black masculinity
Black Masculinity and the White “Patriarchal Mainstream” Somewhere at the intersection of history, race, gender, economics, and humanity lies the contemporary definition of black masculinity. Historically, black men never chose to live in a land controlled by capitalist white patriarchy, but via slavery have been forced to enter such a society. ... Black men were immediately thrust into a world in which “Supported by law, affirmed by history, sanctioned by every element in society, male breadwinning (even if only for one’s self) has been synonymous with maturity, respectability, and masculinity” (Griswold 2). Hence, bombarded by such an intrinsic relationship between masculinity and economic production, every American black man has but two choices amidst the harsh waters of white capitalist patriarchy – sink or swim. Thus, motivated by the will to live, black masculinity, with all its varying faces and methodologies, can be seen as a direct response to navigating survival in the mainstream white capitalist patriarchy. ... One such mode of black male existence is assimilation – to absorb into the popular culture and chase the “American dream” like the white men for whom the structure was conceived: what bell hooks describes as Doing it for Daddy. By becoming part of the white patriarchal society, theoretical assimilation supposedly aims at achieving an equality in which blacks and whites work, live, and play together, undistinguished by race because black becomes white. Another prevalent approach to negotiating existence within the status quo is creating a black community within white patriarchal society in a black-conceived version of “separate but equal”. ... The most volatile of the articulations of black masculinity coping with westernization is the urban criminal mentality of the hip-hop generation. ... American popular cinema, one of the most viable instruments of cultural reflection and introspection, reveals the respective relationships between these formulations of black masculinity and white capitalist patriarchy. And through examination of these relationships with the corrupt dominant organization, one sees clearly the difficulty with which a black man establishes identity within the parameters of the socialized ideological normative standard. In The Pelican Brief (1993), Denzel Washington’s character, Gray Grantham, epitomizes a black man attempting to assimilate into the white patriarchal mainstream. ... In her failure to acknowledge the limited nature of his options as a reporter with ambition, she negligently criticizes Grantham’s representation of black masculinity. ... The film offers no indicative evidence in either direction, however, both possibilities present significant predicaments in black male stability. ... One could even imagine the number of white male bosses closely comparing to the number of incarcerated black men. ... ” However, if he does accept the significance of his race, then he must believe in his assimilation as an equalizing act – one that transcends black and white. ... After all, it was the black man that acquiesced into the white world to find racial harmony, not the two worlds finding any sort of middle ground. Thus, assimilation as a response to white patriarchy, represented here in the character of Gray Grantham, presents another precarious binary in forming black male identity: the choice between disregarding or devaluing blackness. In contrast to this rejection of blackness, there are those who embrace it and negotiate economic existence from within the system by forming separate black communities.