To strive to re-image a virile manhood, black nationalists require more strategies than the rhetoric of violence. Foci on familial structure and values simply suit their purpose.
The aforementioned has testified that a black man can be figured as an authoritative master by re-administering his household. Once straightening himself up from a state of
subordination, he needs not endure powerlessness imposed by whites any more. Yet it is noteworthy that this sort of nuclear family in fact epitomizes essentialized and normativized kinship. Namely, it is a social unit comprised exclusively of a father, a mother, and their offspring. The specified membership within this institutionalized space thus registers three primary, indispensable logics: patriarchy, reproductivity, and heterosexuality.
Let me begin with the logic of patriarchal structure. If the black man assumes a domineering role in his household, his wife is supposed to impersonate a supporting character in the nationalistic stage. During slavery, however, black women inadvertently occupied a more prominent and commanding place in a domestic sphere. Their husbands experienced destitution and despondency precisely because white masters intended to emasculate black men and browbeat them into servility. Black women were no doubt threatened by the master’s sexual violence. Diana Fuss has reminded us that this brutal act was actually
“imbricated in an entire economic and political system in which the rape of black women by white settlers (or ‘colons’) works to establish and maintain what is, in effect, a slave
economy” (“Interior Colonies” 31-32). The inability to prevent black women from whites’
assault indirectly aggravates the colored male’s racial paranoia and debilitates his manhood.
But the black female was immune to dehumanization that plagued her man partly owing to her relative lack of a “risk” which may intimidate white men and partly owing to her being often relegated to domesticity. As contrasted with her male counterpart, she comforted the slaveholder and capitalist employer with such servile precepts as reliance, obedience, and faith (Mercer and Julien 113). Handling household affairs and looking after her offspring and her defeated man rendered her relatively influential in a black family. In literary representation and historical documentation we can easily locate the “almighty” Nanny and the “crippled” man depicted here.11 Put another way, the black man went through symbolic
11 Toni Morrison, for instance, in her Beloved presents us with such characterization. Sethe, the female protagonist, is at once a caring mother who tackles a fallen household and pampers her dead daughter, Beloved, and an Amazonian woman who dares to slay Beloved to protect her from the brutality of racism. Baby Suggs,
castration caused by slavery and matriarchy at once. It is indeed undeniable that black wives never intend to hamstring their spouses, but it is also incontrovertible that the emasculation that men suffer in the private domain is exactly contingent upon the slavery system in the public arena. Slavery, in other words, rips off a black man’s authority in his household at the same time that it hampers his access to masculinity in a political landscape dominated by white men. The Moynihan report exacerbates this condition by stigmatizing the maternalism in the black families as “abnormal” (qtd. in Wallace 31), an abnormality that features black women’s advantageous state in education, employment, and professional trainings over their racial and, more importantly, sexual counterparts. To be brief, this
“‘terrible mother’ [. . .] emasculates and tyrannizes the black male, depriving him of his opportunity to flourish and grow into a healthy American man” (Scott 303-4). This is “a process that not only excludes the slave from a relation to the Name-of-the-Father, but also (and thereby) articulates the logic that mandates that slaves, regardless of gender, figure in mimetic relation not to their ‘mothers’ but to the ‘condition of their mothers’” (Edelman 49).
To make it clearer, the slave is “womanized” in a patriarchal allotment that “produces the [white] human as man and everything else as, not even ‘woman,’ but non-man” (de Lauretis 121), probably not human at all. Since black revolutionaries strived to reconfigure and resuscitate black masculinity, the most urgent step would be to cure themselves of the
physical and mental wounds exerted by the white oppressors in the public spheres on the one hand and the emasculating matriarchs in the private spaces on the other.
This reasons why black nationalists discursively tune out female voice and relegate women to a domesticated or marginalized status. A typical patriarchal model characterizes the NOI to the extent that “[i]nstilling values was a major role of Black Muslim women in the
before the tragic killing occurs, is even depicted as a spiritual leader of not merely her family but the whole black community. As a sharp contrast, black men like Paul D, Stamp Paid and Sixo appear rather impotent and fail to conform to orthodox manliness. We can propose that slavery partially contributes to black female empowerment, though such power mostly emerge as a negative or destructive force in view of nationalism.
