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.
Pumps, Lipstick & Swagger: Gender & Sexuality at Morehouse by Stephane Dunn | TheLoop21
I realized I’d walked into an unusual hot, personal debate soon as I approached my 1:00 p.m. afternoon class. I hardly cleared the door before my excited students begin practically yelling at me indignantly, "Have you seen it? You see how they representin’ us?" “It” was a new story in a former iconic outlet of hip-hop journalism, Vibe magazine.
Can a man of Morehouse be gay? Absolutely. But can he be a woman? Meet the plastics.
That’s one of the leading lines in the latest, almost infamous expose on Morehouse College’s gay and cross dressing “subgroups.” It immediately made my blood pressure rise. I am a woman, who works and walks around campus whose professor status and sometimes deceptive appearance grant me a degree of invisibility. Words like “bitch” are not rare in the passing conversations of men in reference to some of the Daisy Duke wearing women they see or in general reference to the Spelman women across the way.
Just yesterday, I overheard two students having a familiar conversation about the wayward, materialistic, cunning ways of these “hoes” out here. Other times, I’ve seen young men shoot a killing look at some high heel wearing, sashaying fellow diva student or even heard them mutter "faggot"—loudly, as if the very sight was a personal affront.
So I immediately thought that the opening tagline [of the Vibe article] absolutely personifies what’s wrong with not only this sensationalist story, but with too many of the recent public discussions regarding issues of sexuality within African American communities.
Can a Man of Morehouse Be Gay? Absolutely. But Can He Be a Woman?
Diamond Martin Poulin, 20, teetering in strappy sandals with three-inch heels, steps into an eclectic clothing boutique in Little Five Points, a quaint cluster of shops and restaurants two and a half miles outside of downtown Atlanta. “Ooooh,” squeals Diamond. “What about this?” Holding up a white floor-skimming skirt with an eyelet hem, he swoons. The proprietor of the store looks up at Diamond, does a double take, and immediately picks up the cordless phone at the register. “There’s a man in here with heels on!” she whispers loudly into the phone. Diamond raises his eyebrows and continues browsing the racks. He shrugs when asked if the comment bothers him. “Isn’t it true?” he says, chuckling. “There is a man in here with heels on.”
Nibbling on sushi later that day, Diamond explains why he left after one year at Morehouse. A bastion for producing leaders in politics, community service and medicine, Morehouse College has long been viewed as the ultimate HBCU for young Black men, who are conferred with the mystique of being “Men of Morehouse.” Established in 1867 in Augusta, Georgia, as the Augusta Institute, the school counts such luminaries as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard H. Jackson, Jr.; financier Reginald E. Davis; School Daze writer/director Spike Lee; the late Keith “Guru” Elam of Gang Starr; and the late Def Jam exec Shakir Stewart among its graduates.
That pedigree is what brought Diamond (pictured left) to Morehouse, but he says the school’s social conservatism drove him out. In October of last year, the Morehouse College administration announced a new “appropriate attire policy.” The dress code stated that students, referred to as “Renaissance Men,” were not allowed to wear caps, do-rags, sunglasses or sagging pants on the Morehouse campus or at college-sponsored events. But what raised most eyebrows was the rule about women’s clothing: no wearing of dresses, tops, tunics, purses or pumps.
The new dress code resulted in a flurry of media coverage, prompting Dr. William Bynum, Jr., vice president for Student Services, to release a statement to several news outlets: “We are talking about five students who are living a gay lifestyle that is leading them to dress a way we do not expect in Morehouse men.” During a recent visit to the campus, the poet Saul Williams wore a skirt in solidarity.
“Morehouse wasn’t ready for me,” says Diamond, who has the word “unbreakable” tattooed on his collarbone and the acronym C.R.E.A.M (“Cash Rules Everything Around Me” coined by rap group Wu Tang Clan) wrapped around his right wrist. “I’m about freedom of expression. I’m about being whomever you truly are inside. I came to Morehouse because of all the historical leaders that attended and impacted the world so heavily. You know, I really wanted to follow in their footsteps. I don’t think Morehouse believes that someone like me—someone who wears heels and dresses—can uphold that reputation. But they’re wrong.”
