Black Men's Studies: Part II
Groundings With My Sisters and My Brothers: Black Men’s Studies in dialogue with Black Women’s Studies
In asserting an intellectual justification for Black Men’s Studies, the answer is found in the strongest critique of black manhood: black women’s studies. Black women’s studies as I attempt to argue, is inclusive of black feminist thought, Africana womanism, and womanist theology, among other areas. In terms of an interrogation of patriarchy, Historian Manning Marable, in “Groundings With My Sisters: Patriarchy and the Exploitation of Black Women,” establishes the fact that black men must assume responsibility for their role played in the oppression and exploitation of black women.
While I agree wholeheartedly with this fact, I also call for a deeper investigation of the roots of patriarchy committed by black men. Primary upon the manifestations of patriarchy among black men, one identifies the violence and sexually-based acts of oppression inflicted, verbally and physically, upon black women minds, bodies, and souls. By contrast, the roots of black men’s contextual adoption of patriarchy can be traced to their inability and, oftentimes, unwillingness and powerlessness, to reconcile their own identities as men, in a holistic sense. A consequence of this inability manifests itself as sociologist Nathan Hare describes it as “frustrated masculinity,” the effect of which results in recklessness, physical abuse and the like against black men deemed "unmanly" as well as black women.
As a response to this unbearable reality, one notices the more recent attempt by black men to make sense out of senselessness and, in so doing, locate themselves in solidarity with black feminist thought. Among the works in this vein include Michael Awkward’s, “A Black Man’s Place in Black Feminist Criticism,” and more recently scholar Mark Anthony Neal’s call to arms, New Black Man. As I resonate with the messages of “black male feminist” intellectuals, being the product of three strong black working class women from South Carolina, I am compelled to look inwardly in order to fill a void left by the lack of self-disclosure of the black men in my life, ranging from my father to my departed great uncle who served in Vietnam.
Is the beginning and ending of the history and story of black men solely grounded in patriarchy, abuse, shame, and regret? Even as one confronts the nightside of what philosopher Alain Locke characterized as “Self-Criticism: the Third Dimension of Culture,” one has to seek freedom through resolution of wrongs perpetrated against self and others as well as wrongs inflicted upon self. From the standpoint of history and historically-based cultural criticism, Black Men’s Studies seeks to probe deep into the spiritual and historical consciousness of black men, as theologian Howard Thurman admonished in his inspiring autobiography, With Head and Heart.[1]
As a black man historian, theologian, and intellectual, my search for a critical theory that emanates from within black men’s experience has led me to the point of proposing Black Men’s Studies. In the path-breaking book on Black men’s Studies to date, The American Black Male: His Present Status and His Future, edited by Richard Majors and Jacob Gordon, the late Clyde W. Franklin, in referencing the popular James Brown hit, “It’s a Man’s World,” queried …. But is it a Black Man’s world?” Understanding the socially constructed nature of manhood and womanhood, Franklin proceeded to ask whether black males could ever be considered “men.” In the same piece, Taylor argues that not until the late 1960s did black men ever really begin to exercise truly self-styled masculinity-what many women’s studies and masculinity studies scholars accurately label as “hypermasculinity.”
Whether one speaks of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, black Christian churches, or any organization in black life, the reality has been, as Richard Majors articulated, that black men, out of developing survival mechanisms, have developed the “cool pose,” or macho sensibility in order to cope with the realities of violence and terror visited upon them and black people generally.
With this understanding in mind, it is difficult to believe, from a historical standpoint, individually and collectively, that the motivations of black men have been solely mere reactions to or imitations of white manhood. Amidst black men’s reactionary rhetoric and imitation of white men’s lives, seemingly lay a deeper and distinctive reality and history of black men in America-one which has been projected beyond the national borders-yet one which has remained buried in the souls of black men.
Hence, there is a definite need to avoid essentializing any one identity of black men as being representative of all black men. Black Masculinity Studies, black sexuality studies, black male feminist theory, or an amorphous black men’s studies alone cannot define the complicated and multi-dimensional reality of varieties of black men.[2]
In the same volume edited by Majors and Gordon, Manning Marable, probes this critical and confrontational men’s identity in all of its necessary parts. Marable delineates the need for black men to confront white history, the black woman, and himself, in order to move beyond a limited fixation on stereotypical and narrow notions of manhood. Marable seems to call for the kind of comprehensive theory that Black Men’s Studies seeks to provide. Marable ponders:
What is a Black Man? Husband and father. Son and brother. Lover and boyfriend.
Uncle and grandfather. Construction worker and sharecropper. Minister and ghetto
Hustler. Doctor and mineworker. Auto mechanic and presidential candidate. What is a Black man in an institutionally racist society, in the social system of modern
capitalist America? The essential tragedy of being Black and male is our inability, as
as men and as people of African descent, to define ourselves without the stereotypes
the larger society imposes upon us and through various institutional means
perpetuates and permeates within our entire culture. Our relations with our sisters,
our parents and children, and indeed across the entire spectrum of human relations
are imprisoned by images of the past, false distortions that seldom if ever capture the
essence of our being. We cannot come to terms with Black women until we
understand the half-hidden stereotypes that have crippled our development and
social consciouness. We cannot challenge racial and sexual inequality, both within
the Black community and across the larger America society, unless we comprehend
the critical difference between the myths about ourselves and the harsh reality of
being Black men.[3]
In this chapter, Marable lends credence to the need for Black Men’s Studies. The only point of departure I would assume would be in the ordering of confrontations. The acts of self-critical confrontations should follow as such: black men, black women, white history, white men and white women. Such an arrangement orients the origns of self-critical examnination as beginning in an interior-directed manner. Black Men’s studies posits the notion that what has been left out of the gender studies equation is a methodical and self-conscious effort on the part of black men, themselves, to deal with their own realities, history, and challenges. The texts and source material, needed in this vital undertaking are available, yet un-mined.
