Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Hippies and homeboys: manhood in Black and White



There are different rules for men of different colors.

In a funny segment of the film In and Out, Kevin Kline attempts to contain his gay desire to dance because the Manliness Tape tells him that real men don't dance. Well, if you're white. Black men suffer no loss of masculinity by dancing. On the contrary, it is a powerful performance of virility, of the sexual kind, specifically.

It is amusing to me that mostly in Black venues now do we have the traditional pairing and language of "ladies" and "fellas". Gender differentiation between male and female is --in visual presentation-- highly emphasized. No unisex fooling around there; Black men and women are very much opposite sexes. But given the disastrous state of male-female relationships among Blacks (the 70% illegitimacy rate, the disproportionate abortion rate, homes without fathers, etc.), calling the "females" --another speech oddity of Black men-- "ladies" seems ironic.

A thought: White masculinity has been so damaged by feminism that the traditional pride, aggression, status-seeking, etc,. of men is now migrated and intensified to the point of parody in the young Black hiphop male. In terms of "archetype", the dickless peace-loving white Hippie has been supplanted by the phallic black thuggish Homeboy.



Another thing Black men can do, performers especially, is basically do a striptease and not lose status. Can you imagine a white romantic singer taking off his shirt like this and not being seen as somehow undignified or even foolish? Wassup wit dat?

A sociology text I ran across several years ago described an adolescent boy who was interested in music and dance, was picky about the style and cleanliness and presentation of his clothes and his hair and footwear and wore scent to school. If the kid was white, people clocked him as gay; if black, very cool. The difference is clear right there: same behavior in different race reads oppositely.

Speculation: in America, Blacks have always played the role of both the primitive animals and the naturally spiritual and wise, the feral thug and the universal mammy. (Sort of like the peasants in Tsarist Russia). That creepy combination of license and deference that Shelby Steele zeroed in on.

For example, Blacks can talk about God all day and it is considered natural for them --even if they are dressed like hookers, thanking Him for an award for a dirty song--, like Indians invoking the Great Spirit. Whites talking about God immediately provokes a nervous desire to situate them in a particular tradition, so we know whether to tolerate them, ignore them and be alarmed.  Same with Black sexuality: its primitivity is what makes it solid, so a Black man can do things that would have a White man's masculinity called into question and instead have it solidify his male qualities.

A short thesis: in our culture, Blacks are their bodies and their souls; Whites are people who have bodies and minds.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I find it interesting that it isn't considered a blemish on a black man's masculinity to have a conversing style where nearly every point is an emoting point. This kind of thing always makes me think someone has a gear loose.

--Nathan

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