Black Men, Black Feminism: Lucifer’s Nocturne [1 ed.] 9783319741253, 9783319741260

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BLACK MEN, BLACK FEMINISM Lucifer’s Nocturne

Jared Sexton

Black Men, Black Feminism

Protester rests during a November 2014 demonstration in Oakland, California, against the grand jury decision in the case of Officer Darren Wilson. Image reproduced with permission from Reuters Pictures

Jared Sexton

Black Men, Black Feminism Lucifer’s Nocturne

Jared Sexton Department of African American Studies University of California Irvine, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-319-74125-3    ISBN 978-3-319-74126-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74126-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018931893 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Andrew Taylor/Flickr Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To DAS, in memoriam, for a love too big to appreciate in one lifetime. To CJD, for putting me on a path before I could see my own way.

Contents

1 Speak of the Devil   1 2 Where Manhood Lies 41 3 Unbearable Blackness 75 Index 107

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 1.2 Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Stan (Henry Sanders) and his wife (Kaycee Moore) argue with Stan’s friends, Scooter and Smoke, on the front porch in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978). Image reproduced under terms of fair use Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) finds himself chained to an armchair in the basement in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). Image reproduced under terms of fair use Protester rests during a November 2014 demonstration in Oakland, California, against the grand jury decision in the case of Officer Darren Wilson. Image reproduced with permission from Reuters Pictures Dorothy (Barbara O.) holds her daughter, Luann (Susan Williams), in Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1979). Image reproduced under terms of fair use

8 26

93 96

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CHAPTER 1

Speak of the Devil

Living alone never ensures what a boy will become, but black men, above all, are the boys spared long enough to live. —Stacia L. Brown, “We Have Known Black Boys (But None Have Been Bullet-Proof)”

Abstract  This chapter introduces the problematic of black masculinity in an antiblack world. It draws, to that end, upon legal scholar Paul Butler’s The Chokehold and literary critic Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection. “Lucifer” is discussed as a useful name for the complexity of black masculinity in theory, culture, and politics. Readings of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) help to illustrate some of the main points. Keywords  Black feminism • Black masculinity • Devil • Get Out • Killer of Sheep • Lucifer • Policing

1 Black masculinity is always something extraordinary; it is also always something extra ordinary. Whatever it may turn out to be, in any given context or situation, however it is defined or refined, it is never unremarkable, least of all for those living and dying under its heading. It is, from most every vantage, foreign and domestic, the site and sign of ravage and ruin, and of © The Author(s) 2018 J. Sexton, Black Men, Black Feminism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74126-0_1

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revelation too. Insofar as it signifies the greatest exception to the rule and the furthest deviation from the law, it returns no less to claim or to be claimed by a proof of the rule and an institution of the law. Hyper-­ masculinity, one supposed characteristic of the forms of life in question, is both abandonment and recuperation of the desire for dominant masculinity, for masculinity as dominance. It misses the mark by overshooting or overwhelming it. Likewise, though, black masculinity is often enough figured as hypo-masculinity, as lacking, as wanting; it would seem to represent a certain failure of masculinity as well. In either case, we find masculinity in and as permanent crisis. We might wonder how this can be so: a phenomenon seemingly too much and too little of itself by virtue of its most controversial qualification—black. Would it make a difference to describe black masculinity as an oscillation between surplus and deficit, or even a paradoxical insistence of both less and more at once, or neither? If black masculinity suggests a limit-case, we must ask, what is masculinity at all that one can have too much or too little of it, in turn and in tandem? Is there, by contrast, really such a thing as masculinity that is necessary or needed, one that is indeed proper to anybody? Is black masculinity, then, not a negative instance of the very masculinity to which it lays an illegitimate, even illegal, claim and by which it is claimed, imperiously, as too-much-too-little? What better way to outline its conditions of emergence and contestation than through a figure of ambivalent value? I borrow that last phrase from Jonathan Munby’s (2011) survey of “criminal self-representation in African American popular culture,” Under a Bad Sign. There, Munby is interested in how depictions of the “badman” have permeated black popular cultural production throughout the twentieth century (and indeed for much longer) as a strategy for registering and resignifying the tropes of race, class, gender, and sexuality hierarchically organizing the larger society. The broad appeal of the badman’s resistance, Munby suggests, is soldered to equally strong concerns about his liability to the well-being of the good people of the neighborhood: As a figure of ambivalent value to the community that both venerates and fears him, the badman-pimp-hustler-trickster of black folklore clearly violates the doctrine of racial uplift that is meant to pave the way to equality. He is antithetical to that which the leaders of the struggle against racial subordination have required and invoked to legitimate their cause: the idea of a unified and virtuous black community. He claims a name (possession of a

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reputation) through the disrespecting of other’s names (bragging and besting others through superior insult exchanges—leading more often than not to murder) (Munby 2011, 9).

