Byron Hurt’s short documentary on Black masculinity. For more from Byron visit his site.

Fam circa 1979

The following is an excerpt from an autobiography being written by my siblings and I:

Holding Smoke (Fahamu)

We sat watching television after dinner. Me, then 4, and Nefateri, age 3 were already dressed in our pj’s. I don’t remember what we were watching, or much about what was going on. But I remember my father saying, ” When I tell you to go I want you to get out of here as fast as you can!” He walked to the kitchen, and disappeared into the bedroom. I do remember that my parent’s room was separated from the rest of the apartment by a sliding wood-paneled door. I will never forget the vision I saw as the panel door was slid open next. The silhouette of my father was bathed in orange light. Momentarily shocked with awe by the color I just stared at the orange. It was a beautiful orange. Glowing, no, glaring in the background. I was momentarily hypnotized by the color.  “GO! GO NOW” my father yelled, awakening me from my trance.

Next we were outside. I don’t remember it being cold, though it was a January night in Brooklyn, and none of us were properly dressed. But I do remember the rain, and boy was it raining.  But it seemed like fun to be in the rain at night. As we walked down the street, I remember asking my father if I could ride on his “neck”. He picked me up and put me on his shoulders. The feeling of being up so high was always intoxicating, like being on top of the world. This feeling of delight at “riding my daddy’s neck” was further enhanced by the presence of the rain which just seemed too much like breaking the rules. This was something different and new. Yet, I seemed to be the only one enjoying this moment. I remember vaguely my brother and sisters crying. I wasn’t quite sure why Kwasi and Mimi were crying, but Nefateri cried a lot as it was and didn’t need much motivation.  I thought it odd that no one was having as much fun as me and the idea that something was wrong did not dawn on me until we arrived at the police station.

I remember the looks on the faces of the people in the police station as my father lowered me from my perch atop his shoulders. Mouths gaped open. Staring. Wondering. Confused. All of this confusion and shock must have awakened a part of my subconscious that has never let go of the following words. The first words I remember my father saying since we left the apartment. “I am Adam. My wife is Eve. I had to kill Eve because she does not believe”.     I had no idea what those words meant, but they were definitely not right. The next few moments are a blank. I only remember my siblings and I sitting in a room together and all of them crying, and I really had to use the bathroom.

I often try to comfort myself when it comes to memories of my momma by reminding myself that I was only 4 years old when she died. Maybe my cognitive skills and memory retention hadn’t quite developed fully, or maybe the shock and tragedy of the event of her death has created some psychological block that prevents me from accessing that part of my psyche. I try to tell myself these things, convince myself of the validity of those observations, but I never really believe them. There is a looming sense of guilt or my failure to respond that prevents me from accepting that I was too young to react or remember.  Some of the memories remain however, though foggy and vague, they are the memories I have and I cherish them.       A female officer who apparently had been keeping an eye on us came into the room to see how we were. I asked her if I could use the bathroom.  She led me to a bathroom that was the scariest thing I had seen. The paint was green, chipping and peeling away. A single light bulb dangled overhead from an open fixture. There was toilet and a sink. It seemed as though this bathroom had never once been cleaned. The bathroom was dark and smelly. I did not want to be left in there alone. All of a sudden I didn’t have to go anymore. Before the door could close completely I opened it back and told the officer I didn’t have to go.

On the way back to where my siblings were, we passed an ice cream vending machine. She must have caught my stare and asked, “Would you like an ice cream sweetie?” “Yes ma’am” I replied. As we approached the machine, she asked if I knew what kind of ice cream everyone liked. I believe I picked 4 Eskimo pie ice cream bars on a stick. It was by far my favorite. The hard chocolate shell over sweet vanilla ice cream, I could eat only that for the rest of my life. We got ice cream for everyone and returned to the room. I believe I was the only one to actually eat all of mine and maybe some of everyone else’s as the ice cream melted and mixed with their tears. I don’t remember ever crying, or any of us speaking about what had just happened, or anything at all. The memory begins to drift and fade like smoke, despite my best efforts I can’t hold on to anything else that happens that night or for months after.

