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| Sunday, May 16, 2004 |
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| Sunday, May 16, 2004 |
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We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
The book is a brief but powerful look at black men and the lives they lead. In order to analyse black men and their masculinity, hooks makes ample use of inflammatory terms such as "imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy." The way she spells her name, a militant lower case, itself indicates that she represents the voice of the subaltern. For many years, hooks looked around for a male friend or a colleague to take up this project of studying the politics of black masculinity. But when no one came forward, she took up the challenge of doing it alone. And thus this book, which is a passionate as well as a compassionate account of some of the important issues concerning black culture. Starting with plantation culture, she examines how the black father is denied to give his name to his children. A child used to be named after his mother and was the chattel of the master. Black men, for instance, were taken out of homes in the 1960s and women put on welfare dole. But if it was discovered that there were male shoes in her house, her stipend was cut off. Often black workers were chased out of factories and threatened with death if they returned. This treatment automatically led to the adoption of a kind of male prowess, a patriarchal masculinity that overwhelmed every other human attitude. Such a complex in black men arose out of the fear of failure as well as from their inability to engage with intimacy, or meaningful relationships with their fathers or women they so much desired to give their love. bell hooks is of the view that black men "cannot emerge as loving individuals until they develop self-esteem and the capacity to confront systems of domination in a constructive way." In the chapter on "gangsta culture," she takes a deep look at the young black men who regard work as a "sucker’s game." They believe that money is the mark of successful manhood, but only fools work for it. "Such a view is reinforced by gangsta rap, a genre of hip-hop culture that glorifies ‘attitude,’ violence and loads of cash." The "size of the wallet" is all that matters. What black males have not been able to achieve in the world of sport, they have looked to the world of music as a "site of possibility, a location where alternative masculinity could be expressed." The music culture of blues and jazz arose from the desire to give meaning to labour and have a vocation that would require creativity. They took to the guitar as a substitute for the cotton fields where they had to work under a white man, knowing that refusal to work would result in getting fired. Work for them had become synonymous with loss of respect. Black militants had strongly critiqued the corruption within capitalism. Within this system all are thieves, "everybody a gangster, everybody on the take." It becomes a struggle between a world of human values and integrity and a world where all is measured by the dollar. This change in the very character of the black male is contrary to the history that defines the struggle of blacks against the many hardships of a racist society. Their refusal to be defined by others lead to a self-definition that emerged from black male "cool." "Black male cool was defined by black male willingness to confront reality not by black male denial or by assuming a ‘poor me’ victim identity." This is their memory and truth, a history that must be remembered by all young black males. Their " thus are as much about hope as about their cold-blooded history. |
WHERE does a black male stand in the education system in
America? Is he doomed if he becomes a militant thinker, airing his views
that pose a challenge to the state? Is he regarded as a threat to the
system if he intelligently puts forward his opinion? bell hooks, in her
new book, We Real Cool, thinks this will be the plight of the
black male until a link is established between education and liberation.