Gloria T. Hull and Barbara Smith, elaborating on the politics and meaning of Black Women’s Studies, offer instructive tools for scholars of a critical Black Men’s Studies. Hull and Smith stated the case for the field clearly, articulating:
Merely to use the term ‘Black women’s studies’ is an act charged with political significance. At the very least, the combining of these words to name a discipline means taking the stance that Black women exist-and exist positively-a stance that is in direct opposition to most of what passes for culture and thought on the North American continent. To use the term and to act on it in a white-male world is an act of political courage.[4]
In contextualizing the need for black women’s studies, the authors elaborate on the condition of black women, which gives rise to the need for an area of study to examine that condition. They continue:
Silimilarly, black men intellectuals, via the avenue of Black Men's studies, must participate in the same sort of multi-layered engagement.
Echoing the continuity in the Black Women’s Studies project, subsequent black women intellectuals have provided further foundational theory for the discipline. In a 1997 interview on the subject of “Whither Black Women’s Studies” noted feminist scholar Beverly Guy-Sheftall, in support of the position of Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith, argued that feminism represented the most appropriate and effective vehicle for the furtherance of black women’s studies. Guy-Sheftall explains the history and reasoning behind this position. She argues:
By contrast, black women intellectuals advancing the notion of African Womanism, rose to challenge the idea that Black Women’s Studies should find sole representation in a feminist voice. An oppositional voice to black feminism, Clenora Hudson-Weems in the early 1990s introduced the concept of Africana Womanism. In defining Africana womanism, in contrast to black feminism, Hudson-Weems asserted in her 1993 work by the same name, the following:
Neither an outgrowth nor an addendum to feminism, Africana Womanism is not Black feminism, African feminism, or Walker’s womanism that some Africana women have come to embrace. Africana Womanism is an ideology created and designed for all women of African descent. It is grounded in African culture, and therefore, it necessarily focuses on the unique experiences, struggles, needs, and desires of Africana women. It critically addresses the dynamics of the conflict between the mainstream feminist, the Black feminist, the African feminist, and the Africana womanist. The conclusion is that Africana Womanism and its agenda are unique and separate from both White feminism and Black feminism, and moreover, to the extent of naming in particular, Africana Womanism differs from African feminism. [7]
Hudson-Weems, while providing justification for Africana Womanism as a philosophy and theoretical construct from which to redefine black women’s studies, also provides in her work, a parallel justification legitimizing black men’s studies. In the tradition of Hudson-Weems, other Afrocentric scholars, such as Nah Dove, have provided continuity for this particular ideological perspective within Black Women’s Studies. Dove echoes Hudson-Weems in criticizing black feminist thought for being narrowly focused and for its overreliance on European paradigms.[8] Hudson-Weems writes:
the Africana woman, in realizing and properly assessing herself and her movement, must properly name herself and her movement-Africana womanist and Africana womanism. This is a key step which many women of African descent have failed to address. While they have taken the initiative to differentiate their struggle from the white woman’s struggle to some degree, they have yet to give their struggle its own name.[9]
These conversations and heated debates, occurring within black women’s studies over the past two or three decades, have not commenced within Black Men’ Studies. In fact, Black Men’s Studies has yet to be defined.
While similar questions can and should be raised within scholarly circles of black men intellectuals, few have publicly arisen in such a way as to define an area as broad as what is proposed herein. Guy-Sheftall and Hudson-Weems are correct to assert that black women’s studies must properly and effectively define itself in order to engage the struggle faced by the many varied men and women who compose gendered black identities. Much of what has come to represent characteristic notions of the socialized nature of black men, has, as a result, rendered many of these men as replicas of their former self, preferring instead to adopt a reclusive, hidden, and mysteriously cold posture.
While black feminist thought is a critical aspect of black women’s studies, it, alone cannot represent black women’s studies; it also needs to operate in dialogue with Africana womanism, and vice versa. Comparatively, black masculinity studies and black sexuality studies represent legitimate and critical areas of investigation within the broader framework of black men’s studies. However, alone, these areas cannot completely “represent” black men’s studies, especially a holistic study of black men and all of their/our complexities.
So, I propose a larger umbrella and framework that includes the study of masculinity but so much more; hence the need to usher into the academy the arrival of black men’s studies. Furthermore, black women’s studies, both black feminist thought and African womanism, cannot fully achieve its goal of dismantling oppression and patriarchy, while fighting to obtain full recognition and realization of the humanity and equality for black women of African descent, until black men are ready to equally come to the table; prepared to honestly dialogue with them about the challenges, pain, patriarchy, co-struggles, etc of our individual and collective sojourn in America. We cannot do that as males or with the cover of masculinity. We can only effectively enter the conversation by first removing the mask and concluding the performance.
Similarly, as was the case with black women’s studies, to argue for the efficacy and legitimacy for black men’s studies as a field of study is “an act charged with political significance.” However, it is more politically charged considering the persistent labeling and association of black men with white patriarchy. It is true that, in response to the continuing assault on black manhood in America, either knowingly or unknowingly, black men in varying manners and instances have sought, to imitate the model of masculinity and manhood as that of white men in America. However, at no point in time in American history or cultural life, especially on a transnational level, have black men and white men ever been on the same footing.
