Black Male Outsider, A Memoir: Teaching as a Pro-Feminist Man (review)

Upon noticing the title of Gary Lemons's latest project, Black Male Outsider, A Memoir:Teaching as a Pro-Feminist Man, I was immediately piqued, for it expresses the writer's intent to take readers on a journey through an experiential quest across epistemic, social, and political boundaries of existence. Readers will find that Lemons strategically situates his perspective as a black male pro-feminist writer and professor within existing discourses that contextualize the ideological foundations of black feminism within universal liberationist practices. The project is inspired by black feminist writers such as bell hooks, whose work Teaching to Transgress was both self-reflective and socially conscious. In it, she writes:

To enter classroom settings in colleges and universities with the will to share the desire to encourage excitement, was to transgress. Not only did it require movement beyond accepted boundaries, but excitement could not be generated without full recognition of the fact that there could never be an absolute set agenda governing teaching practices. . . .

Critical reflection on my experience as a student in unexciting classrooms enabled me not only to imagine that the classroom could be exciting but that this excitement could co-exist with and even stimulate serious intellectual and/or academic engagement.

(hooks 7)

Lemons's own experiences as a professor and writer effectively underscore the connectivity between scholarly life and activism. As a self-acclaimed black male "pro-feminist" professor, Lemons pays homage to and is inspired by the work of other pioneering black feminists as well, including Audre Lorde and Alice Walker. As he insists throughout his narrative, the works of such women have rendered and substantiated the subjectivity and perspectives of black women as central to conceptualizing and ideally resisting racism, sexism, and homophobia, for instance. Yet Lemons also credits black males who have demonstrated a commitment to black feminism and find it central to collective liberationist, post-colonial goals for having motivated the development of his consciousness as a pro-feminist. Such figures include Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Calvin Hernton. "Black women feminists," he writes, "have challenged us black men of conscience to speak in our own voices in defense of our rights for all females to live free from gender, class, sexist, misogynist, physical, emotional, mental, and sexual exploitation and violence" (35). In addition, Lemons acknowledges the various ways in which his role as a feminist has been impacted by his having served predominantly white college campus communities throughout his career. In the preface of his book he writes:

Over the course of thirteen years of teaching at a small, private college in New York City's historic Greenwich Village, I developed an antiracist pedagogy founded upon black feminist thought. As an African Americanist with a literary background in narratives of racial passing by black writers in the United States, I came to the college with a tenacious zeal for teaching feminist autobiographical writing by women. . . . It would become the testing ground for my curricular exploration as I conceptualized pedagogy that simultaneously confronts ideologies of white supremacy, sexism, and patriarchal masculinity.

(xvi)

Throughout the project, Lemons simultaneously positions himself as an authority figure as well as an observer in the classroom. Although the cultural context of this environment represents perhaps the primary space in which to evaluate the transformative power of "autobiographical writing designed to promote social justice" in student assignments, for Lemons, this is but one step toward reaching a concept of self that leads him to a more profound and holistic consciousness regarding the ways in which he himself perpetuates racism, power, "otherness," and exclusivity as a black man. For example, in the third chapter of the book, entitled "Learning to Love the Little Boy in Me: Breaking Family Silences, Ending Shame," Lemons calls upon his experiences growing up in an abusive home, confronting "internalized wounds of male supremacist thinking rooted in the personal experience of patriarchal violence" (57). He recognizes the power of memory...