Response to “The Thug(s) and the Candidate: Musings on Black Masculinity”

Instead of reading this blog, you should probably just read the article, here: http://blogs.vibe.com/man/2008/10/the-thugs-and-the-candidate-musings-on-black-masculinity/

Mark Anthony Neal looks at Black masculinity in his Vibe.com blog article, “The Thug(s) and the Candidate: Musings on Black Masculinity.” He writes about the nigga-ness of rappers like 50 Cent and their contrast to Obama’s portrayal of Blackness. Pulling on writing from Vershawn Ashanti Young’s book, “Your Average Nigga,” Neal talks about how Middle Class Black identity gets played out in direct opposition to the thug image, even though each is desirous of the other.

Thinking about Stuart Hall and Daniel Banks, and their critiques of representation and race performance respectively, I wonder what both Obama’s and, say, David Banner’s representations of Black masculinity are doing, and how they are in conversation with each other. Both Hall and Banks make it clear that by acting in direct opposition to a stereotype, that very image is often reified by the practice that needs to define itself as NOT that.

So when Obama, or other middle class Black professionals, talk in “Standard” English, wear suits, and enter into the mainstream world of politics, are they deepening the Black stereotype(s), the binaries, or, as Neal puts it, the radical dichotomies, the “…perceptions about black masculinity [that] have been finely shaped by a market culture that makes it easier for us to go to sleep at night, because we can so effectively distinguish the niggas from the black men.”

I think Michelle Obama is staging interventions into that binary when she says, as Neal mentions, that she is worried Barak might get shot at a gas station in Chicago, rather than assassinated at a political rally, and when she gives him a ‘fist bump’ after a speech.

And how is David Banner doing that when he speaks eloquently at trials but raps hypermasculine and dirty as shit? And how might he do that more, perhaps with a blog like NewBlackMan?

300 words is not enough for this…