home and community” (West 44). Malcolm X in his Autobiography also alludes to Muhammad’s teaching that the black female’s “true nature is to be weak” and that a man
“must control her if he expects to get her respect” even though he should hold her in esteem (326). Meanwhile, for Malcolm X, women’s physiological advantage over men urges the latter to “have something above and beyond the wife in order for her to be able to look to him for psychological security” (Autobiography 330). At the same time that Muhammad and Malcolm X admit the wife’s superiority in a biological sense, they also underscore black men’s indispensability on which she must rely for mental sanctuary. The dichotomy and hierarchy between spirituality and physicality comes into full play in the sexist assertions made by black nationalists. No doubt that black men administer “higher,” spiritual terrains, while black women “lower,” physical territories. It is unsurprising that some Black Power polities like the NOI which took more conservative routes exploited sexist language to counteract racial discrimination. Yet surprisingly, the rhetoric of those radical,
unconventional organizations like the Black Panther Party endorsed no more advancement against sexism. Sexual prejudices still suppress black women. Female Panthers like Kathleen Cleaver, Judi Douglas, Patricia Hilliard, Erica Huggins, and Artie Seale did exist, and Elaine Browne even took charge of the party in 1974 and effectuated some policies and welfares for the group and the people.12 Nevertheless, Browne still needed to hand over her leadership upon Huey Newton’s return from Cuba, feeling “frustrated by the insubordination many male members showed to women in leadership roles” (Robinson 59-60). From The Black Panther, this organization’s newspaper, we also learn that women were mainly
appointed to such trivial tasks as “typing, cooking, phone-answering, and message-relaying”
(qtd. in Doss 488). It would not be difficult to perceive black activists’ stealthy alienation of female significance from nationalistic projects. Considering black male psychosexual
12 Browne’s leadership helped the Panthers to “[expand] their Breakfast for Children programs, [create] a number of commercial ventures in order to generate money for the organization’s programs, and [improve] the liberation schools, particularly the one in Oakland” (Robinson 59).
power operating within this tactic, we can further recognize that black men, in a racist context, in fact require a tangible entity to be in the position of woman so that they can be real man and subvert white supremacy. In Shulamith Firestones’s account, “the transformation of the black woman into the traditional passive female creates a useful negative backdrop against which the black man’s own definition of himself as masculine (aggressive) can emerge” (118).
In short, “the black men can be the ‘man’ if someone becomes the ‘woman’” (Firestone 118).
As such, in disengaging black women from authoritative positions and assigning them to less important posts, black nationalist discourses and sexist ideologues ineluctably went hand in hand. That is, to enhance black men’s self-awareness of the gender-inflected imperatives framed by the nation-building projects, patriarchal sexism becomes far more paramount and irreplaceable.
More shockingly, Cleaver went on to exaggerate female submissiveness by bringing his politics of rape to the fore. The exercises of raping black women were strangely upgraded as preliminary steps to firstly devalue the white female and ultimately wreak vengeance upon white men. In “On Becoming,” Cleaver rationalizes such sexual violence toward both black and white women by making the following absurd statement:
I became a rapist. To refine my technique and modus operandi, I started out by practicing on black girls in the ghetto—in the black ghetto where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm, but as part of the sufficiency of the Evil of a day—and when I considered myself smooth enough, I crossed the tracks and sought out white prey. I did this consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically [. . .].
Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women. (33, emphasis added)
Women of both races are therefore objectified as the black man’s vehicle to turn the tables on
whites. As long as he hones his “modus operandi” well enough, he would be able to override his foes’ ordinances, plunder their properties, and collapse their authority. We can easily discern from Cleaver’s statement that the black’s reprisal takes up the very same trajectory as whites’ oppression does, except that the latter does not use their women as a tool against black men. Where the white racist seeks to divest the black of their manhood by raping their women, the black racist retrieves it via both intraracial and interracial sexual aggression. Insofar as black racism distinguishes itself in its appeal to nationalist discourses, misogyny inevitably stands out as the mainstay of the black masculinity project.
Interestingly enough, Cleaver’s hostility to Afro-American women subdues as soon as he borrows Plato’s conceptualization of the Primeval Sphere in Symposium to repair the black male’s psychosexual damage. He revises the Sphere as constitutive of two parts, male and female, which would ultimately conjoin with each other to create a “Unitary Sexual Image”
(207). If slavery separates black men from women and keeps their intimate physical and spiritual contact at bay, then “[a]cross the naked abyss of negated masculinity, of four hundred years minus my Balls, we face each other today, my Queen” (Cleaver 237).
Employing the specific union between he-man and “the Flower of Africa” thus enables Cleaver to maintain that only through the “re-love” of Black Beauty can his conquered manhood “be redeemed” (238). With female passivity held firmly in place, he transforms a forcible sexual intercourse into a blessed act of copulation. The discrepancy in his discourse, however, is in no case coincidental. To reinstate manliness, it seems, requires a man to at once cruelly treat and fervently embrace his female counterpart. The logic of reproduction, however, partially nullifies this suggestion. Sexual abuse against black women indeed exhibits black male bravado to a considerable extent, but passionate coitus with them largely arises from the black man’s single-minded eagerness for posterity, and, by extension, for the reconstruction of a nation. All too often, nationalistic ideology moulds its subjects into converts to reproductive imperative, that is, to reproduce either a male to fight or a female to
bear more offspring for the profit of a nascent nation. Thus Muhammad’s metaphor underlines female reproductivity: “The woman is man’s field to produce his nation” (qtd. in Robinson 42). In Cleaver’s cosmology, moreover, the black woman’s “prone” position (qtd.
in Burns 119) not only indicates her docility to the male regime but signifies her servility to the nationalistic projects, one of whose aims is to reproduce. The nuclear family composed of a man and a woman simply fits the black male’s purpose, and his capability to impregnate her confirms his masculinity and cements his nationality.
