Black Masculinity Black Masculinity RevisitedRevisited

AS/HUMA 1300 9.0Faculty of Arts

Black Masculinity RevisitedBlack Masculinity Revisited

1. Black Men and a Historical Legacy of Failure

2. Black men in Contemporary Canada and the United States

3. Rethinking Black Men and the Family

“You ain’t shit. Just like your

Daddy.”

Frantz FanonFrantz Fanon

“My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that whitewinter day. The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly; look a nigger, it’s cold, the nigger is shivering. . . . The handsome little boy is trembling because he thinks the nigger is quivering with rage, the little boy throws himself into his mother’s arms: Mama, the nigger’s going to eat me up” (Black Skin, White Masks 114).

White Male Heterosexual White Male Heterosexual NormNorm

Primary Indicators of Manhood

1. Whiteness2. Economic Power3. Political Power4. Ability to

Protect Family5. Ability to control all women

Secondary Indicatorsof Manhood

1. Physical Strength2. Virility

Stereotypes of Black MasculinityStereotypes of Black Masculinity

SAMBOAttack on black men’s economic and political powerlessness and their lack of power in the family domain—black masculinity erased;BUCKFear of black male strength and virility;Physical threat to white men and sexual threat to white women;COONLaughs at inability of black men to gain socialand political power after slavery.

Edwin Larwell Edwin Larwell (1849-1850)(1849-1850)

“ Property values would fall because blacks being lazy, would let their farms run down. Crime would increase . . . .Blacks would try to marry white girls, with the result that a “mongrel” population would beproduced and the pure white race would be degraded. Blacks would be able to vote, and before they knew it whites would find a black man sitting in the legislature making laws that whites would have to obey. The humiliation was too much . . .” (qtd. In Walker, Historyof Blacks in Canada 80).

Black Men as US Statistics Black Men as US Statistics

Less than 8% of African American men graduate from college compared to 17% of whites and 35% of Asians. Young African American men die at a rate that is at least 1.5 times the rate of young white and Hispanic men, and almost 3 times the rate of young Asian men. The leading cause of death is homicide, which for young AfricanAmerican men is 3 times the rate for Hispanics, the populationgroup with the second highest homicide rate.In 2002, among males ages 25 to 29, 12.9% of blacks were in prison or jail, compared to 4.3% of Hispanics and about 1.6% of whites;1.46 million black men out of a total voting population of 10.4 million have lost their right to vote due to felony convictions;Economic downturn hits black men hardest—employment among black men has fallen 7.8 % since November 2007.

Black men in Contemporary Black men in Contemporary CanadaCanada

“Among visible minority groups, there is a significant wage disadvantage for black men:16.6% for immigrants and 25.6% for those native born. . . .In particular, we note that, among native born Canadians only black men appear to have a disadvantage” (Hum and Simpson, “Earnings and Employment of Visible Minority Immigrants” 2000).

Structural Functional Definition of Structural Functional Definition of FamilyFamily

Nuclear: Adult heterosexual couple and their young children

Co-resident (preferably married)

Patriarchal

Contesting Three Dominant Contesting Three Dominant TheoriesTheories

Kinship relations outside of the nuclear family are abnormal and dysfunctional;

The “absence” of black men in the household proves their irresponsibility;

Black men are “marginal” to the home and family.