'Left of Black': Episode #6 featuring James Braxton Peterson and Rashod Ollison

Left of Black host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal is joined by Bucknell University Professor James Braxton Peterson in a discussion of the legacy of the Million Man March, The Morehouse College dress code, homophobia and bullying, and Hip-Hop Masculinity.

Neal also talks with former Baltimore Sun music critic and current pop culture critic for The Virginian Pilot and Jet Magazine about the current state of R&B Music and the career of Prince.

Bullies Can't Be Blamed for the Recent String of LGBT Suicides

Do schools care more about racism than homophobia?

Bullies Can't Be Blamed for the Recent String of LGBT Suicides
by Keli Goff

There’s a famous story in the Goff household about my mom’s first week back in school shortly after it was integrated. There was a boy who apparently wasn’t a fan of the progress our country was making and decided to take it out on my mom by shouting the N-word at her repeatedly, every single day. For days mom turned the other cheek, so to speak, but on the fifth day she declared loud enough for everyone to hear, that she was going to beat the stuffing out of the guy. Now anyone who knows my mother knows that she would have, had the principal, who was white, not stepped in and warned Mr. Bully that if he didn’t leave her alone she would have the principal’s permission to hit him and would also be kicked out of school.

That was the end of Mr. Bully.

Most of us believe that the kind of prejudice my mom faced is a thing of the past. The thinking goes, “sure prejudice exists but it’s more subtle” or as an older family friend once said, “people no longer spit in your face but in your food.”

But in recent days we’ve all been reminded that this is not true and that the kind of prejudice and open hostility my mom faced fifty years ago is still alive and well in America’s schools.

In recent weeks Asher Brown, Billy Lucas, Seth Walsh, Tyler Clementi and Raymond Chase killed themselves. While we are still awaiting key details in some of the cases, we do know this: All of the boys either self-identified as gay or their classmates believed that they were. Billy Lucas was 15 years old, while Asher Brown and Seth Walsh were just thirteen years old yet they faced constantly bullying, ranging from verbal to physical, at the hands of classmates for their perceived sexual orientation. In the case of Tyler Clementi, the college freshman is believed to have jumped from the George Washington Bridge after his roommate allegedly tweeted, then recorded and broadcast an intimate encounter Tyler had with another man.

Sadly these are not the first instances of this type of bullying resulting in death. Last year the suicide of 11-year old Carl Walker made national headlines when he hung himself after being teased relentlessly by classmates who accused him of being gay.

Let me ask you a question. If a young student was called the N-word every day for weeks or months on end, and after repeated cries for help finally took his own life, how quickly do you think citizens of all races would take to the streets to protest? Or better yet how quickly would Al Sharpton and co. demand accountability from the school, and elected officials under the threat of casting the kind of media spotlight that people like Don Imus have nightmares about?

Read the Full Essay @ theLoop21

***

Keli Goff is a political blogger for TheLoop21.com. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence (Basic Books, March 2008).

Left of Black: Bullying and the Crisis of Masculinity

Left of Black:

Bullying and the Crisis of Masculinity

by Mark Anthony Neal



The recent suicide death of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover raises troubling questions about the incidence of bullying in our schools and other places where children interact. Earlier this month Walker-Hoover, an 11-year-old African-American boy from Springfield, MA, took his own life, in response to the bullying he endured everyday at school. According to reports, Walker-Hoover was repeatedly taunted for “being gay.” That Walker-Hoover, who was not queer identified, was the target of homophobic vitriol speaks volumes about the challenges faced in society that has yet to fully interrogate how we raise and socialize our boys.



Thanks to best-selling books Queen Bees and Wannabees: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence (the inspiration for the film Mean Girls) and the emergence of YouTube, parents and schools are hypersensitive to the incidence of bullying in the lives children and the sophisticated ways that children deploy technology in such activities. But bullying, now as always, is symptomatic of our inability as a society to deal adequately with difference—sexual, racial, religious, ethnic, gendered, etc.—in meaningful ways.



While children usually understand about the consequences of bullying their peers—the ways they will be punished, for example—there’s still a continued skittishness within schools to actually deal with the reality of difference. This is particularly the case with discussions of sexual orientation, where some feel that focusing on sexual preference encourages behavior that far too many still view as “deviant” behavior. That the term “gay” has become an umbrella term for all things “uncool” in the lives of American children and teenagers, speaks to how dismissive we are of homophobia in our society.



Bullying of course takes many forms, but anyone who has spent any amount of time in the company of boys is well aware of how terms like “punk,” “faggot,” "bitch-ass" and “pussy” are part of the normative discourse of American boyhood. Even those boys, who are not necessarily invested in bullying, find themselves employing such terms as a form of protection, lest they also be targeted (as was the case when I was a boy). Unfortunately such behavior has long been relegated to the status of “boys being boys,” even as it articulates a troubling misogyny among other things. When such bullying escalates to the level of violence, as a society we are happy to enact punitive responses to the offenders without ever interrogating the root cause of the behavior.



Often lost in these responses is that this particular form of bullying is evidence of a general crisis of masculinity in our society, where boys and men, are all too often uncomfortable in the skins that they inhabit. While there is evidence that the behavior of some childhood bullies portends adult behavior tethered to more complex emotional and mental issues, there also little denying that many boys engage in bullying behavior against other boys, because they have been socialized to believe that’s what “real” boys and “real” men do. Bullying, particularly that which targets other male peers as “less than masculine,” helps masks anxieties about what real boyhood/manhood is supposed to be. Indeed such anxiety and apprehension about masculinity was so palpable in the life of Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover that he chose to take his life rather than deal with the daily reminders that somehow he didn’t play to type.



While Walker-Hoover’s tragic death brings necessary attention to the consequences of bullying in our society, the bullying will continue unless we allow our boys and men to be comfortable with who they are, rather than performing some idea of what real maleness is supposed to be.



***



Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books including the recent New Black Man.