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Overview
In When We Imagine Grace, Drake borrows from Toni Morrison’s Beloved to bring imagination to the center of black masculinity studies—allowing individual black men to exempt themselves and their fates from a hateful, ignorant society and open themselves up as active agents at the center of their own stories. Against a backdrop of crisis, Drake brings forth the narratives of black men who have imagined grace for themselves. We meet African American cowboy, Nat Love, and Drake’s own grandfather, who served in the first black military unit to fight in World War II. Synthesizing black feminist and black masculinity studies, Drake analyzes black fathers and daughters, the valorization of black criminals, the black entrepreneurial pursuits of Marcus Garvey, Berry Gordy, and Jay-Z, and the denigration and celebration of gay black men: Cornelius Eady, Antoine Dodson, and Kehinde Wiley. With a powerful command of its subjects and a passionate dedication to hope, When We Imagine Grace gives us a new way of seeing and knowing black masculinity—sophisticated in concept and bracingly vivid in telling.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226364025 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 08/08/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
When We Imagine Grace
Black Men and Subject Making
By Simone C. Drake
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2016 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-36402-5
CHAPTER 1
A Friend of My Mind, or Where I Enter
A central premise of When We Imagine Grace is not only that there are multidimensional masculinities, as cultural and legal studies scholars have investigated, but also that there is an inherent creativity, imaginativeness, and beauty to the ways in which many black men have negotiated identities and rights during the pursuit of equality in the United States. Therefore, I employ a creative and imaginative approach to this chapter through an arrangement of vignettes that consider the complex and sometimes paradoxical relationship between crisis, vulnerability, and agency. I begin by thinking about Paul D's story in relationship to Sethe's, and how his story, coupled with that of Sixo, provides a compelling theoretical framework for seeing what imagining grace looks like. As I do so, black feminist theory provides important tools for seeing power in vulnerability and emotiveness in the public sphere and various cultural productions. President Obama's appearance on the cover of Ms. and his accompanying feminist declaration, social commentary on Tom Joyner's radio show, Donald McKayle's dance performance "Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder," Richard Pryor's comedy, presidential initiated social policy, and the visual art of Kehinde Wiley all work together to illustrate how I both employ and negotiate the challenges of synthesizing black feminist and black masculinity studies. Read together, these vignettes lay out the stakes for the work I do, as well as the complicated nature of constructing complex masculine identities in an era dominated by dialogues of crisis. And, while I privilege vulnerability and emotiveness in this chapter, I also consider how what Mark Anthony Neal references as illegible masculinities — those expressing vulnerability in this case — are not always a progressive performance that fosters self-actualization and resistance to crisis metaphors.
Although Paul D does not receive as much scholarly attention as Sethe, his character is just as pivotal to telling the story of slavery, resistance, and redemption. It is obvious that there are critics who would not agree with my assertion of Paul D's significance, as Morrison's development of black male characters has often come under fire. Accusations of emasculation and castration, though not acknowledged, are rooted in apprehension of representing black men as vulnerable. Ironically, the largely black male critics who shun Morrison are responding to white US constructions of masculine identities that began emerging as white anxiety grew about what manhood looked like at the dawning of the twentieth century. As historian Gail Bederman elucidates in Manliness and Civilization, by 1930, aggression, heterosexual sexuality, physical force, and virility were traits attributed to masculinity. These traits were inextricably linked to white supremacy and civic power, which were exemplified through Theodore Roosevelt's manhood and civilization discourse, touting Manifest Destiny and imperialism as manly duties; these were a means to avoid effeminacy and racial decadence. In response to the effects of migration and immigration on urban cities, anxiety around white manhood heightened feelings of emasculation in urban spaces due to both population size and lack of land ownership, as well as fears of women feminizing boys when functioning as their primary caregivers and teachers.
