Sports, Prison, Violence and Black Masculinity

I have a three-year old son, who is rather tall and strong for his age. Apparently, having parents over six-feet tall did not help any. I remember one day sitting in a restaurant with my son when an older white couple came up to us and said, “He is so cute and so big. I just know he is going to be a football player.” At this point my son hadn’t reached one year old yet, but had received similar comments previously. I responded to the couple, “Or maybe he is going to be a principal or a scientist.” After awkward silence, they left. Years later, he continues to receive the same career predictions. To which I jokingly say, “My son is going to play badminton and chess.” Usually laughs follow, but there is a level of seriousness disguised in my humor. Why is a tall strong black man having tactical skills in chess or dominating the badminton court funny? Is he not a black man if he participates in such activities? I tell this story because certain ideas of black manhood is pervasive in many of our minds. We see many of these manifestations in popular culture. If black men stereotypical have a high acumen for sports, does it matter which sports they play? Or is it only aggressive contact sports that are reserved for and assumed to encompass black masculinity? How do these constructions shape our knowledge (or assumed knowledge) of black men?
A few recent conversations with men plus some readings and debates on the evolution of American conceptions of masculinity prompted further investigation into this topic. I have had, more than I would like to recall, conversations with Black men and their concerns/problems/fear/lack of respect for homosexuality; more so in relation to black men (finding gay women or bisexual women appealing and or fascinating). I have always wondered why black men disproportionately have an aversion to black male homosexuality. So I turned to the construction of maleness in the United States and that led me to the formation of sports, specifically football and incarceration.

First, Black men, since the trans-Atlantic slave trade (beginning in the 1400s), have had their masculinity categorized in at least three different stereotypes (with other variations) but can be easily re-categorized as masculine and feminine: coon, brute, and Uncle Tom. The coon is a grown black man being compared to a child thus effeminate and sexless; the brute was categorized as a savage and violent black man (usually out to rape white women) thus masculine and overly sexual; and the Uncle Tom is the black man forever dedicated to his white master, also effeminate and sexless. After slavery ended in 1865 in the US (specifically during US Reconstruction, 1866 -1877) men were given a stage to eliminate or at least challenge the feminine characteristics assigned to them by the dominate culture. At this time white man’s definition was centered around being “hardy”, laborious, and hard-working. This posed a problem for middle and upper class white men who didn’t need to work outside. Interestingly, during Reconstruction football began in the US in about 1869. Football was a sport for middle class white men. A deadly sport where you could have upwards of 15 men died per season. Many protested for the sport to be banned, but President Theodore Roosevelt refused to ban the sport because (possibly among other things) it allowed white men to display their manhood in a way not offered to them due to their middle and/or upper class status. Beginning in the early 1900s white men’s definition of masculinity transformed and became in relation to his ability to work, provide for his family, and keeping his wife and children in their “place”. Thus the more resources he has, his ability to procreate, and his ability to get a wife, the more of a man he was.

Middle class blacks began to internalize this idea of masculinity but because of political, economic, social, and education barriers few black men were able to live up to these standards. Thus few black men were able to be “complete men” by these standards. So black men had to find other ways to exert their maleness. Two ways were to engage in armed defense/ability to protect his family and surviving prison. When black men appeared to be stepping out of their “safe” proscribed roles (coon or Uncle Tom) or the not-so-safe one (the brute), they often suffered from discrimination and/or mob violence ending in lynching (as document by Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s The Red Record publish in 1895). These lynching were often community-wide spectacles where the men were often castrated and left for public viewing (visual and literal emasculation). Therefore, many black men had to walk a fine line which usually meant subscribing to roles deemed “feminine”. Of course, black men wanted to assert their manhood openly which arguably built a substantial amount to frustration and anger in some black men who, regardless of the outcomes, were willing to assert their ideas of manhood. The second was surviving incarceration. For example, Marcus Garvey exclaimed publicly that he was not scared of prison, once released in 1923. According to scholar George Mosse, prison served as a test to prove manhood. Meanwhile by 1923, thirteen African American men were or had been players in the NFL with the first being Charles W. Follis in 1902.