Often I wake up trying to hold on to a great dream only to have it dissipate in my hands, slipping through my fingers like trying to hold on to smoke. As with my dreams, I’ve struggled much of my life with holding on to my memories. They often merge with visions of my own subconscious conjuring. A blurred line between what was and what I’ve imagined. Are they dreams? Or had they actually happened as I saw them in my mind? I guess a part of this confusion is that my dreams and memories most often play out in my mind like short movies. I can almost pause and fast-forward them. Sometimes its as though I’m watching myself in my own memories. This sort of third-person detachment makes it very confusing for me to remember what was fiction, dream or reality, while simultaneously freeing me from the responsibility of feelings associated with those memories. Then there are the memories I purposefully try to block out or convince myself were merely bad dreams.  Over the years I’ve become so successful at blocking out the painful things or those things I care not to remember that my memories have become as slippery as my dreams. I guess the danger of blocking out memories is you don’t have the luxury of selecting which ones you can retain and which ones fade into dust.

There aren’t many of these memories of my momma, maybe two or three. Like the one where I must have been two, maybe three years old and I was in the kitchen with mommy as she was cleaning or cooking, I can’t really recall. In any event, as was usually the case (until my 9th birthday), I stood there sucking my thumb. “Take your finger out of your mouth,” she said and I obliged, that is, until she turned around again and ‘POP’ the thumb was back in my mouth. When she saw my defiance, she said, “Ok, I got something for you. Come here”. Not knowing what was about to happen I walked over to her as she took my hand and drizzled hot sauce on my thumb. Still unaware, when the moment presented itself again, I popped my thumb back in my mouth only to discover the sudden and stinging taste of the hot sauce. I immediately snatched my finger from my mouth in confusion and shock. “That’ll teach you” mommy said, “Now stop sucking on your finger like that”. Not to be easily defeated, little 2-year-old me surveyed the scene for a moment as mommy returned to her chores. There was a dishtowel draped over the back of a chair and determination presented an opportunity. Unbeknownst to me, Mommy watched me use the dish towel to wipe any remaining residue and even the sheer memory of the hot sauce from my thumb, and tentatively, but proudly return my thumb to my mouth. In disbelief, yet clearly amused, mommy laughed and hugged me and said “Boy you’re too smart for your own good”.

I’m told by relatives, that as a child, I loved to entertain and make my momma laugh. I can recall coercing my kid sister Nefateri into “African dancing” with me. As mommy played her music, my sister and I would flail around and allow our little limbs to float in time with the music. With our eyes closed, we wiggled and moved trance-like with our best interpretations of African dancing. This always brought about a huge grin to mommy’s face and she loved to show off our ‘African dancing’ to friends and relatives at every opportunity.      Another memory which remains was that a neighbor had purchased a gigantic Sugar Daddy candy bar and gave it to me. Mostly I recall that when we behaved well, mommy would break each of us, Kwasi, Mimi, Nefateri and myself, a small piece off after dinner. It felt like Christmas!

Then there is that one indelible memory that seems more like a nightmare than an actual dream. Contrary to many other memories, this one I know to be real yet I have tried to convince myself that it was not, due in large part to the fact that during one of the most tragic events in my life, an experience that would alter the course of my life, I was completely unaware. Asking to ride my father’s shoulders, eating ice cream or being afraid to use the bathroom… Upon becoming conscious of what had actually happened, I became ashamed and embarrassed by my actions. It was not too long after that night that I realized the significance of what had occurred, and that memory would replay in my mind over and over again nearly everyday of my life. At this realization, I can still remember the guilt and shame I felt for being such a silly little boy, or the disappointment I feel at not having cried about it then or even now for that matter. The adult me knows that I was a 4-year-old child and that these reactions were probably normal, but it doesn’t take away the shame I feel for not being cognizant that my mother died, that my father had murdered her, that my life would never be the same.

