If We Must Die: From Bigger Thomas to Biggie Smalls (African American Life) [Illustrated] 081433413X, 9780814334133

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IF WE MUST DIE

African American Life Series A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu Series Editor Melba Joyce Boyd Department of Africana Studies, Wayne State University

Aimé J. Ellis

From Bigger Thomas to Biggie Smalls

Wayne State University Press Detroit

© 2011 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. 15 14 13 12 11

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ellis, Aimé J., 1969–2009. If we must die : from Bigger Thomas to Biggie Smalls / Aime J. Ellis. p. cm. — (African American life series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8143-3413-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. African American men—Social conditions. 2. African American men—Psychology. 3. Masculinity—Social aspects—United States. 4. Death—Social aspects—United States. 5. Masculinity—United States—Psychological aspects. 6. Death—United States—Psychological aspects. 7. Racism—United States—History. 8. State-sponsored terrorism—United States— History. 9. African American men in popular culture. 10. American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. I. Title. E185.86.E436 2011 305.38’896073—dc22 2010037916

Typeset by Maya Rhodes Composed in Adobe Garamond Pro and Univers

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1 “Boys in the Hood”: Black Male Community in Richard Wright’s Native Son 23 2 “It’s a Man’s World”: Rethinking Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice in the Twenty-first Century 43 3 “Am I Black Enough for You?”: Black Male Authenticity in Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America 63 4 Death Bound: The Thug Life 91 5 “How Does It Feel?”: A Question of Life and Death in D’Angelo’s “Untitled” 123 Notes 143 Bibliography 175 Index 189

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Acknowledgments

At least once a day, oftentimes more, I wish Aimé were here. It is a longing that surpasses anything I have ever wanted before, and I wish for it madly. My wishing is simultaneously constant and sporadic encompassing significant life events and completely mundane happenings. I wish he were the first person I could call after receiving good news. I wish he were here to share in life’s accomplishments and setbacks. I wish he were still inspiring students in the classroom with his unique and brilliant academic perspective. I wish he were here to finish plans we had for our old home and cultivate his amazing container garden. I wish he were here to see his dog grow into a very chill and unbelievably sweet but high-maintenance companion. I wish he were here so he could make that face he made when something amused him. I wish he were here to go shopping and watch movies. I wish he were here to take long walks around the state capitol, enjoy hot dogs sold by vendors during Lansing’s warm weather months, drink Sunkist, eat sugary candies, write music, shred a mean riff on his guitar, talk about fashion, complain about my cooking, and make those funny and insightful jokes that only Aimé could make. I wish he were here for his mom, his dad, his nephews, and his friends. Selfishly, I wish he were here for me. And now, more than ever, I wish Aimé were here to see his book in its complete form and to personally acknowledge those who offered guidance and support to him along the way. This book addresses the issues that animated Aimé Jero Ellis’s work as a scholar and teacher: black masculinity, popular culture, and community. Because Aimé died before this book was published, it also stands as the culmination of his intellectual endeavor.

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As with any book, this one was born of, and sustained by, relationships and exchanges both intellectual and emotional. Writing more than a year after Aimé succumbed to cancer on May 26, 2009, I would like to acknowledge those people whom I know helped to shape this work and contribute to what was a tremendously important part of a life cut short. I hope that, reading this, you will recall Aimé-the-scholar as I do: perched behind a pile of books scribbling revisions in his uniquely sculpted penmanship; speaking animatedly, with his hands as much as his voice, in conversations with his peers; or helping his students, gently and with great compassion, to think in new ways about experiences of suffering, redemption, and their legacies. Following Aime’s death, a number of colleagues generously offered time and assistance to ready this book for publication. Special thanks to professors Lloyd Pratt, Stephen Ward, Salah Hassan, Dana Nelson, and Virginia Blum. Many thanks to the editors and staff at Wayne State University Press for remaining committed to the project. I offer special thanks to Melba Joyce Boyd, Kathryn Wildfong, Carrie Teefey, Sarah Murphy, Emily Nowak, and all the other talented individuals who have seen this book to fruition. You are all extraordinarily patient, kind, and considerate. Thank you. Institutional support is important to any scholar. Thank you to Stephen Arch, chair of the English Department at Michigan State University, and Karin A. Wurst, dean of the College of Arts and Letters. At the University of Texas, where Aimé earned his PhD, Barbara Harlow, Ted Gordon, Sheila Walker, and Toyin Falola were important guides as this project first took shape. John “Doc” Warfield offered mentorship and support. Stephen Ward and Salah Hassan, from Texas to Michigan; Dana Nelson and Virginia Blum at Kentucky; Zarena Aslami, Lloyd Pratt, Karl Schoonover, Ken Harrow, Pero Dagbovie, and Jeff Wray at Michigan State: you were Aimé’s friends as well as respected intellectual colleagues. Aimé greatly valued his graduate students at MSU, and I wish to acknowledge Collin Craig, Fumiko Sakashita, Rashida Harrison, and Hugh O’Connell, all of whom worked closely with Aimé. Fumiko, thank you for taking on Aimé’s teaching responsibilities when his health finally kept him from the classroom. Geneva Smitherman, University Distinguished Professor in Sociolinguistics, and acting director and co-founder of the doctoral program in

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African American and African studies at MSU, was a mentor and friend who inspired and energized Aimé with her love, humor, wisdom, and especially her marvelous intellect. Thank you, Geneva. Although she often drove him crazy, she also brought Aimé great pleasure, and I would like to acknowledge the boundless and unconditional love that Aimé’s canine companion, Marley, offered in support of this project. In more ways than I can express, this book would not have been possible, or taken shape as it has, without Aimé’s family. Deepest love and thanks to Ora J. Ellis and Kenneth Ellis, Aimé’s parents, for their unwavering love and support. Together they nurtured a wonderful, curious, smart, sweet, committed, and beautiful man. Aimé’s nephew Dylan was a great source of pride and motivation, as well as the inheritor of a serious gift of style. Ian Alexander Ellis was Aimé’s lifelong guide, co-conspirator, and confidant: his brother. I wish to thank a number of people for their love and support during such a very challenging time: Mom, Dad, Kim, Ashley, Brad, Jordan, Elishia, Zarena, Jim, Ellen, Karl, Lloyd, Brandt, and Casey. You were there during our year of crisis and have offered tremendous support as we all worked to recuperate from an immeasurable loss. While Aimé is not physically here, his intellectual presence remains in the form of the scholarship he leaves behind. His voice, intellect, and creativity lie in the pages of this book. To all of you who helped in its production, I thank you on behalf of Aimé Jero Ellis. Amanda York Ellis November 2010

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Introduction

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n late fall 1994, Christopher Wallace—with the production support of Sean “Puffy” Combs and Bad Boy Records—released his hugely successful debut rap album, Ready to Die. On the album’s final track, “Suicidal Thoughts,” Wallace’s larger-than-life alter ego, Biggie Smalls (also known in the hip-hop world as the Notorious B.I.G., Frank White, Biggie, or, simply, “Big”), testifies to the undefeatable despair of his life, takes a loaded gun to his head, and carries out the album’s anticipated death fantasy. Wallace’s second album, Life after Death (1997), literally picks up where “Suicidal Thoughts” leaves off, sampling this self-annihilating scene on its first two tracks, “Life after Death Intro” and “Somebody’s Gotta Die.” Yet by returning to this performance of deathly violence as a way to introduce Life after Death, Wallace dramatizes how Biggie’s death on his first album functions not only as a point of finality carrying him to a dark, barren nether world but also as a primal scene initiating Biggie’s deathly rite of passage toward manhood and self-discovery. In this latter regard, Biggie’s symbolic suicide not only works to generate the deathly assortment of new hard-core material on his second album but also, and, I think, more importantly, produces a modern-day black male subject that asserts that to be black, poor, and male is to live with the sense that one is at once bound for and yet strangely emanating out of death.1 To concede, on the one hand, a self-annihilating drive in Biggie’s symbolic suicide and, on the other, to distinguish it as an originary and gen-

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erative site of black male subjectivity is, in many ways, to indulge Wallace’s curious obsession with death; however, his inexhaustible excavation of death’s destructive force as well as its emancipatory potentiality is also to bear witness to what in 1987 musical prodigy Prince would memorialize in song as a “sign o[f ] the times,” a sobering commentary on the largescale effects of federal withdrawal from public institutions as well as the paramilitary force of law shaping the lived experiences and artistic imaginings of those relegated to the precarious margins of U.S. society throughout the 1980s and 1990s. To be sure, by 1997 when Wallace was killed, deathly violence saturated the lives of poor urban black male youths, giving altogether new meaning to the problematic and now outdated euphemism “at risk.” Indeed, according to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, “Black males [during this period] accounted for 45 percent of all homicide victims, while they only account[ed] for 6 percent of the entire population.” In addition, “firearms ha[d] become the predominant method of suicide for Blacks aged 10–19 years, accounting for over 66 percent of suicides.” Out of this contemporary zeitgeist of state apathy and violence, Biggie’s engrossing lyrical flow “gives life” to the grim realities and dreams of poor urban black men, capturing—on so many of his hardcore tracks—the life-threatening ways “things” had, in fact, “changed” for those growing up amid deindustrialization, the “crack wars,” the proliferation of the prison-industrial complex, the AIDS epidemic, and the militarization of inner-city life. Thus, even while most of Wallace’s mainstream success has been built on commercially minded club hits such as “Juicy,” “Big Poppa,” “One More Chance,” and “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems,” it is perhaps not surprising that the toxic depictions of deathly violence, the disaffected expectancy of death, and the braggadocious representations of death-defiance make up the leitmotifs of his complete discography. (A sampling of track titles from Wallace’s recordings leaves little room for doubt concerning his untiring fixation on death: “Ready to Die,” “Things Done Changed,” “Warning,” “Who Shot Ya,” “Dead Wrong,” “My Downfall,” “You’re Nobody (Til Somebody Kills You),” “Long Kiss Goodnight,” “Miss U,” “If I Should Die Before I Wake,” and “Would You Die For Me”). Yet, despite all these deathly stories of contemporary urban black male life, Wallace’s hard-core imagination was not the stuff to which his own lived experiences could attest; that is, it is widely known that Wallace was never directly implicated in any gang activity, never caught up in gun violence, and only marginally

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Christopher Wallace posing for the Life after Death album cover at Cypress Hill Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY, February 1997. (Photo by Michael Lavine)

drawn in by drug dealing; nonetheless, his meteoric success as a young poor black male rapper seeking to capitalize on hard-core’s market-driven demand to “keep it real” in the killing fields of U.S. inner cities produced the schizophrenic and vertiginous energy that would ultimately drive his “real life” to become dangerously exposed to death threats, deathly paranoia, and lethal violence. Up until the very end of his life, Wallace’s obsessive compulsion with representations of death, deathly violence, and death-defiance seemed not only a defining mark of his artistic persona but, to many fans, also a warning of the hard-core rapper’s self-fulfilling prophecy to die a violent death: indeed, little explanation was ultimately needed when, two weeks before the release of Life after Death, Wallace was shot dead, a “drive-by killing” largely believed to be the consequence of a viciously personal yet marketdriven “beef ” between East and West Coast hard-core rappers, music producers, and fans.2 Though fans and even critics were shocked—and some, I imagine, awed—by the spectacle of Wallace’s murder, it is curious how little sustained critical attention has been given to the symbolic represen-

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tations of deathly violence by poor urban black men and their relation to the culture of deathly violence and death-defiance from which so many of these representations are imagined.3 To be sure, Wallace’s deathly imagination and untimely murder raise serious questions about the psychic lives of poor urban black men and the anticipation if not expectation of early death, both in their own minds and by mainstream society at large. If probing sociological questions about poor urban black men and deathly violence are even asked, they are most often answered with numbing statistical information that merely rehearses the tragic plight of poor urban black men, inadvertently contributing to a lethal discourse of “endangerment,” “crisis,” and black men’s irretrievability from a life of hope and possibility. Adding the insult of market-driven violence and sensationalism in black popular culture to the injury of poverty-stricken scholarship (namely, the general refusal to grapple with the racially conflated subject of cultural attitudes, values, beliefs, and resulting behaviors as inextricably tied to the historical forces of subjection among poor blacks), these questions concerning “black male self-destructiveness” and black masculinity are now more urgent than ever.4 Wallace’s real-life murder, at the age of twenty-four, was one of the bestknown scenes of deathly violence in U.S. hip-hop culture, perhaps second only to the fatal shooting of twenty-five-year-old rapper Tupac Shakur a year earlier. Emblematic, we are told, of the rampant “black-on-black violence” afflicting poor urban black male youth culture throughout the 1980s and 1990s, both of these death scenes—Wallace’s actual murder and Biggie’s symbolic suicide—attest to the modern-day spectacle of black male death in two distinct ways: (1) the violent deaths of poor urban black men are both fatefully and faithfully staged in the theater of contemporary U.S. popular culture as the always-already dying racialized objects of our collective intrigue and repulsion; and (2) racial terror and state violence appear increasingly removed from view and deemed largely immaterial next to the self-annihilating impulse of poor urban black men capitulating to their own reckless, sometimes studied, demise. Lured by both the finality that death ostensibly assures and the virulent masculinity that deathly violence and death-defiance work to produce, the lives, deaths, and even artistic expressions of Wallace and Shakur are made to reflect—in this cunning design of media spectacle and bio-power—the extensive reach of the state to shape poor urban black men as death-seeking subjects.5 Indeed, from deep within the psychic barrenness of dying cities and the forsaken

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world of prisons where life and law seem at once suspended and crudely exposed, this “call to die” leaves many poor urban black men banned from society’s protection and destined to lie in wait of their own impending and violent deaths.6 Accordingly, some black men anticipate death with increasing impatience; some beckon it, shadowbox with it; some, like Wallace and Shakur before being gunned to death, willfully explore—even traverse in their music and lived experiences—death’s ubiquitous domain.7 Three concerns unify this book on the topic of death and black masculinity in contemporary U.S. black popular culture—racial terror and state violence, the deathly violent formation of poor urban black male subjects, and a black male imaginary violently fueled by a desire for freedom. Tying these concerns together into one cohesive analysis, If We Must Die: From Bigger Thomas to Biggie Smalls relies on two intersecting claims: first, this book asserts that the cultural imaginations of many contemporary U.S. black men have been profoundly shaped by a deathly history of racial terror and state violence; second, this book further contends that it is, paradoxically, this same history of terror and violence that has supplied many black male writers, musicians, and filmmakers with an unlikely horizon for imagining freedom, a horizon upon which freedom is charted in relation to overcoming one’s fear of death. Indeed, it is this violent space between the state’s imminent call for black men to die and black men’s perilous response to live without fear of death that produces the leitmotifs that tie this book into a coherent study. This ubiquitous and violent domain of death—what anthropologist Michael Taussig refers to as the “space of death/culture of terror”—has shaped much of twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. black life. Against the backdrop of slavery, throughout Jim Crow, and, more recently, in the midst of the proliferation of the prison-industrial complex, If We Must Die seeks to expand on Taussig’s understanding of the space of death to make sense of the varied ways in which poor urban black men in the United States are formed within, by, and against a culture of racial terror and state violence. As I argue throughout this book, “racial terror” functions as a coercive disciplinary practice of social control in which the violent threat of death is exercised against (but not limited to) black men through unlawful and extralegal means such as lynching, mob violence, and “white riots.” In a similar manner, “state violence” works in tandem with practices of racial terror as a “legitimated” form of social control—state-sanctioned

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execution, the unregulated use of force by police and prison guards, state neglect or inaction, questionable if not dehumanizing social, economic, and health care policy measures, denial of human and civil rights—that ensures the deliberate and calculated alienation of oppressed people from the state. This violent space of death, a space that strangely gives way to the subaltern possibility of “meaning and consciousness . . . where torture is endemic and where the culture of terror flourishes” (Taussig 4), frames my interpretative excavation of deathly violence among poor urban black men and locates within its domain a principal site of black male subjectivity. Accordingly, this study links black male subjectivity—or, more precisely, the act of “becoming a black male subject”—to a range of deathsummoning initiations (i.e., the palpable threat of lynching and executions, mob violence, riots, prison, poverty, acts of insurrection, threats of violence and death, and so on). Here it seems appropriate to point out that I have generally chosen not to mine the deeply abstracted though vital workings of “the dead,” of terrorized and mutilated black bodies and spirits exhumed from a state of lifelessness and called into service in our collective psyche; to be sure, Sharon Holland’s work in Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (2000) has productively explored this intersection of terror, death, and mourning in reading black subjectivity across U.S. culture and its racial imaginary. I do not mean to imply, however, that “the dead” are not central to the constitution of black subjectivity in general and black male subjectivity in particular. In fact, I would argue that, in spite of my strategic bracketing off of “the dead” for the limited space of this book, many subjectifying ties to the dead remain. Indeed, my focus on the distinctive imaginings of those black men for whom death is largely a lived experience and death-defiance a transfixing pursuit directs attention to “the barely living” or, perhaps, more fittingly, the “already dying” in order to stress the precarious immediacy of actual death. Here, in this space of a living death, where poor black men are forced to feel the historical pull or longue durée of racial terror, where they must bear or defy its magnetic draw, life and death take on altered if not paradoxical meaning. What interests me most are what black men’s symbolic representations of deathly violence and, additionally, death-defiance tell us about what Saidiya V. Hartman describes as “the history that hurts [and kills, I might add]—the still-unfolding narrative of captivity, dispossession, and domination that engenders the black subject in the Americas” (51). Ac-

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cordingly, my analysis interprets representations of deathly violence and death-defiance by black men as the sedimented cultural by-product of racial terror and state violence, a by-product that generates what Hartman calls a “collective enunciation of . . . pain, [that] transform[s] need into politics and cultivate[s] pleasure as a limited response to need and a desperately insufficient form of redress” (52). What this suggests about the deathly violence represented, for example, in Wallace’s concluding track, “Suicidal Thoughts,” is that Biggie’s dying body bears the painful mark of a collective testimony about the de-industrializing and militarizing world of urban Black America, a testimony that at once works destructively and productively to organize the dreaded memories and lethal fantasies of dispossession for poor urban black men. Indeed, by effectively sundering the singularity of his voice and collectivizing the experience of deathly violence in the black male imagination, Biggie’s testimony produces a kind of oral history that reflects not only his own story but also the de-individualized narrative of a communal record: You see it’s kinda like the crack did to Pookie, in New Jack Except when I cross over, there ain’t no comin’ back[.]8

With this kind of “collective enunciation of . . . pain” (which here, and in later lines from the same song that reference Remo in Beatstreet, draws from the varied deathly representations of poor urban black men in late 1980s black popular films), this book questions why representations of deathly violence and death-defiance among black men continually reemerge and even thrive in the popular imagination of contemporary black culture. Are these representations the sedimented carryover of the deep and destructive psychic power of state ideology and the state? If so, what, then, does deathly violence and death-defiance among poor urban black men reveal about the aims and objectives of the state? Conversely, what does the traversing of the imaginative (and corporeal) domain of death yield for black male subjects? That is, what are we to make of the many representations of poor urban black men seeking respect, glory, “freedom,” manhood, and pleasure by embracing death-defiant and death-bound identities? Given the long-standing non-enforcement and under-enforcement of civil and human rights, the persistent devastation of deindustrialization and joblessness, the (over)reliance on prisons, the systemic deprivation of health care in the midst of HIV/AIDS proliferation, and the advent of

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gun violence across urban America in late twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century U.S. black life, do we allow racial terror and state violence to largely fall out of view, leaving representations of deathly violence and death-defiance among poor urban black men to generate “meaning onto themselves”? Or do we begin to engage with the history of racial terror and state violence that has fashioned if not constituted many poor urban black men as death-defiant, death-bound subjects? Central to these concerns is a rethinking of the space of death and imaging of deathly violence and death-defiance as productive sites of opposition if not resistance against subjugation. Indeed, If We Must Die grapples with the following questions: What does it mean for poor urban black men to conquer their fear of the always impending threat of death? What does it mean for these black men to understand death as liberating, emancipatory, and empowering? Taking these questions to heart, this study examines the intersections between deathly violence, death-defiance, and (the potential for) radical black male subjectivity. Focusing primarily on young poor urban U.S. black men who are depicted or see themselves as “niggas” (i.e., “bad niggers,” gangstas, gangbangers, thugs, as well as social outcasts, high school dropouts, and prison inmates), If We Must Die looks specifically at the self-affirming embrace of deathly violence and death-defiance—both imagined and lived—in the cultural psyches of poor urban black men. Certainly, death or, more precisely, the threat of death figures prominently in the literary and artistic production of black male writers, filmmakers, and artists, both reflecting and shaping a central motif running through black popular culture. In a discursive (and often “real”) sense, the figures I write about are all “ready to die,” and thus share a propensity toward violent imaginings and deathdefiance in the face of domination. Part of what If We Must Die explores is the extent to which the movement toward death in this black male imaginary—expressed as deathly violence and death-defiance—not only reflects a despairing condition of fortitude and vitality among poor urban black men but also the degree to which deathly violence and death-defiance function as a space of illumination in the development of social and political meaning. That is to say, can representations of deathly violence and death-defiance offer liberating possibilities of resistance and dignity for poor urban black men? Moreover, can these representations offer us a new prism through which to view the violence intrinsic to the state? Accordingly, this book analyzes how these black men have consciously and

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unconsciously chosen to “represent” and make sense of black men’s deathbound lives. From Richard Wright’s literary classic Native Son (1940), Eldridge Cleaver’s prison memoir/essays Soul on Ice (1968), and Nathan McCall’s autobiography Makes Me Wanna Holler (1994) to the hip-hop music of Eazy-E, Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G., and D’Angelo, If We Must Die investigates what representational identifications with and attachments to deathly violence and death-defiance have come to symbolize across poor urban U.S. black male cultures of the late twentieth/early twenty-first century. If We Must Die grapples with these deathly concerns and offers what I propose is a productive way to rethink black male subjectivity in relation to death’s imaginative and—I say cautiously—actual potential. Black Masculinity and the Culture of Death-Defiance in Late Twentieth-Century Urban America While many critics have been understandably swift to grapple with the destructive and self-annihilating aspects of deathly violence and deathdefiance among poor urban black men, few have been willing to seriously consider how the space of death and the “death-bound effect” that is produced within it provide invaluable insights into the psychic worlds many poor urban black men inhabit.9 Even bell hooks, who has over the last decade contributed compassionate and thoughtful commentary on black men and masculinity, falls short in her work, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004), in addressing the complex psychological significance of death and defiance for black men.10 Thus, even as I heed hooks’s biting critique of patriarchal violence and notions of “dissociative coolness” pervading young black male life, I feel compelled to delve further into this space of death where she refuses to, or rather dares not, tread. Indeed, I hone in on what hooks refers to as a “cult of death” where she argues “now more than ever before, the dark forces of addiction, of violence, of death seem to have a more powerful grip on the black male soul than does the will to live, love, to be healthy and whole” (159). And while I too agree with hooks that many black men find it hard to choose life over death, it is precisely in this space of death where we must begin to think painstakingly about the range of possible meanings death has for poor urban black men. It is in this sullen psychic space where we are forced to grapple with black male identities as the products

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of devastatingly diminished life expectation where, as gangsta rapper Ice Cube says in his popular 1993 track, “It Was a Good Day,” young black men are “out the door / wondering will [they] live, another twenty-four.” Or consider rapper Notorious B.I.G.’s prophetic inference of death in his posthumously released track “If I Should Die” (1999): “How many shots does it take / to make my heart stop and my body start to shake?” In Richard Wright’s Native Son, too, we find in Bigger Thomas’s voice the same foreboding and defiant preoccupation with his own violent death. He bitterly asserts in the opening section of the novel, “ ‘Sometimes I feel like something awful’s going to happen to me,’ Bigger spoke with a tinge of bitter pride in his voice” (20; emphasis mine). It is from within these severely distressed mindscapes where we must look, as cultural critic Robin D. G. Kelley would insightfully emphasize in his introduction to Race Rebels (1994), to “make sense of people where they are rather than where we would like them to be” (Kelley 13).11 In order to contend with the death-bound mindscapes of many poor urban black men, I take up the challenging existential impasse brought to bear by Sharon Holland in her death-centered readings of black subjectivity. That “unaccomplished imaginative shift from enslaved to freed subjectivity,” she observes, “where black subjects are [historically] held in isolation first by a system of slavery and second by its imaginative replacement” (15), marks a crucial moment in examining how black subjects function in the culture. Holland goes on to ask, What if some subjects never achieve, in the eyes of others, the status of the “living”? What if these subjects merely haunt the periphery of the encountering person’s vision, remaining like the past and the ancestors who inhabit it, at one with the dead? [Moreover,] if we were in the position of the subject denied the status of the living, how would we illustrate this social predicament? Communities of color often describe their collective experience in the United States as dystopic rather than utopic. The paradise is often within, and “hell” is a condition arising from encounters with whites. When “living” is something to be achieved and not experienced, and figurative and literal death are very much a part of the social landscape, how do people of color gain a sense of empowerment? (16)

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In addressing Holland’s call to seek out empowerment in “dystopic” spaces, I point to what might best be understood as a “death-bound imaginary.” This imaginary is made up not only of the commonly accepted beliefs and market-mediated stories about death-defiance, glory, and reckless disregard for authority flooding the ghetto-identified imaginations of everyday people on the streets; it is, more substantively, a worldview constituted by the seductive certainty and uncertainty that a death-bound identity brings within view. The tangible result is expressed and lived out in the death-bound prophecies and lethal fantasies of activists, artists, and everyday men and women whose life stories surface to the foreground in black popular culture. For my own investigation into the deathly violent sphere of black male subjectivity, I will draw significantly from Abdul JanMohamed’s articulation of the death-bound subject in his study of Richard Wright’s collected works, The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (2005). Extrapolating from Orlando Patterson’s seminal work, Slavery and Social Death (1982), JanMohamed’s description of the death-bound subject—a “subject who is formed, from infancy on, by the imminent and ubiquitous threat of death”—provides several principal questions for my own analysis of death-bound subjectivities. JanMohamed writes: What happens to the “life” of a subject who grows up under the threat of death, a threat that is constant yet unpredictable? How does that threat permeate the subject’s life? How far and how finely does death penetrate into the capillary structures of subjectivity (considered here as a psychopolitical construct)? And, finally, once death has penetrated into the innermost reaches of subjectivity, what kinds of effects does it have, and how does it manifest itself eventually in the comportment, attitudes, and actions of the death-bound-subject? (JanMohamed 2)

From recklessly dangerous acts that range from gun and gang violence, rampant drug abuse, addiction, and overdosage to lethal sexual practices among young heterosexual and homosexual black men resulting in the contraction of HIV/AIDS, signs of the death-bound subject are everywhere apparent in contemporary U.S. black male cultures. To be certain, the actions of and lethal attitudes held by death-bound subjects have taken shape against the backdrop of “dying,” deindustrialized cities, and the

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massive expansion of the prison-industrial complex in the United States, constituting the principal means of exercising racial terror and state violence—of policing, threatening, killing/deadening, disenfranchising black men—in the modern era. (Incidentally, when Holland writes in her introduction to Raising the Dead that “we have left the horror [of death and terror] to our imaginations,” I cannot help but think that the horror of death and terror haunting the nation’s psyche has for a long time now palpably bled out into view. That is to say, the late twentieth/early twentyfirst century has witnessed not only shadowy specters of death and racial terror in U.S. culture but also displayed its most tangible and gruesomely perceptible living legacy.) The spectacular reliance of post–civil rights America on incarceration (social and political death) and capital punishment (actual death) to control blacks in general and black men in particular rehearses in quite faithful fashion what Jim Crow society (largely in the South) carried out through lynching. Indeed, while lynching proved an effective apparatus for carrying out racial terror during Jim Crow, the prison and its reliance on capital punishment from the 1960s onward—especially following the reinstatement of the death penalty with the 1976 Gregg v. Georgia ruling— gradually restored the long-standing, coercive mission of the U.S. state.12 Even with the recent shift away from capital punishment in U.S. prisons during the late 1990s (an arguable point of contention given the state’s steadfast commitment to capital punishment), the U.S. criminal justice system with its publicly endorsed emphasis on draconian punishment has ushered in even more rapacious if not veiled forms of racial terror and state violence.13 I do not mean to suggest that the degree of racial terror and state violence during Jim Crow is tantamount to that of post–civil rights America; certainly, blacks have struggled to gain more freedoms, rights, and privileges than former generations were able to secure during Jim Crow. However, just as the intimidating and death-invoking use of racial terror and state violence bonds slavery to Jim Crow, one of the fundamental characteristics that links Jim Crow to post–civil rights America is its dependence on “the [persistent] threat and deployment of actual-death in the process of coercion” (JanMohamed 5). Stated another way, like the slave and lynching epochs that preceded it, the persistent threat of (social) death vis-à-vis imprisonment and the deployment of actual death vis-à-vis state-sanctioned execution, as well as extralegal policing (such as police brutality and prison guard abuse), marks the contemporary inheritance

Introduction

13

and historical continuation of the deployment of social and actual death against black people in general and black men in particular.14 Amnesty International reports that the U.S. government has, since 1976, executed over 1,000 condemned prisoners and houses over 3,700 death-row inmates. As of 2001, the United States incarcerates over two million people, most of whom are overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately people of color. Over two million people more are “in the system” on probation, on parole, and, increasingly for young blacks, in juvenile detention centers. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2004 “there were 3,218 black male sentenced prison inmates per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared to 1,220 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 463 white male inmates per 100,000 white males.”15 While the emergence of the prison-industrial complex of the late 1980s is a relatively recent phenomenon, the nightmarish impact of penal institutions was being felt in the psyches of black men well before. Capturing the near unavoidability of prisons, prison activist George Jackson remarks from his prison cell in June 1970 what will profoundly resonate with the experiences of urban black men (and women) in the United States throughout the late twentieth/early twenty-first century: Blackmen born in the U.S. and fortunate enough to live past the age of eighteen are conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison. For most of us, it simply looms as the next phase in a sequence of humiliations. Being born a slave in a captive society and never experiencing any objective basis for expectation had the effect of preparing me for the progressively traumatic misfortunes that lead so many blackmen to the prison gate. I was prepared for prison. It only required minor psychic adjustments. (Soledad Brother 4)

A number of recent critical studies have helped to shape my thinking on the impact of prisons on poor urban black men and women throughout the late twentieth/early twenty-first century. Works such as Angela Y. Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) and Abolition Democracy (2005), Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (1984), Joy James’s Resisting State Violence (1996) and edited collection States of Confinement (2000), Marc Mauer’s Race to Incarcerate (1999), and Christian Parenti’s Lockdown America (2000) have historically grounded the racial,

14

Introduction

gendered, and economic structures of disciplinary power directed against black people. Their scholarship has assisted substantially in contextualizing the political and economic forces, particularly since the end of the Great Migration that pushed and pulled black folks to urban cities of the North between 1915 and 1945 and up until the present historical moment, used to justify the state’s reliance on the coercive power of the prison as an instrument of social and actual death. However, the reliance on U.S. penal institutions is not the sole factor for situating the deathly realities black people have faced throughout the twentieth/twenty-first century. The spectacular and emblematic episodes of racial terror and state violence that, for many blacks, both mark and mar twentieth-/twenty-first-century U.S. history, represent a varied array of events constituting the living legacy of racial terror and state violence: the Red Summer Riots of 1919, the Mississippi floods of 1927, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment that ran between 1932 and 1972, Emmett Till’s murder in 1955, assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and numerous other black political leaders throughout the era of black militancy, the 1963 Ku Klux Klan bombing of a Birmingham church in which four black girls were killed, the Watts Uprising of 1965 and those that followed throughout the late 1960s, the Vietnam War and Project 100,000 (1966–72),16 the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992, the Cincinnati (2000) and Benton Harbor (2003) Riots, and most recently Hurricane Katrina (2005). The global AIDS pandemic, too, which has ravaged Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, and U.S. black and gay male communities throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and the early part of the twenty-first century, serves as a reminder that the insidious effects of racial terror and state violence are neither unique to black men and women in the United States nor solely carried out through the overtly visible force of authoritarian subjection but rather exercised through benign neglect, federal withdrawal, and the increased practice of economic privatization. To be sure, this historical legacy of racial terror and state violence in the United States has long sought to produce a deeply internalized, selfinflicting effect. Largely restricted to dying cities, racially segregated environments, and prisons, poor blacks have remained susceptible to what Cornel West perhaps ungenerously called the “nihilistic threat” afflicting much of Black America.17 Homicide trends among young black men, for example, which rose to staggering heights in the late 1980s and 1990s, remained higher in 2002 than in the mid-1980s. Stated another way,

Introduction

15

while there has been a decline in homicide victimization and offending rates among black men since their peak in the late 1980s, homicide rates among black men remain unacceptably high and still a leading cause of death for young black men.18 AIDS-related deaths (in and out of prison) as a result of sexually promiscuous and risky behavior among heterosexual and homosexual black men, not to mention intravenous drug use, reveal similarly tragic fatalities. Thus, in a remorseless society that refuses to take responsibility for the historical heritage of negating black people’s lives in general and black manhood in particular, religious and political leaders, community activists, social policy makers, health care educators, and, of course, the police are confronted by the inwardly spiraling consequences of racial terror and state violence in black communities. The effects are clear: many poor urban black men seem only to find meaning by “going out” in a blast of violent glory, succumbing to death in an euthanizing haze of crack smoke or, quite literally, by fucking themselves to death in a carefree erotic rush of indiscriminate, unprotected sex. Without a doubt, contemporary U.S. society is faced with the growing numbers of poor black men who, at every turn and in anxious anticipation of their own deaths, are ready to die.19 Lest we get too sociological, we must keep in mind that the deathbound descriptions of poor urban black male life are constituted here largely through a spectrum of stories, irrespective of the actual death tolls they arguably help produce. And while many audiences are quick to point out the degree to which these stories reflect “actual realities,” the deathbound imaginary discussed throughout this book is most often fictionalized and dramatically embellished. Yet I am less concerned with establishing the veracity of these stories and beliefs than I am with exploring what these stories suggest about the imaginative and psychic worlds many black men are forced to inhabit. That is to say, even as we are obligated to sift through market-mediated images, films, literature, and music of black hypermasculinity and “black male violence” in order to gain access to the lived experiences of poor urban black men, I contend that these stories are not first and foremost about ethnographic portraiture or sociological accuracy. Like so many other artistic representations of black life, the deathbound imaginary functions simultaneously as a site of spectacular, marketmediated voyeurism and as an inventive space of idealized self-projection. Through these oftentimes engaging and gripping stories, poor urban black men carve out a larger-than-life persona that supplies them with paradoxi-

16

Introduction

cally resourceful ways to cope and escape the towering obstacles governing much of black male life.20 But the death-bound imaginary is both a sanctuary and a prison in which it is often impossible to separate the psychic relief and artistic license afforded black men from the perilous psychic devastation and selfinflicting violence this imaginary invariably helps to reinforce.21 Unable to escape (and sometimes even embracing) the history of racist revulsion and desire projected onto black male experience, many poor urban black men—condemned to a living and literal death by racial terror, state violence, prison and execution, “black-on-black violence,” and AIDS—look upon this death-bound imaginary as a defiant source of strength and wellbeing. From Richard Wright’s landmark literary classic Native Son to the gritty hard-core and gangsta rap tales of murder and mayhem in the music of Tupac Shakur, Eazy-E, and many others, artists have constructed a body of knowledge concerning defiance and death that is as much about defiant “reality” and the real prospect of dying as it is defiant imaginings and the desire to live without fear. What follows in this book, however, is not so much a history of a black male death-bound imaginary but a loosely overlapping arrangement of scenes that, taken together, attempt to give a picture of (and political meaning to) the multifaceted scope of deathbound imaginings for poor urban black men. While this study is vitally concerned with exploring the historical and political rootedness of racial terror and state violence to the formation of black male identities, or what I refer to as “black male subjectivities,”22 it is most focused on the articulation, performance, and counter-deployment of death and deathly violence as both a representational and lived site of social meaning and consciousness. Stated another way, the connection I make between racial terror and intraracial violence, for example, focuses on the myriad ways that structures of power shape the behaviors, beliefs, and values of black men who desperately struggle to resist domination. By focusing on the articulation of deathly violence and death-defiance among poor urban black men, strategies of performativity and self-imaging, and their participation in specific forms of representational politics, If We Must Die delineates how racial terror and, more broadly, state violence enforce racial subordination as well as how they work to form black men as subjects. And yet, at the same time, this study examines how racial terror and state violence fail in carrying out their annihilating aims, offering what José Muñoz has termed “disidentificatory” possibilities of resistance,

Introduction

17

agency, and dignity for poor urban black men. Ultimately, it is the failure of racial terror and state violence exercised against poor urban black men to which this study is most acutely attentive. While I argue in this book for a consideration of the discursive space of death and death-defiance as a means of challenging the imbalance of social, political, and economic power in American society, they have also been inextricably tied to exploring questions about black masculinity and racial authenticity among poor urban black men. That is to say, this book also explores how the “call to die” has come to reflect a violent marker of black manhood in contemporary black popular culture. I contend that the joint practice and articulation of death-defiance and death is but one reflection of the way in which poor urban black men have sought to define themselves as black men both within and against a system governed by patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. Thus, deathly violence and death-defiance manifest as a desperate attempt for black men to both assert their manhood and preserve their humanity by resisting domination and retaining separateness. In effect, an investigation into the maledominated, death-defiant worlds of poor urban black men reveals the number of ways in which patriarchal beliefs and sexist ideologies can be understood—at least in the minds of many poor urban black men—as both self-affirming and self-destructive, empowering and “nihilistic.” It is from within this dialectic that If We Must Die is offered as an intervention and a call for sustained critical analysis of black masculinism in contemporary U.S. culture. Black women’s and gay men’s voices, in particular, have been vitally important to a critique of black masculinism and function throughout this book as an integral critical landing for continuously exploring and calling into question the inextricable dynamic between black men and women as well as between black gay men and black straight men. Heeding Hazel Carby’s call to “challenge the hegemony of [our] own assumptions about black masculinity and [not] accept the consensus of a dominant society that ‘conceives African American society in terms of a perennial “crisis” of black masculinity whose imagined solution is a proper affirmation of black male authority,’ ” If We Must Die is committed to exploring the politics of black masculinity—its racialized roots, heteronormativity, misogynistic and homophobic propensities, (homo)erotic/gendered anxieties, mobilizing and disidentificatory strengths, its contradictions—and its future as an intellectual space for what Kimberly Crenshaw calls inter-

18

Introduction

sectionality critique.23 In this regard, this book explores how it might be possible to both deterritorialize and reoccupy the critical terrain of black masculinism through a critical practice of “criss-crossing” analytical moves involving the simultaneous reading of race, gender, class, and sexuality. In order to examine the space of death and the articulation of deathdefiance for poor urban black men in late twentieth-century U.S. culture, I begin with Richard Wright’s classic novel Native Son. And while Wright was hardly the first to make sense of deathly violence and death-defiance in relation to black life—to be sure, depictions of deathly violence and death-defiance go back to the slave quarters of the Old South—it is Wright who has most definitively challenged the one-dimensional understandings of deathly violence and death-defiance most often attributed to the lawless and anti-authoritarian “bad nigger.” Emerging from a crucial historical stage in the shifting landscape of Black America during the 1920s and 1930s, Wright’s Native Son also bridges the past and present. Indeed, it is in Richard Wright’s literary voices that we can find continuity, for example, between the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century southern folktales of Stackolee and the “urbanizing” black popular culture depicted in the “raunchy” blues traditions of the Mississippi Delta and Chicago of the 1940s and 1950s. Continued in the modern-day hip-hop culture of hard-core and gangsta rap across urban America, the repeated appropriation and personification of the defiantly oppositional bad nigger by poor urban black men beckons further attention.24 Thus, the first chapter, “ ‘Boys in the Hood’: Black Male Community in Richard Wright’s Native Son,” sets the stage for mapping and investigating the construction of deathly violence and death-defiance in poor urban black male representations of the twentieth century. Focusing on Bigger Thomas, this chapter identifies a foundational urban black male archetype of the death-bound imaginary that stands as a bridge between the folkloric “baaadman” narratives of the nineteenth century and the contemporary representations of hustlers, gangstas, and gangbangers of the late twentieth century. More specifically, this chapter sets out to understand the historical and political character of deathly violence and death-defiance within the black male subculture to which Bigger Thomas belonged. By examining Bigger’s relationships with other poor urban black men in Native Son vis-à-vis the history of racial terror and state violence in Chicago’s Black Belt, I explore what this black male homosocial subculture can tell us about deathly violence and death-defiance as both internalizations of

Introduction

19

and insurrectionary if not emancipatory responses to the brutal environmental forces that trap many poor urban black men in a world of forcible dehumanization. In many respects, this is a reading of the ways in which violence, death, and hope function in the psyches of poor urban black men struggling to fight back against dehumanization. Chapter 2, “ ‘It’s a Man’s World’: Rethinking Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice in the Twenty-first Century,” reinterprets the significance of Cleaver’s autobiography, examines ideologies of black masculinism during the late 1960s, and considers their enduring impact—particularly in the realm of hard-core rap music—throughout the 1990s. I am specifically interested in exploring Cleaver’s interpretation of the Watts Uprising of 1965 as a reflection of the militantly oppositional responses of young urban black men against white authority. From this context, I move to a consideration of what Cleaver’s Soul on Ice suggests about the present-day formation of black male subjectivities in a culture that appears to systematically contain and destroy black male bodies both physically and ideologically. What concerns me most are the ways in which this culture—what I refer to as a “culture of terror”—has informed who black men are, how black men make sense of their lives, as well as how black men tend to articulate expressive cultural responses from within this culture. Focusing on the masculinist ways in which authority and respect are articulated in hip-hop culture, this chapter concludes by pointing to how certain political legacies of the 1960s, for better or worse, endure and even thrive in contemporary black popular culture. In order to demonstrate the connections between the late 1960s and late 1990s, hard-core rapper Ras Kass’s debut album Soul on Ice (1996) is juxtaposed against Cleaver’s work in order to demonstrate the legacies of patriarchy, deathly violence, and empowerment in contemporary black popular culture. Chapter 3, “ ‘Am I Black Enough For You?’: Black Male Authenticity in Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America,” takes a critical look at both the narrative and market strategies of Nathan McCall’s autobiography as a means for critiquing his “slippery” class location throughout the text. Exploring the multiple ways in which McCall chooses to package his life story, my objective is to demonstrate how McCall’s attempt to construct an “authentic” black male voice functions to give him license to identify, address, and resolve the “crisis” concerning poor urban black men in contemporary urban Black America. I conclude the chapter by investigating how McCall’s literary voice partici-

20

Introduction

pates in a recent trend of what I call “black bourgeois nationalism” that has problematically endeavored to “represent” and speak on behalf of the black majority. Chapter 4, “Death Bound: The Thug Life,” turns to the recurring motif of the thug in black popular culture of the 1990s in order to map its overlapping significance in poor urban black male heterosexual and homosexual social worlds. I treat my readings of thug life in hip-hop culture and black gay male representation in literature and film as a space for grappling with the performance of death-defiance among black men. Believing that, for black male subjectivities, the affirmation of life itself emanates from these spaces of death, I ask how might the pursuit of death—that is, thug life—be viewed as meaningful and even productive for black men. In the final chapter, “ ‘How Does It Feel?’: A Question of Life and Death in D’Angelo’s ‘Untitled,’ ” I place D’Angelo’s erotic embodiment of death in conversation with a long history of death-bound representations and images, demonstrating how contemporary black male bodies are subtly and always-already emanating deathly violent narratives of both resignation and insurrection. To carry out this mission, I explore how D’Angelo’s body functions as one of many spectacular sites of death and desire in contemporary U.S. popular culture. Thus, by focusing on D’Angelo’s song and music video, I map the historical traces of racial terror and state violence that continue through the present-day backdrop of the prison-industrial complex, HIV/AIDS, and dead U.S. cities. That is, I use D’Angelo’s text as an embattled site of deathly ambivalence for grappling with black masculinities within hip-hop culture. Through a close reading of D’Angelo’s body, I offer a way to make sense of the space of death/culture of terror that many poor urban U.S. black men are forced to inhabit. I then go on to ask what precisely is at stake in the spectacular fetishization of black men in contemporary popular culture. How are we as viewers being called upon to participate in the modern-day exercise of racial fetishization and surveillance? My discussion of D’Angelo is informed here by a set of varying theories of subjection that point to the fugitive possibilities of escaping the imprisoning hold of death. Deathly and Defiant: Black Male Subjectivities If We Must Die brings together African American studies with postcolonial studies in order to generate a more comprehensive understanding of the

Introduction

21

practice of reading and theorizing race, masculinity, violence, and death back and forth across African diaspora geographies. More specifically, however, this book is offered as a theoretical meditation on the critical intersections and tangible crossings—of postcolonial theory, performance theory, critical race studies, and gender studies—that make up the historical discourse of contemporary U.S. lumpen black masculinities. To be sure, there is an implicit conversation between this study and, for example, the work of Frantz Fanon (particularly his theory of violence and subject formation in Wretched of the Earth); of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Joy James, where it contemplates the presumed erasure of spectacles of violence and the use of biopolitics in policing racial subjects; and, more recently, that of José Muñoz on the performative use of “disidentification” as a politics of identity and as a compelling point of departure for rethinking the psychosocial effects of racial terror in U.S. black male life. Perhaps most important to this study, however, is Abdul JanMohamed’s recent work that wrestles with the “political deployment of death” in Richard Wright’s body of writing as well as Sharon Holland’s interpretative contributions on the blurred, “discontinuous” boundaries of death in U.S. black life.25 If We Must Die is conceived out of the productive paths their works have helped pave. My aim in writing this book is to carry on the vital discussion about poor urban black men and the psychic worlds they inhabit. Certainly, other cultural critics, writers, anthropologists, historians, and filmmakers have been interested in grappling with and making sense of these litigious spaces as well, including Cornel West, bell hooks, Isaac Julien, Michael Eric Dyson, Darlene Clark Hine, and John Edgar Wideman, to name only a few. In many ways, this exploration into the controversial social and cultural worlds of poor urban black men takes its cues and finds its challenges from the intellectual terrain they have pioneered. Indeed, for the last ten years or so these committed thinkers have helped me think differently and deeply about the lives of poor urban black men, especially in relation to what constitutes political activity and empowerment, social change, masculinity, and black male identity formation. At the same time, If We Must Die can best be described as a study of resistance that seeks to grapple with the many ways in which black men are shaped by the brutal force of history and the strategies they have employed to make sense of and contest their violent contexts. The impact of historically minded thinkers in the 1990s worked to radicalize my thinking about the ways

22

Introduction

history works to shape racial subjects: Hazel Carby, Angela Y. Davis, Mike Davis, Ann DuCille, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Barbara Harlow, Joy James, Fredric Jameson, Robin D. G. Kelley, Leon Litwak, Wahneema Lubiano, Kobena Mercer, Dorothy Roberts, James Scott, and David Eng. By examining the history of racial terror and state violence in relation to the circulation of representations pertaining to deathly violence and death-defiance, If We Must Die constitutes a rethinking of the highly charged debates concerning deathly violence and death-defiance in contemporary black popular culture. While If We Must Die demonstrates how many black men are making sense of their lives within a context of extreme political and social repression, it will not glamorize or romanticize deathly violence or death-defiance in poor urban black communities. Indeed, it explicitly scrutinizes the multiple ways in which deathly violence and death-defiance so often betrays any notion of radical potentiality. Most important, this book contextualizes the daily struggles of poor urban black men and rethinks the politics of black male representation in U.S. black popular culture.