What underlies the rhetoric of reproduction, we can go further, is the intensification of—and a requisite for—heterosexuality, and such capitalist apparatuses as cultural products and mass media aid in mandating this prescription and disciplining individuals to internalize the norms of the heterosexual matrix. The sixties’ America for the most part headed toward capitalism and encouraged a consumption-based economy. Monogamous structure matches precisely with this sort of economic condition. Commodities produced by retooled war machines were so torrential that they needed to be channeled into “the stable, heterosexual family,” and “individuals and groups who did not fit the consumer norm were further marginalized” (Dievler 167-68). Advertising also offered images that accorded with bipolarized gender categories and normativized sexual preferences. Since it was accessible to almost every citizen through radios, newspapers, TV programs and commercials, this all-encompassing device lent its force to the homogenized figuration of gender and sexual identity. Here we can recognize the correlativeness between consumptive modes and heterosexual terms, a reciprocity which revitalizes the postwar economy and reconsolidates familial and sexual mores. Given the political and social turbulences of that era, this move effectuates the state’s institutionalized surveillance and its oppression of revolting groups.
On the other hand, some may contend that sexual liberalism during the decade countervailed the rigidity of prescriptive sexuality, but its bondage to the consumer culture in fact told another story. As John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman have cogently observed, whereas
eroticization prevailed in popular culture like movies and music, it was still held in check and confined “within a heterosexual framework of long-term, monogamous relationships” (300).
Sexual impetus was less legitimized than reinscribed into a naturalized myth which registers instead conventional moral standards and, consequently, conforms to capitalist assumptions.
The focus on heterosexism and reproduction, as a result, resonates discursively with the black nationalistic rhetoric which must in turn reconfigure black manhood.
That the Black Power movement extols traditional familial structure and ethics should not be any surprise. What truly requires scrutiny is that black activists’ attempts to deploy an amalgamation of misogynist, reproductive, and heterosexist discourses throw into relief the Black Macho agenda,13 a masculinist strain which lurks behind the nation-building programs. That is, these three elements—misogyny, reproduction, and heterosexism—are synthesized into the formation and performance of black machismo. Stefanie Dunning is correct in pinpointing that “[b]lack nationalism is invested in the production of a patriarchal hegemony, where the black male body is the legitimate space of suffering and where the ultimate reproductive aim of the nation is not only to reproduce blackness, but maleness”
(“Parallel Perversions” 98, emphasis added). Black men emerge as the primary and only victims to vent fury on their oppressors. To enlarge male significance with virility and bellicosity is indeed closely related to the manhood necessary to catalyze the birth of a black nation. Yet the concurrent homogeneity within the nation unavoidably leads to a repressive gender politics that feminists would rebuke, and a suffocating mechanism against sexuality that gay and lesbian activists must denunciate. Hence hooks, a renowned black feminist, disagrees about the presupposition that “racism is more oppressive to black men than black women,” claiming that this misguided assumption is “fundamentally based on acceptance of patriarchal notions of masculinity” (Yearning 75). Wallace in her thought-provoking essay,
13 Such an amalgamation is far from flawless. I would later expose its self-contradictory logic within Black Power movement in the following discussion.
“Black Macho,” also decries nationalist campaigns for insidiously neglecting femaleness and minimizing femininity in building a black nation. Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien, though engaging with black gay activism, never stop mentioning that “[i]s was precisely because this one-dimensional masculinist rhetoric colludes and compromises black struggle [. . .] that black women organized autonomously as feminists in the 1970s” (138). Just as women are driven into muteness and subordination, so too do homosexuals and sexual perverts become inarticulate in respect to their sexual object choices. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. notes that
“national identity became sexualized in the 1960s, in such a way as to engender a curious subterraneous connection between homophobia and nationalism” (234). Philip Brian Harper, too, keenly observes that “[a] violent homophobia [. . .] is necessarily implicated in this
particular nationalistic position” (249). And specifically due to such political exigency,
“[h]omophobia is usually the last oppression to be mentioned, the last to be taken seriously, the last to go” (Smith 99). Insofar as black revolutionaries are preoccupied with nationhood attainable only through hyperbolic black malehood, they do not stop eradicating femininity, as the aforementioned, and any feminized mannerism, male homoeroticism surely included.
Now that gay love has been stereotyped as characteristic of “sissified” men, male-male intimacy is seen as the greatest taboo amidst these “hypermasculinized” activists. Racial politics further complicates homophobia. If intraracial homosexuality is on no account namable, interracial one is certainly prohibited and even punishable in that it signals, as what Cleaver reprimands Baldwin’s depiction of Rufus in Another Country, “a racial death-wish”
(127 and passim). What follows, then, is my investigation into the inextricability and conspiracy between nationalistic and homophobic discourses and my argument that anti-homosexuality in effect operates as a medium to revalorize Black Macho, or, more precisely, an index to the authentic black manhood as distinct from, and thus superior to, the white one. Interracial contestation of power along the axis of orthodox masculinity, in other words, translates the black nationalistic rhetoric into a homophobic narrative.