Abstract
What does it mean that “the black male” is purely a figment of white imagination? This chapter will address this question as critical to understanding hyper-incarceration in America. Interrogating the representation of black male bodies within American culture is key to understanding how we make meaning of this scandalous social reality, how it has become “common sense.”2 American culture legitimizes the prison system by imprinting, even branding, on our imagination the deep-seated myth of the “dangerous black man.”
The black male is purely a figment of the white imagination. He is no more real than the emperor’s new clothes. Like the therapist who takes the delusional patient back to the moment of trauma when the delusions began, we must take ourselves back to the point where our national trauma, slavery began. It was within the dark interiority of this experience, the womb of slavery itself, that the black male was conceived.
D. Marvin Jones1
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Notes
D. Marvin Jones, Race, Sex, and Suspicion (New York: Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), p. 15.
I use the term “common sense” as described by Clifford Geertz. His notion is helpful here because he defines common sense as ideas that are uncritically received and unexamined—and taken for granted as true. See Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, Third Edition, 1985).
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012), p. 200.
James Baldwin, “White Man’s Guilt,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), p. 410.
Bryan Massingale, Racial Justice and the Catholic Church (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2010), p. 42.
Sociologists Leslie Houts Picca and Joe Feagin have studied the reactions of white people to noticing black men on the street at night. They note that when white women claim they would be scared of any man at night, they perceive black men to be more dangerous. See Leslie Houts Picca and Joe Feagin, Two Faced Racism: Whites in the Backstage and Frontstage (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 59–65.
In this essay I will use the words “we” and “our” for two reasons. First, what I am describing is a systemic issue that we enact as persons, but is not an individual phenomenon. These “pictures in our head” are an element of the complex collective cultural process of representation that reinscribes privilege. Second, I use collective pronouns “to situate the reader as active and responsible in the context of the argument I am advancing.” For this second point I am indebted to Nancy Pineda-Madrid, Suffering + Salvation in Ciudad Juarez (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), fn. 1, p. 154.
Franz Fanon, “The Lived Experience of Being Black,” in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 70–75, 186.
Emilie Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave, 2006), p. 5.
Shawn Copeland, “Foundations for Catholic Theology in an African American Context,” in Black and Catholic, p. 112. Copeland makes this same point in “The Exercise of Black Catholic Theology in the United States,” Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology 3, no. 3 (1996): 11. See also Susan Griffin, “Pornography and Silence,” Made From This Earth: An Anthology of Writings by Susan Griffin (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 110–160;
Clarence Rufus J. Rivers, “The Oral African American Tradition Versus the Ocular Western Tradition. The Spirit of Worship,” Taking Down Our Harps, Black Catholics in the United States, ed. Diana Hayes and Cyprian Davis (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1998), p. 239.
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 148.
Otto Klineberg, “Pictures in Our Heads,” Readings in Sociology, ed. Edgar Schuler, Thomas Fords Hoult, Duane Gibson, and Wilbur Brookover (New York: Thomas Crowell Co., 1974), p. 632. See
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922).
Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922), pp. 88–89. This quote is taken from
Jannette Dates and Thomas Mascaro, “African Americans in Film and Television: Twentieth Century Lessons for a New Millennium,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 33, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 2.
For more on this idea of the unconscious, but very active images that condition perception and judgment, see Shankar Vedantam, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars and Save Our Lives (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2010).
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 122.
I have often wondered about the mother in Fanon’s experience. To see a person this cold wouldn’t it be appropriate to offer a scarf or something to keep warm. The aversion and avoidance Young describe is a blunting of basic human ability to respond to suffering. Shawn Copeland insightfully describes how racism blunts basic human ability to respond to suffering. See Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), pp. 95–101.
Barbara Applebaum, Being Good, Being White: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy (New York: Lexington Books, 2010), p. 119.
Edward I. Koch, “Blacks, Jews, Liberals and Crime: Is the Black-Crime Problem a Crime Problem, or Is It a Poverty Problem, or an Education Problem?,” National Review (May 16, 1994): 34.
D. Marvin Jones, Race, Sex, and Suspicion (New York: Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), p. 3.
I appreciate Mary Hobgood’s definition of “hegemonic knowledge.” Her clear concise work is helpful to theoretically connect Lippmann and Gramsci at this point. “Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci defined ‘hegemonic knowledge’ as knowledge developed by dominant groups in the society to further their own monopolization of power.” Dismantling Privilege: An Ethics of Accountability (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2000), p. 11. Hobgood explains that this knowledge is usually only available to people because it not only legitimates but supports the status quo. This knowledge is communicated in the major institutions within society—schools, churches, families, the government, the media, and the legal and medical professions. She explains, “Dominant groups with power in these institutions create discourses, including myths, symbols, language patterns and knowledge through which we understand ourselves as ‘properly’—that is, hierarchically—classed, raced, and gendered person. They also shape cultural practice, such as the work ethic and sexual behavior, further regulating fundamental aspects of our lives” (ibid., p. 11). See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and trans. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith *** (New York: International Publishers, 1972).
Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, re. and exp., ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), pp. 193–194.
D. Marvin Jones, Race, Sex, and Suspicion (New York: Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), p. 15.
See Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1969, 1988).
George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 259.
For more on the history of these two stereotypes, see John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972);
Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: 1974);
Leslie Owens, This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press 1976).
Ronald Takaki, “The Black Child-Savage in Antebellum America,” in The Great Fear: Race in the Mind of America, ed. G. B. Nash and R. Weiss (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 39.
George Fredrickson, “White Images of Black Slaves (Is What We See in Others Some Reflection of What We Find in Ourselves?),” in Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, ed. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1997), p. 39.
See Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia Relative to the Murder Logan Family, ed. William Peden (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1984), pp. 162–163;
Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), pp. 147–149;
Fredrika Brewer, The Homes of the New World (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1853), p. 190.
To understand Nat Turner’s actions they must be historically contextualized in light of the French Revolution but particularly Haiti’s overthrow of slavery at the hands of Toussaint L’Ouverture, and the slave insurrections in the United States led by Denmark Vessy and Gabriel Prosser. See C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (1963), p. ix;
Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943).
Cornel West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (1993), p. 269.
Even the “historical” accounts of Nat Turner amplify theft of agency by white culture of black men. The limited space here does not allow for full account of the research that critiques the controversial creation of William Styron’s work, Confessions of Nat Turner. See William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writer’s Respond, ed. John Henrik Clarke (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); Albert Stone, The Return of Nat Turner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992).
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855). In Shorter Novels of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford and Merston m. Seatts, Jr. (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), p. 79.
John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972), p. 225.
John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972), p. 225.
See Judith Shafer, “ ‘Details of a Most Revolting Character’: Cruelty to Slaves as Seen in Appeals to the Supreme Court of Louisiana,” Chi. Kent Law Review 68 (1993): 1283.
George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 260.
Philip A. Bruce, The Plantation Negro as a Freeman (New York and London; G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889), p. 246.
LeBron James “‘Vogue’ cover called racially insensitive,” USA Today (March 24, 2008) at www.usatoday.com/life/people/2008–03–24-vogue-controversy_N.htm (accessed June 24, 2012).
Wesley Morris, “Monkey Business: So Is That Vogue Cover Racist or Not?,” Slate (March 31, 2008) at www.slate.come/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/03/monkey_business.html (accessed June 23, 2012).
Anna Everett and S. Craig Watkins, “The Power of Play and Performance of Race in Video Games,” The Ecology of Games Connecting Youth, Games and Learning, ed. Katie Salen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), pp. 141–166. The issue of video games reinscribing the myth of the dangerous black man deserves much more consideration than can be explored here. A conversation between two students highlights the importance of this work. As we discussed in Grand Theft Auto one white male student who played the game with his father said, “The game gives me a sensitivity to people who live that life.” A Latina female student replied, “But it is a game, and all the black men look like animals.”
See Ronald Hall, “Clowns, Buffoons, and Gladiators: Media Portrayals of African American Men,” Journal of Men’s Studies 1, no.3 (1993): 239–251;
Jannette Dates and William Barlow eds. Split Image: African American’s in the Mass Media (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, Second Edition, 1993);
Linda Tucker, Lockstep and Dance: Images of Black Men in Popular Culture (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2007).
Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), p. 88.
Nancy Pineda-Madrid, Suffering + Salvation in Ciudad Juarez (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), p. 126.
Joseph Brandt, Understanding and Dismantling Racism: The Twenty-First Century Challenge to White America (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), p. 215.
Mary Hobgood, Dismantling Privilege: An Ethics of Accountability (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2000), p. 40. See
Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995);
Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says About Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999);
David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verson, 1991).
See James Matthew Ashley, Interruptions: Mysticism, Politics, and Theology in the work of Johann Baptist Metz (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998).
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© 2013 Alex Mikulich, Laurie Cassidy, and Margaret Pfeil
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Cassidy, L. (2013). The Myth of the Dangerous Black Man. In: The Scandal of White Complicity in US Hyper-incarceration. Content and Context in Theological Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137032447_4
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