1

“Boys in the Hood” Black Male Community in Richard Wright’s Native Son

W

hen the nineteen-year-old Richard Wright moved from Memphis to Chicago in December 1927, he arrived in a city that had been acknowledged as a site of great economic possibility and racial refuge for many southern blacks. Indeed, Wright, like so many other young blacks, arrived in the midst of an era of massive migration from the South that saw Chicago’s black population increase from 44,103 in 1910 to 109,458 in 1920 to 233,903 in 1930 (Drake and Cayton 8).1 Many of these blacks left the South to escape the legal apartheid of Jim Crow life; however, it was the yearly onslaught of diminishing agricultural returns caused by drought as well as by the destructive boll weevil in the fields of the Mississippi Delta that effectively galvanized the majority of migrating blacks to embark upon the mass exodus to the North. And while many black tenant farmers and sharecroppers submitted to the idea of remaining in the South despite economic hardships, large numbers of blacks saw life in the industrializing North as a movement toward economic autonomy and political liberation. Moreover, with the brutal advent of white mob violence and lynching at the close of the nineteenth century, blacks were increasingly inclined to equate travel with freedom and to envision flight out of the South as an oppositional act of preserving their humanity.2 But life in the North for poor southern blacks during the 1920s and 1930s was a hard one and, tragically, the hope of racial justice in Chicago and other northern cities during the years of the black migration was un-

24

Chapter 1

dercut by the reality of overcrowded and dilapidated housing, joblessness, and race riots. These hostile circumstances demystified any prospect of the North as a “promised land” and ensured both class and racial division among poor migrant blacks and city-dwelling whites. Encountering the harsh racism and segregation that would later be theorized as a type of “domestic colonization,” the majority of newly arrived blacks found themselves forced into the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago’s South Side or what was generally referred to as the Black Belt.3 Indeed, it was precisely in relation to this political context of class hostility and racial violence against newly arrived blacks that prompted novelist Richard Wright to reflect on the personality of this emerging “black underclass.”4 A poor southern migrant himself, Wright was uniquely situated to capture the overwhelming fear and frustration among the black urban poor.5 As author Margaret Walker persuasively asserts in her biography of Wright: Who else but a Mississippi boy, who had lived in rural and urban Mississippi and been wounded by the painful sting of white racism, circumscribed and constrained to a poverty-stricken black world of ignorance and superstition, who had observed the weekly Saturday night razor-cutting scrapes and the drunkenness of tortured and powerless black men killing their own and craving to kill the white man whom they blamed for their depth of degradation and racial impotence, who else but a Mississippi black boy could write with such authenticity of the tormented depths in the soul of a black youth? (148)

And like Richard Wright, many migrant blacks were outraged by America’s social crime against its native sons and daughters. Unable or unwilling to return to the South or to their African homeland,6 they saw no viable alternative other than to stay put in Chicago and fight, resist, and challenge, however possible, the dehumanizing racial injustices of white society. Describing poor urban black life during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Wright’s Native Son (1940) depicts Chicago as a site of extreme racial and political violence. Coupled with severe economic malaise as a result of the stock market crash of 1929, the world of Wright’s protagonist, Bigger Thomas, was largely indicative of white America’s racist and social-Darwinistic disregard for black humanity. Indeed, as literary historian Stephen Michael Best has argued, “One could read causally the

Black Male Community in Richard Wright’s Native Son

25

relation between declining economic conditions and white terroristic violence, suggesting that the former increased idleness and irritability and led, ultimately, to the latter” (114). For many young urban blacks in northern ghettos of the 1930s, Bigger’s violent rage was an understandable, if not identifiable, response to American racism and poverty. Yet many cultural critics and writers would later dispute Bigger’s representational value as an accurate depiction of the collective psyche of poor urban blacks during the 1930s.7 Indeed, in his well-known critique of Bigger Thomas in Notes of a Native Son (1955), writer James Baldwin argues that “a necessary dimension has been cut away; this dimension being the relationship that Negroes bear to one another, that depth of involvement and unspoken recognition of shared experience which creates a way of life” (35). To a large degree, Baldwin was right.8 Wright did not specifically elaborate on Bigger’s relationships with other blacks or focus on the “ways in which Negroes are controlled in our society and the complex techniques they have evolved for their survival” (35).9 Nevertheless, whether or not Wright explicitly acknowledged the importance of Bigger’s relationships with other blacks, it is my contention that Bigger was immersed within a defiantly oppositional black male subculture that not only sought to ensure his survival but also struggled to preserve his humanity. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is to rethink Bigger’s relationships with the other young poor urban black men in Native Son and to explore how young poor urban black men created racial community, combated social alienation in Chicago throughout the 1930s, and ultimately made sense of a world filled with racial terror. For Bigger and his friends (Gus, G. H., and Jack), Chicago’s Black Belt afforded virtually no opportunities to gain access to industrial jobs or vocational training programs. Desperate to fight off hunger and feelings of despair, their daily routines consisted of raiding newsstands, fruit stands, and apartments, going to movies, hanging out at the local poolroom, or simply “loaf[ing] around” (NS 13). A product of reform schools and the macho environment of the neighborhood poolroom, Bigger reflected the worst of “black male rage” and affirmed for many the prevalent stereotype of poor urban black men as irresponsible, savagely immoral, and inhumane. Even as Wright tells the story, Bigger was a bitter embodiment of the hate and injury imposed on black people living in America’s ghettos. However unsavory Bigger’s male world might have appeared, the social embraces and physical interactions that shaped the personality of

26

Chapter 1

his gang tell an important story concerning poor urban black male life. Surprisingly, few critics have sought to critically delve beyond what has been commonly perceived as a hypermasculine world of social despair and dysfunctional violence. Most often obscured in the critical scholarship of Native Son, Bigger’s deeply emotional conversations with his homeboys constitute a site of black male community that allows them to purge the psychic pain of urban blight as well as symbolize an intimate space for sharing their dreams, aspirations, and joys.10 In an early scene of Native Son, Wright depicts a private moment between Bigger and Gus: Bigger took out his pack and gave Gus a cigarette; he lit his and held the match for Gus. They leaned their backs against the red brick wall of a building, smoking, their cigarettes slanting white across their black chins. To the east Bigger saw the sun burning a dazzling yellow. In the sky above him a few big white clouds drifted. He puffed silently, relaxed, his mind pleasantly vacant of purpose. Every slight movement in the street evoked a casual curiosity in him. Automatically, his eyes followed each car as it whirred over the smooth black asphalt. A woman came by and he watched the gentle sway of her body until she disappeared into a doorway. He sighed, scratched his chin and mumbled, “Kinda warm today.” (15)

In Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero (1991), literary critic Robert Butler suggests that this depiction of Bigger is one that “most critics fail to see because his actions violate their standard view of him as a stereotyped ‘bad nigger’ or victim of society” (61). Focusing on Bigger’s “normal drives toward love” (61) as he appreciates the “gentle sway” of a passing woman, Butler suggests that Bigger’s desires are far more nuanced than the limited mythology of the “black male brute” permit. Moreover, Butler asserts that Bigger’s calm observations and actions expose “a rare opportunity” to see Bigger as “a person who has all the usual American instincts for a life of change and possibility” (61). Butler’s attention to the oftentimes obscured or overlooked psychological depth present in the above passage, particularly Bigger’s capacity to aspire “to a better life and a more fully realized self ” (60), is well taken. However, Butler’s attempt to counter Bigger’s violent determinism by

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pointing out his ability to adhere to “acceptable” practices of heterosexual behavior between black men and women falls considerably short of capturing Bigger’s more telling cultural graces. Far from demonstrating the range of Bigger’s emotional depth or his moral disposition, Butler’s heteronormative appraisal of the “gentle” side of Bigger implicitly reaffirms Bigger’s lack of genuine respect for either black or white women. That is, Bigger’s attention to and objectification of the physical beauty of a passing woman might suggest a degree of “normalcy” in his otherwise violent persona, but it is hardly a viable indication of “Bigger’s instincts for a life of change and possibility,” hardly a reasonable vindication of his previously unacknowledged humanity. Ironically, perhaps, it is in the wide-ranging complexity of Bigger’s sometimes compassionate and sometimes bullying relationships with young black men through which his humanity can be reconsidered. An unfortunate limitation, indeed, in Wright’s exclusionary and male-identified articulation of racial community and collective oppositionality, it is nevertheless in Bigger’s relationships with the other young black men of his neighborhood that Wright is able to address what Baldwin insists is lacking in Native Son: “an unspoken recognition of shared experiences” among blacks. While Butler recognizes that “part of Bigger responds to Gus . . . in a personal, even affectionate way” (60), he seems to shy away from, rather than come to terms with, the persistent interplay of black male homosociality implicit in Bigger’s relationship with Gus. Indeed, Bigger’s friendship with Gus, G. H., and Jack—from the warm, intimate exchange “on the block” to the violent rituals that build “reputation” and mask fear in the neighborhood poolroom to the homoerotically suggestive masturbation incident in the movie theater—illustrates the continuity, cohesiveness, and complexity of defiantly oppositional black male cultural practices, practices that have historically functioned as a means of forging community and sustaining sanity in the midst of chronic disempowerment. For young poor urban black men who regularly endured racism, police brutality, unemployment, as well as scrutiny from within black communities and from their own families, the social and cultural world young poor urban black men created for themselves on the streets, in poolrooms, and even in the balconies of segregated movie theaters were places to commiserate over and recover from the absurdity of living within a culture of terror. Indeed, these urban homosocial spaces represent sites

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of black male community that foster the development of black male identities against (though largely informed by) an environment of racist repression and negation. The problem with Butler’s analysis of Bigger’s humanity, of course, is not simply that he fails to identify all these “homosocial spaces” in which Bigger intimately interacts with other black men. More significantly, it is Butler’s own assumptions about what constitutes humanity—and, for Baldwin, what constitutes “shared experience” and community—that limit a more comprehensive understanding of Bigger’s actions and behaviors. That is to say, Butler’s analysis of Bigger’s humanity is restricted to acts of kindness, love, generosity, and compassion. In this framework, Bigger’s humanity (his ability to express kindness and compassion toward Gus) is at best an aberration, a momentary lapse away from the dehumanized person that Bigger has largely become. Butler’s reading of Bigger, while well intentioned in its attempt to disprove or at least complicate the stereotypical view of him as irredeemable, is ultimately flawed in two very important ways. First, it implicitly denies the possibility of interpreting Bigger’s rage and frustration—the norm of Bigger’s existence rather than the exception—as anything other than a mark of his despair and forced dehumanization. In effect, it fails to acknowledge how Bigger’s rage against exploitation, oppression, and continued injustice might be read in constructive and empowering ways (hooks, Killing Rage 26); that is, Butler’s reading fails to consider how Bigger’s rage might be linked to an assertion of his humanity. This is not to suggest that Bigger’s rage is always or even necessarily a sign of his humanity. However, understanding Bigger’s rage as, at times, “enabling” or as a source of his agency challenges us to reconsider Bigger’s humanity not simply in naively objective or positivistic terms (as Butler has done) but as an assertion of his dignity, self-worth, and “somebodiness” in a world that at once dehumanizes and renders him invisible.11 It is in this sense that Bigger’s humanity is inextricably tied to the pursuit of his freedom, inextricably bound up in each violent assertion of Bigger’s rage. Second, Butler fails to appreciate the full extent to which Bigger’s entire life is shaped by and in struggle against a racist society. In effect, he attempts to assess Bigger’s humanity in spite of rather than as inextricably tied to the sociohistorical, political, and economic context that bore him. Lewis Gordon’s reading of violence is particularly noteworthy here: “Violence is fundamentally a form of dehumanization; any effort to create a

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human place in response to violence is inevitably caught in a swirl of continued violence. This is because inhumanity—dehumanization—forces human beings into unavoidable cycles of action and reaction and dirties everyone’s hands” (277). Once we complicate the meaning(s) of Bigger’s rage as well as interpret Bigger’s humanity in relation to his specific context, we cannot help but see Bigger as a complex embodiment of the bitter tensions that afflict poor urban black men. But how, then, are we to account for Bigger’s humanity if not by looking (as Butler has done) to Bigger’s acts of kindness? How are we to make sense of his humanity given the particularly dehumanizing context in which Bigger finds himself? Are Bigger’s defiantly oppositional behaviors and violence simply the internalization of a history of hate and injury that has led to an absence of his own humanity? Or might one—as was common during the era of Black Power—read Bigger’s actions as nothing less than “revolutionary” in his attempt to subvert the social and political order of white supremacy and control? But what if the situation is more complicated than this? Certainly, Bigger’s defiantly oppositional behaviors and practices are destructive at times, particularly in his brutal rape and murder of his girlfriend, Bessie Mears, and his treatment of Gus in the poolroom. But do not Bigger’s violent behaviors also constitute the very expression through which he is able to gain consciousness, restore his selfrespect, and assert his humanity? How are we to account for this doubleness, this ambivalence between self-destruction and self-discovery? Can Bigger’s behaviors somehow reflect both at once? “Playing White” Let us return to Bigger’s interaction with Gus as they share cigarettes and conversation on the neighborhood block. Capturing what is rarely seen from outside the world of poor urban black men, Wright exposes in this scene an array of sentiments and emotions—playfulness, joy and pleasure, rage and frustration, fear and admiration, shame—that mark the complex intimacies and defiantly oppositional practices of black male homosociality. Bigger’s persistent efforts to get Gus to “play ‘white’ ” (17), for example, present us with a comical though disturbing moment in the text, a moment that both appropriates and subverts the oppressive social and political norms of the dominant culture. Indicative of a society in which black men are “prevent[ed] from realizing their full potential as human be-

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ings and exclude[d] from full and equal participation in civil and political society” (JanMohamed, “Negating the Negation” 286), “playing white” is symptomatic of an attempted racial negation. Reenacting for themselves a world of power and control, Bigger and Gus resort to role-playing as white military leaders, as business executives, and as the president of the United States conferring with a high-level cabinet member. Gus, humoring Bigger, plays the part of the successful Wall Street investor: “This is Mr. J. P. Morgan speaking,” Gus said. “Yessuh, Mr. Morgan,” Bigger said; his eyes filled with mock adulation and respect. “I want you to sell twenty thousand shares of U.S. Steel in the market this morning,” Gus said. “At what price, suh?” Bigger asked. “Aw, just dump ’em at any price,” Gus said with casual irritation. “We’re holding too much.” . . . “I bet that’s just the way they talk,” Gus said. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Bigger said. (NS 18–19)

A few passages later, Bigger—acting as the president of the United States—playfully addresses Gus as secretary of state: “ ‘Well, you see, the niggers is raising sand all over the country,’ Bigger said, struggling to keep back his laughter. ‘We’ve got to do something with these black folks. . . .’ ‘Oh, if it’s about the niggers, I’ll be right there, Mr. President,’ Gus said” (19). What do these comedic displays of white authority and legitimacy mean for two downtrodden black men in Chicago’s Black Belt of the 1930s? What do they suggest about the ways in which political domination, economic disenfranchisement, and racial negation effectively shape the psyches of poor urban black men? What do they say about that faraway and unwelcoming place Wright refers to in Native Son as a “cold and distant world; a world of white secrets carefully guarded” (44)? Consider Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a landmark study of the psychological effects of colonization on the oppressed: The settler’s world is a hostile world, which spurns the native, but at the same time it is a world of which he is envious. We have seen that the native never ceases to dream of putting himself in the place of the settler—not of becoming the settler but of substi-

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tuting himself for the settler. This hostile world, ponderous and aggressive because it fends off the colonized masses with all the harshness it is capable of, represents not merely a hell from which the swiftest flight possible is desirable, but also a paradise close at hand which is guarded by terrible watchdogs. (52–53)

Inserting Bigger into Fanon’s formulation as “the native [who] never ceases to dream of putting himself in the place of the settler” supplies us with a psychosocial lens for understanding how Bigger and Gus are subjects bound to repeat and mime the legitimating norms by which they have been degraded (Butler, Bodies 131). Indeed, “play[ing] white” reflects a symbolic appropriation and “internalization” of the central attributes not simply of whiteness but of “white patriarchal power”—authority, property ownership, conquest, control—whereby Wright’s native sons attempt to personify powerful white men as a means of escaping their own racial invisibility and impotence. It is in this sense that “playing white” suggests a logic for grasping the overarching impact of white patriarchy that informs Bigger’s own desperate attempt to gain agency. Cultural critic Kobena Mercer identifies this adoption of values as a process “which occurs when black men subjectively internalize and incorporate aspects of the dominant definitions of masculinity in order to contest the conditions of dependency and powerlessness which racism and racial oppression enforce” (143). Indeed, the link between white patriarchal authority and violence within Bigger’s black world cannot go understated. In both a psychic and imaginative sense Bigger and Gus lose themselves in a dangerous play of white manhood that will later play out in their violently aggressive social practices in the black community. At the same time, however, it seems necessary to appreciate how their performative skits of white male legitimacy and authority—full of sarcasm and insincerity—unfaithfully reenact those same legitimating norms. In effect, their scrutinizing rendition of white male authority (“his eyes filled with mock adulation and respect”) functions as a form of mimicry in which Bigger and Gus question, oppose, and ultimately attempt to subvert racial negation, subordination, and second-class citizenship. As Farah Jasmine Griffin’s poignant reading of Bigger attests in Who Set You Flowin’? (1996), “the closest [Bigger] gets to holding the power of the white man

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is through this game, and yet inherent in the game is a critique of white people” (125). More often than not, however, these “games” reflect for Bigger and Gus both a sense of futility and racial impotence. Nevertheless, it is from within this private and guarded space of black male homosociality that they struggle to create a sense of agency, selfworth, and meaning, a space from which they as black men attempt to carve out their own humanity. Unsatisfied by the relief that parodying white people affords, Bigger quickly becomes angry and yells out in frustration: “But I just can’t get used to it,” Bigger said. “I swear to God, I can’t. I know I oughtn’t think about it, but I can’t help it. Every time I think about it I feel like somebody’s poking a redhot iron down my throat. Goddammit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain’t. They do things and we can’t. It’s just like living in jail. Half the time I feel like I’m on the outside of the world peeping in through a knothole in the fence. . . .” (NS 20)

Wright seems to have implicitly understood how Bigger’s frustration in the above passage led to a practice of repudiation in which his inability or unwillingness to “get used to it” (racial and class oppression) illustrates the more prevalent way in which Bigger comes to assert his humanity. Thus, the practice of “playing white” as a means for social critique and self-assertion is but one of several tactics Bigger and his friends employ to combat racial terror and resist the trauma of negation and submission. Indeed, other tactics or “life practices” that constitute sites of urban black male community are found in the subsequent pages of “Fear.” Take, for example, the plotting of the Blum robbery, the poolroom brawl between Gus and Bigger, as well as the masturbation incident in the theater balcony between Bigger and Jack that illustrate their collective unwillingness to abide by U.S. social decorum and order throughout the 1930s. In these defiantly oppositional practices, Bigger rejects second-class citizenship and partial assimilation into white America, finding empowerment and virtue through the embodiment of the racist sign and signifier, “nigger.” In what cultural critic Abdul R. JanMohamed has called “negating the racist negation” (Death-Bound-Subject 288), Wright’s poor urban black men—forced to conform to the negative stereotypes of a racist

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imagination—wear the mask of the nigger in a paradoxical move to defy the denigrating and self-effacing social and political norms prescribed to blacks during Jim Crow. That is to say, as Wright asserts in his own autobiography, “in what other ways had the South allowed me to be natural, to be real, to be myself, except in rejection, rebellion, and aggression?” (BB 284).12 Thus, while “masquerading” as niggers clearly reaffirms the mythologizing dominant discourse of white society, it can also be understood as a kind of performance of black male identity that reflects not only a sense of defeat and degradation but also (and most importantly here) a sense of defiance and insurrection.13 “Playing Tough” For Bigger and his South Side Chicago cronies, Doc’s poolroom afforded the daily opportunity to congregate, relax, kill time, escape the drudgery of looking for hard-to-get menial jobs,14 and plot illegal ventures to acquire fast money. A world unto itself, Doc’s poolroom symbolized a site of black male community that stood as a testing ground for measuring one’s manhood and courage in the midst of perpetual racial assault and terror. The poolroom scene in Native Son centers around an ambitious if not outlandish scheme: Bigger and his gang would rob Blum’s delicatessen, a small neighborhood store owned and run by a Jewish man. For Bigger, Gus, and their two running partners, G.H. and Jack, robbing Blum’s store represented the ultimate test of defiant oppositionality and rebellion. Wright’s narrator observes: They had always robbed Negroes. They felt that it was much easier and safer to rob their own people, for they knew that white policemen never really searched diligently for Negroes who committed crimes against other Negroes. For months they had talked of robbing Blum’s, but had not been able to bring themselves to do it. They had the feeling that the robbing of Blum’s would be a violation of ultimate taboo; it would be a trespassing into territory where the full wrath of an alien white world would be turned loose upon them; in short, it would be a symbolic challenge of the white world’s rule over them; a challenge which they yearned to make, but were afraid to. Yes; if they could rob Blum’s, it would be a real hold-up, in more senses than one. In comparison, all of their other jobs had been play. (NS 14)

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That Bigger and his male friends “robbed Negroes” as a way to survive the harsh Depression years on Chicago’s South Side is a clear illustration of Bigger’s detachment from and disregard for black communal harmony. Yet robbing and stealing allowed Bigger and his friends to painstakingly challenge systematic black disenfranchisement as well as to “resist wage labor, pursue leisure, and demystify the work ethic myth” (Kelley, Race 176). Their “criminal” acts would pose other challenges, however, both to themselves and the larger social order. For Bigger and his friends, stealing from whites, unlike from blacks, represented a “symbolic challenge of the white world’s rule over them” (NS 14).15 Psychologically, the challenge of robbing a white-owned store—especially those white establishments within the Black Belt—constituted for Bigger and his friends the site of a phantasmatic liberation from white domination. In effect, the project of defiantly opposing the status quo of Jim Crow (i.e., robbing a white-owned store) becomes itself a male rite of passage, a passage representing the process through which Bigger and his male friends attempt to assert their humanity. In this instance, it is their ability to conquer what they fear most, to assert a sense of fearlessness and defiance, that becomes tantamount to black male empowerment. Indeed, as Keith Clark rightly asserts in his critique of Wright’s protest discourse, “Black manhood is achieved only by standing up to white men” (81). What this scene suggests, however, is that fearlessness exists as a psychic ideal to which Bigger and his friends can only approximate through masking their fears and “playing tough.” That this ideal involves an assertion of masculine bravado and, for Bigger, the projection of violent behavior onto his buddies problematically constitutes both hypermasculinity and fearlessness as evidence of empowerment, status, and self-worth.16 That is to say, fearlessness is empowering because it frees Bigger of his inferiority complex and functions to restore his self-respect. However, it is also debilitating and, indeed, destructive because it violently works to threaten communal harmony as well as to disrupt the black male community it purports to nurture. Take, for example, Bigger’s desperate exhibition of brute force over Gus when Gus exposes Bigger’s fear of going through with the robbery: “Lick it,” Bigger said, his body tingling with elation. Gus’s eyes filled with tears. “Lick it, I said! You think I’m playing?” Gus looked round the room without moving his head, just rolling

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his eyes in a mute appeal for help. But no one moved. Bigger’s left fist was slowly lifting to strike. Gus’s lips moved toward the knife; he stuck out his tongue and touched the blade. Gus’s lips quivered and tears streamed down his cheeks. (NS 39)

In this scene, Bigger violently forces Gus to “lick” his knife, a phallic symbol of Bigger’s penis. Filled with “elation” as Gus demeans himself by performing the symbolic act of fellatio on Bigger in front of his male peers, Bigger “rapes” Gus to assert his “power” over him. Here it seems crucial to call attention to the sexualized dimensionality of these homosocial practices, practices that employ both physical and sexual violence in a desperate effort to regain lost masculinity. As Mercer rightly points out in his analysis of sexualized violence among black men, The kind of “power” acted out in the brutal violence of rape and sexual abuse is, in fact, a further expression of powerlessness, as it does nothing to challenge the underlying structure of oppression, but only “passes on” the violence of the dominant white male, via the psychic process of “internalization,” into the black community and onto black women [and men], hence reinforcing their oppression at the end of the chain of colonial violence. (146)

Masking their fears by playing tough is thus a kind of desperate assertion that ultimately never succeeds in freeing Bigger and his friends from psychological bondage and intraracial discord. Nevertheless, it is the assertion itself of defiant oppositionality and hypermasculinity—and the perceived need for that assertion—that becomes both the site and occasion for grappling with their humanity; indeed, these two factors coalesce to produce the mobilizing energy around which black male community is created and sustained. Described by Cornel West as “black male-bonding networks that flaunt machismo [and] promote camaraderie” (Black Culture 394), the homosocial exchanges between young black men in black culture, in general, and in the first book of Native Son, in particular, symbolize not only a site of racial community but also function as a space for cultivating male rites of passage that solicit self-affirmation and respect. On the one hand, these hypermasculinist and oftentimes sexualized practices amounted to hyperbolic appropriations of white male authority within the segregated social and cultural sphere of black life during the 1930s;

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on the other, homosocial networks of black male community, particularly those defined within and against Jim Crow, challenged and even incited confrontation with white society as a way to both express resistance and to preserve their humanity against racial and class oppression. Consider Wright’s own autobiography, Black Boy (1945), in which a young Richard is violently initiated into a black male homosocial network. Recalling his first day at an elementary school in Mississippi, Wright asserts, “This was my test. If I failed now, I would have failed at school, for the first trial came not in books, but in how one’s fellows took one, what value they placed upon one’s willingness to fight” (91). For Richard and his peers, this was a crucial “test” of black masculinity that reflected the struggle of asserting “somebodiness” in a world in which they had little or no control. Indeed, this expression of rebellious adolescence constituted a site of agency for doing battle not only with each other but also with an alien and brutal white world. For many young black men growing up in Jim Crow, strength and toughness was a social necessity that reflected both the past and impending brutalities of racial terror. And as was the case with Richard, animosity toward white racism provided the foundational “touchstone of fraternity” (BB 78) between black men, carrying with it a vengeful pride in their bodies and defiantly oppositional attitudes. Of his early days hanging out with the other black boys, Wright recalls: “We had somehow caught the spirit of the role of our sex and we flocked together for common moral schooling. We spoke boastfully in bass voices; we used the word ‘nigger’ to prove the tough fiber of our feelings; we spouted excessive profanity as a sign of our coming manhood” (78). It would be detrimental, however, to view their tough façades and “cool poses”— much like the adolescent posturing of Bigger and his male partners in the poolroom—as uniformly “sociopathic behavior . . . foster[ing] black men’s estrangement” (Clark 24). Indeed, the “spirit” with which young black men fought to prove their “coming manhood” was as much a dysfunctional response to racial terror as it was a humanizing practice of selfhood and intimate initiation into black male community. Emerging from a historic legacy of political, social, and physical emasculation dating back to black men’s enslavement and continuing into the twentieth century, young black men saw little means or viable reason for thinking differently about gender, empowerment, and racial retribution. And this is crucially important to remember in making sense of the ways in which black men came to understand—both psychically and physically—their chances of

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survival in an overtly racist society. Not surprisingly, many black men not only valued their tough façades and cool poses as proud badges of courage; they saw them as a testament to their physical superiority17 as well as an expression of their resolve to defy white supremacy. This is not at all to suggest that playing tough—a social practice replete with misogyny and oftentimes intraracial discord—should be understood as an indication of subversion. To the contrary, these violent rituals of black manhood reveal a certain participation in and reiteration of dominant norms, norms that function ultimately to “police” and “contain” black male identity. Indeed, there is little if anything to recuperate from Bigger’s maltreatment of Gus in the poolroom. In the end, “playing tough” is not an exemplar of radical subversion. Yet it does demonstrate the ambivalence in which young black men attempt to forge through hegemonic spaces, spaces that “reflect the more general situation of being implicated in the regimes of power by which one is constituted and, hence, of being implicated in the very regimes of power that one opposes” (Butler, Bodies 125). However, as much as there is an aggressively masculine anxiety leading to disharmony within his group, there is also the “creation of kinship” and the building of community that cannot be overlooked. “Playing with Themselves” Part of what makes Bigger and his male world hard to redeem is their blatant disregard for social decorum and decency. Among themselves, they hedonistically and oftentimes recklessly indulge in their bodies as a means of recovering from what they believed to be the constant negation of their humanity by white society. Specifically, in a downtown movie theater balcony, Bigger and Jack take great pleasure in masturbating and expelling their bodily waste onto the floor, competing with each other in a phallic exercise of sexual angst and expedience. Capturing in graphic detail their adolescent shenanigans, Wright leaves little to the imagination: “You at it again?” Jack asked. “I’m polishing my nightstick,” Bigger said. They giggled. “I’ll beat you,” Jack said. “Go to hell.” The organ played for a long moment on a single note, then died away. “I’ll bet you ain’t even hard yet,” Jack whispered. “I’m getting hard.” “Mine’s like a rod,” Jack said with intense pride. “I wished I had Bessie here now,” Bigger said. “I could make old

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Clara moan now.” They sighed. . . . Bigger saw Jack lean forward and stretch out his legs, rigidly. “You gone?” “Yee-eeah. . . .” “You pull off fast. . . .” Again they were silent. Then Bigger leaned forward, breathing hard. “I’m gone . . . God . . . damn . . .” They sat still for five minutes, slumped down in their seats. Finally, they straightened. “I don’t know where to put my feet now,” Bigger said, laughing. “Let’s take another seat.” (30)

Critics who assert that this scene reflects a shameful display of lewd behavior fail, I believe, to come to terms with the spatial constraints and broader social politics operating within the dehumanizing quarters of Chicago’s South Side. First, for many poor urban black families “packed” into the Black Belt, “home” amounted to a one-room kitchenette in which several families were forced to share a single bathroom.18 Reflected in the opening scene of Native Son, Wright gives his readers a glimpse of the tight confines of the Thomas “household”: Bigger, Buddy (younger brother), Vera (younger sister), and Mrs. Thomas (mother) are all waking abruptly to the sound of an alarm clock—Bigger and Buddy sharing one bed, and Vera and Mrs. Thomas sharing another. Constrained by the lack of privacy, Wright exposes how “the two boys kept their faces averted while their mother and sister put on enough clothes to keep from feeling ashamed; and the mother and sister did the same while the boys dressed” (NS 4). Challenging conventional ideas about home as a site of comfort, intimacy, and emotional support, Bigger’s view of domestic space is one of unease, stress, anxiety, confinement, docility, and psychic despair. And not unlike many poor urban black men then and now, Bigger finds solace in the “streets” where he is temporarily free from patriarchal-familial responsibility and the emasculating torment and pressure of his mother. Recall the harsh words she directs toward him at the breakfast table: “Bigger, sometimes I wonder why I birthed you” and “honest, you the most no-countest man I ever seen in all my life!” (8–9). Not surprisingly, Bigger finds comfort with the other young black men of his neighborhood as they seek out what Robin D. G. Kelley refers to as “spaces of leisure” (44–46). Indeed, the spacious movie theater, much like the street corner and the poolroom, provides not only respite from the suffocating confines of the tenement but also facilitates a kind of psychic escape into a world of fantasy and sexual gratification.

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What would it mean, then, to consider their masturbatory act as something other than “obnoxious sexual perversions”?19 Is it possible to see their sexual behavior in the movie theater as liberating or strangely—forgive the pun—uplifting? But here it seems that I am obliged to point out that there is no necessary relation between their sexual act and political subversion; indeed, there is little evidence in this scene to suggest that Bigger and Jack are at all conscious of their participation in anything subversive. However, the social context in which these two boys found themselves may have reflected how the act of masturbation in a public space could be interpreted as defiantly oppositional, throwing caution to the wind within a coercive context of racial obeisance. Hanging out, avoiding the daily grind of looking for menial jobs, and seeking pleasure—in all, refusing to be “good citizens”—symbolized a defiant repudiation of societal expectations; in a world where white society only permitted them limited and unequal access, Bigger and Jack, as was the case with many young black men in urban America, responded with disdain and impunity. Their masturbatory act, reflecting defiance against social decorum and the status quo, also reveals yet another way in which we might be able to make sense of how Bigger and Jack attempt to liberate themselves from white control. That is to say, how can we move to a consideration of their participation in the masturbatory act as an expression of their sexuality and, by that virtue, an expression of their humanity? Inextricably connected to a culture that appears to emasculate, maim, and desexualize, and in every conceivable way castrate black male subjectivity, masturbation can be interpreted not only as an oppositional gesture but also as a “humanizing” practice that may not be deemed as altogether subversive but which nonetheless can be understood as an enabling assertion of the self. And critics who have referred to his masturbation as yet another example of racial impotence fail, I believe, to make this connection. Yet, despite Wright’s efforts to shed light on the tortured psyches of poor urban black men under the reign of racial terror, he ultimately fails to elaborate on the sexualized dimensionality of black male identity in general and of their homosocial practices in particular. And this omission is perhaps done for good reason: focus on Bigger’s sexuality would inevitably distract attention away from Wright’s central thesis that Bigger’s violent behavior was a product of rage and not sexual passion. Moreover, the political and social climate of the 1940s demanded a certain sensitivity toward America’s most volatile sexual taboos, racial amalgamation and the

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myths surrounding black male sexuality. As Keneth Kinnamon points out in his study of Native Son: Having dropped the original ending of the novel, Wright omits from the galleys passages about “life, new and strange” and passages invoking fire imagery: “Bigger Thomas is part of a furious blaze of liquid life energy which once blazed and is still blazing in our land. He is a hot jet of life that spattered itself in futility against a cold wall.” Here Wright may have been uneasy with the orgasmic hyperbole of such a metaphor. Certainly other cuts deemphasize Bigger’s sexuality [my emphasis], such as the deletion of a reference to masturbation as a trope for Bigger’s entire life. In Buckley’s speech, too, Wright cuts a reference to the Florida newsreel and “the obnoxious sexual perversions practiced by these boys [Bigger and Jack] in darkened theatres.” (122)

While Wright makes a seemingly conscious decision to “de-emphasize Bigger’s sexuality,” he nonetheless is unable to avoid altogether leaving traces of the sexual dynamics and masculine anxieties that inform the practices of Bigger and his male friends. Indeed, the masturbatory act in the theater—as well as Bigger’s violently sexual assertion of force over Gus in the poolroom—may very well reflect what Maurice Wallace refers to as the “castration fixation . . . haunting (largely heterosexual) black male selfidentity” (39) whereby “modern manhood [is] an endless rivalry for the power and privileges of patriarchy animated by the psychic discomfiture of men’s mutual fears and desires for one another, often in sexually charged contexts” (1).20 To be sure, this “psychic discomfiture of [black] men’s mutual fears and desires for one another” is suggestive of the multiple ways in which the “homosocial” is not only tied to sexuality but inextricably caught up with the “homosexual.”21 But what more do these phallic anxieties reveal about the bonds created and sustained between young poor urban black men? Indeed, while these masculine anxieties and sexual dynamics operate at the core of black male community and oftentimes manifest in destructive behaviors, they are also simultaneously a part of a broader homosocial network of enabling, nurturing, and self-affirming practices that allow black men a space to heal, take stock, identify with, and—without becoming overly sentimental—love one another. Here, again, the claim of homoerotic attachments

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between black men is duly noted: It would not be far-fetched to view Bigger’s homoerotic attachments with other black men in the novel as holding an equally powerful place as his erotic attachments with women. Thus, even as Bigger references his girlfriend while masturbating beside Jack (“I wished I had Bessie here now”), readers are able to discern the discursive possibilities of homoerotic desire looming in Wright’s imaginative closet. However, drawing attention to these intimate spaces—both physical and emotional—shared by black men illuminates, I believe, the deep bonds that have functioned to help black men keep the fortitude and perseverance to withstand the insanity that racial terror and economic disenfranchisement produce. For example, in Bigger’s interactions with his younger brother, Buddy, one can witness the “unspoken love” in Buddy’s plea to their mother, “Lay off, Ma” (11), in an attempt to shield Bigger from her nagging remarks. Equally protective of and concerned for Buddy, “[Bigger] did not mind what his mother said to Buddy about him. Buddy was all right. Tough, plenty” (15). A rare instance of their mutual affection, it points to how these “black male bonding networks” operate, encapsulating a number of the significant features in Wright’s conception of black male community. And yet, Bigger’s affectionate gestures toward Buddy, Gus, and Jack reveal only part of the empowering significance of black male homosociality. Indeed, we must also examine the other—albeit less palatable—expressions of their defiantly oppositional behaviors, for in them lies important evidence of their desires to be recognized, acknowledged, and, ultimately, respected. Bigger’s relationships with the other black men in Native Son show us the complex (and most often subtle) dynamics of black male homosociality operating paradoxically to reinforce and resist the annihilating aims of white authority. Scholars, religious and political leaders, and journalists who continue to see black male homosociality, particularly the defiantly oppositional behaviors of young poor urban black men, as uniformly nihilistic, or who see them as inherently aberrant manifestations of “black maleness,” or who argue compassionately for their “behavioral reprogramming,” need to examine poor urban black male life in relation to the broader social, economic, and political contexts of U.S. society. Once we delve beyond the “cool poses” and hypermasculine posturing to explore how their social and political values are shaped and, indeed, tied to the overarching ideological structure of the dominant society, we can begin to

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grasp that psychic space in which young poor urban black men make sense of the absurdity and dehumanizing practices of racial subjugation. Thus, whether it is “playing white” on the street corner, “playing tough” in the neighborhood poolroom, or just “playing with themselves” in the movie theater balcony, it is difficult to deny the sense of self (somebodiness), relief (pleasure), and even “power” (control) that many young poor urban black men feel as they assert themselves within and against a culture of racial terror. In this regard, their defiantly oppositional behaviors suggest an ethical ambivalence between “right” and “wrong” that cannot be so readily separated. Whatever cultural critics might make of the misogyny, homophobia, hypermasculinity, and violence that persist in many poor urban black male communities, black people, particularly those who closely identify with hip-hop culture and rap music, are not inclined to wholly dismiss these “ruffnecks” or “bad” brothas. Take, for example, MC Lyte’s 1987 “Ruffneck” or, more recently, Angie Stone’s 2000 “Brotha” in which black women voice their “love” and understanding for these “boys in the hood.” In her attempt to redeem young poor urban black men from the litany of racial stereotypes, Philadelphia Soul Sister Stone proudly asserts: “He’s misunderstood / some say that he’s up to no good around the neighborhood.” In a very real sense, Wright’s Bigger Thomas is representative of those black men Stone refers to as “your down for whatever chillin’ on the corner brotha,” brothers who are “facin’ doubt” and desperately trying to “work it out.”22 But “work[ing] it out” is oftentimes a messy affair in which there are rarely definitive routes, rarely clear paths to “righteousness” for the dispossessed. In fact, for young poor urban black men, responding to racial terror (and thus dehumanization) is to take part in what Lewis Gordon refers to as “unavoidable cycles of action and reaction [that] dirties everyone’s hands” (277). This realization is crucial as we attempt to grapple with the plight of poor urban black youths in contemporary U.S. society. For as we forge into a new millennium, there are more—not fewer—Bigger Thomases who are becoming less and less afraid to assert themselves even in the face of prison or death.

2

“It’s a Man’s World” Rethinking Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice in the Twenty-first Century

hen hip-hop artist Ras Kass1 made his 1998 tribute to Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968) in the first anniversary issue of the hiphop magazine XXL, he reminded his readers of the enduring black nationalist impulse that runs deep within hard-core rap music and contemporary black male identity politics. Controversially recalling a personal and political history filled with rape and misogyny, armed self-defense, and black self-determination, Ras Kass’s evocation of Soul unabashedly paid homage to the militant era of Black Power. For Cleaver, the call for “Black Power” was contingent upon the ability to heal the emasculated, “tortured psyches” of black men and to confront what many black militants believed to be a psychosexual “pathology” afflicting Black America:

W

My main appreciation for Cleaver’s Soul on Ice lies in how brutally, utterly truthful the author was with himself, because that is the only way to find peace of mind. The steps he and others like him took allowed me to psychoanalyze my own pathology and begin to understand my conscious and subconscious motivations. Most of us don’t have the courage to open up and explore the innermost depths of our tortured psyches. I know. Soul on Ice was written to cleanse Cleaver’s soul, just as Soul on Ice, the album, was recorded to cleanse mine.

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Thus, in a defensive effort to reclaim the phallic strength of the race, “the steps [Cleaver] and others like him took” were informed by the belief that black empowerment was inextricably tied to black male virility and sexual potency. As stated in a 1968 review of Soul in Time magazine: “It is Cleaver’s thesis . . . that the root cause of racial prejudice in America is sexual. He argues that as a result of the Negro’s years of servility, the black male has been systematically robbed of his masculinity. Thus ‘castrated,’ the Negro also has been denied his development as a positive intellectual and social force” (“Books” 111). Admiring Cleaver for his ability to transcend the “servility” and “castration” caused by American racism, Ras Kass’s appreciation of Soul in XXL reflects what has been for many black men a compelling narrative of one man’s coming of age through life on the streets, in prison, and eventually as the minister of information for the Black Panther Party. Ras Kass continues, “Cleaver didn’t necessarily answer all the questions. He didn’t attempt to. But he definitely opened my eyes and showed me how to find some sort of reconciliation.” Indeed, for many urban black men, Cleaver’s narrative remains as insightful as it is dangerously symptomatic of the political climate and racial context of the late 1960s.2 The purpose of this chapter is to rethink the significance of Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, to examine ideologies of black masculinism during the late 1960s, as well as to consider their enduring impact—particularly in the realm of hard-core rap music—during the late 1980s and 1990s. I am specifically interested in exploring Cleaver’s interpretation of the Watts Uprising of 1965 as a reflection of the militantly oppositional responses of young urban black men against white authority. From this context, I would like to move to a consideration of what Cleaver’s Soul on Ice suggests about the present-day formation of black male subjectivities in a culture that appears to systematically contain and destroy black male bodies both physically and ideologically. What concerns me most are the ways in which this culture—what I will refer to as a “culture of terror”—has informed who black men are, how black men make sense of their lives, as well as how black men tend to articulate expressive cultural responses from within this culture. Ultimately, the goal of this chapter is to move toward an understanding of what Soul on Ice has meant and continues to mean for contemporary black artists and audiences. Cleaver’s experiences leading up to his writing Soul on Ice reflected his specific reactions to poverty and racism: the trials and tribulations of a

Rethinking Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice 45

young black man who found himself in trouble with the law from a very early age, eventually serving time in prison for rape and coming into consciousness while there through introspection and affiliation with the Nation of Islam and the writings of Malcolm X. As Time stated in 1968, Cleaver was a “product of both the black ghettos and the California penal system” (“Books” 111). For tens of thousands of oppositional and defiant young black men like Ras Kass, particularly those who grow up poor, black, and male within the dehumanizing inner sanctum of contemporary urban America, Cleaver’s path to political consciousness represents an empowering and self-affirming feat of individual agency. Written largely from behind bars between 1965 and 1968, Cleaver conceived and wrote Soul on Ice as a collection of autobiographical essays. However, Soul on Ice may be read as a coherent yet diverging meditation on the question of black masculinity and its relation to revolutionary consciousness in the United States as well as to liberation movements around the world. Structurally, Cleaver’s narrative includes four sections: “Letters from Prison,” “Blood of the Beast,” “Prelude to Love—Three Letters,” and “White Woman, Black Man.” As Cleaver tells the story, Soul on Ice is a story of “becoming,” of finding out who he is as a black man from within a culture of terror and dehumanization. But Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, a spiritual testimonial that accounts for his rite of passage from “troubled” adolescent to political activist, should also be read as a severely imperfect blueprint for revolutionary enlightenment and political praxis. Cleaver’s brand of black nationalism was tragically male-dominated, homophobic,3 and, in many instances, ideologically too reactionary to see beyond a world of continued violence. These shortcomings were inextricably tied to the racially antagonistic historical moment and specific geopolitical location on the streets of Los Angeles from which Cleaver came.4 Emerging out of an era in which dissatisfaction with the struggle for civil rights and integration was shifting toward Black Power and separatism, Cleaver, like Malcolm before him, could envision opposition to dehumanization only in extreme and uncompromising terms. Nineteen sixty-five was a critical turning point not only for Cleaver but for many black men in the United States. With the tragic assassination of Malcolm X on February 21, the release of the controversial Moynihan Report (The Negro Family: A Case for National Action) in early March, and the Watts Uprising during the month of August, black people—particularly black men—were put on high alert. During the next several years,

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black men found themselves at the center of a swirl of events that would tell an unprecedented story about black male identity formation in the midst of state violence and racial terror. Indeed, the years leading up to the publication of Soul on Ice and into the early 1970s marked a turbulent era of drastic instability in the United States characterized by war both at home and abroad. At home, the United States was in the midst of a “race war.” The emergence of the Black Panther Party in 1966, “race riots” throughout the summers of the late 1960s, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 were all signs of a violent white conservative backlash against the legal victories of the civil rights movement. Abroad, U.S. troops—particularly the young black men of Project 100,000—were deployed in Vietnam and Cambodia (1966–72) in an alleged attempt to save democracy from Communism. On both fronts, blacks received overwhelming death blows of state-sanctioned brutality and violence.5 While President Johnson’s “War on Poverty” programs staggered in the United States as federal funds poured into the war effort, many blacks became cynical, if not hostile, toward the systematic practice of neglecting black lives. From his jail cell in Folsom prison, Cleaver, like other blacks, began to question and reject the ethics of white society, realizing that “I could unilaterally—whether anyone agreed with me or not—repudiate all allegiances, morals, values— even while continuing to exist within this society. My mind would be free and no power in the universe could force me to accept something if I didn’t want to. But I would take my own sweet time. That, too, was a part of my new freedom” (5–6). Ironically, perhaps, it was precisely through Cleaver’s growing awareness of and rage against American society that he was able to gain a sense of hope, meaning, and freedom. Indeed, Cleaver’s rejection of America, of “all allegiances, morals, [and] values,” was indicative of a much greater hope and much more complicated need for social and political action expressed by Black America. Thus, blacks who shared Cleaver’s growing resentment of America both envisioned and enacted a form of defiance that antagonistically asserted their efforts to rid themselves of the dehumanizing inferiority complex borne out of a history of American racism and economic exploitation. However, while Cleaver rejected American patriotism, he remained loyal to its patriarchal underpinnings. Indeed, the dominant patriarchal values of white society not only appeared to be embraced but were foundational to Cleaver’s project of uplifting Black America.

Rethinking Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice 47

“We Shall Have Our Manhood” Malcolm X’s political legacy was widely embraced throughout the late 1960s and became a significant part of the foundational ideology of the Black Power movement.6 However, if Malcolm’s legacy was to be a part of the Black Power movement, it also was to be appropriated in a number of different ways. In the writings of Cleaver, for example, furthering Malcolm’s political message of black self-defense and the multifaceted ideology of black liberation meant an explicitly masculine black nationalist voice. As described in Cleaver’s sixth essay in Soul on Ice, “Initial Reactions on the Assassination of Malcolm X,” written from Folsom prison (June 19, 1965), Malcolm’s struggle for black liberation was to be coterminous with the project of vindicating black manhood.7 In his concluding remarks on Malcolm’s death, Cleaver cites Ossie Davis’s eulogy of Malcolm: If you knew him you would know why we must honor him: Malcolm was our manhood, our living, black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves. . . . However much we may have differed with him—or with each other about him and his value as a man, let his going from us serve only to bring us together, now. Consigning these mortal remains to earth, the common mother of all, secure in the knowledge that what we place in the ground is no more now a man—but a seed—which, after the winter of our discontent will come forth again to meet us. And we will know him then for what he was and is—a Prince—our own black shining Prince!—who didn’t hesitate to die, because he loved us so. (60–61)

Confronting the loss of “black manhood” and “our own black shining Prince!” through the assassination of Malcolm, Cleaver’s reactions were unequivocally clear: “We shall have our manhood. We shall have it or the earth will be leveled by our attempts to gain it” (61). Soul on Ice as well as other published black male autobiographies such as Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1968) and Iceberg Slim’s The Pimp (1969) affirmed the increasingly masculinist mood of Black America throughout the late 1960s. Moreover, with the explosion of blaxploitation films such as Shaft (1971), Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), and Superfly

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(1972), black popular culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s became saturated with hypermasculine black images. Heralded by Hollywood and embraced by large black urban audiences as desirable if not “authentic” cultural representations of poor, inner-city black communities, these black male narratives and films quickly became evidence for conservative social scientists and popular cultural critics of a distinctly misogynistic and dysfunctional black male “subculture.” There is a central theoretical premise operating here that relies on our consideration of the ways in which the diffusion and embrace of white patriarchal ideologies and values effectively conditioned and informed black male identity. In effect, while it was believed that an assertive demonstration of masculinity would restore authority and agency in the black community, this hypermasculine identity would also undermine its very attempt to break free from both a racial political discourse and a lived experience of white supremacist domination. I am referring here to what Cornel West calls “nihilistic” strategies of black male aggression and direct confrontation that purport to gain patriarchal authority and social agency. According to West, these nihilistic stylizations of the black male body, which invoke fear in others, amount to a dangerous “machismo” largely directed toward black women and other black men.8 In effect, the “engendering” of white patriarchal ideals through hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms subjects oppositional black men to the violating aims of hegemonic formation—a trap of both violating constitution and subjection—which ultimately affirms racialized mythologies about “dangerous,” “pathological” black men and leads to their continual subordination under white patriarchal law and order (i.e., police brutality, excessive reliance on the criminal justice system, and tremendous growth of prison-industrial complexes). As important as this reading is (and surely there is pervasive evidence that many black men are caught up within this parody of masculinity), it seems to me that it fails to recognize a certain agency, a certain willed and deliberate political impulse existing in the articulation and rearticulation of violent opposition. The hypothesis I want to put forward is that the idealizations of hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms found in Cleaver’s Soul on Ice as well as in the lyrics of contemporary hard-core rap music demonstrate some of the ways that black men have sought to undermine and combat the violating aims of hegemonic formation (i.e., racialized inscription and subjection). In a context in which state violence profoundly

Rethinking Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice 49

brackets black male social formation, Cleaver’s construction of revolutionary black manhood in Soul on Ice represents an empowering catharsis through which black men have been able to envision themselves beyond the limiting scope of racial subjection. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation in the decision popularly known as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. While the abolishment of legal segregation in schools gave some blacks a sense of optimism, many blacks remained beyond the pale of prosperity and opportunity, disgruntled and increasingly detached from America’s promises.9 According to Cleaver, blacks prior to 1954, particularly those growing up in the inner cities of the North and in California, “lived in an atmosphere of Novocain [whereby] we accepted indignities and the mechanics of the apparatus of oppression” (3). Nineteen fifty-four was also the year that the eighteen-year-old Cleaver began serving a sentence in Soledad State Prison in California for possession of a shopping bag full of marijuana. But this was not the first nor the last time that Cleaver would be in trouble with the law. At the age of twelve, Cleaver stole a bicycle. At twenty-two, Cleaver was convicted of assault with intent to kill and would serve nine years of a sentence of one to fourteen years. From theft to drug possession to assault (rape), Cleaver would spend most of the next twelve years in and out of prison before completing Soul on Ice in 1968. As biographer Don A. Schanche tells it, “There was never a day in his life that he was not either a fugitive, incarcerated, on probation, or on parole” (34). It was from within this context—the streets of Los Angeles and the California state prisons of Quentin, Folsom, and Soledad—that Cleaver made sense of the world in which he lived. Focusing primarily on the psychosexual dimension of oppression in black American life and its inextricable relation to class and race struggle, Cleaver’s Soul on Ice bears a likeness to the ideological underpinnings of political narratives written by Richard Wright and Frantz Fanon. Cleaver’s conscious construction of a literary-historical trajectory in which his own narrative participates in the “development [of ] a positive intellectual and social force” (“Books” 111) should not be understated. Their shared concerns over the economic plight of the oppressed, racism, and the primacy of violence or violent resistance in order to effect revolutionary change offer compelling evidence of a distinct political tradition. Maxwell Geismar, who wrote the introduction to Soul on Ice, asserted that the book “reminds me of the great days of the past. It has echoes of Richard Wright’s Native

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Son, just as its true moral affinity is with one of the few other fine books of our period, the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and as it represents in American terms the only comparable approach to the writings of Frantz Fanon” (3). Indeed, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1962), and Malcolm X’s Autobiography (1965) are crucial in establishing a continuity of thought in Cleaver’s own work of literature. Certainly no serious critique of the male-centered, revolutionary voice of the oppressed is made by these black writers, and Cleaver is no exception. Although black liberation was given a great deal of attention in their works, none of these texts focus on black women as agents of revolutionary change in any sustained and meaningful way. To the contrary, black women are assigned to subordinate roles whereby black men are situated as the protagonists of racial struggle and resistance. In Cleaver’s case, the challenges posed by the Moynihan Report to achieve male supremacy in the black family structure of the urban poor, the ethnocidal effects of black men being killed in a war abroad and at home, and the emergence of “Black Power” made allusion to Wright, Fanon, and Malcolm X appear a logical appropriation and extension of their “phallicized” racial identities. That is to say, Cleaver’s fascination with the accumulation of power and agency and, indeed, his quest for self-definition in relation to the phallus—and here I am referring to masculine aggression, violence, and armed militancy—stemmed not only from the defensive yet assertive formation of racial consciousness in the distinct counterculture of the sixties; Cleaver’s conception of Black Power, like Wright’s, Fanon’s, and Malcolm’s projects of revolutionary consciousness, was also constructed from a larger, more complicated, and antagonistic racial discourse in white western culture. Self-definition, in other words, meant constructing a racial self out of the narrow and paradoxical historical representations of black masculinity in the West. Inextricably bound to the dehumanizing portrait of black men as hypersexual rapists of white women and as aggressively nihilistic “brutes,” the juxtaposition of black masculinity and violence came to symbolize an ironically empowering site for black writers such as Wright and Fanon. Wright’s Native Son, for example, illustrates through his construction of Bigger Thomas in the early 1940s the heroic potentiality of violent resistance within America’s Jim Crow culture of terror. Adopted by black nationalists, social historian Robert Brisbane points out that “Wright [had]

Rethinking Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice 51

created a prototype of the black militants, the ‘block boys,’ and the insurrectionists who were to frighten so badly white America during the late 1960s” (269). In part, Cleaver’s Soul on Ice is both a continuation and a defense of Wright’s masculine vision and the revolutionary hero he constructed in Bigger Thomas.10 Consider Cleaver’s reclamation of both Wright’s gender politics and revolutionary consciousness in “Notes on a Native Son,” an essay that antagonistically takes its name from James Baldwin’s 1955 Notes of a Native Son. I think it can safely be said that the men in Wright’s books, albeit shackled with a form of impotence, were strongly heterosexual. Their heterosexuality was implied rather than laboriously stated or emphasized; it was taken for granted, as we all take men until something occurs to make us know otherwise. And Bigger Thomas, Wright’s greatest creation, was a man in violent, though inept, rebellion against the stifling, murderous, totalitarian white world. (106)

Unsurprisingly, Cleaver’s violently masculinist identification with Wright’s Bigger Thomas fits in with the status quo of revolutionary consciousness of the late 1960s. Claiming Bigger Thomas to be “Wright’s greatest creation,” Cleaver understands Bigger’s heterosexual significance in terms of his “violent, though inept, rebellion against the stifling, murderous, totalitarian white world.” Though Cleaver fails to move beyond the disabling masculine world of Wright, his capacity to identify with the political, economic, and social variables that inform the violent practices of the oppressed in Wright’s work deserves appreciation. Cleaver effectively contends, “Wright had the ability . . . of harnessing the gigantic, overwhelming environmental forces and focusing them, with pinpoint sharpness, on individuals and their acts as they are caught up in the whirlwind of the savage, anarchistic sweep of life, love, death, and hate, pain, hope, pleasure, and despair across the face of a nation and the world” (108–9). In many ways, Wright’s attention to both the structural and psychosocial variables of oppression, the “environmental forces” as well as the “whirlwind of the savage, anarchistic sweep of life, love, death, and hate, pain, hope, pleasure, and despair,” would later be revealed in the United

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States throughout the tumultuous 1960s. More precisely, the Watts Uprising of 1965 reflected a real-life manifestation of Wright’s earlier literary creation. “Burn, Baby, Burn!” Overwhelmingly frustrated by the reality of high unemployment, underemployment, and severely inadequate social programs, urban black communities across the country were at a boiling point. As social historian Terry Anderson observed of the late sixties, there was a “growing swell of demands for extreme and immediate change” (73). For Black America, immediacy and change came in the form of urban uprisings; the Watts “riot” in the black ghetto of Los Angeles in August 1965 set the stage in the late 1960s for future confrontations between White and Black America. Triggered by a hostile interaction between a white policeman and a young black driver for “speeding and possible intoxication,” this minor confrontation escalated into a violent conflict between angry protesters and the police. The protesters, made up of young black men and women from the streets of Watts, fought back.11 Some threw bottles. Others began looting and setting fires to buildings. Others shot bullets. It was not long before the National Guard was sent in. When the news of the Watts Uprising hit Folsom prison, Cleaver and others responded with both pride and honor. Cleaver wrote: “Baby, they walking in fours and kicking in doors; dropping Reds and busting heads; drinking wine and committing crime; shooting and looting; high-siding and low-riding; setting fires and slashing tires; turning over cars and burning down bars; making Parker mad and making me glad; putting an end to that go slow crap and putting sweet Watts on the map—my black ass is in Folsom this morning but my black heart is in Watts!” (27). Yet even as this celebrated defiance raised the stakes in terms of political subversion, it also demonstrated the multiple ways in which their conception of liberation was inextricably bound to and represented a reflection of the regulatory order of dominant society. In effect, even as it sought to be oppositional, the loosely articulated liberation ideology of Black Power embraced by Cleaver and large numbers of urban blacks was as much an internalized appropriation of dominant ideology and state violence as it was a radical break from its intolerable tyranny over them.12

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While Cleaver’s version of armed self-defense reflects an attempt to contest and ultimately undermine the abusive legal and extralegal practices of the state, his conceptualization of an “armed black man” as the essence of revolutionary commitment severely compromised his aspirations for counterhegemony. The Watts Uprising as a critique of police brutality on the one hand and as a rejection of the enduring economic malaise of black urban life on the other came to represent an important site of revolutionary violence for Cleaver. Explicitly advocating a call for armed selfdefense against the state, Cleaver’s attention to the Watts Uprising suggests that crisis and turmoil are not solely destructive or nihilistic attempts to disrupt the status quo but also indicate, particularly for oppressed groups, a necessary though reluctant step for creating empowering change. However, as Cleaver reveals in “Domestic Law and International Order,” revolutionary ideology was to be an enterprise of masculinist violence: “So now the blacks, stung by the new knowledge they have unearthed, cry out: ‘police brutality!’ From one end of the country to the other, the new war cry is raised. The youth, those nodes of compulsive energy who are all fuel and muscle, race their motors, itch to do something” (132). For Cleaver, the Watts Uprising was a direct political statement against the status quo. The war cry of black youth to resist “police brutality” represented an empowering refusal to remain second-class citizens and asserted their desperate need to preserve their humanity. Full of “compulsive energy[,] . . . fuel and muscle,” Cleaver’s call to armed self-defense raised the rebellious spirit of many black men and articulated a new code of ethics. Whereas the early civil rights movement championed nonviolent resistance in the face of state domination, the Watts Uprising symbolized a drastic esprit de corps and demonstrated the empowering potential for collective insurrection and civil war that has lasted even into present-day America.13 Black Masculinity and the Moynihan Report While many, like former president Dwight Eisenhower, believed that the Watts Uprising of 1965 demonstrated “an increased lack of respect for law and order throughout the country,”14 its causes had more to do with years of police brutality and discrimination against urban black communities. Seeking to understand the variables that contributed to the frustration and hostility of urban blacks in Watts, the Johnson administration, vis-à-vis

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the Civil Rights Commission, determined that “between 1950 and 1965 segregation in fifteen large northern cities actually rose sharply and that in those cities black unemployment was double that of whites, even during the booming economy of the 1960s. In Watts, the black unemployment rate was 30%, and nationally, the majority of blacks were underemployed in unskilled and service jobs, the prescription for poverty” (Anderson, Sixties 74). More extensive, however, was the commissioned presidential report, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action, by Harvard professor (later U.S. senator) Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Published in November 1965, the goal of Moynihan’s report, it seems to me, was not to take a hard look at discriminatory practices in employment; rather, Moynihan’s diagnosis of the plight of urban blacks centered on the formation of an urban, black “subculture” that was a result of poverty. In the case of poor urban blacks, according to Moynihan, poverty is primarily the result of a dysfunctional black family structure. Specifically, the matriarchal structure of black family life leads to the emasculation of black men and, in turn, nurtures an environment of poor discipline, educational disadvantage and failure, criminality, and social deviance (e.g., irresponsibility, drug addiction, alcoholism). According to historian Gerald Horne, these misperceptions of the plight of poor urban blacks served as the major “pronouncement that the black family was the major source of instability that created the [Watts] revolt” (213).15 Summarizing his diagnosis of the black family structure, Moynihan writes on the first page of the report: The harsh fact is that as a group, at the present time, in terms of ability to win out in the competitions of American life, they are not equal to most of those groups with which they will be competing. Individually, Negro Americans reach the highest peaks of achievement. But collectively, . . . Negroes are among the weakest. . . . The circumstances of the Negro American community in recent years have probably been getting worse, not better. . . . The fundamental problem, in which this is most clearly the case, is that of family structure. . . . So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself. (U.S. Department of Labor)

As Moynihan would continue to argue in his report, the “salvation” of poor urban black communities would lie in their ability to establish a

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“stable Negro family structure” and to rid themselves of both social deviance and dependency upon welfare programs. Moynihan’s conclusions, however implausible they may have seemed within his own pessimistic findings, called for the resituation of male authority in the black family. Failing to address a structural plan for “full employment” and the ongoing economic deterioration in urban black communities, his speculation did little more than “blame the victim” as well as “support a set of class-bound prejudgments about a troublesome element of our society” (Valentine 35). As social anthropologist Charles Valentine would later point out concerning the report, “Most importantly, it tended to direct attention away from what the rest of society was still doing to the black poor, focusing instead on what the Negro lower class was allegedly doing to itself through its own defective and disabling ‘culture’ ” (32). In short, the Moynihan Report, which ostensibly addressed the needs of urban Black America in general and the frustrations of the Watts community of 1965 in particular, diverted responsibility away from the federal government and shifted the onus of improvement to the black masses, who were told to help themselves. In effect, Moynihan leaves little hope for federal programs to “save” urban black communities, insisting on “benign neglect” and a need for cultural and social conformity to fuel the internal strength of those communities. The societal impact of the Moynihan Report in 1965 is difficult to assess. While a concrete plan of action stemming from the report was never created and, therefore, never adopted as a formal social policy directive, the beliefs and aims stated in the report were widely embraced by the Johnson administration. As if to justify the transfer of federal aid from domestic social programs to the increasing costs of sending American troops to Vietnam, Johnson’s administration reiterated the hard line of federal neglect of urban black communities.16 In Cleaver’s own words, “Old funny-styled, zipper-mouthed political night riders know nothing but to haul out an investigating committee to look into the disturbance to find the cause of the unrest among the youth. Look into the mirror! The cause is you, Mr. And Mrs. Yesterday, you with the forked tongues” (137). Like the Watts Uprising, black frustration in the face of state violence and in the absence of economic and political improvements would again turn to rage. Marking an era of open defiance against the state, summer riots in urban black communities across the nation would continue for the next four years.