Despite the apparent difficulties of making this case, especially in the academy, it is a necessary argument that must commence. Black men do have a gender as theologian Dwight Hopkins reminds us in his classic work Head and Heart: Black Theology: Past, Present, and Future. Hopkins asserts:
Too many people within the African American community, church, and black theology believe that gender concerns only women. When the gender issue becomes the center of discussion, most black men, for example, become like corpses. Their tongues grow silent; their bodies drop to a limp posture; and their presence fades into a ghostlike absence. Gender, from their vantage point, relates only to black women. If this logic is true, they reason, then it would be another example of black male sexism to enter the conversation and dominate what is said and not said. The flip side of this belief is that African American men do have a gender, which is obviously false. Black men have a male gender, so gender refers to both men and women.[11]
While I agree with Hopkins’ basic argument, I do depart on one aspect, the aspect of linking the term “male” to gender identity. Such a categorization fits a physiological definition. However, as one considers the socio-cultural and historical condition of black men in America, past, present, nationally, and transnationally, black men must reclaim the definition of their own gender identity and must define that as that of a “man.” Even as it is agreed that the designation of “manhood” is a social construction, so also it must be affirmed that the designation, “male” holds a parallel, socially constructed connotation. The inherent challenge lies in constructing an accountable and progressive manhood.
To date, the area of Men’s Studies has been preoccupied with a fixation on the study of white men, devoid of consistent and comprehensive examinations of black men’s specific histories. Black studies, which does find its way into the work of Michael Kimmel, Henry Brod, and others, seems to imitate the socio-cultural condition of white men, especially intra-racial, gendered discourses. The criticism Jackson leveled against black masculinist scholarship holds sway here, evidencing a tremendous void in the literature of men’s studies. Similarly, Whiteness Studies has become increasingly ghettoized as many of its scholars have chosen to distance themselves from a careful critique of the complexities and realities of white manhood in America. While some studies exist to refute such a claim, the majority of works, developed in recent years, clearly demonstrate an inability to confront head on that particular reality.
Black men must also confront the ghosts and demons of having to live up to the standard of white manhood in America and the contentious and multi-dimensional fallout that stems from this historic and often difficult relationship among men, involving issues of power, oppression, and domination. As a critical part of black men’s studies, this dialogue and study of the complex relationships among black and white men, on social, psychological, physical, emotional, and religious/spiritual levels, intertwined in various subsets of study, what could be roughly called black/white manhood studies, could offer much substantive matter that will unlock other aspects of the issue of manhood for both groups. Not only has white womanhood represented the standard bearer for womanhood in America since the founding of the republic, “white manhood,’ has always functioned as the standard bearer for what being a man in America means.[14]
Furthermore, the shadow of white manhood has continued to haunt black men and women, in terms of hindering the development of other progressive models of manhood and womanhood. From this Du Boisian internal and extraneous struggle within the souls, minds, hearts and bodies of black men, have come the cool pose influenced masculinity tactics that have utilized representation, overrepresentation, sexuality, and other criteria to serve as defense mechanisms, in an attempt to deal with the weight, burden, and impossible challenge of manhood in America.
Black men’s studies involves the following theoretical components but is certainly not limited to these. Over time, the dimensions and parameters of the field will expand as further research is explored, re-examined, and re-conceptualized. Black Men’s Studies will redefine historic and contemporary discussions of men’s lives and will include discussions on the following important areas: 1) the Masculinity vs. Manhood debate. 2) the relationship between the study and reality of black men vis-a-via the American Men’s Studies movement. 3) the investigation of varieties of black men and black manhood. 4) engagement with other areas of gender studies, black studies, and black theology including black feminist thought, Africana womanism, and womanist theology in a fruitful conversation. 5) Black Men’s Studies works to define the role of black men who historically and contemporarily have operated as public intellectuals in various black, white, and varied publics. 6) Lastly, Black Men’s Studies seeks to engage Womanist Theology, by articulating and searching for a critical Black Men’s Theology; one which offers the gender counterpart that has been missing from Black Theology and black religious studies.
Much as Cornel West and Eddie Glaude set forth in African American Religious Thought, concerning the need for black religious studies to re-conceptualize its discipline, black men’s studies assumes a similar theoretical justification of revisonist inclusion. West and Glaude’s re-conceptualization of black religious studies, carves out a new integration of the important themes influencing black religious thought. Among these areas include black religious history, the sociology of black religion, gender configurations, and the influence of cultural criticism on the study of black religion. In a related vein, black men’s studies centrally situates the study of black men’s history, as the fulcrum fuelling the call for a new gendered discipline among men.[16]
To study black men properly, one must do so from a transnational and interdisciplinary standpoint-one that examines critically, humanely, and holistically the music, writings, memoirs, achievements, shortcomings, etc of all black men. In support of the conjoined black men’s history and studies project, Hine and Perkins argue in the introduction to volume two of A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity:
It is hoped that the two volumes of A Question of Manhood: A Reader in Black Men’s History and Masculinity will contribute to the growing interest in African American masculinities. Much erroneous information about black men exists, and is widely circulated in the popular media, Most of it depicts black men as negligent, criminal, and genetically prone to violence. But we have chosen historical essays that tell a more complex reality. They convey some sense of the depth and complexity of black men’s multifaceted experiences in the United States. Historically, the great struggle that has engaged black men and women since the first days of their sojourn in the western world has been the survival of all peoples of African descent in the diaspora. As Aldon D. Morris wrote in the foreword to the first volume, we embrace and place before you ‘the noble side of the notion of what it means to be a man.”[17]
While I agree with virtually everything that Perkins and Hine offer concerning black men and manhood in this statement, I still find the ideal of masculinity or masculinities as being inadequate, especially from a historical standpoint, which undergirdes much of black men’s studies theory. In addition to contributing to the growing body of literature of African American masculinities, Perkins and Hine’s groundbreaking study, as well as the works of Patricia Hill Collins; Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith, Hudson-Weems and others, more centrally signal a need for a larger framework for the study of black men, one larger than black masculinity studies can be expected to or should be expected to meet or fulfill.
[1] . Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, eds. Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001, 177-193.; Mark Anthony Neal. New Black Man. New York: Routledge, 2005; Alain Locke, “Self-Criticism: The Third Dimension in Culture,” Phylon. Vol. 11, No. 4. (4th Quarter, 1950), 391-394.
