I promised I'd keep these posts short from now. But seeing as my book is about masculinity in part, I wanted to post the following by wiser men and women than me.
Please find below excerpts from the work of Dr. Ornette D. Clennon, bell hooks, Cornel West, Toni Morrison, Margarita Aragon and Danté Stewart
We are forever standing on the shoulders of giants 🙏🏾
What’s the problem with Black Masculinities?
‘bell hooks responded to a question from the audience, picking up on and problematising the use of the term ‘hypermasculine’.
We should be careful about how we use the idea of hypermasculinity when talking about black men, hooks argued: it is patriarchy not masculinity that is the problem. This distinction recognises patriarchy as more than an economic system of male power and privilege and acknowledges the ways in which gendered relationships of power are also racialised, infusing identity, emotions and perspective. Talking of patriarchy as a disease Cornel West writes,
I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I’m going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism, patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.
The distinction between hypermasculinity and patriarchy is a subtle and complicated point. hooks seemed to be saying that if there is no critical thinking space from which to examine masculinity in terms outside of a patriarchy we restrict the room for acknowledging what she refers to as the ‘wounded’ psyche of the black male. How then do we begin to value and nurture black men?
One of the things I’ve always felt so strongly and really expressed in We Real Cool hooks said, ‘is the depth of black male woundedness by patriarchial terrorisim and until those wounds get addressed in some way I don’t think we’re gonna get the respect, the recognition, the care…
It is this notion of “patriarchal terrorism” that intrigues me the most. I see this as a terrorism that hijacks black masculinity, in its continually evolving forms, and turns it in on itself[i]. For me, hypermasculinity is both a cultural artefact and a commodity of patriarchy, with repercussions for us all. It is the commodification of black hypermasculinity as an apparatus of patriarchy that I want to consider more closely.
“You can and should care about black women and how black women are forced to be unseen and unprotected, even by black men who proclaim to be defending them. You also can and should care about black men, our trauma, our humanity, and what it means to be made whole.
One thing that’s going around in my mind is how powerful trauma can be in our lives and how trauma + patriarchy can turn us into terrible things. I’m mostly thinking about the joke, the hit, Denzel talking and then Will laughing with P. Diddy after it all. I’m shook and confused.
I’m not into the whole morality talk right now. “Who is right or who is wrong?” still doesn’t get at what is going on. We have to talk about it all: black women’s vulnerability, black men, trauma, and patriarchy, the history between people, and elder intervening. All of it.
I’m part sad and then part angry and then part confused and then part shook because I have been and seen every part of this play out in my own life. I’ve seen Jada’s. I’ve been Chris. I’ve been Will. I’ve been Denzel. I’ve been P. Diddy. It’s terrible and a teachable moment.
One thing we can’t do is let any of these multiple narratives exist without the other.
But then, trauma does things to us.
It’s easy to do that. This where I hold in tension what’s terrible about us and what can be redeemed in us.
What can’t get lost is Jada and Denzel in all of us: how black women still get erased and have to bear so much more than us even as we black men show our tails and how elders get us straight when we go too far.
All this to say: multiple things are and will be true in moments like this.
Police Violence and the Discourse of (White) Fear
White people,’ thinks Stamp Paid, a ferryman and former slave, in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, ‘believed [that] under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood.’
Consistently through the 20th and now into the 21st century, seething danger has been read into black bodies, their every movement and utterance potentially read as a threat or menacing, unintelligible noise.
Shortly before the beating of Rodney King, Laurence Powell sent a message through his in-car computer to colleagues describing a call he had just attended to involving an African American couple. ‘It was right out of Gorillas of the Mist,’ he wrote, employing the dehumanizing jungle metaphor, much to the apparent amusement of his fellow officers. Less than an hour later, after the infamous stop in which he and two fellow officers stomped, kicked and struck King with batons, he typed, ‘Oops,’ and then, ‘I haven’t beaten anyone this bad in a long time.’ Powell took a different tone when on trial for his part in the attack, telling jurors, ‘I was completely in fear for my life, scared to death that [if] this guy got back up, he was going to take my gun away from me.’
Likewise, Timothy Loehmann, the officer who killed Tamir Rice, has also reported that he shot because he felt his life was in peril. Loehmann’s father told a local news agency his son’s story of the incident: ‘I was right there and he went for the gun. I had no choice.
…
The appeal to fear to justify white violence against black people has a long discursive pedigree. At the turn of the century, Ben ‘Pitchfork’ Tillman, a histrionic Senator from South Carolina toured the United States, lecturing audiences about the ‘black beast’ and the apocalyptic dangers of racial integration. Tillman was not so much a lynching apologist as a lynching promoter. In his fervent depictions of the racial threat, Tillman seemed to suggest that black ‘beastiality’ was enough to invoke the savagery of the white man. ‘I have seen,’ he stated in a speech before the Senate, ‘the very highest and best men we have lose all semblance of Christian human beings in their anger and frenzy when some female of their acquaintance or one of their daughters had been ravished.’ The sickening acts of the lynch mob, then, were not crimes but justice, the savagery of the white mob was but the primordial and righteous response to black savagery. The black man torn apart was therefore responsible for not only his own brutality but that of his executioners.
While an extremist, and highly distasteful to many of his contemporaries, Tillman’s basic premise, that lynching was practiced because black people were inclined towards immorality and lawlessness was widely accepted.
All I have to say on the matter is that on Jada and black hair…
Have a great day
Sam
P.s I know there is going to be some non-black women and /or middle class women who try to take my experiences and use them as their own. Trust me, I will hunt you down if you do and you will catch these hands.
bell hooks and Will Smith
This is great. And no I am not going to write on this. What I saw was what I saw.