Getting Angry to Get Ahead: Black College Men, Emotional Performance, and Encouraging Respectable Masculinity (original) (raw)

Not Out to Start a Revolution: Race, Gender, and Emotional Restraint among Black University Men

In this article, I use in-depth interviews with black university men to investigate race, gender, and emotions. Participation in dominant institutions requires African American men to exhibit extraordinary emotional restraint. Because anger is culturally associated with men, however, black men’s sup- pression of anger violates masculine expectations. Thus, racial subordina- tion not only creates difficult emotional expectations but may also create emotional dilemmas in which expected emotional displays undermine other identity expectations. In this article, I examine both how a group of black university men achieve emotional restraint and how they use their emotions to craft and manage their identities as black middle-class men. I argue that black men distance themselves from the controlling image of the angry black man by developing a shared identity I call moderate blackness. Moderate blackness entails emotional restraint, a moderate approach to campus racial politics, and the ability to get along with white people.These strategies work together to produce positive, restrained emotions and to manage anger and agitation, but they require black university men to “not see” racism. Black men use defensive othering to push the stereotype of the angry black onto black women. In doing so, they shore up their masculinity but leave women responsible for combating racial inequality.

Emotions and Redefining Black Masculinity: Movement Narratives of Two Profeminist Organizers

Men and Masculinities, 2010

Using an intersectional analysis of Black masculinities, we explored how 2 African American men's personal emotions regarding violence against women and their perceptions of masculinity became politicized by experiences that led to their participation in the founding of 2 separate profeminist men's organizations. Through the public use of their personal narratives, the men used organizational activities to foster new raced-gendered feeling rules regarding emotion that challenge hegemonic masculinity generally and Black hegemonic masculinities, in particular. Narrative themes indicating reconceptualization of Black masculinity and feeling rules for men included (a) ''becoming aware'' of an injustice to a woman that generated negative emotions, and (b) ''becoming active'' in the profeminist men's movement that allowed the transformation of negative emotions into positive ones. We make recommendations for future research that pays particular attention to how depictions of Black masculinity stigmatize Black men's emotionality in ways that exacerbate differences in emotion norms between men and women and among different racially constructed groups of men.

An Air of Expectancy: Class, Crisis, and the Making of Manhood at a Historically Black College for Men

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2012

This qualitative study explores formations of masculinity among students at a historically black all-male college, offering insights into how the institution crafts the manhood of its students in accordance with gender and class ideologies about black male respectability, heteronormativity, and male hegemony. While a plethora of studies on poverty, deviance, and marginalization have highlighted black men “in crisis,” this article examines middle-class black men and explores sites of conflict and difference for this latter group. Three critical insights into middle-class black masculinity are revealed by this approach: first, that men are institutionally “branded” through class and gender ideologies; second, that the exceptionality of high-achieving black men is politicized to endorse class conflict with other black men; and finally, that sexuality and class performances are inseparably linked through men’s sexual consumption of black women.

Black Masculinities Expressed Through, and Constrained by, Brotherhood

Black males face pressures to adopt dominant social roles in relationships based on expectations from family, peers, and teachers. Many stereotypes define their perceived masculinities in coeducational schools, such as different definitions of masculinity received from peers and adults. Enrollment in all-male, majority-Black schools changes nothing. This article discusses how Black males who attend the Pebbles School—an urban all-male public combined middle and high school—constructed, perceived, and negotiated their masculine identities and perceptions of brotherhood. The relationship between masculinity and brotherhood and the intersection of gender and ethnic studies draw upon studies in Progressive Black Masculinity to challenge restrictive definitions of masculinity constructions shared among some Black males, who tend to view masculinity exclusively through a heterosexual lens, which limits discussions of diversity in brotherhood and sexual orientation. Brotherhood is a bond shared between men of various backgrounds and beliefs centered on commitments or professions. Dancy (2012) writes that Black men's reference to themselves as brothers evokes a bond strengthened by shared experiences of oppression. Brotherhood also denotes a term of endearment and affirmation among Black men. This definition is extended to Black males who attend all-male schools, where they are connected through a common educational experience that fosters brotherhood

“We Need to Come Together and Raise Our Kids and Our Communities Right”: Black Males Rewriting Social Representations

The Urban Review, 1999

This article excavates the voices of urban black males as they "speak their name" (Belton, 1996) in a society that denies them this right. Based on data gathered in a large-scale ethnographic interview study of urban America, the authors traverse the spoken lives of these men, as they weave stories about neighborhood and state violence, opportunities denied and missed, and the current power of black men's groups in the church. Through their day-today lives urban black men challenge social representations about them in racist America, constructing an alternative hegemonic masculinity revolving around relationships, fatherhood, and dignity. We have traversed the soil of North America, bringing advantage to it as farmer, mule trainer, singer, shaper of wood and iron. We have picked cotton and shined shoes, we have bludgeoned the malleable parts of ourselves into new and brash identities that are shattered and bruised by the gun and the bullet. And now the only duty our young men seem ready to imagine is to their maleness with its reckless display of braggadocio, its bright intelligence, its bold and foolish embrace of hate and happenstance. If we are not our brother's keeper, then we are still our brother's witness. We are coconspirators in his story and in his future. August Wilson, Introduction to Speak My Name (1996)

'You make me wanna holler and throw up both my hands!': campus culture, Black misandric microaggressions, and racial battle fatigue

Black males are scarce on White campuses. Still, they experience hypervisibility and are targets of hypersurveillance. This study used focus groups and semi-structured interviews to examine the experiences of 36 Black male students attending seven ‘elite’ historically White Research I institutions. Two themes emerged: (a) anti-Black male stereotyping and marginality and (b) hypersurveillance and control directed at Black men by Whites. Participants reported stereotyping and increased surveillance by police on and off campus. They also reported being defined as ‘out of place’ and ‘fitting the description’ of illegitimate members of the campus community. As a result, students reported psychological stress responses symptomatic of racial battle fatigue (e.g. frustration, shock, anger, disappointment, resentment, anxiety, helplessness, hopelessness, and fear). The study finds the college environment was more hostile toward Black men than other groups, exemplifying Black racial misandry.