[2] . Richard Majors and Jacob Gordon, eds. The American Black Male: His Present Status and His Future. Chicago, Nelson-Hall Publishers, 1994.
[3] . Manning Marable, “The Black Male: Searching Beyond Stereotypes,” in Richard Majors and Jacob Gordon, eds. The American Black Male: His Present Status and His Future.Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers, 1994, 70.
[4] . Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. New York: The Feminist Press, 1982, xvii.
[5] . Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith, eds. All the Women are White, xvii.
[6] . Beverly Guy-Sheftall with Evelyn M. Hammonds, “Whither Women’s Studies. Interview.” Difference: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.. 9. 3. 1997, 36.
[7] . Clenora Hudson-Weems. Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves. Troy, Michigan: Bedford Publishers, 1993, 24.
[8] . Nah Dove, “African Womanism: An Afriocentric Theory,” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 28, No. 5. (May, 1998), 515.
[9] . Hudson-Weems, Africana Womanism, 55-56.
[10] . Ronald L. Jackson, II, “Black Manhood as Xenophobe: An Ontological Exploration of the Hegelian Dialectic,” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 27, No. 6. (July 1997): 731-732. For a detailed history of Black Men in America, see Christopher Booker. “I Will Wear No Chain!” A Social History of African American Males. Westport: Praeger, 2000.
[11] Dwight N. Hopkins. Between Head and Heart: Black Theology, Past, Present, and Future. New York: Palgrave, 2003, 91.
[12] . Na’im Akbar. Visions for Black Men. Tallahassee: Mind Productions & Associates, 1993; Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land. New York: New American Library, 1965.
[13] . Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1991; David Roediger. Colored White: Transcending The Racial Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; David Roediger, ed. Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to Be White. New York: Shocken Books, 1998; Bruce Triaster, “Academic Viagara: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies,” American Studies Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 2 (June 2000), 274-284.
[14] . Dana D. Nelson. National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998; Toni Morrison. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992; Johnetta B. Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Gender Talk: The Struggle For Women’s Equality in African American Communities. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003.
[15] . Grace Hale. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation, 1890-1940. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998; 13-35; Daniel P. Black. Dismantling Black Manhood: An Historical and Literary Analysis of the Legacy of Slavery. New York: Garland Publishers, 1997.
[16] . Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., eds. African American Religious Thought: An Anthology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.
[17] . Earnestine Jenkins and Darlene Clark Hine, ed. A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity. Vol. 2. The Nineteenth Century: From Emancipation to Jim Crow. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000, 11.
In asserting an intellectual justification for Black Men’s Studies, the answer is found in the strongest critique of black manhood: black women’s studies. Black women’s studies as I attempt to argue, is inclusive of black feminist thought, Africana womanism, and womanist theology, among other areas. In terms of an interrogation of patriarchy, Historian Manning Marable, in “Groundings With My Sisters: Patriarchy and the Exploitation of Black Women,” establishes the fact that black men must assume responsibility for their role played in the oppression and exploitation of black women.
While I agree wholeheartedly with this fact, I also call for a deeper investigation of the roots of patriarchy committed by black men. Primary upon the manifestations of patriarchy among black men, one identifies the violence and sexually-based acts of oppression inflicted, verbally and physically, upon black women minds, bodies, and souls. By contrast, the roots of black men’s contextual adoption of patriarchy can be traced to their inability and, oftentimes, unwillingness and powerlessness, to reconcile their own identities as men, in a holistic sense. A consequence of this inability manifests itself as sociologist Nathan Hare describes it as “frustrated masculinity,” the effect of which results in recklessness, physical abuse and the like against black men deemed "unmanly" as well as black women.
As a response to this unbearable reality, one notices the more recent attempt by black men to make sense out of senselessness and, in so doing, locate themselves in solidarity with black feminist thought. Among the works in this vein include Michael Awkward’s, “A Black Man’s Place in Black Feminist Criticism,” and more recently scholar Mark Anthony Neal’s call to arms, New Black Man. As I resonate with the messages of “black male feminist” intellectuals, being the product of three strong black working class women from South Carolina, I am compelled to look inwardly in order to fill a void left by the lack of self-disclosure of the black men in my life, ranging from my father to my departed great uncle who served in Vietnam.
Is the beginning and ending of the history and story of black men solely grounded in patriarchy, abuse, shame, and regret? Even as one confronts the nightside of what philosopher Alain Locke characterized as “Self-Criticism: the Third Dimension of Culture,” one has to seek freedom through resolution of wrongs perpetrated against self and others as well as wrongs inflicted upon self. From the standpoint of history and historically-based cultural criticism, Black Men’s Studies seeks to probe deep into the spiritual and historical consciousness of black men, as theologian Howard Thurman admonished in his inspiring autobiography, With Head and Heart.[1]
As a black man historian, theologian, and intellectual, my search for a critical theory that emanates from within black men’s experience has led me to the point of proposing Black Men’s Studies. In the path-breaking book on Black men’s Studies to date, The American Black Male: His Present Status and His Future, edited by Richard Majors and Jacob Gordon, the late Clyde W. Franklin, in referencing the popular James Brown hit, “It’s a Man’s World,” queried …. But is it a Black Man’s world?” Understanding the socially constructed nature of manhood and womanhood, Franklin proceeded to ask whether black males could ever be considered “men.” In the same piece, Taylor argues that not until the late 1960s did black men ever really begin to exercise truly self-styled masculinity-what many women’s studies and masculinity studies scholars accurately label as “hypermasculinity.”
Whether one speaks of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Nation of Islam, Black Panthers, black Christian churches, or any organization in black life, the reality has been, as Richard Majors articulated, that black men, out of developing survival mechanisms, have developed the “cool pose,” or macho sensibility in order to cope with the realities of violence and terror visited upon them and black people generally.
