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The Black Man's Burden
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10408 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1993 |
2,853 Words |
| Author
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Gerald Early
Gerald Early is professor of English and director of African
and Afro-American studies at Washington University in St.
Louis. He is the author of Tuxedo Junction: Essays on
American Culture and editor of My Soul's High Song: The
Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem
Renaissance and Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity,
and the Ambivalence of Assimilation. |
SLIM'S TABLE
Race, Respectability, and Masculinity
Mitchell Duneier
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992
192 pp., $19.95
The black American male lives in the netherworld of a densely construed enigma: caught between being the pathological embodiment of a social problem and a desirable, even idealized, vision of a perverse and perverted masculinity. The burden of this may be that the black male is, arguably, the most stigmatized and studied person in America, his character, his intelligence, his essence, being the subject for writings from sociologists to historians, from criminologists to investigative journalists. But the origin of our perception of the black male lies more in the world of popular literature and culture than either in the middlebrow press or in the academy.
It has, indeed, been the pervasive power of popular culture that has effectively colored and distorted the views-- intellectual or uneducated--of blacks and whites about the black male. From the "holy" and "enduring" black male of romantic racialist Harriet Beecher Stowe's landmark novel Uncle Tom's Cabin to the "bestial rapist of the radical southern racialists like turn-of-the-century novelist Thomas Dixon and seminal filmmaker D.W. Griffith; from the clown, buffoon, submissive servant and "slickster" of nineteenth-century minstrelsy to the stock "comic relief" in representations from Charlie Chan and Shirley Temple films an Amos 'n' Andy; from the misogynistic existential hero of Norman Mailer ("The White Negro" and The Fight) and Mezz Mezzrow's neurotic masculine fantasies (Really the Blues) to the misogynistic beast of Alice Walker's equally neurotic feminist nightmare (The Color Purple); from the noble and sexless hero Sidney Poitier of the 1950s and 1960s to the stud hustle/gangster of the 1970s blaxploitation films, we have been so bombarded with caricature that it is virtually impossible to distinguish either dimensions of character or humanity in the black male.
Indeed, what all these representations tell us is that the black male stands before us, before his society, with, ironically, no identity at all except as a kind of reflection if the polarity of our Manichaeanism. On the one hand, the black male is a kind of negative capability, a kind of protean, all-purpose psychopathic possibility, a deviant energy. On the other hand, he is the potentiality for humility, faith, goodness, selflessness. In short, the black male is America's teleological
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