Transcript Black Masculinity Revisited AS/HUMA 1300 9.0 Faculty of Arts

Black Masculinity
Revisited
AS/HUMA 1300 9.0
Faculty of Arts
1. Black Men and a Historical Legacy of
Failure
2. Black men in Contemporary Canada
and the United States
3. Rethinking Black Men and the
Family
Black Masculinity Revisited
“You ain’t
shit. Just like
your Daddy.”
“My body was given back to me sprawled out,
distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white
winter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is
bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look a
nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering. . . . The
handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks
the nigger is quivering with rage, the little boy
throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the
nigger’s going to eat me up” (Black Skin, White
Masks 114).
Frantz Fanon
Primary Indicators
of Manhood
Secondary Indicators
of Manhood
1.
2.
3.
4.
1. Physical Strength
2. Virility
Whiteness
Economic Power
Political Power
Ability to Protect
Family
5. Ability to control
all women
White Male Heterosexual Norm
SAMBO
Attack on black men’s economic and political
powerlessness and their lack of power in the
family domain—black masculinity erased;
BUCK
Fear of black male strength and virility;
Physical threat to white men and sexual
threat to white women;
COON
Laughs at inability of black men to gain social
and political power after slavery.
Stereotypes of Black Masculinity
“ Property values would fall because blacks being
lazy, would let their farms run down. Crime would
increase . . . .Blacks would try to marry white girls,
with the result that a “mongrel” population would be
produced and the pure white race would be degraded.
Blacks would be able to vote, and before they knew it
whites would find a black man sitting in the legislature
making laws that whites would have to obey. The
humiliation was too much . . .” (qtd. In Walker, History
of Blacks in Canada 80).
Edwin Larwell
(1849-1850)
Less than 8% of African American men graduate from college
compared to 17% of whites and 35% of Asians.
Young African American men die at a rate that is at least 1.5 times
the rate of young white and Hispanic men, and almost 3 times the
rate of young Asian men.
The leading cause of death is homicide, which for young African
American men is 3 times the rate for Hispanics, the population
group with the second highest homicide rate.
In 2002, among males ages 25 to 29, 12.9% of blacks were in
prison or jail, compared to 4.3% of Hispanics and about 1.6% of
whites;
1.46 million black men out of a total voting population of 10.4
million have lost their right to vote due to felony convictions;
Economic downturn hits black men hardest—employment among
black men has fallen 7.8 % since November 2007.
Black Men as US Statistics
“Among visible minority groups, there is a
significant wage disadvantage for black men:
16.6% for immigrants and 25.6% for those
native born. . . .In particular, we note that,
among native born Canadians only black men
appear to have a disadvantage” (Hum and
Simpson, “Earnings and Employment of
Visible Minority Immigrants” 2000).
Black men in Contemporary
Canada

Nuclear: Adult heterosexual couple and
their young children

Co-resident (preferably married)

Patriarchal
Structural Functional Definition of
Family

Kinship relations outside of the nuclear
family are abnormal and dysfunctional;

The “absence” of black men in the
household proves their irresponsibility;

Black men are “marginal” to the home
and family.
Contesting Three Dominant
Theories