Transgressive Black Masculinities in Contemporary African American Satire

Home , Aaron McGruder, Big Dave (character), Black Buck, Black No More, Black on Black, Cleaver (The Sopranos)

Laughing at My Manhood: Transgressive Black Masculinities in Contemporary African American Satire

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Brandon James Manning, M.A.

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2014

Dissertation Committee:

Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́, Advisor

Ryan Jay Friedman

Valerie Lee

LaMonda H. Stallings

Brandon James Manning

2014

Abstract

Vulnerability, as a way to characterize the movement between passivity, shame, and optimism, rests at the center of the Post-Civil Rights Era debates around representations of blackness. My dissertation examines the implications of the more subtle emotions of passivity, shame, and optimism in contemporary satirical narratives in

African American literature and visual culture and focuses on the use of these emotions to counter racial stereotypes and expand notions of black masculinity. In “Laughing at

My Manhood: Transgressive Black Masculinities in African American Satire,” I chronicle satirists such as Paul Beatty, Percival Everett, Dave Chappelle, and Aaron

McGruder and their use of racial caricatures like Uncle Tom, the Black Buck, and Sambo by interrogating how they pair these problematic figures with emotional responses that disregard issues of respectability in order to question the mythos of the “Strong Black

Man.” I argue that African American satire, as a transgressive form, creates the possibilities for its practitioners to construct alternative configurations of black masculinities that contest dominant masculine ideals.

In my first chapter, I read the trope of the Sambo, as the ideal representation in minstrelsy that demonstrates the facade of racial authenticity. In Dave Chappelle’s The

Chappelle Show and Percival Everett’s Erasure the trope of the Sambo functions as a figure of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism.” In so far as texts like Everett’s and

ii Chappelle’s pixie sketch demonstrate the problems with the anachronistic reproduction of this minstrel figure, they also make explicit the internalization of historical narratives of blackness and the anxiety that they produce for blacks, and specifically black men at the turn of the millennium. In the second chapter, I compare Eldridge Cleaver’s Black Power

Manifesto Soul on Ice and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle, arguing that Beatty is able to promote a more masochistic representation of black men’s sexuality opposed to the sadism and promotion of the stereotypical black buck figure in Cleaver’s earlier work.

Conversely, Beatty’s protagonist in The White Boy Shuffle does not want to assume the position of race leader that he is being thrusted into by others. The protagonist’s ability to embrace masochism serves as a way to rethink the power dynamic in discourses of sexuality without fear of producing a castration narrative. In the third chapter, I examine the trope of the Uncle Tom in contemporary satire, situating him as an agent of resistance through his ability to embrace shame, as I rethink what resistance means in Derrick Bell’s short story “Space Traders” and Trey Ellis’s short film adaptation of Bell’s work. I argue that both Bell’s short story and Ellis’s adaptation create a sense of empathy with the character that relies on the trope of the Uncle Tom and allows the reader and audience to sympathize with his position. The shift from sympathy to shame demonstrates a shift in resistance and privileges silence and interiority over more oral exterior ways of resistance. My final chapter investigates how The Boondocks, a popular editorial comic strip turned animated television show, becomes regressive around conversations and representations of LBTQA communities.

iii

Dedication

For Johnnjalyn, Isaiah,

Jaden, and Zuri

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Adélékè Adéẹ̀kọ́ whose mentorship has helped mold a constellation of ideas about black masculinity into a coherent body of research. You are indeed the thread to my needle. Your attention to detail and structure provided me clarity when I was lost in my own thoughts. I would also like to thank my other committee members, Ryan Friedman, Valerie Lee, and LaMonda H. Stallings. Your questions, feedback, and support have been invaluable in helping me cultivate the scope and stakes of this project, and without them this project would have been a lesser work. I would like to thank James A. Moore and the Bell Doctoral Fellowship program at Ohio State

University for the financial and moral support that they gave me and other students over the years. I would also like to thank Lovalerie King at Pennsylvania State University and her tireless efforts to support African American literature through conferences and summer seminars. It was at the “Celebrating African American Literature” conference where I read my first conference paper on satire, and it was the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute that you crafted that introduced me to LaMonda

Stallings and help provide me with an academic community that continues to be edifying.

I would also like to thank Donald Pease and the faculty at The Futures of American

Studies Institute, and especially Eric Lott, for providing me with an opportunity to hear current scholarship in the field and share my work with a helpful cohort of my peers. I

v would also like to thank the Office of Diversity and Inclusion at Ohio State University for providing me with much needed travel and research funding early on in this process.

Andrea Williams, your support and service to my research and pedagogy has been life altering. Unknowingly, you have served as a model for the kind of scholar I hope to be in this profession. Your professionalism, pedagogy, rigor, and mentorship consistently amaze me and give me new heights to try and reach in my own career. I would also like to thank Theri A. Pickens for being a consistent lifeline in matters of research, pedagogy, and sanity. I would also like to thank Robert Patterson for his support and feedback on this project. In addition, I am forever indebted to Rhaisa Williams, Bradley Freeman,

Leila Ben-Nasr, and J. Brendan Shaw all of whom have served as running mates during this process and have been integral in my ability to cultivate a critical perspective. In addition, I extend my heartfelt gratitude to: Tayo Clyburn, Tiffany Anderson, Candice

Pipes, Christopher Lewis, Anne Langendorfer, Corinne Martin, Kate Horigan, Julia

Istomina, Toni Calbert, James Harris, David B. Green Jr., Tiffany Salter, and Amber

Camus who have served as the best academic community a person could ask for. You all have kept me grounded, focused, and happy throughout this process. Lastly, I would like to thank Johnnjalyn Manning whose patience, love, and optimism has served as the lifeblood for this project and all that I do. You have managed to calm the roughest patches and by my first sounding board for all ideas. Your love and support keep me centered, thank you.

Vita

2007 ...... B.A., English and Modern Language, Jackson State

University

2010 ...... M.A., English Literature, The Ohio State University

2008 to 2014 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English,

The Ohio State University

2010 ...... Graduate Research Assistant, Valerie Lee, The Ohio State

University

Publications

“‘I Felt Like I Was Part of the Troop:’ Satire, Feminist Narratology, and Community”

Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights. eds. Derek Maus and Jim

Donahue. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2014.125-36. Print.

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

vii

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments ...... v

Vita ...... vi

List of Figures ...... xi

Introduction: Postmodern Satire ...... 1

Chapter 1: The Cruel Optimism of the Satirical Sambo ...... 22

Chapter 2: “Menage a Trois Noir”: Satirizing Black Men’s Sexuality in Paul Beatty’s The

White Boy Shuffle ...... 42

Chapter 3: Making Toms of Us All: The Politics of Shamelessness in Post-Civil Rights

Era Satire ...... 73

Chapter 4: Aaron McGruder’s Disgust in Queering the Badman ...... 106

Conclusion……………………………………….……………………………………..137

Works Cited ...... 139

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List of Figures

Figure 1. The Chappelle Show “Stereotype Pixie”...... 31

Figure 2. Cosmic Slop: George Clinton...... 98

Figure 3. Boondocks: Kissing Gangstalicious...... 119

Figure 4. Boondocks: Riley’s Gear...... 126

Figure 5. Boondocks: Huey’s Silence...... 128

Introduction: Postmodern Satire

During my last semester of high school, one of my white classmates “jokingly” called me the n-word and laughed. I was left feeling confused, angry, and ashamed at my inability to respond in a thoughtful and quick manner. It was the first time I was called nigger by someone white but it was the laughing that followed and the “what that’s what you all say” that took me by surprise. It was for me the first time that there would be a troubling association of humor and racist discourse. My inability to “Standup” for myself also provoked an emotional response of vulnerability and emasculation. Years later this scene would become emblematic of what I would come to recognize through advanced literary and cultural studies as a byproduct of postmodernism, particularly the problematic pastiche that sought to separate racism, sexism, homophobia, and all other hegemonic discriminations from the corporeal bodies and subjectivities of their practitioners. In this formulation, it is possible to tell a racist joke and laugh and be absolved of racism as long as one is aware of the racism that undergirds the text. Hence, my classmate answered the door ventriloquizing the n-word and didn’t understand himself as a racist. While his laughter marked for me an acknowledgement of the socio- cultural reality of the misappropriation of language and culture and the smugness of that reality, my own lack of laughter, a reaction that Michael Billig refers to as unlaughter, signaled for me the only way that I could get past my own shock.

1 Similarly, the funniest moment in the 2005 film Guess Who, the remake of the

1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—the makeup of the interracial relationship is inverted with the white male protagonist (played by Ashton Kutcher) meeting the black family—occurs at the dinner table when Kutcher’s character is baited into telling race- based jokes that he has heard about blacks, and he tells them with the understanding that only by telling the jokes would they lose their racist bite.

Shock comedy now claims the protection of satire to justify bigoted, vitriolic speech that is spewed from comedic stages, the alleged aim being the disruption of hegemony. The mantra of “attacking everyone” and the exercise of First Amendment rights are used to further rationalize racist rhetoric as mere rhetoric. This is not to say, however, that contemporary “ethnic” humor is historically unique in parsing race matters with humor. Blackface minstrelsy minted and maintained a lasting currency for racialized humor about black bodies that persists today. Contemporary comedians such as Lisa

Lampanelli, Daniel Tosh, and others justify as satire their crude attempts to address stereotypical rhetoric and racist ideologies. While shock comedy is not a new historical phenomenon calling it satire is nothing but an attempt to position it as a form of activism.

The worst thing anyone can be called during this assumed “post-racial” moment is a racist. America continues to scapegoat those who are deemed to be racist. As Michael

Awkward explains in his book Burying Don Imus: Anatomy of a Scapegoat, “put simply,

Imus was made to stand in for millions of well-known and faceless whites whom blacks

(and liberal and progressive whites) want desperately to identify, put on trial, and excoriate because of incontrovertible—but to this point often easily dismissed—

2 ‘evidence’ of centuries of racial motivated sins” (5). Although Awkward’s book cogently analyzes the need for a scapegoat it fails to consider the implications of America’s move towards a nationalized rhetoric of “post-racialism” and the purpose of these scapegoats in that paradigm.

“Laughing at My Manhood” is a study of black satirical cultural production and its implication for understanding black masculine bodies within post-racialist discourse.

It is not a study of the broader implications of humor and race in postmodernism.

“Laughing at My Manhood” focuses on satire for its unique and undeniable position of speaking to the present moment and for the attention it pays to black masculine subjectivities. The dissertation is not concerned primarily with defining satirical elements and theorizing satire in general. Rather, it is invested in thinking about the ways that satire, as a form, prompts a level of introspection as satirists rethink race and gender.

The Cultural Politics of Vulnerable Black Masculinities

“Laughing at My Manhood” uses the term vulnerability to articulate the ways the narratives analyzed position characters and events in order to reform dominant representations of masculinity that stifle men’s ability to interrogate their feelings.

American masculinity traditionally situates all emotions, except anger, as inherently feminine and dictates that men should distance themselves from affective responses.

Taking the distance between emotions and men to be natural ensures that men don’t interrogate their performance of masculinity and its connection to emotions. This is the context in which much of post-Civil Rights black feminist criticism has been invested in helping men, and specifically black men, reconnect with their emotional selves as a way

3 to treat the stunted emotional lives of black men. In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” for example, Hortense Spillers challenges black men to consider “the power of ‘yes’ to the

‘female’ within” (278), so that they can realize the generative possibilities of their emotional selves.

My engagement with black masculinities arises out of a body of black feminist scholarship interested in black male feminism and helping shape non-hegemonic black masculinities. Thus “Laughing at My Manhood” is in conversation with Audre Lorde and bell hooks for their work on gender and emotions. This project is also in conversation with the work of Michael Awkward, David Ikard, and Mark Anthony Neal in the burgeoning field of black masculinity studies. In addition, my approach to theorizing representations of black masculinity also derives from the robust scholarship around lives and representations of queer people of color, specifically the work done around queer masculinities. Queer theory has advanced the work of affect theory, and scholars like

Marlon Riggs, E. Patrick Johnson, Robert Reid-Pharr, Jeffrey McCune, and others best display how negotiating certain emotions and affect becomes instrumental in the performance and study of black masculinities.

“Laughing at My Manhood” centers the emotional lives of black male characters in contemporary in African American satire and focus on how Black satirists illustrate the psychosocial potential of black masculine vulnerability. I situate vulnerability as a multifaceted approach to moving beyond what Judith Butler articulates as “melancholy gender” in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. According to Butler,

“Becoming a ‘man’ within this logic requires repudiating femininity as a precondition for

4 the heterosexualization of sexual desire and its fundamental ambivalence. If a man becomes heterosexual by repudiating the feminine, where could that repudiation live except in an identification which his heterosexual career seeks to deny” (137). Here,

Butler uses Freud’s formation of the id, ego, and super ego to articulate “the logic of repudiation” that she demonstrates is at the heart of gender formations. For Butler, disavowing the grief and loss of queer Other functions as the impetus for gender formations generally and, as I show in chapter 4, following E. Patrick Johnson and

Robert Reid-Pharr, black homophobic discourses. Vulnerability is key in beginning the process of acknowledging the loss and grieving the queer Other. Extending Butler’s formation to include the emotional, I argue that emotions were conflated with the feminine and thus rejected in dominant representations of masculinity. Embracing black masculine vulnerability as the texts studied in this dissertation do undermines the standard feminine negation and focuses on exploring emotional responses as a defining feature of performing black masculinity.

The use of vulnerability in this study is similar to Derek Scott’s abjection.

According to Scott,

Where the abject is always something to be resisted and overcome for

nationalist politics, and where feminist politics labors to establish a human

dignity for women that does not enforce the definition of the feminine as

the abject—there it is possible that male privilege, the effect of male

domination that permits men to invest in the fantasy that they have no

5 essential relation to the abject, makes abjection something that can be

consciously entered into, ‘played’ with, manipulated. (20)

Here, Scott argues that a purposeful engagement with the abject can counteract male privilege by divorcing the power appropriated to the male body from patriarchy.

Similarly, rendering black masculinities as vulnerable do trouble traditional narratives of strength, assuredness, power, and privilege. Thus choosing to embrace vulnerability, as so many of the satirists and the characters in the selected texts do, the protagonists come to embody non-traditional forms of black masculinities. They depart from hegemonic performances of strength and anger to represent black masculinities that are not invested in the economy of male privilege. My project also seeks to engage what Rinaldo Walcott states as an interest in understanding “modes of self-fashioning that allow for a reconstruction of black manhood from the place of incoherence and femininity” (77).

Vulnerability, as a way to characterize the movement between passivity, shame, and optimism, rests at the center of the post-Civil Rights era debates around representations of blackness. My dissertation examines the implications of the more subtle emotions of passivity, shame, and optimism in contemporary satirical narratives in

African American literature and visual culture and focuses on the use of these emotions to respond to racial stereotypes and expand notions of black masculinity. In “Laughing at

My Manhood: Transgressive Black Masculinities in African American Satire,” I chronicle satirists such as Paul Beatty, Percival Everett, Dave Chappelle, and Aaron

McGruder and their use of racial caricatures like Uncle Tom, the Black Buck, and Sambo by interrogating how they pair these problematic figures with emotional responses that

6 disregard issues of respectability in order to subvert the dominant discourse around black masculinity. I argue that post Civil Rights African American satire, as a transgressive form, creates the possibilities for its practitioners to construct alternative configurations of black masculinities that position masculine ideals differently.

Throughout “Laughing at My Manhood” I use the term “transgressive” to convey the political potential of black masculine vulnerability. Transgressive black masculinities are not a collectivist political act. Instead, transgressive black masculinities are a highly personal multifaceted undertaking. My use of transgressive masculinities is an extension and revision of Athena Mutua’s notion of progressive black masculinity. Mutua defines progressive black masculinities “as the unique and innovative performances of the masculine self that on the one hand personally eschew and ethically and actively stand against social structures of domination. On the other hand, they validate and empower black humanity, in all its variety, as part of the diverse and multicultural humanity of others in the global family” (4). Scholar Jeffrey McCune asserts, “Our assessments of black men from the ‘complex’ vantage point always begins from the place of understanding masculinities as always troubled, but simultaneously potentially transgressive” (125). The complexity of black masculine representations in contemporary

African American satire ensures that these texts transgress dominant narratives of black masculinity. I ask, what are the critical investments of alternative forms of masculinity that are present in African American satire? How does satire serve as both a constructive and limiting space to expand notions of black masculinity? I will return to vulnerability and masculinity later in this introduction. Meanwhile, I want to propose a short historical

7 summary of how critics have thought about 20th century African American satire.

Why Satire?

Scholars rarely discuss African American satire on its own terms. There have been works on black comedy, most notably Mel Watkins On the Real Side: A History of

African American Comedy, that have sought to talk about the role of black humor more broadly, but there is nothing in these works that deals with the specificity of satire. In fact, until recently, literary critics have acknowledged satire in their own theoretical and critical frameworks mainly to show the reach of their claim. Darryl Dickson Carr changed much of that with his 2001 book African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane

Novel. Due to the utter lack of scholarship on satire, Dickson-Carr focuses on creating a literary history for African American satire. In framing this literary history, Dickson-Carr chooses not to use Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s concept of “signifying” as the sole way of understanding African American satire.

Central to the satiric mode in African American literary and cultural production is

Gates’ concept of “signifying.” In the 1988 book The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis

Gates Jr.’s suggests that through the process of signifying, a coded language that centuries of oppression created, one can understand a work’s proximity to African

American literature. Central to Gates’ understanding of signifying is the concept of intertextuality, a text’s ability to talk to another text, be it theme, convention, or characters. In satire, the intertextuality depends on two main ingredients: “Two things…one is wit or humor founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of attack” (Frye 224). Thus, satire generally uses parody, irony, and

8 absurdity in order to critique its object of attack. While Dickson-Carr spends a little time discussing the close relationship between satire and signifying he largely misreads the role that signifying plays in satire, and later discards the relevant parts of Gates’ claim as being too narrow in its attempt to be distinctive.

I want to return to the question of whether African American satire is a form of signifying. More specifically, I will expand upon Gates’ understanding of signifying and show how it can encompass the nuances and diversity present in African American satire across the 20th century. Central to Gates’ concept of “talking texts” is his understanding of parody. Gates uses Ishmael Reed’s 1972 satire Mumbo Jumbo to demonstrate how motivated signifying, a text’s ability to ascribe meaning to its parody of other works, operates in a literary work: “Reed’s use of parody would seem to be fittingly described as motivated Signifyin(g), in which the text Signifies upon other black texts, in the manner of the vernacular ritual of ‘close reading’” (xxvi). Gates asserts that these motivated moments of signifying happen in “talking texts” that seek to reproduce earlier permutations of tropological “talking books” and “speakerly texts,” as is evidenced with

Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Although he suggests that this type of signifying is the evolution of other uniquely African American discursive formations,

Gates primarily uses African American satires to construct his idea of “talking texts” through Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. These texts, as well as almost every other African American satire, support his understanding of talking texts and signifying because they embody the structure of other texts as a form of critique. Gates demonstrates the importance of structure when he exhaustively breaks

9 down all of the various ways that Reed is signifying in Mumbo Jumbo. On the micro level, Gates points to Reed’s character names, political groups, and even the title of the novel, but on the macro level Gates indicates that Reed’s structure is signifying on the whodunit detective/suspense novel (227-229). When a satire's structure is not derived directly from the text it is signifying, authors rely on stereotypes to serve as a shared knowledge to anchor their signifying.

Ashraf Rusdy redefines intertextuality in his 1999 book Neo-Slave Narratives:

Studies in the Social Logic of Literary Form as not simply a text that speaks to or parodies an earlier text but as one that also includes the social conditions around the referent text. In other words, “to read intertextually is to discern how a given text creatively alludes to and possibly rewrites a predecessor text, evokes the political dynamic in the field of cultural production, and inscribes into the dialogue its concerns with the social relations in the field of power” (14). By expanding the concept of intertextuality, Rushdy allows for a broader understanding of how a satirical text can signify upon other works. Charles Chesnutt, for example, signifies on the stereotypes apparent in minstrelsy in his 1899 collection of short stories, The Conjure Woman. These short stories use dialect for their central trickster figure, Uncle Julius. Compared to John, the northern white man who narrates the stories, Uncle Julius’s use of dialect prominently marks his status as uneducated. Thus by the end of each story when the reader realizes that Uncle Julius has managed to dupe John and his wife, Annie, his intelligence subverts this earlier preconceived notions of stupidity. As a “talking text,” Chesnutt’s short stories

10 are in conversation with the African American oral tradition that privileges the trickster figure.

Similarly, George Schuyler is uniquely signifying on stereotypes in his 1931 satire, Black No More, a novel about a black scientist who finds a “cure” for blackness by turning white Harlemites and, later, every other black person in America. The role of signifying becomes apparent when one sees Schuyler’s novel as a response to W.E.B.

Dubois’s prophetic claim that the color line is the problem of the twentieth century.