BROKEN SOCIAL CONTRACTS: A Polarized College Campus Community (Part 5) A FILM BY Laura Holman Rahman
Appearances by M. Bahati Kuumba, Mark Anthony Neal, Beverly Guy-Sheftall Mansa Bilal, Patrica McFadden, Men Stopping Violence, Morehouse & Spelman College students
Spelman and Morehouse Colleges relationship is challenged by accusations of sexual violence on their campuses. Appearances by Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Adia Harvey, Johnnetta B. Cole, Pearl Cleage, Mansa Bilal, and Spelman students
Steve Harvey’s tearful breakdown, Pastor Donnie McClurkin’s emotional rant, and Tiger Woods’s destructive behavior provide insight into the contemporary crisis of black masculinity, which has as much to do with the real structural challenges that black males face as it does with desires within Black communities for performances of black masculinity that are no longer viable or sustainable.
Keynote Address
2010 American Masculinity Studies Association
Atlanta, GA
Coming Apart at the Seams:
Black Masculinity and the Performance of Obama-Era Respectability
by Mark Anthony Neal
Comedian, author and radio host Steve Harvey graces the cover of the November 2009 issue of Essence Magazine. The cover story celebrates what was a highly successful year for Harvey, the apex of which was the publication of his New York Times best-seller Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy and Commitment. Pictured on the cover with his wife Marjorie Bridges-Woods, Harvey exhibits an aura of fitness and prosperity. The underlying theme of the Essence cover story is that Harvey, now a born-again Christian, has turned his back on his sinful past (and profane comic performances), found redemption and is now fit for traditional male leadership within the black community. Indeed, the popularity of Harvey’s book, in which he offers relationship advice, suggest that the Black community also values this new role for Harvey.
The Essence cover photo of Harvey is a far cry from his appearance with Pastor Donnie McClurkin on the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), broadcast just as the issue of Essence was about to hit newsstands. On McClurkin’s show, Harvey seemed to be literally collapsing under the weight of his new found responsibility. A tearful Harvey admits to McClurkin, “when you be out there, man… people don’t know what its like, if you ain’t got nobody to tell it to. See I can’t go sit with nobody who know what I’m feeling sometime…my friends aren’t famous, my real friends are regular cats. I can’t tell them what I feel like sometime. They ain’t got no information for me. I had to try to catch you [McClurkin] on the phone, had to try and catch Bishop Jakes, but he be busy, man…a cat like me, you be trying to hold it together yourself." Harvey’s specific comments are perhaps less important than his intent to convey to McClurkin and his sizable audience—two billion worldwide, according the host—the difficulties of maintaining the image and reality of “Steve Harvey,” born-again Christian.
Donnie McClurkin, a three time Grammy Award winning Gospel artist and ordained minister is no stranger to such tearful outburst. A heavily emotive singer, McClurkin’s overwrought vocal performances often mimic the emotional breakdown that Steve Harvey experienced. It is an exaggeration that some Gospel audiences have become accustomed to, but McClurkin was not singing when, he addressed a COGIC (Church of God in Christ) youth gathering in Memphis, TN in November of 2009. At the event, McClurkin seemed on the verge of an actual nervous breakdown as he spewed homophobic rhetoric—at one point inferring that Black GLBT’s were vampires—leading commentator Keyon Farrow to suggest that McClurkin’s “shrill rant became a shaming, a quasi witch hunt, where he demanded, screaming and speaking in tongues in moments, that the gay and lesbian youth went up to the altar in front of hundreds of people, to have ‘hands laid upon them’." Having confirmed a life of homosexuality on various occasions in his past, including in his best-selling memoir, The Donnie McClurkin Story: From Darkness to Light, McClurkin’s performance at the COGIC gathering pivots on a belief that in the aftermath of his “born-again” Christian conversion, he is no longer tempted by homosexual desire. McClurkin’s antics suggest that he is not fully convinced, that his audience is fully convinced, that he is no longer—to evoke Joseph Beam—“in the life.”
