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There is no law that is not inscribed on bodies. Every law has a hold on the body. —De Certeau, 1984 The body is a most peculiar “thing,” for it is never quite reducible to being merely a thing; nor does it ever quite manage to rise above the status of thing. . . . If bodies are objects or things, they are like no others, for they are the centers of perspective, insight, reflection, desire, agency. —Grosz, 1994 A piece of work that will make sick men whole. But are not some whole that we must make sick? —Shakespeare, Julius Caesar It is my hope that this book offers instructive insights about how Black masculine bodies have been historically situated and are contemporarily scripted. I chose to introduce discussion of various sites where this occurs rather than writing a monograph that emphasizes a single media type or a single type of inscription. I believe the scripting paradigm has emancipatory potential for what it reveals about producer intentionality and audience consumption across the multiple spaces in our everyday lives. American citizens are inundated with negative stereotypical images within commercial and print advertising , news outlets, the Internet, television programs, and films. Many of us consume these images within each of these venues on a daily basis, and have become anesthetized to the effects of these mostly implicit and sometimes explicit daily racial assaults. 143 EPILOGUE “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” Scripting is a deconstructive paradigm that problematizes stereotypes and attempts to restore hope. As famed poet Gil Scott Heron suggests in his album The Revolution Will Not be Televised, liberation is constantly countered by implicit (and explicit) forms of oppression that are not always immediately identifiable. While we are busy launching activistic movements against the obvious forms, the more latent forms often go unnoticed; hence, the idea that if there is a revolution leading to radical progressive change, it will have to take place on multiple levels and must be wary of subversive attempts to undermine liberatory progress. It seems what we are missing, as hooks contends , is “sustained programs for education for critical consciousness that would continually engage black folks of all classes in a process of radical politicization” (p. 251). This does not suggest that Black people must bear the full burden of racial reconciliation or unproblematizing negatively scripted representations of themselves in popular media. We did not invent race and certainly cannot be solely responsible for the dissolution of its diseased end product, racism. What is more significant about hooks’s observation is that popular media have the remarkable opportunity to provide a sustained pedagogy that is salvational rather than toxic. When media fail us in this regard we, as consumers, are left alone to become immediately responsible for our own critical consciousness. Ultimately, we as consumers are left with a hodgepodge of scripts, some of which we co-produced, some that simply mimic “real life,” some that try to imagine another life, and some that impoverish the conditions of our daily lives. It is likely that, for some readers , the term “scripts” seems sanitized or sterile. It does not evoke the same kind of emotion that racist stereotypes produce. It is used here to suggest that, although rendered this way in popular media, Black bodies are more than flesh. They are more than signs and symbols of an objectified text where racism and sexism are deployed. They have become mnemonic instruments reminding consumers of a larger social agenda, one that feeds off of our learned desire to be competitive, individualistic, independent, and generally dismissive of the Other. We would like to believe that popular media (including, but not limited to, television) leave us with no negative cultivation effects (Gerbner, 1999), that the stories told through music, television, and film are mere entertainment . In fact, according to the progenitor of cultivation theory George Gerbner (1999), decades of research have informed us that these “stories socialize us into roles of gender, age, class, vocation, and lifestyle, and offer models of conformity or targets of rebellion. They weave the seamless web of the cultural environment that cultivates most of what we think, what we do, and how we conduct our affairs” (p. ix). As we sort through these scripts, we are perhaps naturally inclined to resist those that are unaligned with our interests and select those that we feel may improve our ways of seeing the world. The point is that scripts about SCRIPTING THE BLACK MASCULINE BODY 144 [18.191.234...

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