Comic book masculinity and the new black superhero

African American Review, Spring, 1999 by Jeffrey A. Brown

But not all Others have been constructed as equal by the dominant masculinist ideology. While the gay man, the Jewish man, the Asian man (and many other "Others") have been burdened by the projection of castrated softness, the black man has been subjected to the burden of racial stereotypes that place him in the symbolic space of being too hard, too physical, too bodily. Ironically, much of the tension regarding the hypermasculine stereotype of black men is a logical cultural development for a group systematically denied full access to the socially constructed ideals of masculinity. In his discussion of the sexual politics of race, Kobena Mercer argues that black masculinity must be understood as a paradoxical position in relation to dominant gender ideals. As he puts it,

Whereas prevailing definitions of masculinity imply power, control and authority, these attributes have been historically denied to black men since slavery. The centrally dominant role of the white male slave master in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century plantation societies debarred black males from patriarchal privileges ascribed to the masculine role. For example, a slave could not fully assume the role of "father," as his children were legal property of the slave owner. In racial terms, black men and women alike were subordinated to the power of the white master in the hierarchical social relations of slavery, and for black men, as objects of oppression, this also canceled out their access to positions of power and prestige which in gender terms are regarded as the essence of masculinity in patriarchy. Shaped by this history, black masculinity is a highly contradictory formation of identity, as it is a subordinated masculinity. (142)

In 1990s North America the situation has not changed all that dramatically for a large majority of black men. Legally sanctioned institutions of slavery may no longer exist, but persistent racist fears and ideologies continue to economically, politically, and socially oppress black men. According to recent statistics (Goat A1), the unequal discrepancies between black and white America are as clear as ever. One-third of the 29 million black citizens in the U.S.A. live in poverty, and the average black American earns $6,700 less per year than the average white worker, and is twice as likely to be unemployed. One in every three black children is currently growing up without a father in the home, and perhaps most shockingly, although black Americans constitute only 12 percent of the nation's population, they represent 51 percent of the country's prison population. Yet society at large still presents a cultural ideal of masculinity that black men are expected to measure up to, at the same time that society denies a great many blacks access to legitimate means for achieving that ideal.

The history of the black male paradox - emasculated, but at the same time feared - is grounded in a long tradition of subjugation and resistance. bell hooks has described the black man's cultivation and embrace of a hypermasculine image as a logical response to antebellum and postbellum views held by white supremacists, which characterized black men as feminine, a rhetoric that "insisted on depicting the black male as symbolically castrated, a female eunuch" ("Feminism" 131). The clearest, and most often cited, examples from the first half of this century are the boxing phenoms Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, both of whom personified black hypermasculinity as a means to resist the emasculation of racism, their prowess in the ring reinforced by widely circulated images of the two men shirtless and intimidatingly muscular. By the time of the Civil Rights era, the more overtly political and rebellious Black Panther movement articulated what Hunter and Davis refer to as "a radicalized Black manhood, throwing off the imagery of the emasculated and shuffling Black male dictated by racial caste" (23).