I Fight for a Living

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Moore
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Sporting Culture ◽  
Collective Group ◽  
White Manhood ◽  
Jim Crow Era

At its heart, I Fight for a Living is a book about black men who came of age in the Reconstruction and early Jim Crow era--a time when the remaking of white manhood was at its most intense, placing vigor and physicality at the center of the construction of manliness. The book uses the stories of black fighters’ lives, from 1880 to 1915, to explore how working-class black men used prizefighting and the sporting culture to assert their manhood in a country that denied their equality, and to examine the reactions by the black middle class and white middle class toward these black fighters. Through these stories, the book explores how the assertion of this working-class manliness confronted American ideas of race and manliness. While other works on black fighters have explored black boxers as individuals, this book seeks to study these men as a collective group while providing a localized and racialized response to black working-class manhood. It was a tough bargain to risk one’s body to prove manhood, but black men across the globe took that chance.

Disability, Race, and Gender on the Stage in Antebellum America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenifer L. Barclay
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Freak Shows ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
And Gender

Antebellum Americans confronted anxieties about many issues, such as industrialization, immigration, and urbanization, that found expression in blackface minstrelsy and freak shows. In these performances, racial fears, gender worries, and the insecurities of an emergent working class combined with the specter of disability to assuage the concerns of white, working-class audiences partly by reinforcing whiteness, masculinity, and nondisability as markers of citizenship. From the “laughable limp” of an elderly, enslaved groom who inspired Thomas “Daddy” Rice to craft his infamous Jim Crow character to displays of the supposedly 161-year-old disabled body of Joice Heth, minstrelsy and freak shows routinely conflated race, gender, and disability on the antebellum stage. This practice reached its pinnacle with Thomas “Japanese Tommy” Dilward, one of only two black men to perform in blackface before the Civil War.

Race and Culture

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy L. Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Mainstream Culture ◽  
Race And Culture

The conflicting racial and cultural values that underpin much of the Supreme Court’s decision making in civil rights cases are brought under critical review in this chapter as part of a larger argument regarding cultural diversity made in the next chapter. Thus, this chapter is a bridge between the socio-legal and socio-cultural race problems. In preparation for arguing in the next chapter that cultural diversity rides with a corpse in its cargo—to wit, cultural subordination—this chapter discusses the conflicting racial and cultural crosscurrents of the American middle class and working class. White-middle-class values, more than any other values, shape the American mainstream culture—“It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!”—wherein the problem of cultural subordination lies.

scholarly journals Contending discourses of black autobiography: respectability, authenticity, and masculinity

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Foy
Keyword(s):  
Black Men ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Bound Constraints ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Racial Representation ◽  
Racial Authenticity ◽  
Jack Johnson ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
Racial Progress

After historicizing the politics of racial representation in the slave narrative, this article considers how race, gender, and class intersect historically in the autobiographical production of Black men in the United States. At the dawn of the Jim Crow era, Black autobiography conformed to a cultural politics of racial synecdoche, which avowed that racial progress depended on the respectability of esteemed individuals. Dominated by aspirational figures who presented themselves as racial emblems, Black autobiography became closely aligned with the imperatives of Black middle-class formation, actuating a discrete form of racial publicity that erected disciplinary boundaries around Black self-presentation and silenced disreputable figures. With the emergence of criminal and sexual self-reference, whether subtle or striking, in the narratives of Black men, autobiographers like boxer Jack Johnson, scholar J. Saunders Redding, and writer Claude Brown, disrupted the class-bound constraints that had determined Black autobiographical production, staging an internecine class struggle over the terms of racial representation—that is, between contending discourses of racial respectability and racial authenticity

Race Man or Race Menace?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Moore
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Leisure Time ◽  
The Other ◽  
Black Middle Class ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Sporting Culture ◽  
The One

Black fighters’ construction of manhood straddled the line between Victorian respectability and sporting manhood. In other words, many tried to emulate their middle-class brothers. Despite spending their leisure time in the sporting culture, when they had a chance most black prizefighters publicly placed themselves as economically responsible patriarchs. They wanted to prove that their manhood went beyond their physicality, on the one hand, and was not solely rooted in the disreputable sporting culture, on the other hand. As part of the black-middle class’s strategy to prove their equality, race men grounded their manhood in thrift and patriarchy. If the pugilist could avoid the perils of the sporting world, he could properly represent the aspirations of the black middle class.

Urban chaos and the imagined other: remaking middle-class hegemony

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christy Kulz
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Ethnic Minority ◽  
Conveyor Belt ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Minority Parents ◽  
Continued Use ◽  
Class Hegemony ◽  
Potential Weight ◽  
Sixth Form

This chapter examines parental orientations to Dreamfields, as responses to the urban chaos discourse show how parents and students conceptualise their positions within this imagined Urbanderry landscape. Discourses of pathology shape the relationships developed between parents and teachers, impacting upon how students and parents are perceived and treated by the school. The urban chaos discourse powerfully reiterates the inequitable positions of the watcher and the watched, the judger and the judged. The white middle-class parent occupies an invisible, normative space, while working-class and ethnic minority parents feel the potential weight of discipline's reformative hand. Rather than students being measured as data, the continued use of types, categories and subjective judgements becomes evident as students are weeded off Dreamfields’ conveyor belt as it progresses from the compulsory lower school to sixth form college.

CULTIVATING A PROFESSIONAL POSE:

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (02) ◽  
pp. 517-532
Author(s):  
Brandon A. Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Black Men ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
White Institution ◽  
Success Group ◽  
Group Members ◽  
And Behaviors

AbstractIn this article I investigate how a group of Black men in college worked together to learn and practice the professional pose—professional styles and behaviors meant to navigate professional settings. I argue that these behaviors were adopted to preempt any potential discriminatory acts and would ideally disassociate them from the negative labels associated with Black men. Specifically, I examine how leaders of the group Uplift and Progress (UP) prepared other members and recruits by teaching them how to present themselves as professional Black men who were familiar with White middle-class practices. To further encourage their success, group members sought out opportunities to practice these styles in public. By cultivating this professional pose, they were able to claim their place at a White institution and distance themselves from the unfavorable stereotypes of Black men. This strategy also bolstered their reputation on campus and would ideally prepare them for the predominantly White workplace.

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