Schuyler’s playful response to turn everyone white suggests that there is nothing innately black about African Americans that would make them different from anyone else. It is important to note here that because a text is signifying or using intertextuality to critique other works it does not mean that it is privileged more than the original work. Dickson-

Carr provides a fruitful extension to Gates’ concept of signifying as it pertains to African

American satire, when he suggests that race and racism are central to the ways in which

African American satirists engage in signifying. He states, “The satiric novel repeatedly installs, subverts, then reinstalls racism as the agent of ideological and political irrationality and chaos, ending with a pessimism that suggests the permanency of racism in the absence of a transformation of the American body politic” (32). Satire’s emphasis is on creating questions and a critical consciousness amongst its readers and not viable answers to the problems it raises.

In Black No More, Schuyler’s critique of the Harlem Renaissance follows the trajectory outlined by Dickson-Carr’s. This is exemplified when the novel’s white antagonists’ plane crashes in Mississippi, and the men try to blend in by rubbing mud and

11 clay on themselves in order to appear black. Unfortunately for the two men, the leader of a white church holding a revival close to the crash site has been praying to God for a black person for his congregation to lynch as a ritual act that will rid his flock of its misfortunes. The appearance of the darkened white men turns the congregation into a lynch mob. Two whitened blacks in the congregation that wanted to come to the men’s aid, but “they were looked at rather sharply by some of the Christ Lovers because they did not appear to be enjoying the spectacle as thoroughly as the rest. Noticing these questioning glances, the whitened Negroes began to yell and prod the burning bodies with sticks and cast stones at them. This exhibition restored them to favor and banished any suspicion that they might not be one-hundred-per-cent Americans” (176). The level of passing that has to occur in order for these whitened blacks to not be discovered is tragic. I use the word ‘passing’ here instead of transformation to underscore the way in which these people still understood themselves as black. Understanding passing as survival and not choice echoes the sentiment that Schuyler conveys in this passage. Had these two whitened blacks not “chosen” to undergo the procedure then they would have been the ones poked and burned. While the participation in this ritual could arguably be their figurative rite of passage into whiteness, it is their reluctance to perform the ritual that causes people to doubt whether they are “one-hundred per-cent Americans.” The whitened blacks mirror the physical actions of the whites around them, they do not understand this process as cathartic or cleansing, and therefore they cannot be understood as part of the whole. The inability of these blacks to fully join lynch mob shows a distinct difference between the two groups, that the transformation from black to white is not as

12 merely topical as Schuyler suggests. By the end of the novel, Schuyler’s criticism comes full circle when the people try to find other ways of distinguishing themselves from one another. Thus, DuBois’s claim, that the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, which Schuyler sets out to correct, is still correct by the end of the novel.

Although Gates uses Reed and Ellison as central figures in conceptualizing

“talking texts,” contemporary satirists, who are indebted to both Reed and Ellison, appear to be at odds with Gates’ primacy of black vernacular. In his satire, Erasure, Percival

Everett critiques Sapphire’s Push, through his character Juanita Mae Jenkins and her novel We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. Everett’s critical commentary on the wide acceptance of

Sapphire’s novel by the larger literary community represents the antagonistic disposition that contemporary satirists have with the use of black vernacular/ dialect as a means of authenticating the black experience. Everett mocks the literary genealogy that Gates writes for Walker’s The Color Purple by extending the terms of analysis to include

Sapphire’s Push, a novel that uses pastiche to create an epistolary novel that focuses on literacy and trauma in ways similar to Walker’s 1982 book. Everett’s novel uses the epistolary form as a means of motivated signifying in order to parody the literacy narratives—and to some extent the trauma—of Walker and Sapphire’s leading female characters. Everett’ s protagonist, Monk, says of the popular reception of We’s Lives in

Da Ghetto “The reality of popular culture was nothing new…But this book was a real slap in the face. It was like strolling through an antique mall, feeling good, liking the sunny day and then turning the corner to find a display of watermelon-eating, banjo-

13 playing darkie carvings and a pyramid of Mammy cookie jars” (29). Monk later asks a love interest who has read the novel, “It didn’t offend you in any way? ... Have you ever known anybody who talks like they do in that book” (188)? In Everett’s attempt to disrupt monolithic notions of blackness, Monk questions how texts that use dialect are perceived as being more authentic than those that do not.

Contemporary African American satirists who desire to broaden notions of blackness trouble black vernacular’s centrality in Gates’ framework of signifying, while still leaving room for the possibility of unmotivated signifying through pastiche. In

Erasure, Everett furthers his critique by having Monk write his own “speakerly text” that uses dialect. Everett sets the tone for Monk’s inspiration thus: “The pain started in my feet and coursed through my legs, up my spine and into my brain and I remembered passages of Native Son and The Color Purple and Amos and Andy …the world opening around me, tree roots trembling on the ground outside, people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo, screet and fahvre! and I was screaming inside, complaining that I didn’t sound like that” (60). This moment of physical and mental pain for Monk marks the cathartic function of the novel he sets out to write and also broadens Everett’s critical angle to include Richard Wright’s Native Son and Alice Walker’s previously mentioned novel,

The Color Purple. Monk goes on to satirize these authors’ speakerly texts by loosely using Native Son’s plot. Monk uses motivated signifying to suggest a lack of creativity in

Sapphire’s novel and also to question Bigger’s claim to an authentic black subjectivity.

Everett also demonstrates unmotivated signifying with Monk’s creation of Stagg. R.

Leigh, the pseudonym/persona for Fuck’s author. Stagg R. Leigh dons the same disguise

14 as Ellison’s unnamed protagonist in his 1952 novel Invisible Man when giving interviews for the book. Everett draws upon this image not to comment on Ellison’s protagonist but as an act “of formal revision [that] can be loving acts of bonding” (Gates xxviii). In this way, Everett aligns his protagonist, and in some ways himself, with Ellison’s distraught protagonist’s liberation and imprisonment around being invisible.

Whether it is tropological, talking books, speakerly texts, or talking texts, knowing what African American satire signifies on, and not how it signifies, serves as an effective means of highlighting the specificity and uniqueness of African American satire. Although Gates contends that “one does not Signify some thing; one Signifies in some way,” in the case of contemporary African American satirists both the authors and their works seem to suggest otherwise (78). Paul Beatty, Trey Ellis, and Percival Everett other the speakerly voice in their satirical narratives in order to demonstrate through their protagonists that understanding one’s blackness through language is a limited way of understanding race or culture. However, knowing what they are signifying upon allows for the concept of signifying to be relevant still for African American satire. Thus, scholars can come to understand satire as an act of signifying if signifying is stripped of its authenticating discursive formations and is broaden to encompass the ways in which authors use the tradition they are adding to.

Within African American satirical instantiations of vulnerability, as in other satirical formations, laughter plays a central role in the didactic process. To quote Bohdan

Dziemidok, “First, the one who ridicules should be convinced as to the inferiority and the fragility of the object ridiculed. Secondly, laughter should evoke a feeling of degradation

15 and the loss of self-confidence in the person ridiculed. Finally, ridicule should seem justified and convincing for he observers” (174). Dziemidok adds that “Since laughter is capable of unmasking false greatness and overthrowing obsolete authorities it may be used in the struggle for social progress. Social institutions and relationships which have become outdated but do not wish to leave the state of history voluntarily together with the people who have lost the sense of the real and live on the past or on illusions make a good object of mockery” (185). For Dziemidok, degradation, incongruity, and superiority complex converge to form satirical laughter.1 Contemporary African American satiric modes shift Dziemidok’s configuration of satiric laughter by having the protagonist, the character that functions as the audience’s moral compass, be the primary source of laughter. However, this laughter does not ridicule or deride as it does in Dziemidok’s formulation, instead it sets the occasion for a cultural interrogation.

Protagonists in contemporary African American satire are primarily hapless, introspective, intelligent black men that garner much of the comedic effect and laughter throughout the work but aren’t ridiculed. These characters’ lack of fortune originates from being black in a racist society and also from their not fitting into stereotypical norms of black masculinity. Darryl Dickson-Carr situates these protagonists as postmodern picaros to capture the ways in which these characters become unlikely heroes in the episodic tales that contain them. While Dickson-Carr’s wording is helpful in thinking through the episodic nature of contemporary satire and the way these characters

1 Satirical degradation arises from a relationship between subject and object where the source of laughter (the thing being laughed at) is so degraded as to cause in the reader feeling a sense of superiority. 16 serve as unlikely heroes, it ultimately fails to demonstrate the nuanced way that these characters carry much of the satirist’s humor. In outlining the role humor plays in contemporary African American satire I don’t wish to assert that humor wasn’t central in the picaresque tradition and that much of that humor didn’t reside in the characterization and plot twists concerning the picaro. Certainly, Don Quixote, as the supreme picaro in the picaresque tradition, elicits laughter from the reader as the site of much of Cervantes’ source of humor. However, unlike Don Quixote the protagonists of contemporary African

American satire are not idealistically trying to change the world around them; they simply want to be, but in a racist society where overcoming ordinary obstacles proves comically idealistic for the black person. For the protagonists, vulnerability develops not just in the self-deprecating humor that binds the reader and the characters but also within demands of daily living as persons of color in the United States. The texts analyzed in this dissertation maintain a deep sense of nihilism in respect to race relations in America and also toward the idea of collectivism and blackness in the post-Civil Rights milieu.

The nihilism in the satires is different from that of foreboding scholars like Cornel West and others who situate it as a systematic byproduct of postmodernity’s flattening of race, gender, and sexual orientation at the very moment that these fields and subjectivities are starting to become visible in the academy. In this dissertation, the nihilism of contemporary African American satire is not gloomy. Instead, the satirists locate the freeing possibilities of this meaninglessness and exploit the potential of male vulnerability for generating meaning.

17 Late 20th century and early 21st century satire focuses on vulnerability to question the tenets of black masculinities put forward during the Black Power Movement. The

1990s witnessed the recuperation of much of the hyper-masculinity of the late sixties and early seventies. The period also recorded highly visible moments like the Million Man

March. During the same time images of the L.A. riots reinvigorated discussions about black patriarchy and hyper masculinity that had successfully been questioned and quelled during the eighties with the rise of black feminist and queer theories and criticism. Acting as if they seek to rebalance the social order, spokespersons of masculinist Black agendas adopt the rhetoric of victimhood when they feel either attacked or forgotten due to the heighten visibility of women, people of color, and queer movements. The language of exclusion covers wide areas of social discourses including how hard men were hit during the recession of 2008, or the sense of “loss” in articles that talk about growing female college enrollment, etc. For black masculinity, victimhood symbolized the extent of the ground lost after Civil Rights victories.

African American satire responded to the turn of the century gender discourse by revisiting male caricatures like Sambo, Buck, Badman, and Uncle Tom that facilitated popular devaluation of black men’s bodies during the early to middle part of the 20th century. In traditional black refutations of these characters black, male activists almost always discredit them as necessary first step towards re-appropriating American patriarchy for themselves. The use of these caricatures in contemporary African

American satire follows a different path. As the foregoing pages demonstrate, contemporary African American satirists are re-formulating them as expressions of

18 complex black masculinities. In the reconfigurations, exposing men as permeable, physically and psychically, plays a central role.

In the first chapter, I read the trope of the Sambo as the ideal façade of racial authenticity in minstrelsy. In Dave Chappelle’s The Chappelle Show and Percival

Everett’s Erasure the trope of the Sambo functions as a figure of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” that is the attachment to an object that creates the illusion of progress but stifles one’s ability to reach their goals. I extend Berlant’s concept to satirical metanarratives as I address the pitfalls that arise in the process of exorcising inner feelings of failed racial authenticity. For Chappelle, this cruel optimism is present in his use of the “Pixie Stereotypes” in the last sketch for his show where he dresses in blackface but is unable to overcome the weight of racial stereotypes. Similarly, in my reading of Everett’s satirical novel Erasure, I situate his author-protagonist’s interpolated novel as a work that relies on the trope of the Sambo as it speaks to the tensions between

African American literature and urban fiction and the way each genre incorporates and tries to counter racial stereotypes. In so far as texts like Everett’s and Chappelle’s pixie sketch demonstrate the problems with the anachronistic reproduction of this minstrel figure, they also make explicit the internalization of historical narratives of blackness and the anxiety that they produce for blacks, and specifically black men at the turn of the last millennium.

In the second chapter, I compare Eldridge Cleaver’s Black Power Manifesto Soul on Ice and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle, arguing that Beatty is able to promote a more masochistic representation of black men’s sexuality that contradicts the sadism of

19 the stereotypical black buck figure in Cleaver’s earlier work. In Soul on Ice, Cleaver situates himself as the next “Race Man” in an attempt to continue the work he sees

Malcolm X accomplishing at the time of his assassination, and in doing so he creates narratives around black men’s sexuality. For Cleaver, sadism serves as a viable representation of black men’s sexuality that can be productive in narratives of resistance.

Cleaver promotes sadism throughout his work but does it most poignantly in his commentary about James Baldwin. Conversely, Beatty’s protagonist in The White Boy

Shuffle does not want to assume the position of race leader that others invest him with.

The protagonist’s ability to embrace masochism serves as a way to rethink the power dynamic in discourses of sexuality without fear of producing a castration narrative.

In the third chapter, I examine the trope of the Uncle Tom in contemporary satire, situating him as an agent of resistance through his ability to embrace shame, as I rethink what resistance means in Derrick Bell’s short story “Space Traders” and Trey Ellis’s short film adaptation of Bell’s work. In “Space Traders,” aliens come to the Atlantic shore and promise to cure all of America’s problems if America agrees to give them all of their black people. I argue that both Bell’s short story and Ellis’s adaptation create a sense of empathy with the character that relies on the trope of the Uncle Tom and allows the reader and audience to sympathize with his position. The shift from sympathy to shame demonstrates a shift in resistance and privileges silence and interiority over more outspoken ways of resistance.

My final chapter investigates how The Boondocks, a popular editorial comic strip turned animated television show, becomes regressive around conversations and

20 representations of LBTQA communities. I analyze McGruder’s representation of queerness in both his comic strip and the animated television show. I turn specifically to

McGruder’s attempt to represent a queer presence in hip-hop in the episodes “The Story of Gangstalicious,” “The Story of Gangstalicious: Part 2,” and “Pause.” In my analysis of these episodes I argue that McGruder departs from the other representations of vulnerability and adopts a homophobic epistemology that precludes non-hegemonic black masculinities. I argue that by exploring the relationship between Huey and Riley, the show’s main characters, and their differing representations of hip-hop, McGruder produces a hermeneutic around socially conscious rap (SCR) that fails to address the needs of women of color and LGBTQA communities.

1. The Cruel Optimism of the Satirical Sambo

Late Twentieth and early Twenty-First Centuries marked a moment of promise that had the potential to usher in an era of new possibilities in race relations. In conjunction with the effects of social activism, landmark court cases, and legislation that sought to help shorten the racial divide, the aesthetic move towards postmodernism in the late twentieth century provided the opportunity to produce a unique tone and sentiment in

African American literature and culture. Salamishah Tillet acknowledges the potential of this moment in African American satire when she writes that “postmodern techniques” gives African American satirists an “irreverent attitude toward dominant historical narratives” and the ability to “abuse, subvert and challenge the past in order to examine the effects of an enduring American racism, both direct and indirect upon the African

American citizen” (58). Dismantling rigid understandings of race and racism became the primary thrust of African American satire in the new millennium.

Within African American satire, the use of cruel optimism with the understanding of the potential of the blackface minstrel—that I will refer to here as the satirical Sambo-- attempts to disrupt the boundaries of blackness to be more inclusive of those subjectivities on the margin. In trying to point to the artifice of racial authenticity, many satirists during the turn-of-the-millennium revisited the trope of the Sambo as the founding stereotypical figure for American minstrelsy in order to disrupt contemporary

22 formulations of blackness. As Eric Lott asserts in Love and Theft, “we must now think of, say, the blackface mask as less a repetition of power relations than a signifier for them— a distorted mirror, reflecting displacements and condensations and discontinuities between which and the social field there exist lags, unevennesses, multiple determinations” (8).

The distortion functions as a sort of funhouse mirror effect for satirists and their ability to signify on these “signifiers” to complicate the racial and gender norms of the

Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. The potential and fantasy associated with the

Sambo figure is that he provides the fixed possibility within satire to topple these historical narratives of simplicity and buffoonery. However, the figure of the Sambo creates a messy, unresolved tension in that the terms of engagement are never as “fixed” or controlled as the satirists hopes for.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Sambo was the playful, simple, lazy caricature of plantation lore who helped to promulgate the idea that enslaved blacks, specifically men, had to be policed and forced to work because their “natural inclinations” would ensure that they resist the labor of slavery. The caricature of the Sambo suggested that this simple-mindedness produced an unintentional yet comical buffoon that when juxtaposed to white masculinity creates the sense of innate backwardness and produced a comical effect. The Sambo figure served as the muse and inspiration of American minstrelsy. Eric Lott asserts that practitioners and audiences of blackface minstrelsy allowed for the stock caricatures on the minstrel stage to serve as nostalgia inducing performances that helped to mitigate the socio-cultural shifts of Postbellum America.

23 Moreover, it was the primacy of the Sambo caricature during slavery that maintained its cultural capital on the minstrel stage. According to Lott, “Minstrelsy, of course, was long enveloped in a reactionary nostalgia that desperately needed debunking; partisans of blackface have always longed for the imaginary day of the strumming Sambo” (7).

Furthermore, as Daphne Brooks suggests, that while Pre-Civil War white minstrelsy was praised for its skill and attention to detail, by the late nineteenth century there was a shift in public sentiment that black minstrels created a narrative of authenticity in their performances (63). As the mythic figure embedded in the burnt cork that both white and black actors placed on their face, Sambo serves as the first widely acknowledged artificial racial representation that ironically then produced a narrative of authenticity and as such, serves as a ripe, transgressive space for satirists to question the rigidity of discourses about authenticity.

In “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” Ellison points to the absurdity of imagining this Sambo figure as being derived from the black experience and suggests that the use of this trope within African American literature inverts its initial signification as a white form of entertainment, and he begins to think about the potential of masking as a form of deception. As Ellison writes about the importance of the mask in minstrelsy,

“Very often, however, the Negro’s masking is motivated not so much by fear as by a profound rejection of the image created to usurp his identity. Sometimes it is for the sheer joy of the joke; sometimes to challenge those who presume across the psychological distance created by race manners, to know his identity. Nonetheless, it is in the American grain” (55). Here, Ellison makes all masking part of a collective American imaginary and

24 prophetically articulates the postmodern treatment of this figure and its potential to challenge prevailing ideologies and iconographies of blackness.

When I use the trope of the Sambo and invoke the historical narrative that I’ve just presented here it is done with satirical meta-narratives that situate themselves as aware of this doubling, as aware of the mask and its ability to create a larger narrative around what Ellison’s calls the “joy of the joke” and its ability to challenge monolithic notions of blackness. Thus, the Sambo functions as a dialectical interrogation into issues of representation and racial authenticity. In other words, the Sambo figure allows satirists a means of interrogating the ideology of "authentic" blackness, and functions in contemporary African American satire as an exemplar of Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness. While I would argue that contemporary satirists like Chappelle, Beatty, and Everett push back against the notion that there is a collective “true” self- consciousness among blacks, Du Bois’s articulation of a “peculiar sensation” of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” is apt for the type of play on race that undergirds these satirical narratives (9). Within different satirical instantiations, the

Sambo or Sambo-like figure, ironically functions as the sign for dominant culture’s idea of an appropriate performance of black authenticity. By creating an awareness and tension between the impulse to succumb to societal demands to perform—and, thus, to be read as a particular type of black subject—the satirists in this formulation becomes an interlocutor between fact and fiction, the actual and the artificial2.

2 I use interlocutor here not only to represent the conversation that is happening between the characters, satirist, and audience but also to signify on the tradition of minstrelsy and the role of the interlocutor on the blackface stage. During the age of minstrelsy’s high 25 For instance, in his last sketch, Dave Chappelle of the wildly successful

Chappelle’s Show displays the possibility and tension of this turn-of-the-millennium moment with his own Sambo figure. The sketch begins with Dave sitting in an airplane seat as his white stewardess approaches him, greets him as “Mr. Chappelle,” and asks whether he wants either chicken or fish for his inflight meal. Chappelle is the only person of color in this mis-en-scene and is the only person who is visibly uncomfortable. As he hears that his choice is between chicken and fish a “pixie” in the form of a small blackface minstrel appears on the back of the seat in front of him. When the “pixie” appears he is a smaller version of Dave Chappelle in black face acting in the traditional

Sambo role using broken English and large gestures. The pixie serves as a visual representation of Chappelle’s own angst about stereotypes. Chappelle wants the chicken as his inner pixie demonstrates but he is concerned about the way that the whites around him will read his blackness when he plays into the stereotype of black people enjoying fried chicken. Although the sketch succeeds in trivializing the decision between chicken and fish, especially when “Big” Dave wins and is allowed to get fish and the pixie says

“maybe it’s catfish” and continues to taunt him, the sketch successfully demonstrates that there are both internal and external stakes to when, where, and how one performs blackness in public settings.