With this understanding in mind, it is difficult to believe, from a historical standpoint, individually and collectively, that the motivations of black men have been solely mere reactions to or imitations of white manhood. Amidst black men’s reactionary rhetoric and imitation of white men’s lives, seemingly lay a deeper and distinctive reality and history of black men in America-one which has been projected beyond the national borders-yet one which has remained buried in the souls of black men.
Hence, there is a definite need to avoid essentializing any one identity of black men as being representative of all black men. Black Masculinity Studies, black sexuality studies, black male feminist theory, or an amorphous black men’s studies alone cannot define the complicated and multi-dimensional reality of varieties of black men.[2]
In the same volume edited by Majors and Gordon, Manning Marable, probes this critical and confrontational men’s identity in all of its necessary parts. Marable delineates the need for black men to confront white history, the black woman, and himself, in order to move beyond a limited fixation on stereotypical and narrow notions of manhood. Marable seems to call for the kind of comprehensive theory that Black Men’s Studies seeks to provide. Marable ponders:
What is a Black Man? Husband and father. Son and brother. Lover and boyfriend.
Uncle and grandfather. Construction worker and sharecropper. Minister and ghetto
Hustler. Doctor and mineworker. Auto mechanic and presidential candidate. What is a Black man in an institutionally racist society, in the social system of modern
capitalist America? The essential tragedy of being Black and male is our inability, as
as men and as people of African descent, to define ourselves without the stereotypes
the larger society imposes upon us and through various institutional means
perpetuates and permeates within our entire culture. Our relations with our sisters,
our parents and children, and indeed across the entire spectrum of human relations
are imprisoned by images of the past, false distortions that seldom if ever capture the
essence of our being. We cannot come to terms with Black women until we
understand the half-hidden stereotypes that have crippled our development and
social consciouness. We cannot challenge racial and sexual inequality, both within
the Black community and across the larger America society, unless we comprehend
the critical difference between the myths about ourselves and the harsh reality of
being Black men.[3]
In this chapter, Marable lends credence to the need for Black Men’s Studies. The only point of departure I would assume would be in the ordering of confrontations. The acts of self-critical confrontations should follow as such: black men, black women, white history, white men and white women. Such an arrangement orients the origns of self-critical examnination as beginning in an interior-directed manner. Black Men’s studies posits the notion that what has been left out of the gender studies equation is a methodical and self-conscious effort on the part of black men, themselves, to deal with their own realities, history, and challenges. The texts and source material, needed in this vital undertaking are available, yet un-mined.
Gloria T. Hull and Barbara Smith, elaborating on the politics and meaning of Black Women’s Studies, offer instructive tools for scholars of a critical Black Men’s Studies. Hull and Smith stated the case for the field clearly, articulating:
Merely to use the term ‘Black women’s studies’ is an act charged with political significance. At the very least, the combining of these words to name a discipline means taking the stance that Black women exist-and exist positively-a stance that is in direct opposition to most of what passes for culture and thought on the North American continent. To use the term and to act on it in a white-male world is an act of political courage.[4]
In contextualizing the need for black women’s studies, the authors elaborate on the condition of black women, which gives rise to the need for an area of study to examine that condition. They continue:
Like any politically disfranchised group, Black women could not exist consciously until we began to name ourselves. The growth of Black women’s studies is an essential aspect of that process of naming. The very fact that Black women’s studies describes something that is really happening, a burgeoning field of study, indicates that there are political changes afoot which have made possible that growth. To examine the politics of Black women’s studies means to consider not only what it is, but why it is and what it can be. Politics is used here in the widest sense to mean any situation/relationship of differential power between groups or individuals.[5]
Silimilarly, black men intellectuals, via the avenue of Black Men's studies, must participate in the same sort of multi-layered engagement.
Echoing the continuity in the Black Women’s Studies project, subsequent black women intellectuals have provided further foundational theory for the discipline. In a 1997 interview on the subject of “Whither Black Women’s Studies” noted feminist scholar Beverly Guy-Sheftall, in support of the position of Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith, argued that feminism represented the most appropriate and effective vehicle for the furtherance of black women’s studies. Guy-Sheftall explains the history and reasoning behind this position. She argues:
Black women’s studies, almost from its inception, wanted to theorize about the oppression of women of African descent but also wanted very much to talk about the ways that black women resisted. Black women’s studies consciously and very explicitly wanted not to construct a discourse that primarily emphasized black women’s victimhood. At the same time though, black women’s studies advocates were up against the notion that black women were in fact not oppressed and had not been victimized. So we had to find a balance between the two premises because within African American communities there’s the notion that black women have not been victimized at all, particularly vis-à-vis black men. This was the difficult balance that black women’s studies had to negotiate."[6]
By contrast, black women intellectuals advancing the notion of African Womanism, rose to challenge the idea that Black Women’s Studies should find sole representation in a feminist voice. An oppositional voice to black feminism, Clenora Hudson-Weems in the early 1990s introduced the concept of Africana Womanism. In defining Africana womanism, in contrast to black feminism, Hudson-Weems asserted in her 1993 work by the same name, the following:
Neither an outgrowth nor an addendum to feminism, Africana Womanism is not Black feminism, African feminism, or Walker’s womanism that some Africana women have come to embrace. Africana Womanism is an ideology created and designed for all women of African descent. It is grounded in African culture, and therefore, it necessarily focuses on the unique experiences, struggles, needs, and desires of Africana women. It critically addresses the dynamics of the conflict between the mainstream feminist, the Black feminist, the African feminist, and the Africana womanist. The conclusion is that Africana Womanism and its agenda are unique and separate from both White feminism and Black feminism, and moreover, to the extent of naming in particular, Africana Womanism differs from African feminism. [7]
Hudson-Weems, while providing justification for Africana Womanism as a philosophy and theoretical construct from which to redefine black women’s studies, also provides in her work, a parallel justification legitimizing black men’s studies. In the tradition of Hudson-Weems, other Afrocentric scholars, such as Nah Dove, have provided continuity for this particular ideological perspective within Black Women’s Studies. Dove echoes Hudson-Weems in criticizing black feminist thought for being narrowly focused and for its overreliance on European paradigms.[8] Hudson-Weems writes:
the Africana woman, in realizing and properly assessing herself and her movement, must properly name herself and her movement-Africana womanist and Africana womanism. This is a key step which many women of African descent have failed to address. While they have taken the initiative to differentiate their struggle from the white woman’s struggle to some degree, they have yet to give their struggle its own name.[9]
These conversations and heated debates, occurring within black women’s studies over the past two or three decades, have not commenced within Black Men’ Studies. In fact, Black Men’s Studies has yet to be defined.
