Embodiment and the New Shape of Black Theological Thought

3. What to Make of Gendered Bodies? Addressing the Male Problem

| 53 3 What to Make of Gendered Bodies? Addressing the Male Problem The task now is to interrogate theologically the ways in which black bodies have been defined as representative of the social system and its complex arrangement of life. I begin this process with a questioning of manhood and masculinity as the assumed representative framing of the black body: Why in black theology are the bodies usually black, male (chap. 3), and heterosexual (chap. 4)? Much time has passed since the October 1995 gathering of African American men in Washington, DC, but much about the framing and defining of black bodies has remained the same over the years since that event.1 What distinguishes the Million Man March is the lack of agreement on its merit. Louis Farrakhan’s call for movement toward responsibility—humaneness —was considered suspect because of media depictions.2 Yet it is arguable that in the late twentieth century only some one of Minister Farrakhan’s stature , like him or hate him, could have brought it about. With the dilemma of leadership continuously exposed by figures such as Cornel West, how many within African American communities could muster the movement of one million African American men?3 Farrakhan called for a physical movement to Washington, DC, on October 16, 1995, as a symbolic or metaphorical gesture denoting a changed sense of self, an embracing of responsibilities, in short a humanization process. This call seems in keeping with the historical agenda of the Nation of Islam, the religious organization developed by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and currently led by Farrakhan. For example, Muhammad, in Message to the Black Man in America, describes the agenda that foreshadowed this movement to Washington: We must begin at the cradle and teach our babies that they must do something for self. They must not be like we, their fathers, who look to the slave- 54 | Addressing the Male Problem makers’ and slave-masters’ children for all. We must teach our children now with an enthusiasm exceeding that which our slave-masters used in having our forefathers imbed the seed of dependency within us. We must stop the process of giving our brain power, labor and wealth to our slavemasters ’ children. We must eliminate the master-slave relationship. We must educate ourselves and our children into the rich power of knowledge which has elevated every people who have sought and used it. We must give the benefit of our knowledge to the elevation of our own people.4 This was, ideally, a call initiated by Farrakhan to humanization. Ideally, it had the intent of forging accountability and responsibility for one’s actions and mistakes. And, ideally, it was to entail attitudinal movement away from harmful notions of masculinity that deflect one’s responsibility to self, friends, family, and community. All of this was symbolized, placed within the metaphor of movement: away from harmful ways of being in the world, to Washington as site of change, and back to home with new ways of operating and renewed commitment to transforming the world. “I, from this day forward,” participants were to recite, “will strive to improve myself spiritually , morally, mentally, socially, politically, and economically for the benefit of myself, my family, and my people.” Commitment did not end with that line because those gathered also vowed to address their concerns in a more measured way, pledging that “that from this day forward, I will never raise my hand with a knife or a gun to beat, cut, or shoot any member of my family or any human being except in self-defense.”5 Whether effective or not, the march garnered the attention of the country and became fodder for Hollywood playback, including an offering from the filmmaker Spike Lee. Spike Lee and Black Male Bodies What follows is explicitly grounded in certain methodological considerations . I rely on a loose interpretation of the anthropologist Victor W. Turner ’s triadically structured ritual process of separation, liminal period, and reintegration as the framework for thinking through Spike Lee’s film. In Ritual Process, Turner builds upon the ethnographer Arnold Van Gennep’s original three-phase notion of ritual. In so doing, Turner suggests that the ritual process involves a movement or transition “in and out of time.” That is, those participating in ritual activity involve themselves in a transforming process, consisting in the movement from a societal present (things as they are), into a period of ambiguity, and back into a reconstituted societal present (an exis...