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The Body, as the text of signs written by experience and recorded as marks of character, is a mnemonic medium in which are inscribed the principles of the content of culture. —Hawes, 1998 “Race,” as the progenitor of racism, occupies a peculiar position in the lives of African Americans, for truly, we are the reason why racism as a social disease still has utility in the United States of America. It is not because we have created it, but that we are the primary canvas upon which the racist’s insecurities, fears and anxieties get projected. —Jackson, 2000 Sociologist Manning Marable (1995) asks, “What is a Black man in an institutionally racist society, in the social system of modern capitalist America?” (p. 26). He answers his own query by contending that the discursive labels placed on Black male reality characterizes him as a social contaminant. This is an ascription that serves to pejoratively encapsulate his existence, forcing him to respond. Cornel West (1993) would perhaps reply that the Black body is treated as cultural capital and commodified in the popular marketplace. The materialistic dividends gained from exploiting Black bodies are lucrative, while the nonmarket values of love, hope, and collective sharing are dismissed . It is not that capitalism is immoral; it is amoral—it has no regard for morality, only concern for achievement of monetary ends. If one surrenders capitalism, one must also concede the exploitation of Black bodies and the negative projections that drive this exploitation. Instead, Black bodies continue being commodified in a number of ways throughout everyday American life, and this practice is mirrored in popular culture. 73 THREE Black Masculine Scripts As Leonard Hawes notes in the opening epigraph, the body is a text, a medium through which individuals come to familiarize themselves with other human beings. Most important, however, the body has a mnemonic function; it becomes part of our spectatorial memory. So, as people come to know Blacks, they also come to know Black bodies and the degree to which these bodies are portrayed in their varied manifestations. In chapter 1, I identified and traced the history of Black body politics during slavery and early minstrelsy, and in chapter 2, I defined and explained the process of scripting or inscribing Black bodies in popular media. Now, in this chapter, I intend to hone the discussion to Black men in particular. I do acknowledge that women can also be masculine; however, I want to concentrate on men. Rather than keeping the discussion broad and all-encompassing of the total composite Black community, I feel it is necessary to move from an extensive examination of Black males as they correlate with Black women to an intensive examination of Black masculinity and its interpretations . In doing so, I will look at several highly popular and evident inscriptions of Black masculine bodies in popular culture. By now it should be clear that the corporeal text is ineludibly complicated by signs and symbols of various realities and experiences. One of the most immediately visible “scripts” or figurative markings that may be found on the body is that of race. Several studies have explored the politics of the body via an analytic technique known as “reading” the body as text. These deconstructive critiques are simplistic in nature, though sophisticated in process. Reading presupposes that there is an already scripted body that can be read by an independent observer from an objective stance. In contrast to reading, scripting is described in terms of writing, so the body is theorized as a canvas, which is written on or scripted by another. The term “scripting” is used to signify that human beings discursively assign meaning to their perceptions of others in an effort to structure their observations and reflections concerning difference. A scripter is usually an institution or individual in a decision-making position who has the authority to develop and mass-distribute images. This may occur via television media, for example, in which case the network executives and/or writers make critical decisions about racial, cultural, class-based, gendered, or homosexual representations on a daily basis. Scripting never indicates a social condition or discursive act that is irreversibly predetermined, predestined, or inevitable. Otherwise, there would be no possibility for liberation or rescripting. The scholar’s objective in analyzing scripting is to decipher what the author of the script intended to suggest when she or he inscribed or assigned meaning to the bodily text. It is critical that scholars understand that the specularities...

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