While similar questions can and should be raised within scholarly circles of black men intellectuals, few have publicly arisen in such a way as to define an area as broad as what is proposed herein. Guy-Sheftall and Hudson-Weems are correct to assert that black women’s studies must properly and effectively define itself in order to engage the struggle faced by the many varied men and women who compose gendered black identities. Much of what has come to represent characteristic notions of the socialized nature of black men, has, as a result, rendered many of these men as replicas of their former self, preferring instead to adopt a reclusive, hidden, and mysteriously cold posture.
Currently, this blanket identification with black masculinity has positioned black men as non-humans, posturing notions that their identity is relegated exclusively to the sexual, profane, and erotic realms. In the academy, black masculinity studies has come to represent, in its totality, black men’s studies by default and without discussion, evidencing a lack of serious dialogue and constructive engagement within the community of men. Despite evident diversities, the composition of black men transcends sexuality.
In terms of nommo or naming, most black men intellectuals cannot bring themselves to the point to call themselves men, which begs the question queried since our arrival on these shores: Am I a Man? Are We Men? Perceptively, communications studies scholar Ronald Jackson raises a critical indictment against Black masculinist scholarship for its uncritical acceptance, approval and adoption of “the same cultural, social, and political agendas as traditional White masculinist scholarship.” Jackson concedes that there exist shared theoretical commonalities between the study of white men and black men, but forcefully argues that “there is a distinction that emerges where gender meets culture.”[10]
While black feminist thought is a critical aspect of black women’s studies, it, alone cannot represent black women’s studies; it also needs to operate in dialogue with Africana womanism, and vice versa. Comparatively, black masculinity studies and black sexuality studies represent legitimate and critical areas of investigation within the broader framework of black men’s studies. However, alone, these areas cannot completely “represent” black men’s studies, especially a holistic study of black men and all of their/our complexities.
So, I propose a larger umbrella and framework that includes the study of masculinity but so much more; hence the need to usher into the academy the arrival of black men’s studies. Furthermore, black women’s studies, both black feminist thought and African womanism, cannot fully achieve its goal of dismantling oppression and patriarchy, while fighting to obtain full recognition and realization of the humanity and equality for black women of African descent, until black men are ready to equally come to the table; prepared to honestly dialogue with them about the challenges, pain, patriarchy, co-struggles, etc of our individual and collective sojourn in America. We cannot do that as males or with the cover of masculinity. We can only effectively enter the conversation by first removing the mask and concluding the performance.
Similarly, as was the case with black women’s studies, to argue for the efficacy and legitimacy for black men’s studies as a field of study is “an act charged with political significance.” However, it is more politically charged considering the persistent labeling and association of black men with white patriarchy. It is true that, in response to the continuing assault on black manhood in America, either knowingly or unknowingly, black men in varying manners and instances have sought, to imitate the model of masculinity and manhood as that of white men in America. However, at no point in time in American history or cultural life, especially on a transnational level, have black men and white men ever been on the same footing.
Despite the apparent difficulties of making this case, especially in the academy, it is a necessary argument that must commence. Black men do have a gender as theologian Dwight Hopkins reminds us in his classic work Head and Heart: Black Theology: Past, Present, and Future. Hopkins asserts:
Too many people within the African American community, church, and black theology believe that gender concerns only women. When the gender issue becomes the center of discussion, most black men, for example, become like corpses. Their tongues grow silent; their bodies drop to a limp posture; and their presence fades into a ghostlike absence. Gender, from their vantage point, relates only to black women. If this logic is true, they reason, then it would be another example of black male sexism to enter the conversation and dominate what is said and not said. The flip side of this belief is that African American men do have a gender, which is obviously false. Black men have a male gender, so gender refers to both men and women.[11]
While I agree with Hopkins’ basic argument, I do depart on one aspect, the aspect of linking the term “male” to gender identity. Such a categorization fits a physiological definition. However, as one considers the socio-cultural and historical condition of black men in America, past, present, nationally, and transnationally, black men must reclaim the definition of their own gender identity and must define that as that of a “man.” Even as it is agreed that the designation of “manhood” is a social construction, so also it must be affirmed that the designation, “male” holds a parallel, socially constructed connotation. The inherent challenge lies in constructing an accountable and progressive manhood.
The difference between the two terms has been interpreted by black men psychologists such as Na’im Akbar. Akbar and others argue that the term “male” translates more closely to “boy” and “mannish,” both descriptors failing miserably as attempts at achieving or depicting complex states of manhood.
Even when one adopts the in between and ambivalent perspective shared by Claude Brown in his important novel, Manchild in the Promised Land, one has to go beyond maleness and masculinity in order to fully understand the enormous complexities constitutive of transnational black manhood.[12] Economically marginalized sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee affirmed in thought and deed that they were indeed, “Men.” Placards read, “I Am a Man,” with no reference to male, manchild, or the equivalent.
