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.



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

The Reggaeton Reader

from Duke University Press

Reggaeton
Raquel Z. Rivera, Wayne Marshall, and Deborah Pacini Hernandez
With a foreword by Juan Flores
392 pages (February 2009)
36 illustrations

A hybrid of reggae and rap, reggaeton is a music with Spanish-language lyrics and Caribbean aesthetics that has taken Latin America, the United States, and the world by storm. Superstars—including Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, and Ivy Queen—garner international attention, while aspiring performers use digital technologies to create and circulate their own tracks. Reggaeton brings together critical assessments of this wildly popular genre. Journalists, scholars, and artists delve into reggaeton’s local roots and its transnational dissemination; they parse the genre’s aesthetics, particularly in relation to those of hip-hop; and they explore the debates about race, nation, gender, and sexuality generated by the music and its associated cultural practices, from dance to fashion.

The collection opens with an in-depth exploration of the social and sonic currents that coalesced into reggaeton in Puerto Rico during the 1990s. Contributors consider reggaeton in relation to that island, Panama, Jamaica, and New York; Cuban society, Miami’s hip-hop scene, and Dominican identity; and other genres including reggae en español, underground, and dancehall reggae. The reggaeton artist Tego Calderón provides a powerful indictment of racism in Latin America, while the hip-hop artist Welmo Romero Joseph discusses the development of reggaeton in Puerto Rico and his refusal to embrace the upstart genre. The collection features interviews with the DJ/rapper El General and the reggae performer Renato, as well as a translation of “Chamaco’s Corner,” the poem that served as the introduction to Daddy Yankee’s debut album. Among the volume’s striking images are photographs from Miguel Luciano’s series Pure Plantainum, a meditation on identity politics in the bling-bling era, and photos taken by the reggaeton videographer Kacho López during the making of the documentary Bling’d: Blood, Diamonds, and Hip-Hop.

Contributors. Geoff Baker, Tego Calderón, Carolina Caycedo, Jose Davila, Jan Fairley, Juan Flores, Gallego (José Raúl González), Félix Jiménez, Kacho López, Miguel Luciano, Wayne Marshall, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Alfredo Nieves Moreno, Ifeoma C. K. Nwankwo, Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Raquel Z. Rivera, Welmo Romero Joseph, Christoph Twickel, Alexandra T. Vazquez

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“It’s about time academia dared to include reggaeton. This might mean that we’re finally understanding that all of us are los de atrás (the ones behind): our country, Puerto Rico, and the whole Caribbean. I hope people support this book so it can be translated into Spanish, and kids in Puerto Rico and Latin America can read it. Because we Caribbean people, even if we don’t want to, even if we don’t like it, even if it hurts, we come from behind, . . . and there’s a value to that. There’s a beauty to being los de atrás.”

—Residente, frontman of the Grammy and Latin Grammy award-winning duo Calle 13

“This anthology opens a chapter in hip-hop history that brings it all back home, back to our transnational Afro-Spanish-speaking countries and diasporas and ’hoods where young people are going through their hip-hop ecstasies and traumas, but in their own language, and in their own unique and hitherto-unknown style.”

—Juan Flores, author of From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity, from the foreword to Reggaeton

“The kinetic contributions in Reggaeton melt false borders—ones wrapped like straitjackets around peoples, knowledges, and cultures—and move the crowd. More than an exciting, exhaustive treatment of this vital musical culture, this anthology is a fine blueprint for engaged cultural scholarship right now.”

—Jeff Chang, author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation

“I cannot overstate how critically important this volume is. It captures the synergies of a musical and cultural movement that few have seriously grappled with, even as the sounds and styles of reggaeton have dominated the air space of so many urban locales.”

—Mark Anthony Neal, author of Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic

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Raquel Z. Rivera is a Researcher at the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York. She is the author of New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone and many articles for magazines and newspapers including Vibe, Urban Latino, El Diario/La Prensa, El Nuevo Día, and Claridad. She blogs at reggaetonica.blogspot.com.

Wayne Marshall is the Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Ethnomusicology at Brandeis University. He blogs at wayneandwax.com, from which a post on reggaeton was selected for the Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006 anthology.

Deborah Pacini Hernandez is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University. The author of Bachata: A Social History of a Dominican Popular Music and a co-editor of Rockin’ Las Americas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin/o America, she has written many articles on Spanish Caribbean and U.S. Latino popular music.

Juan Flores is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His books include The Diaspora Strikes Back: Caribbean Latino Tales of Learning and Turning and From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity.

Stimulating the Arts

from The Nation

The Creativity Stimulus
By Jeff Chang
April 15, 2009

On inauguration day, Tom Brokaw was moved to compare Barack Obama's election to Czechoslovakia's 1989 Velvet Revolution. At the eye of each storm, of course, was an icon who merged the political and the aesthetic--Václav Havel, the rock-star poet and prophet, and Barack Obama, the post-soul master of his own story. Both struck down eras of monocultural repression with their pens.

Artists played a largely unheralded role in Obama's victory. But they had been tugging the national unconscious forward for decades, from the multiculturalist avant-gardes of the 1970s and '80s to the hip-hop rebels of the '90s and 2000s, plying a fearless, sometimes even unruly kind of polyculturalism. By the final months of the election season, these artists had secured Obama as the waking image of change.