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While the Moynihan Report itself reflected the debilitating economic aims of mainstream America in dealing with lower-class Black America, its attention to a so-called culture of poverty and the need for male leadership in the black family structure struck a strong chord in the thinking of many black men. As Horne stated, “The black nationalists’ idea that ‘their’ women should be subordinate dove-tailed neatly with the elite’s idea that the black family was overly matriarchal. Both saw black women as the problem. As a result, black nationalism received a boost, and black women were denigrated” (230). It must be made clear that there is no clear causal correlation between the report and its impact on black men; however, the increasingly visible male-dominated practices of collective resistance and opposition to state authority (e.g., Black Panthers, gangs, urban uprisings, blaxploitation films) in the late 1960s and early 1970s reflected an aggressively militant attempt to uplift the black community through the vindication of black manhood. At the very least, the Moynihan Report and militant black responses to urban blight demonstrated the complicated and inextricably bound ways in which Black Power—particularly its tendency to give primacy to black male leadership—both conform to and resist dominant authority. By challenging the Black Matriarchy Thesis—the idea that social and economic problems in the black community were the result of black women’s matriarchal reign over the black family—in ways that reflected the normative and regulatory intent of white society, male leadership in Black Power was a paradoxical sign of patriarchal indoctrination and conformity even if its goal sought counterhegemonic directives. The Contemporary Significance of Soul on Ice What Watts shows us today is how the historical forces of the 1960s (racism, war, poverty, and sexism) shaped the lives of poor urban black men and bound many of them to see black uplift exclusively in terms of armed self-defense or violent action. While Cleaver’s Soul on Ice also demonstrates the limitations in envisioning racial empowerment along a particular set of gender and class lines, the ontological journey from social invisibility and hopelessness to a state of “revolutionary consciousness” and political agency represents for many an important site for creating hope and meaning. Situating Cleaver’s narrative within the explosive zeitgeist of the late 1960s, it becomes evident that his message, however problematic, inspired

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a number of black men to question white authority, to evaluate their role in the United States as black people, and to identify internationally with the plight of other oppressed communities. Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, as a cultural artifact from the era of Black Power, was not uniformly a nihilistic by-product of the violent 1960s; it was also an empowering racial awakening. And for that gift, Cleaver became a hero to many.17 But why have Cleaver’s Soul and the black nationalisms of his time remained such vital historical resources in the popular imagination of contemporary urban black male youth culture? That is, why have ideologists and practitioners of black masculinism (not all of whom are men) embraced, defended, and (in the case of hip-hop) resurrected dangerous images whereby black men are widely “read” as pathological, hypersexual, and violent? Whatever academicians and cultural critics might think about Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, the youth today, particularly the hip-hop community, are reluctant to dismiss Cleaver as well as the Black Power movement as insignificant. In his title track, “Soul on Ice,” Ras Kass defiantly celebrates Cleaver’s ideological position in which violent protest (“throw the first fuckin’ bottle”) is set against the pacifism of the civil rights movements: And I don’t give a fuck about nonviolent resistance Civil rights will not suffice In the name of Jesus Christ, they got my Soul on Ice.

While some might find these present-day connections to Cleaver in particular and to Black Power in general as a short-sighted and outdated return to sixties-style racial opposition and black male supremacy, they do offer a vehicle for black male youth culture not simply to resurrect past paradigms of black uplift but to further revise the black movement of the late 1960s. With respect to the present-day “revisions” of Cleaver’s detrimental views on women, Ras Kass is seemingly aware though conflicted as to any real empowering conclusion: Eldridge Cleaver personified the Black man of yesteryear and today: disciple (“What’s next?”), agitator (“Fuck the police!”), ridah (“Fuck a bitch!”), role model (“Be a real man.”), misogynist (“Fuck a bitch!”), soldier (“Power to the people!”), and capitalist (“Get money.”). Cleaver embodied all of these seemingly contra-

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dictory characteristics. As a Black Panther, he was a strong, determined, revolutionary Black man. But he secretly desired white women and often misdirected his rage toward his Black sisters. (Ras Kass 218)

Unfortunately, many young black men today disregard these pitfalls of Black Power, reinvoking its militantly male-dominated image. As Angela Y. Davis points out, in contemporary hip-hop culture, “Many of the rappers call upon a market-mediated historical memory of the black movement of the sixties and seventies. The image of an armed Black man is considered the ‘essence’ of revolutionary commitment today” (Davis 327). This may be true for Ras Kass as well, who also privileges “the image of an armed Black man” in his own particular hip-hop style of neo–black nationalism. A whole host of male-dominated, militantly oppositional rap groups, such as Afrika Bambaataa, Public Enemy, Paris, Jeru, Brand Nubian, Poor Righteous Teachers, XCLAN, and the Jungle Brothers, have also participated in the resurgence of black nationalism in hip-hop culture. Take, for example, Ice Cube, formerly of West Coast gangsta rap group N.W.A., which included Eazy-E and Dr. Dre, who released his album The Predator in 1992 following the Rodney King verdict in a fashion that could be understood as political commentary rather than another example of gangsta rap as an “open rejection of politics” (Boyd 294). One of Cube’s most controversial tracks from the album, “We Had to Tear This Motherfucka Up,” addresses the flagrant abuse of power and authority employed by the police and judicial system in California v. Powell. Yet rather than simply rehearsing the acts of violation carried out by the police and the state, Cube’s gangsta rap narrative explores the violent responses of the black community—both documented and imagined—as a means of aggressively asserting contempt and giving voice to the frustration and rage of many dispossessed people of color. In “We Had to Tear This Motherfucka Up,” Cube constructs what might be considered a “fantastic” scenario of violent retribution in which “gangsta niggas” or, in effect, “outlaw niggas” take the law into their own hands in order to find salvation and liberation for both themselves and their oppressed communities. Performed as a scathing diatribe against the four white Los Angeles police officers who were acquitted of the charges of excessive police force in the beating of Rodney King, Cube’s lyrical narrative quickly moves past a critique of the

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corrupt judicial system (“Not guilty, the filthy Devils tried to kill me”) that would condone rather than condemn state violence against black people. Instead, Cube directs his attention to a fantastic “outlaw culture” in which a vindictive hypermasculine aggression—“Cuss, bust, kickin’ up dust is a must”—is embraced as a means of articulating psychic relief in the face of state corruption. In an ideological sense, Cube’s narrative advocates “eye for an eye” tactics—“Shoot him in the face”—against dominant authority whereby oppositional violence in and of itself symbolizes justice, agency, and finally redemption. However, to take Cube’s lyrics too literally might be missing the point of his narrative. Indeed, it would be quite difficult to believe that Cube literally means what he says. When Cube chants “Tear his fuckin’ throat and I smile,” “shoot him in the face, run up in him with a broom,” and “introduce his ass to the AK 40 dick,” he illustrates a curiously homoerotic depiction of power and authority against white control that is more about fantasy rather than “reality,” more about domination rather than subversion. While “We Had to Tear This Motherfucka Up” blurs fact and fiction, it is decidedly unrealistic to the extent that his narrative is meant as anything more than an imaginative construction or exercise in raising black political consciousness. While songs like “We Had to Tear This Motherfucka Up” are decidedly violent and even “nihilistic” if taken literally, Ice Cube seems to understand the symbolic significance of his message as something altogether empowering. While the symbolic confrontation against police brutality and dominant authority that takes place in gangsta and hard-core rap demonstrates the empowering capacity of hip-hop music to address and contest largely impenetrable sites of state power, its performative significance also affords very real consequences and repercussions. That is, the construction and articulation of a unique culture of violent oppositionality and difference—which on the one hand has to do with the rejection of dominant authority and the consequent construction of an alternative space of selfhood and on the other the aesthetic formation of innovative artistic production through beats, polyrhythms, and linguistic genius—is directly linked to and embedded within a living social, cultural, and political context. In terms of contemporary black urban youth culture, oppositionality and difference responds to an antagonistic racial and economic situation where opportunity to enter into mainstream success is limited at best. Indeed, a history of racial alienation and economic disenfranchise-

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ment have led many poor urban black youths to look elsewhere for social validation and affirmation. Thus, the discursive violence of gangsta and hard-core rap against dominant authority is not limited to symbolic confrontation; undeniably, discursive violence informs if not influences “lived” violence, as suggested by the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. Commonly understood as “life on the streets,” this sick culture of oppositionality and difference has emerged to address and account for the social, cultural, economic, and political needs of those who continue to remain excluded from mainstream acceptance. And this is the same world that has implicated and, in some cases, killed the celebrated stars of gangsta rap and hard-core—Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, the Notorious B.I.G., Suge Night, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, DMX, and countless others—throughout the 1990s. Inextricably tied to a national culture, much of hard-core rap music is a world of black-on-black violence, drug and alcohol abuse, drug trafficking, and the pursuit of hedonistic desire. Coupled with internalized racism, the infiltration of illegal drugs and arms into urban areas, the genocidal effects of AIDS among black youths, high unemployment, and the growing insertion of young black men and women into the growing prison industry, much of hard-core rap has sustained a social environment whereby hope, meaning, and love are lost. However, the discursive significance of Ice Cube’s message has not gone unnoticed. As Angela Y. Davis asserted in an interview with Ice Cube: We need to listen to what you are saying—as hard as it may be to hear it. And believe me, sometimes what I hear in your music thoroughly assaults my ears. It makes me feel as if much of the work we have done over the past decades to change our selfrepresentation as African Americans means little or nothing to so many people in your generation. At the same time, it is exhilarating to hear your appeal to young people to stand up and to be proud of who they are. (“Nappy” 177)

Davis’s ambivalence toward Ice Cube’s message and the greater hip-hop culture from which his cultural production emerged beckons further consideration. For it is this ambivalence, this multiplicity of seemingly contradictory responses, that approaches the paradox of living within a culture of terror. As I have tried to suggest, Cleaver’s Soul on Ice for contemporary

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hip-hop culture is embedded within a social and political context whereby self-definition for many young urban black males lies in a narrow field of choices. This historically anchored understanding of identity formation, in relation to the ongoing onslaught against black men (prisons, AIDS, high unemployment, racism), requires a more realistic, if not cynical, approach to political empowerment. That is, a theory that seeks to grapple with the harshly overdetermined effects of both representational and lived histories is necessary for engaging with those individuals who are fighting for their lives and yet live far removed from the social reality through which many cultural critics see the world. For if we acknowledge the organic relation that many hip-hop artists have to the black community, we are bound to be confronted with a multiplicity of directions for black political empowerment. The idea that Cleaver’s Soul on Ice exemplifies a nihilistic, self-destructive ideology that continues to inform the most violent cultural expressions of contemporary black urban youth culture (e.g., gangsta rap and hard-core rap) obscures the empowering articulation of violent opposition and political critique embedded within his narrative. Indeed, the authoritative potential that lies within Soul on Ice surfaces when we abandon the strict categorical claims of either Cleaver’s vindication or dismissal and search for the meanings that reflect the oftentimes ambivalent and contradictory struggle for racial, cultural, and political justice for black people in the ghetto. Cleaver’s Soul on Ice may well be filled with notions of male supremacy and homophobia, a cultural artifact from the era of Black Power that is perhaps best left behind. But it would be to our disadvantage to overlook the ways in which many black male urban youths come to terms with the prospect of gaining agency in American society. To take Soul on Ice seriously is not to suggest that Cleaver’s narrative functions as a revolutionary catalyst for black empowerment. However, the enduring popularity of Eldridge Cleaver in particular and Black Power in general among young urban black men today speaks to the way in which many blacks choose to envision racial pride and struggle. Whether we appreciate the ideology or not, it speaks out loud and clear to many of their social realities.

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“Am I Black Enough for You?” Black Male Authenticity in Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America

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he opening pages of Nathan McCall’s 1994 autobiography begin in the late 1960s with a graphic display of youth violence. A “gang” of black boys—including Nathan himself—brutally attacks a young white male bicyclist as he pedals into their neighborhood. Chasing after him, the black boys finally reach their victim, pull him to the ground, and proceed to kick and stomp him as he lies helplessly in the street. As dramatic as it is startling, the scene concludes with the black boys walking away laughing—indeed, bragging—about the damage they inflicted on the white passerby in particular and white America in general. While I made my way through McCall’s painful yet strangely nostalgic recollection of his youth in Portsmouth, Virginia, I could not help but draw a direct correlation between this opening scene of his autobiography and the 1992 beating of Reginald Denny. Much like the unsuspecting bicyclist of McCall’s youth, Reginald Denny was a white truck driver heinously beaten by four young black men as he drove through a predominantly black area of South Central Los Angeles.1 And in much the same fashion as McCall’s opening vignette, the young black men who attacked Denny celebrated in the streets without fear of surveillance or punishment. Taking place less than two years before the publication of his autobiography, the Denny beating—which had been graphically showcased for all to see on national television during the Los Angeles Riots of April 1992—surely evoked memories in McCall as

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he sat down to write a description of his own tumultuous teenage years. But did his opening scene and, by implication, the Denny beating perhaps serve a strategic function as well? That is, did re-presenting the Denny beating in his own autobiography also give McCall a kind of strategic locality and “street credibility” in speaking to the much-debated question of violence among young urban black men?2 I raise this question because I am intrigued by the way McCall uses violence in this scene and throughout Part One of his autobiography as a form of both agency and racial authenticity. No matter how damaging the racial allegories surrounding violence and black masculinity have become, they are undeniably ingrained in our society and indeed recognizable for many white and black audiences. In this regard, McCall’s reenactment of the Denny beating reaffirms the general perception of black men as violent and at the same time serves in his autobiography as the first of many legitimating, if not authenticating, scenes. To be sure, the Los Angeles Riots in general and the Denny beating in particular would provide McCall with one of the most menacing visual imprints of black masculinity in contemporary American popular culture. Triggered by news of the acquittal of four Los Angeles police officers in California v. Powell, the Denny beating was, on the one hand, the result of increasing frustration and anger felt by many urban residents concerning racial profiling and police brutality. On the other hand, it reflected the dire long-term consequences of economic and political neglect that had caused widespread social and economic malaise throughout South Central. Still, for most of us who witnessed the repeated videotaped images of the Denny beating on national television, the horrifying display of violence haunted our collective psyche. Describing on that fateful day the assault that took place on the street corner of Florence and Normandie, Newsweek journalists Tom Morganthau and Andrew Murr depicted what many of us saw from the news helicopter hovering above: “a thirty-sevenyear-old white man [was] pulled from the cab of his eighteen-wheeler truck, kicked, punched, and blasted with a brick to his head that left him unconscious and bleeding profusely, only to then be pick-pocketed and left for dead” (Morganthau and Murr 28).3 Signaling the start of a drawn out and nightmarish media spectacle,4 the vicious attack on Denny was celebrated by one of the assailants with a “demonic high step for the helicopter news cameras” (Lacayo 46). For the next six days, “the riots” would become a national fixation: with count-

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less arson fires ablaze, widespread looting of stores, and civil unrest in the streets, South Central gripped its television-viewing audience like a scene out of John Carpenter’s cinematic dystopia Escape from New York (1981).5 As large parts of South Central lay in near ruin, Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates made the most of the media’s attention and personally led a highly publicized and expeditious sweep to both round up the Denny attackers and “restore law and order.” Increasing the frenzy surrounding the police investigation, the Los Angeles Police Department alleged that Damian Williams (the chief culprit of the Denny attack) and two other defendants—Antoine Miller and Henry Watson—were members of the notorious Eight Tray Gangster Crips, a prominent black gang in the South Central Los Angeles area. The implication that the Denny beating was indeed “gang related” seemed to feed mainstream paranoia about these young black men and worked to seal their impending fates in the criminal justice system.6 If these troubling depictions were not enough, Damian Williams added insult to injury when the judge remarked on his apparent “lack of remorse” at trial (Farley); indeed, Williams seemed visibly indifferent to being charged with the maximum offense of attempted murder and aggravated mayhem for “throwing a brick on Mr. Denny’s head as the truck driver lay on the ground beside his vehicle” (Mydans 12).7 For many television viewers, Williams’s “criminal” behavior constituted a graphic example of the increasing disaffection of violent ghetto youths who were socially irredeemable, psychologically irretrievable, and largely disposable. In effect, Williams’s violent behavior and lack of remorse in the Denny beating turned him into a symbol of the “enemy within” and reaffirmed that he, like many other poor urban black men, was the real menace to society.8 McCall’s autobiography further embeds the powerful imagery of “black men as menace” in its opening chapter, “Getback.” Filled with marketdriven sensationalism and racial allegories about young black male life, this “tale from the ‘hood’ ” is both familiar and predictable: it is the modernday story of a young black man who must make his journey from adolescence to manhood by overcoming the mean streets of urban America. From the street fights on the neighborhood corner to “packing a gun” to “running trains” on black girls to gang wars to armed burglaries to “doing time” in prison, McCall’s early years read like a perpetual cliché and, at times, as a caricatured stereotype of black men in contemporary Ameri-

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can popular culture. Indeed, the use of these “ghettocentric” motifs as a key feature in the twentieth-century production of black male autobiographies has become part of a classic geopolitical approach to asserting black male authority9 and racial authenticity. Like so many black male autobiographies and novels that came before—Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), Chester Himes’s If He Hollers, Let Him Go (1947), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1947/1952), Malcolm X’s Autobiography (1965), Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1968)—McCall’s narrative invokes a literary tradition in which he too “writes the rage” that many young poor urban black men are expected to live out as a marker of his own racial rite of passage. Yet McCall’s world—two-parent household, relatively comfortable black neighborhoods, access to decent education, moderate privilege—is much more middle class than working poor, and it is hard “middle-class values” that curiously inform McCall’s story even as it is set to the music of “inner-city blues.”10 Nevertheless, the story McCall tells of his early life throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s from bad boy to criminal is overwrought with the social despair, the moral dysfunction, and the “nihilistic threat” most often associated with the ghetto and the “truly disadvantaged” (West; Wilson). Thus, despite his relatively comfortable black middle-class background, McCall’s young life as a gang member, “wannabee” hustler, drug dealer, and petty crook attests to the prevalence of “bad influences” in his black social and cultural world.11 As author Darryl Pinckney stated in a review of McCall’s autobiography, “Makes Me Wanna Holler suggests that the most significant change since desegregation was that McCall didn’t have to come from what used to be called a deprived background to be poisoned by a culture of exclusion and hurt.”12 Angry and “poisoned” with a violent hatred for whites, McCall remembers the hardships of his tumultuous past—as he believes many young black men do today—as a self-destructive journey through low self-esteem, teen peer pressure, and the hypermasculine world of urban Black America.13 However, McCall’s narrative of his teenage and early adult years should be read as a finely crafted reinvention of his life.14 On the one hand, McCall’s story is a chronicle of information about actual events and experiences that sequentially tie his life together. Yet, on the other hand, the chapters of his autobiography reflect a montage of choice moments that can only be considered a literary construction, revealing a story that is at once both a “reality” and a fiction. Moreover, McCall’s autobiography is

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as misleading as it is de-historicized, a story that ultimately obscures the volatile sociopolitical context of the late 1960s and 1970s in which many poor urban black male youths refused to “bow down” to the annihilating aims of the nation-state. In this regard, McCall overlooks the deep-rooted institutional racism, structural oppression, and economic dispossession that have historically plagued Black America and given rise to the defiantly militant attitudes of the Black Power era. Instead, McCall sees his participation as a rebellious adolescent and as a young gangsta as simply “bad behavior,” as an expression of intense selfhatred, or, at best, as a misguided and dysfunctional response to individualized racism and discrimination. Of course, McCall’s story is written in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots when the black middle class was rallying vehemently to separate itself from the stigma of criminality so commonly associated with the black majority, when the “War on Crime” (and gangsta rap) seemed to have gained most of its momentum, and, lastly, at a point in his life when he had become a successful journalist for the Washington Post.15 Like many middle-class and working-class blacks, McCall had reached a point in his life when black uplift could only be imagined through nonviolence, political obeisance, moral discipline, and, if necessary, by making an unsparing sacrifice of criminalized black ghetto youths (Davis, “Race and Criminalization” 270). Accordingly, the self-incriminating, ghetto-veteran approach of Makes Me Wanna Holler—informed by a meshing of closely aligned social ideologies such as black self-help, what I refer to as “bourgeois black nationalism,” and “buppy patriarchy”—purposely structures the way McCall tells his story. Not surprisingly, his assumed call to speak to and on behalf of young black men fits neatly into what preeminent critic of African American literature Henry Louis Gates Jr. has referred to as the representational burden of “Narrating the Negro.”16 Indeed, Gates, who himself was “mesmerized” by McCall’s storytelling, asserts that “sooner or later, every generation must find its voice. It may be that ours belongs to Nathan McCall” (Gates, “Bad Influence” 95).17 But what makes McCall’s story so compelling and, for many, the voice of an entire “generation”? And if McCall commits to “Narrating the Negro,” how does his story convey a kind of representativeness in depicting U.S. black male experience? This chapter takes up these very questions, exploring the ways in which McCall situates himself not only as a representative voice but as an “authentically black” one. In the end, his attempts to “represent” only reaf-

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firm racial stereotypes of young urban black men as nihilistically violent, making even more permanent and “fixed” Manichean allegories of racial identification. Indeed, as McCall writes himself into the ghetto mystique surrounding urban black masculinity, even as he works to condemn it, he not only capitalizes on it; he reinscribes both the ghetto and hypermasculinity as the idealized sites of an authentic, “definitive” blackness. While this male-centered, exclusionary, and street-identified macho identity reinforces patriarchal legitimacy, misogynistic behavior, and homophobic anxiety in both American and black popular culture, it also serves as the necessary location and occasion for rethinking how black men are constituted as racial subjects, many of whom see little possibility in both reimagining and reconfiguring their attachments to “proper” (though admittedly hyperbolic and deeply racialized) forms of black male identity. The young Nathan McCall, who moved with his two brothers, mother, and stepfather to Portsmouth, Virginia, at the age of nine, arrived to a black middle-class neighborhood called Cavalier Manor in 1964. Immersed within a tense racial climate in U.S. political and social history, Nathan perhaps only indirectly realized the weight of much of what was happening throughout the country. On Sunday, September 15, 1963, the stage was set for a race war when the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killed four young black girls.18 Making racial matters increasingly more volatile, black political activist Medgar Evers was assassinated that same year outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Soon after, the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, through which Jim Crow segregation was to be abolished in all sectors of public life, triggered a backlash of racial violence against blacks in the United States. In the North as well as in California, massive black rebellions were erupting even as the 1965 Voting Rights Act guaranteed every American, irrespective of race, access to the machinery of democracy. The assassination of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) in February 1965—occurring not even a year after Nathan was settling into his new home in Virginia—helped fuel an already increasing sea change of sentiment among black people, black people who were previously trying to “maintain” under an apartheid police state. The Watts Uprising would follow that summer, forcing an entire nation to painstakingly examine its history and its future. And then Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps the most recognized figure of black political leadership in the United States during the twentieth century, was assassinated only three years later by

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disgruntled southerner James Earl Ray. To add to these atrocities of the 1960s, the escalation of the Vietnam War also indicated a need to admit to the existence of mass violence and to acknowledge the ruder aspects of state control. For the black community, these violations of humanity imposed a cynical, if not antagonistic, outlook on the state of race relations within the United States. Throughout the 1960s, young blacks were gaining a newly organized confidence in resisting state violence through participation in political activism with groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Black Panthers, and other Black Power affiliates. Outside the major black political movements young blacks also demonstrated what social anthropologists refer to as illicit forms of resistance to combat systematic injustices imposed upon them. But even as McCall himself acknowledged that the “country was already dealing with a lot of racial strife” (82), he downplayed the history of police brutality and racial discrimination during the era, stating that he and his gang of friends “didn’t give a shit about all that political stuff” (75). Indeed, McCall deemed his actions within struggles for racial equality as an opportunity for self-aggrandizement. Thus taking the opportunity to participate in misguided racial retaliation, McCall believed that his childhood antics undermined and contradicted the Black Power tradition of the 1970s by falsely “engag[ing] in urban guerrilla warfare” and by failing to “f[ight] in the real war and contribut[e] to the Cause” (83). His acts of racial violence against whites, according to McCall’s reading, were not only misguided and futile, but also retarded the social and political struggle of blacks. And while the young Nathan downplays, dismisses, or even misses altogether the active political character of this oppositional black youth culture, his autobiography invites a rethinking of the controversial and dangerous world that so many poor urban black male youths inhabited. The bad boys and “baad niggas” who craved excitement and demanded respect by wreaking havoc at school, in the black community, and in white society at large were both and at once revered and reviled. Their “cool poses,” tough posturing, and even violent lifestyles were oftentimes met by other blacks with contradictory responses of envy and disdain, pride and embarrassment. Indeed, McCall’s portrayal of his life (and the lives of his childhood friends)—particularly the way he both waxes nostalgic

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and criticizes his past—reveals telling insights into his own ambivalence about life on the streets of urban America. Most significantly, Makes Me Wanna Holler, particularly in its account of the years leading up to McCall’s incarceration, demonstrates how one man is able to simultaneously embrace and condemn those baad niggas who, with all their sanity, were attempting to “keep it real” in the hood. “Getback” McCall’s autobiography begins by reaffirming what its target audience already suspects about young poor urban black men in the United States: they are, by their very nature, “angry” and unapologetically violent. Taking his readers back to the late 1960s when he was a mischievous and sometimes ruthless teenager, McCall begins: The fellas and I were hanging out on our corner one afternoon when the strangest thing happened. A white boy, who appeared to be about eighteen or nineteen years old, came pedaling a bicycle casually through the neighborhood. I don’t know if he was lost or just confused, but he was definitely in the wrong place to be doing the tourist bit. Somebody spotted him and pointed him out to the rest of us. “Look! What’s that motherfucka doin’ ridin’ through here?! Is he crraaaazy?!” (MMWH 4)

Here McCall attempts to situate himself within an urban geography that looks less like the suburban black middle-class neighborhood of Cavalier Manor from which he came than the mythic war zone he remembers made up of “distinct gangs in different sections of the community” (6).19 This is not to suggest that McCall’s recollection is a disingenuous one; however, his mention of his neighborhood as “the wrong place to be doing the tourist bit,” and that the white boy was indeed “crraaaazy” for “ridin’ through here” (emphasis mine), perhaps implies more than it should. To be sure, McCall’s black middle-class neighborhood was not affluent nor was it free from trouble; yet it was not the feared and oftentimes dangerous terrain of the urban ghetto from which so many black men have lost their lives. Rather, Cavalier Manor was a neighborhood of “freshly sprouted lawns, broad sidewalks, and newly paved streets,” a place where Nathan readily experienced “the steady hum of lawn mowers and the sweet smell

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of freshly cut grass,” a place where he “delivered newspapers and mowed neighbors’ lawns for spending change” (7). Not surprisingly, McCall refers to those very early years in Cavalier Manor as a “Huck Finn kind of existence” in which he played the neighborhood adventurer who “massacred frogs [by conducting] informal biology experiments” (7–8). Why then does the opening scene of McCall’s autobiography read less like Huck Finn’s adventures through the suburban wilderness than it does the concrete jungle of the Hughes brothers’ 1993 ghettocentric film Menace II Society? That is, what is McCall’s preoccupation with telling his story against the gritty backdrop of the “inner city”? It seems to me that McCall’s opening scene suggests a voyeuristic attachment to black inner-city life, an attachment informed by his own anxieties about racial belonging and male recognition. Like many black middle-class men who found themselves moving farther and farther away from the day-to-day circumstances of black urban folks and into the marginally integrated worlds of white America, McCall attempts to traverse a slippery class divide in order to recover both the manhood and blackness he perceives—though never acknowledges—himself to have lost. From one side, McCall journeys into the poverty-stricken, hard-knock life of urban Black America. There he pursues the symbolic power and mythological allure that the street commands, seeing it as a kind of compensatory salve that will absolve him from feelings of racial disconnection and masculine impotence. In his search for community and male validation, McCall seizes this opportunity to both connect with and reflect on the black people with whom he seems to associate closely yet never really knows. From the other side, McCall cuts back across ghetto landscapes to the more secure terrain of the black middle class. Here he is able to enjoy the benefit of his chameleon-like ability to “get in and get out” of the innermost depths of America’s “chocolate cities,” turning his representations of urban black life (fictive as they might be) into social capital and economic gain. Thus, McCall’s transdemographic travels to and from the mythic netherworld of urban black America provide him with a largely unchecked license to tell poor black people’s stories. And while it might serve readers to identify McCall’s class background as well as his tendency to exploit his class positionality, perhaps it is more important to grasp how his class values shape his images of urban black male life. Indeed, McCall’s association with a properly conservative middle-class ideology may or may not reflect his class location or class

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privilege but rather point to his attachment to mainstream beliefs about the rewards of hard work, discipline, personal responsibility, and self-reliance. Burdened with the anxieties of “what it is to be a black man” on the one hand, and biased with a sense of morality that is largely unable to give redemptive meaning to the plight and controversial social practices of poor urban black men on the other, McCall’s interpretations and images of poor urban black life are complicated by his own feelings of estrangement and displacement. Not surprisingly, his estrangement and displacement fuel his desire for acceptance and validation and, ultimately, serve as an opportunity to prove his racial legitimacy or, more colloquially, to demonstrate that he is “down.” bell hooks’s critique of the black middle class is particularly noteworthy here: “The desire to be ‘down’ has not only promoted conservative appropriation of specific aspects of underclass black life; that reality is dehumanized via a process of commodification wherein no correlation is made between mainstream hedonistic consumerism and the reproduction of a social system that perpetuates and maintains an underclass” (Killing 182–83). But does McCall participate in this “process of commodification”? Does he capitalize on the violent mystique of urban black masculinity by foregrounding it—indeed “living it”—in his opening scene? Sustaining our attention in his opening chapter as his “gang” goes after the white bicyclist, McCall writes: It was automatic. We all took after him. We caught him on Cavalier Boulevard and knocked him off the bike. He fell to the ground and it was all over. We were on him like white on rice. Ignoring the passing cars, we stomped him and kicked him. My stick partners kicked him in the head and face and watched the blood gush from his mouth. I kicked him in the stomach and nuts, where I knew it would hurt . . . We walked away, laughing, boasting, competing for bragging rights about who’d done the most damage. “Man, did you see how red that cracker’s face turned when I busted his lip? I almost broke my hand on that ugly motherfucka!” (MMWH 4)20

The iconographic power of McCall’s opening passage, like that of the Denny beating, lies in its shocking brutality, its seemingly senseless pleasure in terror, and what Morganthau and Murr point to in their reportage

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of the Denny beating as the “mindless violence of the urban underclass” (28). However, for many readers, much of the violent force of the passage also stems from historical realities that have both informed black culture and have evoked specific responses and reactions to economic exploitation and white racial terror. That is to say, while the violence McCall described appears to be unprovoked, the social context out of which this violence erupted offers compelling evidence that there was something violent “always already” going on.21 What I am suggesting here is that violence, aggression, defiance, oppositionality, and resentment directed toward what appears to be a random white man tells a multifaceted story about the ways in which racially oppressed people resisted and opposed the status quo, fought back against dehumanization, and began to politicize—albeit in discreet ways—their racial identities.22 Deeply informed by political anthropologist James C. Scott’s concept of infrapolitics, social historian Robin Kelley asserts that “the veiled social and cultural worlds of oppressed people frequently surface in everyday forms of resistance—theft, footdragging, the destruction of property—or, more rarely, in open attacks on individuals, institutions, or symbols of domination” (Kelley, Race Rebels 8). It is precisely these “everyday forms of resistance”—particularly these “open attacks on individuals”—that deserve our closer attention as we consider the political significance of McCall’s opening “Getback” scene. This is not to romanticize the behavior of McCall and his childhood friends or even to suggest that the violence exacted here against an unsuspecting and “innocent” passerby was even meant as an overtly political or conscious act. Rather, to read their violent behavior against whites in relation to a host of mitigating factors such as overt racism, economic dispossession, and political emasculation compels us to grasp what is not readily or necessarily tangible in mainstream political debate. And here I am (explicitly) referring to and rejecting what many journalists and cultural critics dismiss as “nihilistic” or “apolitical” behavior among poor urban black men (see Boyd). Like Scott and Kelley, I approach these violent behaviors—like this instance described by McCall—as inextricably tied to the broader, overarching imbalance of power between blacks and whites throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, violent displays of brute force against whites point not simply to the quick-tempered frustrations of blacks powerlessly immersed within a culture of racial terror or, more generally, the omnipresent volatility of racial tensions across the United States; in many in-

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stances, these attacks became a stage for waging war—indeed, a winnable war—against the social institutions and citizenry who actively and passively supported white supremacy. As impolite as these behaviors may be, they reflect—at least in the minds of those who participate in these forms of violent resistance—an important form of political engagement with racist structures of power. McCall’s own narration, however, suggests a less complicated, more “commonsense” interpretation of his adolescent years. Thad Williamson, for Monthly Review, defends McCall’s storytelling approach: “McCall makes no stab at serious sociological analysis of his life experience—he simply tells it as honestly and unflinchingly as he can” (57). The detrimental ramifications of his insufficiently historicized readings of aggression enacted by young black men—even as he seeks to be “honest” and “unflinching”—have been to create and further sustain imaginary social narratives binding blacks to the racialized allegories of moral degeneracy. Like McCall’s opening scene in which violent black boys fearlessly pound on a white passerby, aggression perpetrated by young black men is easily read as unprovoked and culturally determined.23 McCall himself utilizes phrases that strongly suggest these types of allegorical interpretations. As the opening scene tragically displays, the actions of the black boys were “automatic” and suggest an irrationally animalistic propensity to behave as monstrous predators. Furthermore, the predator-like depiction of “unconscionable” violence as they “ignor[ed] the passing cars” only exacerbates the notion of these young black boys as unthinking and, by that virtue, inhuman. Reflecting the sense of rage and frustration that young black men felt, McCall foregrounds the behavior of one of his friends: “But one dude kept stomping, like he’d gone berserk. He seemed crazed and consumed in the pleasure of kicking that white boy’s ass. When he finished, he reached down and picked up the white dude’s bike, lifted it as high as he could above his head, and slammed it down on him hard” (MMWH 3). As this brutal depiction of violence illustrates, downplaying the historical and political context of racism and economic exploitation within Black America distorts their actions against white people as an ontologically deviant behavior that is “in the blood” of young black men. Moreover, the reference to being “consumed in the pleasure of kicking that white boy’s ass” and the omission of much needed historical information about race relations in the 1960s fashion their use of violence as destructively nihilistic and without meaning.

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The numerous examples of “nihilistic” violence within the early years of McCall’s narrative render that period of his life almost completely irredeemable and without affirmative value. The acts of violence that McCall committed against other young black men (attempted murder and gang violence) and women (rape and daily disrespect) within his community evoke a vivid testimonial of social despair. As McCall paints a picture of his teenage life as hustler and aspiring “baad nigga,” his self-critique is centered on a reading of intense self-hatred and low self-esteem. We can also see embedded within McCall’s narrative a number of intra-communal practices of violence that are based on the internalized inscription of racial and class oppression. It is ironic that a large portion of his chapter “War” does not contend with interracial violence but rather brutally depicts the indiscriminate nature of violence staged between black gangs in his own neighborhood and against “downtown black guys.” Unable to convincingly justify his violent actions against other blacks, McCall understands the reasons for his violence as “irrelevant.” Motivated largely by “turf loyalty” and “street glory,” he describes his “nihilistic” participation in neighborhood gangs as an adolescent attempt at acquiring honor and reputation. McCall captures the frenzy of war in the streets: “My excitement overshadowed any concerns about safety. I was so thrilled to be in the thick of the action that I didn’t have sense enough to be scared. War meant that there would be bloodshed, carnage, but I was caught up in the street glory. Besides, like many young people, I felt invincible. As far as I was concerned, none of those bullets bore my name. Tragedies only happened to other guys” (75). As the above example illustrates, the dangerous combination of youth and nihilism joined to create a sense of invincibility and detachment. Surviving one street war only to become a potential victim in the next renders McCall’s outlook as socially pathological. Not “hav[ing] enough sense to be scared,” McCall’s suicidal tendencies are offered as a reflection of the meaninglessness, hopelessness, and lovelessness of urban black male life. These practices of unformulated racial aggression against whites and intra-communal violence in the form of black-on-black gang warfare and sexual misogyny become the predominant emphasis of McCall’s selfevaluation of his teenage and early adult life; more crucially, these acts of “nihilistic” violence perpetuated by young black men situate his efforts to address the social ills of the black community. For McCall, the entire opening scene served notice for the reckless violence, hypermasculinity,

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and narcissistic individualism that was to follow in the first part of his autobiography; indeed, it was a sneak peek into the dark and terrifying world of “baad niggas” entwined with a scathing indictment against them. “Who’s Baad?!” When the young Nathan enrolled in W. E. Waters, a black junior high school in Portsmouth, he found himself an outsider and wholly unfamiliar with the social challenges of black adolescent life. Aspiring to be a part of the “slick in-crowd” (which was composed of the older fellows and “thugs”), Nathan studied the young black male social rituals he witnessed in the school cafeteria and on the schoolyard. Here Nathan learned the art of “jonin’,” a contemporary form of “playing the dozens” in which someone would make a playfully derogatory comment with the effect of provoking a retaliatory response. Providing a comic example of “jonin’ ” among young black boys, McCall asserts: “Look a’ dat niggah’s head! His mama must a’ put a cereal bowl on his head and cut his hair!” (24). A cultural product of a historic black American tradition of signifying, Nathan eagerly embraced the socially empowering effects of verbal exchange and lyrical slang when interacting with other young black men.24 Through this verbal initiation Nathan also gained access to another significant and related black male cultural practice, the “rap game.” Understood by McCall himself as “the studied ability to talk smooth and persuasive to get [his] way with the ladies” (27), the “rap game” represents the manipulative courtship between young men and women that locates its finale in sexual conquest. Eventually hanging with the most popular “baad niggas” at W. E. Waters—Scobie-D, Nutbrain, Cooder, and Turkey Buzzard—Nathan is initiated into an exclusive black male subculture. But “jonin’ ” his friends and “rapping” to prospective sexual partners as a means to achieving a privileged status within black male social circles was only the tip of the iceberg. For Nathan and the young black men with whom he aspired to spend time, these social practices were part of a larger poor urban black male identity. Akin to the “cool” and oppositional posture of the late 1960s hustler figure on the one hand and the violent “baad ass” gangster on the other, McCall depicts a social world in which being in control and getting respect stood as both testaments to “manliness” and as the central tenets for defining an entire black male subculture. Rehearsing

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the rough-and-tough cultural code held sacred by many young black men trying to “come up” on the streets, McCall writes: The guys on the street who got the most respect were those who had reps as crazy niggers. A crazy nigger was someone who had an explosive temper, someone who took flak from no one—man, woman, or child. He would shoot, stab, bite, or do whatever he could to hurt somebody who disrespected him. It was a big thing then to be considered a crazy nigger. We regarded craziness as an esteemed quality. In fact, to our way of thinking, craziness and courage were one and the same. So most guys in the street tried to establish a rep as a crazy nigger or as a baad nigger. (55–56)

Aspiring to be a “crazy nigger” or “baad [nigga]” might have seemed ill-advised, but to many of the young black men to whom McCall looked up this idealized black male type pointed to a specific black male cultural identity that celebrated opposition to or resistance against any and all authority. The “baad nigga,” represented in McCall’s autobiography as a synthesis of the criminal, the pimp, and the hustler, captures the full range of oppositionality embraced by poor urban black men of the 1970s. Embodied in the larger-than-life black male movie heroes of the blaxploitation era, McCall, like other young black men, found inspiration in movies like Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) by Melvin Van Peebles, Superfly (1972) by Gordon Parks Jr., and The Mack (1972) by Max Julien. Caught up in the degradation and dehumanization of urban poverty, the “baad nigga” provided a way of being that could fulfill at least temporarily their desire to recuperate meaning, respect, dignity, and patriarchal control. Thus, in the absence of institutional access to respectable levels of societal status (e.g., racial, economic, and social equality), the striving for and achievement of a “rep as a baad [nigga]” established a surrogate form of male authority and justice while simultaneously addressing the political, social, economic, and psychic needs of a particular black male experience.25 Capturing the defiantly oppositional spirit of the “baad nigga,” McCall nostalgically recites Curtis Mayfield’s famously popular lyrics from Superfly (1972), the definitive sound track of black ghetto life from the 1970s, in which the “pusherman” or “the nigger in the alley” stands in for “your mama,” “your daddy,” “your doctor,” and “your friend.”

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While partially destroying the black community’s efforts to withstand the nihilistic threat of a drug-induced despair, the popular “baad nigga” image of the “pusherman” also represented the possibilities of economic independence and political autonomy from dominant society. Summarized by McCall as the “black urban answer to capitalism,” the drug trade and its oppositional lifestyle appealed to black male urban youths as a material base for a specific cultural identity. Within this new identity, young black men simultaneously created unique economic opportunities for self-empowerment and racial solidarity that produced social and cultural spaces of oppositionality and opportunity. Through the acquisition and rearticulation of material possessions such as fashionable clothing and luxurious cars, McCall’s “baad nigga” resisted as much as he subscribed to the oppressive workings of a hegemonic culture. Depicted as an empowering source of cultural exclusivity and racial particularity, even the extravagance of the luxury car, the Cadillac, and the unique ways in which it was made to function as a source of black male pride deemed it curiously oppositional. While selling drugs and cruising around in a Cadillac might have been considered “questionable gestures” of racial self-determination and cultural authenticity offering exclusively gendered forms of cultural “access,” they did forge and support strongly knit black male communities within and against white America. However, at the expense of reifying a black male patriarchy as a central source of racial community, the superfly image also contributed to the hypermasculinization of black male life. In effect, while the “baad nigga” is indelibly marked by a profound sense of racial subjugation and defeat, for McCall the “baad nigga” had become paradoxically synonymous with black male agency and insurrection, heroically representing extreme oppositionality to cultural assimilation and racial domination.26 Thus as an assertion of their refusal to consent to a permanent caste-like oppression, the “baad niggas” of McCall’s social world were often celebrated as being “true to the game” and as the “real thing” of an oppositional and defiant young black male culture. Indeed, the “baad nigga” was not only a symbol of racial resistance; he had become—in his extreme opposition to white culture—an embodiment of racial authenticity. It was as if only in rebellion, rejection, and aggression that white America had permitted young black men room to discover a small, unfettered part of themselves, exert some control over their own lives, and even build

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allegiance to one another. Indeed, through this particular allegiance to defiantly oppositional practices of male kinship, young black men were able to cultivate racial community and solidarity that would come to be understood as the site of an exclusionary black male subculture.27 In a world where black male identity formation is severely bracketed off from a range of subjective possibilities, young black men—finding little room to maneuver—embrace the stereotype of themselves as violent and hypersexual. And as we shall discover from McCall’s own story, these practices of collective identification became ritualized as an essential, “authentic” black masculinity to which McCall simultaneously sought to lay claim and disavow. “Are You In?” McCall’s attempt to bring his readers into the menacing and socially rapacious sexual terrain of a particular brand of black masculinity has a seductive appeal. Here, in the dark corners of McCall’s past, white and black audiences are invited to witness “insider” scenes of black male identity formation at their most vulnerable and exposed stage.28 In an early chapter, “Trains,” for example, McCall describes how young awkward black boys are “trained” to be men, initiated into a communal practice of sexual aggression where, as he crudely put it, “a bunch of guys got together and jammed the same girl” (44). Describing this unceremonious rite of passage, McCall retells the story of “running a train” on Vanessa, a black girl from his neighborhood: “I don’t remember who went first. I think it was Buzzard. When Vanessa tried to get up after the first guy finished, another was there to climb on top. Guys crowded into the room and hovered, wide-eyed, around the bed, like gawkers at a zoo. Then another went, and another, until the line of guys climbing on and off Vanessa became blurred” (48). Then, several paragraphs later: That train on Vanessa was definitely a turning point for most of us. We weren’t aware of what it symbolized at the time, but that train marked our real coming together as a gang. It certified us as a group of hanging partners who would do anything and everything together. It sealed our bond in the same way some other guys consummated their alliance by rumbling together in gang wars against downtown boys. In so doing, we served notice—

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mostly to ourselves—that we were a group of up-and-coming young cats with a distinct identity. (49)

These reflections reveal two significant features: first, McCall’s intimate participation in the train on Vanessa situated him within the inner sanctum of Cavalier Manor’s up-and-coming “young cats” and, consequently, granted him a kind of experiential knowledge in disclosing the “unknown” sexual practices of young black boys; second (and equally important here), the above passages demonstrate how the solidarity of the group was achieved. McCall’s nostalgic recollection of a black male world in which his hanging partners “would do anything and everything together” constituted a mythic site of black male communion. Here homosocial bonds romantically signified a kind of platonic love that routinely characterizes the communal world of “homeboys,” “homies,” “crews,” “sets,” and “niggas.” Indeed, in these devout groupings of male companionship, they offer each other a loving community of undying loyalty and trust; they give and receive fierce respect, and, ultimately, invest in a world of mutuality. But if theirs was a black male world of mutuality, held together by the belief that mutual dependence, sharing, and commonality are essential to their social well-being, it was also a world encumbered by tremendous conflict, tension, and anxiety. Indeed, I suggest that the “real coming together as a gang” with a “distinct identity” stemmed not simply from the love-affirming embrace of the gang but from their parasitical quest to search out and destroy any perceived nemesis or scapegoated outsider. Whether it was achieved by violently beating a white boy—as was the case in McCall’s opening scene—or by raping a black girl, their culture of mutuality took its strength from a sustained commitment to forcibly policing any potential threats to the social and cultural homogeneity of the gang. Thus, in a very real sense, running a train on Vanessa while “guys crowded into a room and hovered, wide-eyed, around the bed, like gawkers at a zoo,” functioned much like a ritualized exorcism to both rid and sanitize the communal black male body of perceived impurities; in this instance, the “line of guys” parading and openly “preparing” themselves to commit rape against a young black girl in effect demonstrated how they collectively worked to expunge any sexual anxieties, if not homosexual “demons,” lurking either in the closet of the homoerotic or, similarly, on the “down low” of the homosocial.29 In no uncertain terms, masculine or, more precisely, homophobic anxieties

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that would otherwise force young black men to come to grips with the panic of self-recognition were allayed, reconfigured, and thus translated as safe, authenticating rituals of a proper black masculinization.30 Attempts to obscure these masculine anxieties are further revealed in McCall’s chapter “War,” the section of his autobiography that reflects the intra-racial violence between local black gangs. Shortly after one of McCall’s friends falls prey to enemy fire from a rival black downtown gang, McCall describes the unnerving trauma of taking him to the hospital: I was so overcome with emotion that tears welled in my eyes. It was the first time that I realized I loved my swinging partners. Sometimes, when we were hanging on the corner, jonin,’ drinking wine, and harmonizing songs, I felt warmed by the camaraderie we shared. But never had I allowed myself even to think in terms of loving them. Love was a weakness. When it dawned on me that that was what I might be feeling, I caught myself. I was so uncomfortable with the emotion that I quickly wiped my face and pushed the feeling aside. (79)

As McCall avoided “think[ing] in terms of loving them” and “pushed the feeling [of love] aside,” he once again laid claim to yet simultaneously refuted these ghetto-identified gestures of black masculinity. In a clever sleight of hand, McCall’s simultaneous admission and attempted denial of “lov[ing] his] swinging partners” made it possible for him to tap into both the ethos and the image well of recognizable scenes of black male community while remaining steadfast in his disavowal and renunciation of those same (if now only thinly veiled) legitimating practices. Indeed, McCall captures picture-perfect impressions of 1960s ghetto life, impressions that could have easily been taken from Tally’s Corner (1967), Eliot Liebow’s well-known sociological study of the cultural practices and daily routines of black street corner men in Washington, D.C. Here McCall’s allusion to “back in the day” when he and his swinging partners were “hanging on the corner, jonin’, drinking wine, and harmonizing songs,” strategically invokes and once again locates him in a romanticized black male ghetto world. Capitalizing on his ability to access these black male images of ghetto life, McCall situates himself within this alluring but socially depressed setting while ultimately escaping the stigma of cultural poverty.