Similarly, Percival Everett’s 2001 satire Erasure serves as a more nuanced literary example of the contemporary use of the Sambo In the text, Everett lampoons

popularity, the interlocutor was the minstrel host for the show. He was the one that primarily talked to and engaged the audience. Similarly, satirists function as a conduit between their audience and their use of the minstrel stage and the staging of the Sambo as a subversive entity. 26 Sapphire’s 1996 novel Push, the novel on which Precious is based, through his character

Juanita Mae Jenkins and her book We’s Live in da Ghetto. With its use of urban slang, broken English, poverty, and sexual and physical violence, Everett turns his ire on this text because he thinks it typifies the dominant culture’s idea of an authentically black narrative3. In Everett’s critique of the reception for Sapphire’s work he uses parody, irony, and absurdity for his protagonist Theolonious “Monk” Ellison, a writer who is upset that his books aren’t getting the traction he feels they deserve and annoyed by his agent’s and others’ (both black and white) suggestions to write books about the supposed black experience. After reading the opening paragraph of Juanita’s book, Monk situates her work as purely stereotypical and states, “The truth of the world landing on me daily, hourly, was nothing I did not expect. But this book was a real slap in the face. It was like strolling through an antique mall, feeling good, liking the sunny day and then turning the corner to find a display of watermelon-eating, banjo-playing darkie carvings and a pyramid of Mammy cookie jars” (29). Monk’s physical and mental disgust for Juanita’s work is a constant throughout the novel and after a fit of rage from seeing Juanita Mae

Jenkins on the cover of Time magazine, Monk sits down and pens a novel that he knows he “could never put [his] name” (62). Monk’s interpolated novel, My Pafology, later renamed Fuck, is fully rendered and centrally situated within Erasure, and functions as a

3 The 2009 film-adaptation, Precious similarly provoked the ire of satirist Ishmael Reed in his Op-ed piece for the New York Times “Fade to White” where he states, “Is the enthusiasm of such white audiences and awards committees based on their being comfortable with the stereotypes shown? Barbara Bush, the former first lady, not only hosted a screening of Precious but also wrote about it in Newsweek, saying: ‘There are kids like Precious everywhere. Each day we walk by them: young boys and girls whose home lives are dark secrets’” (4). 27 contemporary sendup of Richard Wright’s Native Son with the protagonist Van Go

Jenkins taking the place of Bigger Thomas. The rest of the novel chronicles Monk’s relationship to this work as it becomes lucrative and is nominated for a prestigious book award.

Monk’s use of Wright’s narrative represents the broad strokes that Everett uses in showing how pervasive this idea of black authenticity is in African American literature and popular culture. The moment Monk sits down to write My Pafology he states, “The pain started in my feet and coursed through my legs, up my spine and into my brain and I remembered passages of Native Son and The Color Purple and Amos and Andy and my hands began to shake… people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo, screet and fahvre! and I was screaming inside, complaining that I didn’t sound like that” (61). The parallels that

Monk draws between the novels of Richard Wright and Alice Walker and the long running radio and television show Amos and Andy, at best could be considered jarring and at worst a form of literary blasphemy with neither Native Son nor The Color Purple functioning as comedic texts.

After implicating Wright and Walker in his critique of Juanita’s work, Monk sits down to produce his own satirical Sambo-like text, in part to show how baseless and easy the form is and also to expel the anxiety that the reception of Juanita’s text produces for him. Everett creates his satirical Sambo figure by juxtaposing Monk and Monk’s protagonist, Van Go Jenkins. Like Bigger Thomas, Van Go is an angry inner-city youth, but Monk isn’t interested in demonstrating that there are a number of Biggers walking

28 around America like Wright is.4 Instead, Monk makes Van Go as absurd as possible. If as

Baldwin asserts “Bigger’s tragedy is that he admits the possibility of his being sub- human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth” (23), then Monk’s Van Go gestures towards the superficiality of Bigger’s conclusion. Where we are meant to empathize with Bigger and his acceptance with his sub-human status, we are meant to laugh at Van Go; where we understand Bigger as ignorant, we understand Van Go as stupid. What ostensibly are subtle differences between the two texts produce drastically different effects and affects for the reader in large part due to the way Monk mediates our understanding and proximity to the work he loves to hate. In creating a novel that he could never put his name on, Monk sets the stage for what Lauren Berlant refers to as cruel optimism in his use of the trope of the Sambo in My Pafology.

In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant explains the affective importance of desire, fantasy, and longing in the state apparatus. For Chappelle and Everett that attachment is to the trope of the Sambo and the potential that Ellison outlined in “Change the Joke Slip the Yoke” in its ability to undermine dominant notions of black authenticity. The cruelty of attaching one’s self to objects that they perceive will help them achieve a better life becomes an inhibitor and not enabler in helping them achieve their goals. Though I share

Berlant’s interest in interrogating the attachment to fantasies that serve as coping mechanisms for disenfranchised people, I depart from her broader use of “cruel

4 In the essay “How Bigger Was Born,” Richard Wright states, “The birth of Bigger Thomas goes back to my childhood, and there was not just one Bigger, but many of them, more than I could count and more than you suspect.” 29 optimism” to think through the specific racialized implications embedded in the lives and narratives of people of color. Thus, part of my revision of Berlant’s idea is through the use of the satirical Sambo and the way he functions as an embodiment of the tension between Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness and racial authenticity. The hope attributed to this figure is an attempt to free its practitioner from historical narratives of oppression and invisibility. However, the satirical Sambo becomes cruel due to his continued usefulness in disrupting contentious narratives around race. In other words, the continued presence and need for the Satirical Sambo serves as a reminder that we do not live in an egalitarian society and that the narratives around post-racialism serves as a neoliberal construct invested in reducing the individuality of people of color to broader stereotypical narratives that allow the state to function more easily.

For instance, in the Dave Chappelle skit I mentioned earlier, Chappelle in the sketch is preoccupied in conversing and one-upping the minstrel pixie. Chappelle’s investment in winning the repartee grows as he tries different avenues to eat the fish. The pixie functions as the object that Chappelle can gauge his own “progress” against. The optimism in creating and then later engaging the satirical Sambo is an attempt to reject the legacy of a historical moment that robbed black men of their humanity and visibility.

Although, the pixie seems to manifest itself as an antagonistic entity that is bent on returning Chappelle to his stereotypical status of sub-human, it is an intentionally created, external representation of Chappelle’s internal strife. In other words, it is the personification of his own doubts that he has about himself. Chappelle’s ability to say no to this stereotype functions as a sign of his own civility.

Figure 1. The Chappelle Show “Stereotype Pixie”

It is something that he needs to dominate, but because stereotypes are so messy and expansive the pixie’s attempt to try and make Dave’s fish into fried catfish demonstrates that there is no way that Dave can win this battle. The scene ends with the pixie badgering Dave to the point that he gets up from his seat. However, Dave is on a plane and there is nowhere to run and furthermore, because the pixie is a manifestation of his self-consciousness it will likely follow him wherever he goes.

What is even crueler about this particular sketch and the optimism embedded in the Sambo figure is that it reflects the dynamic of the Chappelle’s Show more broadly.

Chappelle’s Show consistently played with stereotypes in a number of different ways that

31 was supposed to signify both the freedom to discuss such matters in a public space as well as our own contemporary progress to more historically overt forms of racism.5 In other words, (as I suggested in the introduction) Chappelle optimistically understood the transformative power of humor to try and usher in a new racial politics for the 21st century. During the taping of this sketch a producer laughed when Chappelle thought it inappropriate. Chappelle left the show in the middle of taping for the upcoming season and spent two weeks in South Africa, abandoning his fifty million dollar contract.

Gauging the affective response in cruel optimism is central to Berlant’s larger project.

She writes, “In scenarios of cruel optimism we are forced to suspend ordinary notions of repair and flourishing to ask whether the survival scenarios we attach to those affects weren’t the problem in the first place. Knowing how to assess what’s unraveling there is one way to measure the impasse of living in the overwhelmingly present moment” (49).

For contemporary African American satirists, the impasse of the current moment is the continued preoccupation and power appropriated to race. Although we are living in a

Post-Civil Rights era their work demonstrates we are not in a post-racial era. Thus

Chappelle’s unraveling both in and outside the sketch thus marks the way that, for him, he was unable to exorcise his inner Sambo pixie.

For Everett’s Erasure, there is a similar cruel optimism located in his use of

Monk’s My Pafology as a minstrel space. Everett begins the novel by having Monk admit that he stands squarely outside of every stereotypical racial qualifier having attended an

5 In the “Niggar Family” sketch, Chappelle uses the aesthetic and moment of the 1950s “Leave it to Beaver” television show for a family with the last name “Niggar.” Dave Chappelle’s anachronistic character is the family’s milkman and the entire sketch subverts the derisive use of the word “nigger.” 32 Ivy League school, being good at math, not being good at basketball, and not being a good dancer leaving him with “the hard, gritty truth of the matter” he “hardly ever think[s] about race” (1). He goes on to say “I don’t believe in race. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide nose and slave ancestors. But that’s just the way it is” (1-2). This self-characterization at the beginning of the novel and the awareness of race as a construct that society dictates through simultaneously strict and fluid definitions of different racial categories sets up the crux of the novel and thus its cruel optimism. Monk’s articulation of the empty signifier of blackness echoes E. Patrick

Johnson’s succinct explanation that, “Because the concept of blackness has no essence,

‘black authenticity’ is overdetermined—contingent on the historical, social, and political terms of its production” (3). Although Monk’s cynicism towards race is evident throughout much of the text, his anger towards reviews of Juanita’s work such as “one can actually hear the voice of her people as they make their way through the experience which is and can only be Black America” suggests that it is not race that he does not believe in but the particular definition that excludes his subjectivity (39). Thus, Monk uses the power and optimism of this type of literary minstrelsy, as Everett sees it, to first and foremost acquire wealth for his ailing mother who he is taking care of, but also as a way to give him access to blackness through the pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh and the alternate identity he gives Stagg for different interviews and promotional pieces for My

Pafology. By having Monk perform blackness in this very self-conscious way that points

33 to the artifice of all racial performances, Everett is able to begin the arduous task of destabilizing the societal definition of blackness in the novel.

Similar to Dave Chappelle’s pixie, the narrative space that Monk creates for Van

Go Jenkins reiterates that the optimism in this type of narrative minstrelsy is the ability to exorcise this inner conflict. Monk’s novel creates the space where he can separate himself from Van Go. He is able to do this by juxtaposing his own inability to perform racial authenticity to that of Van Go. For instance, “While in college” he writes, “I was a member of the Black Panther Party, defunct as it was, mainly because I felt I had to prove

I was black enough” (2). Later in the novel he references his childhood and states, “I could never talk the talk, so I didn’t try and being myself has serve me well enough. But when I was a teenager, I wanted badly to fit in. I watched my friends, who didn’t sound so different from me, step into scenes and change completely” (166). It is important then that Monk’s most successful performance of blackness is the creation of Van Go.

Within the dialectics of Monk’s satirical Sambo is an investigation between the congruencies and contradictions between the archaic Sambo as minstrel construct and the

Badman as his equally fabricated contemporary descendant. There is a productive elision between the role of the Sambo in Erasure and the trope of the Badman because Van Go, as a parody of Bigger Thomas, has a proclivity towards violence. The trope of the

Badman is also present in the backstory and present threat of Monk’s performance as

Stagg R. Leigh. Even Stagg’s name is a play on the Badman Stagolee or Lee Shelton, the man at the middle of a folk song about a dice game gone awry that ends in death (Brown

34 10).6 Everett writes of Monk, “I wondered how far I should take my Stagg Leigh performance. I might in fact become a Rhinehart, walking down the street and finding myself in store windows. I yam what I yam. I could throw on a fake beard and a wig and do the talk shows, play the game, walk the walk, shoot the jive. No, I couldn’t…he

[Stagg] would talk to the editor…then disappear, like down a hole” (162). Invoking

Popeye and Ellison’s Invisible Man, Monk reiterates the performances of Ellison’s

Rhinehart and the similarities between that mask and Monk’s Stagg R. Leigh.7 However,

Monk departs from the permanence of invisibility in Ellison’s text when he suggests that he couldn’t keep up the performance, and that it was going to have to be Stagg who people see in reference to this book.

Van Go’s narrative is more violent than Monk’s performance as Stagg Leigh, and within the absurdity of the narrative that Monk creates, it serves as a marker of how unrealistic the assumed “authenticity” of this subject position is. As John Roberts asserts,

“the folklore of black badmen offers African American merely an expressive outlet for their feelings of hostility and violence, (presumably resulting from their oppression in the

6 Stagolee, Stack O’ Lee, or Stagger Lee refers to the story of Lee Shelton, a St. Louis pimp that killed Billy Lyons over a dice game in December of 1895. The folk song became legendary with many different people singing the death of Billy Lyons. Over time the violence is re-appropriated and becomes political. Cecil Brown writes: “The Stagolee paradigm has produced political figures such as Adam Clayton Powell, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, H. “Rap” Brown, Robert Williams, and Bobby Seale. Seale named his son Stagolee and also used the narrative toast version as a recruiting device to get young black men into the Black Panther party” (14). 7 Monk’s “I yam what I yam” parallels the moment in Ellison’s novel when the unnamed protagonist eats a hot yam from a food cart in a back alley on a cold winter day. The moment is an early gesture towards the character’s invisibility and the freedom that it produces for him. The ease with which he slips into invisibility here later leads to him adapting the Rhinehart figure (266). 35 society) and not a model of emulative behavior adaptable to real-life situations” (174).

Insofar as most of the violence that happens in My Pafology is surreal and senseless, the

“gritty” nature of violence attributed to urban landscapes as a tool of survival is subverted through the depiction of violence. For instance, the interpolated novel begins with Van

Go dreaming about stabbing his mother to death “So, I stab Mama again. I stab her cause

I scared. I stab Mama cause I love her. I stab Mama cause I hate her. Cause I love her.

Cause I hate her. Cause I ain’t got no daddy” (65). After this dream sequence Van Go wakes up to find his mother telling him that she has arranged a job interview for him to chauffeur for the Daltons. The main place where My Pafology diverges from Wright’s

Native Son is that Monk writes the Daltons as black and not white. Throughout the novel,

Van Go rapes three women and kills a number of people as he tries to escape from the law.

The shared space of the Badman and the Sambo makes sense for Monk’s text, and here I want to take a moment to reiterate that it is Monk’s novel My Pafology as a material object that functions as the Satirical Sambo—a kind of uncontrollable Trojan horse and that the Badman is Van Go in the novel and his fabricated author, Stagg Lee.

Just as the popularity of the Sambo figure was waning in America because of efforts by the NAACP and the early sentiments of the Civil Rights movement the Badman took his place as the more dominant caricature in circulation. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,”

Baldwin locates the resemblance of these intergenerational stock caricatures when he writes, “Below the surface of this novel [Native Son] there lies, as it seems to me, a continuation, a complement of that monstrous legend it was written to destroy. Bigger is

36 Uncle Tom’s descendant, flesh of his flesh, so exactly opposite a portrait that, when the books are placed together, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and the dead

New England woman are locked together in a deadly, timeless battle” (22).

As a form of masked coping, Everett’s use of the trope of the Sambo, supplants

Monk’s feeling of ineptitude around racial authenticity. By writing the urban fiction that sells and that everybody wants him to write, it would suggest that Monk is invested in performing a specific kind of creative output. However, his sentiment that “if they can’t see it’s a parody, fuck them” suggests that this is still another way to distance himself from what everybody thinks he should do. More importantly, My Pafology is more than just a parody. The title for the work “My pafology” is supposed to be reflective of the voice of the main character, Van Go; however, as the reader comes to find out, Van Go does not understand himself as being wrong. Indeed, throughout the interpolated novel

Van Go blames his teacher, his mother, his boss, and anyone else he can for his misfortune. His ability to rationalize all of his misdeeds suggests that even though My

Pafology is written in the first person, he is not the one who understands himself as diseased, and because the pseudonym and subsequent persona of Stagg R. Leigh is created after Monk writes the novel we realize that it is not part of Stagg’s issues. Thus, the pathology that Van Go embodies is actually that of Monk’s and his inability to be what people want him to be. Unfortunately, Monk does not see the text as his pathology in a way that would benefit him.

The idea that the text is initially a parody allows Monk some ease during the charade, but eventually he begins to question his continued investment. In his early

37 thoughts about the book he had just sold Monk tries to focus on its lack of artistic merits:

“I tried to distance myself from the position where the newly sold piece-of-shit novel had placed me vis-a-vis my art. It was not exactly the case that I had sold out, but I was not apparently, going to turn away the check” (139). Monk then later writes, “I considered everything that was not good about the novel I was about to publish…It was a parody certainly, but so easy had it been to construct that I found it difficult to take it seriously even as that… Then I caught the way I was thinking and realized the saddest thing of all, that I was thinking myself into a funk about idiotic and pretentious bullshit to avoid the real accusation staring me in the face. I was a sell-out” (160). The discourse of “selling- out” does two things for Monk at this moment. First, it suggests that he has indeed executed a recognizable type of racialized performance, albeit a “treacherous” one, because only those in the fold can “sell-out.” Second, the discourse of “selling-out” and the means by which he understands himself as selling-out suggests that he is questioning the parodic aspect of his work because if he was completely sincere in offering it as a parody to an “industry so eager to seek out and sell such demeaning and soul-destroying drivel” (137), he would be fully absolved of the discourse of “selling out.” Indeed, Monk departs from his usual creative aesthetic in writing My Pafology in order to mirror the simplicity that he sees in urban fiction. However, it is not his creative choices, or the lack thereof, that cause him to see himself as a “sell-out;” it is his feeling of “vindication somewhere inside” him towards this industry and how lucrative selling the book has been that cause him a great deal of angst (137).

38 The primary means of cruelness from Monk’s engagement with the Sambo figures happen in a temporal loss embedded in the rhetoric of “selling out.” In Sellout:

The Politics of Racial Betrayal Randall Kennedy asks, “what are the effects of the use of sellout rhetoric and the sentiments that attend it” (68)? Kennedy asserts that this line of thinking by blacks creates a “‘loyalty trap’ that discourages debate and thus facilitates the loss of valuable information and insight” (70). Ultimately, Monk demonstrates what

Kennedy means by “loyalty trap” and seems to compromise his earlier desire to dismantle the idea of race by homogenizing the fold outside of which he once again sees himself. The role that the money plays in assuaging his guilt for his artistic creation, or the lack thereof, is important to his relationship to his work and its inability to help him transcend the idea of racial authenticity.

The end of the novel is phantasmagoric since it features Monk walking to the podium seeing apparitions of his past to receive the National Book Award for My

Pafology. The dreamlike sequence during Monk’s walk towards the stage demonstrates the failings of his cruel optimism through the conflation of Monk, Stagg, and Van Go.

Monk thinks, “Then there was a small boy, perhaps me as boy, and he held up a mirror so that I could see my face and it was the face of Stagg Leigh. ‘Now you’re free of illusion,’

Stagg said. ‘How does it feel to be free of one’s illusions” (264)? By the end of the novel, it becomes clear for the reader that Monk has not been able to fully exorcise these ghostly, though public, sentiments of racial authenticity; and furthermore, seems to be gesturing towards insanity as the only possible outcome of his inability to continue to juggle these expectations and his dissent against them. Everett ends the novel with Monk

39 writing, “I looked at the mirror, still held by the boy. He held it by his thigh and I could only imagine the image the glass held. I chose one of the TV cameras and stared into it. I said, ‘Egads, I’m on television’” (265). These last words, illustrates Monk’s split with the black man that everyone expects him to be. On the one hand, his use of “egads” evokes an earlier moment in the novel where Monk states, “on a couple of occasions, on a basketball court when upon missing a shot I muttered Egads” (2), and on the other hand the emphasis of him being on television echoes the end of My Pafology when Van Go yells “Look at me. I on TV” (131). The syntactical difference between the two sentences reiterates the difference between the two speakers and at the same time the conflation of

Stagg, Monk, and Van Go in this moment.

Specifically, cruel optimism for Monk is that the more he makes himself invisible through cloaking his true intentions with his novel and its author he recognizes the legibility of his performance by society. By evoking Ellison both specifically as well as through similarities in the plot and characterization in Erasure, Everett endorses and simultaneously questions the potentiality of invisibility for people of color as a way of resisting and coping with society’s investment in stereotypes.

The presence of this type of cruel optimism in satire ostensibly suggests the fruitlessness of humorous engagements that question societal norms around the construction of race; however, the deployment of the trope of the Sambo as a way to discern contemporary investments in racial authenticity demonstrates a historicity of racial performance that draws parallels to the minstrel stage. Insofar, as texts like

Everett’s and Chappelle’s pixie sketch demonstrate the problems with the anachronistic

40 reproduction of this minstrel figure, they also make explicit the internalization of historical narratives of blackness and the anxiety that they produce for blacks. As the text becomes less of a parody and more of a reflection of the pressure to perform blackness properly, the novel, as well as others like it, suggest that if there is a crisis around blackness, and specifically black masculinity, during the turn of the millennium, then that crisis comes in the form of a robbed individuality for people of color.