A few weeks after McClurkin’s COGIC performance, audiences were captivated by a unfolding Thanksgiving Day domestic drama in South Florida, where the sheen of respectability that had engulfed the career and image of professional golfer and iconic pitchman Tiger Woods, was dramatically eroding with the charges and subsequent admission that he had engaged in several extra-marital affairs. Woods seemingly cavalier and reckless behavior, could have been easily been dismissed as insolent, but given how casually he went about his relations with more than a dozen women—Woods seemed to want to be caught. It was as if Woods was fatigued—emotionally and mentally—by living up to the image that was crafted by him by his management and the corporate entities that he represented. Indeed in the now famous photo of Woods shot in 2006 by celebrity photographer Anne Leibovitz, and featured on the cover of the January 2010 edition of Vanity Fair Magazine, Woods evokes the iconography of turn-of-the-century Heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson. The photo seems to capture Woods's resignation at having to constantly live up to “Brand Tiger.”
Steve Harvey’s tearful breakdown, Pastor Donnie McClurkin’s emotional rant, and Tiger Woods’s destructive behavior provide insight into the contemporary crisis of black masculinity, which I argue has as much to do with the real structural challenges that black males face on a daily basis, as it does with desires within Black communities for performances of black masculinity that are no longer viable or sustainable—if they ever were. Specifically the demand is for performances of Black masculinity that are tethered to notions of respectability and racial uplift. While such performances are also desired for the Black family at large, it is the Black man—as titular head of the Black family—who is expected to set the example for respectability, though it is often the burden of Black Women to embody that respectability as a reflection of Black masculinity. Thus current narratives of Black masculinity are informed by a widespread belief that Black men are not living up to their responsibilities as “positive” role models, fathers, husbands and community members. What distinguishes this particular discourse of respectability from previous historical examples, is the presence of Barack Hussein Obama. With the emergence of the first African-American president, the current crisis of Black masculinity is largely premised on perceived fissures between the omnipresent figures of respectability that Obama and the first family cut and the reality of how Black life is lived and experienced on a day-to-day basis.
The connection between performances of Blackness and notions of respectability have long been established within African-American life. In her classic book Righteous Discontent: The Black Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920, historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham writes that the “politics of respectability emphasized reform of individual behavior and attitudes both as a goal in itself and as a strategy for reform of the entire structural system of American race relations.” More specifically Higginbotham observes that “respectability demanded that every individual in the black community assume responsibility for behavioral, self-regulation and self-improvement along moral, educational, and economic lines. The goal was to distance oneself as far as possible from images perpetuated by racist stereotypes.” Given these dynamics, it’s not surprising that Black middle class leadership in the early 20th Century would use the available technologies of the day to challenge the hegemony of racist stereotypes. One of the most useful technologies was photography.
As historian Kevin Gaines writes in Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, “Because photography was crucial in transmitting stereotypes, African-Americans found the medium well-suited for trying to refute negrophobic caricatures… anything less than stylized elegance would betray the ideals of race advancement and, indeed, hold the race back, as did the profusion of commodified, demeaning portraits taken of unsuspecting, often youthful, and destitute African-Americans.” As Gaines comments suggest, embedded in early twentieth Century Black Respectability was a disdain—both casual and deliberate—for the Black poor and Black youth. Gaines adds that there was an “extensive photographic record of African Americans’ concern to infuse the black image with dignity, and to embody the “representative” Negro by which the race might be accurately judged.” Those who did not live up to the image of the representative Negro, were subject to scorn and scrutiny.
The presentation of what Gaines calls “stylized elegance” was also to be embodied in everyday black life. The well documented attempts by Black middle class elites during the era to dictate and regulate the dress, manners, vernacular, musical tastes, and leisure time of the black poor and working class were blatant attempts to bring the so-called “lesser” classes on board during a period that was largely defined by the notion of the “New Negro.” As Higginbotham suggest much of the anxiety of this era regarding the black poor and working class was the product of an “unprecedented migration that contributed to growing class cleavage in the black community.” In response, some members of the black poor and working class found creative ways to stylize their lack of resources, embodying an early iteration of what we commonly refer to in contemporary times as “ghetto fabulousness.” As such, sartorial politics—a politics of tailored clothing, if you will—became the obvious terrain in which struggles over legitimate representations of Blackness were waged.