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In many regards, his nostalgic recollection of his demoralizing youth— that is, before he found the “straight” path and before he became a successful journalist—functions curiously like an all-too-eager confession: the narrative act of disclosure—admitting guilt for rape, assault, robbery— becomes the necessary penance for absolution of his past sins. And it is precisely and perhaps paradoxically by making an example of his own troubling times as a black male youth that McCall is afforded an air of moral superiority and racial legitimacy. Now removed by time, circumstance, and social distance, McCall’s remembrance of things past is both one of identification and disidentification, a kind of strategic witnessing that announces that he has “been there” and “done that.”31 To be sure, when McCall ultimately winds up in trouble with the law, it is this very act of witnessing that is made even more authoritative and carries even more political currency. “Doin’ Time” Six months after McCall was busted for the armed robbery of a McDonald’s in December 1974, he was shipped off from Portsmouth jail to serve a twelve-year “bid” at Southampton Correctional Center, a mediumsecurity prison in rural Virginia. As far as McCall was initially concerned, he was “never gonna make it” (150). But almost as soon as McCall was filed into “the system,” he seemed to navigate his way through with precocious wisdom, skillful finesse, and a kind of street-smart caution. Even when he was brought into the holding cell after he had been first sentenced, McCall responded like a seasoned convict. Looking in contempt at another new inmate, McCall asserted, “There were several guys crying in the holding cell where I was taken after being sentenced. All were black and all had gotten time. The dude with the lightest sentence, a tall, burly guy with greasy hair, was wailing the loudest. He had a measly five years— the sentence I’d hoped for—and was boohooing like a baby. I wanted to strangle him” (149). While McCall’s disdain for his fellow inmates seems unwarranted, and perhaps only functions to mask his own fears about being incarcerated, his manly proclamation serves notice—at least to his readers—that he, Nathan McCall, was tough and would “take no shit” in prison.32 To be sure, prison culture demanded a hard and tough facade: for McCall and the disproportionate number of black men who faced similar

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fates, “doin’ time” was understood as a test of survival and, ultimately, served as “a rite of passage” (165). For in the linoleum-lined, ammoniareeking cellblocks, black men would have to prove that they could endure social death and living hell. Indeed, in the predatory world that McCall describes, surrounded by junkies, gang bangers, murderers, wolves, and “booty bandits,” prison was the unquestioned testament to a strong black masculinity and something to be worn as a proud badge of courage. Thus, even while prison life is structured to emasculate and dehumanize men by denying them freedom of choice, stripping them of self-esteem, and ultimately infantilizing grown men into lifelong adolescents, prison remains for many black men the peculiar location of a certain male legitimacy and idealized ghetto blackness. Paradoxical as it might seem, many black men in prison—and the ghetto for that matter—have boastfully learned to draw from their harrowing and dehumanizing experiences a sense of strength and vengeful pride in their ability to “take pain,” to withstand enormous hardship, and to resist the daily tortures and psychic assaults of racial terror. But perhaps we should here be reminded that McCall does not see prison as solely the glorified realm of a hypermasculine “nigga authenticity.”33 For McCall, prison was, above all else, the site of an exalted racial authority, the sacred terrain of “ghetto race men” such as George Jackson, Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas, and Malcolm X, all of whom “did time” and became sage-like spokesmen of black struggle and suffering. But for McCall, prison itself did not reflect “unjust time” nor did it symbolize a place of punishment without redemption. Rather ironically, prison represented a site of rehabilitation, a place for reexamining the consequences of his previous adolescent actions and, quite remarkably, a monk’s cell where he was able to contemplate seriously classic black literary texts. McCall’s chapter “Denial,” the first of seven sections detailing his life in prison, begins with an excerpt from George Jackson’s revolutionary prison letters, Soledad Brother (1970): Blackmen born in the U.S. and fortunate enough to live past the age of eighteen are conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison. For most of us, it simply is the next phase in a sequence of humiliations. Being born a slave in a captive society and never experiencing any objective basis for expectation had the effect of preparing me for the progressively traumatic misfortunes that

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lead so many blackmen to the prison gate. I was prepared for prison. It required only minor psychic adjustments. (149)

While Jackson describes the process in which black men come to terms with “the inevitability of prison,” his reference to “most of us” perhaps was not intended to describe the “traumatic misfortunes” that led to McCall’s incarceration. Or was it? Like George Jackson, did McCall need only to make “minor psychic adjustments” to prepare for prison as the “next phase in a sequence of humiliations”? Even Mo Battle, one of the “old heads” of the cellblock, had cause to raise the issue of “how someone who had spent a year in college had wound up in jail,” someone from “a nice neighborhood . . . [like] Cavalier Manor” (153). Or as Henry Louis Gates Jr. mentions in his favorable review of McCall’s autobiography, McCall had come from “the sort of place where most black folks could only dream of living” (Gates, “Bad Influence” 95). McCall’s identification with George Jackson (and the poor black community to which he belonged) is thus complicated by a discernible class difference in which McCall’s class privilege, family and financial stability, and social and educational expectation are problematically obscured from view. It follows, then, that two crucial questions must be raised here (and these questions have haunted this entire chapter): First, can McCall effectively “represent” the particular black male experience he purports to know, especially if he comes from the black middle class? Second, can the truth of this particular black male experience (again, that McCall purports to know) even be known and “voiced” (presumably by a “truly native” source like Jackson)? To be sure, it is the well-known postcolonial studies question transposed onto contemporary U.S. black culture: “Can the subaltern speak?”34 That is, is it possible to recover or give voice to the “true experience” of historically muted subjects who, in this case, are those idealized, tangibly elusive, “baad niggas” who have been excluded from contributing their own account of themselves and their history to the official record?35 As strange a question as it might appear, can these historically muted subjects voice an “authentic account” of themselves? Indeed, is there even an “authentic account” of their experiences to be told? And, in the end, is not the “authentic account” of “baad niggas” that McCall seeks to understand and represent, embody and negate, merely the culmination of an endless array of representations, projections, fantasies, and

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desires? For black men in particular, is the search for real “baad niggas” just another version of the Argonautic quest for the gold-encased “black dick,” that “legendary dick” we desperately struggle to keep up with, proudly uphold, or run away from? “Ghetto Race Men” In the conclusion to this chapter I would like to address what I see in the first part of McCall’s autobiography as his attempt to access this “subaltern voice,” these “baad niggas,” this “legendary dick,” or what I will refer to generally as the authentic site of ghetto black masculinity. In the end, what is at stake in McCall’s attempt to “access” the quintessence of ghetto black manhood? Does he succeed in grasping it? And while it is generally agreed by many postcolonial scholars that the subaltern cannot speak, and that there is no authentic truth to be recovered or to which voice can be given, let us for the moment suspend their insights and accept the notion that an “authentic account” of ghetto black masculinity indeed exists and is within our representational reach. Let us then suppose (as McCall has done) that the lives of George Jackson, Bigger Thomas, and Malcolm X collectively constitute that authentic site of ghetto black masculinity. Joined together, the harrowing circumstances of their lives—urban poverty, dispossession, heroism in their defiant oppositionality to cultural assimilation and racial domination, time in prison, fearlessness in death—are ennobled: black male suffering and black male defiance are writ large and sacredly turned into the “real thing” of ghetto black masculinity. Indeed, these poor urban black men to whom McCall makes reference—George Jackson, Bigger Thomas, Malcolm X—have come to embody the ideal of the poor urban black man; that is, they are the real “baad niggas” whose defiantly oppositional ways of resisting and “being” signified an unquestioned blackness and whose street lives and urban philosophies evoked a “politics of the people.” McCall’s reference to Soledad Brother is thus to imply that Jackson can somehow speak through him. This is a political move on McCall’s part, not only in asserting that he is “black enough” to speak but also that his message, like Jackson’s, is organically tied to the black community and, indeed, from the very “souls of black folk.” McCall’s allusion to Jackson (like those to his childhood “homies”) is just one of the many dialogic moments in the text that pro-

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vide McCall with a way to retrieve and fuse himself with Jackson in the construction of his own subjectivity as well as to capitalize on historically potent representations of black masculinity. Another dialogic moment is revealed in McCall’s emotional response to reading Richard Wright’s classic novel Native Son (1940). Identifying with Wright’s black male protagonist, Bigger Thomas, McCall proclaims: I identified strongly with Bigger and the book’s narrative. He was twenty, the same age as me. He felt the things I felt, and, like me, he wound up in prison. The book’s portrait of Bigger captured all those conflicting feelings—restless anger, hopelessness, a tough facade among blacks and a deep-seated fear of whites—that I’d sensed in myself but was unable to express. Often, during my teenage years, I’d felt like Bigger—headed down a road toward a destruction I couldn’t ward off, beaten by forces so large and amorphous that I had no idea how to fight back. I was surprised that somebody had written a book that so closely reflected my experiences and feelings. (164)

Reading about Bigger Thomas as he contemplated his life from behind prison walls, Nathan saw himself in Bigger and discovered “a book that so closely reflected [his] experiences and feelings.” While compelling in its sentimentality, it seems to me that Nathan McCall’s identification with Bigger was not without its problems; namely, McCall never faced the same hardships as Bigger and, I argue, was never “beaten by forces so large and amorphous.” Bigger is—according to Wright’s own account—near illiterate, living in a rat-infested, one-room tenement on Chicago’s South Side without any real possibility of upward mobility; conversely, McCall was homecoming king, a high school graduate and college-bound, and of the black middle class. And while Henry Louis Gates Jr. has contended that Nathan McCall’s life seemed more similar to Bigger’s than Richard Wright’s, Bigger and Nathan perhaps had less in common than both Gates and McCall might have believed. Admittedly, there is a danger here in suggesting that McCall was not as beseiged as Bigger is and, by that virtue, not the “real thing” of ghetto black masculinity. Am I not inadvertently supporting a hierarchy of black male authenticity and legitimacy by pointing to Nathan McCall’s apparent “misidentification” with Bigger? That is, if I am arguing that McCall

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cannot justifiably identify with Bigger, is it not implying that someone else can, someone in closer proximity to Bigger’s economic circumstances? Who is more qualified than McCall to represent ghetto black masculinity? Who is more “identifiable” as a real “baad nigga” or as authentically black? Of course, in the end, these are hypothetical, “academic” questions, fraught with the underlying assumption (and impossibility) of an absolute blackness. Moreover, the questions themselves are perhaps even in need of further revision as they subtly obscure the normalizing effect of malecentered (and heterosexist) claims of authenticity and representativeness; that is, the slippage between real “baad nigga” and black authenticity is made indistinguishable vis-à-vis a practice of rearticulation whereby the historical trope of the defiantly oppositional “baad nigger” is continuously resurrected and revitalized. Black women were certainly a part of the many traditions of defiant oppositionality against racist oppression, but it would be poor black men who, in their oftentimes defeatist and hyperbolic attempts to reassert their manhood since slavery, would demand the silence, if not erasure, of black women’s agency. Hazel Carby’s Race Men (1999) provocatively explores the problematic terrain of privileged black male representation in her study of twentiethcentury black male intellectuals and artists in which she asserts her “outright rejection of the male-centered assumptions at work in such claims of representativeness” (5). Though Carby’s attention to “race men” focuses on W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, C. L. R. James, Miles Davis, Samuel Delany, and Danny Glover, all of whom embody race consciousness, race pride, and racial solidarity, I do not think it far-reaching to assert that the same male-centered assumptions that support claims of black male representativeness among black male intellectuals and artists are also operating to privilege black men at the bottom rung of America’s social order. And while Carby chooses largely not to focus on America’s most “wretched” black men, the stories of Bigger Thomas, George Jackson, and Malcolm X raise similar concerns about who can and continues to “speak” authoritatively and authentically for the race. Indeed, when actor and activist Ossie Davis gave his prophetic eulogy of Malcolm X on February 21, 1965, and proclaimed that Malcolm was “our black manhood,” he recapitulated what had long been felt and what continues to be expressed in many poor urban black communities across the United States: Malcolm was and remains the defiantly oppositional black spirit in all of us, a man who identified freedom for black people

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with “speaking truth” about racial oppression. As Michael Dyson asserts in an essay titled “The Politics of Black Masculinity and the Ghetto in Black Film”: “To many . . . Malcolm is black manhood squared, the unadulterated truth of white racism ever on his tongue, the black unity of black people ever on his agenda, the black people in ghetto pain ever on his mind” (166). It should be no surprise, then, that McCall would invoke Malcolm X in order to reaffirm both his masculinity and racial identification. But McCall’s attachment to Malcolm is a selective one; to be sure, the “truth” Malcolm speaks (at least for McCall) is a truth stripped from its social and political context and isolated to the realm of moral psychology (i.e., self-esteem). Curiously, this selectively appropriated Malcolm fits neatly into McCall’s own project of personal responsibility, individual initiative, and self-help. McCall, sitting in his prison cell, ruminates about Malcolm’s life story and message: I was most attracted to black classics, such as Malcolm X’s autobiography. Malcolm’s tale helped me understand the devastating effects of self-hatred and introduced me to a universal principle: that if you change your self-perception, you can change your behavior. I concluded that if Malcolm X, who had also gone to prison, could pull his life out of the toilet, then maybe I could, too. Up to that point, I’d often wanted to think of myself as a baad nigger, and as a result, I’d tried to act like one. After reading about Malcolm X, I worked to get rid of that notion and replace it with a positive image of what I wanted to become. I walked around silently repeating to myself, “You are an intelligent-thinking human being; you are an intelligent-thinking human being,” hoping that it would sink in and help me begin to change the way I viewed myself. (165–6)

Much like Malcolm X’s 1965 Autobiography, in which Malcolm understood his adolescence as “a fascinating but destructive detour on the road to self-consciousness and political enlightenment” (Kelley, Race Rebels 162), McCall too had “wanted to think of [him]self as a baad nigger” and ultimately “worked to get rid of that notion and replace it with a positive image of what [he] wanted to become.” Attempting to invoke Malcolm’s

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transformed spirit, McCall repeatedly asserts to himself, “You are an intelligent-thinking human being.” However, the “devastating effects of selfhatred” related in Malcolm X’s Autobiography and curiously reinscribed in McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler reveal what Robin Kelley has brilliantly reinterpreted as a kind of cultural oppositionality that was “an essential element of his radicalization” (163). And as Malcolm negatively depicts his time spent as a young Harlem “bad nigger” in the chapters titled “Detroit Red” and “Hustler,” Kelley challenges us to rethink Malcolm’s rebellious social practices—sporting the “conk” hairstyle, wearing the zoot suit, lindy hopping, dodging the draft, and even hustling and pimping—as defiantly oppositional and inextricably tied to the historical and political context of the 1940s. Only then, Kelley argues, are we able to address the “riddle of the zoot” and the cultural politics practiced by many poor urban black men of Malcolm’s time. Failing to recognize the defiant oppositionality of Malcolm’s early life, McCall too makes a harsh critique against what he considers to be his early nihilistic practices of black male survival. From his prison cell, McCall dangerously reinscribes Malcolm’s unsparing condemnation of himself and the ghetto underworld that shaped him. Although McCall’s appropriation of these historical black male figures is problematic (particularly in the way that he isolates certain parts of their lives to fit his needs), his desire to align himself with their legacies is a sentiment shared by a great number of black people in general and black men in particular. And while I have drawn attention to the strategic implications of such an alignment, the psychic attachments to what these black men represent perhaps bears repeating. That is to say, I would argue that McCall’s identification with violence, the ghetto, “baad niggas,” and “ghetto race men” goes far beyond his sensibilities about how to market himself to mainstream audiences. Indeed, I do not doubt that McCall firmly believes what he says about his violent past, that he is fully committed to the lessons he has learned, and that he genuinely sees his experiences as a testament to overcoming the devastating emotional inferiority complex that so many black men experience. And while many might agree that McCall’s disidentification with his troubling past is, in the end, liberating (as it allows him healthier, more constructive ways of facing his future), I would only suggest rethinking the “emancipatory” cultural politics McCall endorses. This look at the first part of McCall’s autobiography, and the questions it raises about violence and authenticity, just touches the surface of the

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underlying masculine and racial anxieties that are a part of black male identity formation in contemporary black popular culture. In many regards, the title question “Am I black enough for you?” merely sets the stage for rethinking the multiple ways in which many black men—not just Nathan McCall—attempt to achieve black male authenticity and “pass for black.” To be sure, this is a kind of passing in which anxieties about race, class, gender, sexuality, and cultural politics converge and ultimately act in concert to govern black men’s lives. Indeed, what McCall’s narrative of his early life shows us (despite its ability to entertain) is the all-encompassing pressure black men feel in asserting that we are indeed “black enough” to be black men. As peculiar a thought as this might seem, failure to adhere to the middle-class conventions of black male identity can lead to profound feelings of alienation and marginalization within the black community. In the end, McCall’s identity politics are not emancipatory; to the contrary, they suggest a politics that condemns, imprisons, and stifles by its inability to break free from the restricting imagination of a society refusing to question itself.

4

Death Bound The Thug Life

He screamed “thug life!” And emptied the clip. —Tupac Shakur, “Runnin’,” from Resurrection (2003)

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open this chapter with a powerful citation from “Runnin’,” the popular Tupac Shakur rap single posthumously released for the 2003 documentary film of his life, Resurrection.1 Expressing what is commonly identified as a “thug” mentality, Tupac’s sobering lyrics point at once to a deathdefying and death-embracing sentiment of “no fear” among young black men with little to lose. And while “thug” has carried currency as a pejorative term connoting everything from “robber” and “assassin” in the nineteenth century to black male “super-predator” in the late twentieth to “Muslim terrorist” in the dawn of the new millennium,2 Tupac’s success in the mid-1990s as a rapper and black male icon paradoxically ennobled the long stigmatized word and invested it with new “life.”3 Indeed, Tupac’s signature phrase “thug life”—a slogan proudly emblazoned across his tattooed abdomen and boastfully repeated in his rap songs and those of many other rappers—became (and still remains) for many disenfranchised youths a celebrated banner of the “ghetto soldier’s” conviction to live without fear of death as well as a defiant mark of their disregard for all authority.4 As cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson asserts in his impassioned reading of Tupac’s life in Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur (2001), “Tupac believed he spoke for the desperately demobilized and degraded lumpen who were, as he said on one of his songs,

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‘young [and] strapped,’ those who ‘don’t give a fuck’ ” (218).5 In much the same vein as “nigga” and “gangsta,” “thug” or, more emblematically, “thug life” had come to symbolize by century’s end one of the most menacing yet curiously alluring labels of male irreverence and social disobedience in urban America.6 So why is the thug such a powerful figure in the psyches of so many young men? What is the seductive appeal and mystique of the thug life? In this chapter I explore what this deadly attachment to the thug life specifically suggests about black male identity formation and performance in contemporary urban Black America, particularly in the way that the thug life provides many black men not only with emotional satisfaction, meaning, and pleasure in their lives but a space of defiant oppositionality for imagining what a dominant culture has rendered unimaginable—thug life as a site of empowerment and political possibility. At a moment in early twenty-first century U.S. history when poor urban black men remain perpetually “on the run,” the thug life is a testament to the potentially lethal ways in which innumerable young black men have opted to make sense of the powerful death grip that racial terror and state violence have historically produced.7 Emerging out of U.S. black communities in the absence of a movement that has been able to mobilize the poor and working classes into an effective political force, and at precisely a moment when political leadership has failed in the face of increasing economic and social urban blight, the thug life speaks to the unaddressed and growing frustrations of multitudes of black urban youths. As distressing as it is perilous, the thug life is not simply a culture of bad boys “gone wild”; it is, far more, the celebration of contempt against the mundane despair and existential dis-ease ravaging the psyches of so many young black men. In the most extreme terms of death-defiance, the culture’s most devoted members—unafraid to “empty the clip”—gesture toward a life of death-defying and death-seeking ambition and purpose. As the opening epigraph demonstrates, risking one’s life on the streets in gun violence against the police and/or “empty[ing] the clip” in sexually explicit ways—acts that unavoidably draw on the phallic sexual imagery and potency of the gun (for example, the reckless spraying of a cocked dick into a variety of reproductive and nonreproductive spaces or cavities)—make plain the ways in which self-proclaimed thugs and, in recent years, “homo-thugs” not only pursue the ecstatic charge of living (and dying) dangerously but also thrust themselves toward the affirmation and

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fulfillment of life.8 To be sure, it is a life lived in defiance of both the law and moral convention, a world filled with perpetual risk in which black men are forever on the brink of death.9 Facing danger, the inevitability of prison (social death) and/or literal death from gun violence and sex, many of these black men confront their fear and embrace the thug life as a kind of “death-discovering” in which they indulge an intoxicating compulsion to consciously or unconsciously pursue their own death; accordingly, “death-discovering” is an opening up, little by little, of the topography of death, a traversing back and forth into death’s domain where the possibilities of exceeding life’s limits are “discovered” and radically explored. And whether we think of this deathly phenomenon in terms of Freud’s notion of the death drive, Lingis’s theory of death-bound subjectivity, Émile Durkheim’s theory of suicide, or even as Jacques Derrida’s “gift of death,” it is a trend that has special significance in these menacing times. But the self-annihilating impulse that propels so many poor urban black men to embrace death also marks a moment of mysterious significance. While the destructive element of these practices is readily apparent, what can be said about the emancipatory, triumphant sense of power many of these men claim to experience? How can we understand the paradoxical (and counterintuitive) assertion that death and defiance (especially in the face of death) are humanizing, a proclamation of one’s ability to have some “say” in confronting what many black men see as their inevitable and imminent fates? In effect, many of these poor urban black men choose not to embrace a lifeless existence in which they can find no viable meaning in the monotony of menial labor, no familial affirmation from the emasculating torment of joblessness and poverty, nor any pleasure in the lifedraining force of a disciplined and docile conformity. To the contrary, these black men choose the awakening thrill and “ghetto-superstar” appeal of the thug life, a dangerous world of fast-paced “wheelin’ and dealin’,” gun slinging, and raunchy, selfish sexuality that reminds them that they are not only alive but that they are . . . somebody.10 As peculiar as it might seem, the thug life affords these young men the opportunity to choose death or, more precisely, what social anthropologist Michael Taussig calls the “space of death” to carve out an exhilarating racial and social identity that offers a gratifying if only fleeting and illusory sense of control and strength.11 Even as it sets in motion social forces driving so many black men to their deaths, the thug life is experienced as a site of self-affirmation and purpose, emotional comfort, and

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existential certainty. As Tupac Shakur would unambiguously assert in his 1995 track, “So Many Tears,” “inside my mind couldn’t find a place to rest / Until I got that THUG LIFE tatted on my chest,” and then, again in the same track, “my every move is a calculated step / to bring me closer to embrace an early death.”12 To be sure, Tupac’s conception of the thug life appears extreme, even hyperbolic; but stripped of its overstatement the thug life captures the apocalyptic spirit of a generation of disenfranchised and disaffected youths who are not merely in search of resolve in the face of death but who are finding comfort with the existential closure and “embrac[ing]” finality that death assures.13 Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory—And It’s “Tatted on My Chest” Tupac might have brought unprecedented attention in his music and music videos to the theme of black men lying in wait for their impending deaths, but he was not the first black man to “rap” about “see[ing] death around the corner,” as he writes in the song of that title (1995). Whether the result of slavery, lynchings and white mob rule, state-sanctioned execution, prison, “black-on-black violence,” drug addiction, AIDS, or even suicide, black men (and women) have long been forced to make sense of their lives (and, in some cases, inescapable fates) from within a culture of terror committed to their annihilation. In large part, this space of death has framed—even defined—much of their collective identities and lived experiences; and unsurprisingly, black men have grappled with visions of their early death in spirituals, folk songs, sermons, fiction and nonfiction, popular film, and hip-hop music. To be sure, even before Tupac gave poetic meaning to the deadly transgressions of street life in popular tracks such as “Death around the Corner,” “Bury Me a G,” “I Wonder If Heaven Got a Ghetto,” “If I Die 2Nite,” “Last Words,” and “Heaven Ain’t Hard 2 Find,” an earlier generation of black men had already cultivated their own death-bound prophecies. From the ominously foreboding references to his own violent death in Malcolm X’s 1965 Autobiography to the spiritually defiant “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech famously delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the eve of his death, numerous black political leaders of the 1960s were forced to come to terms with the imminent threat of state-sanctioned violence and death.14 Moreover, gratuitously violent blaxploitation films such as Superfly (1971) and Black Caesar (1973) as well as the in-

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dulgently morbid pulp fiction of Donald Goines in stories such as Daddy Cool (1974) and Black Gangster (1977) offered cautionary tales about the death-defying, death-seeking feats of “baad ass” black men. These political and popular narratives of black male defiance provided the kind of market-saturated death-bound prophecies of the 1960s and 1970s that would undoubtedly supply contemporary rappers with an array of both romanticized and sensationalized stories requiring little adaptation for black popular culture in the final decade of the twentieth century.15 But to get an even better sense of the history of these kinds of deathbound prophecies, particularly those expressive of a “thug life” mentality, we have to go back even before the 1960s to Richard Wright’s classic novel Native Son (1940). Indeed, Wright’s foreboding construction of Bigger Thomas captures not only the prophetic call toward death but also the unabashed embrace of the thug life, a life in which agency and meaning are primarily found by overcoming fear, asserting defiant behavior against authority, and in accepting death. Wright’s construction of Bigger as, I dare say, a thug was hardly the first of its kind—to be sure, depictions of thugs or, rather, bad niggers go back to the slave quarters of the Old South—but it was Wright who most definitively challenged the one-dimensional, uniformly “self-destructive” understandings of violence, rage, and death most often attributed to and surrounding the lawless and anti-authoritarian “black male brute.”16 At a crucial historical stage in the shifting landscape of Black America between 1914 and 1945, Wright’s Native Son has also stood as a bridge between the past and present. Indeed, it is in Richard Wright’s literary construction of Bigger that we can find continuity, for example, between the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century southern folktales of Stackolee and the “urbanizing” black popular culture depicted in the raunchy, nitty-gritty blues traditions of the Mississippi Delta and Chicago of the 1940s and 1950s. With very little revision, this trope of the bad nigger would be resurrected and revitalized in the blaxploitation films of the 1970s and then again in the gangsta rap of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But if Wright’s construction of Bigger (and the rural folk ideologies Bigger embodies) reflects a kind of archetypal 1940s thug life, it is a thug life decidedly absent of the religious symbolism and overt appeals to God made in Tupac’s rap lyrics. To be sure, the religious references in Tupac’s lyrics are far from subtle. For example, in his 1995 track “So Many Tears,” Tupac begins the song with a prayer-like meditation:

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. . . (if I should die before I wake) Please God walk with me (grab a nigga and take me to Heaven)

In his reading of Tupac, Michael Eric Dyson makes the most of these death-bound identifications with God: “The [thug’s] readiness to die is characteristic of thug theology, as much because of the intensity of the suffering they observe and endure—and quite often cause—as the belief that they have squared themselves with God” (Holler 212). Dyson’s correlation between God and thug is intriguing not simply because he brings together an unlikely pairing but because he seems to take the thug’s narrative (Tupac’s, in particular) so literally. Of course, given the countless references Tupac made in his music and music videos to God, Christ, Sin, Death, and the Afterlife, it is not entirely surprising that Dyson—ordained Baptist minister and cultural critic—would explore the endless connections between God and gangsta rap.17 While Dyson is compelling in his recuperative, if not redemptive, approach to making sense of the thug life as an ambivalent site of both “prophetic scripture and moral plague” (211), I am concerned, however, with what might be gained if we look to the thug life not as a “thug theology” but as a “thug imaginary” in which religious iconography and doctrine are merely one set of imaginative resources among the many social, popular, political, and psychic realms from which artists draw inspiration. What if we were to foreground the dynamic yet controversial manner in which black male identities and imaginations are shaped by a marketplace and history so thoroughly invested in witnessing the symbolic death of young black men? And what about the attendant forces driving so many young people to construct death-bound identities out of the popular and marketable images of “black male death” made widely available on television, at the movies, and in music and music videos? Raising these questions about the ways in which black male identities are fated by material conditions rather than theological divinations necessarily calls into question the underlying moral assumptions of Dyson’s argument.18 But this is not to entirely dismiss its religiosity or moral reach. Rather, this is to suggest that Tupac does not primarily see the “glory of the coming of the Lord” (as Dyson’s argument implicitly suggests) as much as he recognizes in death’s call a certain kind of dignifying glory and oppositional majesty that comes from knowledge not of the Lord’s salvation but of the ghetto soldier’s con-

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viction to smugly accept who he is and what his history has forced him to become.19 Here it seems useful to return to the literary construction of Bigger, and Native Son more generally, to illustrate an alternative approach to Dyson’s religiously rooted path for redemption (i.e., thug theology as a way to “square themselves with God”). By offering a brief reading of Bigger’s conversation with Gus in the opening pages of Book One, “Fear,” and Bigger’s concluding conversation with Max in his jail cell at the end of Book Three, “Fate,” I want to suggest another way for making sense of not only Tupac’s notion of thug life but also the very suffering it reflects and salvation it describes. From prophecy to acceptance of death, Bigger’s existential passage in the novel demonstrates the paradoxical possibility of seeing glory in the space of death. Through recognition, prophecy, and acceptance of the historical materiality of white racial terror (space of death), Bigger’s life is a testament to his self-discovery and an example of his death-bound subjectivity. As he confides to Gus on a South Side Chicago street corner: “ ‘Sometimes I feel like something awful’s going to happen to me,’ Bigger spoke with a tinge of bitter pride in his voice. ‘I don’t know I just feel that way. Every time I get to thinking about me being black and they being white, me being here, and they being there, I feel like something awful’s going to happen to me’ ” (NS 20). Indeed, Bigger’s violent fate at the end of the novel comes as no surprise. “Something awful” does happen to Bigger, and from the outset of the novel we all but know it is only a matter of time before Bigger comes to his irreversible end.20 And while many literary critics have argued that it is in this precise scene readers are made aware of Bigger’s impending “doom,” the “tinge of bitter pride in his voice” suggests something rarely if ever remarked upon by Wright scholars. Usually dismissed as an expression of his “racial impotence,” the cocky conceit or smug arrogance in Bigger’s sour tone deserves our attention, not only because it contradicts our expectation of a frightened and helpless Bigger but because it suggests that Bigger has come—in that brief instance—to a profound awareness of the white racial terror that routinely subjugates him and to a moment of clarity in which he finds his resolve to accept a course leading to death. In refusing to willfully accept a life of racial invisibility and submission, economic dispossession and, ultimately, the degrading status of second-class citizenship, the “bitter pride” Bigger feels and expresses marks a crucial moment of his coming to consciousness and his radicalization. Like the slave who never loses sight of her/his manumis-

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sion, Bigger’s sense of being free “begins with the consciousness that real life comes with the negation of his social death” (Patterson 98). Indeed, it is in Bigger’s belligerent defiance against white racial terror through which he is able to come to terms with the violent acts he has committed and the violent man he is forced to become. In his final conversation with Mr. Max while awaiting execution, Bigger is able to discern a change in his consciousness: “But what I killed for must’ve been good! It must have been good! When a man kills, it’s for something . . . I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em . . . It’s the truth, Mr. Max. I can say it now, ’cause I’m going to die. I know what I’m saying real good and I know how it sounds. But I’m all right. I feel all right when I look at it that way” (849). Bigger’s sense that “what [he] killed for must’ve been good!” and his ability to “feel all right” in the face of certain death mark his moment of truth: the act of violence, even as it leads to his death, has served—in the words of Frantz Fanon—as the “cleansing force that rids the black subject of his inferiority complex borne out of a history of oppression” (Fanon, Black 13). Here the violence that has marked Bigger as a “biological danger”—that has at once defined his blackness as shame, inferiority, deviance, and as a site of death—has beckoned Bigger to “act” and to “respond to the world’s anticipation” (Fanon, Black 139).21 That is, Bigger’s violent acts are not solely a measure of his defeat and submission; the violence that leads to his death also constitutes his efforts to “shatter the hellish cycle” (140) of his forced subjugation. Indeed, Bigger does not simply resign himself to his tragic fate; he finds within the horror of his imposed dehumanization what Negritude poet Aimé Césaire insightfully referred to as a defiant and ennobling assertion of racial acceptance.22 Yet if Bigger’s “bitter pride” and resolve to find something “good” in killing constitute a site of illumination for understanding how black men have come to recognize in the space of death/culture of terror a kind of individual consciousness and glory, it also reflects—in sometimes the most violent and self-destructive ways—the reckless abandon and cold detachment that same space of death often produces. Indeed, from the ignoble “punking” of his homeboy in the pool hall to the gruesome dismemberment of Mary Dalton’s dead body to the savage rape, murder, and disposal of his girlfriend, Bessie Mears, Bigger’s quest for his humanity is inextricably implicated in the very regimes of racial violence he vehemently resists. To be sure, Bigger covets his life at the violent and deathly expense

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of others; in this regard, Bessie’s murder is not only shocking, it is a seemingly gratuitous demonstration by Wright of Bigger’s intoxicating need to free himself from the social constraints Bessie embodies. But just as Bigger’s command of killing becomes more assured, it also paves the road for Bigger to accept his own death and is a mark of how he both exceeds and is bound by the imprisoning hold of a Jim Crow society. In this regard, Wright constructs Bessie’s murder as a necessary if not unfortunate dimension of Bigger’s self-actualization. Wright’s ambivalent articulation of an ennobling and consciousnessraising glory on the one hand and a disgraceful and self-destructive glorification of violence on the other remain at the heart of many ongoing literary and cultural debates on the representational value of America’s native sons. In the mid-1990s, when Tupac stood center stage in American popular culture as a preeminent black male icon and celebrity, this same ambivalence aptly characterized both the popular and academic discourses on the question of contemporary lumpen black masculinities. Like Wright, Tupac is aware of the space of death that looms large in the psyches of many poor blacks and works not only to dramatize its devastating effects but also seeks to draw from its lethal strength. Indeed, the existential shift in Bigger’s development, from fearful angst in Book One to an acceptance of his state-sanctioned fate in Book Three, is similarly reconstituted in Tupac as a continuing legacy of Wright’s deeply provocative though unsettling commentary on the shaping of black male identities: the space of death for many poor urban black male youths is an indelible mark of their racial subjectivity and sense of agency. For Tupac, this subjective marking of death is expressed with pride and glorious immoderation on his body. Perhaps most prominently paraded is the “thug life” tattoo etched like an arch across his abdomen. Boldly carved into his inelastic six-pack stomach, both his sculpted torso and the “thug life” emblem written onto it together appear as a kind of body armor, an impenetrable façade of black masculinity and strength. Certainly, Tupac’s iconographic body is forced to remark upon the imposition of a figurative and literal demand to die, but it does so with seemingly tireless impunity and nonliability. Even the bullet-ravaged scar tissue on his chest makes tangible, if not real, death’s proximity, a wound that carries the permanent imprint of death’s coercive presence. Yet for Tupac, the bullet wound takes on heroic significance as a symbol of his death-defiance; it’s transformed not only into décor but a life-affirming tattoo itself. And while Tupac’s

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marked body is inescapably inscribed with the historical memory of slave branding and the Jim Crow obsession of mutilating black bodies, the gunshot badges of honor and graphic tattoos displayed on his torso, arms, and back outwardly reflect his stylization of a body that he attempted to make uniquely his own. Indeed, every tattoo “tatted on his chest”—the “2pac” on his left breast, “the outlaw” on his arm, the “Playaz” on his neck, the “Fuck the World” on his back, the “50 NIGGAZ” across his sternum, the Christ figure in flames and wearing a crown of thorns—becomes a defiant gesture toward self-definition, self-reclamation, or what queer theorist José Muñoz has called “disidentification.”23 And while Dyson’s poignant reading of Tupac’s body goes so far as to suggest that his body is in many ways never his own (invoking a Jesus-like symbolism of self-sacrifice and suffering that mirrors back to the world the pain and punishment black people are forced to endure), Tupac’s image also points to a mind and body both egotistically beckoning death. Indeed, Tupac’s well-acknowledged addiction to alcohol and marijuana, as well as his relentless efforts to get in and cause trouble (sometimes with the law, sometimes with other rap artists, sometimes with women, sometimes a combination of all three), surface not only as sacrificial or selfless but also as selfishly sacrosanct. Supremely self-serving, Tupac’s self-fashioning as a thug constitutes, in the end, an unlikely space of political possibility; but it is here that he and many others like him have chosen to position and empower themselves. Perhaps an ironic and even unfortunate twist in the shaping of black male subjectivities, the “glory,” “freedom,” and pleasure found under the tyranny of racial subjection reveals, for some, an ignoble and misguided striving for self-realization and truth. For others, however, Tupac perhaps represents a feasible truth—what scholar-activist Joy James points to in Fanon’s political ideology as “the breathing, living embodiment of the contradictions, debasement, rage, and resentment and rebellion that mark the very conditions of oppression” (21). Grappling with the ways in which popular media markets (in film, music, and print) produce and reproduce what has been made intelligible only as excessively indulgent and narcissistic stylings of urban black male life and death further complicates if not undermines our ability to make sense of the thug life as potentially empowering or as a developing “consciousness of freedom.” Indeed, overwhelmingly nihilistic interpretations of the thug life in popular culture provide little in the way of historical contextualization and, more importantly, point to the absence of a criti-

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cal apparatus for understanding how racial subjects are, on the one hand, restricted by the market-driven forces of a consumerist society and, on the other, determined to explore the deathly themes with which they have been so closely associated. With no sign of waning consumer interest in the death-invoking images of black men produced in American popular culture, the U.S. marketplace—rife with “studio thugs,” elaborate, million-dollar rap music video sets, and innumerable hip-hop commodities—would continue to constitute an indispensable piece of the riddle of black male identity formation and performativity. But to what end? Would imaging gratuitous gun violence and death in black popular culture produce anything but real-life fatalities? Thug Life and the Media Spectacle of Black Male Violence, 1993–97 On their CDs, in their music videos and feature films, and even projected onto their “real life” personas, many rappers of the mid-1990s capitalized on if not exploited the popularity of the bad nigger used to depict the gritty urban street life of earlier gangsta and hard-core rap: Talk slick, you get your neck slit quick Cause real street niggaz ain’t havin’ that shit (“Things Done Changed,” Notorious B.I.G.) You got guns, [we] got guns too. (“Incarcerated Scarfaces,” Raekwon) I gather alla . . . my baddest niggaz, niggaz that’s quickest with the triggaz (“Hang ’em High,” Sadat X [formerly of Brand Nubian])

Even despite its dishonorable and shameful heritage as selfishly destructive and damaging to the collective good of the black community, the bad nigger continued to provide these young disenfranchised men with a surefire way to make money as well as a long-standing literary and folkloric tradition for protesting against the absurdity of their racial situation. But the enduring legacy of racism and white racial terror, which had wrathfully inspired many rappers to resurrect the “lawless” bad nigger, also prompted

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them to rewrite this dastardly figure anew. In some of the most shocking lyrical rhymes of “amped” bravado, modern-day bad niggers of hard-core/ thug rap stretched their thuggish imaginations to come up with outlandish, even fantastic scenarios of violent retribution and egotism. New York– based rap group Mobb Deep captures this sentiment in their 1995 track “Survival of the Fittest,” as main rapper Prodigy declares: “I’m goin’ out blastin,’ takin’ my enemies with me / and if not, they scarred, so they will never forget me.” After each lyrical stanza the Mobb Deep crew chimes in repeating the chant: (Thug life, we still livin’ it) We livin’ this ’til the day that we die.24

Indulged by a music industry and society at large to live out the white supremacist fantasy depicting black men as violent outlaws, these rappers made the most of this limited opportunity to sensationalize images of themselves as dangerous desperado heroes. Sadat X, for example, who released his solo album Wild Cowboys in 1996, looked directly back to the outlaw-inspired folklore of the nineteenth century to underscore his shift from hip-hop “righteousness” as a member of the 5 Percenter rap group Brand Nubian to hip-hop outlaw consumerism.25 Sadat X’s most celebrated track on the album, “Hang ’em High,” takes listeners into a fictive world of lawless “high plains” renegades where, according to his gun-slinging alter ego, he “gather[s] all of [his] baddest niggaz / niggaz that’s quickest with the triggaz.” Even Wu-Tang Clan, the stellar ninemember posse of MCs from Staten Island, New York, that created an entire hip-hop subculture out of kung-fu iconography, gritty social realism, and a distinctly East Coast hip-hop sound, would not only take outlaw consumerism to unprecedented levels, but would do so with industrious zeal.26 Undeniably entrepreneurial, even forward-thinking in their business savvy to sell records, clothing, and video games to white and black consumers alike, Wu-Tang Clan’s long-awaited second album, Wu-Tang Forever (1997), tapped into futuristic representations of the bad nigger that would perhaps reveal the degree to which the genre of the black gun-slinging outlaw was thoroughly exhausted if not embarrassingly spent.27 But Wu-Tang’s more meaningful, long-lasting contribution to hip-hop culture perhaps comes from their first album, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), released in November 1993. With hit tracks such as “C.R.E.A.M. [Cash

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Rules Everything around Me],” “Can It All Be So Simple,” and “Protect Ya Neck,” Wu-Tang’s hard-core rap style brought a more serious and sincere edge to the thug imaginary. Capturing the unglamorous East Coast street life, Wu-Tang’s Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and other rap albums such as Raekwon’s Only Built for Cuban Linx (1995), Nas’s Illmatic (1994), and It Was Written (1996), as well as Jay-Z’s debut album Reasonable Doubt (1996), perhaps best emblematize the storytelling genius and raw affect of these hip-hop outlaws. Indeed, the bad nigger that inspired Richard Wright’s harsh critique of race relations in 1940 and shocked the tens of thousands of first-time Native Son readers into a “new awareness of the terrible dimension of American racism” (Kinnamon 127) would do little to unnerve these gangsta/thug rappers of the mid-1990s, a period that could be conveniently described as “post”–gangsta rap. Charged with glorifying violence and what Robin Kelley referred to as reducing gangsta rap to “nihilism for nihilism’s sake” (Race 224), gangsta/thug rappers (especially those who achieved notoriety after 1993 from Dr. Dre to Snoop Dogg to Tupac Shakur to the Notorious B.I.G. to the Wu-Tang Clan) have increasingly been perceived not as “race rebels” who challenge social injustice but as rambunctious, self-promoting “studio gangstas” complicit in reinforcing the stereotypically brutal images of black people.28 And it was not just the conservative campaign spearheaded by C. Delores Tucker, Reverend Calvin Butts, Dionne Warwick, and William Bennett in the early 1990s that would argue gangsta/thug rap was “too violent” and seemed only to glorify the lumpen lifestyles of thugs, hustlers, gang bangers, and pimps.29 Even the well-meaning black public intellectuals and popular artists who regularly called attention to the misdirection of urban black male youth also indicted them in their books, films, and comedy stand-up routines for succumbing to the “nihilistic threat” plaguing urban Black America.30 From the Hughes Brothers’ uninspired lament over the “tangle of pathology” ravaging urban black men in Menace II Society (1993), to Cornel West’s expressed concern in Race Matters (1994) about the loss of hope, love, and meaning in urban black communities, to black comedian Chris Rock’s infamous declaration “I hate niggas!” in Bring the Pain (1996), the salvation of Black America in the early to mid-1990s rested—as far as many middle- and working-class blacks were concerned—in its deliverance from the increasingly irredeemable nigga, gangsta, or thug.

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Certainly, it would be hard to disagree with the evidence detailing how “things” had, in fact, “changed” within urban Black America during the late 1980s and 1990s, not just in terms of deindustrialization and unemployment, as well as the influx of crack cocaine and guns, but also in the highly disconcerting ways many black people—especially young black men—responded to the increasingly bitter realities of urban despair. Circumscribed and restricted to racially segregated urban areas, “black-onblack” gun violence resulting in homicide produced staggering death tolls. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice, there were enormous increases in both homicide victimization and offending rates among young black men in the late 1980s and 1990s. To add disheartening evidence of this death-bound effect among black males, even as the late 1990s saw a decrease in murder rates nationally, youth gun killings among black males continued to rise.31 As a direct consequence of the persistent force of racism and the waning possibilities of finding work and social legitimacy, many young black men saw and continue to see no viable alternatives in a world where, as rapper Talib Kweli asserts, “survival tactics mean busting gats to prove you hard.”32 But even if this “gun-totin’ ” bad nigger lives on in contemporary black popular culture, I argue that the bad nigger of old has not been replaced by a more threatening, “harder” version of its former self as much as it has adapted to the popular audience’s insatiable appetite for gritty scenes of urban brutality. Even if we agree with Kelley that “the tragedy of all this is that the gangsta rappers have gotten harder and harder, kicking more ballistics [fabricated narratives of gun violence] than ‘reality,’ ” we are also bound by Kelley’s cautionary call to explore the array of fanciful accounts of murder, death-defiance, and sexual exploitation for what they say about the audiences that demand them as well as the gangsta/thug artists who “spit” them out. This task, however, is not to bow entirely to the voyeuristic power of the marketplace both fueling and shaping the far-fetched gangsta/thug raps rushed into production; rather, it means that we must seek to grapple with the complex netting of “facts” and fiction, gritty “reality” and fantasy out of which many young black men are forced to image/imagine themselves. Out of these restricting black male types such as the “gangsta,” “thug,” “nigga,” “playa,” “baller,” and pimp, many black men participate in and perform these stereotypical roles with award-winning determination. On the one hand, their surrender to the self-destructive images of black masculinity marks their sense of futility and powerlessness in an in-

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creasingly nihilistic context of social despair; on the other, however, their embrace—their paradoxical “love for the [rap or street] game”—points to an attempted repudiation of the futility and powerlessness these same images impose. That is, by turning so-called negative images—in mass media and in “real life”—into sites of enabling possibility and opposition, many gangsta/thug rappers and black men more generally theatrically play the part or, rather, “wear the [gangsta/thug] mask” as a means for renegotiating or, perhaps more appropriately, exploiting for their own personal gain the social script in contemporary American life. Gangsta/thug rappers such as Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Master P, and DMX all come to mind as individuals who, throughout the late 1990s, are able to “bank” on their well-constructed street images. Of course, the production of these popular black male images through mass-media manipulation has created its own set of effects and material consequences for poor urban black men. Forced to indulge audiences and consciously give a distorted impression about themselves, these marketinspired “fearless” black men have become subjects of increasing militaristic police inspection.33 Since the late 1980s/early 1990s, the double campaign of the War on Drugs and the War on Crime that began during the Reagan and Bush administrations and continued well into the social reform policies of the Clinton era has worked to impose stiffer penalties for nonviolent offenses, from “mandatory minimum sentences” and “truth in sentencing laws” to the “three strikes law” and Federal Crime Bill of 1994.34 To be sure, criminologists quickly discerned that as a consequence of their increasing the likelihood of imprisonment without the possibility of parole, the criminal justice system and its ensnaring policies not only failed to curtail crime but rather contributed to the social malaise in marginalized communities.35 Criminologist Steven R. Donziger sums up the disheartening effects of incarceration practices in The Real War on Crime (1996): “By running so many persons through jails and prisons each year, the violent ethos of the correctional facility has increasingly come to shape behavior on the streets and undermine respect for the law” (124). As Los Angeles–based rap lyricist Ras Kass put it on his 1996 track “Ordo Abchao”: “Nowadays the average niggas think they Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, doin’ bids [jail time] with no remorse / it’s almost methodical.” Interestingly, Ras Kass’s description of the “methodical” imprisoned racial subject, seemingly immune to becoming what Foucault referred to in Discipline

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and Punish (1977) as a docile body, suggests a failure—not a success—of panoptic-styled penal institutions. Indeed, the “tough on crime” measures of the late 1980s/early 1990s, designed to house in mass legions of marginalized men and women, increased (not lessened) the volatility between police and black youth and pushed an already defiant group of young black men further into a state of psychic upheaval. “Doin’ bids with no remorse” is just the tip of the iceberg for understanding the psychosocial/ psycho-political imaginations of many of these so-called gangstas/thugs. What lies beneath their icy façade is an imagistic world of proud defiance in which gangstas/thugs look upon prison and death, refusing to be shaken. Accordingly, the U.S. prison-industrial complex committed itself to the challenge of policing its most incorrigible and “unassimilable” inmates, disproportionately black and overwhelmingly poor, through the use of the most draconian methods. As Joy James has pointed out in Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (1996), Foucault’s theory of the totalizing panoptic power of the state that appears as “an interrogation without end ”—“the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination” (Foucault, Discipline 227; emphasis added)—is inadequate for explaining the continued use and reliance on state torture (police brutality, denial of human rights) and execution (death penalty). While acknowledging the primary and extensive use of surveillance in prisons, James brings attention to the alarming manner in which the state has increasingly determined that incarcerated blacks are beyond disciplining, irredeemably without productive value, and that “the policing objective [is] the death of the targeted subject[s]” (33).36 James’s poignant uncovering of Foucault’s erasure of torture and terror in prisons and penal institutions opens up the possibilities for examining more closely not only the hidden spectacle of “lockdown, deprivation tanks, control units, and holes for political prisoners” (34) that is meted out on black, brown, and poor white bodies behind prison walls, but also the exercise of what Foucault refers to as biopower and the lethal use of what I am calling “bio-violence” that reaches far into the body in order to seize control over, if not take away, life. To be certain, Foucault’s privileging in the modern era of the state’s “administration of bodies and the calculated management of life” (Foucault, History 140; emphasis added) garners less and less currency here when grappling

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with racialized bodies and the state’s continuing compulsion to see blacks as expendable, as a menace in need of eradication. The far-reaching effects of racial terror/bio-violence in prisons over the last twenty years are hard to tangibly discern. But the centrality of prison and sex within the thug imaginary would reveal telling insights into the death-embracing and death-defying sentiments of a generation of young black men coming of age with the advent and proliferation of the prisonindustrial complex. Indeed, the “thug life” itself, historically congruent with the increasing use and spectacle of hidden torture in prisons, illustrates a profoundly important space for grappling with the “deployment of sexuality” and the pandemic of AIDS as a most discreet and intimate form of bio-violence and death. If our attention is turned to the sexual practices of a large number of black men in (and out of ) prison, we are confronted with this increasingly visible domain in which the black male body and thug life capitulate to and resist cultures of racial bio-violence. Prison, AIDS, and the Shaping of the Thug Imaginary For my purposes of mapping how racial terror/state violence is exercised against black men, it is imperative to first point to the devastating effects of both AIDS and prisons on the black community at large. Throughout the 1990s, both had made indelible imprints on black life and black social networks, placing an overwhelming number of blacks in general and poor urban black men in particular at the center of a nightmarish convergence. By 2001, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported, “HIV/AIDS was among the top 3 causes of death for African American men aged 25–54 years and among the top 4 causes of death for African American women aged 20–54 years. It was the number 1 cause of death for African American women aged 25–34.” The CDC goes on to disclose that blacks, constituting 12 percent of the U.S. population, “accounted for [following the 2000 consensus] 368,169 (40 percent) of the 929,985 estimated AIDS cases diagnosed since the epidemic began.”37 In U.S. white gay male communities—where HIV/AIDS was first seen to make a devastating impact during the 1980s—the mid-1990s saw a slackening of apprehension and concern over contracting the disease. It was an era in which antiretroviral drug cocktails, combination therapies, and AIDS education were drastically changing the terms of “living with

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AIDS,” a time when AIDS was no longer deemed a death sentence but a chronic illness.38 In U.S. black communities, however, the opposite was true: AIDS remained a death sentence, one that produced—besides hundreds of thousands of literal deaths—a profound anxiety and silence that “prevent[ed] such deaths from effectively galvanizing AIDS activism in African-American communities” (Harper 4). Indeed, according to Phillip Brian Harper’s Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity (1996), the black community’s responses to the AIDS-related death of television broadcaster Max Robinson in 1988 and the contraction of HIV by the celebrated basketball star Earvin “Magic” Johnson in 1991 spotlight the detrimental limitations of attempting to solve the “crisis” of black masculinity through the “proper affirmation of black male authority” (x). That is to say, the deep anxiety and silence around homosexuality that surrounded the discussion of Johnson’s contraction of HIV and saturated AIDS-education programs in the black community contributed to the devastation AIDS produced by focusing attention away from homosexual contraction to the more acceptable domain of heterosexual sex and family values. Harper goes on to point out that even attention to HIV contraction due to intravenous drug use elided many black people’s anxiety about homosexual contraction: “This continued silence is enabled beneath the admittedly significant (but also, to many minds, more ‘acceptable’) problem of IV drug-related HIV transmission that is endemic in some black communities” (19). While intravenous drug use has long played a significant role in determining how large numbers of black men contracted HIV/AIDS in black communities and in prison, researchers are now strenuously asserting that homosexual sex among black men—predominantly initiated in prison where blacks disproportionately outnumber whites and often continued after release—is the primary means of infection. Thus, prison and the shaping of “prison masculinities”—a set of male typologies whereby inmates, forced to adjust to the deprivation of outside sources of intimacy, community, and love, develop highly adaptable modes of social and sexual relations—account for a previously hidden and secreted prison world. This practice of sexual exchange where men have sex with both men and women has created the need for new ways of understanding the structural and social corollary of prison on black families and communities. In 2002, Christopher Krebs of the Research Triangle Institute published a now oft-cited essay, “High-Risk HIV Transmission Behavior in

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Prison and the Prison Subculture,” in which he writes that “sex and tattooing are the two most prevalent intraprison high-risk HIV transmission behaviors . . . [with] the majority of high-risk behavior in prison be[ing] attributed to the deprivation model.”39 According to Krebs, this deprivation model—a mode of analysis that seeks to explain the process of adjusting to the prison environment—assumes that particular characteristics of prison life affect an inmate’s attitudes, self-image, values, and behavior, which once changed produce a unique culture that embodies certain behaviors and viewpoints. The prison environment deprives inmates of certain needs, and it is believed that the absence of these needs leads to behavioral changes in the inmate, known as modes of response. Gresham Sykes (1958), in his classic study The Society of Captives, referred to the loss of these basic needs as the “pains of imprisonment.” The pains are produced by the loss of liberty, goods and services, heterosexual relationships, autonomy, and security. The loss of these basic needs leads to an array of behavioral responses, most of which involve the adherence to an “inmate code,” which opposes the institutional authority of the prison staff. As a result, the inmates’ modes of response often entail the internalization of deviant normative prescriptions, a feature of the inmate social system that carries special importance in a study of this kind. It is the adherence to the inmate code that helps inmates neutralize the pains of imprisonment, become prisonized, survive, and cope with incarceration. (Krebs 24)

This combination of “loss of liberty, goods and services, heterosexual relationships, autonomy, and security” on the one hand and “the internalization of deviant normative prescriptions [or inmate code]” on the other point to a long list of film and literary narratives of prison sex among black and Latino men. Edward James Olmos’s American Me (1992), Sanyika Shakur’s prison autobiography Monster (1993), and Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler (1994), to name only a few, all depict the sexual brutalities relating to an inmate code in which men are forced into submission. Though the depictions of rape in these prison narratives are represented in varying degrees of violence, McCall’s portrait of prison sex generally illustrates how power, sexuality, and the inmate code operate.

