Black Activism and Black Hyper Masculinities Dr Ornette D Clennon Manchester Metropolitan University Critical Race and Ethnicity Research Cluster https://critracemmu.wordpress.com/ o.clennon@mmu.ac.uk Critracemmu

Sociogeny and the Racial Contract For Fanon (1986[1952], p. 4) the notion of sociogeny is described by “society….cannot escape human influences. Man is what brings society into being. The prognosis is in the hands of those who are willing to get rid of the worm eaten roots of the structure”. Maldonado Torres (2005, p. 157) argues that the “inferiority of Black and colonized peoples on the one hand and the particularly oppressive structure of colonial society on the other” need to be fully examined and brought into the open if any sort of social unity can be achieved. Contained within what Mills (1997, p. 16&17) calls a racial contract that “creates a universe of persons and sub persons” who are “destined never to penetrate the normative rights ceiling established for them below white persons”.

Fear of the Black body Black body reduced to a phobic object Black body stripped of interiority Black body stripped of agency Black body needs to be controlled

Male Black body Like the female black body, the male black body is reduced to a mere canvass for the projection of white fears (phobias) Hyper-masculinity and hyper-sexuality used as means of controlling the male black body via illicit pleasure (e.g. via incarceration, lynching, contemporary criminal justice system, etc) Hyper-masculinity is a function of white fear and prohibited pleasure project onto the canvass of the male black body White projection takes the form of a substitute interiority in the black subject C.f. that what is often called the black soul is a white man’s artifact” (Fanon, 1986[1952], p. 6)

Disavowed ‘Blackness’ ‘Blackness’ is disavowed and as a consequence, its alter ego is pathological (Altman, 2006) Invisibility of ‘whiteness’ in terms of its universal “eye” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 3) White male gaze (c.f. Mulvey, 2009)

Bad faith The persistence of dehumanising the ‘black man’ to a mere black body is a continual choice of perspective that Lewis Gordon calls bad faith where it “can hence also be shown to be an effort to deny the blackness within by way of asserting the supremacy of whiteness. It can be regarded as an effort to purge blackness from the self and the world, literally and symbolically” Gordon’s (1999, p. 6) C.f. Double consciousness (Du Bois, 1903)

Market ‘Blackness’as Neoliberal control ‘Blackness’ is traded as a market commodity (Collins, 2006) The market transformation of ‘blackness’ into a commercial hegemony via ‘market freedom’ and ‘individuality’ (Graeber , 2006; De Angelis , 2001; Bentham, 1787; Hayek, 1976)

A possible antidote? Applying sociogeny as a means of developing male black leadership (facilitation of black ‘unity’ and agency) “we have to be able to embrace our own shame and our own pain” (Ahmun, 2016: 29:23) In sympathy with this view, Bernard (2016) writes movingly about his internal struggles with black hyper-masculinity where he wrestles with a “double consciousness” of what it means to be black man under a racial contract. Reclaiming and re-shaping our masculinities on our own terms away from the white male gaze (e.g. decolonising black masculinities away from strict hetero-normative binaries)

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