autobiographies. I investigate how they counter the
dominant discourses on poverty, and in the case of Manchild, the intertwined
discourses of poverty and sexuality. Then, I look at the causal relationship
between autoethnographic resistance to “outsider” representations and the narrative constructions of black masculinities.
Chapter 6 is a comparative analysis of Bobby Seale’s two startlingly different autobiographies Seize the Time and A Lonely Rage, with attention to
Seale’s representations of gender and sexuality. In Seize the Time, I mainly
28
focus on the situational, performative aspect of oppositional collective black
masculinity as embedded in the narrative of conversion. My analysis of A
Lonely Rage investigates how the Bildungsroman mode of narration affects the
various narrative enactments of masculinity in different times and places. What
links the two narratives is the use of sexuality as a masculinity-validating
resource. Comparing the masculine self-representation in the two texts, I
account for their generic differences, functions, intended audiences, and the
changing social and political context.
Chapter 7 explores Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and George Jackson’s
Soledad Brother, and specifically the way those prison self-narratives selectively
comply with and challenge the disciplining power of the prison, and how their
narrators negotiate their racialized masculinities in relation to the criminal
identity imposed on them by the prison. I am particularly interested in how the
homosocial environment and the intramale hierarchies of the prison affect
Cleaver’s and Jackson’s narrative constructions of masculinity around heterosexuality and homophobia.
The book ends with a comparative reading of the ethnographies and autobiographical writing with attention to how they transcend, dispute, as well as
complement mainstream discourses on black subjectivities, male and female.
29