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Explaining the process of “turning out” an inmate, McCall writes: My homies taunted Tooty regularly on the yard—“Hey, baby, when you gonna gimme that brown-eye?”—testing him to see how he’d respond. It amazed me that guys weren’t ashamed to let somebody see them cracking on another man. In fact, in a warped way, they were proud. It fed a macho notion widely accepted in the joint: That a guy was even more of a man if he could “flip” another man, turn him into a homosexual. They also called it “breaking him down.” If they thought they spotted a mental weakness that they could exploit, they’d chip and chisel at it until they got results. Sometimes it took months before they got a breakthrough; sometimes it took years, which was no big deal for somebody doing time. . . . My homeboys had psyched Tooty out by treating him like a woman until he doubted his own manhood. Then, when they had broken him down, they flipped him like a pancake. (195–96)40

In what are often more graphically explicit passages than the one described here, the vast majority of prison sex acts are unequivocally understood as coercive and nonconsensual sexual relations between inmates; quite simply, prison sex (otherwise rape) is the structural effect of deprivation. Carrying serious policy and social implications for felons and exfelons reintegrating into the world outside of prisons, it is perhaps no coincidence that the increasing attention directed toward combating prison rape is simultaneously aimed at addressing the proliferation of AIDS in prisons as well as in black communities.41 With upwards of 600,000 former prisoners released into society each year, many of whom continue to live with HIV, researchers have come to view the crisis of AIDS in both prison and black communities as intertwined epidemics, calling for combined prevention and treatment strategies.42 Until recently, structural neglect on two fronts—the absence of AIDS prevention and treatment programs within correctional institutions, which themselves are inadequate for the permanent housing of those afflicted by substandard education, chronic unemployment/underemployment, or drug dependency—has exacerbated the problem. As such, it has become increasingly difficult to tell if initiatives such as the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act signed into law by President George W. Bush or

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even issuing condoms in prison can turn back the tide on this culture of terror where black men and women are not only dying but are consigned to a particularly gruesome form of “death-torture.” I would go so far as to suggest that the negligent health care practices of the state function as a form of violence on black bodies inside prison whereby “death-torture is the art of maintaining life in pain, by subdividing it into a ‘thousand deaths,’ by achieving before life ceases ‘the most exquisite agonies’ ” (Foucault, Discipline 33–34). While Robin Kelley pointed to the impact of prison on black popular culture in general and gangsta rap in particular in his well-known 1994 essay “Kickin’ Ballistics, Kickin’ Reality,” little attention was given then to the lethal transmission of AIDS in prisons or the question of prison sex. Kelley looked toward misogyny primarily and homophobia secondarily. Indeed, the idea of men having sex with men in prisons was most often cited in relation to the severest emasculation of vulnerable heterosexual black men who may have shown “weakness” around other men. Even Isaac Julien’s Darker Side of Black (1996), a documentary film account of hiphop and dancehall that harshly indicted hip-hop’s gangsta and 5 Percent Nation rappers for their refusal to address homophobia in their music, had not yet become attuned to what would become quite visible with the spread of AIDS in prisons, prison overcrowding, and the spillover of prison populations throughout the United States, which forced the criminal justice system to create early reduced-sentence programs for nonviolent offenses throughout the late 1990s and early part of the twenty-first century.43 [Thug] Life and Death for Eazy-E and Gangsta Rap In exploring the ways that the thug life, death, and prison converge on if not shape black male identities, I look to the AIDS-related death of gangsta rapper Eazy-E on March 25, 1995. Even though I had been painfully aware of the statistics that tell us black men in the United States are disproportionately infected with HIV, I was still taken aback by Eazy-E’s sudden demise. Perhaps my shock stemmed from my own willful ignorance about the lived experiences of many poor urban black men who avoid HIV testing, choosing instead to live in denial or in complete disregard. Or perhaps it had to do with my own market-shaped notions about Eazy-E and the “thug life” to which he pledged his allegiance. According

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to his hard-core gangsta/thug image, Eazy-E was not simply lawless; he lived a life without consequence, a fantasy of dangerous carnage in which his death, while understood as inevitable, was a destiny that could be defiantly evaded. Even in a market-driven genre of hard-core gangsta rap where hyperbole had become the norm, his boastful lyrics always seemed to me faithful, if not to the person Eazy-E actually was, then to the uncompromisingly oppositional man he wanted to be. Never one to mince lyrics, EazyE proclaimed in 1991, “ ’Cause a nigga ain’t afraid of being locked up / I’m out of luck, so why should I give a fuck / But they still want to try / To kill a nigga like me but muthafuckin’ real niggaz don’t die.”44 To be sure, if Eazy-E’s lyrics served in any way as an empowering announcement of his resolve to live without fear, it also testified to the reckless sense of invincibility so many rappers would seem to embrace both onstage and off. And for Eazy-E and many other rappers like Tupac, Snoop Dogg, DMX, and Biggie who lived out the code of the street, this indomitable feeling not only applied to “being locked up” or “kill[ed]” by the police; it permeated all aspects of their social living. From onstage battles to offstage beefs, from boasting on wax about “getting laid” to living up to the hustler hype in their own lives, celebrity lore often bled into the real-world politics of black masculinity and fueled some of the most self-indulgent, lethal lifestyles in urban black America. As co-founder of the late 1980s Compton rap group N.W.A. (Niggas With Attitude), Eazy-E exemplified the most damning and unsalvageable aspects of gangsta rap—rash anti-authoritarianism, unapologetic materialism, an insatiable appetite for degrading women. But beyond his celebrity, Eazy-E (a.k.a. Eric Wright) was simply another young black man who grew up poor in one of Los Angeles’ most deindustrialized sections, a young man who fathered seven children by six women (Williams, “EasyE”), and a man whose death at the age of thirty-one was merely one of the 332,229 casualties of AIDS in the United States up to that time. In the end, Eric Wright’s life story (aside from becoming a gangsta rap star) seemed almost as commonplace as it was tragic in reflecting the always impending, multi-directional threat of violence for so many poor urban black men. Still, it is perhaps ironic that what becomes most noteworthy today about Eazy-E’s life and death is not the gun and gang violence that most characterized gangsta rap throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s but rather the heightened visibility his life and death have brought to the

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increasingly “infected” terrain of black male sexuality. A prickly twist in the final days of gangsta/thug rap, Eazy-E’s AIDS-related death was a bitter symbol of its gasping end, leaving only the murders of Tupac (in 1996) and Biggie (in 1997) to carry out the genre’s final breath.45 But gangsta/thug rap was not actually dead: more accurately, it had retreated back to the studio to reinvent itself, get rearranged and remixed to suit the increasingly hedonistic and materialistic appetite of mainstream audiences. Seemingly worn out by “shoot ’em up” gangland brutality, popular audiences lost interest in what they perceived to be the thug’s penchant for violence and gravitated toward his insatiable thirst for money and sex. Consider the majority of successful rap CDs since at least 1996 that have all relocated the death-defying behavior of the street into the self-gratifying space of the nightclub.46 Gangsta/thug rappers now overwhelmingly willing to write raps about sex and material accumulation— what many refer to as “bling”—turned their attention to a life after gangsta rap. Introducing audiences to this new genre, rap artist and producer extraordinaire Dr. Dre broke from the infamously thuggish Death Row Records in 1996, deemed gangsta rap “dead,” and formed his own record label, Aftermath. That same year, Dre released the label’s first album, Dr. Dre Presents . . . The Aftermath (1996) featuring the hit “Been There, Done That.” On this track, Dre exemplifies the transition away from the streets and represents a high-society black world of tuxedo parties, luxury sedans, and lavish mansions: “Kick back, relax, and grow old with my millions / That’s where it’s at. You got drama, I got the gat.” Similarly in 1997, the Notorious B.I.G.’s second CD, eerily titled Life after Death (the CD being released a week after his own slaying), featured the mega-hit “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems” in which Biggie asserts: “B-I-G be flossin’ / jig on the cover of Fortune.” These “thug-turned-pseudo-respectable” narratives of material accumulation point to a changing mood in the history of the thug life. Yet while the accumulation of material wealth (and sex, for that matter) reflects a popular motif for hip-hop artists both during this moment of transition and throughout this history of rap music, what became most apparent over the course of the next eight years (between 1996 and 2004) in American popular culture is the super-saturation of rap music into mainstream markets almost uniformly geared toward playing “party rap” or “booty rap” tracks for nightclubs—selling sex in general and thug sexuality in particular. It is the era that brought us Will Smith’s “Getting Jiggy with

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It,” P. Diddy club tracks like “Victory,” “It’s All about the Benjamins,” and “Been around the World” (all 1997), as well as Jay-Z’s club hits from “Money Ain’t a Thang” in 1998 to “Big Pimpin’ ” in 1999 to “Girls, Girls, Girls” in 2001. Even Ice Cube, perhaps gangsta rap’s most creative and oppositional voice, had by 1998 given in to the hypersexuality of gangsta/ thug rap in his supremely misogynistic sound track Player’s Club (1998), which he stars in and produces.47 Becoming increasingly market-driven, the booty rap styles and hits of Nelly (“Hot in Herre”) and Lil’ Jon (“Get Low”) in 2002 and 50 Cent (“In Da Club”) in the winter of 2003 all demonstrated the degree to which gangsta/thug rap had both banked and capitalized on thug sexuality as a way to successfully reinvent itself.48 In many ways, these representations of thug sexuality in black popular culture are a derivative form and, in some cases, a continuation of the “pimp tradition” revitalized throughout the late 1980s and early to mid1990s by artists such as Big Daddy Kane, Slick Rick, Snoop Dogg, and more recently Trick Daddy. Robin Kelley rightly argues that the figures of the pimp and hustler remain prominent because of the long-standing attempt for black communities to address the charge laid bare in the 1965 Moynihan Report that stated black men need to take back patriarchal authority from black women. As least as far as gender construction is concerned, all share in varying degree an attachment to deeply patriarchal, misogynistic sensibilities toward women and are equally homophobic. Indeed, the thug is perhaps only a slight variation on a very common theme running through black popular culture. As hip-hop reached its thirtieth birthday in 2004, rappers were finding in thug sexuality an easy and viable way to channel the young black male defiance of gangsta/thug rap into more respectable forms of black manhood.49 For a generation of male rappers that were both growing older and away from the downtrodden streets of urban America, rapping about sex—their prowess, exploits, and pimp standing—ensured not only record sales but also their “proper” if not stereotypical status as urban black men. Rapper Snoop Dogg exemplifies this transition wonderfully when in 2002 he vowed to clean up his drug image and released the album Paid tha Cost to Be da Bo$$ featuring the hit “Beautiful” (featuring hit-maker Pharell Williams). With follow-up hits “Let’s Get Blown,” “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” and “Ups & Downs” off his 2004 Album release R & G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece, Snoop Dogg had successfully reshaped his image from largely gangsta to largely pimp. Adding to Snoop’s “pimpalis-

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tic” makeover, Snoop appeared in 2003 as the host of one of the Girls Gone Wild videos, a popular adult sex video of white coeds, cementing his status as a household name and American icon.50 To be sure, this space of thug sexuality—the overtly vulgar and sexually aggressive attitudes of “gangsta-identified” young (black) men—is nothing new. But the sheer volume of sexually saturated booty rap music that steadily replaced “gun-centered” gangsta/thug rap on the Billboard charts has suggested a story all its own about, on the one hand, the increasingly sophisticated ways in which black bodies are at once desired and demonized in the nation’s popular cultural imagination and, on the other, how these bodies are disciplined to carry out the annihilating mission. And while I have earlier put forward that Eazy-E’s AIDS-related death was a bitter symbol of gangsta/thug rap’s end, his death more importantly foreshadowed what was soon to be understood as the most significant proliferation of AIDS among many poor urban heterosexual and homosexual black men as well as black women across the United States. Indeed, Eazy-E’s death broadened the scope for both grappling with the space of death/culture of terror in urban black America as well as for maintaining a theory of death-bound subjectivities for poor urban black men. In this regard, black bodies have once again become reconstituted as the sites of a veiled racial violence where, on the slick surface of market-driven film and music, booty rap depicts hyper-sexed, pleasure-seeking young black men and women while doing little to nothing to oppose or underscore the manner in which these same bodies are racially inscribed as symbolically potent death-bound vessels of disease. Racial violence, once primarily exercised through the gun, was now being increasingly propagated through the body. It is, of course, hard to dispute that Eazy’s body—like that of Tupac’s (dead at twenty-five from gunshots wounds), Biggie’s (dead at twentyfour from gunshot wounds), Big Pun’s (dead at twenty-eight from obesityrelated heart attack/respiratory failure), and Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s (dead at thirty-four from drug overdose)—was not already racially marked for an early death, perpetually positioned in compromising ways, and, as Michael Dyson would assert of Tupac’s body in particular, always “at risk” (Holler 236). Dyson’s observations of Tupac’s “openness to placing his body in harm’s way” are particularly noteworthy here: “With Tupac the body was risk, was at risk, perennially exposing itself to delight and danger in fell swoops: smoking weed, fighting, brandishing weapons, getting

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shot, receiving oral sex in public, and chugging Alizé and Cristal” (236). While Dyson’s observations rightly point to the dangers of violent machismo vis-à-vis “fighting, brandishing weapons, [and] getting shot,” he also looks to the risky “delights” and pleasures that Tupac never seemed to resist. “Smoking weed . . . receiving oral sex in public, and chugging Alizé and Cristal” all attest to the numerous ways in which the black male body both internalizes and explores its imminent call to a death-bound subjection. What remains important to keep in mind is the degree to which many black male hip-hop artists have participated in risky pleasures to an extreme, so much so that these pleasures constitute a death-discovering force. And while the meanings of deathly risk permeate the entire culture of hip-hop, its appropriation in the black male homosexual underground has proved most lethal, demonstrating the thug life’s reach and appeal. Queering the Thug Imaginary While middle-class white, black, Latino, and Asian youths have received increasing national attention for their controversial embrace of the thug life, it is the self-affirming identification with thug life by poor urban black and Latino men engaging in secret homosexual relations that has sent the most unsettling shock through contemporary mainstream American culture.51 Indeed, this thug life that was once generally believed to exist exclusively in the unvaryingly heterosexual world of gangsta rap has become one of the most coveted social spheres for a distinct group of ambiguously sexual black and Latino men, men who have fashioned a culture of ghettoidentified irreverence around hypermasculine homosexuality.52 Here reckless abandon, bold defiance, a propensity toward violence, “cool posing,” and aggressive sexuality (all of which are defining features of the thug life) have taken on their own uniquely homoerotic and unrepentantly brazen configurations. In his New York Times Magazine article “Living and Dying on the Down-Low,” journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis describes an encounter that reveals the degree of psychic disavowal and physical risk that characterize this homosexual subculture.53 After being approached by a man, the author asks if he’s gay: “Nah, man,” he says. “I got a girl. You look like you would have a girl, too.” I tell him that I don’t have a girl. “Doesn’t matter,” he says, stepping closer. I decline his advances, to which he

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seems genuinely perplexed. Before I go back upstairs, I ask him if he normally uses condoms here. As a recurring announcement comes over the club’s loudspeaker—“HIV Testing is available in Room 207 . . . HIV Testing in Room 207”—he shakes his head. “Nah, man,” he says. “I like it raw.”

Commonly referred to in the black homosexual underground as the sexual practice of “homo-thugs” or, as in the above passage, hip-hop–identified men who “like it raw,” their blatantly egregious behaviors and lifestyles are subjects of great speculation and concern. To be sure, the recent national stir on television talk shows, on websites, in newspapers, and in popular books about black men “on the down low” or “on the DL”—that is, black men having “secret” sexual relations with other men and refusing any acknowledgment of being gay or bisexual— has unearthed an increasingly visible subculture of men having sex with men (MSM).54 Benoit Denizet-Lewis rehearses some of the sobering statistics of these men whose dangerously casual sex lives are significantly contributing to the rise in HIV/AIDS infections in the black community at large: Blacks make up only 12 percent of the population in America, but they account for half of all new reported HIV infections. While intravenous drug use is a large part of the problem, experts say that the leading cause of HIV in black men is homosexual sex (some of which takes place in prison, where blacks disproportionately outnumber whites). According to the Centers for Disease Control, one-third of young urban black men who have sex with men in this country are HIV-positive, and 90 percent of those are unaware of their infection.

The degree to which black men in general and DL black men in particular “are unaware of their infection” is compounded by the fact that DL black men are considered a “bridge” population, passing the virus both to the men they encounter for sex as well as to the women they date and marry. Indeed, black women, unaware of the sexual indiscretions of their male partners, are fast becoming the highest risk group for contracting the virus (Edwards).55 At the same time, within the DL culture, homothugs (sometimes referred to as “DL thugs”) appear to be the most “at

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risk” for contracting the virus as well as “in demand” for sex by other DL men. Their liability and overwhelming popularity are the result of their overt and wanton refusal to protect themselves with condoms and because they represent the “roughest, most masculine, ‘straightest looking’ DL top” (Denizet-Lewis).56 Like their heterosexual counterparts (and in many cases indistinguishable from them), homo-thugs embrace the life of the thug as a death-seeking and death-defying embrace of their denigrated and eroticized masculinity. “Us[ing] hip hop style—baggy garments, work boots, flashy jewelry—as a form of drag” (Venable 104), homo-thugs have fixated on the erotic potency of hip-hop culture, “a culture of men who never stray from the phallic microphones and blunts; a culture of dispensable females” (106). But even as early as 1991 when documentary filmmaker Jennie Livingston released Paris Is Burning, a fascinating account of New York City drag balls among poor black and Latino gay men, signs of the homo-thug were already surfacing. In these highly competitive, fashion-focused productions—appropriately named “Paris Balls”—men would dress in drag and vie for ostentatious trophies and the prestigious bragging rights bestowed on those who exemplified the qualities of “realness.” For many, to be(come) real is to approximate—vis-à-vis their black male, sometimes transsexual bodies—the ideals of white femininity. But realness is not restricted to the highly feminized and ever-popular “queen” model emblematized in the mid- to late 1990s by black drag queen and pop diva Rupaul. Indeed, among the different categories showcased in the balls (including up-and-coming pretty girl, high-fashion Parisian/high-fashion evening wear, model, butch queen, schoolboy/schoolgirl realness) were also the male-identified town-and-country, the executive realness, the military, and finally the “banjee boy,” a black or Latino gay male who convincingly assumes the heterosexual look of hip-hop culture.57 This banjee boy, described by the Paris Ball MC as “looking like the boy who probably robbed you before you came to the Paris Ball!” takes his turn in this pageant striving to achieve “realness” or “authenticity” as a measure of his ability to go undetected or blend into the heterosexual world. Judith Butler’s critique of Paris Is Burning rightly argues that “becoming real . . . although not everyone’s desire (some children want merely to ‘do’ realness, and that only within the confines of the ball), constitutes the site of the phantasmatic promise of a rescue from poverty, homophobia, and racist delegitimation” (Bodies 130). Indeed, Venus Xtravanganza, the

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tragic hero/heroine of the film who is subsequently murdered at the hands of an assumed john, testifies to this “phantasmatic promise” that cannot be easily realized outside the self-affirming and familial bonds of this black and Latino male community. Undeniably, while the stakes of participating and potentially winning a drag category at the balls are comparatively low, drag (or what I refer to as “DL drag” in the world outside of the ball) can be extremely dangerous: being exposed or “outed” can lead to homohatred or even death. And while neither Livingston nor Butler deal with issues of sexuality or being outed other than as an intentionally obscured secondary context for how these “girls” sometimes hustle to make money, the strategic “leaving out” of their homosexual lives at a moment of such AIDS proliferation was a dangerous omission. That is, participating inadvertently in the voyeuristic pleasure of gazing into the gritty ghetto worlds of black and Latino gay men without taking up the ever-present state of emergency that AIDS produced throughout the mid- to late 1980s and early 1990s was, at best, irresponsible. While I want to point out that there is no fundamental correlation between homosexuality and drag, the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality are crucially important here. We need to take account of what the AIDS epidemic has meant for poor urban black men and the degree to which homophobia is exercised against black men who have sex with men, particularly those who are forced to live compartmentalized, sometimes secreted sexual lives to avoid public scrutiny, or those forced to do the opposite, as seen by men who become queens in prison as a mode of survival or, worse, as a consequence of being sold into sexual slavery.58 Consider this charged reading of the sex trade among black men from E. Lynn Harris’s first novel Invisible Life (1991),59 a black gay male coming-of-age story, released the same year as Livingston’s Paris Is Burning: AIDS was hitting the black gay community with devastating force, and with all the closet black men out there like Basil [professional football player], it would soon hit the heterosexual community with equal force—not all black men were IV drug users, as the media would have had us believe. I thought about trade, men who had sex with other men for money or other motivations. The majority of these men were lower middle class and either married or living with black women of the same class. They usually chose feminine guys as targets and didn’t consider them-

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selves gay or bisexual. The women they lived with usually had no idea of their secret lives because of their great sexual prowess. These women thought there was no way these men would mess around with a sissy or a punk. Difficult economic times had caused a lot of these black men to, in fact, mess around with sissies and punks. But as Kyle always said, “A dollar bill doesn’t make a dick hard.” (170–71)

In the midst of the proliferation of AIDS in the black community, perhaps it was no coincidence that Invisible Life would be released the same year that basketball legend Magic Johnson would publicly announce his retirement from the NBA as a result of contracting HIV. While Phillip Brian Harper astutely addresses Magic’s seropositivity in the face of the black community’s collective anxiety and silence around homosexuality in Are We Not Men (1996), mainstream cultural critic Nelson George misses a crucial opportunity in his acclaimed book, Buppies, B-Boys, Baps, and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture (1992): The legacy of Johnson the ballplayer is clear and complete; the legacy of Johnson the practicing heterosexual male will take longer to discern. He is a tall, charismatic, handsome, rich, lusty African American man, and in manifesting those qualities he contracted the HIV virus. In star-fixated L.A., his Showtime was Hollywood in Inglewood, and as that show’s leading man, Johnson enjoyed his pick of starlets. Like Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Michael Jordan, and Mike Tyson, Johnson was co-chairman of what RunD.M.C. labeled N.F.L.—“that’s Niggas Fuckin’ Large”—a loose bicoastal posse of black male stars who hung together, sharing adult fun and games. . . . Even as AIDS ravaged poor blacks and gays in the 80s, in N.F.L. circles fucking continued on unabated and unprotected. So did sharing women. (244)

Eazy-E’s AIDS-related death four years later in 1995 also raised serious concerns about the “unabated and unprotected” sexuality of those “Niggas Fuckin’ Large” and its relation to AIDS, particularly among poor urban black men and women. And while the impact of “Niggas Fuckin’ Large” (and what I discuss in this chapter as thug sexuality) has been primarily directed toward women as an expression of misogyny, it is paramount to

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point out how discussions of both Magic Johnson and Eazy-E focused on their heterosexual contraction of HIV through promiscuous sexual activity. What happens when we address, as Harper suggests, the profound masculine anxiety and silence around homosexual contraction and homosexuality? Moreover, what happens when we “queer” the thug imaginary in black popular culture and in prisons? What would it mean to read all black men in the world of gangsta/thug rap—including Tupac, Eazy-E, and the Notorious B.I.G.—as potential banjee boys? What kind of analysis of black masculinities would become possible or even necessary? What critical matter remains understated in the gangsta/thug rappers’ venomous disdain of women and contempt of homosexuality? Is it possible to read against the lyrical and cultural script of homophobia, heteronormative sexuality, and male violence in gangsta/thug rap music? There is no proverbial baby to be saved here from the bathwater of misogyny and homophobia; there is, however, a thug imaginary that tellingly encompasses not only the patriarchal and homophobic policing of black male bodies by black men but also the elusive traces of something else, something mysteriously important. Consider the Notorious B.I.G.’s attempt at sexual policing in his posthumously released track “Dead Wrong,” an exaggerated if not outlandish “gay bash” (among other things) of nihilistic proportions.60 Featuring Ice Cube and Eminem, rap artists well known for their misogyny and homophobia, B.I.G. raps from the grave regarding his putatively homophobic reaction to men whose crimes legitimate his own sadistic homoeroticism: “I stabbed her brother with an ice pick / Because he wanted me to fuck him from the back.” While Biggie’s lyrics confirm the thug imaginary’s seemingly endless supply of rants against women, homosexuals, and “weak” men, they also provide a minefield of information for grappling with the ways in which thug sexualities work to reassert masculine and misogynistic authority as well as act out homosexual fantasies, albeit sadistic fantasies of rape. B.I.G.’s recounting in “Dead Wrong” of sexual violence against a young woman (“slit the wrist of little sis”), her brother, and their father (“fucked him with the broom”) conveys a kind of sexual fluidity and continuity that seems inextricably tied together. That is, while Biggie discloses that “little sis . . . sucked the dick” and that he stabbed her brother because of the brother’s sexual solicitation, his broomstick sodomy of the father demonstrates, at the very least, how the thug imaginary works at once to expunge and mask homosexual desire through sexual violence. This violent blurring of pleasure, sexual domination, and

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homophobia encapsulates so much of what has yet to be uncovered in black male youth culture, prison culture, and American popular culture as a whole.61 James Earl Hardy’s pop novel The Day Eazy-E Died (2001) gives readers a rare glimpse into the elusively secret lives of hip-hop–identified black gay men. Cutting across urban black male social landscapes, Hardy sets out to capture what in 2001 was largely only rumored to be taking place. Perhaps more tabloid-like than high-brow literature, Hardy describes his own NFL, a set of bi-coastal DL hip-hop celebrities calling themselves “Tha Camp”: Now, it don’t su’prise me that there’s a lota brothas in hip-hop who are, as he put it, “on tha down low.” Tha Camp is one of tha groups they got ta hook up and hang out. (I guess they got a North and a South chapter, too.) Malice took me ta a Camp jam, where there was a whole lota drinkin, bluntin, and fuckin goin on. They had go-go boyz doin lap dances and a “darkroom,” where ya could get ya groove on and off. (Yeah, Malice tried his best ta get me up in there.) But I gotta admit, I was su’prised ta see a few faces I never expected, like b-ballers from the Lakers and the Suns, footballers from the 49ers and the Seahawks, a coupla singers Little Bit told me he suspected of bein gay, and one very big movie star. (103)

A move toward new discourses on black masculinity, particularly those rooted in reading gender performativity among black men as a site of palpable ambivalence, can open up possibilities for understanding the complex politics of sexual identity in the thug imaginary. Indeed, by recognizing that black male sexualities serve as one of the key locations for grappling with both the space of death and the death-bound subjectivities it shapes, we can begin to generate much-needed conversations about writing a history of poor urban black male bodies across the often disconnected terrains of critical race, queer, feminist, and masculinity studies. Especially as the death-defying and death-embracing imaginary of the thug life does battle with AIDS, attention to the prevalence of consensual death-discovering sex between black men in prisons and on the outside is conspicuously absent from hip-hop studies in particular and African American studies in general.

5

“How Does It Feel?” A Question of Life and Death in D’Angelo’s “Untitled”

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n 2000, hip-hop soul artist extraordinaire Michael “D’Angelo” Archer released his much-anticipated second album, Voodoo. The album was introduced over U.S. mainstream radio and music video stations in late 1999 with his Grammy-winning single, “(Untitled) How Does It Feel?” As D’Angelo’s lyrical style and captivating visual performance of the song reliably returns to the rather straightforward convention of the soulful R&B ballad, it also contains palpable traces of something else. This sexy love song and its accompanying video were produced in an era when the black male body had come to signify—both literally and figuratively—the very convergence of death and desire in contemporary U.S. popular culture. That is, D’Angelo’s seductive force in the song represents one of the deathly ways in which black men have come to experience a precarious relation to both life and death. Thus, in the highly frenetic space of erotic song, black men’s passionate and emancipatory longing for life becomes inextricably tied to a paradoxical yearning for death, a yearning that exemplifies many black men’s complicity with and, for my purposes, resistance to the erotics of racism in contemporary U.S. popular culture. I am suggesting that “Untitled” serves as a stage upon which D’Angelo sings not only of sexual joy and intimacy but also hints of what is largely deemed nonpermissive in the culture—the possibilities of freedom to be found in the space of death. In looking to “Untitled” as enmeshed within a political economy of life and death meted out in each lyrical phrase and

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vocal vibrato, I want to take seriously if not literally D’Angelo’s mystical assertion in the liner notes of the Voodoo album that he aspires to “seduce and serenade the night and powers of darkness” in order to evoke “the mysteries of the unseen.” While the liner notes go on to paint a rather grandiose picture of D’Angelo as a self-anointed “conjur man” whose artistic genius invokes the spirits of “Jimi [Hendrix], Sly [Stone], Marvin [Gaye], [and] Stevie [Wonder],” the lyrics of “Untitled” (like most of the songs on the Voodoo album) are strikingly bare yet curiously difficult to understand.1 Certainly, the penetrating visual focus of the music video implicitly overshadows the lyrical performance of the song. In part, this privileged attention to D’Angelo’s body and physical movement is symptomatic of the visual medium of music video itself. Famed pop music video director Paul Hunter’s repeated shifting away from D’Angelo’s mouth while he sings—his cutting back and forth between D’Angelo’s face, torso, lower abdomen, and back so that the lyrics appear at moments displaced if not dubbed over the video frame—only magnifies the camera’s wanderlust into the erotic landscape of D’Angelo’s body. Appearing to convey disinterest in the vocal material, Hunter’s photographic if not pornographic gaze slices away at the song’s poetic intelligibility. To make matters more complicated, the music video version of the “original,” full-length song from the album is drastically abridged for television and radio play. Par for the course in a music industry that came to rely on eagerly awaited, larger-than-life music videos as promotional advertisements for the sale of records, the abbreviated and edited music video (as well as the radio edit versions) appeared well before the original version of the song was available for purchase. Given these market constraints and challenges, Hunter’s camera subtly edits out the musical text deemed nonessential. This hyperdigitized reconstitution of the music and music video effectively happens by directing viewers away from what D’Angelo is saying, violently obfuscating if not hollowing out his subjective voice even as the camera returns to accentuate the workings and contours of D’Angelo’s oral cavity. Hunter’s privileging of D’Angelo’s body, the invasive editing of the music video text, and the barren transcription of the lyrics all work to draw attention to the ways in which the song is as elusive as it is “obvious.” If these complications were not enough, the “official translation” of the original song—a reductive if not incomplete account of the actual lyrical content supplied by the liner notes of the album/compact disc jacket—

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conceals much more than it offers up. The first two verses of “Untitled” offer a glimpse into D’Angelo’s songwriting style and lyrical phrasing, providing a picture of foreplay and seduction that rely on a fairly predictable performance of black male sexuality in contemporary black popular music and culture. Confidently declaring his ability to satisfy his lover’s needs, and promising “U Can Decide,” D’Angelo continues with an earnest declaration, “I just wanna be your man.”2 If the lyrics seem uncomplicated, they are also (and perhaps paradoxically) quite hard to follow; the stylized phrasings of D’Angelo’s words are akin to beautiful arrangements of garbled vocalization. A signature technique of his vocal enunciation, D’Angelo’s lyrical approach seems a kind of speaking in tongues that draws on his professed interest in voodoo (as his album title suggests) and his own religious background in the Pentecostal church. Indeed, according to Teresa L. Reed’s study of religion in black popular culture, The Holy Profane, speaking in tongues—a practice that she points out is one of the defining features of Pentecostalism—is “characterized by emotional freedom, intensity, spontaneity and physical expressivity” (16). Drawing from a combination of Caribbean, West African, and U.S. black religious traditions that are invested in reaching a higher level of spirituality through song, D’Angelo’s unintelligibility in “Untitled” hints of a language of ecstatic utterances in which the obvious inferences to carnal desire conceals even more profound possibilities. As D’Angelo told Vibe magazine in a 1995 interview, “I learned that the music part of the [religious] service was just as important as the actual preaching. Someone might not be ready to hear preaching, but a song will touch him. Music is a ministry in itself ” (DeVine-Rinehart). Here D’Angelo’s religiously inflected yet libidinal language suggests what Africanist historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe calls an “erotics of alterity” in which the unintelligibility of D’Angelo’s vocalization (the unspecified oral vicissitudes around the simply stated words of the song) marks an important location for the excavation of the “mysteries of the unseen.”3 Indeed, it seems to me that it is the unintelligibility itself that houses the dream of a hidden if not phantasmatic transcript, where the indecipherable meanings behind D’Angelo’s words and falsetto signify at once erotic death and spiritual hunger. Thus, while D’Angelo’s music video enacts a spectacle of black male suffering and dying, it also performs a kind of desperate (and perhaps inadequate) insurgency against the very violence from which it is compelled into subjection. As literary critic Mae

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Gwendolyn Henderson points out in her influential essay “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition,” to speak in tongues is to “speak in a plurality of voices as well as in a multiplicity of discourses” (22). One of the best examples of this takes place in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) in which a tormented and tortured Paul D and forty-six other black men are humiliated in being relegated to a chain gang. There, in the face of the severest indignity and brutality, these black men’s fraught efforts at redress materialize by “singing love songs to Mr. Death . . . garbling the words so they could not be understood; tricking the words so their syllables yielded up other meanings” (115). Somewhere between “Hi Man’s ‘Hiiii!’ at dawn and the ‘Hoooo!’ when evening came,” buried in the songs “they sang [of ] the women they knew,” behind the pained “eyes sa[ying] ‘[s]teady now’ and ‘[h]ang by me’ ” (115), the black men swayed back and forth between resurrecting and annihilating the life they had once desired. I am not suggesting that D’Angelo’s soul-inspired love song is not what it literally claims to be; to be sure, D’Angelo’s lyrics in this song are assertive if not commanding as he communicates with his lover. But is it possible to read this erotic scene D’Angelo describes—simply stated through a few sexual commands—as evidence of a kind of subversion itself? That is, emanating out of the erotic spectacle of black male death, and between and through his evocative words, can we bear witness to the struggle for life and battle with death? By way of concluding the song D’Angelo wistfully sings, “Baby, close the door / Listen, girl, I have something I wanna show U / I wish you’d open up ’cause / I wanna take the walls down with U . . . (vamp out).” Mbembe offers a compelling argument for the way in which a colonized body ecstatically “invoke[s] muscular strength and the power of dream . . . in order to exorcise itself, to liberate itself, to explain itself ” (182). Mbembe continues: “Grumbling and sweating through an exhausting life, the colonized expresses himself or herself primarily in a fantastic language that, invoking both muscular strength and the power of dream, almost always ends up dissolving into unreality, provoking the liberation of the enslaved, but in the imaginary” (182). While D’Angelo’s lyrics could be readily understood as reproducing their own bodily economy of deathly violence, they also house the imaginative possibilities of grappling with—and potentially liberating oneself from—a history of subjection. That is, I cannot help but hear or, rather,

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“feel” sedimented in D’Angelo’s “fantastic [and erotic] language” the dreams and, perhaps, possibilities of a certain push toward freedom. In this reading of his song and famously choreographed music video, “(Untitled) How Does It Feel?” (Paul Hunter/Dominique Trinier, 1999), I argue that D’Angelo’s performance stages the violent effects of a long and collective history of black male life shaped by the imminent threat of terror, demonstrating how many contemporary black male subjects are always-already invoking narratives of deathly subjection. Informed by Abdul JanMohamed’s excavation of the “ ‘internal’ and ‘external’ horizons of subject formation”—that is, how subjects are enacted into being by power and how subjects are acted upon by power—I emphasize the ways in which the force of racial terror emanates out of the black male body itself.4 Thus, by charting a whole range of painful expressions, evocative stylizations, sexual anxieties, physical preoccupations, and emancipatory yearnings in D’Angelo’s artistic performance, I highlight how the narrative convention of romance in black popular culture—here, highlighted in the hiphop soul of D’Angelo—simultaneously maps and conceals a geography of deathly emotion and narrative dissemblance.5 Reminiscent of the brilliant yet troubled careers of other U.S. black male musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, and even Michael Jackson, D’Angelo’s personal life is deeply burdened by his own emotional and familial turmoil. I should point out that D’Angelo won a Grammy for Best R&B Vocal as well as a Grammy for Voodoo for Best R&B Album. Indeed, at the same time that D’Angelo has been hailed as a musical genius of his generation by music critics and his peers for bringing out hip-hop soul’s brooding complexity and melancholic sensuality, not to mention that he had become one of the best-known sexual icons in U.S. popular culture of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, his public and private battles with alcohol and drugs in the years following the release of his second album, Voodoo (2000), point to overwhelming evidence of his spiraling demise.6 Like so many other young black men of his generation, D’Angelo’s precarious relationship with his father in particular and his own life and death in general might explain how he comes to see and represent himself in contemporary U.S. society. On the liner notes of Voodoo, for example, D’Angelo conveys his deep attachment to an array of black male artists, both dead and alive, after whom he has patterned his music and life:

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We have come in the name of Jimi [Hendrix], Sly [Stone], Marvin [Gaye], Stevie [Wonder], all artists formerly known as spirits and all spirits formerly known as stars. We have come in the tradition of burning bushes, burning ghettos, burning spliffs, and the ever-burning candles of our bedrooms and silent chambers. We have come bearing instruments and our voices; falsetto and baritone, percussions and horns. We have come adorned in the apparel of the anointed; leather and feathers, jeans and t-shirts, linen and cashmere, and even polyester. We have come to seduce and serenade the night and the powers of darkness. We speak of darkness, not as ignorance, but as the unknown and the mysteries of the unseen.7

D’Angelo’s efforts to situate himself as the progeny of black male artists who have been innovators in rock, funk, and soul point not only to his sense of artistic self-importance and purpose but also to his investment in writing (or, rather, “riting”) anew a black paternal bond. Shielded from recollections of his father’s filicidal threats, D’Angelo’s embrace of the spirit lives of other black male musicians provides telling alternatives for imagining new possibilities of black manhood in hip-hop and contemporary black popular culture. Cool, daring, experimentally “free,” and pleasure-seeking, these spirited black men not only sought freedom from the mundane life of working-class black experience through their music but also fought for control over the emotional landscape of their lives.8 But even these spiritually intimate landscapes, where D’Angelo asserts that the “ever-burning candles of [their] bedrooms and silent chambers” are lit, seem curiously bound by the same patriarchal legacies of racial terror— threats of castration, political impotence, and social death—that have historically shaped black male subjectivity. In this regard, D’Angelo’s dutiful charge “to seduce and serenade the night and the powers of darkness” is understood not only as a kind of boastful announcement of his artistic mastery and sexual dominance (see, for example, inside the album sleeve, images of D’Angelo surrounded by a harem of scantily clad black women) but also threatening evidence of a deathly call from Marvin Gaye to Prince to D’Angelo that has long relied upon the erotic performance and violent laboring of black male sexuality.9 While there is no room here for even a brief sketch of the broad range of this tradition of violence directed against and internalized by black

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male musicians, a few observations of Marvin Gaye’s music and ill-fated murder-suicide are necessary for contextualizing my reading of D’Angelo. The two fatal shots fired into Marvin Gaye’s chest by his father in 1984 reverberated throughout U.S. black communities (Marvin’s father, like D’Angelo’s, was a minister). It should be noted that the patriarchal force of racial terror haunting black male sexuality from the 1970s on and the emotively erotic “love songs” pervading contemporary black popular culture of the late 1990s are underscored by the black church tradition, contradictions between spirituality and sexuality, as well as massive campaigns in the popular-public sphere to right the wrongs of black political and social emasculation. For D’Angelo himself, Marvin’s tragic death anxiously resonated in both deeply cultural and familial ways. Speaking about the soul singer in 1999, D’Angelo confesses: [Marvin’s] life scares me. The fear is when I look in the mirror, I see him, in some Sixth Sense way. Not, as in, “I think I’m Marvin Gaye,” but I know he’s there. . . . What upset me is how he died [shot and killed by his father]. My father was a strict disciplinarian who came from that Bill Cosby School of “I brought you in this world, and I’ll take you out!” That was the mantra for every father in the ghetto. And I would remember sometimes he would justify Marvin’s death. As in, he disrespected his father and that was the result—it was like he was letting me know that I, too, could choose the same fate if I ever crossed him. And for the longest my fear was dying the same way. (Touré “Interview”)

Describing the late Marvin Gaye as a shadowy specter haunting his life and music, D’Angelo testifies in this passage not only to the unspeakable legacies of the dead emanating from within but also to the palpable threat of violence pulling him toward death. As he tells the story of his own troubled relationship with his father, D’Angelo literally sees Marvin in himself, acknowledging his own filicidal fear of “dying the same way.” Indeed, D’Angelo reveals that his father, a Pentecostal preacher and “strict disciplinarian,” would implicitly condone Marvin’s death, intimating that he, too, “like every father in the ghetto,” would “take [his son] out if [he] ever crossed him.” So distressing was his unease about being killed, D’Angelo spent years in counseling to get over his fear of dying by his father’s hand.10

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Growing up in Virginia in the post–civil rights era that produced what Mark Anthony Neal identifies as a generation of “soul babies,” D’Angelo was born in 1974 to a family that had known both segregation and desegregation. Even at that time, “the strict code of discipline toward black children [was] just one example of the violence directed within the community to protect it from the violence directed toward the community from beyond” (Neal, Soul Babies 5).11 It is this violence “directed within the community” and its binding relation to the “violence directed toward the community from beyond” that points to a crucial intersection for exploring how black people in general and black men in particular have been incorporated into a racial hegemony structured by the threat and actual deployment of deathly violence. To be sure, for many black men, the unforgotten legacies of white supremacist violence throughout the early and mid-twentieth century—lynching, castration, political and economic disenfranchisement, racial dishonor and disrespect, social infantilization— have since produced not only a profound masculine anxiety concerning the proper assertion of patriarchal authority in black families and communities but also bear the lingering traces of a specifically gendered political project designed to reproduce racist terror within them. In this regard, D’Angelo’s (as well as Marvin’s) fraught relationship with his father beckons readers to explore the filial terrain of black manhood as a deathly site of self-directed violence shaping black male subjectivity in its most sacred and intimate province.12 Evidence of these tormented black father-son relationships abound in the literature and film of U.S. black male writers and filmmakers, from Richard Wright’s “Fire and Cloud” in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and Black Boy (1945), Malcolm X’s Autobiography (1965), and Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler (1994) to Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991), John Singleton’s Boyz in the Hood (1991), Allen and Albert Hughes’s Menace II Society (1993), not to mention the popular feature film Purple Rain (1984) in which superstar melody-maker Prince plays the up-and-coming musician struggling to overcome the abusive pattern of his father.13 To be sure, D’Angelo’s remembrance of horrors past invokes a deeply rooted primal scene across U.S. black male cultures that, in its breach of an implicitly inviolate bond between father and son, becomes insidiously reiterated in the mundane as well as defining moments of his life. Thus, whether it be his deathly recollections, his spiritual beliefs, his “cool pose” postures,14 his bare body in front of the camera, or the soulful sound of his music, D’Angelo’s artistic life and personal

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memory reveal how the paternal symptoms of racial terror are lived out on the son’s body and psyche. What would it mean, then, to read D’Angelo’s signature “love songs” as emanating from the same tainted psychic well from which his body maps the intimate effects of a racialized history of patriarchal violence? Are these soulful and sexy songs endlessly conspiring to play out the terror historically exercised against black male life? Could we not also find in his emotionally and erotically evocative songs the fugitive possibilities of circumventing if not escaping the longue durée of racial terror? Let me offer here a close reading of D’Angelo’s music video, “(Untitled) How Does It Feel?” First airing on VH1, BET, and MTV in December 1999,15 the opening scene of “Untitled” begins with the digital clapstick slate introducing the video. The slate reads: frame number 101, D’Angelo the sync point, take 9, and, across the bottom of the board, the director’s name, Paul Hunter. It is a resourceful technique that both quickly and self-consciously announces the camera’s gaze, offering the prized moment for the celebrity music video director to proclaim possession of his art. Paul Hunter, known for his epic action shots and “inventive style” in hip-hop and rock videos from Lenny Kravitz’s Emmy-winning “American Woman” (1998) and “Fly Away” (1998) to Marilyn Manson’s “I Don’t Like the Drugs (but the Drugs Like Me)” (1998) and Janet Jackson’s “I Get Lonely” (1998) to, more recently, Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” (2005) and the Pussycat Dolls’ “Don’t Cha” (2005), has also received acclaim for his successful crossover into television commercials for Nike’s Air Jordan line, Gap, Coca-Cola (Dasani), and Pepsi. A young, hip, biracial, dreadlocked graduate of California State University–Northridge, Hunter, like a number of other young black male videographers-cum-filmmakers such as Hype Williams, has played a significant role in this “new” production of mainstream imaging. Hunter has nevertheless emerged as the premier director of a medium through which the white male gaze of the music industry and corporate America unapologetically surfaces. Enter D’Angelo. In contrast to most of Hunter’s over-the-top, bigbudget music videos, “Untitled” stands out for its simplicity, its stark, black backdrop. The slow-moving camera begins by clinically observing and isolating segmented parts of its object: D’Angelo’s explicit riffing of Prince—his punctuated phrasing and soulful swagger in the song—only makes the camera’s gaze more overtly erotic. The camera begins with D’Angelo’s right ear, then pans around the back of his head and corn-

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rowed hair, scans in his left ear, and locks onto his eyes; the camera stops, but D’Angelo’s body is made to continue the 360º loop as if positioned on a sculptor’s pedestal or a turntable. The camera fixes on his mouth and D’Angelo begins to sing as the camera slowly opens out to reveal his face, bare shoulders, arms, chest, torso, and lower abdomen. “One could call the video for ‘Untitled (How Does It Feel)’ narcissistic, but in an era when most R&B videos are nothing but ‘bling, bling’ and booty, D’Angelo’s bare naked torso was refreshing,” writes Mark Anthony Neal in his Pop Matters review of D’Angelo’s Voodoo. Such attention to D’Angelo’s body, he continues, suggests that “the video was a striking admission that it is no longer simply about the music; image is damn near everything.” While Neal does not go on to discuss the representational significance of D’Angelo’s “refreshing” bodily image and thereby misses an important opportunity to bring attention to the elusive way black male subjects are served up for the murderous appetites of the marketplace or, conversely, maintain their humanity in the face of dehumanization, cultural and film studies critic Keith Harris situates D’Angelo’s body and music video into what he rightly refers to as “two separate photographic traditions,” offering “an aesthetic and social framework for understanding the performance” (Harris 106). I should add here that the “untitled” moniker curiously affixed to the “how does it feel?” in the title of D’Angelo’s song and music video could be understood as Hunter’s if not D’Angelo’s nod to elevating the music video to the art of photography. Nevertheless, in reading D’Angelo’s “Untitled” against Geoffrey Holder’s Adam (1986) and Robert Mapplethorpe’s well-known photography of black men (1986), Harris’s preoccupation with celluloid, like perhaps the photograph itself, obscures as much about the meaning behind the image as it purports to reveal. That is to say, Harris’s attention to “Untitled” as “a male nude study” in its relation to Holder or as a “self-objectifying erotic object” in its relation to Mapplethorpe functions largely as a study in surfaces, angles, forms, camera zooms, gazes, and visual commodities: D’Angelo’s body and music video are inadvertently rendered at once fixed in time and yet “timeless,” stripped from the deeply rooted matter of history. Saidiya Hartman’s pioneering study of slave performativity and the spectacle of black contentment in Scenes of Subjection (1997) provides one of the central theoretical landings for this chapter’s discussion of the performance of black masculinity and black male sexuality in contemporary black popular and hip-hop culture. Paying close attention to the ways in

Video clips taken from the 1999 music video “(Untitled) How Does It Feel?” directed by Paul Hunter and Dominique Trenier.