To date, the area of Men’s Studies has been preoccupied with a fixation on the study of white men, devoid of consistent and comprehensive examinations of black men’s specific histories. Black studies, which does find its way into the work of Michael Kimmel, Henry Brod, and others, seems to imitate the socio-cultural condition of white men, especially intra-racial, gendered discourses. The criticism Jackson leveled against black masculinist scholarship holds sway here, evidencing a tremendous void in the literature of men’s studies. Similarly, Whiteness Studies has become increasingly ghettoized as many of its scholars have chosen to distance themselves from a careful critique of the complexities and realities of white manhood in America. While some studies exist to refute such a claim, the majority of works, developed in recent years, clearly demonstrate an inability to confront head on that particular reality.
While important, these studies fail to, comparatively, provide insightful analysis of the historical relationship between black men and white men. Few historians with the exception of David Roediger and Darlene Clark Hine, respectively, have entered the conversation to correct incomplete and inaccurate historical analysis offered by some social theorists and literary scholars, including post-modernists, who are themselves criticized by Patricia Hill Collins in her work, Black Feminist Thought.
Consequently, the result of more black men intellectuals choosing to bypass the issue of theorizing their own histories and critiquing themselves has intensified the criticism levied against them for historic and current irresponsibility, patriarchy, and powerlessness. Much of the continued criticism could be attributed, in part, to the fact that more black men remain outside of the realm of discourse occurring among gendered publics. Even amidst serious criticisms that black men who assert an identity of agency are being patriarchal, without black men engaging in increasing levels of self-criticism, scholars of black women’s studies and black sexuality studies will find themselves continually “playing in the dark.”[13]
Black men must also confront the ghosts and demons of having to live up to the standard of white manhood in America and the contentious and multi-dimensional fallout that stems from this historic and often difficult relationship among men, involving issues of power, oppression, and domination. As a critical part of black men’s studies, this dialogue and study of the complex relationships among black and white men, on social, psychological, physical, emotional, and religious/spiritual levels, intertwined in various subsets of study, what could be roughly called black/white manhood studies, could offer much substantive matter that will unlock other aspects of the issue of manhood for both groups. Not only has white womanhood represented the standard bearer for womanhood in America since the founding of the republic, “white manhood,’ has always functioned as the standard bearer for what being a man in America means.[14]
Furthermore, the shadow of white manhood has continued to haunt black men and women, in terms of hindering the development of other progressive models of manhood and womanhood. From this Du Boisian internal and extraneous struggle within the souls, minds, hearts and bodies of black men, have come the cool pose influenced masculinity tactics that have utilized representation, overrepresentation, sexuality, and other criteria to serve as defense mechanisms, in an attempt to deal with the weight, burden, and impossible challenge of manhood in America.
This shadow has contributed, in varying ways, to the “invisibility” and phantom-like existence that both Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin articulated so well. Such an existence has propelled black intellectuals such as Ellison, Albert Murray, and Stanley Crouch to adopt what amounts to a neutral positional identity, one that hopes to maintain a unity between the two selves Du Bois hoped would never be torn asunder.
In the process, the battle over manhood became a battle over representation and sexuality, with notions of religion/spirituality and intellect mixed in a strange psycho-social-historical brew. In this sense, not only has rac perplexed and plagued black men of varying sexualities, religions, and intellects, it has also served to cast a veil over its connected and conjoined twin: gender. For example, black men were lynched in the period Rayford Logan characterizes as “the nadir” not only because they were “black” but because they were men. The challenges of numerous historical moments forced black men to assert either some self-defined negotiation of the Du Boisian dual identity or submerge any feeling at all.
The realization of this definitive moment has been decidedly stark for many black men, realizing that their inability to offer an effective response and resolution to the threat of white manhood and the inverse fear of black manhood, could end in injury or death. As in the case of Emmit Till, any assumed assertion of agency or authentic black manhood posed too much for the wages of white manhood. Subsequently, black men, in varying ways, chose to descend down into the underground, in a manner likened to Ellison’s “invisible man.” Today, the over-preoccupation and concentration on “masculinity” is reflective of such a reoccurring and sad trend in American life and culture. Instead of carving out new terrain, gender and cultures studies have chosen, thus far, to focus on illustrating, as opposed to interpreting the reasoning for the escapism of black men.[15]
Black men’s studies involves the following theoretical components but is certainly not limited to these. Over time, the dimensions and parameters of the field will expand as further research is explored, re-examined, and re-conceptualized. Black Men’s Studies will redefine historic and contemporary discussions of men’s lives and will include discussions on the following important areas: 1) the Masculinity vs. Manhood debate. 2) the relationship between the study and reality of black men vis-a-via the American Men’s Studies movement. 3) the investigation of varieties of black men and black manhood. 4) engagement with other areas of gender studies, black studies, and black theology including black feminist thought, Africana womanism, and womanist theology in a fruitful conversation. 5) Black Men’s Studies works to define the role of black men who historically and contemporarily have operated as public intellectuals in various black, white, and varied publics. 6) Lastly, Black Men’s Studies seeks to engage Womanist Theology, by articulating and searching for a critical Black Men’s Theology; one which offers the gender counterpart that has been missing from Black Theology and black religious studies.
In summation, related fields of Black Men’s Studies consist of areas incorporating theory building within the field itself: U.S. black men’s history, black men’s literary and cultural studies, biographical and autobiographical studies, oral tradition studies, black masculinity studies, black sexuality studies, black men intellectual studies, and black men’s theology. This series will end with a postscript of sorts that provides recommendations of where we go from here, mirroring the example set out by Hull-Bell-Scott, and Smith.
