Black Mens Studies. Serie McDougal III
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following Reconstruction; increases in Black male income in the late 1960s; the election of Barack Obama as the first Black president of the United States.
Black males have experienced White supremacy in some significantly different ways than Black women. For example, the vast majority of lynching victims in the early 1900s were Black men (Estes, 2005). During this period, the Reverend Henry Turner once spoke in response to injustice against Black men, saying “there’s no place in this infernal country for manly Negroes” (The Colored American, 1899). In her journal article, “The Anatomy of Lynching,” Wiegman (1993) explains the social symbolism of White lynching of Black males as a form of ritualized killing, aimed in part at an objective of feminization. Her analysis builds on the fact that White lynchers’ preferred form of mutilation of Black men was castration. In her analysis, castrated Black men were symbolically separated from their masculinity and any privilege associated with it through ritualized dismemberment (Wiegman, 1993). Therefore, the act was a symbolic stripping of both sexual and political power. Through the perversity ←62 | 63→of this act, the White mob asserted its own notions of masculinity, symbolically, through the removal of the Black male victim’s visible claim to masculinity. The message to Black men was that their manhood and masculinities were threats that needed to be put down. Estes (2005) argues that Black men’s survival in the early 1900s thus depended upon their ability to mask their masculinity. Garvey’s teaching said otherwise, promoting Black male pride, independence, and assertiveness. The brash African American boxer, Jack Johnson, stood out as a symbol of assertiveness because of his open expressions of aggression and dominance against White boxers (Wiggins, 1985). Johnson did this during a time when most Black men were taught to hold back any open expressions of masculine assertiveness, particularly against Whites.
The sixth period was The Civil Rights Era: Identity Crisis and the Emergence of a “Cool Pose.” According to Perkins (2000) and Dancy (2012), two key economic factors influenced shifts in Black male identity. First was the combined effects of deindustrialization, job losses, and globalization on African American communities and families. As a consequence, many Black males were denied the most basic realization of masculinity in the American context—the ability to work and provide. Undoubtedly, this produced a great deal of frustration to channel compared to those who had jobs. Although oppression didn’t exempt Black males from patriarchy (Neal, 2005), low wages and unemployment made it difficult for Black men to achieve the kind of patriarchal manhood that was characteristic of middle-class America. Second, significant increases in the numbers of African American unmarried mothers since World War II led to increased welfare dependency.
According to Hill-Collins (2004), two additional factors influenced Black male identity constructions during this period. The first was overt racism and political disenfranchisement via Jim Crow laws and the government, and the general public’s failure to assist African Americans who were formerly enslaved. The second factor was the popular imagery of African American men as hypersexual and innately violent. These economic and racial challenges fostered increased conflict between Black men and women and family life. Estes (2005) explains that when the modern Civil Rights Movement began, the dominant understanding of manhood in American included several general expectations. Men were expected to be the leaders and breadwinners of their households and have a local and national political voice. However, racism prevented Black men from achieving these attributes of manhood.
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1965) began to address the gendered racism and economic discrimination that uniquely affected Black men. He observed that the gendered nature of job availability (domestic jobs that favored women) made it especially difficult for Black men to be heads of households. Moreover, as Martin Luther King Jr.’s mentor Benjamin Mays recalled, to display manhood as White men did, was to invite disaster (Estes, 2005, p. 6). Yet, Malcolm X put forth a conceptualization of masculinity that was more assertive in regard to self-determination and self-defense. He rejected the non-violent principle of Martin Luther King, Jr. as unintelligent and unmanly.
The seventh period was the Black Power Era. Heavily influenced by Malcolm X, the Black Power movement represented a revolutionary, resistant, and rebellious form of manhood as compared to earlier periods. The Black Power movement promoted a worldview in which every aspect of a Black person’s life was expected to be geared toward Black collective self-determination (Rhoden, 2006). Pass, Benoit, and Dunlap (2014) claim that this period during the 1960s was the first time Black manhood was acknowledged on a societal level—although it was presented in a pathological way. In the mainstream media, Black males were presented as dangerous, menacing, and angry, especially the male leaders of the Black Power movement (Pass et al., 2014). The Black Panther Party tied assertive community service to manhood; engaging in armed self-defense and building their own institutions. Some Black men during the Black Power movement were outspoken against homosexuality, perhaps none more than Eldridge Cleaver. However, others like Huey Newton challenged such views and voiced support for women’s and gay liberation movements (Estes, 2005).
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This era was also accompanied by some patriarchal patterns of thinking and acting among Black men. But the women’s and gay liberation movements of this period also influenced many to begin to question and reinterrogate notions of patriarchy during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Although Black women comprised the majority of the party, Black men were overrepresented in leadership positions. While many men held beliefs that women were unfit for leadership, some Black male party members, like Fred Hampton, openly challenged those who attempted to subordinate Black women.
Presently, Black males continue to be presented as angry, violent, hypersexual, and deviant. They are perceived socially as “threatening, animalistic, sexually depraved and crime-prone” (Pass et al., 2014). These historical periods of gender identity illustrate how conceptualizations of manhood have shifted and maintained common features, while gender equality has experienced both progress and stagnation.
Gender socialization, through the observation of social roles in families, represents one of the major ways that children learn gender roles. Yet, Black men have largely been excluded from research on gender socialization. Hill (2002) explains that most scholars focus on the gender socialization of African American girls. Pre-colonial African societies established clearly defined roles for males and carefully delineated steps designed to facilitate boys’ psychosocial maturation to manhood (White & Cones, 1999). The system of slavery was used to suppress Black men’s abilities to assume the roles of breadwinners, protectors, and heads of families. However, Black men continued to find ways to fight against this suppression and be providers and protectors of their families, and socializers of their children.
Presently, within African American families, Black children are exposed to a range of masculine roles including Black men as provider, egalitarian decision maker, defeated male, player of women, and street tough (i.e., a gangster). Using in-depth interviews with 35 African American parents, Hill (2002) examined what parents teach their children about gender and how gender affects the distribution of work in their families. Her results showed that, regardless of sex, most Black parents gave verbal support for gender equality in child socialization. Those who had higher levels of education were more likely to support gender equality than those with lower levels of education. However, some gender differences existed in how work was distributed. In married families, fathers were proud of their participation in the home. Mothers did most of the routine care tasks and discipline, while fathers spent more recreational and education time with the children (Hill, 2002).
Hill (2002) also found that sons of single mothers were more involved in childcare activities than sons of married mothers. Belgrave and Brevard (2015) refer to this as an androgynous gender role (an individual possessing close to a balance in masculine and feminine qualities). Some parents (newly middle-class Black) had concerns about homosexuality. However, there is some evidence that cross-gender type behaviors from males are met with more parental disapproval. According to Hill (2002), feminine traits were devalued by some parents; boys would be more likely to be stigmatized for being “sissies” than girls for being “tomboys.” Leaper’s (1995) investigation of mother-child communication patterns revealed that mothers were much less