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which the slave’s “pleasure was ensnared in a web of domination, accumulation, abjection, resignation, and possibility” (49), Hartman asserts that the enslaved black subject—dancing on the auction block, in the slave quarters as well as “shuck[in] and jiv[in]” as a Zip Coon on the popular stage—“provided the context in which power was challenged and claims made in the name of pleasure, need, and desire” (50). Hartman goes on to elaborate the critical practice of “redress”: Redressing the pained body encompasses operating in and against the demands of the system, negotiating the disciplinary harnessing of the body, and counterinvesting in the body as a site of possibility. In this instance, pain must be recognized in its historicity and as the articulation of a social condition of brutal constraint, extreme need, and constant violence; in other words, it is the perpetual condition of ravishment. . . . This pain might best be described as the history that hurts—the still-unfolding narrative of captivity, dispossession, and domination that engenders the black subject in the Americas. (Scenes 51)

I want to suggest that this “still-unfolding narrative of captivity, dispossession, and domination” can, in many fundamental ways, be mapped out across distinct historical eras. That is, antebellum slavery, Jim Crow society, and, more recently, the proliferation of the prison-industrial complex from the mid-1970s on constitute the horrific horizon of a “perpetual condition of ravishment” or what I have referred to throughout my larger project on black masculinity as the political and cultural legacies of terror and death for enslaved and, subsequently, freed black subjects. This is not at all to argue that the distinct character and historicity of enslaved and freed subjects need be collapsed; to the contrary, while each period has its own unique set of historically terrorizing and deathly characteristics, at the same time all three historical sets of characteristics draw from a “shared reliance on the threat and deployment of actual-death . . . in the process of coercion” (JanMohamed, Death-Bound-Subject 5). Moreover, the boundaries between slavery and Jim Crow and, similarly, between Jim Crow and the proliferation of the prison-industrial complex in the United States throughout the late twentieth century are unavoidably blurred by black subjects whose lives, memories, and generational ties traverse these cultures of terror, both reiterating and detemporalizing the “threat and

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deployment of actual-death.” As Hartman poignantly makes clear in Lose Your Mother (2007), “Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched years ago. This is the afterlife of slavery” (6). To view D’Angelo’s body and music video as a scene of subjection and as evidence of the historical skeins of racial terror and state violence that are woven into the text and stitched into a political economy of the body is to take seriously the ways in which the spirit world of slavery and its afterlife persist not only in the filial relations between black fathers and sons but also in the market-driven imaging and (self-)representation of contemporary black life. Accordingly, my attention to this scene begins by acknowledging both the white patriarchal violence already committed there, already suffered by the black male subject as well as the violence of identification produced through the gaze of the audience. While the very straightforward “love song” convention of “Untitled” appears to belie any tangible signs of violation or degradation, the violence of the camera— the erotic gaze exquisitely examining, dissecting, and exposing D’Angelo’s “captive body,” the use of lighting and shimmer-emitting products on his body to enhance visual stimulation and vitalize the health, strength, and power of the subject, and, at the same time, the containment of D’Angelo’s body in an alternating position of restraint, if not abjection, as the back side of his body is turned to the camera—implicitly “generates” on the music video stage “the rhetoric of a black body as slave commodity, of goods to be inspected and sold” (Marriott, On Black Men 29). Recalling the horrors of the slave auction block, the camera facilitates the re-creation of a terrorizing scene, not just of slave market commodities but also of voyeuristic cannibalism and erotic possession. Thus, the camera functions as a “devouring eye,” an apparatus that “incorporates, eats, through the eyes . . . that wants to look, and look again, in the name of appreciating and destroying, loving, and hating” (27), as David Marriott’s provocative study On Black Men demonstrates. D’Angelo’s body is thus held captive, symbolically reduced to “erotic meat,” probed and penetrated, but also ingested and savored, and ultimately possessed.16

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But the camera—and the market-driven audiences to which it pledges its allegiance—also operates as an apparatus repeatedly called upon to reenact more contemporary scenes of subjection. While the auction block is unconsciously or perhaps suggestively invoked, the image environment of the modern prison openly fills the dark, isolated framing of D’Angelo’s music video. To see the video as a violent initiation into the carceral city, as a kind of virtual tour of the “body cavity search” streaming into “free” society, is to render market-driven representations of hip-hop–identified black men as a kind of currency fueling the corporate-sponsored economy of the prison-industrial complex. D’Angelo’s body itself, identified by its combination of racial, gendered, and class signifiers (black skin, corn-rowed hair, multiple tattoos, fanatical muscularity—the mythological quintessence of prison masculinity), is marked as a site of terror even as it is indulged as a scene of erotic consumption. To be sure, there is something quite curious about the identificatory demand for the inseparable imaging of terror and titillation onto black bodies in general and black male bodies in particular. While the terror of the scene is necessarily disavowed, erotic titillation is foregrounded as one of the dominant spectacles made available for the representation of black male life. Moreover, the “sexy glamorization” of D’Angelo’s racialized body has produced a powerful visual that not only seeks to aestheticize black suffering and sacrifice but also operates as a means of desensitizing audiences to it. Highlighted in the video by the gold necklace with crucifix across his chest, the gold chain bracelet “shackling” his left wrist, his tightened, grasping hands expressing impassioned restraint—all subtly invoke a pained representation of ravishment under the veiled guise of (music) video art. But the aestheticization of black suffering might be even more implicitly profound. Staged against the backdrop of the global AIDS pandemic disproportionately ravaging black lives, D’Angelo’s striking body is also exhibited in the popular culture as the forbidden fruit, a repository of social fear and deathly contagion while, at the same time, quarantined, “made safe,” and turned into a virtual space of erotic longing and voyeuristic consumption. But who makes up these audiences holding D’Angelo’s body captive? Or, rather, who makes up the audiences held captive by the spectacle of D’Angelo’s bodily image? If “different readers make different readings” (204), as Kobena Mercer suggests in Welcome to the Jungle (1994), then D’Angelo’s bodily image—at least among U.S. blacks—may be seen at once for b-boys and bohos (and even buppies) as a life-affirming yet ideal-

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ized projection of the self, for banjee boys and homo-thugs as a thinly veiled poster child for life “on the down low,” and for black straight women and lesbians as lover, brother, and son. I should point out that Mercer’s argument concerning the possibility of a liberatory gaze among audiences, particularly black gay men (but also and implicitly black women), remains in this reading inextricably bound by the violence of the pornographic gaze. Nevertheless, seeing D’Angelo’s “Untitled” through a black feminist or black queer lens, for example, offers the occasion to juxtapose D’Angelo’s body against hyper-eroticized representations of black women’s/black queer bodies in black popular culture as well as to grapple with the myriad ways in which other marginalized blacks have at once been hailed into and resisted the devouring call toward violence through the erotic gaze of the marketplace. But rather than supply a reading here of the different audiences for the music video, or a reading of black women/queer bodies in relation to D’Angelo’s, I want to focus on D’Angelo’s bodily image as a deathly site of masculine anxiety for black men. To do so is to ask: How have black men in particular been anxiously captivated and engrossed by recognizing their own deathly eroticism symbolized in D’Angelo’s image? Drummer and close friend Ahmir Thompson,17 otherwise known as ?uestlove of the alternative hip-hop group The Roots, spoke on the subject of D’Angelo’s deathly eroticism during his 2003 Voodoo concert tour: The first night of the Voodoo tour the “take-it-off” chants started not ten minutes into the show. This is a three-hour show. And he had mastered all the tricks from the Yodas [or masters]. The Al Green Yoda tricks of him giving a wink to the drummer, and all the music stops, and Al Green goin’ away from the mic and singing to the audience without the microphone. We planned every trick out. But the girls are like, “Take it off! Take it off!” That put too much pressure on him. (Touré “Interview”)

D’Angelo’s provocative performance in the “Untitled” video, which undoubtedly incited the “take-it-off” chants during the Voodoo tour, relies on a subtle logic of disavowal and displacement. Teasing the transgressive limits of what is socially permissive (that is, we almost but never quite get “the full monty”), D’Angelo’s upper body becomes a powerful site of phallic transference and a text that draws from a familiar well of racial fantasy. While invoking images such as Nicholas Muray’s celebrated “Paul Robe-

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son” photograph taken in 1925 and Leni Riefenstahl’s resurfacing of the now-famed image of Nuba wrestlers in 1976,18 D’Angelo’s choreographed movement of muscle(s) nevertheless suggests more than just the violent gaze of racial desire; his body is made to enact a sexual scene, to do sex work, a sort of peep show that hails the black subject into an erotic bond of subjection. Thus, his bare black skin becomes not only publicly exposed by the camera but animatedly cathected by it, producing, figuratively and literally, what Achille Mbembe calls a state of erection (182). According to Mbembe, the main components of this state of erection are “retraction, relaxation, retention, obliteration, and discharge . . . a violence that one inflicts on Oneself: self-exhaustion, self-crucifixion, the void that is the founding moment and paradox from which all this is deployed” (182). (Interestingly, this is a scene that curiously evokes the passage in Ralph Ellison’s 1952 classic novel Invisible Man, where the black male protagonist finds himself made to “get hot!” both in the battle royal scene and the factory hospital as the white doctors look on, forcing him to undergo a lobotomy as a corrective for his alleged cultural pathology.)19 Indeed, I am reminded in D’Angelo’s video of how the camera—with its piercingly focused eye stretched open—closely hones in on, relishes, and reaches out to touch D’Angelo’s abdomen as it crunches and compresses, relaxes and extends, over and over again until the body exhausts, de-animates, and withdraws for a moment of respite and relief. What begins as a seductive taunt advances to unabashed foreplay, and then after a period of calm in which the sexual energy and music crescendos, the erotic energy of the performance forcefully returns and slowly swells to an epiphanous discharge and dénouement. To be sure, D’Angelo’s erotic performance stages a riveting though implicitly violent sex act in which D’Angelo is made to carry out his much anticipated “petit mort” as a symbol of his own deathly urge. Here, black men’s erotic environments are rendered rank, tainted, and exposed to the terms of bare life. The complicated terrain of consent, produced out of a history not of their own choosing, becomes both a carnivorous site of deathly feasting as well as an occasion for attempting to undermine the annihilating aims of a society fueled by deathly violence. D’Angelo’s participation in this performance necessarily raises the question of what it means for black men to be entangled in the production of erotic fantasy that crudely reduces his artistic life to its murderously marketable value. That the trafficking of commodifiable images of black men appear a ubiquitous “fact” of contemporary black popular culture

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is merely to witness the engulfing “spirit of violence . . . insinuat[ing] itself into the economy, [into] domestic life . . . in sleep and [in] dream” (Mbembe 175). Indeed, looking at D’Angelo’s naked body as a commodity cunningly disavowed of its insemination by violence, where black male subjects are curiously compelled by the will of the market, is to see his body opened up to a biological technology of power, what Foucault called “biopower” in his History of Sexuality. D’Angelo’s “dreamy” body, thus, comes to epitomize how black male sexuality is productively used not only to rouse the flow of capital but in so doing also to discipline the body into a perversely panoptic obedience. Ahmir Thompson, the wellknown statesman of The Roots and D’Angelo’s drummer on the Voodoo tour, would make this point concerning his pressured consent startlingly clear as he describes D’Angelo’s obsessive preoccupation with his body’s definition: Some nights on tour he’d look in the mirror and say, “I don’t look like the [Untitled] video.” . . . It was totally in his mind, on some Kate Moss shit. So, he’d say, “Lemme do 200 more stomach crunches.” He’d literally hold the show up for half an hour just to do crunches. We would hold the show for an hour and a half if he didn’t feel mentally prepared or physically prepared. Some shows got cancelled because he didn’t feel physically prepared, but it was such a delusion. (Touré “Thompson”)

D’Angelo’s “delusion” about not being “mentally and physically prepared”—in other words, not just his inability to distinguish “reality” from fantasy but also his getting lost in the fiction of that fantasy—appears symptomatic of what Jean Baudrillard refers to as “hyperreality,” in which neither D’Angelo nor his fans can effectively differentiate between lived experience and highly stylized simulation. Despite his jutting lower abdomen in the music video—in particular, the transverse, internal, and external oblique muscles—that stands out as weirdly and even intriguingly nonhuman, D’Angelo’s compulsive efforts during the tour and after to maintain the hipline of what can only be likened to a Ken doll or marionette ultimately proved futile.20 Perhaps it is a sign of the times in which alienated yet commercially exploitable young urban black men have found their dream of “self-made” American celebrity through an almost surgical self-fashioning of the body.21 Even so, D’Angelo’s anxiety about preserving

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Mug shot of D’Angelo, c. 2006.

the eternalness of his video image in “real life” reveals not only how television is “luring us into a world of simulacra from which there is no escape” (Blum 255), but also how U.S. popular culture works to colonize the body into an implicitly violent subjection. For black men, in particular, the body is further subjected to a range of racial commandments in which black men are often compelled to publicly perform—both symbolically and in actuality—a sacrificial rite of their own undignified death. Most commonly staged is the televisual littering of violently dying or violently dead black men, as depicted, for example, in Ed Burns’s hugely popular HBO series The Wire (2002–8).22 Less often, but equally problematic, the black male body becomes an imagined site of reconstruction and genetic manipulation, an experimental site of racial reincarnation if not uplift. This seems precisely the concern in Spike Lee’s controversial if not misogynistic film She Hate Me (2004) in which Jack Armstrong (Anthony Mackie), an attractive, thirty-one-year-old Harvard-educated black man, is forcibly cast out of the bio-tech industry and into the “baby-making business”—selling his sperm to lesbians—for $10,000 a “pop.” Moving

A Question of Life and Death in D’Angelo’s “Untitled”

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from the burlesque to the morose, She Hate Me suggests that “strong, viable black men,” particularly those who are well educated, straight, infection-free, and teeming with the stuff of life, are not only a “dying breed” but constitute an incomparable commodity. Indeed, in the zeitgeist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, when good black men are being regularly invoked as “endangered,” Lee takes aim at a society that crudely diminishes black men to their most reductive yet elemental part. Because the plot of the film seems largely far-fetched, a flight of his cinematic imagination, Lee’s unease over the pillaging of black male life is overtly palpable. And while Jack is guilty of becoming a “stud-for-hire,” an unemployed black man who pursues his American dream one impregnation at a time, Lee’s indignation seems most acutely directed to a lesbian duo of “glamazon gal pals,” Jack’s former fiancée, Fatima (Kerry Washington), and Alex (Dania Ramirez), her exquisitely beautiful Dominican lover. Though Fatima is portrayed as brazen in her entrepreneurial zeal for “pimping the playa” in Jack, it is Alex, Fatima’s disgruntled partner, who unambiguously clarifies for him what he and his body have been reduced to in their lesbian world. She bluntly proclaims, “We see you as dick, balls, and sperm.”23 No doubt a scathing commentary on the dehumanizing place black male subjects have come to occupy in contemporary U.S. popular culture, Lee’s imaginings of a besieged black manhood in She Hate Me stages a scene of subjection that curiously and perhaps satirically invokes D’Angelo’s “Untitled” music video. However, in Lee’s misanthropic vision for the film, it is five vampirish lesbians (Nadia, a bookish biracial black woman; Omi, an Asian woman; Evelyn, a well-known black rap diva who refers to herself as the “wicked bitch of the East Side Riders”; Rachel, a scrutinizing Jewish woman; and Song Gupta, a meek Indian woman) who openly “hawk” Jack’s body for his biological seed. In a scene called “The Interview,” Jack is commandeered into his role as commodity as Fatima and Alex introduce their prized possession for sexual purchase. After initiating the financial transaction (that is, signing donor waiver forms and paying for his insemination services), Rachel delays the process with concerns about Jack’s high price of service. Determined to make her judicious customers happy, Fatima prompts Jack to strip in order to assure them that he is worth every bit of their $10,000 investment. As the women cajole him to “disrobe” (Evelyn callously barks, “Just strip, bitch!”), Jack undresses down to his underwear. Nadia prods him further, “Can you drop

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your drawers, please?” As Jack finally bares all, the women are immediately “sold,” reinforcing in one quick gaze the well-established myth of black male virility. Moreover, as he is made to endure a humiliating turnabout in order to give the women “a good look,” Jack’s body transforms—by Lee’s strategic use of shadowing and backlighting—not just into an object of desire but a mythical relic of the past, a resurrection of the “original [black] man,” who in an opportunistic era of surplus capitalism refashions his recently idled labor power into a sellable sexual service and begrudgingly allows his body to be mined for its bio-booty and made into a “thing of value.”24 One cannot help but read these self-objectifying scenes as engaging a palpable anxiety about the erotic violence shaping black male subjectivity in contemporary U.S. popular culture. That is, both Lee’s She Hate Me and Hunter’s/D’Angelo’s “(Untitled) How Does It Feel?” represent black men at the center of a racial and gendered economy in which they are imagined and imagine themselves as at once desired and under siege, the procreative symbol of life itself and yet facing the imminent threat of death. Indeed, the erotic violence implicitly represented on screen, that at once erects and emasculates black masculinity, strikes me as related to if not symptomatic of a political violence pressuring black male subjects beyond the pale of the polity and into a social condition of racialized abandon—poverty, imprisonment, war, social isolation, drug abuse, mental illness, AIDS—culminating most often in the enveloping threat of social, symbolic, or actual death. Here reside the ghosts of Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas, Chester Himes’s Bob Jones, James Baldwin’s Rufus Scott, and Ralph Ellison’s invisible man. The real-life stories, too, of U.S. black male musicians such as Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix, Donnie Hathaway, and Marvin Gaye, to name only a few who died tragically in a mysterious haze of delirium, point to an insidious history of violence directed against and internalized by black men. But their untimely deaths also indicate a longing relation with death that has yet to be entirely unraveled.

Notes

Introduction 1. Wallace’s third album, Born Again (1999), would also seem to solidify the important link to Biggie’s symbolic death(s) on the previous two albums and, as the title suggests, as a site of rebirth and an organizing arc of Biggie’s existential horizon. I am reminded here of Eduardo Cadava’s work in “The Guano of History” in which he writes, “What is at stake here is a body that bears the traces of what it undergoes, the trace of its decomposition but also its transformation into commodities and capital, its inscription within an exploitative economic system of international dimensions” (138). 2. Heeding Saidiya Hartman’s incisive move to avoid “reinforc[ing] the spectacular character of black suffering,” I have elected to leave out graphic descriptions of the murder of Wallace “in order to call attention to the ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated, the casualness with which they are circulated, and the consequences of this routine display of the . . . ravaged [black] body” (Scenes 3). See Cheo Hodari Coker’s The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Notorious B.I.G. (2003) or Jake Brown’s Ready to Die: The Story of Biggie Smalls: Fast Money, Puff Daddy, Faith, and Life after Death—The Unauthorized Biography (2004) for a detailed description of the spectacular life and death of Christopher Wallace. While Wallace’s death remains unsolved, his family was awarded $1.1 million as a result of a lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), claiming that a corrupt LAPD officer and Marion “Suge” Night, founder of Death Row Records and recording label of Tupac Shakur, colluded to kill Wallace. Even as I write this introduction, the deathly violence saturating the world of hard-core rappers is ubiquitous: in Detroit on April 11, 2006, thirty-two-year-old rapper Proof (b. Deshaun Holton) of the rap group D-12 was fatally shot in the head outside of a club. Proof is just the latest addition to a long list of rappers murdered in hip-hop’s history, including Run-D.M.C.’s Jam Master Jay in 2002 and Scott La Rock in 1987. For more on Proof ’s murder,

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see Ben Schmitt and Kelley L. Carter, “D12 Rapper Proof Killed in Shooting at Afterhours Nightclub,” Detroit Free Press, April 13, 2006. 3. To be clear, I am not talking specifically about the importance of his unsolved murder, the quest to bring the responsible individual(s) to justice, and the lawsuits filed by Wallace’s family against the police for failing to properly conduct their murder investigation; undoubtedly, these points have been covered tirelessly by the media. 4. Sociologist Orlando Patterson offers an astute reading of the contemporary discourse on “black male self-destructiveness” in a New York Times op-ed piece, “A Poverty of the Mind,” March 26, 2006. In this piece, Patterson asserts, “Why do we ignore the culture behind young blacks’ plight? . . . The main cause for this shortcoming is a deep-seated dogma that has prevailed in social science and policy circles since the mid-1960s: the rejection of any explanation that involves a group’s cultural attributes—its distinctive attitudes, values, and predispositions, and the resulting behavior of its members—and the relentless preference for relying on structural factors like low income, joblessness, poor schools and bad housing.” 5. My use of the term “the state” draws generally from Max Weber’s 1919 description of the state as “men dominating men through a relation supported by means of ‘legitimate’ violence or as supreme ‘legitimate’ authority entrusted with the exercise of violence force over a group of people.” More specifically, I draw from Michel Foucault’s application of the state as an ensemble of coercive and administrative institutions of power present at every level of the social body—the family, the army, the school, the police, the hospital. My use of the state also entails a broader scope, encompassing “political power” that functions as a totalizing web of control. I would mention, however, that Foucault builds his argument of the disciplinary control of the state around the sustainability of life or, rather, a kind of “death-in-life” for subjected bodies. Drawing on Joy James’s critique of Foucault, I argue that for black subjects, the disciplinary goal is most often not surveillance, self-policing, and life but violent spectacle, brutal force, and death. Thus, my reading of Foucault constitutes a “disidentificatory” relation to Foucault whereby my use of the “state” is focused on the intersectional aspects of Foucault’s normative state and James’s reconceptualization of it. Intersectionality, thus, calls attention to conflicts and strife between working definitions. 6. I am making an explicit reference here to Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life” from his text Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998). Agamben writes concerning the significance of exception to sovereignty, The relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally not

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possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order. . . . The matchless potentiality of the nomos, its originary “force of law,” is that it holds life in its ban by abandoning it. (28–29)

7. Tupac’s repeated near-death instances from gunshot wounds made him infamous and became the stuff of which legends are made. Biggie horrifically reveals his own obsession with the traversing of death in “Suicidal Thoughts.” 8. The references in this quote to Beatstreet and New Jack are references to the ghetto-identified films Beatstreet (1984) and New Jack City (1991) in which the urban decay of New York is juxtaposed with the burgeoning youth culture and crack trade of 1980s Black America. Wallace’s reference to Ramon in Beatstreet is a reference to the tragic tale of a graffiti artist. Similarly, Wallace’s mention of Pookie in New Jack City captures the “nihilistic threat” of the crack trade among young black men. 9. I am reminded here of a 1994 Vibe interview with rap artist DMX in which journalist Karen R. Good asserts: “Some black men, X men, are so absolutely scared of—or familiar with—death and its gradual approach, that they’ve embraced it . . . so familiar with its formidability, they call on it, challenge it, shadow box. . . . And though there is nobility in confronting fears, living to die ain’t noble or fearless. It ain’t living” (qtd. in Holland 179–80). 10. Coincidentally, bell hooks’s book We Real Cool borrows its title from Gwendolyn Brooks’s short but powerful poem of the same name. Brooks’s poem sadly points to black men’s preoccupation with dying as a space of cool. 11. As Robin Kelley put it, “They [young poor urban black men] are race rebels much like Richard Wright’s ‘Bigger Thomas,’ products of capitalist transformation, urban decay, persistent racism, male pathos, and nihilistic imaginations, struggling to create a collective identity that reflects their race, gender, class, and location in the city” (Race Rebels 12). 12. Just four years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Furman v. Georgia case in 1972 that the death penalty was unconstitutional, it was reinstated with a vengeance. 13. These include mandatory minimum sentences, truth-in-sentencing laws, “three strikes” laws, “bait-and-switch” sentencing laws, the notorious Rockefeller laws of 1974, to name but a few. 14. This thinking on state violence is particularly compelling for prison abolitionist Angela Y. Davis, who is continually trying to think about the ways that the prison reproduces forms of racism based on the traces of slavery that can still be discovered within the contemporary criminal justice system. There is, I believe, a clear relationship between the rise of the prison-industrial complex in the era of global capitalism and the persistence of structures in the punishment system that originated with slavery. I argue, for example, that the most compelling explanation for

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the routine continuation of capital punishment in the U.S.—which, in this respect, is alone among industrialized countries in the world—is the racism that links the death penalty to slavery. (Abolition Democracy 35)

15. For statistical information from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, see http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm. 16. Project 100,000 was an insidious policy utilized by the U.S. government during the Vietnam War to enlist primarily black, Latino, and poor white “low aptitude” recruits into the war effort. In the end, over 246,000 soldiers previously deemed “ineligible” for duty were called into service. 17. See Eric Lott’s critique of Cornel West’s concept of the “nihilistic threat” in urban Black America in “Cornel West in the Hour of Chaos.” 18. See “Homicide Trends in the United States: 2002 Update” from the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the U.S. Department of Justice: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ bjs/homicide/homtrnd.htm. 19. Psychologist Keith Barrett has examined funeral practices of gang members in the Los Angeles area who buy burial plots in anticipation of their own deaths. 20. Implicit in this thug imaginary is a “political unconscious,” if you will, where buried within these cultural texts exist the “psycho-political-ideological” traces of utopian possibilities. 21. Implicit here is a Foucauldian sensibility concerning the surveilling function of the panoptic “play of signs” whereby individuals partake in the damaging production and reproduction of racialized identities. As Foucault will assert in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), Our society is not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. (217; emphasis added)

22. I find it useful when speaking of the lives of poor urban black men to employ the term “black male subjectivities” in order to convey an understanding of black male selfhood that accounts for black men’s assertion of agency, their subjection within asymmetrical power relations, as well as the range of lived experiences, ideology, and representations pertaining to a diversity of poor urban black men in the United States. 23. Kimberly Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality establishes a model of critique that accounts for the convergences of multiple identity markers (i.e., race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.) in such a way as to simultaneously write against the

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impulse to privilege one identity marker at the expense of another one. One way to make sense of intersectionality is to consider it as a way of accounting for the normatizing tendency in cultural critique. 24. Consistently, a number of black and Latino rap artists since the 1980s have appropriated, either consciously or unconsciously, the “Big” prefix as a mark of their solidarity to the bad nigger. Emcees such as the Notorious B.I.G. and Big Punisher (a.k.a. Big Pun), among others, have attempted to follow in the footsteps of a host of other rap artists who preceded them, including Big Bank Hank (Sugar Hill Gang), Big Daddy Kane, Big Al (Nemesis), and Big Mike, who in the varying forms attributed to the bad nigger expressed their own unique “brand of critical social consciousness” (Davis, Blues 197). 25. JanMohamed speculates in his own analysis of the death-bound subject in Richard Wright’s writings about the contemporary traces of “death-dream-work” in the rap music of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. (Death-Bound-Subject 3). In these “death-dream” structures a “work of art . . . is designed to resolve contradictions that cannot be resolved in reality” (12).

Chapter 1 1. According to Drake and Cayton, Chicago’s other populations, “native white” and “foreign-born white and other races,” increased from 1,357,840 and 783,340, respectively, in 1910 to 1,783,687 and 808,560 in 1920 and to 2,275,674 and 866,861 in 1930. 2. Despite the intolerable treatment of blacks in the South, accommodationist black political leader Booker T. Washington adamantly warned against blacks migrating to the North and upsetting the social and political order of American society. Also, see Ida B. Wells’s On Lynchings (1892) and Paula Giddings’s When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984). Wells compiles one of the most complete records of racial violence and lynchings. The long history of blacks being lynched in the South began during the 1870s but continued to a significant degree well into the first quarter of the twentieth century. 3. The “Black Belt” refers to the section of Chicago in which an overwhelming proportion (90 percent) of the black community lived and, through circumstance and segregation, were forced to remain. Increasingly, the Black Belt became more concentrated as more and more blacks moved into Chicago. Drake and Cayton wrote, “By 1940, this area in Chicago had virtually ceased to expand in size, but new migrants to the city were pouring into it, and very few Negroes were trickling out into other parts of the city” (174). “Black Belt” also refers to what W. E. B. Du Bois describes in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) as the geographical “centre of those nine million men who are America’s dark heritage from slavery and the

148 Notes to Chapter 1

slave-trade” (78). Locating the Black Belt in the heart of Georgia, Du Bois maps the Black Belt as “two hundred miles south of Atlanta, two hundred miles west of the Atlantic, and one hundred miles north of the Great Gulf lies Dougherty County, with ten thousand Negroes and two thousand whites” (79). See the sections therein titled “Of the Black Belt” and “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece” for a further elaboration of the southern Black Belt. Also see Charles S. Johnson’s Growing Up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South (1941). 4. The “black underclass” was a phrase coined by William Julius Wilson in The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) to describe the black urban poor. While Wilson’s definition has been greatly utilized and generally accepted by social scientists, it is a definition which is imbued with several faulty premises. That is, implicit in his understanding of the black underclass is the presumption of a “deficient” culture or a “culture of poverty” that has emerged in the face of economic adversity. 5. According to Edward Margolies in Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Writers (1968), Wright was “born the son of a tenant farmer outside Natchez in September, 1908. When he was six, his father abandoned his family and his mother was left in sole charge of Richard and his younger brother” (67). Asserting his familiarity with southern black folk traditions, Wright comments in White Man Listen! (1957), “Because I feel personally identified with the migrant Negro, his folk songs, his ditties, his wild tales of bad men; and because my own life was forged in the depths in which they live, I’ll tell first of them” (85–86). 6. In LeRoi Jones’s Blues People, he writes, “The Garvey Movement, even though ill-fated, enjoyed a great deal of popularity among poorer Negroes, and it is important to realize that even at the time of World War I and the years directly following, the Negro masses had not moved so far into the mainstream of American life that they could forget there was an Africa out of which their forebears had been taken and to which they themselves might yet have to return” (114). 7. In Alain Locke’s 1941 review of Native Son, he raises this very question of representationality: “What about Bigger? Is he typical, or as some hotly contest, misrepresentative?” (19). 8. Wright has this to say about Bigger’s detachment from other blacks: “I had also to show what oppression had done to Bigger’s relationships with his own people, how it had split him off from them, how it had baffled him; how oppression seems to hinder and stifle in the victim those very qualities of character which are so essential for an effective struggle against the oppressor” (NS 452–53). 9. In his recent study of black masculinity, Black Manhood (2002), Keith Clark reiterates Baldwin’s critique: “Echoing Ellison, [Baldwin] castigated masculinist protest and its archetypal document, Native Son, for effacing the ‘humanity’ of black people” (66). 10. In Who Set You Flowin’ (1995), Farah Jasmine Griffin also points to the

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construction of urban black male spaces or, as she calls them, “the street culture space” of men (110). However, her reading emphasizes a troubled world in which “male protagonists give up any hope of dreaming and seek instead to carve out some degree of manhood in a male-defined street culture and its accompanying spaces” (110). Keith Clark, too, condemns Wright’s “street-identified” black male community in Native Son as “debased” and “reiterates how Bigger’s combustible relationships with other black men become nothing more than testosteronesodden competitions in which he defines himself by standards of patriarchal masculinity” (24). 11. Positivism, as an epistemological method, suggests that one’s humanity can be measured by “observable facts”; accordingly, this approach to knowledge fails to address what Raymond Williams points to in Keywords (1983) as a neglect of “experiences and questions which are not ‘measurable’ in this way” (239). Does Butler “neglect experiences and questions which are not ‘measurable’ ” according to “observable facts” such as compassionate behavior, kind acts, and so on? 12. Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper and Row, 1945), 284. Here I am borrowing from Abdul R. JanMohamed’s insightful “Negating the Negation.” JanMohamed adds, “Wright’s strategy requires that such stereotypes not be denied through simple negation but rather that they be exploded through a demonstration of how racist society forces blacks to conform to these stereotypes” (301n5). 13. I am borrowing here from Judith Butler’s analysis of gender performativity in Bodies That Matter. 14. The unlikely prospects of landing menial jobs were often referred to as a situation in which blacks were “forced to ‘only stand and wait’ at relief stations, on street corners, in poolrooms and taverns, in policy stations and churches, for opportunities that never came and for the work which eluded both them and their white fellow-hopers” (Drake and Cayton 523). 15. Wright’s reference to antagonistic black-Jewish relations in Native Son is supported by the violent anti-Semitic campaign of 1938. According to St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton Jr. in Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), “The inhabitants of the Black Ghetto grow restless in their frustration, penned in, isolated, overcrowded. During a depression or a war (the periods covered by this account), the consciousness of their exclusion and subordination is tremendously heightened. Within this spatial and social framework morale tends to be low and tempers taut. Anti-Semitic sentiments are latent” (213). 16. bell hooks writes in Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995): “Within black life, as well as in mainstream society, males prove they are ‘men’ by the exhibition of antisocial behavior, lack of consideration for the needs of others, refusal to communicate, unwillingness to show nurturance and care. Here I am not speaking

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about traits adult males cultivate, I am talking about the traits little boys learn early in life to associate with manhood and act out” (74). 17. In her recent essay, “This Disease Called Strength,” Trudier Harris describes the historical legacy of black men’s psychic internalization of physical strength. She writes, Many black men, who have been taught to rely on their own bodies more than anything else, have simultaneously been taught—through history, popular culture, and their own communities—that their bodies are physically superior to those of the frail, “puny” white men who enslaved them. This superior physical strength therefore enables them to endure—and withstand— extreme physical duress. They can carry more weight (think of black men’s historical work on levees or in cotton fields or other physically demanding situations), fight harder (boxing, physical contests during slavery), run longer (escape from slavery), jump higher (sports), and withstand more (war, prison)—or so they believe . . . and die in a culturally defined drama that will value how they are “laid to rest” just as enthusiastically as they valued the strength that led to their deaths. (37–38)

A further extension of Harris’s thesis can be correlated to young urban black men in prisons (i.e., prisons as a rite of passage to black manhood). 18. See Black Metropolis for an elaborated discussion of housing segregation in Chicago’s Black Belt. 19. Here I am making a reference to Keneth Kinnamon’s research that points to Wright’s omission in his galley proofs of this particular scene. 20. Here Maurice Wallace is drawing from Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) in which she asserts an inextricable relation between “homosocial” and “homosexual.” Indeed, Sedgwick makes the claim that the “homosocial” is unavoidably bound or caught up in the “orbit of ‘desire’ ” associated with the “dreaded” site of homosexuality (1). 21. Several recent studies by Maurice Wallace, Keith Clark, and Antiwan Walker have paid attention to the sexual dynamics operating in Richard Wright’s Native Son. Furthermore, Margaret Walker’s analysis of Wright’s life draws compelling connections between Wright’s problematic personal relations with black women in general and his mother in particular. 22. Stone continues, “and to every one of y’all behind bars, you know that Angie loves ya.” . . . “whenever you’re facin’ doubt / brothas gonna work it out.” “I love you.”

Chapter 2 1. John Austin, aka Ras Kass, is a hard-core rap artist from Watts, California, who shortly after the death of Eldridge Cleaver offered a tribute to his book

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Soul on Ice. Ras Kass’s debut album, Soul on Ice, was released in 1996, and his second album, Rassassination, in 1999. Ras Kass has also collaborated with the Wu-Tang Clan’s infamous producer, RZA, on albums by Killa Priest and Bobby Digital, and, more recently, fellow West Coast rappers Xzibit and Saafir, forming the group Golden State Warriors. 2. It should be noted that Cleaver later made an abrupt and puzzling (or perhaps opportunistic) shift to the right, rejecting his past radicalism and embracing a religious and political conservatism very much at odds with his previous pronouncements and political activities. Cultural critic Manning Marable points out in his Race, Reform, and Rebellion (1991) that Cleaver’s eventual shift away from the rebellious spirit of the 1960s exemplified the “triumph of Reaganism” during the 1980s. Marable asserts, “By the early 1980s, Cleaver had not only repudiated his old Black Panther ties but actually had joined forces with racist mass conservatism.” Marable cites a February 1982 interview in which Cleaver declared: God came to France and tapped me on my shoulder and said, “Eldridge, follow me.” . . . [Americans] don’t believe or even manifest any awareness of what makes our democratic form of government different from other forms of government. They don’t understand and appreciate the great battles and triumphs and victories that were involved in creating this country. We are still the most free and the most democratic country in the world. I think America is the greatest country in the world. I really feel in my heart that America really needs to take control of the world. . . . Black people are notorious for sitting on the sidelines complaining, but they won’t get off their butts and go vote and so they are taking no responsibility for what happens except they have full responsibility for not doing anything to make it happen differently. I believe that instead of black people hating the police department, I think they need to join the police department . . . and make it our own. (83–84)

See Early Anthony’s “Interview: Eldridge Cleaver,” Players 8 (February 1982): 27–35 for the complete interview. William L. Van Deburg writes in New Day in Babylon, Eldridge Cleaver surrendered first to God and then to the authorities. After returning from overseas in 1975 to face assault charges, he negotiated a probation/community service sentence and began a new career as a spokesperson for evangelical Christianity, anti-communism, and mainline American patriotism. His “brand new friends, brothers and sisters in Christ” included Watergate conspirator-turned-prison evangelist Charles Colson, television evangelist Jerry Falwell, and members of CARP, the politically conservative campus-based affiliate of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. (300–301)

3. Cleaver stated in “Notes on a Native Son” that “homosexuality is a sickness, just as are baby-rape or wanting to be the head of General Motors” (110).

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Furthermore, Cleaver expounded on the protagonist of James Baldwin’s Another Country: “Rufus Scott, a pathetic wretch who indulged in the white man’s pastime of committing suicide, who let a white bisexual homosexual fuck him in his ass, and who took a Southern Jezebel for his woman, with all that these tortured relationships imply, was the epitome of a black eunuch who has completely submitted to the white man” (107). 4. See Don A. Schanche’s The Panther Paradox: A Liberal’s Dilemma for more on Cleaver’s background. Schanche writes, “Born in a small town in Kansas, Cleaver moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was ten years old. At the age of thirteen, he was sent to reform school for breaking into a store. This was merely the beginning” (34). Robert Brisbane’s Black Activism: Racial Revolution in the U.S., 1954–1970 also provides useful biographical notes. 5. Examples include the Watts Uprising of 1965, as well as the summer uprisings of ’66, ’67, and ’68, in which blacks who openly contested police brutality and the ongoing economic malaise came into direct contact with violent police force. Also, disproportionate numbers of blacks fought in Vietnam and consequently suffered the greatest percentage of deaths in combat. 6. Van Deburg, for example, argues that “leaders of the Black Panther Party . . . conceptualized their own organization as the spiritual successor to the OAAU [Organization of Afro-American Unity]—a living testament to Malcolm’s life’s work. Having announced the inheritance, they proceeded to elaborate upon one component of the Muslim’s leader’s multifaceted ideology: self-defense of the black community” (3). 7. It should be noted that while Malcolm X ultimately renounced his earlier sexist views concerning the role of black women during the 1960s, he is most notably remembered for his impassioned patriarchal speeches. For instance, in his famous speech “The Ballot or the Bullet,” Malcolm X asserts, “The political philosophy of black nationalism means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his own community” (1964). 8. West mentioned this during a public lecture at the University of Texas in 1994, shortly after the publication of Race Matters (1994). 9. Marable 42–45. 10. Robert Butler, author of Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero (1991), notes: Wright’s example as a politically engaged writer who had a deeper understanding of how the social environment affected individual black people inspired a whole generation of black activist writers of the sixties and seventies who read Native Son as a novel containing powerful “relevance” to their own situations. Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), with its gritty description of Harlem life, is clearly cut from the same bolt of cloth

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Wright wove for Native Son, and Eldridge Cleaver in Soul on Ice (1968) characterizes himself as a native son moving in a direction Wright helped to define. (11)

11. Consider Mike Davis’s compelling reading of the unified response enacted by an increasingly politicized black community, particularly those belonging to the South Central Los Angeles gang culture: For gang members [the Watts Uprising] was “The Last Great Rumble,” as formerly hostile groups forgot old grudges and cheered each other on against the hated LAPD and the National Guard. . . . It is not really surprising, therefore, that in the late 1960s the doo-ragged, hardcore street brothers and sisters, who for an extraordinary week in 1965 had actually driven the police out of the ghetto, were visualized by Black Power theorists as the strategic reserve of Black Liberation, if not its vanguard. . . . There was a potent moment in this period, around 1968–9, when the Panthers—their following soaring in the streets and high schools—looked as if they might become the ultimate revolutionary gang. (297–98)

12. Cultural critic Wahneema Lubiano affirms this sentiment in her essay “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense”: Black nationalism is a constantly reinvented and reinventing discourse that generally opposes the Eurocentricism of the U.S. state, but neither historically nor contemporaneously depends upon a consistent or complete opposition to Eurocentrism. As conservative thinker Wilson Moses argues, black nationalism does not necessarily entail a complete rejection of the EuroAmerican cultural tradition. In fact, one consistent black feminist critique of black nationalist ideology is that it insufficiently breaks with patriarchal modes of economic, political, cultural (especially familial), and social circulations of power that mimic Euro-American modes. (234)

Also, Larry Neal’s essay, “New Space: The Growth of Black Consciousness in the Sixties,” observes that “their generation was caught in a strange set of contradictions, foremost of which is: in order to survive America one must understand the enemy. But our history, in the West, indicates that understanding the enemy entails, in some respect, an internalization of his values” (21). 13. Gerald Horne’s Fire This Time (1995) provides an interesting side note: On all sides there was a recognition of a heightened prestige for the Nation of Islam and, inevitably, for its beliefs. This perception was an outgrowth of an increased solidarity. Those in Watts, who felt that they lived in a backwater, now could feel they were on the cutting edge of Black America. As one resident put it, “Since the riot we feel more together. We look at each other and say hello ‘brother’ to other Negroes who we don’t even know.” This statement reflects the contradictory nature of the postrevolt dispensation. The increased solidarity was welcome, but the failure to include “sisters” may

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not have been accidental and, in fact, signaled the acceleration of a black nationalism laced with a spiraling masculinity that was to continue through the 1990s. (341)

14. Eisenhower spoke out aggressively against the behavior exhibited in the Watts Uprising (qtd. in Anderson, Sixties 74). According to Mike Davis, “Los Angeles Police Chief Parker articulated a ‘riff-raff theory’ that the August events were the work of a small criminal minority, [while] subsequent research . . . proved that up to 75,000 people took part in the uprising, mostly from the stolid Black working class” (297). 15. Horne writes in Fire This Time, As early as 14 August 1965, a page-one LA Times headline blared, “Racial Unrest Laid to Negro Family Failure.” The Wall Street Journal followed up with a front-page article claiming, “Family Life Breakdown in Negro Slums Sows Seeds of Race Violence. . . . Racing a Booming Birth Rate.” This focus on the black family did not materialize mysteriously; it was largely a product of the well-known study conducted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. When CBS-TV produced a report on the uprising, he was interviewed at length and repeated his themes about the alleged weaknesses in the black family that provided fertile soil for rage and violence. (230–31)

16. According to a 1969 Newsweek poll seeking to gauge black attitudes about the Vietnam War, many blacks saw Vietnam “as their own particular incubus—a war that depletes their young manhood and saps the resources available to healing their ills at home” (Newsweek, June 30, 1969). See Robert W. Mullen’s Blacks in America’s Wars: The Shifts in Attitudes from the Revolutionary War to Vietnam (1973) for further details. 17. Van Deburg, in New Day in Babylon, writes that “black troops . . . selected their own wartime culture heroes. Neither John Wayne nor General Patton was among them. Instead, they chose figures such as Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, and Muhammad Ali. As one black private told Time correspondent Wallace Terry in 1969, “‘I dig the militant brothers. Non-violence didn’t do anything but get Martin Luther King killed’ ” (104).

Chapter 3 1. The four black men who attacked Reginald Denny were Damian “Football” Williams (age nineteen), Henry Watson (twenty-eight), Antoine Miller (twentyone), and Gary Williams (thirty-four). 2. I am referring to the overwhelming attention directed toward the plight of young black men in the United States during the early to mid-1990s. Focused largely on the problems of gangs, crime, incarceration, AIDS, drugs, and gangsta rap, the “crisis” of black manhood was writ large in America’s public culture.

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3. The beating of Reginald Denny took place on April 29, 1992, the first day of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. It should also be noted that there were four black rescuers of Reginald Denny after his attack: Lei Yuille, Bobby Green, Terri Barnett, and Titus Murphy. See Meg Greenfield, “Ignoring the ‘Why Nots,’ ” Newsweek, September 13, 1993, p. 80, for further information. 4. The stories told in local Los Angeles and national newspapers describing Williams’s background only exacerbate the negative perceptions of the urban poor as “dysfunctional” and “morally degenerating”: he is the product of a singleparent (mother) home who grew up with three siblings and twelve foster children (not to mention that Williams had already fathered a child). That is to say, media depiction of Williams (like the depiction of Rodney King made by the defense in California v. Powell ) not only revitalized the myth of the “dangerous black man” as angry, uncivil, and defiantly anti-authoritarian, but also reinscribed mythologies about the “irresponsible,” “morally degenerative,” and “reckless” behavior of poor urban black men against a presumably innocent white population. 5. While I could have made a seemingly more appropriate reference to John Carpenter’s film sequel Escape from LA (1996), it was Escape from New York that— despite its geographic location—bore closer resemblance. In Escape from New York, tough guy Snake Blissken (Kurt Russell) is commandeered by the state to go into New York City, a city that has been turned into a prison, to rescue a president held hostage. 6. Justified by the violent “gang-related” beating of Reginald Denny, heightened surveillance and the rounding up of “suspected” gang members and agitators during the Los Angeles Riots effectively galvanized support across the country for the lock-down on large populations of predominantly black male youths. Accordingly, two weeks after the Denny beating Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, “clad in a bullet proof vest and with a backup of two hundred cops and FBI agents, personally arrested Damian” (Davis, City 18) as a media show of his “no tolerance” assault against crime and social disorder. Incidentally, the Eight Tray Gangster Crips is the gang to which Sanyika Shakur, author of Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member (1993), belonged. 7. Christopher John Farley, “Without a Prayer.” Damian Williams was sentenced to the maximum penalty of ten years in prison; however, he was released after serving four years. In 2003 he was convicted of participating in the 2000 murder of a drug dealer. He received a forty-six-year sentence that he is serving at Pelican Bay State Prison. 8. Substantiated by a pervasive social science, from the well-known Moynihan Report of 1965 to the sophisticated and well-meaning work by black intellectuals such as Cornel West and William Julius Wilson, the “mindless violence of the urban under class” is most often depicted as a result of a number of social afflictions. These social afflictions of the urban underclass are commonly understood as the

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disintegration of the black family in the ghetto, high unemployment due to urban deindustrialization, a lack of “positive” black male role models, the glamorization of “gangsta culture,” and an increasing absence of meaning, hope, and love in the lives of many young urban black men. Indeed, the booming production of federal and state prison complexes to house the many thousands of increasingly young black males convicted of drug-related crimes in the United States is largely one such redress to the presumed moral degeneration and criminal behavior that is widely interpreted to be a result of “cultural poverty” among poor urban blacks and people of color. The frustrating effects of these kinds of cultural deficiency interpretations in conjunction with drugs and the drug trade in poor workingclass black communities have also led many urban blacks to situate themselves as proponents for the militaristic surveillance of the “inner cities” and supporters of the “War on Crime” ideology of the nation-state. The targeting of black male youths and urban gangs by the police and urban communities of color as the allencompassing culprits of urban despair (e.g., sellers and users of crack cocaine, wielders of reckless and “braggadocious” abandon in attempting to control urban “territories,” and terrorizers inside and outside of urban communities) has made monstrous images out of the lives and cultural practices of large groups of poor urban black men. 9. See Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods (1906), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), and Malcolm X’s Autobiography as told to Alex Haley (1965). The repetition of motifs in their autobiographies and fiction has created an uncritical “imaginary middle” in the form of a black male literary tradition. Their distinct histories, however, have been understood in narrow and homogenous ways so as to produce a dominant way of understanding a “black experience.” 10. The title of McCall’s autobiography is taken from the song by Marvin Gaye, “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler),” released in 1971 on Gaye’s LP titled What’s Going On (Motown). 11. Here I am making an explicit reference to the 1994 New Yorker review of McCall’s autobiography, “Bad Influence,” by Henry Louis Gates Jr. 12. Darryl Pinckney, “Promissory Notes—(1994) Parallel Time: Growing Up in Black and White by Brent Staples; (1994) Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America by Nathan McCall,” New York Review of Books, April 6, 1995, 41–46. 13. See Phillip Brian Harper’s Are We Not Men? in which he argues that among black men there is a “masculinist anxiety that forecloses certain possibilities for black subjectivity” (xi). This “masculinist anxiety,” Harper argues, is a result of the tremendous pressure for black men to be “authentic,” “to be real,” and to “be black” as an embodiment of an exclusionary racial politics. 14. See Robin D. G. Kelley’s insightful reading of Malcolm Little (a.k.a. Mal-

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colm X) in “The Riddle of the Zoot: Malcolm Little and Black Cultural Politics during World War II” (Race Rebels 161–81). My reading of McCall owes much to Kelley’s approach to reading Malcolm’s early life. 15. Chris Rock’s “Niggas vs. Black People,” in his “Rock This!” (HBO Comedy Special, 1996), disdainfully exemplifies this growing divide between hard-working, law-abiding black people and “niggas” whom Rock sees as “ignorant” and as a disgrace to the race. Interestingly, urban sociologist Elijah Anderson in his 1999 Code of the Street, a study of violence, decency, and morality in Philadelphia, seems to drink from the same ideological well, distinguishing between blacks who live “decently” in dehumanizing conditions and those who share the same dehumanizing conditions but live manipulatively on the exploitation of others. 16. Gates writes in his review of McCall’s autobiography, It is the birthright of the black writer that his experiences, however personal, are also automatically historical. In the same way that Shelley saw all problems as fragments of one vast ur-poem, we see the black memoirist’s tale as part of a larger, subsuming saga—an entry in the vast, multivolume project of Narrating the Negro. Like most birthrights, this one is both a blessing and a burden. For one thing, it means that your tale is never completely your own—that the particularity of your tale is subordinated to an overarching narrative. If the goal of autobiography is the assertion of individuality, as has conventionally been understood, the typical black memoir is assigned the contrary task: that of being representative. (“Bad Influence” 94)

17. Cultural critic Dwight A. McBride raises a compelling concern of how middle-class black intellectuals seem to avoid coming to terms with their own complicity in reinscribing a kind of patriarchal heterosexuality as a normative value in racial representation when he asserts, While one routinely witnesses the use of narratives of racial discrimination, narratives of growing up poor and black and elevating oneself through education and hard work, narratives about how connected middle-class black intellectuals are to “the black community” or “the hood,” we could scarcely imagine an instance in which narrating or even claiming one’s gay or lesbian identity would authenticate or legitimate oneself as a racial representative. (42)

18. The four young black girls killed in the church bombing were Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins. In addition, twenty others were injured. As Manning Marable observes in Freedom, the bombing marked the “third in Birmingham since elementary and secondary school integration had been initiated two weeks before” (332). 19. McCall makes it explicitly clear that “although some folks there liked to think of themselves as middle-class, Cavalier Manor was a working-class neighborhood” (5).

