African American Masculinity Research Articles

"Men Ain’t All": A Reworking of Masculinity inTales from the Hood, or, Grandma Meets the Zombie

AbstractIn the 1995 horror film Tales from the Hood, director / screenwriter Rusty Cundiejf and his company rework stereotypes of African American masculinity by borrowing elements from folklore. Influences on the movie from African American folklore-specifically ghost, trickster, and conjurer tales featuring the use of enchanted objects to exact vengeance-emphasize one’s responsibility to the community, the weak overcoming the strong, and the wisdom of elders. Tales thereby questions and complicates previous binary depictions.

"Men Ain't All"-- A Reworking of Masculinity in Tales from the Hood, or, Grandma Meets the Zombie

In the 1995 horror film Tales from the Hood, director/screenwriter Rusty Cundieff and his company rework stereotypes of African American masculinity by borrowing ele- ments from folklore. Influences on the movie from African American folklore—specifi- cally ghost, trickster, and conjurer tales featuring the use of enchanted objects to exact vengeance—emphasize one's responsibility to the community, the weak overcoming the strong, and the wisdom of elders. Tales thereby questions and complicates previous bi- nary depictions. HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. SEES the young African American filmmaker Rusty Cundieff as one of the harbingers of the renaissance to end all renaissances (Gates 1994: n.p.). He cites Cundieff's previous film, the hip-hop satire Fear of a Black Hat, as an example of African American art that displays consciousness of previous traditions and confidence in the legitimacy of black experiences as artistic material (Gates 1994: n.p.). Gates praises Cundieff's and the other artists' zest for parodies and the self-conscious echo, imitation, parody, and revision of their riffing and signifying on African American culture. I agree with Gates's assessment, and I take it one step further. In Tales from the Hood, director/screenwriter Rusty Cundieff revises not only African American artistic tradition for the screen; he and his production company attempt an even larger revision, by reworking stereotypes of African American masculinity. The significance of Cundieff's 1995 horror movie lies in the progress it makes toward eradi- cating binary gender depictions from the genre of horror film. It makes a small contri- bution toward disassembling such binaries in the larger culture as well. This measure of progress comes from Cundieff's use of certain elements of folklore to question and complicate depictions of African American men in film. The importance of this film for folklore studies comes from the example it provides us, not only of folklore's con- tinuing influence on popular culture but also of its potential for disrupting hegemonic images that popular culture promotes. Specifically, elements of African American folk- lore that emphasize one's responsibility to the community, the weak overcoming the strong, and the wisdom of elders appear to have influenced this particular example of

Lessons from Against the Odds

Editor's Note: These three articles draw from Jeremy Price's Against Odds: The Meaning of School and Relationships in Lives of Six Young African-American Men, Vivian G. Morris and Curtis L. Morris's Creating Caring and Nurturing Educational Environments for African American Children, and June Gordon's The Color of Teaching. These books were among finalists for AACTE 2001 Outstanding Writing Award and were particularly relevant to issues of demography and democracy in teacher education, theme of this issue of journal. Education is a right, not a privilege. This stance is increasingly important as we witness an expansion and transformation of social groups within United States. Almost 25% of America's children live below poverty level, and population projections over next century indicate White students will no longer be dominant within public schools. With research suggesting that those who are poor or belong to marginalized ethnic-racial communities oftentimes experience an inferior education compared to many White and middle-class students, challenge of creating a rich and empowering education for all is heightened. The demographic shifts noted above have enormous implications for theory and practice of teaching and teacher education. Developing teacher education programs that foster students' capacities to understand and act in their world and beyond becomes one of central challenges for teacher educators. Part of this challenge requires educators to move beyond universal constructs of various social and cultural groups while recognizing significance of relationships of race, class, and gender to power and privilege in lives and experiences of all students. The challenge is not only one of recognizing experiences of various disenfranchised groups but also recognizing differences in experiences within groups. My book Against Odds: The Meaning of School and Relationships in Lives of Six Young African-American Men (2000) takes up an exploration of such challenge. The book attempts to understand experiences of six African American young men from different social class backgrounds attending four different schools. Rather than trying to universalize their experiences of school, this study provides an opportunity to understand threads that bind and separate their lives through exploring meanings of school experiences, different relationships they forged in and out of school, and their hopes and dreams for life beyond school. My quest to understand lives and experiences of a range of young African American men was, in part, spurred by pervasive and narrow images of the African American man that have been portrayed in media and much research. Such representations have tended to ignore array of African American masculinities that are lived out within and among a variety of sociocultural and geographic contexts. I used ethnographic interview to learn about young men's lives over course of a year. Because of my own social location as a White, middle-class man, I decided to interview young men outside context of school and in contexts of their own choosing. Interviewing them outside of school and having open-ended interviews, however, did not lessen unequal power relations that lay between me and study participants. Our differences in race, class, gender, and age all were at play in research relationships we developed. It is important, then, to note that my interpretations and representations are partial and in no way can be seen as only account of young men's lives. In book, I unravel how six young men developed different meanings of high school diploma, their experiences in classrooms, and their relationships with family members and peers. I argue that these meanings of school and relationships, in large measure, can be explained by examining their differential access to power and privilege, their encounters with inequality, and their interactions with school culture and structures. …