2. “Menage a Trois Noir”: Satirizing Black Men’s Sexuality

in Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle

In 1996, almost thirty years after Eldridge Cleaver published his autobiographical manifesto Soul on Ice, Paul Beatty responded to Cleaver’s ideas on black men’s sexuality with the satirical novel The White Boy Shuffle. In the wake of Malcolm X’s assassination,

Cleaver uses Soul on Ice to assert himself as the next great race man. This assertion inadvertently articulates a position on sexuality that promotes the performance of sadism as a means of resistance during the Black Power Movement. Conversely, The White Boy

Shuffle is a Bildungsroman about Gunnar Kaufman, a black man, who does not want to be thrusted into the position of a great race man, and demonstrates the generative possibilities of masochism in the Post-Civil Rights Era. The intertextual dialog between

Cleaver and Beatty occurs around each writer’s reworking of the Buck figure, a historical caricature of the idea of black men as lecherous. In this chapter, I do a symptomatic reading of sadomasochism in Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle to index late 20th century changes in the conception of black masculinity. His refiguration of the black buck stereotype in satire is the fulcrum of my discussion.

Black Power Movement agitators of the late 60s and early 70s, many of whose leaders believed “their agendas could not be realized fully without reassessing the sexual ideologies that reinforced the racial subordination of African Americans historically,”

42 used sexuality as a prominent means of resisting racist white hegemony (Murray 67).

While historically black men’s allegedly “insatiable sexual appetite” signified a lack of humanity and intelligence, some nationalists at the mid-twentieth century adopted that depiction, like they did other negative stereotypes, so that they could empty out its negative denotations. The Black Buck figure was reshaped into an emblem of superior physicality and sexual prowess. Eldridge Cleaver exemplifies the terms by which black men’s sexuality attempted to be rebellious during this era. When Cleaver wrote his autobiographical manifesto in 1968, Soul on Ice, he was already being touted as the reincarnation of Malcolm X and progenitor of “Our living manhood8.” At the heart of

Soul on Ice, Cleaver muses about how black men have been feminized and how a reclamation of black masculinity is going to counteract systems of domination that constantly marginalize people of color. Cleaver embraces the trope of the buck in order to acknowledge the power in dominant culture’s discourse around black men’s sexuality. To overturn the prevailing myths, Cleaver casts himself as the exemplary black “super stud” with the mandate to wield the legendary black phallus for sadistic ends.

THE HISTORY OF THE BUCK FIGURE

Historically, the myth of the insatiable sexual appetite of black males was created in the post-bellum era when the stereotype of the black beast dominated America’s imagination and helped white terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan become a popular fixture in towns and cities throughout the country. Southerners first defined the

8 See Ossie Davis’s moving eulogy of Malcolm X on February 27, 1965. Among other places, the statement is also central to Rolland Murray’s monograph Our Living Manhood and featured as the ending voice over in Spike Lee’s Get on the Bus. 43 black buck offensively during the postbellum era when segregation and Jim Crow laws were consolidated. The ideology that without the constant policing that the institution of slavery provided whites could not make citizens of black men in a way that would dissuade their natural inclinations towards violence and sexual aggression proved effective at the end of the Reconstruction period. Institutions of power that serviced white men’s interests insisted that without their proper supervision black men would attack white women and threaten whiteness as a whole, a belief that has proved useful in the dissemination of racist ideology. During slavery, slave masters denied black men’s sexuality any positive social significance other than to exploit it as a means of increasing their property. Almost forty years after the end of reconstruction, the success of D.W.

Griffith’s 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, would in part act out the continued national fascination and fear of black sexuality when one of the more iconic moments in the film featured a man in blackface threatening to rape a white woman.

Of this moment, Michael Kimmel suggests, “The new and powerful fear of the black rapist revealed more about southern white men’s fears of lost manhood than about any propensity on the part of black men” (71). With lynchings becoming a popular form of vigilante “justice,” this anxiety resulted in white men manipulating the law as,

“castration quickly became a part of the summary hanging prescribed for black males accused of sexual offenses” (Harris 5). As scholars Trudier Harris, Koritha Mitchell, and others have asserted in their articulations of the staged ritualistic violence of lynchings, sexual offenses often times served as lies fabricated to induce fear in black communities by ripping black men from successful black businesses and families. However, as Sandy

44 Alexandre cogently traces this property dispossession and lynching back to Ida B. Wells when she states that “while conflict over property—construed materially as land, as house, or as store—often underlay the ritual lynching of blacks, it was the lynchers’ claims to white southern womanhood that repeatedly served as lynching’s ritualistic pretext” (4). I would extend Alexandre’s analysis a step further to include that the lynchers’ claim included black men’s sexuality.

Due to the peculiar institution of American slavery, the proximity of African

American sexuality to power has always been a complicated one. In The History of

Sexuality: An Introduction, Michel Foucault suggests that when addressing the role and importance of sexuality “the objective is to analyze a certain form of knowledge regarding sex, not in terms of repression or law, but in terms of power” (92). For

Foucault, power is defined by who has control over the status of illicit and licit sexuality.

In other words, who is able to sanction sexuality and what are the byproducts and politics at play in sanctioning it. Outlining the origins of this complicated history, Patricia Hill

Collins in her book Black Sexual Politics explains the way that black bodies were reduced to laboring parts. For black men, this meant that their sexuality was made illicit through the ways that they were deemed bestial, or as Collins suggests, some hybrid between man and animal that lacked the elevated thought to be considered wholly human.

As part of their assumed closeness to animals, the mythos around black men’s sexuality dictated that they were innately violent and hypersexual in ways that their slave masters ostensibly needed to constantly police. She states that, “Taming the beast in order to produce the buck involved domesticating Black Men’s predilection for violence, placing

45 their brute strength in service to productive manual labor, and directing their natural albeit deviant sexuality toward appropriate female partners. In this fashion, White elites reduced Black men to their bodies, and identified their muscles and their penises as their most important sites” (56-57).

CLEAVER EMBRACING THE MYTHOS OF THE BLACK BUCK

Cleaver seizes on the historical fantasy about the black phallus to ground his radical program for black men to try to challenge the prevailing feelings of powerlessness.

Originally articulated as a sign of their subhuman status, the historical and contemporary preoccupation with black men’s penises is the product of purposeful attempts to make a spectacle of black men’s anatomy something to which black men’s subjectivity and claims of power can be reduced. The historical staging of blackness has confined black sexuality to the pornographic and bound black men’s subjectivity to the physical. This preoccupation with the pornographic in many of the same ways echoes Audre Lorde’s problem with the prevailing definition of the erotic where she argues that “In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives” (53). For Lorde, the conflation of eroticism and pornography by patriarchal societies creates a sight of erasure around a source of energy and a sense of completion that robs women of their full potential.

Black men’s sexuality initially was defined in terms similar to Lorde’s articulation of the erotic and the ways that it has been coopted and perverted by hetero-patriarchal

46 societies. Where Lorde understands the rejection of the erotic as a misguided hollow form of strength because it submits to the tenets of patriarchal ideology, black men such as

Cleaver embraced a similar misnaming of the erotic as a way of gaining their own superficial form of strength. When Cleaver says “I felt a hot throbbing in my crotch.

Instinctively and with a taste of panic, I reached down, almost afraid that my rod would be missing, but it was there and it as erect and I squeezed it and it was strong and resilient and firm. When I gave it that squeeze, a wave of strength surged through my body. I felt powerful, and I knew that I would make it if I never betrayed the law of my rod” (166), he is playing within the political force field of white power’s corporeal dissemination of the discourses of race, sex, and the black male. Both Cleaver and his political opponents understand that some form of race epistemology is being consolidated with (and in) the black body, more specifically the phallus.

African American satirists during the turn of the millennium invert stereotypical paradigms to push past normative gender formations as they complicate black sexuality in their work. On the surface, many of these satirical narratives have sex scenes that seem like nothing more than the wet dreams of a smart aleck whose lack of social skills and status as an outsider situates him as the less experienced but never less equipped partner.

These moments generally never demonstrate the tension between the physical manifestation of love and the emotional aspect of it, for the authors of the characters in these narratives rarely depict these characters as in love. Moreover, these narratives depict unwilling male partners, who receive fellatio or are straddled by more dominant women. Such is the case in Percival Everett’s novel I am Sidney Poitier when the

47 protagonist is repeatedly the submissive partner during sexual encounters in the satire.

Throughout contemporary African American satire, a mainstay has been the inversion of gender roles during moments of sexual intimacy. The sex play positions men in the novels as passive, even unwilling, partners engaged in their heterosexual sex with

“aggressive” female partners. Written almost thirty years after Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul

On Ice, Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle offers complicated images of black men’s sexuality in ways that counter the machismo put forth in Cleaver’s autobiography.

Central to Beatty’s complication of Cleaver’s understanding of black masculinity is the subversion of the buck figure.

SADOMASOCHIST EPISTEMOLOGY

Instead of masking a queer pain, as Huey Newton asserts that Cleaver did with his hyper-masculine persona, African American satirists, specifically Paul Beatty, seek to explore pain as a possible site of eroticism and sexuality. Due to the historical ideology of black sexuality as always already being pathologized, few scholars have broached the subject of sadism and masochism as possible avenues to understand black sexual and gender presentations, especially as it pertains to black men’s sexuality. Sadomasochism became a central part of the conversations in the late ‘80s with lesbianism and feminism.

Audre Lorde states in an interview with Susan Leigh Star that “Sadomasochism is an institionalized celebration of dominant/subordinate relationships. And, it prepares us either to accept subordination or to enforce dominance. Even in play, to affirm that the exertion of power over powerlessness is erotic, is empowering, is to set the emotional and social stage for the continuation of that relationship, politically, socially, and

48 economically” (A Burst of Light 14). Further on, she argues: “Sadomasochism feeds the belief that domination is inevitable and legitimately enjoyable” (A Burst of Light 14). “I do not believe that sexuality is separate from living, As a minority woman, I know dominance and subordination are not bedroom issues. In the same way that rape is not about sex, s/m is not about sex but about how we use power. If it were only about personal sexual exchange or private taste, why would it be presented as a political issue”

(A Burst of Light 17)? Originally Lorde’s commentary on sadomasochism was published in the book Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis in 1982 and comes to represent the majority of the criticism in that volume. Lorde, here, acknowledges the politics of sexuality and how sadomasochism both takes attention from more pressing issues as it gives the media during the late 80s a way to fetishize this queer lesbian space as it recreates and eroticizes female subjugation. However, outside of Lorde’s configuration is a thorough questioning of what this subjugation or passivity would do for those in power.

While Lorde acknowledges that gay men partake in this economy as a way to sustain the continuation of a white supremacist acceptance of power as it relates to domination and submission (she explicitly states that she doesn’t think that the white gay movement is at odds with racism or white patriarchy in its attempts to gain equality and visibility), she did not consider the possibilities of queer people of color in this framework as she implies, on some level, that sadomasochism is racialized as a predominantly white erotic phenomenon. In addition, Lorde’s comments render masochism as a space of subjugation and the welcomed recipient to sexual violence as

49 she precludes the potentiality of empowerment and pleasure. In doing so, Lorde fails to realize the control potential of the masochist in this setting.

However, if we take a moment to consider the way scholars have written about

Eldridge Cleaver’s writings about sexuality and his obsession with queer bodies, specifically that of James Baldwin, then we can construct a narrative that presupposes, at the very least, that a type of metaphorical sadomasochism has always been present and demonstrates both the problems and possibilities of this framework. In his Appropriating

Blackness E. Patrick Johnson writes about Cleaver’s obsession with gay men and

Cleaver’s suggestion that the presence of gay black men is symptomatic of the acceptance of a white supremacy. Johnson turns all of his attention to the “Notes on a

Native Son” section in Souls on Ice where Cleaver attacks James Baldwin. Johnson notes the very sexual nature of Cleaver’s prose: “I…lusted for anything that Baldwin had written. It would have been a gas for me to sit on a pillow beneath the womb of

Baldwin’s typewriter and catch each newborn page as it entered this world of ours. I was delighted that Baldwin, with those great big eyes of his, which one thought to be fixedly focused on the macrocosm, could also pierce the microcosm ” (97). Johnson writes of this scene and Cleaver’s subsequent attack of Baldwin’s work as a longing for the queer

Other and a disavowal of “the black fag within” (51). My understanding of Cleaver’s sadism as emblematic of the Black Power Movement’s approach to sexuality and resistance more broadly is indebted to Johnson’s claim of longing and self-rejection because this produces a performative anger that Cleaver engages in textually with James

Baldwin.

50 Although the bulk of Cleaver’s homophobic attacks are ostensibly not geared towards Baldwin, Baldwin serves as a clear starting point for Cleaver’s anger and aggression. Cleaver writes, “The case of James Baldwin aside for a moment, it seems that many Negro homosexuals, acquiescing in this racial death-wish, are outraged and frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by a white man. The cross they have to bear is that, already bending over and touching their toes for the white man” (102). Cleaver continues his diatribe on gay black men when he states, “The white man has deprived him of his masculinity, castrated him in the center of his burning skull, and when he submits to this change and takes the white man for his lover as well as Big

Daddy, he focuses on ‘whiteness’ all the love in his pent up soul and turns the razor edge of hatred against ‘blackness’” (103). While Cleaver’s homophobic rants seemingly serve as asides in his conversation about Baldwin, Cleaver himself states that Baldwin is the apotheosis of the “racial death wish” that black queerness represents. Cleaver’s sadism demonstrates his anger in what he locates as Baldwin’s cultural self-hatred, as well as in the performance of figuratively binding and gagging Baldwin—who never speaks publicly about Cleaver’s criticism.

Part of Cleaver and Baldwin’s pseudo-sadomasochism with Cleaver as dominate and Baldwin as the passive, silent submissive is illuminated in Huey Newton’s account of a dinner party that both he and Cleaver attended. “When we arrived” Newton writes,

“Cleaver and Baldwin walked into each other, and the giant, six-foot-three-inch Cleaver bent down and engaged in a long, passionate French kiss with the tiny (barely five feet)

Baldwin” (34). Interestingly, Newton’s account seems to reproduce the figurative

51 sadomasochistic exchange in the way that he speaks to the size of Cleaver and Baldwin.

Both Newton and E. Patrick Johnson come to the conclusion that this scene speaks to

Cleaver’s own latent homosexuality and helps to contextualize the vitriolic attack on

Baldwin’s work as a form of self-hatred. I am interested in how this scene provides context for understanding Cleaver as a sadist in the relationship and how this moment speaks to both the relationship of the two men as well as the performed abuse that gives

Cleaver pleasure in “Notes on a Native Son.”

In addition to Cleaver’s discursive relationship to Baldwin, I also want to make a clear distinction between Cleaver’s sexual violence and his performed sadism in Souls on

Ice. Much has been written about the abhorrent misogyny in Cleaver’s text, and all of these critical conversations rightly treat Cleaver’s admission and conception of rape as the apex of their discussions. After explaining that he practiced on black girls in “the black ghetto, where dark and vicious deeds appear not as aberrations or deviations from the norm,” in order to “consciously, deliberately, willfully, methodically” rape white women after he perfected his craft, Cleaver writes: “Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man’s law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women—and this point, I believe, was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge” (14). Here, I want to focus not on Cleaver’s black phallogocentrism, the creation of a corrosive logic that uses black and white women as currency in order to attack white masculinity, I want to focus on the

“delight,” “satisfaction,” and, I would argue, pleasure in narrating the events and

52 justifying rape as a sign of his discursive sadism. Noting the pleasure that Cleaver derives during this exchange scholar Robert Reid-Pharr states, “Both white and black women act as pawns in an erotic conversation between Cleaver and his white male counterparts”

(107). Cleaver, here, functions as a sadist for the pleasure he derives in fulfilling the modus operandi whiteness has already contractually provided him. In other words, by evoking the image of the black buck, as rapist, Cleaver does not subvert whiteness, and rape, in this paradigm, definitely is not an “insurrectionary tool” in this theater of resistance. Instead, Cleaver’s raping of white women functions as the fulfillment of this trope and Cleaver’s own satisfaction of its fulfillment marks performative violence that he enacts upon whiteness.

Indeed, contemporary conversations on the topic of black sexuality locate queer sexuality as the primary deviant/non-normative sexuality to be aware of in African

American literature, and there is a surplus of queer writers and tropes taken up in African

American literature. However, given the historical understanding of black sexuality as an already troubled construct, it is conceivable that a sadomasochist epistemology would be necessary to interrogate contemporary constructions of black sexuality, with its legacy of pleasure and pain. Sadomasochism helps to contextualize both previous constructions of black men’s sexuality and subjectivity as well as contemporary attempts to refute those accepted forms of black masculinity. If, as Nick Mansfield suggests, “Masochism has been a peculiarly modern experiment in the redefinition of power,” then this epistemology is geared towards understanding the flow of power and the type of power that it gives the sexual subject.

53 The temporality of this epistemology is a utopian enterprise merging past, present, and future to produce a new black masculine self, one divorced from pain and punishment as a means of self-definition. In Biman Basu’s formulation, which I adopt for understanding the role of sadomasochism in the presentation and understanding of black masculinity, he suggests that the performance of sadomasochism creates a temporal nexus of past, present, and future in order to produce an ideal new self. Basu writes,

“This new body is assembled by using certain practices of embodiment and modes of affective relations from the past, but these practices and modes are historically refracted to produce an entirely new assemblage in the present and endowed with an inventiveness that is projected into the future” (7). According to Basu, the “embodiment and modes of affective relations from the past” serves as a way to reiterate Deleuze’s claim that the pleasure-pain exchange between the sadist and the masochist is a staged performance of the Oedipal Complex. In this performance, pain represents the father in the internal conflict that the masochist has to endure at the hands of the sadist. Once the pain stops so too does the father’s reign over the masochist’s subjectivity. Deleuze suggests a similar outcome when he writes, “The masochist thus liberates himself in preparation for a rebirth in which the father will have no part” (66).

Within a sadomasochist epistemology is the idea that black masculinity, especially that personified by Eldridge Cleaver and other hyper masculine figures throughout the twentieth century, is performed sadistically. However, the decision to have the “law of the rod” serve only sadistic purposes in the fight against racial oppression situates white hegemony as the masochist, and as Victor Smirnoff suggests in the essay “The

54 Masochistic Contract” “the masochist knows that his position is simply the result of his own power: the power of endowing the executioner with the obligation of playing the role of a master, when indeed he is only a slave, a creation of the masochist’s desire”

(69). In this formulation, the masochist already predetermines the potential for violence and resistance with the black masculine sadist.

Mark Anthony Neal speaks to the need for different facets of black masculinity to address and redefine their approach and understanding of sexuality when he writes,

“What is really at stake is the inability of men, in this case black men, to give in to the impulses of the erotic (the ability of us to be sensuously healed) and cede the sense of control that comes from the ‘sexual conquering’ (both real and imagined)” (47).

Although Neal doesn’t explicitly describe his critique of black men’s sexuality in terms of sadism and masochism, his push towards alternative models of sexuality suggests that black men are operating with a dangerously antiquated model of what a healthy sexuality looks like. On the surface of this paradigm, there seems to be an assumption that masochism is the desired place within this ontology. However, the problem arises not with the role that black men’s sexuality and subjectivity plays in imagining itself but that it is being operated alongside whites as a form of resistance. By trying to take away white men’s ability to have access to both black men and women’s bodies through rape and scenes of torture, black men like Cleaver assumed a one-to-one ratio that meant the reclamation of the body and the dissemination of violence equated with power. However, the depths of racism and inequality are systemic and the body serves as only one facet of control.

55 The sadomasochist epistemology becomes generative not just as a way of articulating the problems of homosociality in the construction of black masculinities but also in demonstrating how it can resist these earlier configurations once black masculinities embrace their alterity and begin to engage itself on its own terms, and repositions the sadistic desire to a masochistic one. Yes, historically there have been issues with the assumed feminization of black masculinity and the way it negates claims of equality. Unfortunately, this negation and the anxiety it produced around figurative castration kept notions like masochism out of the purview of black men’s sexuality. For instance, in Exorcising Blackness, Trudier Harris creates an entire literary history around the “Fear of Castration” because of the feminization/infantilization of black men due to rituals like lynching and their ability to police and confine black men. Nevertheless, masochism transgresses the validity of prevailing notions of appropriate black men’s sexuality and replaces these notions with images of black men that do not place their anatomy and sexuality on the front line against systems of domination. Instead these masochistic imaginings of black men’s sexuality are conversant with earlier forms of black men’s sexuality and engage them not as a means to reproduce the power dynamic set up by white heteropatriarchy but as a means to critique itself. In other words, while the black nationalism of the late 60s and early 70s was contractually bound to play the role that the white masochist, or as Cleaver calls him Omnipotent Administrator, created for him, black satirists of the turn of the century were invested in setting up a contract with themselves as a way to shift the homosociality from white men and black men to black men and black men. Within literature, and specifically African American satire at

56 the turn of the millennium, masochism serves as a way to assert, “a means of achieving control through a reversal of pain and pleasure, functions in literature as a useful indicator of power relations in texts of culture” (Taylor 60). The power play inherent in the theatrics of the masochistic moment in Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle illuminates the possibilities of this epistemology.

