Posts tagged bell hooks.
— bell hooks
“What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.”
- bell hooks
”The ‘thug’ image that many rappers work so hard to project is nothing less than an updated version of the ‘buck’ character depicted in Birth of a Nation: a fearsome and hypersexualized black male. Rap performers are profiting from their music, but as bell hooks reported, when young black males “labor in the plantations of misogyny and sexism to produce gangsta rap,” it is a reflection of their own subjugation by powerful of economic forces. Rap music is consumed by a large, international audience and it contributes to the ways in which young African American men are perceived
“…Stereotypes about Black men foster overt and unconscious discrimination. Scholars representing a range of academic disciplines have produced an extensive body of research that demonstrates the existence of unconscious discrimination. Their research shows that negative stereotypes often operate at an unconscious level, functioning outside a person’s awareness at a level independent of the conscious attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions. These unarticulated understandings are not present in an individual’s conscious memory; they are stored deeply in their psyche. The disposition is based on socialized attitudes and beliefs that are developed at an early age. Unconscious discrimination causes many whites to act in ways that disadvantage blacks without consciously intending to do so.”
- Jessie Carney Smith, Encyclopedia of African American Popular Culture, Volume 1, p.931
A pride, an arrogance even, that is at once laid back,unconcerned,perceived to be highly sexual and potentially violent.” This definition of black male cool rearticulates the way unenlightened white male hipsters read black masculinity. It is a fake stereotyped notion of cool, that denies the history of the “real cool,” which was not about disassociation, hardheartedness, and violence, but rather about being intensely, connected, aware, and able to judge the right action to take in a given circumstance.”
-bell hooks, We Real Cool
“Embracing patriarchal notions of manhood, black males thought of sex as informed first and foremost by male desire.In his essay “Patriarchal Sex” Robert Jensen explains: “Sex is fucking. In patriarchy, there is an imperative to fuck—in rape and in ‘normal’ sex, with strangers and girlfriends and wives and estranged wives and child. What matters in patriarchal sex is the male need to fuck. When that need presents itself, sex occurs.” Much of the subculture of blackness in the early years of the twentieth century was created in reaction and resistance to the culture whites sought to impose on black folks. Since whiteness had repressed black sexuality, in the subculture space of blackness, sexual desire was expressed with degrees of abandon unheard of in white society…. Those black males who wanted to let the world know that they were engaged in the patriarchal sex that centralized fucking could do so by spreading their seed and making babies. In segregated black communities men in power (political leaders, the clergy, teachers) used their authority to sexually harass or seduce willing and unwilling females. Equating manhood with fucking, many black men saw status and economic success as synonymous with endless sexual conquest. Jensen writes that the “curriculum for sex education for a normal American boy” simply teaches males that they must “fuck women” or fuck somebody. Added to this lesson, Jensen says, was a notion that males should “fuck as many women as often as you can for as long as you can get away it”or “fuck a lot of women until you get tired of it, and then find one to marry and just fuck her.” In segregated African-American life, patriarchal sex was not only the medium for the assertion of manhood; it was also reconceptualized in the spaceof blackness as entitled pleasure for black males who were not getting all the perks of patriarchal maleness in arenas where white men were still controlling the show,
-bell hooks, We Real Cool, p.80
— Bell Hooks, We’re Real Cool, p.11
“There is a definitive link between masculinity and sexuality in American society. A boy becomes a man with the completion of his first sexual act and the loss of his virginity. Then, and only then is he a “real man”. “Real Men” are those males that are virile as well as sexually active and experienced. Consequently, for young Black men, the idea of what it means to be a man tends to focus solely on the sexual aspect of their lives and does not include any rules on how to act in regards to family and partnerships.”
-Danielle M. Wallace, “It’s a M-A-N Thang”: Black Male Gender Role Socialization and the Performance of Masculinity in Love Relationships”
“The virgin/whore dichotomy is continually reified through the lens of race wherein white women exist with the construction of purity and the black female is reduced to the ever wanton Jezebel. This construction has its foundation in slavery. It was meant to justify the repeated rape of black women by their white male slave owners.
Though we have long since moved beyond slavery as a condition of living in the broader culture, its shadow continues to interject itself into our discourse about sex and sexuality. Young black girls quickly internalize the idea that their bodies exist for consumption based in the falsehood that they are continually desirous of sex. This construction removes the agency from the decision to have sex and implies that sex must occur because that is the foundation of the black female identity. It further reifies a hierarchy of beings wherein the black female is routinely located at the bottom. Bell Hooks theorizes that the black woman has no institutional other, and when we examine the discourse of sex and gender what immediately becomes clear is that the politics of colonization and oppression continually manifest in ways in which foster a negative sexual identity in black females.
Reducing black women to simply sexual beings without agency or autonomy over their physical beings translates into high rates of teen pregnancy and a low cultural self esteem. If your identity is based on sexual performance rather than achievement in education, it perpetuates the idea that success can only be achieved by conforming to the role of eternal Jezebel. This creates an unhealthy sexuality in that sex is no longer something one engages in to share pleasure or manifest a loving relationship, but to assert a form of self worth.
While a healthy sexuality is important to achieve a well rounded sense of self, the overvaluation of it is detrimental. Reducing women to what they do with their vaginas rather than with their brains serves patriarchal interests. For black women who have a history of slavery the perpetuation of the Jezebel complex amounts to the continued colonization of black female bodies.”
Read Full Article: http://www.womanist-musings.com/2009/02/confronting-hyper-sexuality-in-black.html
— ― bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
— Bell Hooks