The effects of racism, african self-consciousness and psychological functioning on black masculinity: A historical and social adaptation framework

This theoretical paper examines the impact of racism and African self-consciousness on Black males' conceptions of masculinity and psychological functioning. Much of the literature on the masculinity of African American men has been based on theoretical reviews (Blazina, 1997; Franklin, 1994, 1985, 1986; Hall, 1992; Harris, 1992; Oliver, 1989; Pin 1996; Roberts, 1994, Rowan1996; Staples, 1978) or addressing theoretical models (Hunter, 1992). Several recent studies have attempted to examine empirically African American masculinity and ideology in relation to gender and race differences (Levant & Majors, 1997; Levant, Majors, & Kelley, 1998). These studies left several key questions unanswered. They failed to examine the impact of African self-consciousness, racism and discrimination on the endorsement of tradition and non-traditional masculinity ideology.

"I will wear no chain!": a social history of African-American males

Introduction Slavery and the Development of Black Male Masculinity, 1619-1860 The Context of Black Masculine Development during the Antebellum Era The Development of African American Masculinity among Free Black Males 1619-1861 The Civil War and the Black Male African American Males and the Challenge of Emancipation, 1865-1895 Booker T. Washington, Accommodationism, and Black Masculinity Black Males, Race Riots, and the Scourge of Lynching Marcus Garvey and the New Negro Man The Emergence of the Urban Black Male: African American Males and Increasing Black Power, 1945-1972 African American Males in Contemporary Society, 1972-Present

Slouching toward Beastliness: Richard Wright's Anatomy of Thomas Dixon

Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy, writes W. E. B. Du Bois L in Black Reconstruction, central of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man (237). U.S. literature has both tried to resolve this and contributed to it. Two of the most influential fictional portrayals of African-American men, Uncle Tom and Bigger Thomas, illustrate polarized responses. These protagonists, one notoriously passive and the other violently aggressive, are linked in more than name. Indeed, James Baldwin's complaints in Everybody's Protest Novel have made the most important precursor of Richard Wright's character appear to be Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom. [1] But I would like to direct attention to an equally important depiction of the problem of African-American masculinity against which Wright defined the protagonist of Native Son: the black male beast of Thomas Dixon's novels. The North Carolinian novelist did not, to be sure, invent this degrading representation of black men. While historians debate how far back the stereotype goes, the beast exploded in notoriety in the 1890s, a time of massive black disenfranchisement and the rise of legalized Jim Crow. Whites touted this construct as proof of the supposed degeneration of blacks and used it to justify their own increasing acts of brutality during this period (Fredrickson 258, 282, 98). [2] Critical race studies boasts an extensive bibliography on the D. W. Griffith blockbuster The Birth of a Nation (1915), but notes few treatments of the Dixon novels that inspired the racial stereotypes so widely disseminated in that film. [3] As consolidated in these novels, especially The Leopard's Spots (1902) and The Clansman (1905), the beast stereotype delineates a particular linking of eros and thanatos: the rape of a white woman as prelude to her death and/or to the lynching of her accused rapist. I do not propose a study of Dixon' s direct influence on Wright here but rather an examination of Native Son's complex relation to a pervasive myth, a myth that finds its most complete articulation in Dixon's novels. Convinced that radical Reconstruction--which marked the first attempt in the U.S. to incorporate blacks into the body politic--had unleashed the beast, Dixon crystallized the anxieties of many whites of his time. [4] Wright interrogates the white fantasy about black beasts through a plot centering on a legal lynching in response to a presumed rape that in fact never occurred. Wright so closely examines Dixon's assumptions about black masculinity that Native Son needs to be seen as parodying the white supremacist vision. In anatomizing the beast, Wright both follows and makes strategic revisions in the stereotype. Much as Dixon sought, by his own admission, to correct Stowe's influential representaton of African Americans, providing what he described as the true story of the South (qtd. in Cook, Thomas Dixon 51), so did Wri ght seek to amend the consequential image of the black male beast and, with that, the portrait of the nation. [5] In preparation for writing his socalled Reconstruction Trilogy, Dixon organized over 1000 pages of historical notes (Cook, Thomas Dixon 65), and his perspective can quickly be captured by reviewing his historical assumptions. According to Dioxonian history, after the Civil War white Southerners were perfectly happy to accept their defeat and rejoin the Union. But unscrupulous whites such as Simon Legree (Stowe's villain reappears in The Leopard's Spots as master artificer of Reconstruction policy [103], Wall Street millionaire, and evil industrialist) engineered policies that created interracial strife. For instance, The Leopard's Spots depicts the short-lived Freedman's Bureau--created in 1865 to oversee education and free labor while providing provisions and shelter to the destitute--as forcing whites to pay blacks for work they hadn't done, thus precipitating innocent and hard-working whites into bankruptcy. …

African American masculinity: Power and expression

African American masculinity: Power and expression