The sense of fear, however, is not restricted to those committed to the accommodationist doctrine of racial uplift, those promoting middle-class mores for a narrow politics of respectability. This is not only a worry about fueling racist myth and stereotype. Nor is it a fear confined to the badman per se, but rather to the actual or potential elements of the badman within any black man whatsoever. For as we see already in the symbolic amalgamation of the trickster with the pimp and the hustler, the badman is, as well, one who can and does exploit those within the community more vulnerable than himself—principally women and children, but also weaker men of any age. The badman surely flouts bourgeois social norms and breaks the white man’s law, but he also attenuates or undermines the prospect of any radical transformation initiated by black collectivities themselves. Legendary blues guitarist Albert King sang the eponymous 1971 track, “Born Under a Bad Sign,” declaring in a late verse: “Wine and women is all I crave/A big legged woman is gonna carry me to my grave.” King’s downtrodden illiterate protagonist, whose only luck is “real bad luck,” raises the question of how black masculinity can serve the cause of an unlawful and unseemly freedom without retaining or resorting to generational, gender, and sexual violence, at home or on the street, and thereby contributing to the reproductive oppression of black communities. Put the other way around, the question is raised whether there can be a black feminist reconstruction of black masculinity without retaining or resorting to law enforcement and thereby contributing to the reproductive oppression of black communities. Stacia Brown’s (2014) above elegy, written in the immediate aftermath of Michael Dunn’s mistrial for the 2012 murder of Jordan Davis in Jacksonville, Florida (he was later convicted at retrial and sentenced to life without parole), spoke about the communal hope that black boys be allowed to grow up, “reaching bullet-free adulthood,” but, as she was quick to add, this requires their “outreaching everyone’s fear” (emphasis added), not only that of white police and vigilantes. If black men live in the shadow of the badman, as figures of ambivalent value—loved/hated, desired/feared, embraced/rejected, and so on—then any (real or imagined) promise they hold or (real or imagined) threat they pose would invariably contaminate one another as its obverse or underside. So too

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would any support for and defense of that promise or any opposition of and defense against that threat. This is just another way to say that if black masculinity is riven by a certain structural ambivalence, and by ambiguity no less, then any black feminist critique of its impetus, source, aim, and object cannot help but be similarly torn. Developing habits of language adequate to address the resultant complexity—the permanent destabilization of our ideas of moral clarity, ethical certainty, political direction, and conceptual rigor—remains the pressing task at hand. Lucifer’s Nocturne is not, however, a critique of black feminism, nor is it an attempt to contribute to black feminist thought. It is a commentary on some examples of black men’s attempts to take up and take on black feminism, for better or worse, and, more specifically, some of the basic assumptions that have guided, or misguided, those efforts in the last generation. In what follows, we interrogate some of the more taken-for-­ granted intellectual postures adopted by black men writing about black feminism and highlight those who have written from other, perhaps more critical vantages in order to depart from a prevailing discourse on “black male feminism” (Awkward 1995, Lemons 2008, Neal 2015) that has likely left many black readers—across the range of genders and sexualities—unsatisfied, unenlightened, or uninspired. This text should be read, then, as a respectful disagreement with, or dissensus within, the project of raising “black feminist consciousness for black men and boys,” as one recent initiative put it (AAPF 2017).1 Not because there is a problem with “a vision of racial justice rooted in a Black feminist ethic of liberation.” Indeed, the thrust of this short book is to sustain that point and even to draw out how some of black men’s best efforts to participate in such an ethic are themselves shot through with false humility and resentment. Rather, the inquiry pursued here is prompted by the unremarked, if unavoidable, tension between, on the one hand, reclaiming “a vision of racial justice that centers the concerns of all Black lives” by displacing the exclusive focus on the concerns of black men and boys and, on the other, “acknowledging and advancing the need to center the concerns of Black women and girls at the heart” of that vision. These may be two sides of the same coin, but the relation between these twin political moves nonetheless remains hazy. If we can see the manifest problems with an exclusive focus on the concerns of black men and boys, and if we can note as well that centering the concerns of black women and girls is not only a critical improvement but also a crucial precondition for true racial justice, it is

