Scripting the Black Masculine Body: Identity, Discourse, and Racial Politics in Popular Media

5.Toward an Integrated Theory of Black Masculinity

It is important to see than an overreliance on ideology critique has limited our inability to understand how people actively participate in the dominant culture through processes of accommodation, negotiation, and even resistance. —Giroux, 1992 Throughout the book until this point, I have problematized representations of Black bodies in popular culture. I have presented the origins, history, politics, and stereotypes of Black bodies in the United States. I have also assessed damage to Black representations as caused by Black popular culture. We are now in desperate need of remedies and paradigmatic resolutions that will assist in recuperating Black bodies and offering corrective insights about how Black bodies function. Rather than attempt to theorize Black women’s identities and hence speak for and about experiences with which I am not fully familiar, I will restrict my theorizing to Black men and Black masculinities. Theory, by its very nature, is something that can be proven wrong. It has voids because no one theory can possibly characterize all aspects of a given phenomenon. Communication scholar Stanley Deetz (1992) explains, “A theory is a way of seeing and thinking about the world. As such, it is better seen as the ‘lens’ one uses in observation rather than as the ‘mirror’ of nature” (p. 66). The existing lenses used to explore Black masculinity, as a communicative aspect of gendered lives, require correction. Any time a body of theory , set of discoveries or range of conceptualizations are no longer effective in explaining the phenomena or behaviors they purport to describe, a paradigm shift is needed. Presently, there is no body of theory that is specifically 127 FIVE Toward an Integrated Theory of Black Masculinity designed to examine Black masculinities as communication-driven aspect of identities. I have stated elsewhere: “Black masculinist scholarship cannot afford to accept, approve, and adopt the same cultural, social and political agendas as traditional White masculinist scholarship. The two areas of gender theory share some commonalities, however there is a distinction that emerges at the intersection where gender meets culture” (Jackson, 1997, p. 731). After having reviewed the existing interdisciplinary literatures and conceptualizations of Black masculinity, I feel I have read a set of foreign autobiographies , few of which pertain to me, a Black male. Married, middle-class, educated spiritual Black men, who are goal-driven, employed, competent, and noncriminal are missing from both the vast amount of literature and the constellation of media representations of Black males. We are in desperate need of radical progressive paradigms of Black masculinity, ones focused on liberation, on agency to define the self. The present model is an attempt to present one such paradigm. The indisputable and tragic reality is that Black males have been pathologized and labeled as violent/criminal, sexual and incompetent/uneducated individuals. It is this prevalent set of stereotypical depictions of Black masculinity as a stigmatized condition or of Black males as an “endangered species” that makes it extremely difficult to theorize Black masculinities in the same ways as White or other marginalized group masculinities. Black masculinities are first and foremost cultural property communicated in everyday interaction as manifestations of Black identities.1 Traditionally, the impulse among gender theorists in many disciplines including communication has been to interpret the incendiary nature of masculinity studies in the specter of the European American experience. The assumption made is that all masculine persons function in homogeneous ways.2 However, a growing contingent of Black writers, including bell hooks, Clyde Franklin III, Patricia Hill Collins, Richard Majors, Michelle Wallace, Philip Brian Harper, Na’im Akbar, Haki Madhubuti, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, and others, have proposed that Black masculinities are cultural property, and that they are ritualistically, explicitly, and implicitly validated by communities within everyday interactions. I agree with bell hooks’s (1992) assertion about scholarship pertaining to Black masculinities. She writes: [the literature on black masculinity] does not interrogate the conventional construction of patriarchal masculinity or question the extent to which Black men have internalized this norm. It never assumes the existence of black men whose creative agency has enabled them to subvert norms and develop ways of thinking about masculinity that challenge patriarchy. (p. 89) Essentially, the literature presupposes complicity with hegemony, and never questions whether Black men have been affected by their own exclusion from the mainstream to the extent that they have constructed their masculinities SCRIPTING THE BLACK MASCULINE BODY 128 differently. In assuming that all masculinities are the same, one...