Chris Brown is strong!

from: New Black Masculinity – The Diary of a Black Male Feminist. Nice letter!

Dear Mr. Brown,

WL | Media Library | Video | Black Masculanity

Embedded Video

In the analysis of ‘Black masculinity’ as a discursive formation one must focus on what has actually been said. Rather than try to find the grammatical codes in which a word such as ‘black’ could appear and operate, one need to pay attention to the those fields of words that have already been used in order to speak, measure, and account for ‘black masculinity’. By the same token, instead of an attempt to examine the logical ‘architecture’ of propositions about ‘blackness’ and how much consistent in terms of truth they are, one must describe how effectively ‘blackness’ has been inscribed by the different regimes of production of truth.

In the History of Sexuality, the fundamental thesis is that sexuality is not a natural reality but the product of a system of discourses and practices, which form part of the intensifying surveillance and control of the individual. Foucault states how sex has historically been subordinated to sexuality. Between sex and sexuality there is not an equation in which sex is on the side of reality and sexuality on the side of illusions or confused ideas. Instead, Foucault claims that “…sexuality is a very real historical formation; it is what gave rise to the notion of sex, as a speculative element necessary to its operation”[1]. This argument does not mean that ‘sex’ is just an illusion and sexuality is a natural thing. Rather than reproduce the dichotomy material reality / illusory representation, Foucault introduces a novel epistemology in which reality is discursively constituted. Sexuality appears, then, as a discursive formation historically located and associated with a set of non-discursive practices whereas sex has been produced as such into this regime. That is, sex has been made thinkable and operable precisely under the conditions of possibility configured by the discursive formation of sexuality and by its associated non-discursive practices.

From this perspective, while ‘blackness’ and by deduction black masculinity appears as a discursive formation that is articulated with a set of non-discursive practices; ‘black’ is, paraphrasing Foucault, a speculative element necessary to its operation. Thus, ‘black’ must be understood as the historical subordinated to ‘blackness.’ Like sex, ‘black’ must be analyzed as a deployment of ‘regimes of blackness’ beyond the specific somatic and behavioral diacritics used to characterize and define it. Therefore, ‘black’ does not exist as such independent of the discursive formations and non-discursive practices that have historically and differentially constituted it. In fact, what counts as ‘black’ had not only changed through time and place, but also what matters is to describe its multiple locations and transformations into a particular discursive formation as well as in its relations with non-discursive practices.

A relevant consequence is that ‘black’ does not have a clear and a unique referent in the ‘real world’. Rather than trying to find this pristine referent outside and previous to any discourse event, one must focus on the description of the plurality, contradictory and overlapping discursive and non-discursive practices that have constituted ‘blackness’ as such: In “[t]he analysis of the discursive field…we must grasp the statement in the exact specificity of its occurrence; determine its conditions of existence, fix at least its limits, establish its correlations with other statements that may be connected whit it, and show what other forms of statement it excludes”[2].

From this framework, then, the question is not what is the referent in the world that has been defined by ‘black masculinity’, but what kind of objects, practices and relationships have been made possible by the different ‘regimes of black masculinity’. Nor is it ontology of the true essence of ‘black masculinity’, but a description of discursive events in their occurrence and in their conditions of existence. The goal is not a hermeneutics of hidden meanings behind the speeches and texts, but a careful account of the discursive facts and their connections, emergence, ruptures and disappearance. Not a history of a mental idea that have developed slowly, but a material examination of a set of statements inscribed in their materiality in speeches or texts. In a nutshell, from a Foucaultian perspective, rather than a phenomenology, a semiotics or a history of mentality, ‘black masculinity’ must be made the subject of an archeological and genealogical inquiry. As Foucault states for sex, in sum, the point must be in the analysis of ‘black’ “… to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said. What is at issue, briefly, is the over-all ‘discursive fact,’ the way in which sex or ‘black’ is ‘put into discourse’ ”[3].

