"It's a M-A-N Thang": Black Male Gender Role Socialization and the Performance of Masculinity in Love Relationships"

Men have got to develop some heart and some sound analysis to realize that when sisters get passionate about themselves and their direction, it does not mean that they are readying up to kick men's ass. They are readying up for honesty. --Toni Cade Bambara (1970) In the African American community, debates on gender and male-female relationships have always been in the forefront of general discussions about the state of the Black nation and family (Bambara, 1970; Staples, 1979; Franklin & Pillow, 1982; Collins, 1987; Aldridge, 1991; Dixon, 1991; Staples and Johnson, 1993; Hill, 2002; hooks, 2004). In the late 1960's and throughout the 1970's, this discussion became especially prominent with the rise of the Black Power Movement and the Women's Movement causing many African Americans to question the ideas of Black masculinity and its affect on Black male-female interpersonal relationships (Karenga, 2002). Authors like Alice Walker (1967), Toni Cade Bambara (1970), and Michele Wallace (1978) explored what Wallace coined the "Black Macho" or generally, the idea that Black women had to begin to step back and allow Black men to reclaim and put to use their long denied masculinity. Wallace's notion of the "Black macho" was extremely provocative in that in her analysis of Black male-female relationships (unlike many authors who had previously blamed conflictual relationships between Black men and women on white society), Wallace implied that the blame lay with Black males. Wallace's Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman caused such a stir among Black men and women that a few months following its publication, an entire issue of the Black Scholar was devoted to the discussion of Black male-female relationships, often with Wallace's concept of Black Macho as the starting point (Jones, 1979; Karenga, 1979; Staples, 1979). Scholars like Karenga (1979), and Staples (1979) argued that women like Michele Wallace and Ntozake Shange (1977) unfairly and unjustly hated Black men. Critiques of Wallace's work were typically grounded in the belief that Wallace was misguided and speaking out of personal hurt. It was also believed that her middle class status and education in a predominantly white environment prevented her from truly understanding the influence of the white power structure on Black male-female relationships and therefore rendered her argument null and void (Karenga, 1979). A holdover from the Black Power Movement, there is often the idea in the Black community that gender conflict is a "white thing" that does not affect Black people and most often, it is believed that Black people do not adhere to typical gender roles because racial inequality and the enslavement process have prevented them from doing so. Steeped in this argument is the belief that during enslavement, African men were not allowed to be "real men" and consequently African women began to take on a more prominent and dominant role in the family and community (Frazier, 1939; Monyihan, 1965) (1). As a result, many people began to argue that "on the institutional level, most Black men do not have the power to force women into subordinate roles" (Staples 27) and that the problems in Black male-female relationships were most likely due to the restraints that Black women put on Black men inside the home and were therefore, the Black woman's fault. Staples (1979) even goes so far as to argue that while sexism may be an emerging problem within the Black community, because of the lack of institutional power available to Black men, and because of low male involvement in families, Black men cannot, as a result, be sexist (27). Staples also theorizes that it may not necessarily be Black women that Black men are angry at, but their own societal condition which due to frustration, causes them to act out their aggression in ways that may directly or indirectly affect their mates and families. While the previous arguments may be accurate as far as the discussion of enslavement and its interruption of certain African cultural characteristics pertaining to gender, such as the complementary nature of interactions between African men and women, the issue of the "dominance" of one group--men or women--is one that needs to be analyzed in its proper context. …