In The White Boy Shuffle, the notion of masochism could be lost in the figurative moves that the satirical novel makes. Beatty’s novel uses satire to comment on the longstanding idea that black America needs a messianic leader in order to obtain any progress. In the form of the unassuming protagonist Gunnar Kaufman, the coming of age narrative set in California in the 90s undermines the need for the charismatic black leader of past movements. Throughout the narrative, Gunnar is constantly trying to figure out the predetermined black masculine position he is supposed to assume. Gunnar’s final resolve of entering into a massive suicide pact with Blacks questions the legitimacy of pleasure and pain. In scenes where the threat of violence is so vivid in its depiction and so regular in its frequency such as when Gunnar cuts off a finger as “a small sacrifice and show of appreciation to [his recently deceased friend]” the novel’s exploration of pain questions the usefulness of such acts (222). While the pain is prevalent, at times gratuitous, and seemingly lacking affect in its description, Beatty seems aware of it as masochistic. Gunnar thinks of that night where he cut his finger as, “That night cemented my status as savior of the blacks. The distraught minions interpreted my masochistic act as sincerity, the media as lunacy” (223). Furthermore, the way that Beatty frames pain in the novel emphasizes the corporeal element of being that helps frame later

57 transformations.

An early rape scene that colors later moments of sexuality and desire in the novel further complicates the use of masochism as a generative space. In the section where

Gunnar poetically defines the colors that his multicultural school taught him to be color- blind to, he writes:

Black was a suffocating bully that tied my mind behind my back and

shoved me into a walk-in closet. Black was my father on a weekend

custody drunken binge, pushing me around as if I were a twelve-year-old,

seventy-five-pound bell clapper clanging hard against the door, the wall,

the shoe tree. Black is a repressed memory of a sandpapery hand rubbing

abrasive circles into the small of my back, my face rising and falling in

time with a hairy heaving chest. Black is the sound of metal hangers

sliding away in fear, my shirt halfway off, hula-hooping around my neck.

(36)

The scene demonstrates the poetic appeal that initially brings Gunnar recognition amongst his peers and is largely responsible for his ascending into his role as race man, or as L.H. Stallings writes, “anti-race man.” Gunnar’s status as anti-race man is, as

Stallings writes, felt throughout the course of the novel, but is heightened in this moment in his ability to narrate his rape by his father. By claiming that his father raped him,

Gunnar does two things, he takes on the notion that he is less masculine because of his molestation and he gains some agency in the way he narrates in the traumatic event.

Although Gunnar’s rape further situates him as an anti-race man in the way it installs a

58 narrative of sexual trauma where there should only be one of racial strife. Furthermore, he problematizes a patrilineal line that “like an autogamous self-pollinating men’s club” aligns itself with hegemonic whiteness (23). As Stallings asserts, “In divulging the

Kaufman lineage, Gunnar presents a tradition of black masculinity that uses cultural imagination as a form of negotiation between sites of agency. Each Kaufman male has made attempts to be a part of the United States by accessing specific masculinities validated by white supremacy through cultural forms” (104).

However, where the novel begins with Gunnar tracing his family tree for his classmates and speaks about his forefathers and their acceptance and endorsement of racist ideologies as a means of gaining a marginalized type agency, for his father the rape demonstrates neither of these traits. It is important that this rape scene happens in the closet for the figurative way that it could possibly serve as an origin for a pathological homosexuality that is defined through abuse. The terms of homosociality are metaphorically staged through the abuse he experiences with his father. In other words, where the patrilineal Kaufman line comes to represent the “anti-race man” so too does this story of domination in terms of the power play. Therefore the father’s representation as opposite to a figure like Cleaver and the sadistic sexuality that he represents (it is also important to note here that Gunnar’s father and Eldridge Cleaver are contemporaries), this rape forms the locus of these two masculine constructs in the way Gunnar’s father uses his sexuality. As bell hooks asserts “Keeping males and females from telling the truth about what happens to them in families is one way patriarchal culture is maintained”

(hooks—the will to change 24). Gunnar’s ability to publicly tell the truth about his father

59 serves as a move that rejects black patriarchy. Thus, while this rape reaffirms both

Gunnar and his father’s position as “anti-race men,” it then also calls into question the way that rape and sexuality serve as affirming qualities for “real race men.”

Furthermore, the decision to aesthetically render this rape scene impressionistically as a part of a poem about colors works narratively around the agency of naming and description. After asking his mother what she thinks poems are she replies, “It’s corny, but I think poems are echoes of the voices in your head and from your past. Your sisters, your father, your ancestors talking to you and through you. Some of it is primal, some of it is hallucinatory bullshit” (79). Therefore, similar to Kathryn Stockton’s articulation of the potential of Morrison’s beautiful language around moments of hardship and tragedy in Bottom in Sula and how it comes to represent a reclamation of the bottom as a queer landscape that produces more than just tragedy, Beatty also reclaims this horrific rape scene. Gunnar’s ability to recall his rape with such beautiful language does not suggest that he takes some type of masochistic pleasure in lessening or making less real his molestation, but serves as a way to claim some agency around narrrativizing the incident.

Although this scene ostensibly negates the masochistic reading that I want to apply to the overall depiction of black masculinities that I see Beatty producing by the end of the novel, by providing an early rape scene that would question issues of desire, control, and safety he is able to engage the idea of masochism and its removal of the father figure in a less metaphoric, more realistic, way. Furthermore, it is important that the rape scene happens in the color “black.” Before the rape scene, Gunnar defines black as a thing, a race, an object unfulfilled. He begins this section by stating, “Black was an unwanted dog

60 abandoned in the forest who finds its way home by fording flooded rivers and hitchhiking in the beds of pickup trucks and arrives at its destination only to be taken for a car ride to the desert. Black was hating fried chicken even before I knew I was supposed to like it.

Black was being a nigger who didn’t know any other niggers” (35). Gunnar’s decision to narrate his rape alongside a depiction of blackness as an unfulfilled subjectivity, calls into question the productivity of earlier movements and their desire to define blackness as powerful and beautiful.

While Gunnar’s description of the rape, and the rape itself, are not signposts of his claims toward masochism, it does set up the conversation about pain and pleasure. As previously stated, sadomasochism is often times defined through the Oedipal complex and the son’s desire to create a future and present self that his father has not defined and created for him. It is through this rupture that we see the generative possibilities of the epistemology. Beatty's presentation of Gunnar’s sexuality and his desire to create a new self that is independent of the father complicates older modes of black masculinity that situated sexuality within movements of resistance. Part of Gunnar’s transformation into blackness is his sexual encounter with Betty and Veronica, two girls in his neighborhood.

The scene begins with the threat of violence as Betty and Veronica ask Gunnar if he wants to play “hide-and-go-get-it” as they punch at his fence post with brass knuckles and give him the option of either playing or giving him “bruise tattoos” (80). Although this threat of violence serves as the impetus for Gunnar’s inclusion in the game, the moment serves as part of the contractual agreement between Gunnar and these girls.

Traditionally, the contract that sadists and masochists enter into is free of the threat

61 of violence and outlines the sexual activity and thus the power dynamic of the parties involved. Therefore, the threat of “bruise tattoos” suggests that there is the presence of violence that seemingly negates the presence of sadomasochism. However, the verbal back and forth suggests that the threat of violence, and Gunnar’s reluctance, is more of a performance than an actuality. Betty begins by asking, “I know you want to play hide- and-go-get-it with us” (80; emphasis added). To which Gunnar responds, “But I’m the only boy. That’s not fair, two against one” (80). Gunnar’s response inverts the usual sexual politics that are associated with these types of adolescent “games,” and more specifically ascribed to assumed sexual prowess of black men. While Gunnar’s protestation marks his placement outside “the mythos of black male sexual power and potency” (Stallings 109), it serves as a verbal signifier of this mythos and evokes this figure in order to enter a contract with “him.” Therefore, the conversation and the threat of violence that follows his claim of “unfairness” is nothing more than a stylized agreement to the terms implicitly understood. In other words, Gunnar’s verbal play and subversion of this mythos demonstrates his awareness in choosing passivity as a generative space. In addition, Gunnar is sitting on his front porch and could have gone easily inside in order to evade Betty and Veronica but he chooses to go along with the game. Gunnar’s awareness of his active role in the contract is demonstrated once he finds his hiding place. After getting himself wet in an attempt to “change his scent,” he strips down and puts his clothes in a dryer in the Laundromat where he hides sitting “on top of the washing machine playing with [his] dick” (81). Gunnar quickly gives the detail and makes it seem like he is playing with himself in order to pass the time; however his

62 decision to “play with [his] dick” and hide in a vacant laundry room that can be locked from the inside knowing that Betty and Veronica are looking for him in order to have sex suggests that he is a willing participant in the sex act that is about to happen, and in fact is prepping himself for it. However, in order to set up the terms of this sadomasochistic contract and its ability to undo the representation of black men’s sexuality, Beatty must depict Betty and Veronica as the dominants. Where this would normally support the stereotype of the jezebel, as lecherous black women, Beatty’s skillful use of absurdity and exaggeration allows for these two characters to operate outside this paradigm.

Although Gunnar seemingly aligns himself with the coolness associated with the prison industrial complex and the trope of the badman by speeding, “down the street like an escaped convict, trying not to panic and running through the list of hackneyed movie tricks for outwitting the search party” he actually aligns himself with the white damsel in distress from D.W. Griffith’s Birth of Nation. Although Gunnar evokes the image of the white damsel in distress, his masculinity is never negated or questioned during this scene.

This is due to the notion that Gunnar’s participation in the sex act is supposed to make a man out of him. Indeed, Gunnar losing his virginity to Betty and Veronica serves as a precursor to the systematic way that Scoby, Gunnar’s best friend, tries to make him cool with subheadings in the chapter chronicling these moves: “The Haircut,” “The Shoes,” and “The Ball.” Thus, Gunnar’s participation in this sexual encounter and the sadomasochistic attempt to create a new self, signals an early move in racializing Gunnar and making him socially fit for his environment. Betty exemplifies this move to

63 “racialized” Gunnar by evoking the lore of the flying Africans9 when she states at the end of the sex act, “Give your frigid spirit wings and just imagine if niggers could fly” (83).

With the contract set and Gunnar being a willing participant with the performed threat of rape, Betty and Veronica are cast as sexually deviant black buck figures.

In this formulation of the sadomasochist contract, the desire to usurp dominant forms of masculinity dictates a particular type of sadism through religious discourses.

Deleuze asserts in his understanding of masochism and its potential to undermine systems of domination that, “In modern thought irony and humor take on a new form: they are now directed at a subversion of the law. This leads us back to Sade and Masoch, who represent the two main attempts at subversion, at turning the law upside down” (86).

While Gunnar’s masochism is able to turn the law upside down through his pacification and reconfiguration of black masculinity, Betty and Veronica are able to subvert the law through the way they ask readers to question modes of domination present in black masculinity. Betty and Veronica expand their representation of domination during the sex act to also include the more proper realm of religion, as a space where rampant sexuality and power get aligned with masculinity and resistance.

After Gunnar recalls that “Veronica cradled my limp body in her arms and placed me gently on the floor” with his underwear sliding down to his ankles shackling him

“into complete submission,” Betty and Veronica use religion to further masculinize themselves for their sadistic acts:

Veronica stretched my limp dick with one hand, plucked it like a bass

9 The folklore around the Flying Africans comes from the tradition of the Igbo and their ability to take flight. Toni Morrison also takes up this concept in Song of Solomon. 64 string, and the girls broke into a dueling chorus of gospel double-entendre.

Veronica opened with “Go down, Moses, waaaay down to Egypt’s land,’

forcing my face between her legs. Betty side-stepped and countered in an

Easter Sunday vibrato of ‘Touch me, Lord Jesus, mmmmmmm, with thy

hand of mercy,” ramming my hand into her crotch. Veronica reeling from

Betty’s blows, pointed at my flaccid member and slid into a storefront

Pentecostal soprano: ‘Fix it, Lord Jesus, you fixed it for my mother, now

fix it for me.’ Betty reached into my mouth, grabbed my tongue and

placed its pointy tip on her knee, and started singing Mahalia Jackson’s

subliminal hit, ‘Move On Up a Little Higher.’ (82-83)

The subversive use of “Go Down, Moses10,” signifies a moment in the text where the historical and religious reverence of Negro Spirituals provides an authority for the girls who are to center themselves in the sex act. Beatty’s use of that specific Negro Spiritual also reaffirms the power dynamic that is at play. As Albert Raboteau asserts, “Spirituals were not only sung, but they engaged the whole body in hand-clapping, foot-stamping, head-shaking excitement…As they circled around in a ring, the slaves moved into states of religious trance that left them renewed in spirit” (47-48). If Veronica is figuratively situating Gunnar to be Moses in this typological revision and her vagina as Egypt’s land, it situates a particular type of power in her corporeal femaleness and another type of

10 “Go Down, Moses” is a Negro Spiritual that narrates the moment that Moses speaks to God as a nearby bush burns but is left undestroyed. Moses receives at this time instructions to free the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery. The song itself has a slow tempo and a wailing like sentiment to it. James Weldon Johnson writes of this song, “there is not a nobler theme in the whole musical literature of the world.” 65 power through her use of the religious discourse. In other words, Veronica’s use of “Go

Down, Moses” on the one hand situates her vagina as Egypt’s Land, the place that signifies enslavement and bondage, and on the other hand marks her as a deity because it is from the perspective of God that the song is being sung. The transposition of

Veronica’s vagina to Egypt’s Land creates the image of bondage, and assumes that

Moses, now Gunnar, then falls outside of that bondage. However, her ability to speak from the position of God binds Gunnar and mandates by “forcing” his head down that he perform this act, cunnilingus. The orality of the next line of the song “Tell ole Pharaoh,

To let my people go” is then palimpsestically mapped on to the image of Gunnar who presumably fulfills this request thereby having his performed cunnilingus be aligned with freedom. In Gunnar’s attempt to create a new self outside the boundaries that his patrilineal line have created and that the abuse at the hands of his father have further inscribed, his performance of cunnilingus as freedom is revolutionary in the way that he comes to understand desire through the fulfillment of others.

Similarly, Betty’s response “Touch me, Lord Jesus, mmmmmmm, with thy hand of mercy,” both emphasizes and privileges her pleasure and femaleness as well as mandates that Gunnar perform another action. Instead of using the image of Moses, Betty goes one step farther in the biblical reenactment and situates Gunnar as Jesus. Jesus’s position in the New Testament as the sacrificial lamb that is the savior of humanity functions well as a signpost of Gunnar’s status as masochist11. Like the violent language of “forcing” and

11 Jesus serves as a great biblical example of masochism through the contract that he enters with God around the role of his death, as well as being the extreme embodiment of pacifism. 66 “ramming” Gunnar also states, “Feeling left out, Veronica snatched me by the Afro, smothered my lips with kiss, and forced her long tongue down my throat until it tickled my larynx. Betty extracted her spongy plumber’s helper from my ear” (83). The beginning of the sex act understands Betty and Veronica as more feminized through their use of religious rhetoric evoking the centrality of black women in the black church.

Furthermore, just as Robert Tobin suggests that masochism demonstrates “the real but arbitrary nature of power,” so too does Betty and Veronica’s use of religious rhetoric.

However, shortly after this moment Betty and Veronica come to fulfill their sadistic role in a more aggressive manner as they penetrate Gunnar’s body, specifically his head, with their tongues. In this moment, their sadism seems to become more aggressive.

Furthermore, the evocation of black women’s faith in using the religious rhetoric and recalling a figure like Mahalia Jackson12 on the bodies of these masculinized female figures subverts the submissiveness and selflessness of these women in these spaces. The power appropriated to black women during this moment is further acknowledged and broadened to be reflective of a larger group of black women and not just Betty and

Veronica when the sex act comes to an end because a black woman has come to get her clothes and says “If y’all in there fucking, you better save some for me. I’ll give a motherfucker a shot of life.”

This moment in the novel and the use of Negro Spirituals and religious rhetoric as tools to construct and subvert gender boundaries evokes the black buck through its parallel to the opening scene of Melvin Van Peebles’ 1971 film Sweet Sweetback’s

12 Mahalia Jackson, was considered the voice of the Civil Rights Movement. 67 Baadasssss Song. After the opening credits with Melvin Van Peebles’ running as Sweet

Sweetback and the dedication stating, “This film is dedicated to all the Brothers and

Sisters who had enough of the Man,” viewers see a young runaway Sweet Sweetback, played by Mario Van Peebles, taken into a brothel and nursed back to health. In the course of his working as a towel boy in the brothel, Sweet Sweetback has sex with one of the prostitutes. Similar to Beatty’s text, the prostitute undresses young Sweetback and situates herself as the aggressor in the sex act stating, “You ain’t at the photographers, you ain’t getting your picture taken…move!” as the negro spirituals “Wade in the Water” and “This little light of mine” play in the background. The use of these Negro Spirituals undermines the original intent of these songs and resituates them pornographically to describe the sexual gratification of Sweetback. However, a significant difference between the two scenes is that the black female prostitute is not singing the songs as Betty and

Veronica are, and thus, the agency appropriated to Betty and Veronica is not the same as the unnamed prostitute. In fact, the prostitute serves as more a vehicle for Sweetback’s manhood as he literally transforms from young Sweetback played by Mario Van Peebles to the contemporary Sweetback played by his father during the sex act. Nevertheless, just as young Gunnar does not convey affect during the sex act neither does young

Sweetback. This early moment in the film is important because at the end of this sex scene the sex worker says, “You got a sweet Sweetback” as a compliment and acknowledgment of Sweetback’s’ sexual prowess that comes to be his name and define his actions throughout much of the film. While there are clear similarities between

Gunnar and Sweetback during these two scenes, they have different meanings and

68 trajectories.

For Sweetback, this early moment, which should be read as statutory rape but is not due to the way that Sweetback embraces his sexual prowess and becomes hyper- sexualized, serves as the sole defining characteristic of his own notoriety in the community and what he brings to the “Movement.” Where Sweetback revels in his ability to make white women moan as his sadistic way to “stick it to the man,” Gunnar never situates his sexuality as part of his ill-conceived resistance towards systems of domination.

Similar to the importance of naming in Sweetback’s early sex scene, Betty and

Veronica’s final act of sadism is trying to find the appropriate name for a man losing his virginity. At the end of their sexual episode, Betty and Veronica begin to argue over what is the appropriate term for a boy losing his virginity as they toss around terms like

“Deboned” and “Bitch dipped.” Betty and Veronica’s attempt to set the terms of

Gunnar’s virginity evokes the terms in which women’s virginity is usually defined through patriarchal understanding of sexuality. Furthermore, the fact that the narrative never explicitly states that Gunnar penetrated Betty and Veronica with his penis, their decision to claim his lack of virginity suggests a re-articulation of virginity and satisfaction, one that privileges female desire and satisfaction over that of men’s.

Stallings accurately suggests of this moment that “Beatty makes it clear that white control over self-definition and sexuality has little power in the ‘hood. Fas; Betty and Vamp a

Nigger Veronica contribute to Gunnar’s masculinity, as opposed to emasculating him”

(109-110).

69 Gunnar’s narration of this sex scene not only privileges the masochistic potential of this exchange, but it also withholds from readers a verbal or physical signifier of his satisfaction and acceptance thus frees them to determine the proper affect towards the events that just transpired. By delaying his reactions during the sex act Gunnar situates the reader as passive recipient along with him. According to Deleuze, “The essence of masochistic humor lies in this, that the very law which forbids the satisfaction of a desire under threat of subsequent punishment is converted into one which demands the punishment first and then orders that the satisfaction of the desire should necessarily follow upon the punishment” (88-89). Gunnar’s narration allows this inversion to be a collective experience that the reader voyeuristically goes through with him. Throughout the sex scene, Gunnar coldly gives facts, vivid images of things that Betty and Veronica are doing to him, and his thoughtless submission to their different requests. It is not until the end of the sexual moment when Betty asks, “Why don’t you sing, Gunnar?” that the reader gets confirmation of Gunnar’s willing participation with a reflective “Oh Happy

Day” (83).

