Meditations on Masculinity

1. Suffer the Little Children

I take my son to the playground several times a week. At two years of age, he requires lots of exercise before either he or I get any rest. If I go to the playground closest to my house, he is almost always the only black child there. This alone makes the playground political. Two incidents, for quick examples, happened on two consecutive days: On Monday, my son went over to the benches to play with a little girl who lives on our street. He sat on one end of the park bench, she on the other. They laughed and swung their feet back and forth as though they were trying to see who could swing their legs harder. Another little girl of about three ran up to the little girl with whom my son was playing and tried to drag her away. She told her to stop playing with him and she told my son to go away. She whispered in the neighbor girl’s ear and they both looked at him with sober faces. But the leg-swinging game was too much fun for the first little girl, who, after all, knew my son, and she went on kicking her legs—though considerably subdued. The second little girl gave up and ran to her mother who was standing within earshot, and said, “I don’t like that little boy. He’s scary.” Her mother advised her, “Well, stay close to me then.”

On Tuesday, we arrived at the playground and my son ran immediately to the sandbox. There were two little girls of about four already there. The moment my son got into the sandbox, one of the little girls started screaming: “Get out of here! Don’t you get near me! Go back to where you came from! Get out! I said get out!” My son was startled—his face literally crumpled and he burst into tears immediately. He came running over to me, threw himself into my arms and sobbed on my shoulder as though his heart would break. I held onto him tightly, trying desperately to figure out some adult response or neutral intervention, but still the little girl kept screaming, waving her plastic shovel like a can of mace: “I said get out of here and don’t you ever come back!”

2. Unholy Ghosts

New York Times essayist Brent Staples writes about the fearsome social profile of the black male self. He writes about his dawning realization, while a student at the University of Chicago, that white people were afraid of him:

I’d been a fool. I’d been grinning good evening at people who were frightened to death of me. I did violence to them just by being. How had I missed this? I kept walking at night, but from then on I paid attention. . . . I tried to be innocuous but I didn’t know how. The more I thought about how I moved, the less my body belonged to me; I became a false character riding along inside it. ¹

Staples describes how he went through a period of whistling Vivaldi so that people would hear him coming and “they wouldn’t feel trapped”; in effect he hung a bell around his neck, playing domesticated cat to a frightened cast of mice.

Then I changed . . . The man and the woman walking toward me were laughing and talking but clammed up when they saw me. . . . I veered toward them and aimed myself so that they’d have to part to avoid walking into me. The man stiffened, threw back his head and assumed the stare: eyes ahead, mouth open. I suppressed the urge to scream into his face. Instead, I glided between them, my shoulder nearly brushing his. A few steps beyond them I stopped and howled with laughter. I came to call this game “Scatter the Pigeons.” ²

The gentle journalist who stands on the street corner and howls. What upside-down craziness, this paradoxical logic of having to debase oneself in order to retrieve one’s sanity from the remaindered edges of market space...