Masculinidades negras em disputa: Autenticidade racial e política de respeitabilidade na representação da homossexualidade negra masculina // Black masculinities in dispute: Racial authenticity and respectability policy in the representation of black male

A partir do caso de Lionel Higgins, da série Dear White People (Netflix, 2017–2019), este artigo se concentra na crítica à refutável dicotomia entre negritude e homossexualidade produzida a partir uma concepção de autenticidade sobre o signo negro e suas implicações na produção de representações da homossexualidade do homem negro na televisão americana. Nas palavras de Devon Carbado (2017), há uma racialização da homossexualidade masculina como branca e uma pretensa condição ontológica da negritude como heterossexual que marginalizam e invisibilizam gays e lésbicas negros tanto na sua identidade racial quanto na sexualidade. São abordadas aqui considerações sobre a condições de produção de representações da homossexualidade do homem negro e suas implicações.

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

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

School Choice as Community Disempowerment: Racial Rhetoric about Voucher Policy in Urban America

Depictions of school choice offering greater individual and local autonomy are widespread, yet they sit uneasily with portrayals of such policies within African-American political discourse. This article analyses the ways in which opposition to publicly funded private school vouchers has been used as a cue to signal solidaristic ties to the African-American electorate. School choice is highly racialized. Black politicians have been known to campaign against school choice policies by presenting them as tools of White outsiders to break up and divide the Black community. Although opinion polls have indicated that a majority of African-American voters support education vouchers, in a campaign context school choice policies can be framed through the prisms of racial authenticity and community control. Using data drawn from interviews with political operatives and archival research in Newark, New Jersey, this article demonstrates that school choice can paradoxically be rendered as a policy of community disempowerment.

After Du Bois

This concluding chapter explores African American literature and print culture in the following century. Here, the prestige and popularity of most Victorian literature—and of Victorian literature as a category—diminished rapidly in the first half of the twentieth century, thanks in good part to the rise of modernism. Moreover, when twentieth-century African American writers looked abroad for cultures that seemed freer from racial prejudice or even the pressures of racialized identity than the United States, their gaze shifted from Britain elsewhere. France in particular took on this role, while also becoming the privileged site of black internationalism, with Paris viewed as “a special space for black transnational interaction, exchange, and dialogue.” Beginning with the Harlem Renaissance, notions of racial authenticity also reinforced this turn away from Victorian literature, not only for its whiteness but also for its association with gentility and middle-class values. Indeed, these same attitudes have shaped the dominant critical reception of the Victorian presence in African American literature and print culture until quite recently.

Masculinity, Misogyny, and the Limits of Racial Community

This excerpt from Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic offers a different perspective on Wright’s thinking regarding relations between black men and women, and about the ability of black communities more generally to offer liberating narratives of racial authenticity. Gilroy suggests that one legacy of the racially coercive Jim Crow South was domestic authoritarianism, as well as violence in public and intimate relations. Wright recognized this and openly addressed it in his art. According to Gilroy, Wright manifested a protofeminism in his early work and later seemed to recognize the place of black women in racial struggle. At the same time, Wright thought that the stresses of modern black life meant that racial identity, on its own, could not guarantee racial solidarity or even fraternal association. This was evident in Wright’s portraits of black homophobia, misogyny and other antisocial attributes that could not be ascribed solely to racism. This frankness, Gilroy worries, is misunderstood by those who would read him in a narrowly US black context rather than alongside his diverse interlocutors on both sides of the Atlantic.