The image of the physically fit and elegant Black man, presiding over an equally physically fit and elegant family was deployed regularly to counteract racist depictions of African-American life. According to Gaines, “To be the patriarch, the master of one’s family, was ardently desired by African-American men, who considered this an essential prerequisite of respectability, civilization and progress.” Citing the example of Booker T. Washington’s book New Negro in a New Century (1900), which features portraits of more than 50 prominent African-Americans at the turn of the 20th Century, literary scholar Marlon Ross makes a finer point on the politics of representation and respectability. Ross argues that the “race album attempts to avoid the insinuations associated with the display of the black body as the embodiment of backward savagery.” Specifically addressing the constructions of Black masculinity evident in the portraits, Ross writes in his book Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era, that “the racial implications of the hyperformality in the photos can easily get lost in history if we forget that this style of portraiture is not ‘natural’ but evolves as a ‘realistic’ way of portraying the authority and respectability of solidly middle class late Victorian patriarchs.” But Ross adds, that “this realistic style of photography asserts class and gender norms so quietly and yet so forcefully that we can easily overlook how historically fabricated is the masculine attire of dark suit, white shirt and, simple cravat.” Of particular interest to me is Ross’s emphasis on the staging of Black respectability which suggest a conscious attempt by Black elites to perform a version of Blackness that was not only not realistic, but likely unsustainable outside of the specific racial politics that birthed the performances.
Of course there were legitimate reason for Black middle class investment in these performances. In relationships between middles class Whites and Blacks, Higginbotham suggest that “respectability provided a discursive common ground in its concern for sexual purity, child rearing, habits of cleanliness and order, and overall self-improvement.” In such a context there was clear relationship between African-American ideals of respectability and desires for social and political progress. From the standpoint of twenty-first century politics of respectability though, it seems unlikely that it would also be driven by the same desires that animated previous efforts. As political scientist Cathy Cohen suggest, the stakes are quite different now, because there has been a degree of progress in race relations in this country. More than anything the current discourse of Black respectability is driven by desires within the Black middle class to protect their hard-earned social gains; no longer a movement about uplift, current efforts find their energies in notions of maintenance and expansion. Cohen writes that in a political environment dominated by the Religious and Radical Right, “African Americans with some access to power, mobility, and status and those aspiring to secure such resources are feeling especially anxious about what they perceive to the bad or deviant behavior of other group members…behaviors that are thought to threaten the status and mobility of other black people”
The roots of contemporary investments in Black respectability might be traced to the mid-1990s and the Republican Party “revolution” in the 1994 mid-term elections, which precipitated the rise of the Radical Right in mainstream politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century with the election of George W. Bush as President. Additionally the early to mid-1990s featured several very public events that portrayed Black masculinity as deviant and pathological including the Rodney King beating, Magic Johnson’s contraction of the HIV virus, the arrest of Black elected officials like Illinois Congressman Mel Reynolds and Washington, D.C. mayor Marion Barry, the first Michael Jackson child molestation investigation and perhaps most famously, the O.J. Simpson murder trial. The most visible manifestations of the anxieties produced during this period—a period which some argue featured the “first” symbolic Black president in Bill Clinton—was the Million Man March, held in October of 1995. The march, facilitated at the behest of Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan, was explicitly intended to force Black men into accepting the mantle of responsibility within their communities and families, as part and parcel of a larger move towards a late twentieth century articulation of Black respectability. Though the movement never maintained its momentum, there’s no denying that the aims of the march became a building block of contemporary Black political discourses. Such was the case with the Million Family March, held on the five year anniversary of the Million Man March and less than a month before George W. Bush’s contested election as President.
As feminist scholar E. Frances White writes in her book Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Feminism and the Politics of Respectability, “the building blocks for a strong community did not welcome welfare dependent families; female-headed households; and especially gay, bi-sexual and lesbian family members. This narrative does not find acceptable the families in which many of us live.” (78-79) The reality though, is that Black political discourse was not in a position to dramatically alter the lives that the majority of black people live in the absence of real political power to address the structural inequalities that many citizens face, regardless of race. Thus it was not surprising that such efforts were directed within the realm of culture or rather performance, notably around the issues of the public presentation of blackness and black sexuality. Perhaps nothing better captured the level of anxiety in some Black communities than the controversies surrounding the issues of “sagging,” and DL sexuality, much of which came to a head recently with Morehouse College’s decision to institute a long-unwritten dress code on their campus.
