Black Mens Studies. Serie McDougal III
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have them. Knowing the variations in ways of thinking and style characteristics of Black males can be used to improve the delivery of basic human services—healthcare, education, faith-based initiatives, and the formulation of public policy. Teaching and learning can be improved through making use of African American music, Black male behavioral styles, intellectual heritage, and the learning styles that prove most effective with Black males compared to other demographics. Knowing the cultural rituals, values, and spiritual beliefs of Black males can help mental health professionals integrate cultural practices into their therapy modalities or seek resources that may benefit more Black males.
Although some service providers are culturally sensitive, others struggle to construct culturally congruent practices that are aligned with the culture of the people they serve (Nobles, 2015). Knowledge of Black male cultural characteristics helps in constructing culturally relevant teaching practices, intervention strategies, and other services.
Culturally Determined Definitional Systems and Cultural Misperception
The cultural norms that have primarily been institutionalized in the U.S. context are those reflecting a worldview characterized by materialism, individualism, control, aggression, opposition-dichotomous thinking, linear-order ranking, anti-Blackness, and White superiority (Kambon, 2003). The dominant values in the African worldview (spirituality, synthesis, collectivism, and inclusiveness) are in direct conflict with many core values in this European-derived dominant value system, according to Kambon (2003). Eurocentric history, culture, ideas and social philosophy, beliefs, and values have been so thoroughly institutionalized that they are taken for granted. But they are a driving societal force ←23 | 24→(Kambon, 2003). Kambon (1985, 2003) explains that the European worldview has shaped the basic ideological-philosophical character of American social reality. The European worldview is reflected in standard American approaches to education, saturated with Eurocentric values, history, and behavioral priorities and preference; standard psychological assessments are derived from Eurocentric cultural assumptions; and, entertainment is saturated with projections of Eurocentric standards of visual and performing arts and beauty.
Due to European Americans disproportionate share of power and influence, Kambon (1985) argues that the imposition of White American cultural norms has resulted in varying levels of psychological misorientation among African Americans. Therefore, there is very little in American society that would problematize an African American man who evaluated his features as unattractive, African American musical traditions as low-class, African American styles of worship as uncivilized, African American linguistic styles as signals of lack of intelligence, African religions as barbaric, and African American values as unsuited for modern society. People of African descent who embrace the legitimacy of their own cultural realities can anticipate facing social punishment for their deviation from the norm. According to Kambon (1985), this state of mind represents a state of psychological misorientation that must be remedied by the reconstruction and re-institutionalization of values and norms that affirm the cultural and social realities of people of African descent.
In many cases, without cultural understanding and appreciation, Black male culture can be perceived as off-putting and deviant (Johnson & Cuyjet, 2009). Specifically, this may occur in settings where Black men are expected to assimilate the behaviors and characteristics of dominant society’s cultural norms. This is, in part, because dominant society rarely imagines Black male identities outside of radical dichotomies (Neal, 2013). Black males in school settings face negative reactions from teachers in response to their culturally conditioned behaviors, from their movement styles to linguistic styles. For example, experimental research has demonstrated that teachers associate Black male cultural walking styles with lower academic achievement, higher levels of aggression, and a need for special education services (Beasley, Miller, & Cokely, 2014). Black male cultural liberty is reduced when teachers make judgments about abilities and mental capacities based on cultural styles.
Similar judgments may be made about Black males in work settings. Youth cultural styles come in and out of vogue over time. However, according to Whiting (2014), the stakes are much higher for Black and Brown males who face criminalization, incarceration, and murder (e.g., the killing of Trayvon Martin) for their cultural styles. According to Bonner (2014), some high-achieving Black students go unidentified and therefore miss out on advanced placement opportunities because they are culturally out of sync with teachers. Majors and Gordon (1994) make the point that some Black males in school settings face being suspended for culturally influenced behaviors such as playing the dozens, their clothing styles, rapping, and using slang. Many people associate Black males and their non-verbal and verbal cultural styles with criminality, violence, and aggressiveness (Sutherland & Carrone, 2009). Due to these stereotypes, Black males risk being profiled by police officers as criminal, just as they risk being profiled by teachers as unintelligent. Black male cultural styles play a role in police judgments; any number of police killings of unarmed Black males demonstrate this reality. Young (2007) points out that when the cultural styles of Black males are assigned to a negative profile, educators can be led to believe that African American culture is a problem that must change while White children’s cultures may remain intact.
Many non-Blacks adopt not only the social and political messages that accompany Black Male forms of cultural expression (i.e., hip-hop), but also a fetishized kind of commodity racism that reduces Black male culture to stereotypical images—for profit. Even in mainstream culture, African American males ←24 | 25→are fetishized, often in stereotypical ways. Alexander (2006) defines fetishism as a “performative act of looking, an unreasonable excessive attention bordering on violation of one’s personal sense of comfort and place, when the confluence of difference and desirous curiosity collides” (p. 6). Many of the cultural elements that have been described in this text qualify as cultural performance, which Alexander (2006) defines as “practical behaviors, signifiers of social membership, and markers of familiarity that are negotiated as bonds of affiliation and recognition, in particular, social, cultural, and racial communities” (p. 34).
This phenomenon of co-opting Black male cultural performance is known as cultural exploitation or anti-Black cultural appropriation. It is defined as the adopting of cultural elements of a people of African descent by interlopers, typically outside of context, without understanding or respect for cultural meaning, or acknowledgment of its originators, and/or in a context in which the cultural insiders are relatively disempowered. Appropriation of Black culture is a problem primarily because it displaces or disconnects Black cultural forms or manifestations from their local, social, cultural contexts (White, 2011). White males, for example, who may have had little contact with Black males outside of commodified images of them, don caricature types of Black masculinity and act out reductive fantasies of Black masculine culture in ways that objectify Black males.
Globally, the surface level of Black masculine culture is adopted by many different ethnic groups in efforts to construct local masculinities. In many cases, but not always, it is done in ways that reinforce highly stereotypical or exaggerated imaginations of Black maleness; therein lies another critical layer of the problem. These reductive fantasies of Black masculine culture generate real social and political consequences, from lynching and the underdevelopment of neighborhoods, to present-day police abuses. Black males themselves resist White stereotyping and appropriation of their culture by crafting new identities through cultural products like hip-hop (Brown, 2006).
Like Black culture in general, Black male culture influences mainstream American culture and popular culture around the world. Mainstream culture would be impossible to imagine without the transformative force of Black culture (White, 2011). In the media, Black male culture has been reduced to visible evidence, or what has been described as surface-level culture (Alexander, 2006). Hip-hop in general and hardcore hip-hop specifically has typically privileged the male body and the performance of masculinity (White, 2011). In many instances, Blackness has been reduced to exaggerations of surface-level cultural manifestations, reducing it to a spectacle or parody for many non-Blacks.
When Blackness is reduced to an aesthetic act it becomes disconnected