The early 1900s mark a point in time when manhood was no longer attached to land ownership and character, but to one's ability to prove one's manhood. In fact, the anxiety around white manhood gave rise to proving one's manhood through physical activities rooted in dominance, such as pugilism. As a result, black men also felt the anxiety around heterosexual masculinity and power dynamics. Discussions about black men, vulnerability, and general emotiveness, then, are frequently viewed as emasculating. I would argue, however, that for Paul D, those very acts represent the possibility of something else — something besides feeling emasculated by a rooster, something besides memories of chain gangs and iron bits in his mouth. They are what save him from the past. The road to salvation happens when he finds the only woman "who could have left him his manhood" and whose shared pain enables him to begin to pry open "the tobacco tin lodged in his chest" as he thought nothing could.
Although Paul D does not have physical scarring to mark his pain, like the chokecherry tree on Sethe's back, the narrator creates a window for readers to see his pain develop. In fact, throughout the narrative, Paul D is uncertain about his manhood and, at times, rejects particular traits of masculinity. Much ado has been made about Paul D's turn to brute-style violence when he attempts to exorcise 124 Bluestone of Beloved's ghost, but his character has greater dimension than this episode reveals. Early in the narrative, the description of Paul D sets the tone for his complexity and contradiction. He is described with "peachstone skin; straight-backed. For a man with an immobile face it was amazing how ready it was to smile, or blaze or be sorry with you. As though all you had to do was get his attention and right away he produced the feeling you were feeling." The ability of Paul D to register and connect to the emotions of others reveals a great deal about him. The brutality that critics and readers have honed in on, then, is far more nuanced than acknowledged.
The brute Paul D is undercut by the empathetic Paul D, perhaps most poetically, when he and Sethe are discussing Sethe's belief that Halle, her husband, betrayed her by not showing up at the barn as planned for their escape. Paul D explains that Halle witnessed Schoolteacher's nephews steal Sethe's milk. When Sethe queries, "He saw them boys do that to me and let them keep on breathing air?" Paul D quickly retorts, "Hey! Hey! Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain't no goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down because they're inside." While Sethe's tree marks the outside of her body, Paul D's tree grows on the inside, demanding that he suppress what stretches him to the point of feeling as though he will explode. It grows and grows, no matter how long he hacks away at it day in and day out. The tree grows, seemingly infinitely, as a marker of his psychic violation, but he registers his choice to determine if its branches will entangle and bind him to a constant state of reaction and enslavement. Acknowledging undefeatable pain is emotive and also registers vulnerability. His response pushes back against popular constructions of masculinity both now and contemporaneously with the setting of the novel. Being willing to throw off the pretense of invincibility, and making the choice to reject notions that real men are "strong," allow Paul D to imagine a black masculine self that is not bound by societal definitions, a self that is produced by imagining what has not been extended to him by the nation — grace. Those who would fixate on brutality without exploring this state of imagined grace actually do both Paul D and Morrison a disservice.
At the conclusion of Beloved, when Sethe and Paul D reconcile, Paul D remembers the poignancy of Sixo's description of the Thirty-Mile Woman; for this woman, he would walk thirty miles, miss a night's sleep to see her for only one hour, and then turn around to make his seventeen-hour journey back to Sweet Home in order to report to field call on Monday morning. Sixo describes the Thirty-Mile Woman as "a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind." Sixo's description is bound up in imagining grace because certain constructions of manhood dictate hierarchical relationships between the sexes. His willingness to not only acknowledge a friendship with a woman that is healing, but also admit to being in "pieces" creates space to construct a masculine identity that is not confined by social construction. For Sixo, to be a friend of someone's mind means knowing someone with exceptional depth, knowing his or her joys and strengths, as well as his or her vulnerabilities and weaknesses. For Paul D, it means that he is attuned to Sethe's needs — insisting, "You your best thing, Sethe. You are" — and Sethe, in turn, leaves Paul D his manhood when she "never mentioned or looked at" the iron collar he wore around his neck at Sweet Home, "so he did not have to feel the shame of being collared like a beast." Being a friend of your mind, then, importantly fosters a partnership that makes achieving racial justice communal, for the good of all, rather than a patriarchal project. Therefore, while I do not do this work to become a friend of black men's minds, as a black woman scholar, I understand my contributions to how black masculinities are theorized to be an act that works toward gathering the pieces of black men's lives that have been overlooked and undertheorized. Through those fragments, we can think anew about what gender means in the context of black men and their lived existences.
