Comic book masculinity and the new black superhero

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

Even in contemporary Western culture, the most pervasive and influential images of black men are tied up in hypermasculine symbols. The two primary means to legitimate success for black males in popular culture, sports and music, ensure the replication of such ideals from the world of sports as Michael Jordan, Mike Tyson, Bo Jackson, and Shaquille O'Neil, and from music such overtly masculine examples as L.L. Cool J, Snoop Doggy Dog, and Tupac Shakur - images that consistently associate black men with extremes of physicality and masculine posturing. Over the years, in diverse ways, black men have responded to their shared experience of cultural alienation by adopting "certain patriarchal values such as physical strength, sexual prowess and being in control as a means of survival against the repressive and violent system of subordination to which they were subjected" (Mercer 137).

Recently, Richard G. Majors's concept of the "cool pose" has proved an insightful term for understanding the dynamics of black masculinity as it has developed in response to unequal conditions in the modern urban environment. In a series of closely related works (listed at the end of this essay), Majors argues that black males have accepted the traditional values of masculinity but are so restricted by social and political factors that many of them have been deeply frustrated by their inability to enact these traditional masculine roles. "In brief," Majors explains, "cool pose originated as a coping mechanism for the 'invisibility,' frustration, discrimination, and educational and employment inequities faced by Black males. In response to these obstacles, many of these individuals have channeled their creative talents and energies into the construction of masculine symbols and into the use of conspicuous nonverbal behaviors (e.g., demeanors, gestures, clothing, hairstyles, walks, stances and handshakes)" (Majors, et al. 246). Majors includes in his examples of the cool pose such diverse behaviors as the use of humor, feigned emotional detachment, and specific stylistic expressions like the black athlete's inventive basketball dunking, football spiking, and endzone dancing, as well as black musical performers' aggressive posing and graceful yet strenuous dancing styles. A prime ingredient of the cool pose as a compensatory form of masculinity is an exaggerated style of toughness: "Symbolic displays of toughness defend his identity and gain him respect; they can also promote camaraderie and solidarity among black males" (Majors and Billson 30). Unfortunately, as Majors is always careful to point out, the ritualized hypermasculinity performed by many black men as a cool pose, particularly the preoccupation with enacting a tough persona, is rife with the negative potential to promote dangerous lifestyles (e.g., gang bangers, tough guys, drug dealers, street hustlers, and pimps) and to reinforce harmful stereotypes.

The "cool pose" that is so important to the understanding of black masculinity in contemporary Western culture is, in essence, another metaphorical mask: "For some black males," Majors and Billson write, "cool pose represents a fundamental structuring of the psyche - the cool mask belies the rage held in check beneath the surface. . . . black males have learned to use posing and posturing to communicate power, toughness, detachment, and style" (8). Of course, the concept of black culture's employment of a mask is not a new one. James Baldwin's novels were about the complexity and effectiveness of masking as a defensive strategy, and psychoanalytic accounts of the black position such as Frantz Fanon's much cited Black Skin, White Masks (1970) have formalized the concept. What is interesting, though, about the cool pose as a mask of masculinity is that by its very definition - a mask of a mask - it becomes a location of exaggerated masculine signifiers. Hence, both by projection of the dominant white society's fears, and the black male's embrace and over-compensating performance of extreme masculine values, many black males (consciously or unconsciously) are perceived as relatively too masculine. While the cool pose can, and often does, embody attitudes beyond those of toughness and fearlessness, attitudes that suggest alternative forms of masculinity that might exercise a genuine control over traditional masculine features of symbolic physicality as power, it is the trope of toughness and bodily presence - as reductionist and potentially harmful a stereotype as this is - that is most commonly associated with popular images of black masculinity in the modern world.