Gunnar’s simple “Oh Happy Day” signifies both his pleasure in his role as masochist and the girls role as sadist as well as the emergence of Gunner’s new self. It is important that the emergence of this new self happens just before Gunnar meets Psycho

Loco, the neighborhood’s hardest thug, and the character that is responsible for Gunnar’s ascension into Messianic leadership. Gunnar continued passivity during moments of intimacy, most notably by labeling himself “punked for life” when he awakens to find the finger of Yoshiko, his Japanese mail-ordered bride, in his anus. After introducing and

70 marrying Gunnar to Yoshiko, Psycho Loco warns “that in prison when two men fall in love, they have to be careful not to relax and give in to the passion, because just when you let yourself go, your lover slips his finger into your anus and your punked for life”

(169). Although Gunnar’s tightens his sphincter upon hearing this, Beatty uses this moment and the imagery of Yoshiko “worming her finger towards his prostate” as a way to juxtapose the stereotypically submissive nature and sexuality of Asian women with

Gunnar’s status as passive and his assumed sexual prowess.

Stallings writes of this moment, “Further, as Gunnar speaks to his wife Yoshiko’s wandering hand, it seems obvious that Beatty may be using his novel to suggest that black males confront and embrace alternative models of gender for their black bodies, lest they…continue to be manipulated and destroyed by the psychological impetus to claim a patriarchal legacy embedded within white supremacy” (1).

Beatty’s use of Gunnar’s sexuality produces one of the sincere ways that Gunnar could function as a leader for his readership. Gunnar’s embodiment of alternative sexualities displays the potential of shifting the paradigm from a violent sadistic presentation of sexuality where the terms are always in conversation with white masculinity to a masochistic presentation of sexuality where the subject is able to transform and deal with black masculinity and the (re) presentation of sexuality on its own terms and not in conversation with white men. Furthermore, Beatty’s engagement with the Buck in close spaces that do not dictate, at least explicitly, Gunnar’s politics helps to de-politicize this figure and black men’s sexuality more broadly within his role as a leader. Although Beatty’s satire is multivalent and provides commentary for a

71 number of different issues plaguing black America at the end of the twentieth century, the clarity and candidness around moments of sexuality felt through Gunnar’s lack of meta- commentary suggests that Beatty is sincere in the solution that he sees in Gunnar’s sexuality. Theoretically the idea of satirizing an already caricatured image may seem troublesome, but Beatty’s ability to call to question the inherent ties of black men to this figure through Betty and Veronica helps the reader to become aware of the buck’s historical significance and its contemporary manifestations.

3. Making Toms of Us All: The Politics of Shamelessness in Post-Civil Rights Era Satire

Shug snort, Well, she say, Uncle Tom wasn’t call Uncle for nothing (96).

—Alice Walker, The Color Purple 1982

Introduction

A brief moment in Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple speaks to the tensions and possibilities of the Uncle Tom figure in black America and what some of the implications may be in using him as an agent of change. In thinking through the possibilities of this figure, Walker plays with the idea of shame as she questions the usefulness of transparency during moments of resistance. Midway through the novel,

Sofia is imprisoned for hitting a white man in town and the community comes together in order to think of ways to get her out of jail because she will die, due to her physical abuse, if she stays. They agree that Mary Agnes, who is sleeping with Sophia’s husband and is related to the sheriff, should suggest dubiously that jail is not harsh enough for her and that she should be made to be a domestic worker for the man she struck. Celie’s narration states:

Tell him you just think justice ought to be done, yourself. But make sure

he know you living with Sofia husband, say Shug. Make sure you git in

the part bout being happy where she at, worse thing could happen to her is

73 to be some white lady maid. I don’t know, say the prizefighter. This sound

mighty much like some ole uncle Tomming to me. Shug snort, Well, she

say, Uncle Tom wasn’t call Uncle for nothing” (95-96).

The gendered dynamics of the scene highlights the issues that the prizefighter has around his masculinity and the use of subversion. Unlike Albert and Harpo in the novel, the role of the prizefighter is peculiar in that he serves as a hyper-masculine alternative that is not invested in the power of patriarchy. Earlier in the novel, he states smoothly “I don’t fight

Sofia battle…My job is to love her and take her where she want to go” (83). In essence, while his relationship with Sofia does not replicate the oppression that the other men inflict, it also does not directly challenge that oppression. What then becomes ironic about his concern regarding the perception of “uncle Tomming” is that it is not direct enough in countering a racist hegemony that is literally beating the life out of his partner.

For the prizefighter, who we can assume has fought and beaten white boxers in the ring, the use of subversion along these terms would acknowledge his relative powerlessness in a system and discourse that he has to partially accept and manipulate in order to challenge.

His reservations about the plan and the use of subversion demonstrate a personal shame in his inability to directly fight this battle for Sofia; a shame that he tries to make collective by voicing his concerns to the group. However, Shug’s quick response helps to dismiss any sense of collective shame felt by the group. The prizefighter’s leeriness about the implications of the plan, echoes Riche Richardson’s observation that “the view of black men in the South as unmanly and cowardly reveals how geography constitutes

74 authentic notions of black masculinity and demonstrates how some models of black masculinity are viewed as undesirable and inferior” (172). Thus, Walker’s text anachronistically comments upon the tacit understanding of regionalism and black masculinity in Black Nationalism through this quick anxiety of the prizefighter, an anxiety that functions as a political act projected as shame. Here, the prizefighter’s expression of shame acknowledges in effect that the plan falls outside of the standard masculinist economy that situates subversion as the disavowal of the power of transparency and directness. Shug’s refusal to be shamed redirects the prizefighter’s shame and calls for him to be ashamed for thinking along a racist-patriarchal axiom that would create such a sense of shame in the first place.

I begin this chapter with the reading of Walker’s text because it is emblematic of the role of the Uncle Tom in late twentieth and early twenty-first century black satires. In their new manipulations of historical narratives of shame that are tethered to the figure of the Uncle Tom, African American satirists question the meaning of masculinity and blackness in the “Uncle Tomming” actions of characters who are situated as “race- traitors” and dissenters.

Tomming Around: The Legacy of Stowe’s Novel

The historical matrix that enshrouds Uncle Tom has at its core Harriet Beecher

Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is well documented that Stowe “borrows” from Josiah Henson’s slave narrative in order to create her character Uncle Tom13.

However, it isn’t until well after the antebellum moment that the term “Uncle Tom” is

13 Ishmael Reed in his 1979 novel Flight to Canada spends a good deal of the beginning of the novel freeing Josiah Henson’s narrative from Stowe’s clutches and the rest of the satirical novel undermining the trope of the Uncle Tom. 75 used pejoratively as a way to underscore someone’s willful complicity in being continuously subservient. As Wilson Jeremiah Moses writes, “The emphasis on the myth of a black male who put the welfare of his master’s family above his own and who defended his mistress while his own loved ones remained in bondage was obviously not a flattering one. It contributed to a desexualized image of the black male and to the myth of the ignorant, stupid darky, contented to remain in bondage” (53). The post-bellum development is in part the product of Uncle Tom’s rewriting on the minstrel stage as an embodiment of the happy worker.

However, there is no shame for Stowe’s Uncle Tom. Uncle Tom’s moral authority prohibits shame from entering into the way he perceives himself in the institution of slavery. Tom’s devout Christianity allows him to understand the possibilities of being a masochistic martyr in much the same way that Jesus is in the Bible. This produces a messianic masculinity that relies on passivity, love, and altruism as its main tenets, and while this characteristic feature may seem close to the pejorative 20th century revision of the figure, the historical Uncle Tom uses his command of Christianity to resist certain immoral acts in slavery. For instance when the original Tom is responding to Legree’s threat on his life, he says, “Mas’r, if you was sick, or in trouble, or dying, and I could save ye, I’d give ye my heart’s blood; and if taking every drop of blood in this poor old body would save your precious soul, I’d give ‘em freely, as the Lord gave his for me. O,

Mas’r! don’t bring this great sin on your soul! It will hurt you more than ‘twill me”

(586)! According to Linda Williams, “What Stowe invented was a way to make even those not susceptible to abolitionist politics feel its melodramatic pathos and action.

76 Romantic racialism asserted the moral superiority of feeling over intellect, of affection, docility, and patience over Anglo-Saxon coldness, will and impetuosity” (57). Through his moral groundings Stowe’s Uncle Tom created a sense of empathy in Northern white readers. However, Stowe’s clear ties to sentimentality and emphasis on messianic masculinity for Uncle Tom aligns her character with the discourse of the Cult of True

Womanhood/ Domesticity. His very close association with piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity binds Stowe’s Uncle Tom to 19th century definitions of white womanhood ad offers support for the simplistic readings of Uncle Tom as emasculated in late 20th adaptations.

The resurrection of Uncle Tom’s messianic masculinity on the minstrel stage misrepresented his use of religion and passivity as naiveté. According to Williams, “as many as fifty people eventually saw the play of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for every one person who read the novel” (77). From these vaudevillian stages the myth emerged of Uncle

Tom as a foil to the violent buck stereotype that persisted from Post-Reconstruction to the beginning of the twentieth century. On the minstrel stage, Uncle Tom’s simplicity and subservience served as a nostalgic figure to romanticize a “prelapsarian” South. As time went on, however, the myth of Uncle Tom was embraced by blacks who used the figure to create and redefined discourses about “the black community.” As dominant America systemically used blackness to define that which it is not, so too did Black America embrace the myth of the Uncle Tom for the purpose of creating a sense of solidarity.

Shame: Normative and Hegemonic

77 The feeling associated with this figure is in part produced from the collective shame of blacks towards an enslaved past as Uncle Tom becomes synonymous with the contentment of servitude in much the same way as Aunt Jemima does. Shame as articulated in most affect theory and by psychologists, most notably Silvan Tomkins, Eve

Sedgwick, and others, is an outward manifestation, usually in the face, such as looking down and blushing that creates an unintentional outward expression of an inner feeling.

Sedgwick and Frank write, “Whenever an individual, a class, or a nation wishes to maintain a hierarchical relationship, or to maintain aloofness it will have to resort to contempt of the other. Contempt is the mark of the oppressor. The hierarchical relationship is maintained either when the oppressed one assumes the attitude of contempt for himself or hangs his head in shame” (Sedgwick and Frank 139). While much of the scholarship discusses the physicality of shame and its mark on the face and body, Ahmed also notes that shame is a public sentiment: “However, it is not just anybody that can cause me to feel shame by catching me doing something bad. Only some others can witness my action such that I feel ashamed…shame as an emotion requires a witness: even if a subject feels shame when it is alone, it is the imagined view of the other that is taken on by a subject in relation to itself” (Ahmed 105).

Just as gender and race are social constructs mediated through breaks and changes in society, so too is shame and one’s ability to feel ashamed through real or implied witness is mediated differently through these intersectional constructs. Not only do people feel shame differently, but they are also ashamed of different things. The negotiation of shame and the performance of shame is enveloped in the experiences of

78 blackness. Furthermore, America’s patriarchal society deems shame as being intrinsically feminine as it privileges more masculine attributes and accords less recognition to emotional and mental stability. Historically, “The African American people, often judged by white American society as inferior, have endured the stigma of being different since their history on this continent began. The sense of difference and internalization of that judgment by the affected group long-standing, deeply simmering shame has accompanied the African American experience since slavery” (Morrison 35). While I am less inclined to create a black pathology around shame and am not interested in going into any singular psychoanalytic experiences, Morrison raises valid points about the affects of racism.

Morrison continues “The connection between self-hatred about ethnic origin, cultural heritage, and feelings of being different is indeed compelling. When an individual speaks of feeling different from a given cultural or social norm we should wonder whether the language of shame is behind this expression” (Morrison 39). During slavery blacks were regularly made to avert their eyes and look at the ground both as a way to show deference and to perform a visible shame for their enslavers.

As previously mentioned, shame is a highly personal, emotional response to the feeling of inadequacy and failed societal norms. Shaming, as a verb, is quite the opposite.

It comes to be a very public act where the person or group responsible for shaming is invested in humiliating and Othering another person. Shaming stands as a facet of domination and control in its ability to create and direct social hierarchies and normative actions. According to bell hooks, “Shaming has been a central component of racial assault, yet it is also central to all other dehumanizing practices. Within a culture of

79 domination shaming others is one way to assert coercive power and dominance”

(Salvation 82). Here, hooks notes the importance of shaming, whether the subject feels ashamed or not, in the way it creates divisions and power. Melissa Harris-Perry echoes this sentiment when she cogently writes, “The deep and lasting state-sponsored shaming of black people was part of a system of modernity” (Harris-Perry 112). Within the fields of psychology and cultural studies, the best way to avoid feeling shame is by having a strong sense of self-esteem and self-confidence.

Psychologists generally articulate shamelessness as a further deviation from the sense of a healthy self. It is understood to be a type of defense mechanism used to avoid the initial feeling of shame. Leon Wurmser in The Mask of Shame argues that, “Since shame is contempt against oneself, the ‘shameless’ cynic may in his core very well be a traumatically humiliated, cruelly shamed person who originally suffered a profound disregard for the self in its autonomy and now deals with it by lifelong reversal” (259).

Much of what has been written about the failings of shamelessness presupposes that shame is a positive tool in creating a sense of community among individuals. However, these accounts of ‘positive shame’ don’t acknowledge the power dynamic at play in community building through these shaming tactics and what they do for marginalized groups and the emphasis they place on assimilation.

Negotiating Shame in Black American Writing

Two of the most widely read slave narratives demonstrate the significance of shame as blacks try to negotiate and cultivate their own subjectivity and individuality in slavery. The climatic moments of Frederick Douglass’s narrative and his attempt to

80 literally wrestle his humanity from Covey during a fight scene that Douglass understands to be life changing begins with his refusal to be ashamed. Douglass’s fight with Covey becomes a physical attempt to reject the shame he previously articulates in the Narrative.

Douglass’s words merge any sense of his whole self as human and as a man with his ability to reject the coercion to feel shame and perform it on demand. In speaking of the ways that Covey is able to break him both physically and mentally, Douglass writes, “I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute” (38). Douglass gives us one of the earliest explicit descriptions of shame in the

African American literary tradition. Douglass’s language about his “broken” state causes the reader to bear witness to his dehumanization. As an appeal to the reader’s pathos,

Douglass’s narrating is also meant to shame the institution of slavery that caused him to feel dejected in the first place.

Similarly, Harriet Jacobs’ admission of guilt and shame to her Northern white female readership around the limited control she has of her reproductive rights when she chooses to have children as an unmarried woman underscores another gendered way of negotiating shame. Jacobs’ chooses to narrate her shame around her inability to properly perform a 19th century womanhood that relied upon the Cult of Domesticity.14 Jacobs writes, “And now, reader, I come to a period in my unhappy life, which I would gladly forget if I could. The remembrance fills me with sorrow and shame…The influences of

14 The Cult of Domesticity, also referred to as the Cult of True Womanhood, mandated that women be pious, pure, domestic, and submissive. Jacobs throughout her narrative is aware of these tenets and tries as hard as she can to validate them just as well as she points out how slavery prevents her to perform as such. 81 slavery had had the same effect on me that they had on other young girls; they had made me prematurely knowing, concerning the evil ways of the world. I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation” (46). Although Jacobs departs from Douglass’s sense of shame by acknowledging her agency in determining how she resists slavery, she does write that “If slavery had been abolished, I also, could have married the man of my choice; I could have had a home shielded by the laws; and I should have been spared the painful task of confessing hat I am now about to relate” (46). This narrative self- abasement, which is never articulated as a physical or emotional response on the faces of these people, serves as a political aim in order to redirect the initial feeling of shame towards the institution of slavery.

Beyond slavery and far into the twentieth century the negotiation and response to shame is coupled with the discourse of race-patriotism as issues of skin complexion and passing became prominent. The contempt held for those who passed during the early part of the twentieth century as an early form of Uncle Tomism and their being perceived as race traitors came to represent some of the more literary instantiations of shame in

African American culture. James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel The Autobiography of an

Ex-Colored Man articulates one of the greatest moments of literary shame in the tradition when after having witnessed a lynching his unnamed biracial protagonist states, “I understood that it was not discouragement, or fear, or search for a larger field of action and opportunity that was driving me out of the Negro race. I knew that it was shame, unbearable shame. Shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals. For certainly the law would restrain and punish the malicious

82 burning alive of animals” (113). This reflection makes passing synonymous with a race betrayal and thus reiterates the trope of the Uncle Tom in the early 20th century. Passing during this early century moment is not considered, as Cheryl Harris asserts in

“Whiteness as Property,” as an act of survival (277), but is contentious amongst black writers and people that understand it as complicit to black subjugation in ways that evoke

Stowe’s titled figure. Between the antebellum Tom and those that pass in contemporary popular Black American imaginary there is a similar assimilationist-passivity to black subordination such that a defining trope of one of the more politically and artistic moments of resistance in Black America, crossing the color line, lost its critical potential.

Within a sociopolitical framework the rhetoric of Uncle Tom is used as a tool to create a sense of homogeneity and propriety around different performances of blackness.

More specifically black masculinity, became heavily regionalized as the North became openly critical of the ways that blacks in the South had to accommodate a more virulently racist society that constantly endangered their communities. These competing ideas of blackness, and by extension black masculinity, play out publicly in two pivotal moments in the twentieth century. The first of these is W.E.B. DuBois’s criticism of Booker T.

Washington’s speech at the Atlanta Cotton Expo in 1895. Washington, having the untenable position of speaking on behalf of all blacks to a white racist audience whose fears of modernization and social equality after Reconstruction maintained an anxiety around the direction of the South at the turn of the century, has been situated historically as the originator of black conservative thought. Throughout Du Bois’s writings he

83 consistently situates Washington as a product of his Southern environment as the continuation of a slave mentality.

Similarly, scholar Riché Richardson cogently argues that Malcolm X’s use of the

Uncle Tom trope in ridiculing Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent efforts to integrate a white supremacist society typifies the continued cultural capital, as well as the underlying gender and sexual implications, of using this discourse in the late twentieth century.

Richardson writes, “In Malcolm X’s itinerary, the house Negro, or Uncle Tom, embodied the most abject form of black masculinity” (167). Richardson goes on to articulate how

Malcolm X’s use of Uncle Tom created the false binary of “real black men” and a failed, assimilative Other whose sexuality and gender was questioned in the same capacity as his race. She writes,

The critique directed at King’s platforms on integration and nonviolence

in the southern-based Civil Rights movement cast him as an inadequate

and inferior revolutionary, frequently invoking him as an ‘Uncle Tom’ and

‘house Negro.’ With its homophobic innuendoes of homosexuality, it

construed black southern male bodies as pathological. In doing so, it

ironically recast the historical economy of ideologies of black masculinity

in the South that reflected white raced and sexed stereotypes, including the

Uncle Tom that was steeped in ideological scripts of the body and

sexuality, along with representations of black Reconstruction politicians as

incompetent. (158-159)

84 Here, Richardson speaks to Malcolm X’s appropriation of white supremacist hetero- patriarchal discourse that originally situates the Uncle Tom as an asexual, altruistic figure that induced a national nostalgia for the institution of slavery. According to Richardson, the initial asexuality of this figure as the emasculated, masculine version of the mammy figure, during the mid-twentieth century primarily through the rhetoric of Malcolm X is reimagined as queer as Malcolm X attempts to use sexuality as a way to capitalize on the moral panic of queer subjectivities in order to discredit King’s blackness, masculinity, and ability to lead and speak for black people. King’s Christian altruism during the Civil

Rights Movement makes him particularly susceptible to Malcolm X’s critique.

These narrative and visual moments of shame and the trope of the Uncle Tom are highly personal and deal with the actual emotion of shame as racialized and gendered facets of oppression that are embedded in the systems of slavery and institutional racism in the Jim Crow South. However, Tom’s re-appropriation at the end of the twentieth century in African American satire suggests a different investment that I will call here shamelessness. In order to move beyond the deleterious effects of intra-racial shaming, late incarnations of Uncle Tom reject any impulse to feel ashamed and revels in a brand of shamelessness that dismantles the binary of being either inside or outside the “black community.” Although much of the conversation here has dealt with actual moments of shame and the way they are narrated in the African American literary tradition, I want to make a distinction here about the differences between the personal feeling of shame and the act of shaming someone or some group.

85 For blacks, the assertion and fight for their own humanity produces a type of shamelessness that does not rely on narcissism or hubris but on a survival technique meant to reject the shaming tactics of a racist-sexist society that tries to produce self- hatred among its marginalized people. When shame proceeds from an oppressive regime that historically embraces whiteness and patriarchy as the norm, defying same, (and not self-esteem) operates as a way to resist the impulse to internalize the goals of those shaming tactics. Shamelessness in this matrix manifests as a public gesture of self-love that disregards the need to conform to a system that would produce self-hatred for marginalized people. In the rest of this chapter, I argue that the shamelessness of the

Uncle Tom figure in Derrick Bell’s 1992 short story “Space Traders” and its television adaptation by Trey Ellis for HBO calls to question the idea of homogenous “black community” and what resistance and race men look like in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Bell’s Allegory of Uncle Tom’s Shame

Derrick Bell was a known legal scholar and one of the foremost leaders of critical race theory, a practice that highlights the failings of the legal system for people of color.