You Need a Man with Sensitivity; You Need a Man like Me
While this project is not intended to be yet another discussion regarding the election of President Barack Obama and its implications for perceptions of black masculinity both locally and globally, I am going to use his election to frame a discussion of black men, sentimentality, and vulnerability in the United States. The Winter 2009 issue of Ms., "Visions of Change," was marketed as the "Special Inaugural Issue." President-elect Barack Hussein Obama is featured on the cover, superimposed on a distant image of the White House. In Superman fashion, with tie whisked behind him like a cape, he is ripping open his dress shirt to reveal a T-shirt with the beloved feminist T-shirt expression "This is what a feminist looks like." Rather than the bold, red S emblazoned on Superman's chest, Ms. has clothed Obama with a phrase that is the equivalent of an F on his chest — F for feminist. In his interview with the publisher, Eleanor Smeal, and the chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation board, Peg Yorkin, Obama declared, "I am a feminist" without solicitation. The ease with which Obama claimed the "F-word" and the subsequent depiction of him on the cover of Ms. as a superhero-leader who will fight for women's rights — because he believes women ought to be socially, politically, and economically equal to men — is not an image likely to appear in most mainstream popular cultural or media representations of Obama. The unlikelihood of such a depiction in black popular cultural and media representations is even greater. In order to be what cultural critic and black popular culture scholar Mark Anthony Neal has identified as a Strong Black Man, black men, or at least those who strive to be considered "real" black men, are bound by codes of conduct that vehemently resist performances of sentimentality or vulnerability.
For many black men, the claim of being a feminist is the equivalent of self-emasculation. Thus, I think it is important to take a moment to analyze the significance of the four-word declarative statement Obama makes. In a firm yet simple statement, he declares, "I am a feminist." He offers no disclaimers, no conjunctions, and no adjectives. He does not foreground respect for his mother, wife, or daughters. He offers no "if," "and," or "but." More importantly, "I am a feminist" is absent of the popular adjective, "male," that often accompanies it, primarily in the circle of black male academics who want to frame their gender politics as antisexist. Instead of understanding feminism as gendered — something that women actually are and men can only be sympathetic toward — Obama suggests feminism as epistemological and divorced from sex, which is a risky move for a black man, especially a black man who is the commander in chief.
The perilousness of his position on feminism is amplified because of the always already questioning of Obama's fitness to serve as US president. The Tea Party's "birthers," for example, espouse a particularly troubling brand of racism when it comes to Obama's leadership acumen. Ironically, the same blackness that incites birthers' ire simultaneously fuels opposition from black religious leaders who condemn Obama's support of same-sex marriage; for black pastors like Rev. William Owens, president and founder of the Coalition of African American Pastors, Obama's support of same-sex marriage is tantamount to racial genocide because it is "not normal," "not natural," and defies "moral law." Yet, in much the same way that his declaration of feminism recognizes the ungendered and epistemological spirit of feminism as a movement, his support of civil rights for all citizens resists the historical tendency to limit equality to certain groups and assign "difference as deviance" to others. Recently reignited rumors that, because of his support for marriage equality, Obama himself must be gay reinforce the very hierarchical systems that Obama resists. His support of women's rights, epitomized by the first law he passed upon taking office, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, and his support of marriage equality position him as "alien" to many groups within his constituency. But their dispersions of Obama do not negate what his words and actions reveal — a conception of feminism as more than definitional — equal political, economic, and social rights for women; he conveys it as a system of knowledge not determined by one's sex, eliminating any need for adjectives.
The security that frames his declaration of being a feminist can be contrasted to two specific popular cultural demonstrations of sentimentality and vulnerability: commentary by radio talk show host Tom Joyner regarding hip-hop artist Chris Brown's 2010 BET Awards performance tribute to Michael Jackson and R&B vocalist Eric Benét's "Sometimes I Cry." The point of bringing these two texts together with the image of President Obama on the cover of Ms. is to think critically about how acts of sentimentality and vulnerability by black men are read and received in popular culture and, consequently, why the image of Obama "looking like" a feminist and talking like a feminist never went much farther than the cover of Ms. in media and popular cultural presentations. Each instance displays the limits placed on performances of black masculinities in both the public and the private domain.