The issue of “sagging” or the practice of young African-American men wearing their trousers well below their waists, has functioned like a social panic in some municipalities, where local officials have sought to pass ordinances banning sagging pants, as the style is thought, by some, to be evidence of Black male criminality. The town of Delcambre, LA did in fact pass such an ordinance, punishable by 6-months in jail and a $500.00 fine. The city of Opa-Locka, FL banned sagging pants in city parks and public buildings. Additionally the city of Dallas funded a series of public service announcements denouncing saggy pants, equating the practice with homosexuality. It was in this context that a MTV viewer asked then Senator Obama about saggy pants, when he sat down with MTV News days before the November 2008 presidential election. During that interview, Obama made the now famous comment, “brothers should pull up their pants. You are walking by your mother, your grandmother, your underwear is showing. What's wrong with that? Come on.”
Yet while Obama’s carefully crafted response was intended to offend no one who might have potentially voted for him, his comments took on a life of their own, utilized to organize anti-sagging/dress code efforts at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and public high schools, like Plantation High School in South Florida which sponsored a “Pull Up Your Pants Day.” That this sudden inspiration often takes place within the context of black communities, long grappling with how to relate to and control the young men in their communities, should not be surprising. President Obama’s stance on the issue has simply been used to shame black youth into “normalcy.” Underlying this push towards routine sartorial choices, is a troubling class dynamic, rooted in a century-old (if not longer) debate amongst Black Americans about the proper presentation of blackness in mainstream culture. Indeed Obama’s election represented the symbolic political bully pulpit that a figure like Louis Farrakhan and Black religious leaders never had access to. Obama quickly became the most historically visible paragon of Black Respectability.
It was in this context that Morehouse College instituted a dress code in the fall of 2009. The college’s Vice-President of the office of Student Services, argued the new policy was an effort to “get back to the legacy” of the college, which in its heyday during legal segregation was a pantheon to Black male respectability. As the Vice President added, “We expect our young men to be Renaissance men…When people go about campus we want them to represent the college in an appropriate manner.” (Atlanta Journal Constitution 10/16). The college is obviously within its right to dictate the policies of the campus, but what instigated national commentary about the new policy were several explicit aspect that outlawed, even criminalized, the wearing of head-gear like, caps and doo-rags in classrooms and the cafeteria, dental adornments like “grills,” sagging, and perhaps most controversially, the wearing of female attire, explicitly citing the wearing of high heel shoes and pocketbooks. As commentator Frank Leon Roberts argued, “Morehouse College is much more than simply a “private institution;” it is a black cultural pillar…Given Morehouse’s stature as a historical pillar, all African-American men (not just those who are students or alumni of the institution) have an ethical obligation to contribute to this national dialogue about the politics of the college’s policies—especially in instances where it promotes a climate of rampant anti-ghetto-culture classism and femiphobia.”
Quite often what is at play in efforts like the Morehouse dress code, particularly in relationship to the concerns about women’s dress wear, is the issue of sexuality, specifically the issues of DL or down-low sexuality, which inspires within Black American a moral or social panic. This is exactly what Donnie McClurkin displayed in his rambling, even non-sensical rant at the COGIC youth gathering in November of 2009, which functioned as a mass exorcism. In his performance McClurkin states, “today I am overwhelmed from this holy convocation because I see feminine men…it’s because we failed, it’s not the children’s fault, it’s because we failed.” At one point he directs the youth in the audience to come to the alter stating, “right now everyone of you young people who say I need this and I can’t leave out of here acting like this. I got to be right; I don’t want to be a feminine man; I don’t want to be a hard woman; I don’t want to be in homosexuality, bi-sexuality, tri-sexuality, I’m not a lesbian, I’m a holy woman of God, I’m not gay, I’m “born again.. Come now, I said run!” Cohen challenges the notion that rants like McClurkin’s and the symbolic politics that inform it are irrational suggesting that “African-American fear and deep concern for what is believed to be the non-normative sexual behaviors of community members is not only a reaction to the internalization of patriarchal heteronormative values about what constitutes proper sexual conduct, it is also…a reaction to the knowledge that the idea of black deviant sexuality has been used continuously as a justification for the secondary status of African Americans.”