His career is marked with highly contentious moments of voicing his concerns over the prevalence of institutional racism in high education.15 His 1992 short story “Space

Traders” that was featured in the collection Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative

Fiction from the African Diaspora highlights the frailty of black political thought and

15 After a yearlong visiting professorship at Stanford University, Bell returned to Harvard and protested the school’s tenure denial to two black professors whose work centered on critical race theory. At the time Harvard had three tenured black men and five women none of whom were tenured. 86 action with science fiction. The story begins with aliens hovering over the Atlantic and offering solutions to all of America’s problems (gold for the deficit, renewable energy, and a way to fix the present pollution) if they would in turn offer up their black people for the aliens to take. The aliens come on the first day of the new millennium and give

America until January 17th to make their decision. In 2012, Derrick Bell’s connection to

Barack Obama and, specifically, Bell’s writing of this short story fueled conservative

Andrew Breitbart’s attempt to thwart Obama’s re-election campaign.16

Bell’s investment in pointing to more institutional forms of black vulnerability leaves his short story largely out of the narrative scope that is present in the other satires that I take up in this book, in that it is a third person narrative with an omnipotent narrator, and thus limits the interiority of the protagonist, Professor Gleason Golightly, the one unofficial black cabinet member in a highly conservative presidency who has largely endorsed the president’s attempts to dismantle affirmative action and the welfare state in order to create more self-reliance among blacks. The short story echoes the efforts put forth during the Reagan presidency, and the text evokes the image and presidency of Reagan when extraterrestrial life forms choose Reagan’s voice as a means to transmit their offer. In Trey Ellis’s adaptation into a short film for HBO’s miniseries

Cosmic Slop he uses the image of Reagan as a hologram that the extraterrestrials use in communicating with Americans. The use of Reagan for the aliens’ proposition is not unintentional.

16 Barack Obama was the first black elected to lead the Harvard Review and introduced Derrick Bell, one of his law professors, during a speaking engagement where Bell was telling to students why he was protesting. 87 Bell evokes the image of Ronald Reagan in his story because Reagan is the face of the country’s move towards conservatism in the late twentieth century. Winning against the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan’s presidency in 1981 marked 12 years of uninterrupted conservative power. The political climate of Bell’s short story evokes the late twentieth century moment when the country turned towards political conservatism in the ‘80s as a response to the forward strides taken towards racial and gender equality and rebuilding the economy after the Vietnam War. Bell’s short story is written during the George H. Bush’s administration and the extension of a long uninterrupted period in American conservatism.

When the narrative first makes mention of these politics and the protagonist’s position as an “Uncle Tom,” it is aligned with Golightly’s own conservatism towards issues that situate him as a race traitor. After the extraterrestrials have made their proposition and the unnamed conservative president’s cabinet begins to support the removal of African Americans, Golightly interjects,

Even so I have been willing to be a ‘good soldier’ for the Party even

though I am condemned as an Uncle Tom by my people. I sincerely

believe that black people needed to stand up on their own feet, free of

special protection provided by civil rights laws, the suffocating burden of

welfare checks, and the stigmatizing influence of affirmative action

programs. In helping you undermine these policies, I realized that your

reasons for doing so differed from mine. (333)

88 Thus, Golightly functions as an embodiment of black conservatism that rose during the

Reagan administration and shifted the popular use of the term “Uncle Tom.” Black

Conservatism since the beginning of the twentieth century has always been bound to politics that focused on self-reliance and hard work. Booker T Washington’s use of the images of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and casting down your buckets then signifies as both the first image of black conservatism as well as the first admonishment for someone possessing traits of the Uncle Tom.

While contemporary black conservatism traces its roots back to Booker T.

Washington and even Frederick Douglass in some instances, with Professor Golightly acknowledging that “Booker T. Washington was his hero and had been since he was a child growing up in a middle-class family in Alabama, not far from Tuskegee, the home of Tuskegee Institute, which Washington had founded in 1881” (336), the bulk of political rhetoric and ideology that Golightly seems to wholeheartedly agree with was honed at the Fairmont Conference after the election of Ronald Reagan (336). On

December 12-13 in 1980, prior to Reagan’s inauguration, a group of black conservatives met in San Francisco to discuss the political vision and investments of a black conservative politics. The two-day conference was later referred to as the “Black

Alternatives Conference” and the discussions were later published in The Fairmont

Papers (Ondaatje 2-3). As Dona Hamilton and Charles Hamilton assert, it was here that black conservatives “challenged what they considered to be the hegemony enjoyed by the civil rights groups in discussions of policies pertaining to blacks” (209). It was at the

Fairmont conference that black conservatives collectively voiced their disagreement with

89 the welfare campaigns of the Nixon and Carter administrations. Many of the Fairmont conservatives would go on to take high ranking positions in Ronald Reagan and George

H. W. Bush’s presidencies. While the threat of racialized violence was not an issue for black conservative conference goers, in the same way it was for Washington at the

Cotton Expo, the overall tenor of their reliance on capitalism as a tool for social equality is virtually the same. Behind the push for de-regulation, the end of the welfare state, and affirmative action is the ideological belief that the inherent social Darwinism embedded in capitalism will provide the uplift necessary for all to compete in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Golightly realizes that his ideological motives do not coincide with that of those who want to use conservatism to disenfranchise people of color. Golightly’s subtle submission that “In helping you undermine these policies, I realized that your reasons for doing so differed from mine” highlights the ways that he is cognizant of the ways that his emphasis on capitalism can have negative repercussions of people of color (333).

Golightly’s acknowledgement at the end of the statement suggests that there could be a level of shame with realization that he is helping white conservatives. Indeed, later in the text the narrator acknowledges that “As a black man, his support legitimated those policies and salved the consciences of the whites who proposed and implemented them”

(336). Here, it is important to note that the policies instituted during the `80s and early

`90s conservative moment had adverse affects for blacks across the country. The ramping up of the wars on drugs and crime, and the less attention given to the war on poverty helped to introduce the modern era of the prison industrial complex in America. The text

90 acknowledges the negative impact of conservative ideologies during this moment when

Bell writes,

The race problem had worsened greatly in the 1990s. A relatively small

number of blacks had survived the retrogression of civil rights protection,

perhaps 20 percent having managed to make good in the increasingly

technological oriented society. But, without anyone acknowledging it and

with hardly a peep from the press, more than one half of the group had

become outcasts. They were confined to former inner-city areas that had

been divorced from their political boundaries. High walls surrounded these

areas, armed guards controlled entrance and exit around the clock. Still,

despite all precautions, young blacks escaped from time to time to

terrorize whites. Long dead was the dream that this black underclass

would ever ‘overcome.’ (330).

I quote at length this section of the short story to highlight the critical tone and perspective of the narration and to demonstrate the differences between Golightly and the narrator. Indeed, the narrative only focuses on Professor Golightly and the executive branch for only part of the story and then gives an insight into the broader implications of systemic racism as it focuses on economic, legislative, judicial, and social initiatives to accept the extraterrestrial’s proposal. This excerpt is also important because it speaks to the broad scope of race relations during this moment, and demonstrates Bell’s commitment to engaging a somewhat realistic depiction of this moment at the same time

91 he is using science fiction and satire as apparatuses to point to legal vulnerability of

African Americans during his conservative moment.

The distinction between the unnamed narrator and Professor Golightly is important in setting up the story’s conversation around shame. The narrative seemingly functions as a series of vignettes that begin with the date and explain the impact that the proposal has made on society and outlines the systemic racism embedded in the decision making process and how legislative, executive, judicial, economic, social, and cultural conditions all converge on one another to create a national sentiment around the devaluation and deportation of black bodies. In doing so, the narrative partially focuses on Golightly as he becomes representative of the executive and social approaches to accepting the terms of the Space Traders. While Golightly is arguably not central to the narrative, he is the only person of interest that the story follows as the character vulnerable to these hegemonic forces. The narration then moves from day-to-day rather apathetically and creates a clear distinction from its telling of the events and the rhetoric of a cultural logic based on exclusion and dehumanization that prevails in the diegesis. In this way, all readers, be they black or white, feel shame about living in a country that, to borrow James Weldon Johnson’s language, could deal with blacks and really any of its citizens in such a way. This initial sense of shame is important for the way it erases and lays bare the telos of white privilege and American racism.

Standing outside the dominant definitions of blackness Golightly functions in ways similar to other satirical characters in this project. Indeed, his exclusion defines masculine vulnerability in these works. For Professor Golightly, his status as “Uncle

92 Tom” for black communities puts him outside the traditional position of black leadership.

However, Professor Golightly operates subversively within the confines of this narrative and maintains a type of philanthropy that is constantly giving to causes that affect African

Americans. Bell writes of the favors that Golightly would get in return for him being the legitimating black face needed to quell white guilt over certain policies: “Golightly had always rationalized, for the many behind-the-scenes favors he received. The favors were not for himself…he saw that black colleges got much-needed funding; and through his efforts, certain black officials received appointments or key promotions. He smiled wryly when some of these officials criticized his conservative positions and called him ‘Uncle

Tom’” (336). Golightly’s smile here indicates a shift from the earlier recognition of his perceived Tom-dom and gives the texts first glimpse of his shamelessness.

Golightly’s shamelessness is a product of his vulnerability in this setting. His inability to lay claim to any group that fully understands and sympathizes with his political or social ideologies excludes him from the full membership in any community.

However, it is important that this vulnerability is framed as intentional and sought-after.

For Professor Golightly, his shamelessness is fueled by his subversiveness. He states towards the end of the narrative, “without power, a people must use cunning and guile.

Or were cunning and guile, based on superior understanding of a situation, themselves power? Certainly, most black people knew and used this art to survive in their everyday contacts with white people. It was only civil rights professionals who confused integrity with foolhardiness” (342).

93 It is with this understanding of subversiveness coupled with shamelessness that

Golightly tries to ascend into the realm of race leader as he goes to a town hall meeting for blacks to articulate what their response should be to the government’s support of the extraterrestrials proposition. Before Golightly speaks at this venue the black audience yells, ‘Sellout!’ ‘Traitor!’ And ‘Ultimate Uncle Tom!’” (340). The narrator acknowledges the audience’s disdain for Golightly further, “Golightly’s close connection to the conservative administrations and active support of its anti-black views made him far from a hero to most blacks.” Golightly shares his own realization of this position when he opens his speech by stating “I am well aware that political and ideological differences have for several years sustained a wide chasm between us” (338). His vulnerability shows in his inability to find a community, either among his political compatriots or his would- be constituent base. The reader is painfully reminded that during this moment of need he is not being listened by anyone.

Scholar Salamisha Tillet thoroughly explores the affect of contemporary recuperations of the Uncle Tom figure in African American satire in how she traces the lineage of Stowe’s novel and its appropriation throughout the twentieth century. Tillet sets up the satirical investments in how this figure is revisited in a late twentieth-century postmodern context in the form of Ishmael Reed’s Uncle Robin in his 1976 novel Flight to Canada or Kara Walker’s 1995 installation The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand

Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven. In addressing the affective implications of postmodern representations and the way they counter the hegemony of the iconography of Stowe’s novel, she writes, “Reveling in the excessive affects of satire rather than those

94 of sentimentality, these versions of Toms and Topsys produce different affects like anger, shame, or revenge that can potentially serve as a the basis of democratic collectivities. In this way, it is the perfect genre for black dissent and dissidence in the face of ongoing political invisibility and civic estrangement” (59). While Tillet explores the role that shame plays in engaging the Uncle Tom trope when she outlines the way Tom functioned for black audiences and black writers during the early to mid twentieth-century, she does not consider shamelessness as a generative space for Tom. Furthermore, her analysis of the Uncle Tom in postmodern satire only thinks through the most obvious and explicit versions of this figure in historiographical metafictions.

While Tillet’s engagement with more direct representations of Stowe’s character speaks to the currency of this figure in contemporary popular imaginaries, visual satires provide a richer more modernized versions of this character. Aaron McGruder’s Uncle

Ruckus in Boondocks notoriously evokes the trope of the Uncle Tom for the show. While

McGruder intentionally evokes this trope to garner laughs from his audience, Uncle

Ruckus’s brand of hatred towards black people is illustrated as absurd, with him consistently playing the foil to the racial politics of the show. Due to the show’s adoption of Black Nationalist ideals Uncle Ruckus’s representation as an Uncle Tom does not give way to the possibility of him functioning as a subversive figure towards any political or social ends.

Similarly, Dave Chappelle’s popular skit “The Black White Supremacist” on The

Chappelle Show evokes a contemporary version of the trope of the Uncle Tom as

Chappelle introduces the sketch by telling his live viewing audience that one of his

95 friends said that he “set black people back thirty years” with this sketch. In the sketch,

Chappelle plays a man, Clayton Bigsby, that is blind, but was told that he was white at a young age and he grew into the mouthpiece for white supremacist organizations. The sketch operates at the intersection of race, class, and disability as Chappelle uses the idea of blindness to trouble stereotypes and representations of blackness. Ultimately,

Chappelle gives a varied approach to thinking through the authorial subversiveness of the trope of the Uncle Tom in the early twenty-first century as he uses Clayton Bigsby as a foil for the racial politics of the show. Unfortunately, this situates Clayton’s blindness as a central source for laughter as Chappelle evokes and the same time inverts the discourse of color blindness simultaneously.

In film, a similar dynamic occurs with Spike Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled and his representation of Pierre Delacroix as a modern day Uncle Tom. Within the narrative framework of the film, Pierre functions as a subversive Uncle Tom in many of the same ways that Golightly does in Bell’s work. However, the trope of the Uncle Tom becomes murky in the film, as Pierre attempts to use reductio ad absurdum to dismantle the insistence upon using racial caricatures in contemporary television as he proposes a modern day minstrel show. However, the film as well as Macon Detournay’s framing as a white Uncle Tom in Adam Mansbach’s Angry Black White Boy, suggests that while historical fiction’s direct engagement with the Uncle Tom is still pertinent, there is a growing distinction and evolution of this character as black cultural production moves into the twenty-first century. Golightly is only a part of this unfolding pantheon.

96 Contemporary versions of the Uncle Tom figure in African American satire stress the role of shamelessness in the way these characters create a sense of vulnerability.

Golightly’s central moment of vulnerability and shamelessness comes during his engagement of the primarily black audience at the town hall. After they jeer him the text says he was “seemingly unmoved by the outburst” (340). In the HBO adaptation by Trey

Ellis this moment is reframed to make this scene central to the narrative and to emphasize the vulnerability of Golightly during this excerpt.

Ellis’s Satire of Bell’s Allegory of Uncle Tom’s Shame

Before we analyze the breaks and similarities between Trey Ellis’s teleplay and

Bell’s short story it is important to note the stylistic frame that the Hudlin brothers use in directing this episode. In 1994 Trey Ellis adapted Bell’s short story into a teleplay for brothers Warrington and Reginald Hudlin’s HBO miniseries Cosmic Slop and aired a series of three short films under the collection of Cosmic Slop. The Hudlin’s infuse these stories of science fiction with a funk aesthetic by intentionally using the George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic’s fifth studio album Cosmic Slop. Here, the choice to use

Clinton and P-Funk as an epistemological framework evokes the afrofuturity of funk and echoes Michael C. Ladd’s sentiment that “Funkadelic, the ultimate expatriates, are from space…They come down to earth as the repatriating Astro-Afro Conquistadors, space messengers here to save us from eating our young…It is a part of a tradition of elastic history fused with social critique fused with science fiction” (74-75). The funk created landscape of afrofuturism is immediately represented in the teleplays with George

Clinton’s dismembered, floating head talking to the viewer in the way that Rod Serling

97 introduced different episodes of Twilight Zone. Here, Clinton begins the three short films stating “You are standing on the verge of getting it on beyond the twilight zone further than the outer limits deep-deeper than deep in the black hole. Free your mind and your ass will follow cause once you’ve passed the point of no return you are caught in the cosmic slop.” As Clinton finishes his introductory remarks the refrain “Would you like to dance with me?/ We’re doing the Cosmic Slop” from the Parliament Funkadelic’s song

“Cosmic Slop” plays in the background.

Figure 2. Cosmic Slop: George Clinton

In a film promotion in the New York Times, brothers Warrington and Reginald Hudlin, the executive producers and directors for the series, speak to the influence of the Twilight

Zone and the representation of race, gender, class, and religion in a parallel universe when Reginald states, “During the 50’s and 60’s, ‘The Twilight Zone’ was very

98 provocative. Serling dealt with prejudice, he dealt with social issues of all stripes. What you see missing in a lot of the clones of ‘Twilight Zone’ made since then is that same sense of true provocativeness. And that’s what we’re trying to bring back” (Meisler 7).

Scholar Julie Moody-Freeman outlines the difference between Bell’s short story and Trey Ellis’s teleplay as an opportunity for Ellis to create a platform to shift Bell’s direction from white hegemony and an overarching black vulnerability to intraracial issues, one that she says is symptomatic to Ellis’s ideals in “The New Black Aesthetic, by adding colorism to the storyline in a way that does acknowledge its relationship to whiteness.17 However, Moody-Freeman fails to consider the P-funk aesthetic of cosmic slop and how that adds a narrative level to Bell’s work and the trope of the subversive- shameless Uncle Tom. For instance, the Hudlins’ episode begins after the initial introduction with another short proverb-like message from George Clinton: “They call me the doctor I’m the head man around here I’ll be your seeing your eye guide through the black hole. Beware of strangers bearing gifts; there may be strings attached and what might be strange for some might be a noose for others.” As the first episode of this three part series, Clinton’s introduction makes sense to the viewer. However, Clinton’s warning to the audience functions as a foreshadowing for Bell’s short story and Ellis’s adaptation. Furthermore, Clinton’s warning elucidates the different audiences for the show and different viewing positions between “strange” and “noose”. It is also important

17 In Ellis’s The New Black Aesthetic,” often referred to as NBA, he asserts that there is a generational shift of young black people in the ‘90s and their parents who endured more direct forms of American racism. He suggests that black life and culture is no longer wedded to responding to and negotiating racism in the same way that previous black generations have had to do. 99 to note that the close proximity between strange and noose in this sentence evokes Abel

Meeropol’s poem “Strange Fruit” and subsequent song recordings, most notably Billy

Holiday’s version.

Ellis’s transition from Bell’s allegory to satire is subtle but reliant on the P-funk frame and absurdity. The idea of cosmic slop creates a type of intergalactic second dimension that reveals the absurdity of American racism. This opening frame and its situating American racism as absurd provides an overtly humorous aspect to Bell’s otherwise deadpan humor.

Ellis’s adaptation focuses more on Professor Gleason Golightly, played by Robert

Guillaume, than Bell’s short story. Ellis focuses much of the narrative on Golightly’s family and the domestic space as Golightly talks more openly and introspectively with his family about the Space Trader’s offer than he does in Bell’s short story. For instance, during one moment of the teleplay Golightly says to his wife “Black people have been calling me an Oreo since the age of twelve; by tomorrow they will be calling me a hero”

(17:30-17:33). Here, Golightly speaks candidly about his undermining whiteness through his subversiveness, and how he hopes his efforts will be legible to the black America that he wants to come to lead during this moment of crisis. Golightly feels a tinge of shame only after going before a predominantly black audience to suggest that they pretend to accept the terms of the trade in order to fill white Americans with envy when they think of blacks going to space. The “hostile murmuring” that Bell writes into the short story is magnified in the teleplay as Golightly goes before an audience of predominantly black leaders and community members. Although Golightly expresses the desire to be a heroic

100 figure during this moment and performs the necessary charisma that scholar Erica

Edwards articulates as being vital for black leadership, both the text and the teleplay indicate that “Golightly’s close connection to the conservative administrations and active support of its anti-black views made him far from a hero to most blacks” (338).

Unfortunately, as in the short story the African Americans refuse his suggestion.

However, the visibility of this meeting with African American leaders and community members is more visceral than the short story due in part because of the visualization of

Golightly’s ridicule and contempt in this space.

Ellis does find space to revisit Golightly’s subversiveness in his teleplay when he makes him responsible for bringing a group of leaders from Fortune 500 companies together. In the short story, Bell writes this moment as an initiative that business tycoons, supported by the vice president and a few wealthy members of congress, take in order to think through the implications of losing a large group of consumers. However, Ellis envisions this moment as another instance of Golightly’s subversiveness as he is the one that calls upon these business heads and has them contemplate what life would be like if the “Trade” happened. Bell writes, “First, blacks represented 12 percent of the market and generally consumed much more of their income than did their white counterparts. No one wanted to send that portion of the market into outer space—not even for the social and practical benefits offered by the Space Traders” (344). There is a satiric element to

Bell’s story during this moment as he uses wit to touch on black consumerism in his allegory. Present as well is a sincere conversation around the guise of capitalism and the social and economic mobility of poor whites:

101 They recognized that potentially turbulent unrest among those on the

bottom was deflected by the continuing efforts of poorer whites to ensure

that they, as least, remained ahead of blacks. If blacks were removed from

the society, working- and middle-class whites—deprived of their racial

distraction—might look upward toward the top of the societal well and

realize that they as well as the black below them suffered because of the

gross disparities in opportunities and income. (344)

Outside of the political performance that the reader understands Golightly as playing, this added nuance by Ellis helps to demonstrate the economic upheaval that would happen if there were no African Americans.

