Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays On Race and Sexuality

Notes

Notes Notes to Chapter 1 1 Griffin, “Black Feminist and Du Bois,” 28–40. 2 Carbado, McBride, and Weise, eds., Black Like Us. 3 Gross, “Examining the Politics of Respectability in African-American Studies.” 4 At the time of this writing, an announcement of the conference listing the names of the participants could be found archived online at http://www.unc.edu/ ~epjohnso/bqs.html. 5 I am thankful to Susan Manning at Northwestern University for engaging me in this very productive conversation. 6 The original subtitle was “A Century of Queer African American Literature.” It was changed in response to concerns and discussion over the term “queer.” 7 This is in part the goal of one of my next book projects, tentatively titled Poetics, Politics, and Phillis Wheatley. 8 Some of the most visible exemplars of this kind of work, to name but a few, include literary and cultural critics Phillip Brian Harper and Robert Reid-Pharr and political scientist Cathy Cohen. 9 Judging by the 1949 essay, “The Preservation of Innocence,” that he wrote and published in Zero, a small Moroccan journal, Baldwin knows just how profoundly 227 important sexuality is to discussions of race. But the desire registered here for sexuality not to make a difference is important to recognize. When we understand this statement as spoken in a prophetic mode, it imagines a world in which the details of a person’s sex life can “matter” as part of a person’s humanity but not have to “matter” in terms that usurp their authority or legitimacy to represent the race. 10 Carby, Race Men. 11 Black women, in this regard, would appear, in the confines of race discourse, to be ever the passive players. They are rhetorically useful in that they lend legitimacy to the black male’s responsibility for their care and protection, but they cannot speak any more than the gay or lesbian brother or sister can. The gendered portion of this critique has long been argued by black feminist critics since at least the early 1970s with the likes of Toni Cade Bambara up to the more recent works of Hazel Carby, Valerie Smith, E. Frances White, Farah Griffin, and many others. 12 Read by Cole in Karen Thorsen’s 1989 film James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket. 13 Ross, “White Fantasies of Desire,” 25. 14 “Wandering” is a euphemism utilized by Gertrude Stein in Melanctha to signal wayward or promiscuous sexuality. 15 Following is the Oxford English Dictionary entry for “racism”: “1936 L. DENNIS Coming Amer. Fascism 109 If . . . it be assumed that one of our values should be a type of racism which excludes certain races from citizenship, then the plan of execution should provide for the annihilation, deportation, or sterilization of the excluded races. 1938 E. & C. PAUL tr. Hirschfeld’s Racism xx. 260 The apostles and energumens of racism can in all good faith give free rein to impulses of which they would be ashamed did they realise their true nature. 1940 R. BENEDICT Race: Science & Politics i. 7 Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed. 1952 M. BERGER Equality by Statute 236 Racism, tension in industrial, urban areas. 1952 Theology LV. 283 The idolatry of our time—its setting up of nationalism, racism, vulgar materialism . 1960 New Left Rev. Jan./Feb. 21/2 George Rogers saw fit to kow-tow to the incipient racism of his electorate by including a line about getting rid of ‘undesirable elements.’” 16 Black queer studies has been defined by Jennifer DeVere Brody and myself in “Plum Nelly” as a critical sensibility which draws “its influences from sources such as identity politics, cultural studies, feminist and gender studies, race theory, gay and lesbian studies, masculinity studies and queer studies.” Its primary goal NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 228 is the push “for a greater degree of specificity in both the questions being formulated and on the conclusions being reached at the margins of American society” (286). 17 The very language of this phrase is caught up in the primacy of race in the discussion of racial identity. But for now it will have to suffice. Notes to Chapter 4 1. See Hill and Jordan, eds., Race, Gender, and Power in America, and Morrison, ed., Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power for a wealth of such informative essays on the...