Every moment of major social change requires a collective leap of imagination. Political transformation must be accompanied not just by spontaneous and organized expressions of unrest and risk but by an explosion of mass creativity. Little wonder that two of the most maligned jobs during the forty years after Richard Nixon's 1968 election sealed the backlash of the "silent majority" were community organizer and artist.

Obama was both. So why haven't community organizers and artists been offered a greater role in the national recovery?

During the transition, arts advocates floated some big ideas--including the creation of an arts corps to bring young artists into underfunded schools, the expansion of unemployment support and job retraining to people working in creative industries and the appointment of a senior-level "arts czar" in the administration. But in practice, they faced the wreckage left by a nearly three-decade culture war.

In January they lobbied for $50 million for the NEA in the stimulus package and prevailed over Republican opposition. The one-time allocation will preserve more than 14,000 jobs, allow for new stimulus grants and leverage hundreds of millions more in private support for the arts. Two million Americans list "artist" as their primary occupation. Nearly 6 million workers are employed in the nonprofit arts-and-culture complex. In the words of the NEA's Patrice Walker Powell, the stimulus vote finally "dignified [them] as part of the American workforce."

Read the Full Essay HERE

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Jeff Chang, a 2008 USA Ford Fellow in Literature, is the author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. He is at work on Who We Be: The Colorization of America, on the cultural implications of the new American majority

9th Wonder making Beats for Nas?

Black, Male & Feminist? A Mini-Conference

Black, Male and Feminist? A Mini-Conference



Tuesday April 21, 2009

Duke University

The Ernestine Friedl Building, Room 225

5pm



Roundtable Discussion: The Labors of Black Male Feminist Analysis



Kinohi Nishikawa (Duke, Literature)

Otis Tilson’s Shame and the “Crisis” of Black Masculinity:

Queering Iceberg Slim’s Mama Black Widow



Armond R. Towns (UNC, Communications)

From G’s to Gents:

Questioning Black Male Progressivism on Reality Television



Wallace C. Baxter III (Duke, Divinity)

Liberation Through Self-Actualization:

A Black Preacher’s Salvific Pedagogical Responsibilities



Andrew Belton (UNC, English)

Kanye’s Closet, Kristeva’s ‘Catastrophic’, and the Cons(truction)umption of a Twenty-First Century Hip-Hop Fashionisto



Kelvin Clark (Duke, MALS)

The Effectiveness of the Black Male Feminist Critique



Respondents:



Kaneasha Shackelford (Duke, Dvinity)

Chantel Liggett (Duke, Women’s Studies)



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Keynote Address:



David Ikard, Assistant Professor of English

Florida State University



Author, Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism (LSU Press)



She Had It Coming: Rethinking the "Good Black Man" Paradigm

Though our library shelves now abound with texts, commercial and academic, that investigate the social pitfalls of hyper-black masculinity and strong black womanhood, we have yet to adequately interrogate the "Good Black Man Paradigm" upon which many of our loftiest visions of a better world rest. To riff on Toni Morrison's Playing in Dark, I want to make this culturally celebrated version of black manhood "strange" by making visible our continued preoccupation with black race/gender authenticity. That is to say, I want to make more obvious the disjuncture between our political ideals and our lived experience. Teasing out the conflation of good black manhood with dominating/beating women in Tyler Perry's highly touted movie, The Family that Preys, I will make the case that the "good black man" discourse is, in many ways, as ideologically lethal to black communal health as the hypermasculine thug discourse that most of us vehemently repudiate.

Sponsored by the Department of African & African-American Studies

What If Michelle Obama Was White?

from The Loop

What If Michelle Obama Were White?
by Crystal P. Smith

Barack Obama won the presidency by a landslide. The answer was clear — yes, America was ready for a black president. But how much different would things have been if Michelle Obama were white?

The family of a presidential hopeful, and his wife in particular, become a very important factor in whether a president will be elected. Voters tend to go for the total package and appearances matter. It's been proven that Americans usually pick the more handsome, taller candidate with the most attractive family. President Obama is no exception, which is why he and his family have garnered so much attention.

But what if Michelle Obama were white and, along with the idea of a black president, we had needed to accept an interracial union?

Read the Full Essay @

Bakari Kitwana on John Hope Franklin

photo by DAWOUD BEY

from The Huffington Post

Did John Hope Franklin Want $100 Trillion For Blacks?
by Bakari Kitwana

Dr. John Hope Franklin, the wildly accomplished historian who documented Blacks’ place in the great American story, firmly believed in reparations — the idea that the descendants of slaves in the United States should be compensated for the centuries of free labor that enriched slaveowners and their descendants and the American empire. It is a fact overlooked by the recent flurry of mainstream media coverage commemorating his life work. (He died at the age of 94 late last month.) But it is no small detail.

Consider his response in 2007 to state legislators in North Carolina and Virginia who balked at apologies for slavery introduced by their peers. For him a mere verbal apology wasn’t enough.

Read the Fully Essay HERE