For the most part President Obama as stayed above the fray, excepting his rather pointed comments at Black men with regards to taking greater responsibility for their children. In his now infamous Father’s Day speech in 2008, Obama asserted “But if we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that what too many fathers also are is missing — missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it. You and I know how true this is in the African-American community. We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.”
Obama’s comments dually reflect his own investment in Black respectability, as well as a fundamental political belief that two-parented households represent the most effective route out of poverty for many poor Black Americans. Arguably Obama’s approach finds resonance in the ways that Black life is lived as opposed to the radically different concerns of those who have exploited his image to challenge what they deem as destructive cultural performances. Indeed I would argue that what partially informs critiques of Obama regarding the lack of a so-called Black Agenda, is his unwillingness to engage in a discourse that juxtaposes Black Middle class success and aspirations with the failures of the Black poor to resist the pathologies that largely frame their visibility in mainstream media in culture. If anything Obama’s very pragmatic view of Black life and culture highlights the inadequacy and unsustainability of performances of Black Respectability, when they are not tethered to real issues of Black empowerment, as was more likely the case for the Black middle class of the early twentieth century. As the performances of Donnie McClurkin, Steve Harvey and even Tiger Woods suggest, such performances will ultimately falter under the weight of their pretensions. Like a suit that no longer fits, their performances are coming apart at the seams.
Jeffrey B. Perry is an independent working class scholar formally educated at Princeton, Harvard, Rutgers, and Columbia. His work focuses on the role of white supremacy as a retardant to social change and on the centrality of struggle against white supremacy to social change.
For over thirty-five years he has been active in the working class movement as a rank-and-file worker and as a union shop steward, officer, editor, and retiree.
Morehouse College represents the “perfect storm” of homophobia —racial and class anxieties of “exceptional Negroes,” masculine gender trouble, class conflict and fundamentalist religious baggage [or as some might say, "heritage" or "tradition."] Homophobia at Morehouse is therefore instructive, dramatic and sad, but not rare in our world.
I have never walked across the stage on the Morehouse College campus green to receive my degree. On the first day of our indoctrination in 1986, who would have thought I would end up as one of those missing in action four years later? The upperclassman speaking prophesized: “Look to your left and your right. Four years later, one of these brothers will not be here,” and in 1990 one of those brothers was me. I was an “out” gay man at Morehouse College. On my would-be graduation day, I contemplated what looked like a dismal future, by Morehouse standards—no Morehouse degree and no respect from the men that made up my peer group.
A recent article in the Los Angles Times, by Richard Fausset, bookends the recent history of homophobia and gay awakening at Morehouse with the heinous 2002 baseball-bat beating of a Morehouse student, Greg Love, by a dormitory mate, Aaron Price, and the historic “No More ‘No Homo’ ” events organized by Michael Brewer and members of the campus organization, Safe Space, in April 2008. For me, this recalls memories that I had put away, but which provide the foundations of my life as a scholar and activist. The fact that homophobia at Morehouse is not unique or unusual with respect to heterosexism and homophobia in society at large should be obvious. The institution represents rather, the “perfect storm” of homophobia —racial and class anxieties of “exceptional Negroes,” masculine gender trouble, class conflict and fundamentalist religious baggage [or as some might say, "heritage" or "tradition."] These seas roil and skies open up in an international climate of heterosexism and misogyny. Homophobia at Morehouse is therefore instructive, dramatic and sad, but not rare in our world.
In return for the “crown,” which we are told Morehouse holds over the head of its sons who endeavor to grow tall enough to wear it, we are asked to buy a bill of goods that include fidelity to image and representation. But what—and whom– does this respectability betray?
Who pays the price for this shoddy mimicry- the picture in which the Black man takes up his “rightful” place at the head of a family with a dutiful longsuffering well-educated but decidedly under-employed light-skinned wife, and children with good hair?
[To each, her and his own, of course. My point here is not to point a finger, but to shine a light.]
How do these images and longings for certain types of lives, mates and relationships get shaped? To whom do we look for examples and for approval? My point here is that Black angst over appearing freaky, weird, less-than, or too Black shape our decisions and the ways we treat each other. Perhaps—the logic goes—if I speak, act and embody the White middle class heterosexual standard, or at least closely approximate it, I will finally be accepted as levelly human, as worthy, employable and loved.
