Rac(e)ing Questions III

by Astrid Recker, University of Cologne, Germany

1      Despite the "mild trendiness" (398) that the topic of African American masculinity has acquired over the last decade, it remains a site in which much ground is still uncovered. Marlon B. Ross's comprehensive study Manning the Race, with its focus on the Jim Crow era, is an ambitious attempt to address this lack by charting in amazing detail the diverse and often competing discourses that laid out and shaped notions of a reformed African American masculinity in post-reconstruction America. Thus Manning the Race "explores how men of African descent were marketed, embodied, socialized, and imaged for the purpose of political, professional, and cultural advancement during the early decades of the twentieth century," and how these men "have attempted to formulate and re-form their experiences, roles, and self-concepts as men in a variety of genres, media, and social practices" (1). By pitting these discourses and practices against those of the Jim Crow regime, with its insistence on an ideal of normalized (i.e. white patriarchal) masculinity impossible for black men to live up to due to the restrictions placed on them, Ross on the one hand makes apparent how this regime was itself primarily "a sexual system of oppression" (2; Ross's emphasis). On the other hand he illustrates how black men challenged and often managed to displace the "gender and sexual norms" (3) on which this system operated in their attempts to reform the race through a reformation of black men in various (discursive) fields. As Ross not only draws on race theory and masculinity studies but ties his analysis of African American masculinity closely to the concerns of black feminist theory as well as sexuality and queer studies, he is at the same time able to show how African American men have often based their effort of manhood reform on the exclusion of or triangulation with others - American Indians, African American Women, Jews, criminal or "sexually deviant" men - and thereby adhered to and strengthened rather than subverted the sexual and gender norms of Jim Crow.

2      The focus of Manning the Race is on three different but interacting discourses: Part 1 of the study investigates "New Negro ideology" (18) as it was formulated by race leaders at the turn of the century in three "authoritative modes of expression: new-century race treatises and anthologies (race tracts and albums), New Negro personal narratives (autobiographical and fictional), and professional sociological studies" (16). Part 2 critically considers the field of race patronage in biracial political organizations such as the NAACP and in the cultural context of the "so-called New Negro Renaissance" (139) by examining a number of institutional and personal patronage relationships involving both black and white, male and female, patrons and protégés. Part 3 centers on the genre of the black urban folk novel, analyzing works of male and female authors that stage the lives and development of both male and female protagonists and in doing so present reconceptualized versions of "black manhood, womanhood, and gender relations […] under the conditions of modern urbanity as a site of racial oppression" (306). The primary concern of each part is to examine in which manner these discourses attempt to construct African American masculinity against the powerful, violent and often literally life-threatening limitations of Jim Crow. Although Ross is anxious to point out the importance "of moving beyond an exclusive attention to the black body […] as the sole stigmatized object of racial and sexual subordination" (4), Manning the Race nonetheless does not leave the black body unconsidered but demonstrates convincingly how in each of the discursive fields that it investigates the notion of the trespassing body - the (black male) body in motion across color, class, and gender lines - becomes a highly important and contested site. Thus the study is not only organized around three different kinds of discourse but also

around three kinds of racial/sexual movement: (1) the individual and collective migratory body […]; (2) the black male person in social circulation within biracial institutions and patronage networks; and (3) the "footloose" mass migrant restlessly seeking community amid the changing racial and class affiliations and sexual boundaries of the northern city. (12)

3      When Part 1 of Manning the Race therefore engages with the above-mentioned "three New Negro expressive modes" (17) of African American race leaders at the turn of the century, one of its primary interests is to show to what extent the respective versions of New Negro ideology hinge upon notions of and "insistence on the manly freedom of mobility" (17) and to illustrate how in all the considered genres mobility is put to different uses in order to "reconceptualize radically the worth, status, and iconography of the race" (22). It is made obvious that often the individual leader's attitude to mobility also depends on his answer to the question of "the race's sexual identification and gender-role performance" (24). On the one hand, "sexually assertive" race tracts such as Charles Chesnutt's 1900 "The Future American"-trilogy and William Pickens's The New Negro (1916) hail the mobility of the Great Migration as a sign of progress promising "a more sexually competitive and competent, and thus a more modern, racial identity" (26). With their reliance on "the cool cowboy pose," New Negro personal narratives such as Pickens's autobiography Bursting Bonds (1923), or, curiously, Ida B. Wells's autobiography Crusade for Justice (1970), tend to posit a strong link between mobility and "sexual independence […], rugged individualism, and compulsory masculinity" (93). On the other hand, African American sociologists', for example W.E.B. Du Bois's, George Edmund Haynes's, or E. Franklin Frazier's, linking of mobility and mass migration with dangerous sexual deviance/license enabled them "to construct their own masculinity as normal, their sexuality as self-disciplined, and their social status as professional" through positing themselves as static and hence stable counterweights to the footloose masses (147).

4      Ross's discussion demonstrates, however, that despite their contrary evaluations of mobility and their varying attitudes to whether one should attempt to "resex" or "un-"/"desex" the race (24), nearly all the "expressive modes" treated in Part 1 - including central works of the New Negro movement from Booker T. Washington's A New Negro for a New Century (1900) to Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) - "scrip[t] racial progress in masculine terms" (86) and revert to various forms of conventional (white) patriarchal "gender typing" (87). The latter is expressed, for example, in "Washington's patriarchal household, Du Bois's gentle but manly Talented Tenth patronage, Adam's chivalric sketching, and Pickens's conquering race-tribes," or in Locke's placing of the "Brown Madonna" on the frontispiece of his anthology, whose "iconoclastic break with the predominant disrespectful racial image of the black woman […] is not a break with the more general sexualized/spiritualized dichotomy familiar in European traditions" (87-88; Ross's emphasis).

5      While Part 2, "Negotiating Racial Uplift: Gender Rivalry and Erotic Longing in the Making of New Negro Patronage," certainly presents one of the most intriguing ideas of Manning the Race, namely that "patronage desire gets structured along libidinal lines as though it were a mode of sexual desire" (195), it does, unfortunately, not succeed in making its claim fully convincing. Even though the two chapters comprising Part 2 present various (readings of) instances to corroborate its central claim - Ross discusses, for example, Du Bois's relations to various NAACP patrons and protégés, NAACP co-founder Mary White Ovington's study Half a Man (1911) and her memoirs Black and White Sat Down Together (published posthumously in 1995), McKay's attacks on Locke as a black patron, Langston Hughes's relation to the white patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, or Carl Van Vechten's patronage efforts - these instances seem not enough to warrant the general nature of Ross's claim concerning the libidinal nature of patronage relations. Although Ross's arguments are often convincing, the straightforward sexual nature of the implications that he detects in the discussed relationships is not always manifest. Nevertheless, Ross's lucid discussion of tropes employed in the discourse of patronage is immensely fruitful and illustrates that, even if race patronage should not in all cases be actually structured like sexual desire, it is certainly frequently conceptualized as such in personal and critical accounts of patronage relations to various rhetorical purposes. Thus Ross's discussion of the implications of the designation of a white woman as patron rather than matron, or of a black male patron as midwife (see esp. 225, 264-265), and particularly his detailed analysis of the "sexual logic" of the "two complementary, contrary paradigms" through which Negro Renaissance cultural patronage was rhetorically rendered, namely "prostitution (usually heterosexual and interracial) and affiliation (usually patriarchal and familial)" (255) demonstrate how such patronage was shaped as a "conflictingly gendered racial institution" that often worked to strengthen rather than undermine the white patriarchal norms on which the Jim Crow regime was built (253).