"Real" Black Men Dance!

Manly men can wear cleats and dance shoes
By Annette John-Hall
Columnist, Philadelphia Inquirer

Who's the man?

Come fall, he is certainly the gridiron god, the fleet-footed playmaker or the bone-crushing hit man whose respect quotient rises in proportion to just how badly he can jack up his opponent.

Football players are manly men, all right, at least in a conventional military sense. The team forms the platoon; the athletes march onto the field like soldiers, led by their field-general quarterback.

With the image of a menacing, padded footballer as a masculine ideal, you can imagine my intrigue with what has become an unlikely showcase for some notable manly men - ABC's reality hit Dancing With the Stars.

First, it was boxer Evander Holyfield gamely stepping on the dance floor in Season One, flat-footed and gawky, but unafraid to try. Then last season there was Jerry Rice. Yes, the Jerry Rice, the shoo-in first-ballot Hall of Famer, recently retired, arguably the greatest receiver in NFL history, shimmying in tight polyester slacks, Afro wig, and platform shoes, shaking his groove thang all the way to runner-up.

And this season, Emmitt Smith, the former Dallas Cowboys great, will lace up his dancing shoes as part of a Stars lineup that premieres Sept 12.

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The African American community, in particular, is desperately in need of redefining macho. For many young black males living in the nation's urban centers, macho means maintaining an image, no matter what the cost.

For some of the men cut off from life's promises, it's a self-made image. In their world, demonstrating sensitivity and emotion is frowned upon. Speaking proper English, a sign of weakness. Going to school, not cool.

It's about adopting what sociologists refer to as the "cool-pose culture," a rigid lifestyle that focuses on the latest clothes and shoes, sexual conquests, hip-hop music, and which, above all, demands the respect of peers.

The cool pose may be an enormous moneymaker in pop culture, admired and even copied by white youth, but it's leading to the slaughter of black youth. African Americans are killing each other at nine times the rate of white youth, often over beefs stemming from nothing more than a perceived slight.

"If you back down, you're a punk," says Duke professor Mark Anthony Neal, who lays out a new, less burdensome model of black masculinity in his book New Black Man. "To negotiate is to be weak. Everything has to be a confrontation."

The message is reinforced widely - from the words and imagery of hip-hop, to the reproachful taunting in sports, even from the White House, Neal tells me.

"Say what you want about [White House] policies, one of Bush's successes was getting across the message that a real man never wavers. You attack first; attack before they attack you. So it's coming from the top."

Read the full joint here.