But what violence takes place outside the picture’s pose, in order to frame this ‘just so’ story, in which Black men get to borrow the crumbling crown of the White patriarch? We rarely call into question the concept of “leadership,” or the assumption that an elite college education and middle class status qualify us to take the reins of a community putatively deemed “out of control.” And where do we turn, but to places like Morehouse, where suited and well-spoken men stand poised to do so?
Jafari Sinclaire Allen as Assistant Professor of Anthropology (Ph.D. Columbia University, 2003) at Yale University and the author of the forthcoming ¡Venceremos?: Sexuality, Gender and Black Self-Making in Cuba [Perverse Modernities series of Duke University Press].
I must admit, I had lofty expectations of Morehouse College when I began teaching here two years ago. After all, this was the house that such social and intellectual giants as Benjamin Davis and James Brawley built and that superstar students like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. solidified. The college’s mystique — as the only historically black male college — made me darn near skip into my interview and later into those first few classes.
I had visions of suits, bow ties, yes ma’ams and staggering displays of intellectual brilliance dancing in my head. Before too long, however, reality tempered the mystique, and I was forced to see that a legacy of social and cultural distinction and intellectual achievement is merely a sleeping history unless it continues to thrive in a contemporary version.
The newly implemented “no sagging” dress code with respect to men’s pants is an attempt to do just that.
The code raises obvious questions about individual freedom. Its inclusion of a very traditional script for male style — like no pumps and purses for men — will inevitably elevate the debate and criticism both inside and outside Morehouse. As I’ve walked to and from classes, I’ve often laughed aloud over how much my students resemble the public high school kids that I’d decided might be too much to deal with every day. Rather than being both disciplinarian and etiquette teacher, I thought I’d be a professor primarily engaged in my students’ academic and professional potential.
Instead, there is rarely a day when I’m not reluctantly forced to view the backside of students and worry for the millionth time that I will not make it up the stairway before the loose, bright red shorts shouting out from pants already bound for the floor completely fall off the oblivious student in front of me. It’s like being forced to peep when you absolutely don’t want to.
Usually, after mustering a reluctant, “Excuse me,” I implore the young man to “pull them up please” or jokingly say, “I’m sure you’re not trying to flash anybody.” In class, teaching is punctuated by commands to “pull those pants up, Mr. So-and-So — can’t you feel those pants falling lower and lower?” and trying to wheedle some sleeping or shy student out from his hiding place under a cap. Even if the written rules of the class include no hats in class, I’m inevitably forced to admonish, “Hat, please.”
During these moments of playing dress etiquette police, I’m uneasy and resentful. I’m forced to be their “mama” instead of an accepted and serious sister-professor.
*** Stephane Dunn, an assistant professor in the English Department at Morehouse College, is the author of “Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films.”
Crisis in the Village? The Morehouse College Dress Code
Mark Anthony Neal of NewBlackMan is joined by David Ikard (Florida State University), Simone Drake (Ohio State University) and Jeffrey McCune (University of Maryland) in a discussion of the Morehouse College Dress Code.
The conversation regarding the new dress-code policy at Morehouse College has been hijacked by a vociferous gang of socially conservative black pundits: some of them simply politically misguided, others merely proud homophobes; a few of them the ideological love-children of Ward Connerly and Bill Cosby. In the short week and a half since I became the first writer to report the news of Morehouse’s new policy, the college has become the subject of an intensifying national debate regarding the role that style plays in producing (or constraining) black male substance.
By now, there is no need to explain what went “down” at Morehouse. You already know. But while you may have already heard the details of Morehouse’s new “no grills or purses” policy, it’s quite possible that you have yet to hear an impassioned defense of grillz and purses in the spirit of Morehouse’s most illustrious progenitors.
There are those who have argued that it is inappropriate to incite a national public dialogue about what’s happening at a private, independently funded college. In the blogosphere, there have been comments in recent days such as “What goes on at Morehouse is a private affair between its students, alumni and administrators. There is nothing illegal about a private school enforcing a dress code. Any student who is unhappy with the dress code has the liberty to leave.”
