Dwight A. McBride. Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality

African American Review, Winter, 2007 by Zhou Yupei

Dwight A. McBride. Why I Hate Abercrombie &

Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality. New

York: New York UP, 2005. 251 pp. $60.00

cloth/$19.00 paper.

This collection of essays exposes and explores the racialized and heterosexist discourses working in a wide range of political, social, and intellectual spaces. The essays model a new African American scholarship that integrates the multiple genres and methodologies of academic, journalistic, and autobiographical writing. An initiation of such integration, McBride's introduction presents the author as a black, gay, bourgeois professional, whose authority of voice derives not only from his scholarship but also from his personal and shared experiences of race, class, and sexuality.

The three essays in Part I examine the relation between heterosexism and the ideology of respectability. The first essay, "Straight Black Studies," opening with a positive reading of Essex Hemphill's daring and truth-telling personal account, maintains that the ideology of black respectability permeates African Americanist discourse and helps to engender its heterosexist attitude. For McBride, Baldwin, the first "openly gay" black writer, challenges this ideology by presenting in such novels as Giovanni's Room a complex racial identity inseparable from gender, sexuality, and class. Though unable to openly identify his own gay sexuality, Baldwin, in McBride's reading, contributes to the tradition of queer African American fiction and calls into question the dominant "respectable" narratives of the African American literary tradition. McBride competently disputes the homogeneous and hegemonic black subjectivity endorsed by African Americanist discourse.

The titular essay locates the ideology of respectability in the corporate culture and the marketing strategies of Abercrombie & Fitch. Combining an account of the company's history with statistics, interviews, and examples, McBride convincingly associates the success of the company with its profitable construction and promotion of a white, male, and upper-class US lifestyle and citizenship. His insightful reading of Abercrombie & Fitch models a way of doing cultural studies without repeating the ideology of respectability.

In the third essay, "It's a White Man's World," McBride transgresses the logic of respectability by honestly engaging himself in the issue of gay marketplace of desire. After laying bare his own psychology of fear in contrast to the truth-telling attitudes of Robert Reid-Pharr and Gary Fisher, he sets out to catalogue profuse examples from pornography, especially gay pornography, gay male personal ads, and gay TV shows to expose the political nature of the gay marketplace of desire. McBride proves that in gay pornography and personal ads, whiteness is always shown as desired and idealized whereas blackness, constantly seen as physically brutish, sexually insatiable, socially and economically disempowered, becomes virtual and contained. Gay TV shows are heterosexist and racist because they feed into a typical heterosexual anxiety to identify a gay man's sexuality, on the one hand, and prioritize only white gay men and their liberation, on the other. Outspoken about the gay marketplace of desire in relation to politics and humanity, the author refuses to totalize his analysis and only hopes to join others to pioneer the way for a polyvocal, multi-pronged, and multidisciplinary study of this area.

Part II shifts focus to political issues that engage race and sexuality. The first essay here, "On Race, Gender, and Power," observes that in both the hearings of the Clarence Thomas confirmation and the dramatization of the hearings, Anita Hill is denied the status of epistemology, turned into a stereotypical black temptress, and rendered voiceless. Throughout the event, right-wing ideology is repeated and strengthened such that it allows the white person to speak from his own position and for the Other.

In "Feel the Rage," a response to the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising, McBride holds responsible white violence done to the blacks for the latter's anger, rage, frustration, hopelessness, and violence. For him, white Americans' refusal and unwillingness to hear complaints of African Americans and to reflect on their own discriminatory mindset leave African Americans in an unfavorable and disadvantaged position and their spirit in darkness. African American riots, in his view, are the voices of the unheard, an expression of their humanity. To prevent such violence, he asserts, the joined efforts of white Americans and African Americans are required.

"Affirmative Action and White Rage" turns to white men's anger toward affirmative action aroused by the political right to reverse the gains afforded by affirmative action to women and people of color. Citing the recent violent acts done by white men to people of color, McBride points out that while these acts reflect the crisis in cultural whiteness precipitated by multiculturalism, violence against affirmative action derives from the rhetoric of reverse discrimination and victimization created by the political right. Such reductive and distorted rhetoric becomes easily accepted and internalized by the US public, because this public has been made to believe in its personal, sexual, and political innocence. McBride warns against the recent turn of the debate over affirmative action to the right.