Tom Joyner is a radio talk show host whose syndicated morning radio program is broadcast in over one hundred markets to over eight million listeners. Joyner is an HBCU alum (Tuskegee); he has established foundations and sponsors events that are invested in the social, economic, and political well-being of African Americans. As I was driving my children to school the day after the 2010 BET Music Awards, I was disappointed, but not terribly surprised, when I heard Tom Joyner's response to Chris Brown's emotional tribute to Michael Jackson. Joyner announced that there needed to be a ban on black men crying in public. He said he was tired that every time he turns around, another black man is on TV crying; Joyner did not note what other black men besides Brown had been crying publicly. What Brown was crying about is debatable and not the real issue. The issue is that Joyner, who had only recently lifted his ban of Chris Brown's music on his radio program — an act that purportedly demonstrated his disgust with Brown for assaulting Rihanna — would refuse black men the right to cry publicly, even though vulnerable acts like crying challenge images of black men as violent brutes. Upon hearing Joyner's rant, I immediately thought of various and largely white men's Christian organizations that embrace crying as a redemptive rite of passage to a new life. The political views of many members of these men's Christian organizations, however, are often not concerned about social issues specific to being both male and black. Whiteness makes a critical difference when it comes to stretching the bounds of masculine space because it is historically normalized through them. Black men are not afforded that flexibility and must always already be hypermasculine in order to be perceived as masculine at all. So, black men crying is emasculating rather than assuring a path to a form of redemption. Thus, it would seem that black men need a space where a new life with new images can be juxtaposed to the very images of black masculinity that Chris Brown might, in fact, have been crying about, especially given Michael Jackson's notorious crises of identity.
While Chris Brown's tears elicited condemnation from Joyner, apparently there are some tears cried by black men that are acceptable — namely, Eric Benét's "Sometimes I Cry," a single featured on his CD Lost in Time (2010). Presumably, the black masculine impropriety of fictively admitting tears over a lost love did not affect the ranking of this song on Billboard's "Hot Adult R&B Airplay" chart, where it reached No. 5. And, unlike Chris Brown, Benét's crying did not elicit a rant from Joyner; rather, it garnered him an invitation to Joyner's annual Black Family Reunion and a live appearance on his morning show (Sept. 2010). Not only did Joyner not object to a black man crying in this song, but Lil Wayne also endorsed the song, encouraging followers on his blog site, weezythanxyou.com, to stop what they were doing and listen to Benét's new song if they had not done so already. Weezy noted that, in prison, he listened to only ESPN and slow jams, and that "Sometimes I Cry" was the best song he had heard since Maxwell's "Woman's Worth." Showing his sensitive side invited joke making and speculation about his sexuality, especially considering his incarceration. Complicating Lil Wayne's endorsement was the fact that he, like many other admirers, misnamed Maxwell's song. The song's actual title is "This Woman's Work" and is a cover of British songstress Kate Bush's 1989 original work. Both the jokes that Lil Wayne unintentionally invited and the error that he made speak to why Joyner and he would not feel uncomfortable with the sentimentality and vulnerability expressed in the lyrics to both of these songs.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from When We Imagine Grace by Simone C. Drake. Copyright © 2016 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface: When Crisis Meets GraceAcknowledgments
Introduction: Navigating Discourses of Crisis
1 A Friend of My Mind, or Where I Enter
2 Nat Love: A New Negro Rebel in Wide Open Spaces
3 Lest We Forget: Stories My Grandfather Told Me
4 Deliver Us from Evil: Black Family Hauntings in a Neoliberal State
5 Twisted Criminalities: Contradictory Black Heroism
6 “I’m Not a Businessman, I’m a Business, Man”: A Hip-Hop Genealogy of Black Entrepreneurship
Epilogue: Boys Making Sense of Race
Notes
Index