These voices are misguided and unsophisticated. Morehouse College is much more than simply a “private institution;” it is a black culturalpillar. In other words, the institution we call “Morehouse” is quite similar to the institution we call “the black church.” One does not have to be a member of these institutions in order to be affected by what goes on within their walls. Given Morehouse’s stature as a historical pillar, all African-American men (not just those who are students or alumni of the institution) have an ethical obligation to contribute to this national dialogue about the politics of the college’s policies—especially in instances where it promotes a climate of rampant anti-ghetto-culture classism and femiphobia.
Like many graduate students, I suffer from a serious “cant-get-any-work-done-in-my-apartment” syndrome. Try as I may, each time I sit down to write an article or dissertation chapter, I find myself having to venture out of my apartment and into a more open, public setting (libraries or cafes work well for me).
As I paid my $6 Non-Morehouse student fee to enter the cafeteria, I was told that in order to enter I would need to remove my red, fitted-baseball cap. “Uhm…ok” I thought to myself. It seemed a bit strange to me that baseball hats would be prohibited in a stinky, old cafeteria lounge, but hey, then again this was Morehouse College, an institution hell-bent on promoting images of black middle class respectability and propriety.
I didn’t think anything of the no-red-fitted-caps-in-the-cafeteria policy until I glanced over at a headline from the October 6th Issue of The Maroon Tiger (Morehouse’s 84 year old student newspaper). “Administration Announces New Attire Policy.”
Immediately, I dropped my spoon in the stale cafeteria macaroni.
The emails, surprisingly, began to flow in shortly after midnight and President-elect Barack Obama’s speech at Grant Park. I had told my students at Morehouse College that we would have an electronic class in lieu of our Wednesday classes. They would have to email me their reactions to our historic election by midnight Wednesday (within twenty-four hours after Tuesdays election night) come what may.
I gave them one mandate: Keep it real.
In that first wave of emails, one steady refrain stood out-I’m proud to be a black man.
The sentiment brought to mind Michelle Obama’s statement, “For the first time, I am proud to be a black American.” Her comment was much maligned in mainstream media. But among the African-American community, however, her statement was anything but unpatriotic and incomprehensible.
Michelle was signifying the historic definition, treatment, and representation of black folk as something less than first class, genuine American citizens. She was echoing W.E.B DuBois’s much referenced articulation of double-consciousness, that curious condition of being American and, yet, via the demonization of one’s own blackness not American too.
My eighteen through twenty-something black male students at Morehouse may not grasp all the historical representations of black masculinity and various names for them that have dogged black male identity in America-Zip Coon and the brute-for example. But they have come of age when the culture and music that in part defines their speech, fashion, and masculinity has been marked dangerous and dysfunctional.
The Film discusses how two historically black colleges confront accusations of sexual assault on their campus. Broken Social Contracts depicts the necessity for conversations in the black community on our relationships. Can dialogue go beyond music videos and lyrics? Activists, students, and scholars weigh in our communities gender roles...trailer includes Mark Anthony Neal, Duke Univ. Prof.--Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Spelman Prof.,--Cynthia Neal Spence, Spelman Prof.--(Bilal) Mark King, Morehouse Prof.--Johnnetta B. Cole, President Emeritus (Spelman & Bennett),-- Pearl Cleage, Writer/Activist--M.Bahti Kuumba, Spelman Prof.--Patrica McFadden, Activist,---Andy Lowry, Spelman Prof.--Adia Harvey, Georgia State Univ. Prof--Mychael Bond, Britny Ray, Star Tolerson, Marcus Edwards, Tony Anderson, Tiara Dungy & Spelmans Violence Against Womens Class.
The calls started early in the week before Morehouse's graduation ceremony and increased after snippets of it appeared on national television. I saw your school on CNN and Fox News, they'd say. "Got the white boy all over TV like that's the most outstanding thing ever to happen at Morehouse."
The 'white boy' of course is Joshua Packwood, the valedictorian for Morehouse's class of 2008.
Some of the internal conversation at Morehouse and within the black community has centered on the question of whether a young white man should be valedictorian of historically black Morehouse and what it says about the school.
And there's another disturbing question which has become the center of media attention about Packwood's presence at Morehouse: Why would a stellar, white male student with Ivy League attention and potential choose Morehouse?
But there is a better question: Why not Morehouse?