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20. According to McCall’s autobiography, this event occurred sometime between 1968 and 1973. 21. Here I am making a subtle reference to Eric Lott’s critique of Cornel West’s Race Matters in which Lott argues against West’s notion of nihilism in Black America (Lott 42). 22. Here I am drawing from Robin Kelley’s notion of the “political” whereby we shift our attention away from the idea that “what is political hinges on whether or not groups are involved in elections, political parties, or grassroots social movements,” and focus more significantly on “what motivates disenfranchised black working people to struggle” (Race Rebels 9). 23. Similarly, television coverage of the Denny incident by major networks such as CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC repeatedly showed the violent beating of a white man without sufficient context. By “sufficient” I mean broadening and maintaining the discussion surrounding the Rodney King verdict, a verdict that failed to convict four L.A. police officers of brutality against a black man (caught on video) and to situate that discussion as a structural critique against state violence. Instead, the verdict indicated that state violence committed by the police was sanctioned as a necessary evil against a preexisting black male deviance. Thus, the acts of violence committed against Denny were read as a reaffirming sign of negative resistance or, worse, black male deviance. 24. Henry Louis Gates Jr. argues in his 1988 Signifying Monkey that “signification” is a central trope within African American culture and literature that “allows the speaker to argue indirectly through innuendo, humor or riddles to undermine and to unbalance a master discourse” (Fuss 1989). 25. Jerry G. Watts’s “Reflections on the King Verdict and the Paradoxes of the Black Response,” in Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising, discusses the paradoxical faith of black Americans in the criminal justice system as they awaited the Rodney King verdict. Compelled to believe in justice as a result of the “irrefutable proof ” of video footage capturing the police brutality committed against King, Watts rightly contends that the video was “viewed by blacks as moral capital in a racial struggle.” In the aftermath of the King verdict and subsequent riot, the increasing hostility and anger felt by L.A. rioters quickly consolidated itself into forms of aggressive oppositional protest. Although far less politicized than critical observers would have desired, the violent protest of the Los Angeles Riots signified alternative measures of justice. 26. Cultural historian Jerry Bryant, in “Born in a Mighty Bad Land”: The Violent Man in African American Folklore and Fiction (2003), writes that the “bad nigger” was the white man’s worst dream: the slave or (after Emancipation) the laborer who refused to knuckle under, who repeatedly ran away, who deliberately slowed down work, surreptitiously or openly throwing sand into the master’s machines. He was the out-of-control black man,

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the surly slacker, the belligerent troublemaker, and occasionally the killer of whites. . . . What is negative for whites becomes positive for blacks. This special denotation of “bad” was encoded in its special pronunciation, the prolonged rather than the short “a,” as in “ba-ad.” “Thus transformed,” as historian Lawrence Levine puts it, “the term has been used to describe those who were admired because they had the strength, courage, and ability to flout the limitations imposed by white society,” and thus gain a point for racial pride and self-esteem. (2)

27. Ann Ferguson reiterates this point in Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity (2000), an ethnographic study that demonstrates how young black boys are negatively impacted by public school punishment practices. Ferguson writes, The baddest kids in school are the most visibly black-identified as they construct subjectivity around cultural representations of an “authentic” Blackness derived from cultural icons of the gangster as a renegade, transgressive masculinity. . . . This is a masculine power that is animated through the figure of the Nigger, undoubtedly the name that most epitomizes the stigmatization and denigration of Blackness in the racial hierarchy of the United States. (219)

28. For white readers, the voyeuristic compulsion to venture into that mythological place of black male sexuality is informed by and inextricably tied to a historical legacy of colonial desire—of simultaneous repulsion and fascination, fear and desire—and reinforced through the contemporaneous policing and surveillance of black male bodies. Furthermore, white fantasies of violence and hypersexuality are projected onto a terrain of blackness, leaving whiteness unblemished. For black readers, the attachment to these scenes of black male sexuality is just as problematic, if not for different reasons: recognizable images, even savagely stereotypical ones, become the terrain for building and projecting an authentic racial community. 29. In an article in the New York Times Magazine, “Living (and Dying) on the Down Low: Double Lives, AIDS and the Black Homosexual Underground,” writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis brings light to the otherwise “shadowy” underground subculture of black men who refuse to identify themselves as gay or bisexual but who have sex with men. Down low (DL) men, Denizet-Lewis writes, are mostly “young and from the inner city, where they live in a hypermasculine ‘thug’ culture.” Yet, he continues, “the DL label is both an announcement of masculinity and a separation from white gay culture.” Moreover, the DL type—and the idealized black male vision these men seek to approximate—is popularly understood as a “never-ending search for the roughest, most masculine, ‘straightest looking’ DL top [the stereotypically more masculine role who assumes the top position in sexual intercourse].”

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30. In “Hip Hop’s Closet: A Fanzine Article Touches a Nerve,” Touré seemingly agrees: And in a country where, historically, the center of so much has been the black penis—whether motivated by violent fear, or curious longing or proprietary desire, or some reaction to one or more of those, or some reactions to that reaction—black masculinity remains equally threatening, powerful, and fragile. So it’s the black male’s effort to keep up with his legendary dick, and the resulting caricaturishly exaggerated manhood that emerged to quash even a hint of waffling, that are the source of the homophobia grafted into hip hop [culture]. (317)

31. In 1997, rap artist and producer Dr. Dre released a track, “Been There, Done That,” that dramatizes Dre’s move toward social legitimacy, abandoning the street for “high society.” Also, in his recent book Who’s Gonna Take the Weight? (2003), author Kevin Powell (former housemate on MTV’s first season of The Real World ) articulates a curiously similar strategy of self-construction. See Powell’s discussion of himself as a recovering misogynist. 32. I am making an irresistible allusion to Sidney Poiter’s comic film Stir Crazy (1980), starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, in which these two hilarious sidekicks first enter jail and attempt to “act tough” in order to stave off potential attacks from hardened criminals. 33. Ronald A. T. Judy offers an interesting analysis of what he calls “nigga authenticity” in the journal boundary 2. 34. Suffice it to say, “subaltern” here romantically signifies for McCall those oppressed poor urban black heterosexual men who defiantly struggle against dehumanization (even if they mostly just wrought havoc on other black folks). 35. In Race Rebels (1994), Kelley argues that “ ‘real Niggaz’ are not only victims of race and class domination but agents—dangerous agents, nightmarish caricatures of the worst of the dispossessed” (213).

Chapter 4 1. The documentary film Resurrection (2003) is one of many posthumously released accounts of Tupac Shakur’s tumultuous life. Tupac was murdered in Las Vegas in 1996 after attending a Mike Tyson boxing match. His murder case remains unsolved. 2. In his War on Terror campaign following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, President George W. Bush made repeated remarks concerning Islamic extremist groups such as Al-Qaeda and Afghani and Iraqi insurgents as “thugs and assassins.” The term “thug” is of Hindi derivation, “one of a former group of professional robbers and murderers in India who strangled their victims” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/thug). Yule and

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Burnell write: “Latterly applied to a robber and assassin of a peculiar class, who sallying forth in a gang . . . and in the character of wayfarers, either on business or pilgrimage, fall in with other travelers on the road, and having gained their confidence, take a favourable opportunity of strangling them by throwing their handkerchiefs round their necks, and then plundering them and burying their bodies” (916). Los Angeles police chief William Bratton in 2002 referred to gang members in Los Angeles as “terrorists” (LeDuff). Marc Mauer, author of Race to Incarcerate (1999) and co-director of The Sentencing Project, writes that leading academics, political pundits, and members of Congress began to refer to this new generation of criminals as containing a group of “superpredators.” The animal imagery is inescapable here; consider whether most people conjure up the image of a white teenager when thinking of “superpredator.” Hardly. But a baggy pants–wearing kid with a handgun fits the bill correctly. To many Americans, some combination of bad family, bad culture, or bad genes created this young thug whose behavior is presumably beyond the capacity of modern law or social science to improve. (Mauer 126)

3. The term “thug” and the corresponding phrase “thug life” first received national acclaim as an “ennobled oppositional identity” when Tupac released the album Thug Life: Vol. 1 in 1994. Definitions for “thug” are somewhat varied in contemporary black popular culture but remain consistent insofar as they all pertain to men of the lumpenproletariat or a particular “underclass.” Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang defines “thugging” as a distinctly 1990s U.S. black term signifying “relaxing or acting a cool manner, chilling . . . the image of the successful thug as a positive role model” (Green 1199). “Thuggin’,” however, is generally understood as “wrongdoing,” “being shady,” or “deceitful.” The definition I have used in the body of this chapter is taken from Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary (1983). “Thug” has also taken on a very specific racialized dimension. While “thugs” are almost always poor, in contemporary American popular culture they are also colored by and identified with specific kinds of black male social practices. An interesting side note concerning allegations of rape by football players at the University of Colorado provides a revealing example. A 2004 New York Times article noted: “Stacie Conrad, a 20-year-old journalism student, said her mother called her on Wednesday, warning her to stay away from football players. ‘She said they’re all thugs,’ Ms. Conrad said. ‘She was kind of joking, but I’m sure she’s somewhat worried.’ ” While the racial implications might appear somewhat removed, the warning made by Conrad’s mother suggests a common sensibility about dangerous, hypersexed black men in sports. 4. Tupac describes “thug life” as an acronym for “the hate you gave little infants fucks everybody.” Tupac will later add that “thug life” is “niggas who don’t have anything . . . but they got that talent, that spark, that certain something that can get them out [of the ghetto].” See the movie Thug Immortal: The Tupac

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Shakur Story (2000) for home video interviews with Tupac in which it is asserted that “thug life” is also concerned with “uniting ghetto soldiers.” Also, see Eithne Quinn’s reading of “thug” in her study of gangsta rap: “As with the many meanings of ‘nigga’ elaborated by N.W.A., paranoid and playful Tupac explored instabilities in the signification of charged words and images. ‘Nigga’ and ‘thug’ contained vestiges of political commitment (like himself ) beneath their nihilistic, ghettocentric surfaces” (178). 5. In Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, Sharon Holland writes: “So THUG LIFE represents a coming back from the dead, as black youth not only recognize their relative invisibility in the culture at large but also perceive an active hatred aimed at them that is systematic. . . . These words etched in the flesh take on a life of their own and resonate even after Shakur’s death— Still/Here” (180). 6. While the term “thug” has been appropriated by a wide array of ethnic and social groups in the United States and abroad, I only address its use by poor U.S. black men. 7. Examples of black men being pursued by the police abound in news coverage of the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. For example, in Cincinnati, Timothy Thomas, a nineteen-year-old black man, was shot to death while running from the Cincinnati police at 2 a.m. on Saturday, April 7, 2001. Thomas had fourteen warrants for his arrest for traffic offenses such as “not wearing a seatbelt.” His murder triggered several days of violent protest that would receive national attention as the “Cincinnati Riots.” Similarly, on Monday, June 16, 2003, Terrance Shurn, a black twenty-eight-year-old motorcyclist and resident of Benton Harbor, Michigan, died during a police chase when he crashed into a vacant building. Shurn’s death would trigger two days of rioting that was quelled only after the National Guard was called in to patrol and set curfews in Benton Harbor Township. On Thursday, June 24, 2004, Stanley Miller, a thirty-six-year-old black man suspected of having stolen a Toyota Camry, was apprehended while attempting to evade police officers in Los Angeles by the LAPD. Upon his surrender one officer assaulted Miller with a flashlight at least eleven times as a passerby videotaped the assault. 8. The social category “homo-thug” refers to a group of black and Latino “hiphop–identified” men who, during the late 1990s and the early part of the new millennium, proclaim themselves or are proclaimed to be engaged in an aggressive homosexual male culture whereby they assume dominance in sexual acts. With regard to dangerous sex acts, “emptying the clip” as an affirmation of life points, for example, to the possibility of spreading one’s biological seed as a way to defy death. This physiological prolongation of the self through sex is a powerful aspect of thug life among men. See later in this chapter Eazy-E’s death-seeking/ death-defying/life-affirming practices. Eazy-E led an extremely promiscuous sex

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life that is said to have led to his contraction of HIV/AIDS, which, on the one hand, might associate him in the public imagination with homosexuality. On the other hand, he fathered seven children with six different women—which codes as hyper-heterosexuality. 9. While the implications and impact of thug life extend well beyond black male cultures in the United States, I only address U.S. black men in relation to the thug life. To be sure, thug life in particular and death-bound identities in general can be identified throughout the African Diaspora if not the entire world. 10. Given the bleak conditions today that inform black male lives and the limited field of opportunities that shape the fatal choices they make, they attempt to “make their own history but not under the circumstances of their own choosing” (Kelley, Race Rebels 194, quoting Marx). 11. In his influential book Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987), Michael Taussig writes, “This space of death is important in the creation of meaning and consciousness, nowhere more so than in societies where torture is endemic and where the culture of terror flourishes. We may think of the space of death as a threshold that allows for illumination as well as extinction” (4). Taussig continues, “Yet this space of death is preeminently a space of transformation: through the experience of coming close to death there well may be a more vivid sense of life; through fear there can come not only a growth in self-consciousness but also fragmentation, then loss of self conforming to authority” (7). 12. These lyrics are taken from “So Many Tears” on Tupac’s Me against the World (Jive Records, March 14, 1995). 13. See “Suicidal Thoughts” by the Notorious B.I.G. from his debut album Ready to Die (1994). The song is emblematic of the powerfully nihilistic imagery of death in hard-core rap. 14. On the second page of his autobiography, Malcolm points to the violent deaths of three of his father’s brothers by white men, one of whom was lynched. Malcolm’s father would also die violently at the hands of white men. Of his own life, Malcolm prophetically asserted, “It has always been my belief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can to be prepared” (2). Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech on April 3, 1968, the day before he was assassinated. The speech was given in an effort to assist black sanitation workers on strike against the city of Memphis, Tennessee. King concluded his speech with the prophetic passage, “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you.

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But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” Also see the 1971 documentary film The Murder of Fred Hampton, dir. Howard Alk (rereleased in 2007 by Facets Multimedia), Huey P. Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide (1973), Angela Y. Davis’s If They Come in the Morning (1971), as well as George Jackson’s Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (1971) in which he cites Jamaican-born writer and poet Claude McKay’s famous 1919 poem “If We Must Die.” 15. Donald Goines’s Daddy Cool (1974), the story of a ruthless hit man on a quest to avenge his daughter’s murder, is currently being adapted for a movie release. The film is to be directed by Ernest Dickerson, whose previous work includes Juice (1992, starring Omar Epps and Tupac Shakur), Bones (2001, starring Snoop Doggy Dogg), and Never Die Alone (2003, featuring rapper/actor DMX). Daddy Cool will feature DMX in a supporting role. It should also be noted that rappers such as Jadakiss, Nas, and Tupac have all sung his praises on their rap CDs. Even with Tupac’s well-documented upbringing as a “child of the Panther Party,” his lyrics suggest a willingness to explore well beyond the strict parameters of Black Power ideology. Indeed, Tupac drew from a wide range of political values, religious beliefs, “street” motifs, and even commodifiable American images. What I am trying to get at here is Tupac’s varied sensibilities about death in general and death-defiance in particular. Consider Tupac’s first album, 2Pacalypse Now (1991), which directly draws from Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam story Apocalypse Now (1979), a filmic revisit to Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Heart of Darkness. These tracks of death and defiance point not only to the despair the thug life is known to address and counteract but also to the evolving ways in which many black men have sought to recognize in death’s call a certain majesty and glory. 16. I borrow here from Angela Y. Davis’s framing of her discussion of Erykah Badu in relation to black American blues and jazz singers in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1999). 17. Michael Eric Dyson published Between God and Gangsta Rap in 1997. Also, see the film Tupac Vs. (2002), directed by Ken Peters, for its homage to Tupac’s philosophical and religious beliefs. Perhaps more than any other documentary film about his life, Tupac Vs. is most devoted to exploring Tupac’s vision for selfrealization. 18. That is, rather than see the young black men for whom Tupac speaks as morally bankrupt, Dyson understands their embrace of thug theology as a “relational” form of Christian belief. 19. Echoes of Martinican writer Aimé Césaire in his 1947 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (originally published in French as Cahier D’Un Retour Au Pays

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Natal ) abound here, in particular recalling when a young Césaire feels compelled to “accept” his blackness in all its splendor as well as all its degradation. 20. That “something awful” was his execution for the murders of Mary Dalton and Bessie Mears. 21. In Black Skin, White Masks, his 1952 study of anticolonialism, black identity, and consciousness, Frantz Fanon makes explicit mention of Wright’s Native Son. Moreover, Fanon also addresses this question of the “death-bound effect” in his chapter “The Negro and Recognition.” Fanon writes: “When I began this book, I wanted to devote one section to a study of the death wish among Negroes. I believed it necessary because people are forever saying that Negroes never commit suicide” (n. 218). Fanon also mentions in “The Negro and Psychopathology” that “the Negro symbolizes the biological danger.” 22. I am directly invoking Aimé Césaire’s understanding of the term “accept” from Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. It bears mentioning here that Miko Juhani Tuhkanen’s essay “A [B]igger’s Place: Lynching and Specularity in Richard Wright’s ‘Fire and Cloud’ and Native Son” addresses the issue of Bigger’s body as a “ ‘racially’ marked subject” whose presence signifies an “enforced visibility.” 23. The term “disidentification” is defined in detail in this book’s introduction. Borrowing from Muñoz’s conceptualization of a specific mode of performative politics in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (1999), I reiterate here his definition: Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics of positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture. (31)

24. “Survival of the Fittest” is the third track off Mobb Deep’s debut album, The Infamous MOBB DEEP (RCA, 1995). 25. Sadat X, who had been with the 5 Percenter rap group Brand Nubian throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, branched out on his own to cultivate a more commercially minded sound. 26. The nine members of the Wu-Tang Clan are Robert Diggs a.k.a. RZA and Bobby Steels; Gary Grice aka Genius/GZA, Justice, and Maxi Million; Russell Jones aka Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Dirt McGirt, Joe Bananas, etc.; Clifford Smith aka Method Man aka Johnny Blaze, Methical, etc.; Corey Woods aka Raekwon the Chef, Lou Diamonds, etc.; Lamont Hawkins aka U-GOD, Golden Arms, Lucky Hands, Baby U, etc.; Jason Hunter aka Inspectah Deck, Rebel INS, Rollie Fingers; Elgin Turner aka Masta Killa, Noodles; and Dennis Coles aka Tony Starks

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and Sun God. 27. Consider Wu-Tang’s space-age rap video “Impossible,” off their 1997 double album Wu-Tang Forever, which displays the rap clan as warrior bees flying and fighting against danger throughout the galaxy. Perhaps made for a predominantly male, science-fiction/animation/video arcade audience, “Impossible” illustrates the range of possibilities for constructing the bad nigger in contemporary U.S. popular culture. An example of the futuristic lyrics of the bad nigger RZA asserts: “Consume planets like Unicron/blasting photon bombs from the arm like Galvatron.” See Steve Juon’s RapReviews of the “Back to the Lab” series for more on Wu-Tang Clan’s Wu-Tang Forever. 28. Greg Tate, author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk (1992), wrote an interesting commentary lamenting hip-hop’s “painful death in a marketplace saturated with sucker MCs” in the March 1996 issue of Vibe magazine, “Is Hip Hop Dead?” Waxing nostalgic over what he considers to have been hip-hop’s golden age, 1979 to 1991, Tate says: “What I know about hip hop is that around 1992 the music stopped giving me that good-good-feeling I’d got used to” (35). 29. See the cover story in Newsweek, November 29, 1993, “When Is Rap 2 Violent?” Gangsta rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg graces the cover. 30. The list of well-meaning black public intellectuals and popular artists included this nonexhaustive sampling from the early to mid-1990s: Cornel West (Race Matters, 1994), William Julius Wilson (The Truly Disadvantaged, 1987), Chris Rock (“Bring the Pain,” 1996), John Singleton (Boyz in the Hood, 1991), Ernest Dickerson (Juice, 1992), Nathan McCall (Makes Me Wanna Holler, 1994), and the Hughes brothers (Menace II Society, 1993). 31. The authors of “Young African-American Males: Continuing Victims of High Homicide Rates in Urban Communities” conclude: “Though the national death rate from homicide by young African-American males has fallen dramatically since 1991, it remains alarmingly high in absolute terms. In eight of the largest urban African-American communities [Baltimore, Brooklyn, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.], teenagers face probabilities of being murdered before they reach age 45 that range from one in 53 in Brooklyn to one in 12 in Washington, D. C.” (http://www.heritage.org/ Research/Crime/CDA00-05.cfm). 32. These are lyrics taken from “The Bluest Eye,” a track from Black Star’s debut album, Mos Def and Talib Kweli are BLACK STAR (1998). 33. See Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, particularly chapter 5, “The Hammer and the Rock,” for a careful look at the panoptic police practices of the Los Angeles Police Department under the direction of Daryl Gates in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s. 34. The “three strikes law” (referring to “three strikes and you’re out”) is best known for its heavily scrutinized implementation in California in 1994. Seen as

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casting the net too wide in fighting crime, the three strikes law imposed lengthier prison sentences for repeat felons. Most significantly, the third felony or “third strike” would result in a sentence of twenty-five years to life. “Although the first two ‘strikes’ accrue for serious felonies, the crime that triggers the life sentence can be any felony. Furthermore, the law doubles sentences for a second strike, requires that these extended sentences be served in prison (rather than in jail or on probation), and limits ‘good time’ earned during prison to 20 percent of the sentence given (rather than 50 percent, as mandated under the previous law)” (Greenwood et al. xi). 35. I am referring to Jerome Miller’s thesis in Search and Destroy in which he argues that the criminal justice system creates a number of long-lasting “unanticipated consequences” which, in the end, overwhelmingly disrupt the black community. Not only are employment opportunities substantially diminished as a result of doing time but so also are the ex-convicts’ ability to maintain family relations. “Loss of faith in government” and loss of voting rights are also noted as contributing to the disease of reintegration of the ex-convict back into society. Miller makes this point clear, laying out the desensitizing frequency in which black men are channeled into the gates of the U.S. prison-industrial complex. 36. James, however, acknowledges the wide use of surveillance: “Constant monitoring, bureaucratic documentation and analysis, and interrogation without end are in fact characteristic of American prisons. Yet through its police and penal executions, the United States also enacts violence that is fundamentally different from such ceaseless interrogation” (33). 37. The first cases of AIDS in the United States were reported in 1981. 38. In the white gay male community where AIDS awareness and education were pioneered throughout the 1980s, the 1990s saw a willed return to sexually risky behavior. 39. Brent Staples cites Krebs’s report that “inmates reported that 44 percent of the people they knew participated in sex acts in prison” (Staples, “Fighting”). 40. Also see Sanyika Shakur’s gut-wrenching description of prison rape in Monster. 41. See Parenti 47–67 for a detailed accounting of how deprivation and sexual abuse inform prison populations in the state of California. On September 4, 2003, President George W. Bush signed into law the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which “provides for the analysis of the incidence and effects of prison rape in Federal, State and local institutions, and for information, resources, recommendations and funding to protect individuals from prison rape. The act also creates a National Prison Rape Reduction Commission.” According to the national human rights organization Stop Prison Rape (SPR), “One in five men in prison has been sexually abused, often by other inmates. Rates for women, who are most likely to be abused by male staff, reach as high as one in four in some facilities.”

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42. Clemetson; Villarosa. 43. In 2004, we witnessed the dismantling of the infamous 1973 Rockefeller Laws that initiated exceedingly stiff prison sentences in New York State for drugrelated offenses. 44. “Real Niggaz Don’t Die” from N.W.A.’s 1991 CD Niggaz4Life (Priority Records), released May 27, 1991. 45. Perhaps this is a cheesy reference to the rap song “Miss You,” Puff Daddy’s homage to the Notorious B.I.G. after his death. Puff Daddy samples the classic rock single by the Police, “Every Breath You Take.” 46. Here I am referring to the hit rap CDs by Nelly (Nellyville, featuring “Hot in Herre”) and Lil’ Jon in 2002 (Kings of Crunk, featuring “Get Low”), and 50 Cent in 2003 (Get Rich or Die Tryin’, featuring “In Da Club”). 47. Will Smith’s “Getting Jiggy with It” came out on his 1997 CD Big Willie Style. Puff Daddy’s “Victory,” “It’s All about the Benjamins,” and “Been around the World” all came out on his 1997 CD No Way Out (Bad Boy Records). Ice Cube’s sexually explicit tracks on the Player’s Club sound track are “We Be Chillin’,” “Who Are You Lovin’,” and “You Know I’m a Ho” (A&M Records). 48. “Hot in Herre” was released on Nelly’s Nellyville album on June 25, 2002, from Universal Records. “In Da Club” was released on 50 Cent’s album Get Rich or Die Tryin’, released on February 6, 2003. “Get Low” was released on the Kings of Crunk album of Lil’ Jon and the East Side Boyz on October 29, 2002, on TVT Records. 49. I am marking the beginning of hip-hop in 1974 with the presence and popularity of DJs such Kool Herc, Grandmaster Caz, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash, and then in 1979 with the release of Sugar Hill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” 50. Snoop Dogg makes a cameo appearance in the popular movie Old School. 51. The “unsettling shock” of poor urban black men engaging in secret homosexual relations has come mainly from black women who have become the most susceptible risk group for contracting HIV/AIDS. Oprah Winfrey spotlighted the issue in her broadcast of April 16, 2004, “A Secret Sex World: Living on the ‘Down Low.’ ” 52. While much of the “hype” surrounding the DL culture has to do with its relatively recent press coverage, Denizet-Lewis argues that it is a culture that “place[s] a premium on pleasure” and offers “a certain freedom in not playing by modern society’s rules of self-identification, in not having to explain yourself, or your sexuality, to anyone. Like the black athletes and rappers they idolize, DL men convey a strong sense of masculine independence and power: I do what I want when I want with whom I want.” 53. While Denizet-Lewis’s exposé brings much needed attention to the pressing issue of DL men having unprotected sex, it is worth noting that the manner in

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which DL lives are represented in this exposé is the very stuff of which sensationalist spectacle, self-righteous-AIDS-activist-contempt for the lifestyles of poor urban black men, and racist AIDS panic are made. Denizet-Lewis, who is a white, gay man, somewhat uncritically participates in the age-old practice of white men and women “slumming” into black urban areas in order to witness—if not indulge in—the sexual practices of blacks. 54. See Winfrey’s program, “A Secret Sex World: Living on the ‘Down Low,’ ” and J. L. King’s recent book On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of “Straight” Black Men Who Sleep with Men. NBC’s celebrated television drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, known for its attention to disturbing sex crimes, aired an episode about black men on the “down low” on April 6, 2004. Also see Roberts; Hooper; livingdownlow.com; and streetthugz.com for prevention and subscription materials as well as images. 55. See Tamala Edwards’s article “Brothers on the ‘Down Low.’ ” A year earlier, bell hooks had proclaimed in “Homophobia in Black Communities” that “black people must confront the reality of bisexuality and the extent to which the spread of AIDS in black communities is connected to bisexual transmission of HIV.” 56. “Top” refers to what Denizet-Lewis describes as the “active, more stereotypically ‘masculine’ role during sexual intercourse.” That is, the “top” is the one who penetrates as opposed to the one who is penetrated. 57. Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang defines “banjee boy” as an early 1990s U.S. term for “a gay male who dresses as if he were part of the heterosexual hip-hop culture” (Green 57). 58. See “Sexual Slavery in Prison,” a New York Times editorial of October 12, 2005, focusing on the need for studies directed at stopping sexual assault behind bars and highlighting the lawsuit brought by Roderick Johnson, an openly gay ex-Navy seaman who was forced into sexual slavery while in prison for violating his probation. 59. Harris’s novel dramatizes the secreted homosexual life of a young black man struggling to come to terms with his sexual identity. Set in the 1980s, Invisible Life is fundamentally the “coming out” story of Raymond Tyler, a southern-bred, HBC/Ivy League–educated lawyer. Distinctly upper middle class, Raymond’s portrait of what is commonly referred to as being “in the life”—a coded phrase used to discreetly acknowledge kinship and assert familial bonds among gay-identified men—demonstrates the far-reaching yet closely linked black social networks of men and women who are often unwittingly tied to an inconspicuous homosexual world. To be sure, Raymond’s same-sex and heterosexual relationships from high school and college in the South to his professional life in New York City involve an array of black people from a range of different backgrounds: a well-to-do black sorority girl (Delta), a college “jock” (Kevin), a professional football player (Basil), a New York City actress (Nicole), a married stock broker (Quinn Mathis). As the

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novel captivatingly meanders from Raymond’s relationship dramas to his marital anxieties, his romantic world is, in the end, unavoidably undermined by the arresting fear that he may be HIV positive. Indeed, the AIDS-related death of his ex-boyfriend’s wife serves as a shocking interruption to the secreted homosexual life Raymond has been leading. Marking the novel’s climax, the fear of contracting HIV and, in Raymond’s case, the deception and infidelity the virus conjures up symbolize a cathartic realization about his life and the black community as a whole: silence = death. Appropriating the popular 1980s AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) slogan for AIDS awareness and education for his own life and the lives of all black people, Raymond’s coming to consciousness about who he is—a black bisexual/homosexual man—is an unsurprising finale. But in 1991 it bears mentioning how Raymond’s story—and its inextricable connection to U.S. black heterosexual communities—was a story in need of grave attention. 60. “Dead Wrong” was released in 2000 as an EP. 61. See James Earl Hardy’s popular novel, The Day Eazy-E Died (2002).

Chapter 5 1. The liner notes for the Voodoo album contain this passage: “Envision this: a lone man in a haunted room surrounded by glowing instruments. What sounds are evoked from a room where Jimi once slept? What are the rewards of those who tend to their God-given talents as they would have the creator tend to their spirits and daily lives? What happens when the artist becomes the conjur[e] man?” 2. “(Untitled) How Does It Feel?” 3. See Ronald A. T. Judy’s Disforming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular (1993) for a compelling read of textual unintelligibility in African Arabic slave narratives. 4. While it is important to acknowledge here the ways state terror persists through the present-day backdrop of the U.S. prison-industrial complex and dying U.S. cities, D’Angelo’s artistic career and personal life points to some of the more intangible aspects of subjection, representing a life literally stripped bare, a life devoid of access and legitimate authority, symbolically existing at the absolute minimum end of the circulation of power and yet, at the same time, displaying how unfaithfully black male subjects have internalized those same annihilating aims. 5. It is from within this context that D’Angelo turns his debut album’s title song, “Brown Sugar,” a rather straightforward but soulful ballad, into a subtle if not poignant anthem for “smoking weed.” “Brown Sugar” signifies on the popular convention of the love song by writing it anew as a thinly veiled and cheeky ditty: “See, we be making love constantly / That’s why my eyes are a shade blood burgundy.”

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Here, “Brown Sugar” typifies D’Angelo’s disinterest in “the political” and yet represents its own political paradox as a gesture of defiance and social redress. That is, invoking the “Philly Blunt” as one of hip-hop’s ceremonial symbols and motifs (Dr. Dre’s 1992 The Chronic and Cyprus Hill’s 1993 Black Sunday are well-known rap albums that also come to mind), D’Angelo pays homage to a disaffected culture of urban black men seeking to escape the meaninglessness of their racial situation while, at the same time, embracing the ritual of smoking as an act of “love,” spiritual communion, and existential elation. To be sure, many of the album’s other tracks—“Cruisin’,” “Lady,” “Me and Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine,” and “Higher”—pursue heterosexual courtship and love in the most idealized if not spiritual of terms, for example, in “Cruisin’ ”—a rather faithful remake of Smokey Robinson’s acclaimed 1979 song. D’Angelo’s follow-up project, Voodoo, would also undoubtedly steer the theme of sexuality to a more provocatively erotic if not spiritual height. With the fast moving, samba-invoking track “Spanish Joint” to the bluesy-spirited “Root” and “Greatdayindamornin/Booty” to the seductively slow “Untitled (How Does it Feel?)” and soothing remake of Roberta Flack’s 1975 “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” Voodoo is an eclectic assortment of understated distinction in which D’Angelo draws on the bare sensuality of funkinspired grooves to capture an almost carnal feel. But Voodoo’s mysterious musical alchemy—made up of percussively deep bass beats and rhythms, ethereal falsettos, and gritty folk and funk motifs—also seems indebted to D’Angelo’s knack for conjuring passion from the alterity of death. 6. In January 2005, for example, D’Angelo was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana, possession of a controlled substance (cocaine), and driving while intoxicated. D’Angelo was issued a fine, received a suspended sentence, and had his driver’s license revoked. The following September, D’Angelo received a three-year suspended sentence for cocaine possession. Adding insult to injury, D’Angelo was critically injured a week later when he was ejected from a vehicle that hit a fence. In July 2006, D’Angelo was confirmed to have exited a rehabilitation center on the island of Antigua. 7. Perhaps it is no surprise, too, that when D’Angelo was asked by music journalist Touré what cultural event had affected him most during the making of Voodoo, he unequivocally replied, “The deaths of Tupac [Shakur] and Biggie [Smalls].” 8. Social historian Robin Kelley makes this clear in his perceptive reading of Miles Davis. Pointing to Davis’s socialization within a “masculine culture [of jazz musicians and everyday hustlers] that aspired to be like a pimp,” Kelley calls for a reconsideration of the musical and narrative structure of “romance [as] a form of emotional power that can be used to control or oppress” (Kelley, “Miles Davis” 2). In “Miles Davis: The Chameleon of Cool; A Jazz Genius in the Guise of a Hustler,” Kelley more generally situates Davis within a tradition of black male jazz

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musicians and popular icons from Leadbelly to Superfly and Sweetback. 9. Jimi Hendrix, Donnie Hathaway, and Eugene Robinson of Oxbow are additional examples of this. 10. In his conversation with music journalist Touré for Interview magazine, D’Angelo confesses, “The night [Marvin] died my nightmares started. I couldn’t listen to any song of his for years. I was petrified of them. I would weep. My mother took me to a psychiatrist to get a grip on it. The psychiatrist said something like, unconsciously I had phobias about similarities between Marvin’s relationship with his father and my relationship with my father—that I was afraid my father was going to do the same. I don’t have the fear now.” 11. Neal continues, “Such inward violence—and violence is not too strong a term—was also associated with patriarchal and heterosexist tendencies that denied full agency to women, queers, and others within the black community” (Soul Babies 5). According to Neal, the post-soul generation emerges from between the 1963 March on Washington and the 1978 Bakke v. University of California decision, which found for a white medical student who claimed reverse discrimination due to the state universities’ admissions policies. 12. Of course, the disciplinary if not self-annihilating aims of white supremacy are not isolated to the coercive measures black fathers exact on black boys; to be sure, these aims also operate through a patriarchal web of relations that can manifest for poor, aggrieved black men in physical forms of gun, domestic, and sexual violence. 13. I should state here that the theme of the troubled psychic relationships between black fathers and sons extends to other texts such as George Jackson’s Soledad Brother (1970) and John Edgar Wideman’s Fatheralong (1995), in which fathers are historically silenced. In contemporary African American film, Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991), for example, sheds disquieting light on the deathsaturated terrain of black father-son relationships. While in many of Lee’s films the theme of fatherhood is a recurring motif, Jungle Fever dramatizes an “honor killing” of disgraced and crack-addicted son Gator (Samuel L. Jackson) by his father, the “honorable” and former preacher Dr. Purity (Ossie Davis). Curiously, Gator is fatally shot by his father in what appears to be the area of his groin. The Hughes brothers, too, take on the deathly violence between black fathers and sons as young Caine Lawson (Tyrin Turner) witnesses his drug-dealing father, Tat Lawson (Samuel L. Jackson), kill a man for talking out of line when asked to pay his debt. To be sure, the haunting call of Caine’s subsequently murdered father (“Caine . . . Caine . . . Caine”) is literally made to chase Caine throughout the film’s present as he lives out a life of death-bound subjectivity. 14. Here I am making an explicit reference to the well-known study of black masculinity, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America, by Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson (1993), in which “cool pose” references black

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men’s oppositional and recuperative responses to economic, social, and political domination. 15. D’Angelo’s “Untitled” music video was deemed one of VH1’s “50 Sexiest Videos,” in which VH1 “showcase[s] the best, hottest, most titillating clips of all time” (VH1.com; emphasis added). 16. D’Angelo’s video image becomes evidence of his own symbolic death as human. The video image, however, never actually quite dies; indeed, it is favored not only because it refuses to change but also because it can be worked to the brink of death, revived by the small screen, and killed again and again. 17. Thompson also played drums on D’Angelo’s Voodoo album and tour. 18. I am referring to the two Nuba wrestlers famously photographed first by English documentarist George Rodgers, and then infamously affixed to the back cover of Leni Riefenstahl’s book The Last of the Nuba (1976). Riefenstahl was a former Nazi filmmaker famous for her films Triumph of the Will and Olympia made during the 1930s. 19. Amiri Baraka’s 1967 film-adapted play, Dutchman, wonderfully illustrates this “state of erection” when Clay, the youngish black middle-class male, is mesmerized by the unholy “snake-charmer,” Lula, who figuratively reduces him to his phallic essence by leading him to and fro, calling him to erotic attention like a snake hypnotized by a flute-like call. 20. D’Angelo’s subsequently drastic weight gain, his alcohol and drug abuse, and his reckless behavior leading to several broken ribs all suggest his problematic relation to his body. 21. I am directly invoking Virginia Blum’s Flesh Wounds (2003). As Blum points out concerning television and its drive to colonize the American body, “television is . . . prodding us into unspeakable acts of violence, debasing our morals, supplanting the family, and most insidious, luring us into a world of simulacra from which there is no escape” (255). 22. Ed Burns, a white former Baltimore detective, is the creator and director of this successful HBO series about life on the streets of Baltimore. The trailer/ opening credits of the show feature a young black male lying on the street in a body bag as an iconic image for the show’s naturalistic look at the social malaise of urban Black America. 23. In an interview about She Hate Me, Lee responded unpersuasively when asked if he had had “any discussions with the gay community about the way that lesbians were going to be portrayed in this movie.” “Well, we hired a technical consultant. Her name is Tristan Taormino. Tristan is well-respected within the lesbian community so, we hired her, she worked with me on the script. You know, the script was written, but she looked at the script and pointed things out. She also worked with the actresses” (www.movies.about.com/library/weekly/aaspikelee072804ahtm). For Groucho Review, Lee remarked,

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What’s interesting, though, is that Tristan had several screeners across the country for lesbian audiences before the film opens—you gotta remember the movie opens August 13th, here in the Bay Area. And interestingly, the film—people liked and disliked was really broken down by race. AfricanAmerican lesbians, lesbians of color liked the film a whole lot more better than white lesbians. I just think if you’re going to do the fact, I think African-American lesbians were much more comfortable with these women getting pregnant by other means than artificial insemination. Whereas the white lesbians, the fact that [a] penis was introduced into the equation, they just can’t get with it. Very simple. (www.grouchoreviews.com/interviews/22)

24. Drawing from Ruthie Gilmore’s Golden Gulag (2007), I want to suggest, as Gilmore has done, that “the progressive nature of capitalism requires the essential commodity—working people’s labor power—in varying quantities and qualities over space, sector, and time” (71). I am also making reference to Achille Mbembe’s use of Heidegger’s economy of terms “being-a-thing.” Mbembe writes, The “thing” is, in Heideggerian terms, a something and not nothing, but it is not at this level that colonialism defines the colonized as absolute void. For the being-a-thing of the colonized does not prevent their being, in some circumstances, “things of value.” This “value” is to be usable, and that usefulness makes them objects, tools. Their being-a-thing of value lies precisely in this function as implements and in this usefulness. (187)

Bibliography

Books and Articles Adams, Timothy Dow. “ ‘I Do Believe Though I Know He Lies’: Lying as Genre and Metaphor in Black Boy.” In Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah, 302–16. New York: Amistad, 1993. Agamben, Giorgio. Sacer Homo: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Anderson, Elijah. Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. Anderson, Terry H. The Sixties. New York: Longman, 1999. Baker, Houston A. Jr., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Native Son: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Bakish, David. Richard Wright. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973. Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon, 1955. Barbour, Floyd B. The Black Seventies. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1970. Barry, John M. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Best, Stephen Michael. “Stand by Your Man: Richard Wright, Lynch Pedagogy, and Rethinking Black Male Agency.” In Representing Black Men, ed. Marcellus Blount and George P. Cunningham, 111–30. New York: Routledge, 1996. Bigsby, C. W. E. The Second Black Renaissance: Essays in Black Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980. Blum, Virginia. Flesh Wounds: The Culture of Cosmetic Surgery. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. New York: Continuum, 1973.

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Filmography Dickerson, Ernest, dir. Juice. DVD. Paramount, 1992. Hughes, Allen, and Albert Hughes, dirs. Menace II Society. DVD. New Line Cinema, 1993. Lee, Spike, dir. Jungle Fever. DVD. Universal Pictures, 1991. ———. She Hate Me. DVD. Sony Pictures, 2004. Singleton, John, dir. Boyz in the Hood. DVD. Columbia Pictures, 1991.

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Index

Abolition Democracy (Davis), 13 Adam (Holder), 132 Afrika Bambaataa (rap group), 58 Aftermath (record label), 113 Agamben, Giorgio, 21, 144n. 6 Agency: in articulation of violent opposition, 48–49, 64; “baad nigga” as synonymous with black male, 78; Bigger’s rage in Native Son as source of, 28; of black women, 87; Cleaver’s Soul on Ice as feat of individual, 45, 56, 61; “playing tough” as site for, 36; “playing white” as attempt to gain, 31, 32; thug life and, 95, 99; See also Black male subjectivity AIDS, 14; African American deaths caused by, 15, 107; anxiety and silence in African-American communities in response to, 108, 120, 121; avoidance of HIV testing by poor urban black men, 111; D’Angelo’s “Untitled” staged against backdrop of AIDS pandemic, 136; death-bound subjectivities for poor urban black men and, 115; Eazy-E, AIDSrelated death of (1995), 111–13,

115, 162n. 8; first cases of, 167n. 37; living with, 107–8; shaping of thug imaginary and, 107–11; subculture of men having sex with men (MSM) and, 117, 119–20, 122, 169n. 55; transmission of HIV/AIDS in prison, 108–11; in white gay male community, 107–8, 167n. 38 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), 170n. 59 AIDS-Education Programs, 108 Ali, Muhammad, 154n. 17 Alk, Howard, 164n. 14 American Me (Olmos), 109 “American Woman” (video), 131 Amnesty International, 13 Anderson, Elijah, 157n. 15 Anderson, Terry, 52, 54 Another Country (Baldwin), 152n. 3 Anthony, Early, 151n. 2 Antisemitic campaign of 1938, 149n. 15 Anxiety, masculine, 80–81, 108, 120, 121, 130, 137, 156n. 13 Apocalypse Now (film), 164n. 15 Archer, Michael “D’Angelo.” See D’Angelo

190

Index

Are Prisons Obsolete? (Davis), 13 Are We Not Men? Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity (Harper), 108, 120, 156n. 13 Armed self-defense, 56; Cleaver’s call to, 53; See also Violence Austin, John. See Ras Kass Authenticity, racial, 17, 19, 63–90; “baad nigga” as embodiment of, 78–79, 87; concerns about who can speak authoritatively and authentically for race, 87; ghettocentric motifs in black male autobiographies and, 66, 68, 85; McCall’s attempt to access authentic account of ghetto black masculinity, 85–90; See also Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America (McCall) Autobiographies, “ghettocentric” motifs of black male, 65–66, 68, 85; See also Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America (McCall) Autobiography of Malcolm X (Malcolm X), 50, 66, 88, 89, 94, 130 Bad Boy Records, 1 Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity (Ferguson), 159n. 27 “Bad nigger”: appropriation and personification of, in hip-hop culture, 18; “Big” prefix used as mark of solidarity to, 147n. 24; gangsta rap’s capitalization on popularity of, 101–7; McCall’s idealized “baad nigga,” 75, 76–79, 84–85, 87; trope of, 95; white vs.

black perspective on, 158n. 26 Badu, Erykah, 164n. 16 Bakke v. University of California, 172n. 11 Baldwin, James, 25, 27, 28, 51, 142, 148n. 9, 152n. 3 “Ballot Or the Bullet, The” (Malcolm X), 152n. 7 Banjee boy, 118, 121, 169n. 57 Baraka, Amiri, 173n. 19 “Bare life,” Agamben’s concept of, 144n. 6 Barnett, Terri, 155n. 3 Barrett, Keith, 146n. 19 Battle, Mo, 84 Baudrillard, Jean, 139 Beatstreet (film), 145n. 8 “Beautiful” (song track), 114 “Been Around the World” (song track), 114 “Been There, Done That” (song track), 113, 160n. 31 Being-a-thing, 174n. 24 Beloved (Morrison), 126 Bennett, William, 103 Benton Harbor, Michigan, Riots (2003), 14, 162n. 7 Best, Stephen Michael, 24–25 Between God and Gangsta Rap (Dyson), 164n. 17 Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Sedgwick), 150n. 20 “[B]igger’s Place: Lynching and Specularity in Richard Wright’s ‘Fire and Cloud’ and Native Son, A” (Tuhkanen), 165n. 22 Biggie. See Wallace, Christopher “Big Pimpin’” (song track), 114 “Big” prefix used as mark of solidarity

Index

to “bad nigger,” 147n. 24 Big Punisher (a.k.a. Big Pun), 115, 147n. 24 Billson, Janet Mancini, 173n. 14 Bio-violence, 106; prison, AIDS, and shaping of thug imaginary, 107–11 Birmingham, Alabama, bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in (1963), 68, 157n. 18 Bisexuality, 169n. 5; men having sex with men (MSM), subculture of, 116–22; See also Homosexuality; Sexual behavior Black Belt, Du Bois’ description of geographical, 147n. 3 Black Belt section of Chicago, 24, 25, 147n. 3, 150n. 18; tenement living conditions in, 38; white establishments within, 34 Black bourgeois nationalism, 20 Black Boy (Wright), 36–37, 66, 130, 149n. 12 Black Caesar (film), 94 Black Gangster (Goines), 95 Black intellectuals, 97, 103, 157n. 17, 166n. 30 Black-Jewish relations, 149n. 15 Black male literary tradition, 66, 156n. 9 Black male self-destructiveness, 1–2, 4–5, 144n. 4 Black male subjectivity, 16, 20–22; deathly violent formation of, 5–6; erotic violence shaping, in contemporary U.S. popular culture, 142; masturbation as “humanizing” practice enabling assertion of self, 39; self-annihilating drive, 1–2, 4; subjectifying ties to the dead, 6; use

191

of term, 146n. 22 Black Manhood (Clark), 148n. 9 Black Matriarchy Thesis, 56 Black men as menace, imagery of, 65 Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Drake and Cayton), 149n. 15 Black migration to the North, 23–24, 147n. 2 Black nationalism, 153n. 12–13; bourgeois, 20, 67; of Cleaver, 43, 45, 47; neo-black nationalism, 58; resurgence of, in hip-hop culture, 58 “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense” (Lubiano), 153n. 12 Black-on-black violence/crime, 4, 16, 34–35, 37, 81; gun violence, 104; police response to, 33; robbery, 33, 34; tormented black father-son relationships, 127, 128, 129, 130– 31, 135, 172n. 10, 172n. 12–13 Black Panther Party, 44, 46, 56, 69, 152n. 6 Black Power, 29, 43; Cleaver’s conception of, 50; conforming to and resisting dominant authority, 52, 56; contemporary significance of, 57–58; emergence of, 50; liberation ideology of, 52; Malcolm X’s political legacy as part of, 47 Black self-help, 67, 99 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 30–31, 50, 165n. 21 Black Star, 166n. 32 Black underclass, 24, 72, 148n. 4, 156n. 8 Blaxploitation films, 47–48, 56, 94– 95; heroes of, 77

192

Index

Bling, 113 Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (David), 164n. 16 Blues People (Jones), 148n. 6 Blum, Virginia, 173n. 21 Bodies That Matter (Butler), 149n. 13 Body, commodification of black, 138–42 Bones (film), 164n. 15 Booty rap, 113–15 Born Again (album), 143n. 1 “Born in a Mighty Bad Land”: The Violent Man in African American Folklore and Fiction (Bryant), 158 Bourgeois black nationalism, 20, 67 Boyz in the Hood, 130 Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, 2 Brand Nubian (rap group), 58, 102, 165n. 25 Bratton, William, 161n. 2 Bring the Pain (Rock), 103 Brisbane, Robert, 50–51, 152n. 4 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 145n. 10 “Brotha” (Stone), 42 Brown, Claude, 47, 66, 152n. 10 Brown, Jake, 143n. 2 “Brown Sugar” (song), 170n. 5 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, 49 Bryant, Jerry, 158n. 26 Buppies, B-Boys, Baps, and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture (George), 120 Buppy patriarchy, 67 Bureau of Justice Statistics of U.S. Department of Justice, 13, 104, 146n. 15, 146n. 18

Burns, Ed, 140, 173n. 22 “Bury Me A G” (song track), 94 Bush, George W., 110, 160n. 2, 167n. 41 Bush (George H. W.) administration, 105 Butler, Judith, 31, 37, 118–19, 149n. 11, 149n. 13 Butler, Robert, 26–29, 152n. 10 Butts, Reverend Calvin, 103 “C.R.E.A.M. [Cash Rules Everything around Me]” (song track), 102–3 Cadava, Eduardo, 143n. 1 California v. Powell, 58, 64, 155n. 4 “Can It All Be So Simple” (song track), 103 Capital punishment, 12–14, 145n. 12, 146n. 14 Carby, Hazel, 17, 22, 87 Carpenter, John, 65, 155n. 5 Carter, Kelley L., 144n. 2 Cayton, Horace, Jr., 147n. 3, 149n. 15 Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 107, 117 Césaire, Aimé, 98, 164n. 19, 165n. 22 Chicago: black population (1910–30), 23; blues traditions of 1940s and 1950s, 95; era of massive migration from the South to, 23–24; population increase from 1920 to 1930, 147n. 1; South Side (Black Belt), 24, 25, 147n. 3, 150n. 18; South Side (Black Belt), tenement living conditions in, 38; South Side (Black Belt), white establishments within, 34; See also Native Son (Wright) Cincinnati Riots (2001), 14, 162n. 7

Index

City of Quartz (David), 166n. 33 Civil Rights Act (1964), 68 Civil Rights Commission, 54 Civil rights movement: nonviolent, 53, 57; violent white conservative backlash against legal victories of, 46; Watts Uprising and empowering potential for collective insurrection and civil war, 53 Clark, Keith, 34, 148n. 9, 149n. 10, 150n. 21 Cleaver, Eldridge, 9, 19, 66, 150n. 1, 152n. 4, 153n. 10, 154n. 17; black nationalism of, 43, 45, 47; conscious construction of literaryhistorical trajectory, 49–50; dominant white patriarchal values embraced by, 46, 48; experiences leading up to writing Soul on Ice, 44–45; on homosexuality, 151n. 3; path to political consciousness, 45; quest for self-definition in relation to phallus, 50; rejection of America, 46; response to Watts Uprising, 44, 52–53; shift to right, embracing religious and political conservatism, 151n. 2; twelve years in and out of prison, 49; See also Soul on Ice (Cleaver) Clinton administration, 105 Code of Street (Anderson), 157 Coker, Cheo Hodari, 143n. 2 Coles, Dennis, 166n. 26 Collins, Addie Mae, 157n. 18 Colonization: of body by U.S. popular culture, 140; the colonized’s expression of self through fantastic language, 126; psychological effects on the oppressed, 30–31; racism and segregation as domestic, 24;

193

white voyeuristic compulsion to venture into mythological place of black male sexuality, as legacy of colonial desire, 159n. 28 Combs, Sean “Puffy,” 1 Commodification: process of, 72; trafficking of commodifiable images of black men, 135–42 Condoms, AIDS transmission and, 111, 117–18 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 69 Conrad, Joseph, 164n. 15 Consumerism: interest in deathinvoking images of black men in popular culture, 101; outlaw, 102–3; process of commodification and, 72; See also Marketplace Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (Majors and Billson), 172n. 14 Coppola, Francis Ford, 164n. 15 Crack trade, “nihilistic threat” of, 145n. 8 Crenshaw, Kimberly, 17–18, 146n. 23 Criminal justice system, U.S., 65, 105–6, 111, 145n. 13; long-lasting “unanticipated consequences,” 167n. 35; paradoxical faith of black Americans in, awaiting Rodney King verdict, 158n. 25; racial terror and state violence of post–civil rights America and, 12–14; traces of slavery within contemporary, 145n. 14; See also Prison(s) “Cruisin’” (song), 171n. 5 Culture: of oppositionality and difference, 59–60; of poverty (cultural deficiency), 56, 148n. 4, 156n. 8