Taking a short step back to Word War I (1914-1918) many black men were welcomed in their black communities as strong soldiers. However, after fighting for their country and hoping to no longer be treated as second-class citizens, they found themselves and their families still in the middle of Jim Crow. Thus the definitions of white masculinity were still not easily offered to black men. The frustration exploded in the late 1960s after the arguably passive Civil Rights movement and the arguably more direct Black Power Movement began. The Black Power Movement was a hyper-masculine movement which put many men at the forefront. Armed and ready to defend their civil rights, humanity and family, Black men (and women) were still relegated to the economic, political, and social margins. From the 60s through the 70s black men were portrayed as vocal and violent. A persona exemplified during the Blaxploitation movie era, with a key figure being football player turned actor Jim Brown (with Brown’s help, successfully join black maleness, football athleticism, violence and sexuality). Melvin Van Peebles said to have begun the Blaxploitation era with his movie Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) with the opening stating “Watch Out. A baad asssss nigger is coming back to collect some dues.” Melvin van Pebbles explicitly stated he wanted to go against the effeminate, sexless Black male portrayal created by white America. As the Blaxploitation era took off with movies such as Shaft and others, we find Black men no longer being portrayed as timid sexless boys but as gun-toting sexual men in control of their environment even though that did not appear to be the case in real life.

Black men have always been disproportionately incarcerated. But, COINTELPRO, various riots, demonstrations and unlawful actively in general put many Black men in prison during the 60s and 70s when Black men’s identity was supposedly getting a makeover. Thus there is a return, if you will, of a possibly inevitable prison culture in relation to manhood. But ironically, prison is the most emasculating place in the United States. Not only are all of your liberties taken from you, but prison is the place a man will most likely be raped and willingly engaged in same-sex intercourse.

So the 70s provide a plethora of African American football stars. More Blacks are in the NFL and more black men are going to college and many are able to attend on college football scholarships. The 70s appear to be pivotal in the construction of black masculinity. Therefore, it appears that to be the most masculine, a black man needs to be able to play sports (or at least have a more than decent knowledge of sports in order to make up for his inability to play, this is probably due to education becoming a factor in being able to provide for his family thus becoming a part of masculinity), protect and provide for his family (at least protect), and survive harsh circumstances (such as prison). The physical nature of football especially provides a space for black men to assert their masculinity in the only masculine part of the binary offered to them by the dominate culture, the brute. In addition, football does offer other opportunities to black men such as an education and the ability to be a provider for his family whether it be through a football career or with the education he received.

Arguably most black men are still working off of this binary: a black man is effeminate or he is masculine, there is virtually no middle ground (but there is some). The little bit of middle ground that is available is mostly constructed in relation to class and education. Men with an education often times don’t go to prison. They live in middle to upper class neighborhoods so they don’t need to practice armed resistance and because of their education they can be providers. Black men are approaching the same dilemma white men were in the early 1900s: How can I still be a “hardy” male when I live a somewhat privileged life? So as black men are moving more and more in the middle ground they still have to differentiate themselves from other men deemed less masculine. This is where homophobia creeps in. For many black men defending, asserting, and/or protecting their masculinity, gay men (who can also reside in this middle ground) are deem effeminate, the very thing black men have been running from sense slavery. So many black men distance themselves (to undisclosed lengths) to separate themselves from homosexuality. What makes this most complicated is that all professional sports have gay players (in football, most disclosed their sexuality after leaving the league). It appears to me that black men in general rely on their sports knowledge and physical abilities to assert their manhood but middle class black men rely the heaviest on sports to secure and or assert their manhood, because the other ideas of a “hardy” man are not necessary for/to them (unless they are middle class and they have the ability to fix things about the house, fix a car or something else deemed “manly”). Arguably black men are the most homophobic because black men in general have not been consistently offered a different version of manhood like white men have. So, how should this situation be remedied?

Possibly we need to recognize the external forces within the dominate culture working from a fragmented world that is imposing identity categories on members of the society. All members of racial, gender, and class communities (and their intersections) have the agency to (re)determine the ways in which they present themselves. Therefore, there needs to be a break from the archaic definition of masculinity that is presenting challenges to male identity construction, arguably, at the expense of black men. Sports and the prison industrial complex are all maintained by the presence of black male bodies for the profit of non-black bodies.

My son and I will be seeing Alvin Alley next weekend.