Much as Cornel West and Eddie Glaude set forth in African American Religious Thought, concerning the need for black religious studies to re-conceptualize its discipline, black men’s studies assumes a similar theoretical justification of revisonist inclusion. West and Glaude’s re-conceptualization of black religious studies, carves out a new integration of the important themes influencing black religious thought. Among these areas include black religious history, the sociology of black religion, gender configurations, and the influence of cultural criticism on the study of black religion. In a related vein, black men’s studies centrally situates the study of black men’s history, as the fulcrum fuelling the call for a new gendered discipline among men.[16]
To study black men properly, one must do so from a transnational and interdisciplinary standpoint-one that examines critically, humanely, and holistically the music, writings, memoirs, achievements, shortcomings, etc of all black men. In support of the conjoined black men’s history and studies project, Hine and Perkins argue in the introduction to volume two of A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity:
It is hoped that the two volumes of A Question of Manhood: A Reader in Black Men’s History and Masculinity will contribute to the growing interest in African American masculinities. Much erroneous information about black men exists, and is widely circulated in the popular media, Most of it depicts black men as negligent, criminal, and genetically prone to violence. But we have chosen historical essays that tell a more complex reality. They convey some sense of the depth and complexity of black men’s multifaceted experiences in the United States. Historically, the great struggle that has engaged black men and women since the first days of their sojourn in the western world has been the survival of all peoples of African descent in the diaspora. As Aldon D. Morris wrote in the foreword to the first volume, we embrace and place before you ‘the noble side of the notion of what it means to be a man.”[17]
While I agree with virtually everything that Perkins and Hine offer concerning black men and manhood in this statement, I still find the ideal of masculinity or masculinities as being inadequate, especially from a historical standpoint, which undergirdes much of black men’s studies theory. In addition to contributing to the growing body of literature of African American masculinities, Perkins and Hine’s groundbreaking study, as well as the works of Patricia Hill Collins; Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith, Hudson-Weems and others, more centrally signal a need for a larger framework for the study of black men, one larger than black masculinity studies can be expected to or should be expected to meet or fulfill.
Lastly, Black Men’s Studies must examine black manhood as it appears in all walks of life. Not only should the of the field interpret “Great Black Men” of history and view black men as objects of desire, envy, and property, but black men’s studies must examine all black men as subjects and actors in their own unfolding historical drama, in all of our complexities, nuances, creative moments, etc.
For example the songs of Sam Cooke, the lyrics of The Game; the films of Oscar Micheaux, the photography of Gordan Parks, and the art of Jacob Lawrence are as relevant texts as are the prose of Paul Laurence Dunbar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sterling Brown, and Cornel West. Similarly relevany are the revelations of my uncle about the joys and frustrations of his life. They all tell a story and in their stories, black communities and families, including black women, can acheive sustained social justice, truth, and healing. Henry Louis Gates' important offering, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, highlighted thirteen personal portraits of black men, with the understanding that thirteen examples are not nearly enough to capture the diversity of experience embedded within that gender. Black Men’s Studies stands to provide limitless intellectual space for the continued interrogation of these diverse experiences of men.
[1] . Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, eds. Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001, 177-193.; Mark Anthony Neal. New Black Man. New York: Routledge, 2005; Alain Locke, “Self-Criticism: The Third Dimension in Culture,” Phylon. Vol. 11, No. 4. (4th Quarter, 1950), 391-394.
[2] . Richard Majors and Jacob Gordon, eds. The American Black Male: His Present Status and His Future. Chicago, Nelson-Hall Publishers, 1994.
[3] . Manning Marable, “The Black Male: Searching Beyond Stereotypes,” in Richard Majors and Jacob Gordon, eds. The American Black Male: His Present Status and His Future.Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers, 1994, 70.
[4] . Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. New York: The Feminist Press, 1982, xvii.
[5] . Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith, eds. All the Women are White, xvii.
[6] . Beverly Guy-Sheftall with Evelyn M. Hammonds, “Whither Women’s Studies. Interview.” Difference: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies.. 9. 3. 1997, 36.
[7] . Clenora Hudson-Weems. Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves. Troy, Michigan: Bedford Publishers, 1993, 24.
[8] . Nah Dove, “African Womanism: An Afriocentric Theory,” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 28, No. 5. (May, 1998), 515.
[9] . Hudson-Weems, Africana Womanism, 55-56.
[10] . Ronald L. Jackson, II, “Black Manhood as Xenophobe: An Ontological Exploration of the Hegelian Dialectic,” Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 27, No. 6. (July 1997): 731-732. For a detailed history of Black Men in America, see Christopher Booker. “I Will Wear No Chain!” A Social History of African American Males. Westport: Praeger, 2000.
[11] Dwight N. Hopkins. Between Head and Heart: Black Theology, Past, Present, and Future. New York: Palgrave, 2003, 91.
[12] . Na’im Akbar. Visions for Black Men. Tallahassee: Mind Productions & Associates, 1993; Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land. New York: New American Library, 1965.
[13] . Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 1991; David Roediger. Colored White: Transcending The Racial Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; David Roediger, ed. Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to Be White. New York: Shocken Books, 1998; Bruce Triaster, “Academic Viagara: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies,” American Studies Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 2 (June 2000), 274-284.
[14] . Dana D. Nelson. National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998; Toni Morrison. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992; Johnetta B. Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Gender Talk: The Struggle For Women’s Equality in African American Communities. New York: Ballantine Books, 2003.
[15] . Grace Hale. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation, 1890-1940. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998; 13-35; Daniel P. Black. Dismantling Black Manhood: An Historical and Literary Analysis of the Legacy of Slavery. New York: Garland Publishers, 1997.
[16] . Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., eds. African American Religious Thought: An Anthology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.
[17] . Earnestine Jenkins and Darlene Clark Hine, ed. A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity. Vol. 2. The Nineteenth Century: From Emancipation to Jim Crow. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000, 11.
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