194

Index

Culture of terror, 44; black cultural responses from within, 19; black male community in urban homosocial spaces to cope with, 27–28; across distinct historical eras, 134–35; heroic potentiality of violent resistance within, in Wright’s Native Son, 50–51; making sense of life from within, 94; paradox of living within, 60–61; prison and AIDS as “deathtorture,” 111; See also Racial terror and state violence Cyprus Hill, 171n. 5 Daddy Cool (Goines), 95, 164n. 15 D’Angelo, 9, 123–42, 170n. 4–5, 171n. 6–7, 173n. 15–17; bodily image, as deathly site of masculine anxiety for black men, 137–40; bodily image, audiences of, 136–37; commodification of body of, 138–40; debut album, 170n. 5; deep attachment to black male artists, 127–28; drug-related arrests, 171n. 6; erotic embodiment of death, 20, 137–38; precarious relationship with his father, 127, 128, 129, 130–31; problematic relation to his body, 139–40, 173n. 20; See also “(Untitled) How Does It Feel?” (song track and video) Dangerous black man, myth of, 48, 155n. 4 Darker Side of Black (film), 111 Davis, Angela Y., 13, 22, 58, 67, 145n. 14, 164n. 14, 164n. 16; ambivalence toward Ice Cube and hip-hop culture, 60 Davis, Mike, 22, 153n. 11, 154n. 14,

166n. 33 Davis, Miles, 87, 171n. 8 Davis, Ossie, 47, 87–88, 172n. 13 Day Eazy-E Died, The (Hardy), 122 Death: by capital punishment, 12–14, 145n. 12, 146n. 14; HIV/ AIDS-related, 15, 107 (See also Eazy-E); living, 6; range of deathsummoning initiations, 6; “space of death/culture of terror,” 5–6; threat of (social), by imprisonment, 12–14; violent, expectation among poor urban black men and society at large of, 4–5; Wallace’s fixation on, 1–4 “Death Around the Corner” (song track), 94 Death-bound effect, 9, 104, 165n. 21 Death-bound imaginary, 11, 15–16, 18–19; See also Thug life Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death, The (JanMohamed), 11 Death-bound subject/subjectivity, 11, 115, 147n. 2, 172n. 13 Death-defiance, 6–9, 22; as assertion of black manhood and preservation of humanity, 17, 93–94, 97–99; black masculinity and culture of, in late twentieth century urban America, 9–20; physiological prolongation of self through sex, 162n. 8; political and popular narratives of black male, 94–95; See also Thug life “Death-discovering,” 93, 116, 122 Deathly violence: as assertion of black manhood and preservation of humanity, 17; black men’s symbolic representations of, 6–9; selfaffirming embrace of, 8–9; in world

Index

of hard-core rappers, 143n. 2 Death penalty (capital punishment), 12–14, 145n. 12, 146n. 14 Death Row Records, 113, 143n. 2 “Death-torture,” prison and AIDS as form of, 111 Defiance against social decorum and status quo, masturbation in public space as, 37–41, 42; See also Deathdefiance Dehumanization: “baad nigga” as way of opposing, 77; Cleaver’s black nationalism and opposition to, 45; defiant and ennobling assertion of racial acceptance within, 98–99; forms of resistance against, 73–74; of good black men in She Hate Me, 140–42; living conditions in Chicago’s Black Belt and, 38; poor urban black men fighting back against. See Native Son (Wright); prison and, 83; process of commodification and, 72; violence as form of, 28–29 Delany, Samuel, 87 Denizet-Lewis, Benoit, 116–18, 159n. 29, 168n. 52–53, 169n. 56 Denny, Reginald, 1992 beating of, 63– 65, 72–73, 154n. 1, 155; attackers of, 65, 155n. 2; black rescuers of, 155n. 3; television coverage of, 63, 158n. 23 Deprivation model of high-risk behavior in prison, 109, 110 Derrida, Jacques, 93 Desegregation, 66 Dickerson, Ernest, 164n. 15, 166n. 30 Diddy, P., 114 Diggs, Robert (a.k.a. RZA), 151n. 1, 165n. 26, 166n. 27

195

Digital, Bobby, 151n. 1 Disciplinary control of state, 144n. 5 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison (Foucault), 105–6, 146n. 21 Discrimination, Watts Uprising of 1965 and years of, 53 Disidentification, 100; defined, 165n. 23; as a politics of identity, 16–17, 21 Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Muñoz), 165n. 23 DL (down low) culture, 117–19, 122, 159n. 29, 168n. 52–53, 169n. 54 DMX, 60, 105, 112, 145n. 9, 164n. 15 Dr. Dre Presents . . . the Aftermath (album), 113 Dogg, Snoop Doggy, 60, 103, 112, 164n. 15, 166n. 29, 168n. 50; transition from gangsta to pimp, 114–15 Domestic space in Wright’s Native Son, 38 “Don’t Cha” (video), 131 Donziger, Steven R., 105 Doubleness, 29 Drag balls, 118–19 Drake, St. Clair, 147n. 3, 149n. 15 Dre, Dr., 58, 103, 113, 160n. 31, 171n. 5 “Drop It Like It Hot” (song track), 114 Drug trade, 77–78, 156n. 8; “nihilistic threat” of crack trade, 145n. 8; oppositional lifestyle of, 78; Rockefeller Laws (1973) and, 168n. 43 Du Bois, W. E. B., 87, 147n. 3 DuCille, Ann, 22

196

Index

Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 156n. 9 Durkheim, Émile, 93 Dutchman (Baraka), 173n. 19 Dyson, Michael Eric, 21, 88, 91–92, 96–97, 100, 115–16, 164n. 17–18 Eazy-E, 9, 16, 58; AIDS-related death of (1995), 111–13, 115, 120, 121; death-seeking/death-defying/lifeaffirming practices, 162n. 8; lyrics of, reckless sense of invincibility in, 112 Edwards, Tamala, 169n. 55 Eight Tray Gangster Crips, 65, 155n. 6 Eisenhower, Dwight, 53, 154n. 14 Ellison, Ralph, 66, 138, 142 Eminem, 121 Empowerment: contemporary significance of Soul on Ice for, 56–61; empowering potential for collective insurrection and civil war, 53; fearlessness as evidence of, 34; multiplicity of directions for black political, 61; thug life as site of, 92 Eng, David, 22 Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (album), 102–3 Epps, Omar, 164n. 15 Erotics of alterity, 125 Escape from LA (film), 155 Escape from New York (film), 65, 155 Ethics, Cleaver’s call to armed selfdefense and new code of, 53 Evers, Medgar, 68 Existential closure, thug life and finding comfort with, 94 Family, Moynihan Report on black, 54–55, 56, 154n. 15

Fanon, Frantz, 21, 30–31, 49, 50, 98, 100, 165n. 21 Farley, Christopher John, 155n. 7 Fatheralong (Wideman), 172n. 13 Father-son relationships, tormented black, 127, 128, 129, 130–31, 135, 172n. 10, 172n. 12–13 Fearlessness: as evidence of empowerment, 34; as psychic ideal, “playing tough” and, 34, 35 Federal Crime Bill of 1994, 105 Ferguson, Ann, 159n. 27 50 Cent, 105, 114 Fire This Time (Horne), 153n. 13, 154n. 15 Flack, Roberta, 171n. 5 Flesh Wounds (Blum), 173n. 21 “Fly Away” (video), 131 Flyboy in Buttermilk (Tate), 166n. 28 Foucault, Michel, 21, 105–7, 139, 144n. 5, 146n. 21 Freedom: Bigger’s humanity in Native Son tied to pursuit of, 28; black male imaginary violently fueled by desire for, 5 Freedom (Marable), 157n. 18 Freud, Sigmund, 93 Furman v. Georgia, 145n. 12 Gangs, 65, 75, 155n. 6; funeral practices of, 146n. 19; gang members referred to as “terrorists,” 161n. 2; intraracial violence between local black, 81; South Central Los Angeles gang culture, 153n. 11 Gangsta and hard-core rap, 58–60; audience demand for stereotypical bad nigger, 104; capitalizing on popularity of bad nigger image,

Index

101–7; connections between God and, 96; hypersexuality of, 113–15; impact of prison on, 111; most damning and unsalvageable aspects of, 112; murders of celebrated stars of, 60; “post”–gangsta rap period of mid-1990s, 103; reinvented to suit hedonistic and materialistic appetite of mainstream audiences, 113; social environment sustained by, 60; symbolic and performative significance of, 59–60; [thug] life and death for Eazy-E and, 111–16 Garvey Movement, 148n. 6 Gates, Daryl, 65, 155n. 6, 166n. 33 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 67, 84, 86, 156n. 11, 157n. 16, 158n. 24 Gaye, Marvin, 127, 128, 129, 142, 156n. 10, 172n. 10 Gay male representation in literature and film, black, 20; See also Homosexuality Geismar, Maxwell, 49–50 Genius/GZA (Gary Grice), 165n. 26 George, Nelson, 120 “Getting Jiggy with It” (song track), 113–14 Ghetto: as idealized site of authentic, “definitive” blackness, 65–66, 68; McCall’s impressions of 1960s ghetto life, 81 Ghetto race men: McCall’s identification with, 85–90; racial authority of, 83 Giddings, Paula, 147n. 2 Gilmore, Ruthie, 174n. 24 “Girls, Girls, Girls” (song track), 114 Girls Gone Wild videos, 115 Glover, Danny, 87 Goines, Donald, 95, 164n. 15

197

Golden Gulag (Gilmore), 174n. 24 Golden State Warriors, 151n. 1 Good, Karen R., 145n. 9 Gordon, Lewis, 28–29, 42 Great Depression, poor urban black life during, 24–25; See also Native Son (Wright) Great Migration, 14 Green, Bobby, 155n. 3 Greenfield, Meg, 155n. 3 Gregg v. Georgia, 12 Grice, Gary, 165n. 26 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 22, 31–32, 148n. 10 “Guano of History, The” (Cadava), 143n. 1 Gun violence, 2; “black-on-black,” 104; phallic sexual imagery and potency of gun, 92 Haley, Alex, 156n. 9 Hard-core rap music. See Gangsta and hard-core rap Hardy, James Earl, 122, 170n. 61 Harlow, Barbara, 22 Harper, Phillip Brian, 108, 120, 121, 156n. 13 Harris, E. Lynn, 119–20, 169n. 59 Harris, Keith, 132 Harris, Trudier, 150n. 17 Hartman, Saidiya V., 6–7, 132–35, 143n. 2 Hathaway, Donnie, 142, 172n. 9 Hawkins, Lamont, 165n. 26 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 164n. 15 “Heaven Ain’t Hard 2 Find” (song track), 94 Hegemonic formation, undermining and combating the violating aims of, 48–49

198

Index

Heidegger, Martin, 174n. 24 Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn, 125–26 Hendrix, Jimi, 127, 128, 142, 172n. 9 “High-Risk HIV Transmission Behavior in Prison and the Prison Subculture” (Krebs), 108–9 Himes, Chester, 66, 142 Hine, Darlene Clark, 21 “Hip Hop Closet: A Fanzine Article Touches a Nerve” (Touré), 160n. 30 Hip-hop culture, 20; appropriation and personification of defiantly oppositional bad nigger in, 18; beginning of hip-hop, 168n. 49; contemporary significance of Soul on Ice to, 57–61; empowering capacity of hip-hop music, 58–60; homophobia in, 160n. 30; image of armed Black man privileged in, 58; performance of black masculinity in, 132–35; resurgence of black nationalism in, 58; scenes of deathly violence in U.S., 4; shift from hip-hop righteousness to hiphop outlaw consumerism, 102–3; Tate’s lamentation of death of, 166n. 28; See also Thug life History of Sexuality (Foucault), 139 HIV/AIDS. See AIDS Holder, Geoffrey, 132 “Hollaback Girl” (video), 131 Holland, Sharon, 6, 10–11, 12, 21, 162n. 5 Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur (Dyson), 91–92 Holton, Deshaun (Proof ), murder of, 143n. 2 Holy Profane, The (Reed), 125 Homicide victimization and offending

rates, 2, 14–15, 104, 166n. 31 Homoerotic attachments, 40–41 Homophobia, 17, 42, 68, 111, 119, 121–22, 160n. 30 “Homophobia in Black Communities” (hooks), 169n. 55 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Agamben), 144n. 6 Homosexuality: AIDS and homosexual sex among black men in prison, 108–11; black community’s collective anxiety and silence around, 108, 120, 121; black gay male representation in literature and film, 20; Cleaver on, 151n. 3; DL culture, 117–19, 122, 159n. 29, 168n. 52–53, 169n. 54; queering the thug imaginary, 116– 22; relation between “homosocial” and “homosexual,” 40, 150n. 20; secreted homosexual life, 109, 116–17, 119–20, 122, 168n. 51, 169n. 59; sex trade among black men, 119–20 Homosociality, black male, 18–19, 27, 29; carving out own humanity from space of, 32; masculine anxieties and sexual dynamics as part of, 40–41; McCall’s depiction of initiation into communal practice of sexual aggression and, 79–82; paradoxical reinforcement and resistance of white authority, 41–42; relation between “homosexual” and, 40, 150n. 20; sexualized dimensionality of practices of, 35–36; urban homosocial spaces, 27–28 Homo-thugs, 92, 117–18, 162n. 8 hooks, bell, 9, 21, 28, 72, 145n. 10,

Index

149n. 16, 169n. 55 Horne, Gerald, 54, 153n. 13, 154n. 15 How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Marable), 13 Hughes, Allen and Albert, 71, 103, 130, 166n. 30, 172n. 13 Humanity: of Bigger in Wright’s Native Son, 27–29; Bigger’s rage as assertion of his, 28–29; deathdefiance and preservation of, 17, 93–94, 97–99; male rite of passage and attempt to assert, 34, 35; from space of black male homosociality, carving out, 32 Hunter, Jason, 165n. 26 Hunter, Paul, 124, 127, 131, 132, 133, 142 Hurricane Katrina (2005), 14 Hypermasculinity: of black images in black popular culture of late 1960s and early 1970s, 47–48; as idealized site of authentic, “definitive” blackness, 68; nihilistic stylizations of black male body, 48; “outlaw culture” embracing, 59; playing tough as assertion of defiant oppositionality and, 34, 35–36; superfly image contributing to hypermasculinization of black male life, 78 Hyperreality, 139 Hypersexuality of gangsta/thug rap, 113–15 Ice Cube, 10, 58–60, 114, 121, 168n. 47 Identity, “disidentification” as a politics of, 16–17, 21 Identity formation, black male, 21, 61, 92, 101; “baad nigga” ideal

199

and, 76–79; masculine and racial anxieties underlying, 90; McCall’s depiction of initiation in communal practice of sexual aggression, 79–82; in turbulent 1960s and early 1970s, 46; See also Thug life “I Don’t Like the Drugs (but the Drugs Like Me)” (video), 131 If He Hollers, Let Him Go (Himes), 66 “If I Die 2Nite” (song track), 94 “If I Should Die” (song track), 10 If They Come in the Morning (Davis), 164n. 14 “If We Must Die” (McKay), 164 “I Get Lonely” (video), 131 Illmatic (album), 103 Imaginary, death-bound. See Deathbound imaginary Incarceration: by race, 13; reliance of post–civil rights America on, to control blacks, 12–14; unavoidability of, sense of, 13; See also Prison(s) Infrapolitics, 73 “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” (song), 156n. 10 Intellectuals, black, 97, 103, 157n. 17, 166n. 30 Intersectionality, theory of, 144n. 5, 146n. 23 Intraracial violence, 4, 34–35, 37, 81, 104; racial terror and, 16 Intravenous drug-related HIV transmission, 108–9 Invisible Life (Harris), 119–20, 169n. 59 Invisible Man (Ellison), 66, 138 “Is Hip Hop Dead?” (Tate), 166n. 28

200

Index

“It All about the Benjamins” (song track), 114 “It Was A Good Day” (song), 10 It Was Written (album), 103 “I Wonder if Heaven Got a Ghetto” (song track), 94 Jackson, George, 13, 83–86, 87, 164n. 14, 172n. 13 Jackson, Janet, 131 Jackson, Michael, 127 Jackson, Samuel L., 172n. 13 James, C. L. R., 87 James, Joy, 13, 21, 22, 100, 106, 144n. 5, 167n. 36 Jameson, Fredric, 22 JanMohamed, Abdul R., 11, 12, 21, 30, 32, 147n. 25, 149n. 12 Jay, Jam Master, 143 Jay-Z, 103, 105, 114 Jeru (rap group), 58 Jewish-black relations, 149n. 15 Jim Crow, 12, 33, 99, 100, 134; abolished (1964), 68; defiant opposition of status quo of, 34; migration of blacks from South to escape, 23; playing tough as response to, 36 Johnson, Earvin “Magic,” 108, 120, 121 Johnson, Lyndon B., and Johnson administration, 46, 53–54, 55 Johnson, Roderick, 169n. 57 Jones, LeRoi, 148n. 6 Jones, Russell, 165n. 26 “Jonin’,” art of, 76 Judy, Ronald A. T., 160n. 33, 170n. 3 Juice (film), 164n. 15 Julien, Isaac, 21, 111 Julien, Max, 77

Jungle Brothers, 58 Jungle Fever (film), 130, 172n. 13 Juon, Steve, 166n. 27 Kane, Big Daddy, 114 Kelley, Robin D. G., 10, 22, 34, 38, 114, 145n. 11, 156n. 14, 160n. 35, 171n. 8; on everyday forms of resistance, 73; on gangsta rappers, 103, 104, 111; on Malcolm X, 88, 89; notion of “political,” 158n. 22 Keywords (Williams), 149n. 11 “Kickin’ Ballistics, Kickin’ Reality” (Kelley), 111 Killing Rage: Ending Racism (hooks), 149n. 16 King, J. L., 169n. 54 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 14; assassination of (1968), 46, 68–69; “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, 94, 163n. 14 King, Rodney, 58, 155n. 4; verdict, aftermath of, 158n. 23, 158n. 25 Kinnamon, Keneth, 40, 150n. 19 Kravitz, Lenny, 131 Krebs, Christopher, 108–9, 167n. 39 Ku Klux Klan, 14 Kweli, Talib, 104 Lacayo, 64 La Rock, Scott, 143n. 2 Last of Nuba, The (Riefenstahl), 173n. 18 “Last Words” (song track), 94 Latino men, queering of thug imaginary and, 116, 118–19 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (TV), 169 Lee, Spike, 130, 140–42, 172n. 13, 173n. 23

Index

“Let’s Get Blown” (song track), 114 Levine, Lawrence, 159n. 26 Liebow, Eliot, 81 Life after Death (album), 1, 3, 113 Lil John, 114 Lingis, Alphonso, 93 Little, Malcolm. See Malcolm X Litwak, Leon, 22 “Living (and Dying) on the Down Low: Double Lives, AIDS and the Black Homosexual Underground” (Denizet-Lewis), 116–18, 159n. 29 Livingston, Jennie, 118, 119 Lockdown America (Parenti), 13 Locke, Alain, 148n. 7 Los Angeles: riots of 1992, 14, 63, 64– 65, 67, 155n. 3, 155n. 6, 158n. 25; Watts Uprising of 1965, 14, 19, 44, 45, 52–55, 56, 68, 152n. 5, 153n. 11, 153n. 13, 154n. 14 Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), 65, 143n. 2, 166n. 33 Lose Your Mother (Hartman), 135 Lott, Eric, 146n. 17, 158n. 21 Lubiano, Wahneema, 22, 153n. 12 Lynchings, 12, 23, 147n. 2, 163n. 14 Lyte, MC, 42 McBride, Dwight A., 157n. 17 McCall, Nathan, 9, 19–20, 63, 109–10, 130, 156n. 10, 157n. 19, 160n. 34, 166n. 30; ability to give “authentic account” of “baad niggas,” 84–85; identification with ghetto race men, 83, 85–90; middle-class background, 66, 68, 70–72, 84; See also Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America (McCall)

201

Machismo, 35, 48, 68; See also Masculinity, black Mack, The (film), 77 McKay, Claude, 164n. 14 Mackie, Anthony, 140 McNair, Denise, 157n. 18 Majors, Richard, 172n. 14 Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America (McCall), 9, 19–20, 63–90, 109–10, 130; air of moral superiority and racial legitimacy in, 82; ambivalence about life on streets, 69–70; “baad [nigga],” aspiring to be, 75, 76–79; caricatured stereotype of black men in contemporary America, 65–66; intra-communal violence in, 75; as literary construction both “reality” and fiction, 66–67; middle-class values informing, 66, 68, 70–72, 84; New Yorker review of, 156n. 11, 157n. 16; prison experience, 82–85; self-incriminating, ghettoveteran approach of, 67, 89; sexual rite of passage, 79–82; source of title, 156n. 10; suicidal tendencies in, 75; violent opening scene, 63, 64, 70–76; voyeuristic attachment to black inner-city life, 71, 72; written in aftermath of 1992 Los Angeles Riots, 63–64, 67 Malcolm X, 14, 45, 47, 50, 66, 83, 85, 87, 130, 152nn. 6–7, 154n. 17, 156n. 9, 156n. 14, 163n. 14; assassination of (1965), 45, 47, 68; Davis’s eulogy of, 47, 87–88; defiant oppositionality of early life of, 89; foreboding references to his own violent death, 94; McCall’s selective appropriation of, 88–89

202

Index

Manchild in Promised Land (Brown), 47, 66, 152n. 10 Mandatory minimum sentences, 105 Manhood. See Masculinity, black Manson, Marilyn, 131 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 132 Marable, Manning, 13, 151n. 2, 157n. 18 March on Washington (1963), 172n. 11 Margolies, Edward, 148n. 5 Marketplace: black male body as commodity in, 135–42; deathbound imaginary in black popular culture, 11, 15, 95, 101; market-driven demand for gangsta and hard-core rap, 3, 4, 58, 96, 104, 111–15; process of commodification, 72; See also Media; Popular culture, U.S. Marriott, David, 135 Masculinity, black, 4; authentic site of ghetto, 85–90; “baad nigga” as embodiment of racial authenticity and, 78–79; “crisis” of black manhood in America’s public culture in 1990s, 154n. 2; culture of death-defiance in late twentieth century urban America and, 9–20; erotic violence at once erecting and emasculating, 142; future as intellectual space for intersectional critique, 17–18; historical legacy of black men’s psychic internalization of physical strength, 150n. 17; homophobia grafted into hiphop [culture], 160n. 30; hooks on males proving their manhood, 149n. 16; increasingly masculinist mood of Black America throughout

late 1960s, 47–48; masculine anxiety, 80–81, 108, 120, 121, 130, 137, 156n. 13; Moynihan Report and, 53–56; performance of, in contemporary black popular and hip-hop culture, 132–35; politics of, 17; in prison, 82–85, 150n. 17; sexualized violence among black men and, 35–36; violence and, 50; willingness to fight as crucial “test” of, 36 Master P, 105 Masturbation, in Wright’s Native Son, 37–41, 42 Material accumulation, “thug-turnedpseudo-respectable” narratives of, 113–14 Matriarchal structure of black family life, poverty and, 54–55, 56 Mauer, Marc, 13, 161n. 2 Mayfield, Curtis, 77 Mbembe, Achille, 125, 126, 138–39, 174n. 24 Media: nihilistic interpretations of thug life in, 100–101; spectacle of black male violence (1993–97) in, 101– 7; See also Marketplace; Popular culture, U.S. Menace II Society (film), 71, 103, 130 Men having sex with men (MSM), subculture of, 116–22; See also Homosexuality Menial jobs, unlikely prospects of landing, 149n. 14 Mercer, Kobena, 22, 31, 35, 136–37 Middle class, black, 66, 67, 84; anxieties about racial belonging and male recognition, 71, 72; conventions of black male identity, consequences of failure to adhere

Index

to, 90; intellectuals, 157n. 17; values, 66, 68, 71–72 “Miles Davis: The Chameleon of Cool: A Jazz Genius in Guise of a Hustler” (Kelley), 171n. 8 Miller, Antoine, 65, 154n. 1 Miller, Jerome, 167n. 35 Miller, Stanley, 162n. 7 Misogyny, 17, 37, 42, 43, 48, 68, 75, 111, 114, 120, 121; See also Women, black Mississippi Delta: blues traditions of, 18, 95; migration of blacks to North from, 23 Mississippi Floods of 1927, 14 Mobb Deep (rap group), 102, 165n. 24 “Mo Money Mo Problems” (song track), 113 “Money Ain’t a Thang” (song track), 114 Monster (Shakur), 109 Monthly Review, 74 Morganthau, Tom, 64, 72–73 Morrison, Toni, 126 Moses, Wilson, 153n. 12 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 54, 154n. 15 Moynihan Report (The Negro Family: A Case for National Action), 45, 50, 53–56, 114, 155n. 8; “blaming the victim” in, 55; on poverty and urban black “subculture,” 54–55; societal impact of, 55 Mullen, Robert W., 154n. 16 Muñoz, José, 16–17, 21, 100, 165n. 23 Muray, Nicholas, 137–38 Murder of Fred Hampton, The (documentary film), 164n. 14 Murphy, Titus, 155n. 3

203

Murr, Andrew, 64, 72–73 Music videos, 124, 131; See also “(Untitled) How Does It Feel?” (song track and video) N.W.A. (Niggas With Attitude), 58, 112, 162n. 4 “Narrating the Negro,” representational burden of, 67–68 Nas, 103 Nationalism. See Black nationalism National Prison Rape Reduction Commission, 167n. 41 Nation of Islam, 45, 153n. 13 Native Son (Wright), 9, 10, 16, 49–50, 66; Bigger as foundational urban black male archetype of deathbound imaginary, 18–19; Bigger’s coming to consciousness and his radicalization in, 97–99; Bigger’s relationships with other young black men in, 25–26, 27, 148n. 8; black male community in, 23–42; bridging of past and present in, 18, 95; Cleaver’s Soul on Ice as continuation and defense of, 51; critical scholarship of, 25, 26–29, 148n. 7, 148n. 9–10; daily routine of Bigger and friends in, 25; deathbound prophecy and embrace of thug life in, 10, 95, 97–99; effect on readers, 103; heroic potentiality of violent resistance within America’s Jim Crow culture of terror, 50–51; McCall’s emotional response to reading, 86–87; “playing tough,” 33–37; “playing white,” 29–33; “playing with themselves,” 37–42, 150n. 21; reference to black-Jewish relations

204

Index

Native Son (Wright) (continued) in, 149n. 15 Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero (Butler), 26–29, 152n. 10 Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Writers (Margolies), 148n. 5 Neal, Larry, 153n. 12 Neal, Mark Anthony, 130, 132, 172n. 11 Neglect, economic and political, 46, 55, 64 Negro Family: A Case for National Action, The (Moynihan Report), 45, 50, 53–56, 114, 155n. 8 Nelly, 114 Neo-black nationalism, 58 Never Die Alone (film), 164n. 15 New Day in Babylon (Van Deburg), 151n. 2, 154n. 17 New Jack City (film), 145n. 8 “New Space: The Growth of Black Consciousness in the Sixties” (Neal), 153n. 12 Newsweek magazine, 64, 166n. 29 Newton, Huey P., 164n. 14 “Nigger,” finding empowerment and virtue through embodiment of, 32–33 Night, Marion “Suge,” 60, 143n. 2 Nihilistic behavior, urban black violence/aggression seen as, 41, 48, 50, 59, 61, 66, 68, 73, 74–75 Nihilistic threat, 14, 66, 78, 103, 146n. 17 Norms, playing tough as participation in and reiteration of dominant, 37 North, the, life for poor southern blacks during the 1920s and 1930s

in, 23–24, 147n. 2 Notebook of Return to the Native Land (Césaire), 164n. 19, 165n. 22 Notes of a Native Son (Baldwin), 25, 51 “Notes on a Native Son” (Cleaver), 51 Notorious B.I.G. See Wallace, Christopher OAAU [Organization of AfroAmerican Unity], 152n. 6 Old Dirty Bastard, 60, 115 Old School (film), 168n. 50 Olmos, Edward James, 109 On Black Men (Marriott), 135 Only Built for Cuban Linx (album), 103 On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of “Straight” Black Men Who Sleep with Men (King), 169n. 54 Oppositionality and difference, culture of, 59–60, 61, 77–78, 85, 89, 92; in Wright’s Native Son, 33, 35 Oppression: psychological effects of colonization on the oppressed, 30–31; psychosexual dimension of, 49–50; structural and psychosocial variables of, 51–52; violent forms of resistance to, 73–74; Wright on effects of, 148n. 8 “Ordo Abchao” (song track), 105 Outlaw consumerism, 102–3 Paid Tha Cost to Be Da Bo$$ (album), 114 Panther Paradox: A Liberal Dilemma, The (Schanche), 152n. 4 Parenti, Christian, 13 Paris Balls, 118–19 Paris Is Burning (documentary), 118–19 Paris (rap group), 58

Index

Parker, Charlie, 142 Parker, Police Chief, 154n. 14 Parks, Gordon, Jr., 77 Patriarchal ideologies, Cleaver’s embrace of white, 46, 48 Patterson, Orlando, 11, 144n. 4 Pentecostalism, 125 Peters, Ken, 164n. 17 Physical strength, historical legacy of black men’s psychic internalization of, 36–37, 150n. 17 Pimp, The (Slim), 47 Pimp tradition, thug sexuality as continuation of, 114–15 Pinckney, Darryl, 66, 156n. 12 Player Club (sound track), 114 “Playing tough” in Native Son, 33–37 “Playing white” in Native Son, 29–33 “Play of signs,” surveilling function of panoptic, 146n. 21 Poiter, Sidney, 160n. 32 Police brutality, 152n. 5; Denny beating in response to, 64–65; examples of black men being pursued by the police, 162n. 7; Ice Cube’s “We Had to Tear This Motherfucka Up” against, 58–60; increasing militaristic police inspection, 105–7; Rodney King verdict and, 158n. 23, 158n. 25; Watts Uprising as critique of, 53 Political leaders coming to terms with imminent threat of state-sanctioned violence and death, black, 94 Political possibility: thug life as site of, 92; Tupac’s self-fashioning as thug constituting, 100 Political power, state and, 144n. 5; See also Racial terror and state violence “Politics of Black Masculinity and

205

the Ghetto in Black Film, The” (Dyson), 88 Poor Righteous Teachers, 58 Popular culture, U.S.: black male body as convergence of death and desire in, 123; black men’s complicity with and resistance to the erotics of racism, 123; erotic violence shaping black male subjectivity in, 142; impact of prison on black, 111; nihilistic interpretations of thug life in, 100–101; religion in black, 125; thug sexuality in black, 113– 15; trafficking of commodifiable images of black men, 135–42; violent deaths of poor urban black men in, 4–5; See also Marketplace; Media Positivism, 149n. 11 Poverty: culture of, 56, 148n. 4, 156n. 8; urban, black “subculture” in Moynihan Report resulting from, 54–55 “Poverty of Mind, A” (Patterson), 144n. 4 Powell, Kevin, 160n. 31 Power: Foucault’s theory of totalizing panoptic, of state, 106; Ice Cube’s homoerotic depiction of, in “ We Had to Tear This Motherfucka up,” 59; violent resistance reflecting racial imbalance of, throughout late 1960s and 1970s, 73–74; See also Black Power Predator, The (Ice Cube), 58–59 Priest, Killa, 151n. 1 Prince, 2, 130, 131 Prison(s): AIDS and homosexual sex among black men initiated in, 108–11; booming production

206

Index

Prison(s) (continued ) of federal and state, 156n. 8; deprivation model of highrisk behavior in, 109, 110; “inevitability” of, 83–84; internalization of inmate code, 109; long-lasting “unanticipated consequences,” 105, 167n. 35; McCall’s depiction of, 82–85; rape in, 109–10, 167n. 40–41; as rite of passage to black manhood, 83, 150n. 17; sense of strength and vengeful pride in ability to withstand, 83; sexual slavery in, 119, 169n. 58; shaping of thug imaginary and, 107–11; as site of rehabilitation for McCall, 83–84; social reform policies and increased likelihood of imprisonment, 105– 7, 168n. 43; surveillance in, 106, 167n. 36 Prison-industrial complex, 12, 13, 106–7, 134, 136, 145n. 14, 167n. 35, 170n. 4 Prison Rape Elimination Act (2003), 110, 167n. 41 Prodigy (rapper), 102 Project 100,000, 14, 46, 146n. 16 Proof (Deshaun Holton), murder of, 143n. 2 “Protect Ya Neck” (song track), 103 Pryor, Richard, 160n. 32 Public Enemy, 58 Public school punishment practices, 159n. 27 Puff Daddy, 168n. 45, 168n. 47 Pulp fiction, 95 Purple Rain (film), 130 Pussycat Dolls, 131

Quinn, Eithne, 162n. 4 Race, Reform, and Rebellion (Marable), 151n. 2 Race Matters (West), 103, 158 Race Men (Carby), 87 Race Rebels (Kelley), 10, 160n. 35 Race relations: in 1940, 103; in 1960s, 68–69, 74 Race to Incarcerate (Mauer), 13, 161n. 2 Race war, 46; See also Racial terror and state violence; Urban uprisings Racial authenticity. See Authenticity, racial Racial negation, “playing white” as symptomatic of attempted, 30, 32 Racial profiling, 64 Racial terror and state violence, 4, 5; Bigger’s profound awareness of, in Native Son, 97–99; Cleaver’s call to armed self-defense against, 53; events constituting living legacy of, 14; failure of, 16–17; Foucault’s theory of totalizing panoptic power of state, 106; historical skeins of, 134–35; internalized, self-inflicting effect of, 14–15; intraracial violence and, 16; as “legitimated” form of social control, 5–6; liberation ideology of Black Power and, 52; “outlaw culture” embracing hypermasculine aggression in face of, 59; “playing white” as tactic to combat, 32; principal means of exercising, 11–14; prison, AIDS, and shaping of thug imaginary, 107–11; prisonindustrial complex, 12, 13, 106–7,

Index

134, 136, 145n. 14, 167n. 35, 170n. 4; representations of deathly violence and death-defiance by black men as sedimented cultural by-product of, 7–8; summer riots of late 1960s in urban black communities and, 55; thug life and making sense of death grip produced by, 92–94; violence in response to, 73–74; See also Police brutality Racism, 24–25; animosity toward white, as foundational “touchstone of fraternity” between black men, 36–37; negating racist negation, 32–33; racist sign and signifier “nigger,” 32–33; in U.S. popular culture, black men’s complicity with and resistance to erotics of, 123 Raekwon, 101, 103 Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Holland), 6, 12, 162n. 5 Ramirez, Dania, 141 Rape: by football players at University of Colorado, allegations of‘, 161n. 3; homosexual fantasies of, 121; McCall’s depiction of initiation into communal practice of sexual aggression, 79–82; in prison, 109– 10, 167n. 40–41 “Rap game,” 76 Rap music: “Big” prefix used by rap artists as mark of solidarity to “bad nigger,” 147n. 24; booty rap, 113–15; super-saturation into mainstream markets, 113–14; See also Gangsta and hard-core rap; specific rap artists

207

Ras Kass, 19, 45, 57–58, 105, 150n. 1; evocation of Soul on Ice, 43, 44, 150n. 1; image of armed Black man privileged by, 58; present-day “revisions” of Cleaver’s detrimental views on women, 57–58 Rassassination (album), 151n. 1 Ray, James Earl, 69 Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (Watts), 158n. 25 Ready to Die (album), 1 Reagan administration, 105 Real War on Crime, The (Donziger), 105 Reasonable Doubt (album), 103 Redress, critical practice of, 134 Red Summer Riots of 1919, 14 Reed, Teresa L., 125 Religion: in black popular culture, 125; religious references in Tupac’s lyrics, 95–96; thug theology, 96, 97, 164n. 18 Representationality, 148n. 7; debates on representational value of America’s native sons, 25, 99; of McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler, 67; See also Authenticity, racial Research Triangle Institute, 108 Resistance: “baad nigga” as symbol of racial, 78, 85; “disidentificatory” possibilities of, 16–17; everyday forms of, 73–74; illicit forms of, 69; male-dominated practices of collective, 56; nonviolent, 53, 57; playing tough to express, 36; political activist groups of 1960s, 69; representations of deathly violence and death-defiance as liberating possibilities of, 8, 17; violent, to effect revolutionary

208

Index

Resistance (continued) change, 49–50, 53; See also Urban uprisings Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (James), 13, 106 Resurrection (documentary film), 91, 160n. 1 Revolutionary consciousness of late 1960s, 50, 51, 56 Revolutionary Suicide (Newton), 164n. 14 R & G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece (album), 114 Riefenstahl, Leni, 138, 173n. 18 Riots. See Urban uprisings Rite of passage, male: attempt to assert humanity through, 34, 35; communal practice of sexual aggression as, 79–81; “doin’ time” in prison as, 83, 150n. 17; robbing a white-owned store as, 34 Roberts, Dorothy, 22 Robertson, Carole, 157n. 18 Robeson, Paul, 87, 137–38 Robinson, Eugene, 172n. 9 Robinson, Max, 108 Robinson, Smokey, 171n. 5 Rock, Chris, 103, 157n. 15, 166n. 30 Rockefeller Laws (1973), 168n. 43 “Rock This” (HBO Comedy Special), 157n. 15 Rodgers, George, 173n. 18 “Ruffneck” (Lyte), 42 “Runnin’” (rap single), 91 Rupaul, 118 Russell, Kurt, 155n. 5 RZA (Robert Diggs), 151n. 1, 165n. 26, 166n. 27

Saafir, 151n. 1 Sadat X, 101, 102, 165n. 25 Scenes of Subjection (Hartman), 132–35 Schanche, Don A., 49, 152n. 4 Schmitt, Ben, 144n. 2 Scott, James C., 22, 73 Search and Destroy (Miller), 167n. 35 Sedgwick, Eve, 150n. 20 Segregation, 24; in large northern cities between 1950 and 1965, 54; in schools, abolishment of legal, 49 Self-definition, 50; narrow field of choices for urban black males, 61 Self-destructiveness, black, 1–2, 4–5, 144n. 4; ambivalence between selfdiscovery and, 29 Self-help, black, 67, 99 Sexual behavior: AIDS and homosexual sex among black men in prison, 108–11; contradictions between spirituality and sexuality, 129; masturbation in Wright’s Native Son, 37–41, 42; McCall’s depiction of initiation into communal practice of sexual aggression, 79– 82, 159n. 28; performance of black male sexuality, in contemporary black popular and hip-hop culture, 132–35; prison rape, 109–10, 167n. 40–41; queering the thug imaginary, 116–22; “rap game,” 76; thug sexuality, 113–15, 120–21; See also Bisexuality; Homosexuality Shabazz, El Hajj Malik El. See Malcolm X Shaft (film), 47 Shakur, Sanyika, 109, 155n. 6, 167n. 40 Shakur, Tupac, 4, 9, 16, 103, 112, 143n. 2, 145n. 7; bullet wound

Index

as symbol of his death-defiance, 99–100; “death-dream-work” in rap music of, 147n. 25; as feasible truth, 100; murder of (1996), 60, 113, 115, 160n. 1; openness to risk, 115–16; religious references in lyrics of, 95–96; tattoos, selfdefinition through, 91, 99–100; thug life described by, 91–92, 94, 95–97, 99–100, 161n. 4; varied sensibilities about death and death defiance, 164n. 15 Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Taussig), 163n. 11 She Hate Me (film), 140–42, 173n. 23 Shurn, Terrance, 162n. 7 Signifying, historic black American tradition of, 76, 158n. 24 Signifying Monkey (Gates), 158n. 24 Singleton, John, 130, 166n. 30 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, bombing of (1963), 68, 157n. 18 Slavery, 134; afterlife of, 135; rhetoric of black body as slave commodity in “Untitled,” 135; sexual, in prison, 119, 169n. 58 Slavery and Social Death (Patterson), 11 Slick Rick, 114 Slim, Iceberg, 47 Smalls, Biggie. See Wallace, Christopher Smith, Clifford, 165n. 26 Smith, Will, 113, 168n. 47 Social reform policies, 105–7, 168n. 43 Society of Captives, The (Sykes), 109 Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Jackson), 83–84, 85, 164n. 14, 172n. 13

209

“So Many Tears” (song track), 94; religious references in, 95–96 Soul on Ice (album), 19, 151n. 1 Soul on Ice (Cleaver), 9, 19, 43–61, 66, 153; authoritative potential within, 61; black masculinity and Moynihan Report, 53–56; contemporary significance of, 56–61; as continuation and defense of Wright’s Native Son, 51; era of U.S. instability leading up to, 46; as meditation on black masculinity and its relation to revolutionary consciousness, 45; Ras Kass’s tribute to, 43, 44, 150n. 1; revolutionary black manhood constructed in, 47–52; structure of, 45; Watts Uprising of 1965, 44, 45, 52–53 “Soul on Ice” (song track), 57 Souls of Black Folk, The (Du Bois), 147n. 3 South Central Los Angeles. See Los Angeles Space of death, 5–6; choosing, 93–94; framing black collective identities and lived experiences, 94; paradoxical possibility of seeing glory in, 97–99; as space of transformation, 163n. 11; See also Culture of terror; Racial terror and state violence Speaking in tongues, 125–26 “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer Literary Tradition” (Henderson), 126 Stackolee, folktales of, 18, 95 Staples, Brent, 167n. 39 “State,” the, use of term, 144n. 5

210

Index

States of Con-Finement (James), 13 State violence. See Racial terror and state violence Steels, Bobby, 165n. 26 Stefani, Gwen, 131 Stir Crazy (film), 160 Stone, Angie, 42, 150n. 22 Stone, Sly, 128 Stop Prison Rape (SPR), 167n. 41 Street culture, male-defined, 149n. 10 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 69 Studio gangstas, 103 Studio thugs, 101 Subaltern voice, McCall’s attempt to access, 84, 85–90, 160n. 34 Subculture, black male, 18–19, 25, 48, 54; idealized “crazy nigger” or “baad [nigga],” 77–79; McCall’s depiction of, 76–77; See also Homosociality, black male Subjectivity, black male. See Black male subjectivity “Suicidal Thoughts” (song), 1, 7, 163n. 13 Suicide: Biggie’s symbolic, in Wallace’s “Suicidal Thoughts,” 1, 4; firearms as predominant method of, for Blacks aged 10–19 years, 2 Superfly (film), 47, 77–78, 94; sound track, 77 “Survival of the Fittest” (song track), 102, 165 Sweet Sweetback Baadasssss Song (film), 47, 77 Sykes, Gresham, 109 Tally’s Corner (Liebow), 81 Taormino, Tristan, 173n. 23 Tate, Greg, 166n. 28

Taussig, Michael, 5–6, 93, 163n. 11 Television: colonization of American body, 173n. 21; violently dying or violently dead black men on, 140, 169 Tenements of Chicago’s Black Belt, 38 Terror. See Culture of terror; Racial terror and state violence Terry, Wallace, 154n. 17 “This Disease Called Strength” (Harris), 150n. 17 Thomas, Timothy, 162n. 7 Thompson, Ahmir, 137, 139, 173n. 17 Three strikes law, 105, 166n. 34 “Thug”: definitions in contemporary black popular culture, 161n. 3; Hindi derivation of term, 160n. 2; racialized dimension, 161n. 3; recurring motif of, 20 Thug Immortal: The Tupac Shakur Story (film), 161n. 4 Thug life, 20, 91–122, 162n. 5; death for Eazy-E and gangsta rap, 111–16; as “ennobled oppositional identity,” 91, 161n. 3; extending beyond black male cultures in United States, 163n. 9; history of death-bound prophecies among black men, 94–101; as a kind of “death-discovering,” 93, 116, 122; making sense of death grip produced by racial terror and state violence, 92–94; media spectacle of black male violence (1993–97) and, 101–7; nihilistic interpretations of, in popular culture, 100–101; political unconscious in thug imaginary, 146n. 20; prison, AIDS, and shaping of thug imaginary, 107–11; queering the thug

Index

imaginary, 116–22; as site of selfaffirmation and purpose, 92–94; as “thug imaginary,” 96–97; Tupac’s conception of, 91–92, 94, 95–97, 99–100, 161n. 4 Thug Life: Vol. 1 (album), 161 Thug sexuality, 113–15, 120–21 Thug theology, 96, 97, 164n. 18 Till, Emmett, 14 Time magazine, 1968 review of Soul on Ice in, 44, 45 Touré, 160n. 30, 171n. 7, 172n. 10 Trick Daddy, 114 Trinier, Dominique, 127, 133 Truly Disadvantaged, The (Wilson), 148n. 4 Truth in sentencing laws, 105 Tucker, C. Delores, 103 Tuhkanen, Miko Juhani, 165n. 22 Tupac. See Shakur, Tupac Tupac Vs. (documentary film), 164 Turner, Elgin, 166n. 26 Turner, Tyrin, 172n. 13 Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, 14 2Pacalypse Now (album), 164n. 15 Tyson, Mike, 160n. 1 Uncle Tom’s Children (Wright), 130 Underclass, black, 24, 72; cultural deficiency interpretations of, 56, 148n. 4, 156n. 8; process of commodification of, 72; violence and social afflictions of, 155n. 8 Unemployment in 1960s, black, 54 U.S. Supreme Court, 49, 145n. 12 “(Untitled) How Does It Feel?” (song track and video), 20, 123–42, 173n. 15; D’Angelo’s performance staging violent effects of long and collective history of black male life,

211

127; D’Angelo’s unintelligibility in, 125–26; “official translation” of lyrics, 124–25; opening scene, 131–32; privileged attention to D’Angelo’s body and physical movement of music video, 124, 131–32, 135–37; video clips from, 133 “Ups & Downs” (song track), 114 Urban America, black masculinity and culture of death-defiance in late twentieth century, 9–20 Urban uprisings: Benton Harbor, Michigan (2003), 14, 162n. 7; Los Angeles riots of 1992, 14, 63, 64– 65, 67, 155n. 3, 155n. 6, 158n. 25; Watts Uprising of 1965, 14, 19, 44, 45, 52–55, 56, 68, 152n. 5, 153n. 11, 153n. 13, 154n. 14 Valentine, Charles, 55 Van Deburg, William L., 151n. 2, 152n. 6, 154n. 17 Van Peebles, Melvin, 77 Vibe magazine, 125, 145n. 9, 166n. 28 “Victory” (song track), 114 Vietnam and Cambodia, war in (1966–72), 14, 46, 152n. 5, 154n. 17; escalation of, 69; Newsweek poll (1969) of black attitudes about, 154n. 16; Project 100,000, 14, 46, 146n. 16; transfer of federal aid from domestic social programs to, 55 Violence: between black fathers and sons, 127, 128, 129, 130–31, 135, 172n. 10, 172n. 12–13; black masculinity and, 50; black-onblack, 4, 16, 33, 34–35, 37, 81, 104, 130–31; as cleansing force

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Index

Violence (continued ) ridding black subject of inferiority complex produced by oppression, 98; Denny beating, 63–65, 72–73, 154n. 1, 155; discursive and “lived,” of gangsta and hard-core rap against dominant authority, 60; erotic, shaping black male subjectivity in contemporary U.S. popular culture, 142; as form of both agency and racial authenticity in McCall’s autobiography, 64; as form of dehumanization, 28–29; gun, 2, 92, 104; as humanizing practice of selfhood and intimate initiation into black male community, 36–37; in lives of poor urban black male youths, 2, 3–5; media spectacle of black male (1993–97), 101–7; in opening scene of Makes Me Wanna Holler, 63, 64, 70–76; playing tough, 33–37; political, 142; prison and AIDS as death-torture, 111; racial, against blacks, 68; rape, 79–82, 109–10, 121, 161n. 3, 167n. 40–41; as response to racial terror, 36; revolutionary, Watts Uprising of 1965 as, 52–53; sexual, 121–22; social afflictions of urban underclass and, 155n. 8; social context of, 73; white patriarchal authority and, 31; white supremacist, 130, 172n. 12; See also Racial terror and state violence; Thug life Virility, myth of black male, 142 Voodoo (album), 123, 124, 137, 170n. 1, 171n. 5, 171n. 7; 2003 Voodoo concert tour, 137–38, 139; awards given, 127; Neal’s Pop Matters

review of, 132; See also “(Untitled) How Does It Feel?” (song track and video) Voting Rights Act (1965), 68 Voyeurism, market-mediated, 15–16, 104, 135–36 Walker, Antiwan, 150n. 21 Walker, Margaret, 24, 150n. 21 Wallace, Christopher (a.k.a. Biggie, Biggie Smalls, Notorious B.I.G.), 1–5, 7, 10, 101, 103, 113, 121, 143n. 1, 147n. 24, 163n. 13; “death-dream-work” in rap music of, 147n. 25; leitmotifs of complete discography of, 2; references to ghetto-identified films, 145n. 8; symbolic suicide in Ready to Die, 1, 7; violent death of (1997), 3–4, 115, 143n. 2, 144n. 3, 60, 113 Wallace, Maurice, 40, 150n. 20–21 War on Crime, 67, 105, 156n. 8 War on Drugs, 105 War on Poverty, 46 War on Terror, 160n. 2 Warwick, Dionne, 103 Washington, Booker T., 147n. 2 Washington, Kerry, 141 Watson, Henry, 65, 154n. 1 Watts, Jerry G., 158n. 25 Watts Uprising of 1965, 14, 19, 45, 52–53, 56, 68, 152n. 5, 153n. 11, 153n. 13, 154n. 14; Cleaver’s response to, 44, 45, 52–53; Moynihan Report on instability creating, 54–55; See also Soul on Ice (Cleaver) Weber, Max, 144n. 5 “We Had to Tear This Motherfucka Up” (song track), 58–59 Welcome to the Jungle (Mercer), 136–37

Index

Wells, Ida B., 147n. 2 We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (hooks), 9, 145n. 10 Wesley, Cynthia, 157n. 18 West, Cornel, 14, 21, 35, 48, 103, 146n. 17, 152n. 8, 155n. 8, 158n. 21, 166n. 30 What’s Going On (album), 156n. 10 White Man Listen! (Wright), 148n. 5 White patriarchal power: Cleaver’s embrace of white patriarchal ideologies, 46, 48; playing tough as hyperbolic appropriation of, 35; play[ing] white as symbolic appropriation and “internalization” of, 31 White supremacist violence, 130, 172n. 12 Who Gonna Take the Weight? (Powell), 160n. 31 Who Set You Flowin’? (Griffin), 31–32, 148n. 10 Wideman, John Edgar, 21, 172n. 13 Wild Cowboys (album), 102 Wilder, Gene, 160n. 32 Williams, Damian “Football,” 65, 154n. 1; arrest and imprisonment of, 155n. 6–7; media depiction of, 155n. 4 Williams, Gary, 154n. 1 Williams, Hype, 131 Williams, Pharell, 114 Williams, Raymond, 149n. 11 Williamson, Thad, 74 Wilson, William Julius, 148n. 4, 155n. 8, 166n. 30 Winfrey, Oprah, 168n. 51, 169n. 54 Wire, The (TV series), 140 Women, black: as agents of revolutionary change, 50; denigration of, Moynihan Report and, 56; HIV/AIDS transmitted

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to, 117, 168n. 51; Malcolm X’s patriarchal speeches and, 152n. 7; matriarchal structure of black family and, 54–55, 56; McCall’s depiction of initiation into communal practice of sexual aggression against, 79–82; misogynistic sensibilities toward, 17, 37, 42, 43, 48, 68, 75, 111, 114, 120, 121; poor black men’s demand for silence of black women’s agency, 87; present-day “revisions” of Cleaver’s detrimental views on, 57–58 Wonder, Stevie, 128 Woods, Corey, 165n. 26 Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon), 21, 50 Wright, Eric. See Eazy-E Wright, Richard, 11, 21, 83, 95, 130, 142, 145n. 11, 147n. 25, 149n. 12, 156n. 9; arrival in Chicago (1927), 23; autobiography of, 36–37; on Bigger’s detachment from other blacks, 148n. 8; critique of race relations in 1940, 103; early life, 148n. 5; reference to black-Jewish relations, 149n. 15; as uniquely situated to capture personality of emerging “black underclass,” 24; See also Native Son (Wright) Wu-Tang Clan, 102–3, 151n. 1, 166n. 27; members of, 165n. 26 Wu-Tang Forever (album), 102, 166n. 27 XCLAN, 58 XXL (hip-hop magazine), 43, 44 Xzibit, 151n. 1 Yuille, Lei, 155n. 3