The young man got on the bus barking into two cell phones, armed with
the standard “ghetto” gear of slouching pants, cocked baseball
cap and studied scowl. His presence would have been unremarkable had
it not been for the intelligent looking little girl with French braids
pulling at his pants leg. As the young man continued to spit into the
cell phone, the little girl sat down across from him wide-eyed, her
inquisitive expression brightening as he completed the call with the
salvo “fuck that bitch, I don’t like her.”
I thought about that little girl during a recent assembly on sexual
assault awareness that I co-facilitated at a local high school. By
the time she reaches high school she will have been exposed to every
conceivable dehumanizing epithet and perversion of her identity as
a young black woman. She will have spent umpteen hours devouring videos,
films, billboards, and other mainstream media that degrade her or render
her invisible. She will have perhaps become conditioned to believe
that her experience of black male sexism is not as important as “the
race’s” struggle against white supremacy. And if she lives
in urban America she will have a disproportionate chance of being sexually
assaulted by a friend, relative or stranger who justifies the act as
a distorted expression of his manhood.
Three decades after black women fought to hold the modern women’s
movement accountable to the way racism and sexism shape their American
experience, the cult of hypermasculinity has put black women in reverse.
As my co-facilitator and I attempted to engage in a discussion with
the students in the high school audience about the connection between
violent/hypersexual imagery, macho posturing, and sexual assault the
silence of the young women and the defiance of the young men was deafening.
The young men were eager to break it down for us. Put simply, if you
don’t act hard you’re a punk. If you don’t conform
to the mainstream stereotype of hard swaggering masculinity you’re
soft, gay, and not “authentically” black or Latino. If
you don’t participate in the demonization of young women with
sexist language and/or aggressive behavior you’re a “faggot.” If
you haven’t mastered the nihilistic dance of gangsta rap braggadocio
you’re a sellout. Acting hard is not just an affectation but
a matter of survival, a rite of passage. The murder of every child,
teenager, or adult senselessly gunned down on the streets of black
and brown communities testifies to the insanity of this Hobson’s
choice. A visit to the Inglewood cemetery is a sobering reminder of
the toll that this model of violent masculinity has taken on the lives
and communities of African American families. The headstones of the
fallen young potential leaders, activists, and intellectuals are the
memento mori for a lost generation.
In the 1998 documentary “Tough Guise: Violence, Media, and the
Crisis in Masculinity,” researcher Jackson Katz chronicles the
social and human costs that male violence exacts on American society
annually. Male violence is one of those easily dismissed public health
and safety crises that have become naturalized. The dominant culture
persuades us that men act violently because of the interplay between
testosterone and socialization and that there is essentially nothing
that public policy can do about it. Although epidemic black male on
black male homicide rates prompted the coinage of terms like the “endangered
black male” in the 1980s this characterization obscures the degree
to which violent death has become a fact of life for young black females.
According to the Institute on Domestic Violence in the African American
Community, homicide is the leading cause of death for young black females
between the ages of 15 and 34. Yet there has been no corresponding
social or educational focus on the public safety and civil rights crises
faced by young black women steeped in a culture that routinely brutalizes
them.
While “deviant” behavior among women of color is often
addressed by looking at underlying gender dynamics, there has been
little appraisal of the influence of sexism and patriarchy on the destructive
behavior and negative self-image of young men of color. Groundbreaking
feminist scholars like bell hooks, Johnetta Cole, and Yasmin Davidds-Garridos
have all addressed the degree to which mainstream models of violent
masculinity distort the identity formation of young men of color. Although
a few male advocates like Kevin Powell and Michael Eric Dyson have
encouraged other black men to recognize the value of feminism for healthy
black communities, their calls for deeper male engagement with the
impact of sexism on the everyday lives and experiences of young men
of color have gone largely unheeded by anti-violence educators and
activists.
This is especially tragic because standard models of gang prevention
and intervention tend to focus on responsibility and self-realization,
without an emphasis on the root causes of violent masculinity. Clearly
there is a direct correlation between sexual assault and economic disenfranchisement
in black, Latino, and Native American communities. Statistically, women
of color are more likely to be victims of domestic abuse or sexual
assault than are white women. In their defiance, the young men at the
high school were simply confirming that one of the only ways that young
men of color can be authentically “enfranchised” in a manner
akin to white men is through control and abuse of women of color. Criminalized,
shut out of living wage job and educational opportunities at every
turn, men of color respond to the racist regime of patriarchy by internalizing
their rage and channeling it against women and other men of color.
The plight of disenfranchised young black men is a source of continuing
outrage and frustration among leaders of color, yet where is the outrage
for the lives of black and Latina women? The failure of mainstream
leaders of color to take up the mantle of anti-sexism in their frequent
calls for “stopping the violence, increasing the peace” among
young black and Latino men guarantees that these otherwise well-intentioned
campaigns will ultimately amount to empty sloganeering. Alternative
models of masculinity based on exposure to historical and cultural
images of strong femininity, modeling of healthy working partnerships
and interpersonal relationships between young men and women, and the
unlearning of sexist language should go hand in hand with culturally
responsive educational strategies that focus on validating young people
of color. Community support for grassroots male responsibility initiatives
like the Black Women’s Health Project’s national public
education campaign on sexual assault and the Los Angeles Commission
on Assault Against Women’s Men of Strength high school programs
(which focus on developing leadership among young men to stop sexual
assault) are crucial for ending the low intensity gender war of black
on black and brown on brown dehumanization that our little girls and
young women are sacrificed to every minute of the day.
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