The Thug(s) and the Candidate: Musings on Black Masculinity
"That black men who display hypermasculine characteristics fetishize--that is, simultaneously love and loathe--those considered less masculine or, to be explicit, that niggas covet faggots has been unmasked in insightful criticism. That faggots desire to be niggas has occasioned less critique..."--Vershawn Ashanti Young, Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity
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One of the prevailing theses of the current election season is that Senator Barack Hussein Obama is not the round-way-brand of black man. Such a premise is palpable only to the extent that one chooses to read Obama against the image of marketplace confections of black masculinity, particularly those that legibly erect centuries' old tropes of danger, bestial behavior, and sinister eroticism. The idea that we should distinguish between the candidate and the thug(s) is one of the defining truisms of polite society--less a measure of the candidate's humanity and more so an index of the tolerance within said polite society.
But black men do not live in polite society--however effectively they earn their keep within those spaces--and even the candidate's wife understands this, telling CBS news months ago about her fears that her husband might get shot at a gas station in Chicago as opposed to being assassinated on the campaign trial by some desperate political actor yelling "traitor." As Chris Rock surmised some time ago, niggas don't get assassinated, they get shot--and there always been more of a chance that the Senator from Illinois's fate would be decided by a bullet intended for a nigga, as opposed to that intended for the candidate, because quiet as it's kept--Harvard pedigree notwithstanding--Obama never stops being a black man. And this is perhaps the implicit message of Byron Hurt's recent film short Barack & Curtis: Manhood, Power and Respect. The film is a brilliant and thoughtful intervention on the subject of black masculinity at a moment when Senator Barack Obama is poised to redefine black manhood for much of the world.
There is a telling sequence early in Hurt's Barack & Curtis, where radio journalist Esther Armah, states that "Barack equaled Harvard, someone like 50 Cent equaled hood; hood equaled virility, Harvard equaled impotence." That Armah's compelling observation is rarely disturbed speaks to the extent that many of our perceptions about black masculinity 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. As such Barack Obama and Curtis Jackson are little more than brands, in a highly volatile and fabulously lucrative, politicized marketplace.
The concept of 50 Cent as brand is a no-brainer, as a commodity who implores us to believe that he is a highly dangerous and highly sexualized (to all comers, I might add) embodiment of contemporary black masculinity. Barack Obama-as-brand (as historian William Jelani Cobb suggest we think of him in the film) is less-pronounced, presumably as running for political office doesn't immediately translate into the salaries associated with being a highly compensated "gangsta" rapper. But Obama's political success has been largely premised on his ability to brand himself as a beacon of hope, as an alternative to the Clinton aristocracy and as a black man that we don't have to fear (despite John McCain's best efforts). Branding helps make these men legible to very diverse and often competing constituencies.
What branding doesn't help illuminate is to the extent that the candidate and the thug(s) are dependent upon each other to lay claim to that which their brand doesn't--and quite frankly, can't--allow. This is the point that literacy expert Vershawn Ashanti Young makes when he suggest above that "niggas" and "faggots"--both terms used as rhetorical tropes to make hypermasculinity visible--fetishize each other. Mr. Jackson's ability to wear $2,000 suits establishes a mainstream upper-middle-class identity that G-Unit clothing largely undermines. Mr. Obama's feigned performance of "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" pivots on hypermasculine tropes easily accessed by those who would think otherwise.
Where the candidate and the thug(s) find common ground is perhaps more nuanced and to be observed in the "I don't give a fuck" look that Obama has so brilliantly deployed in the waning months of the presidential campaign. As Young notes in his book Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity, "What the phrase 'I don't give a fuck' really does is convert racial and gender anxiety into a mask on nonchalance...That niggas carry it off so well, however is exactly why [black middle class professionals] are drawn to them." Young adds that "whereas rappers exaggerate their blackness and masculinity, [black middle class professionals] are required to underplay ours."
Both Barack Obama and Curtis Jackson are fictions that are the products of the larger culture's inability to imagine anything but radical dichotomies, for black men. As Ras Baraka eloquently notes in the film "I know black men for real, I don't just know them from the movies and a rap tape." With Barack & Curtis, Byron Hurt forces us to take the humanity of black men seriously enough to recognize the value and achievement of both.
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