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From “The Birth of A Nation” to “Black Studs”

Despite every negative thing being said, brothers in the Sexiest & Ghetto Black Male Felon Bragging Rights community are extremely excited by Vogue Magazine’s April cover featuring sports superstar Lebron James and Brazillian top model Giselle Buchen.

“It only confirms what we’ve known all along,” one member writes.

“Lebron is from the ‘hood. If it wasn’t for sports, he could have verily easily been one of us – a Lonnie ‘Bonafide Hustler’ Webster or Lemaricus ‘Carjacker’ Davidson,” another member writers

“It feels good on the inside to know that they know we are physically and sexually superior,” another GBR community member penned.

“Ghetto Bragging Rights publisher Kirkland Perkins has been documenting this for years, now,” another member writes.

“Racially, Vogue’s cover is sexually stimulating,” Perkins said in a brief interview he gave this morning.

“We’ve covered this consitently over the years:

“As we are finding out, there are a lot of white girls who want impoverished, young, black men to rob, rape and kill them,” says GBR publisher Kirkland Perkins. “We get letters from young white women affirming this.”

“Thier lusts have progressed to wanting more than sex from us, though. They want to be robed, (often kidnapped – like Channon Christian), raped and killed. It is widely reported that Channon Christian wanted the death by sexual torture scenario and staged it herself.

“We can foresee a day when white women will no longer want sex from black men and will only want us to violently slay them.” – Kirkland Perkins “It goes all the way back to the days of slavery.”

Photographer Annie Leibovitz shot the 6-foot-9 NBA star and the 5-foot-11 Brazilian model for the cover and an inside spread.

Vogue spokesman Patrick O’Connell is quoted as saying: the magazine “sought to celebrate two superstars at the top of their game” for the magazine’s annual issue devoted to size and shape.

“We think Lebron James and Gisele Bundchen look beautiful together and we are honored to have them on the cover.”

King Kong and the White Woman:
Hustler Magazine and the Demonization of Black Masculinity

Theorists such as Wiegman (1993) and Snead (1994) have traced the beginnings of the image of the black man as sexual monster back to the late nineteenth century, as the product of a white supremacist ideology which saw the end of slavery as bringing about an unleashing of animalistic, brute violence inherent in African-American men. D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), was, without question, the first major mass circulation of this image in film and was to become the blueprint for how contemporary mass media depicts black males.

The notion of the black male as sexual monster has been linked to the economic vulnerability that white working-class men feel in the face of a capitalist economy over which they have little power. Guerrero (1993), in his discussion of the emergence of this new stereotype in the novels of Thomas Dixon, suggests that the economic turmoil of the postbellum South served to undermine the white southern male’s role as provider for his family; thus he sought to inflate his depreciated sense of manhood by taking up the honorific task of protecting White Womanhood against the newly constructed specter of the “brute Negro” (p. 12).

This encoding of the economic threat within a sexual context, is, according to Snead (1994), the principal mechanism of cinematic racism and is one of the subplots of the enormously successful King Kong movie (re-named King Kong and the White Women in Germany). Arguing that “in all Hollywood film portrayals of blacks … the political is never far from the sexual” (p. 8), Snead links the image of King-Kong rampaging through the streets of Manhattan with a defenseless white woman clutched to his body to the increasing economic emasculation of white men in the Depression years and the growing fear that black migration from the South had reduced the number of jobs available to working-class whites. King Kong’s death at the end of the movie remasculinizes the white man, not only by his conquering of the black menace but also by regaining the woman.

Couple of Interesting Facts:

1663

• Maryland passed a law under which free white women would lose their freedom if they married a black slave, and under which the children of white women and black men became slaves

1664

• Maryland became the first of the future states to pass a law making it illegal for free English women to marry “Negro slaves”