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not, for all that, apparent how the concerns of black men and boys (or black women and girls, for that matter) should be most productively reframed in the process. What happens after the space-clearing gesture, in the wake of the intervention? Legal scholar Paul Butler (2017a) writes in Chokehold: Policing Black Men: “The challenge for any project that focuses on African American men … is to highlight the particular ways in which black men are stereotyped without marginalizing the experiences of African American women in the process” (Butler 2017a, 8). The problem, of course, is that this gendered particularity is precisely what is in question. Black feminist scholars and activists have long argued that black women and girls are in no ways spared from forms of state-sanctioned racial violence that predominantly target black men and boys, even if they experience them at varying rates. Additionally, black women and girls must combat forms of state-­ sanctioned racial violence that predominantly target them, including violence committed against them by black men and boys (Richie 2012; Ritchie 2017). Which is to say that black women and girls most certainly have it worse in an antiblack world because they inhabit the social locations at which racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism (among other systems) intersect with and powerfully augment the ravages of life under capitalism, and vice versa. But does this imply, in turn, that black men and boys necessarily have it better? Is it not possible to conceive of antiblackness in such a way that black women and girls are uniquely positioned by its operations and, at the same time, share with black men and boys what Angela Davis termed “the deformed equality of equal oppression” (Davis 1972, 89) forged under the slave regime and permutated in our ostensibly post-emancipation society?2 Is there not a way to talk, in this case, about topological figures of difference without boundary?3 Butler glosses the logic of the police power in what he claims is its formative encounter with black men, a logic encapsulated in dynamics of a literal chokehold: A chokehold is a process of coercing submission that is self-reinforcing. A chokehold justifies additional pressure on the body because the body does not come into compliance, but the body cannot come into compliance because of the vice grip that is on it. This is the black experience in the United States. This is how the process of law and order pushes African American men into the criminal system. This is how the system is broke on purpose (Butler 2017a, 4).

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He continues, in anticipation of those who would restrict the implications of his study to some criminal element within black communities (i.e. to the badman), to elaborate the explanatory power of a figurative vice grip, his concept-metaphor of the Chokehold: But the Chokehold applies to all African American men, not only the brothers who are locked up or have criminal records. It is insidious enough that it clamps down on black men even when there are no cops around. The Chokehold demands a certain kind of performance from a black man every time he leaves his home. He must affirmatively demonstrate—to the police and the public at large—that he is not a threat. Most African American men follow the script. Black men who are noncompliant suffer the consequences (Butler 2017a, 8).

There are a few points worth underscoring here. First, of course, is that the chokehold brooks no genuine response. One cannot, under any circumstances, comply with a chokehold because it invariably provokes one’s resistance; we might even say that it imposes one’s resistance upon oneself. Worse still, it then uses that resistance against itself, since the chokehold does not only persist to the extent that it is resisted, it also tightens. One cannot comply and one cannot escape; there is no mediation or negotiation in this direct relation of force. Second, the chokehold applies indiscriminately, which is to say gratuitously, to all black men, regardless of prior record or current activity, regardless of time or place. Third, the chokehold is not limited to the sworn officers of law enforcement a­ gencies; it represents a larger conception of the police power that extends to the general public (including, Butler makes clear, black communities). Fourth, the purpose of the chokehold is to demand that black men demonstrate they are not threats to public safety. But as Butler’s own evidence and argument plainly show, black men are thought to be a threat in their very being, and not for any particular conduct or performance. It is, therefore, as impossible for black men to follow the required script as it is for them to submit to the chokehold. This slippage in Butler’s analysis is telling, and common: black men are shown to inhabit an impossible predicament, a type of damnation, if you will, but somehow they are afforded an entirely unfounded notion of choice in the matter. Stated slightly differently, black men are shown to be facing a forced choice—you can comply and slowly choke or you can resist and choke even faster, but since the chokehold forces you to resist, you

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can only resist and choke faster—and then the unyielding force that underwrites the “choice” drops out of the discussion at key moments. I suspect that this slippage is related fundamentally to the other slippage in question, namely, between statements about black men and statements about all black people. “Cops routinely hurt and humiliate black people because that is what they are paid to do,” writes Butler in a recent article for the UK Guardian. “Virtually every objective investigation of a US law enforcement agency finds that the police, as policy, treat African Americans with contempt” (Butler 2017b). If law enforcement agencies serve as the avant-garde of a larger police power, that is, an antiblack state and civil society, then it is in fact the general public that treats black people with contempt, routinely hurting and humiliating them as policy and not only as practice, de jure and not only de facto. Butler, in short, has put his finger on an organizing principle.4 What does it mean to be differentiated by gender (or sexuality or class or…) under these conditions? Female gender in black, not unlike youth or old age or disability, generally intensifies structural vulnerability and affords none of the traditional protections. Male gender in black inconsistently mediates structural vulnerability but affords none of the traditional entitlements. Power in black is a negative affordance, a capability for immiserating the lives of others without a capacity for ameliorating one’s own, like a seesaw that works in only one direction, down. Dominant claims in black reproduce domination without dominance, except as a force multiplier for borrowed institutionality. There is no familiar figure of speech to describe this strange algebra: x