Cool pose as a cultural signature

Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Black Canadian Rap artists, many of whom are the children of Caribbean-born immigrants to Canada, employed the hyper-racialized and hyper-gendered “Cool Pose” as oppositional politics to intervene in a conversation about citizenship, space, and anti-blackness. Drawing from local and trans-local imaginings and practices, Black Canadian rappers created counter-narratives intended to confront their own sense of exclusion from a nation that has consistently imagined itself as White and rendered the Black presence hyper-(in)visible. Despite a nationwide policy of sameness (multiculturalism), Black Canadian musicians have used Rap as a discursive and dialogical space to disrupt the project of Black Canadian erasure from the national imagination. These efforts provided Black youth with the critically important platform to critique the limitations of multiculturalism, write Black Canadian stories into the larger framework of the nation state, and remind audiences of the deeply masculinized and racialized nature of Canadian iconography. And yet, even as they engaged in these oppositional politics, rappers have consistently encountered exclusionary practices at the hands of the state that have made it increasingly difficult to sustain a Black music infrastructure and spotlight Canadian Rap’s political and cultural intervention.

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Cool Pose

Encyclopedia of Race and Crime ◽

10.4135/9781412971928.n62 ◽

2012 ◽

Author(s):

Laurie J. Samuel

Keyword(s):

Cool Pose

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Race, Racism, and the Cool Pose: Exploring Black and White Male Masculinity

Social Problems ◽

10.1093/socpro/spaa010 ◽

2020 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

James D Unnever ◽

Cecilia Chouhy

Keyword(s):

Black Males ◽

White Male ◽

Research Needs ◽

Racial Oppression ◽

Cultural Adaptations ◽

Black And White ◽

Nationally Representative ◽

Cool Pose ◽

Definition Of ◽

Young Black Males

Abstract Scholars argue that racial oppression uniquely causes Black males to construct a definition of their masculinity—the “Cool Pose”—that is different from White male masculinity. In this paper, using a nationally representative survey conducted in 2018, we examined whether young Black males were more likely than White male youths to feel greater pressure to conform to the Cool Pose. We analyzed six measures of the Cool Pose. We found no evidence that young Black males were more likely than White male youths to feel greater pressure to use violence if provoked. However, we found that young Black males were more likely than White male youths to feel greater pressure to be physically and emotionally strong, play sports, and to dominate or control others. We conclude that research needs to move beyond idiosyncratic accounts of Black males’ cultural adaptations in order to explicate the developmental processes that affect how Black males living in a systemically racist society express their masculinity.

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Our Schools Suck: Students Talk Back to a Segregated Nation on the Failures of Urban Education. By Gaston Alonso, Noel S. Anderson, Celina Su, and Jeanne Theoharis. New York: New York University Press, 2009. 304p. $70.00 cloth, $23.00 paper.

Perspectives on Politics ◽

10.1017/s153759271100048x ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 9 (2) ◽

pp. 393-395

Author(s):

Joshua M. Dunn

Keyword(s):

Urban Education ◽

New York ◽

New York Times ◽

Minority Youth ◽

Real Problem ◽

New York University ◽

School Conditions ◽

Inner Cities ◽

Urban Minority ◽

Cool Pose

In a March 2006 New York Times editorial, sociologist Orlando Patterson highlighted and tried to explain the “tragedy unfolding in our inner cities,” particularly the “self-destructive” behavior of “young black men.” Provocatively, he identified what sociologists have labeled the “cool-pose culture” as the primary culprit. According to this “culture of failure” thesis, minority youth are partly responsible for this tragedy by choosing a lifestyle that disconnects them from the “socioeconomic mainstream.” It is this thesis that Our Schools Suck is determined to discredit. The authors, four scholars and also, importantly, self-professed activists, criticize scholars, politicians, political analysts, and entertainers, including Patterson, Barack Obama, Juan Williams, and Bill Cosby, for giving “nonwhite youth” a “moral flogging” rather than focusing on the real problem, “socioeconomic and school conditions” (p. 5). Instead of being unconcerned about education, they argue, urban minority youth value education and are acutely aware of their schools' shortcomings.

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"The Cool Pose": Intersectionality, Masculinity, and Quiescence in the Comedy and Films of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy

Race and the Subject of Masculinities ◽

10.1515/9780822397748-011 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 253-285

Keyword(s):

Cool Pose

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Uneven Vulnerability

Black Queer Freedom ◽

10.5622/illinois/9780252043376.003.0004 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 87-117

Author(s):

GerShun Avilez

Keyword(s):

Gay Men ◽

Black Masculinity ◽

Same Sex ◽

Prison Rape ◽

Cool Pose ◽

Men's Experience ◽

Hiv Aids

This chapter shows how incarcerated gay men present prisons as spaces of exposure and seek to disorder the governing logics that enable acts of exposure, which derive from surveillance. Gay men’s experience of incarceration is one of hypervisibility, meaning that their visibility consists of multiple layers and is differentiated because of the perceptions of their bodies and their desires. This enhanced visibility magnifies the general vulnerability associated with detention. The chapter explores edited collections of writing alongside memoirs by gay men in prison to show how same-sex desire is used as a way to refuse queer vulnerability, to undermine notions of Black masculinity as rooted in the concept of the “cool pose,” and to rewrite familiar scripts about male prison rape and HIV/AIDS concerns.

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