This moment becomes more satirical through in Ellis’s adaptation where the businessmen represent the interests of liquor, athletic shoes, cigarette, and pork. This meeting also demonstrates the Golightly’s ability to subvert the rhetorical and ideological underpinnings of neoliberalism in order to try and counteract his failings in the political arena. These stereotypical concerns are then made more comical when two scenes later

Golightly is in his car and is approached by a white woman who says, “Did you know that the African Americans won over 500 of 850 Olympic medals awarded to the United

States” (20:35-20:40)? Reducing black life in America to Olympic medals, liquor, and cigarettes is laughable in the ways that Ellis tries to think through the way that whites would implore other whites to value the role that African Americans play in the

American landscape in hopes that they will reject the trade offer from the Space Traders.

102 Similarly, there is another added scene later during the teleplay where Golightly and his wife are watching a telethon for the Anti-Trade Coalition hosted by Casey Kasem where he opens with “Can you imagine life without Jazz or without the blues, or without

Rock and Roll well that’s what life would’ve been like in these United States without the contributions of African Americans” The telethon ends with a Michael Jackson impersonator singing a song very similar to “We are the World” with other black celebrities on stage. Again, this is an addition to Bell’s originally story and emphasizes the absurdity of America’s racial politics while also tacitly suggesting that even the great behemoths of free market capitalism do not provide enough an allure to shift the political vulnerability of African Americans. Although, Golightly successfully gets these white men to engender an “Anti-Trade Coalition” to oppose the Space Trader’s proposal, they fail to change the public sentiment and the trade referendum passes.

These more overtly satirical elements in Ellis’s adaptation create a greater capacity to demonstrate Golightly’s role as an Uncle Tom, as the viewer hears black characters refer to Golightly as a “Tom,” and Ellis’s adaptation also illustrates

Golightly’s shamelessness in a more legible way for visual audiences. With Ellis creating more moments in his teleplay for Golightly to perform subversiveness through the trope of the Uncle Tom he creates more spaces for that performance to be read as shameless.

Golightly’s shamelessness in political, economic, and communal spaces then serves as a way to shift the conversation from racial authenticity and those that choose to operate outside the confines of pre-approved racial performances.

103 For readers and viewers that find themselves aligned with notions of blackness that largely preclude and ostracize those who don’t fit into the mainstream ideological and political practices of black bodies more broadly, this moment calls into question their disdain for this position. The shame that would normally be directed towards the Uncle

Tom figure is staged within the diegetical space of the narrative but the text presents it as an archaic and misguided form of racial essentialism. The text redirects the shame by demonstrating how Golightly’s conservatism pragmatically subverts domination from within. Golightly understands that publicly championing civil rights’ discourse would render him powerless. Instead, he uses the political power that he gains from being a supporting voice for the president’s policies to help out people of color, most notably by appointing people of color to positions and also by helping to channel donations towards historically black colleges and universities.

Ellis’s teleplay shows blackness to be more overdetermined than the short story.

For example, it references colorism by changing that it will be darker skinned blacks that are going to be shipped away. Although the film, evokes the same iconography of the middle passage as the blacks board the extraterrestrial space crafts, by shifting the alien’s proposal to a scientific amount of “blackness” the film seems to invert the one drop rule of American slavery while at the same time evoking the legacy of intra-racial tensions around skin complexion.18 Ellis’s emphasis on dark skinned and light skinned African

Americans does not draw attention to the historical relationship of this intra-racial conflict and its origins in whiteness. Unlike Julie Moody-Freeman’s articulation that “the

18 During slaver, the one-drop rule stipulated that if a person has one drop of “black blood” or any black ancestry that person should be enslaved. 104 contrasting effect in the short story vs. the teleplay is that Ellis’s aesthetic choice to highlight complexion centres audiences’ focus on the intra-racial divisions of black people based on colour” (74), Bell’s Professor Golightly demonstrates that there is no homologous blackness. Ellis’s varied and nuanced blackness does not negate Bell’s claim that African Americans are unprotected by the law if it benefits whiteness. Moreover, this shift does not change the presence of shame in the text.

Golightly’s remarkable shamelessness throughout the text and teleplay, particularly when the primarily black audience rejects his suggested tactics to beat the referendum on the Space Traders’ proposition and the popular strategy fails, redirects attention to those who opposed him. Golightly’s resilience affirms that he has been treated unfairly on both sides of the political and racial spectrum. It also draws attention to an expansive understanding of blackness for readers.

105

4. Aaron McGruder’s Disgust in Queering the Badman

Although I have spent much of this project outlining the potential in intentionally rendering black masculinities vulnerable and allowing for that to be unresolved, there are many moments when contemporary African American satire is complicit in furthering hegemonic black masculinities that rely on compulsory hetero-patriarchy as a critical position to recuperate Black Nationalist ideals. In this way, some satires are not as invested in countering the iconography of black masculinities of the Black Power

Movement but serve as a safe guard for them to continue to have currency in this contemporary moment. Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks, and specifically the animated cartoon version, functions in this capacity.

Most scholars who engage McGruder’s work, approach it with the acknowledgement that his nationally syndicated cartoon strip is more critical (and thus deemed more appropriate for scholarly attention) than his television show. However, the two Boondocks have very different audiences prompted by their different mediums. Here,

I will focus on the animated television series that is featured on Adult Swim as part of the

Cartoon Network adult programming. I will interrogate the implications of McGruder’s representation of queer bodies, specifically the queer gangsta/thug caricature. This chapter argues that the limitations of “socially conscious rap” (SCR) as a cultural and political ideology that impedes the queer possibilities in hip-hop ensures that the image of

106 the queer gangsta in The Boondocks can only reaffirm homophobia. Regularly foregrounded disgust and absurdity at queer moments in the series inhibits understanding and dialogue about the intersections of homosocial, homoerotic, and queer bodies.

Rapping with Animation

For McGruder, hip-hop serves a number of different purposes in this animated series. At any given moment, the show interchangeably uses hip-hop as a muse, object of attack, and an aesthetic. For instance, McGruder uses Asheru’s rap song “Judo Flip” for the title sequence, and there have been many episodes that feature voices of rap artists as well as a steady focus on the show’s fictive rapper, Gangstalicious, voiced by Mos Def.

However, the show’s primary use of hip-hop comes in the form of the politics that it espouses to its viewers. Like Dave Chappelle, Aaron McGruder has been able to reach a number of different demographics because of his ability to make the show appealing to hip-hop heads, hipsters, and the larger Gen X and Y-ers (Higgins 237). Part of

McGruder’s success in reaching these different markets is due to the show’s satirical, at times apathetic, way of providing easily accessible social commentary and entertainment around contemporary Black issues.

Due to its close proximity to hip-hop culture and its practitioners, the show adopts what I am calling a socially conscious rap (SCR) agenda in the way that it approaches contemporary issues on race, gender, sexuality, and politics. As Tricia Rose explains in

The Hip Hop Wars, “The conventional split between commercial and politically conscious rap creates a narrow ‘alternative’ to the commercial options that saturate hip hop. One of the ways that hip hop’s progressive spirit has been driven to the margins is

107 through the fashioning of an overtly ‘political’ identity (i.e., conscious rap) as the only alternative to gangstas, pimps, and hoes” (243). Thus, McGruder’s The Boondocks intersects both commercially successful and SCR in its ability to be both political and popular. Part of the show’s identity hinges on both the outward performance of intelligence in the form of critical thinking as well as promoting a nostalgia for earlier political movements, especially the Black Power Movement. Whereas Trey Ellis in “The

New Black Aesthetic” asserts that contemporary cultural production is ambivalent towards issues pertaining to race, SCR serves as a refuge for earlier ideals of solidarity, separatism, and empowerment, the main principles in Black Nationalism. However, as

Marc Lamont Hill laments, “At the height of the political rap era during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the progressive agendas of political rap artists such as Public Enemy, X-

Clan, Paris, and Sista Souljah were strongly informed by radical Afrocentric, Black

Islamic, and crude Black Nationalist ideologies that were openly hostile to queer identities” (385). The nostalgia for this earlier moment by contemporary socially conscious rappers heavily determines the perspective they have on different issues. In addition, the over-arching goals of contemporary SCR is to impart the coolness of intelligence amongst their listeners, so while they are afforded some flexibility in their artistic influences and subject matter they are still bound to a set of ideas that would make their overall critique palatable to their audience and, more importantly, marketable.

For The Boondocks, this agenda is understood as a way to champion Black

Nationalist ideals as a system of common sense values that blacks should share (Lubiano

232). As Avi Santo suggests, “the Boondocks community tries to resolve particular

108 tensions activated by the series over the current state of black American cultural citizenship… [it] also readily points an accusatory finger at particular classed and generational subgroups of black Americans who they hold responsible for perpetuating black stereotypes and failing to help the black community as a whole move forward”

(253). McGruder personifies the competing images of commercially successful rap and

SCR and the types of subjectivities they assume in his two main characters, Huey and

Riley. Riley, the younger brother, represents the voice of a young, misled hip-hop generation whose obsession with money, guns, and women reflects the bulk of the content in commercially successful rap. The older brother, Huey, named after Huey

Newton, one of the founding members of the Black Panther Party, is more reserved and functions as the show’s moral compass. If McGruder aligns Huey with Black

Nationalism and more importantly with the astuteness to properly navigate the absurdities of life in white suburbia as a black boy, then Riley is characterized as a delinquent that is the product of his environment (Rambsy 650). Mark Anthony Neal articulates Riley’s proclivity towards all things “hood” as a “construction of ghettocentric masculinities…as a repository and conduit for black popular culture, Riley is also utilized by McGruder to comment on how pervasive ghettocentric forms of black identity are within mass culture and society” (169-170). Neal goes on to say that Huey “is specifically utilized to challenge the limits of romantic political ideologies and affirm the possibility of seeing this generation of black youth, even as they thoroughly embrace mass culture, as potential social critics and intellectuals” (171). However, Neal’s optimism does not

109 account for the ways that The Boondocks, through Huey, promotes a particular brand of intellectualism that would not be inclusive of different identity formations.

More broadly, when I refer to hip-hop masculinities in this context, I mean a cluster of masculinities that arise out of their relationship to hip-hop music and posed as resistant to the authority of the state and the culture of respectability. It is not singular, but rather a multivalent response to systems of domination to the male body—and specifically the black male body. According to Jay Z (2010), “It’s about perceptions people had long before you even walked onto the scene. The joke’s on them because they’re really just fighting phantoms of their own creation. Once you realize that, things get interesting…So many people can’t see that every great rapper is not just a documentarian, but a trickster” (p. 55). This trickster aspect of the music and the men and women creates a cultural logic of resistance through subversiveness and masking in order to undermine dominant stereotypes about black people’s determination, intelligence, physicality, and sexuality.

Miles White (2011) echoes Jay Z’s sentiment when he asserts “If there is a redeeming note to the contemporary gangsta/thug rapper and an alternate reading of him that transcends his complicity in perpetuating the bad nigger/brute stereotype, it is in the very flaunting of black masculinity in provocative and subversive ways that resist the historical policing and containment of black male bodies” (p. 71). If scholars such as

Bryant Keith Alexander (2006) are correct in asserting that black men are always already held in contention in the popular American imaginary, then hip-hop masculinities function in tandem with this perception. The subversiveness embodied in hip-hop

110 masculinities is made legible through its cultural signification as cool. As Richard Majors and Janet Billson (1992) assert in Cool Pose the coolness of black masculinity serves as a survival tactic for men of color and within this spectrum hip-hop masculinities maintains not just a subcultural relationship to coolness, but hip-hop masculinities has become the epitome of cool in the same way that Langston Hughes (1940) asserts about the Harlem

Renaissance and jazz moment in “When the Negro was in Vogue.” However, I do not want to suggest that hip-hop masculinities are without its ethical flaws, particularly its widespread misogyny and homophobia. In this formulation, I echo Imani Perry (2006) when she writes, “that masculinity in hip hop reflects the desire to assert black male subjectivity, and that it sometimes does so at the expense of black female subjectivity and by subjugating women’s bodies, while at other times it simply reveals the complexity of black male identity” (118). When I refer to the visual or corporeal aspects of hip-hop masculinities it is done with the understanding that so much of hip hop is visual and that clothing and physique come to play central roles in the performance, and that it is this cultural economy of hip-hop fashion that represents the visual aspects of resistance as well as the economic market value that clothing companies have since commodified.

The brand of Black Nationalism that is present in SCR and which McGruder endorses in his show historically has left issues pertaining to black women and LBTQ communities outside of the purview of its political scope. While there were socially conscious female rappers like MC Lyte and Queen Latifa that infused black feminist ideologies into the politics of SCR in the late 80s and early 90s, contemporary SCR has problematically understood itself as being inclusive through “man-splaining” problems

111 for women of color and completely ignoring queerness. Unfortunately, because black men are the ones with this “insight” the songs consistently situate black men as victims and impose the onus of changing the problems between men and women on black women. Tricia Ross explains, “Homophobia is tacitly accepted on both sides of this battle over hip hop. Most public critics of hip hop—progressive as well as conservative pundits, ministers, and journalists—simply remain silent about or only occasionally mention hip hop’s homophobia, letting the emphasis on sexism or the ‘disrespect’ of black women stand in for other kinds of hatred and discrimination perpetuated by hip hop” (236).

The lack of black female characters in the show puts Aaron McGruder’s The

Boondocks in a similar trajectory. Huey and Riley live in a house with their grandfather and the only semblance of a woman of color is a biracial girl in the neighborhood who does not understand many of the racial issues that the show engages with, and there are no regularly appearing gay characters on the show. Black feminist criticism and queer theory could and should have a place in SCR as a way of being critical of systemic oppression for women of color. Furthermore, Black feminist criticism has ushered in the ideological perspective for resisting heteronormativity as a system of domination that would be productive for countering hip-hop’s rampant homophobia. By including black feminist ideologies, SCR would be able to undermine “the general public silence about homophobia” that “helps obscure the fundamental connections among patriarchal masculinity, femininity, and homophobia. Hip Hop reflects the important role that homophobia plays in defining masculinity” (Rose 237).

112 The limited scope of what is “conscious” in SCR and by extension The

Boondocks has afforded the social practice of outing in hip-hop to go unchecked. As

Marc Lamont Hill suggests, “the hip-hop community is able to sustain the myth of universal heterosexuality through its constant attempts to locate, isolate, and, most importantly, ‘out’ the gay citizen. The threat of outing, or publicly exposing a person’s non-heterosexual identity, has facilitated the development of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ climate within hip-hop culture” (384). Socially conscious rappers like Mos Def have often found themselves silent when asked about homophobia in hip hop and their silence has allowed for “conscious rap, which is known for being politically progressive on issues of class, race, and women’s equality” to sometimes be “part of this problem” (Rose

239). Furthermore, many of these socially conscious rappers like Common and Mos Def have used terms like faggot in their own music, demonstrating for their audience that there are limits to their empathy and social activism. These rappers’ silence demonstrates complicity with the project of a hip-hop community that looks to them as voices of reason and morality. Using homophobic slurs as cultural currency to reject the possibility of being feminized and queered for their intellect is part and parcel of that project.

The stakes of foreclosing the possibilities of openly supported queer bodies in hip-hop is rooted in the belief that hip-hop masculinities, and specifically the ideological underpinnings and mythos around the gangsta/thug figure, are a modern day incarnation of folk-heroic badmen. In a culture that always-already criminalizes black bodies the folk tradition of badmen comes to represent the heroic ways that blacks can counter systems of oppression and subvert these dominant narratives of criminality. John Roberts’ asserts

113 that “the folklore of black badmen offers African Americans merely an expressive outlet for their feelings of hostility and violence, (presumably resulting from their oppression in the society) and not a model of emulative behavior adaptable to real-life situations”

(174). The explanation that black badmen do not serve as an actual model for black people more largely suggests that there is a performativity to both moments of badness and the oration of badness that functions as an outlet in the earlier cultural formations that inform contemporary articulations and conceptions of the hip-hop masculinities especially around those legible—yet mythic—representations of thugs, hustlers, and pimps. This historical understanding is important as the contemporary celebration and disdain of the thug and gets re-assimilated into the folk tradition.

Furthermore, Roberts is able to trace a lineage of the black badman back to the trickster figure of African folklore. If we agree with Roberts’ assertion that contemporary and early formations of bad blackmen derive from the trans-Atlantic movement of the trickster figure from African culture to African American culture via the middle passage and was cultivated in the oppressive regime that enslaved Africans had to endure, then contemporary performances of thugs, hustlers, and pimps both actual and discursive, function as the continued embodiment of this figure. Robert writes: “To understand the folklore of the black badman as a normative model of heroic action in black culture, it is essential that we view the black badman not only within the tradition of black folk heroic creation begun during slavery but also as an outlaw folk hero.” And he continues,

“Consequently, we must turn to the folk heroic traditions created by enslaved Africans to discover the prototype for the black badman as an outlaw folk hero and the socio-cultural

114 environment of the late nineteenth century to discover the basis on which African

Americans evaluated the actions of this figure as heroic” (184). Locating the trickster figure in the badman is important because it speaks to the historical relevance of subversiveness in African American culture and potential of hip-hop masculinity serving as a space for counter culture in African American communities. Roberts also asserts that, “In folklore, the badman emerged as an outlaw folk hero whose characteristic actions offered a model of behavior for dealing with the power of whites under the law that created conditions threatening to the values of the black community from both within and without” (215). Thus, when in The Boondocks Riley becomes consumed by the hypermasculine, hetero-normative speech patterns of hip-hop his actions in part acknowledge that to be queered, or even question, would stifle his ability to represent a street denizen that resists the cultures of respectability and whiteness. The implications to queering the gangsta/thug are explored in McGruder’s first and second seasons with the episodes focusing on a fictive-gay rapper Gangstalicious.

Although the historicity of the badman figure, as Roberts so succinctly lays out, is dominated with men whose sexuality becomes a facet of their both outlawed and heroic presentations, LaMonda Stallings demonstrates the queer possibilities of this trope within

African American cultural production. She writes, “The use of illegal Black bodies and outlaw culture in Black folk and oral aesthetics and figures forms a queer collective consciousness” (152). Here, Stallings thinks through the deviance and illegality as a way that opens this folk hero to a queer potential that could have afforded McGruder an alternative way of framing Gangstalicious. Unfortunately, like the visible black

115 nationalists before him, McGruder chooses to operate within a heteronormative space that would like to understand itself as transgressing against the culture of respectability but is only truly able to do so in very limiting ways. Thus, his queer badman in The Boondocks is a disgusting rapper.

McGruder’s preoccupation with supporting a homophobic epistemology in his

SCR framework comes from the need to perform disgust publicly. Since Charles

Darwin’s initial foray into the politics of disgust, the field of psychology has become enamored with the social, cultural, and political implications of disgust in building community and citizenship. I depart from this larger conversation of disgust and the impact that it has to focus on the cultural currency of disgust for marginalized people.

Here I engage William Ian Miller’s assertion that “Disgust seems intimately connected to the creation of culture…if you were casually to enumerate the norms and values, aesthetic and moral, whose breach prompts disgust, you would see just how crucial the emotion is to keeping us in line and minimally presentable” (18).

Central to Johnson’s articulation of “Manifest Faggotry,” a concept that he borrows from Marlon Riggs, are the cultural and self-definition purposes that prominent black leaders and popular culture direct the performativity of disgust. An exploration of disgust is thus necessary to better understand the complexities of a homophobic epistemology served in the elisions made by McGruder and other cultural arbiters as they advance, or are on some level interested in, the socio-political equality of Black

Americans. Much of what I will say here is similar to my exploration of shame and the contemporary re-imagining of the Uncle Tom figure in a previous chapter. I see both

116 shame and disgust as instrumental emotions meant to discipline individuals into adopting a cultural sensibility in line with the whole.

Most black Americans embrace black contemporary cultural production that follows a racial progress/uplift iconography that presents with visceral disgust those who do not conform to the main image. Indeed, for a large group of African Americans the insistence upon the culture of respectability is inextricably tied to Johnson’s correlation of effeminacy and ineffectuality. Cathy Cohen understands this investment in respectability as a fear of an “internal undermining of black mobility by other black people is the intensified secondary marginalization of those in black communities thought to compromise the status of those with greater access” (115). The wholesale adoption of racial uplift ideals mandates that in order for queer bodies to participate in black resistance to white hegemony they have to adopt a normative presentation.

Season 1 episode 6 titled “The Story of Gangstalicious” tells the story of how

Gangstalicious is shot and also of the longstanding rap feud that he has with southern rapper, Eat Dirt. Evoking the East verse West rap feud of the 90s led by the falling out of

Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, the episode sets the northern Gangstalicious against the southern rapper Eat Dirt. Gangstalicious, Riley’s favorite rapper, represents a brand of gangster rap that was popular in the late 90s and early 2000s and associated with Fifty

Cents and others. The episode is pulled from a March 14, 2005 comic strip that has

McGruder making light of a “beef,” or verbal altercation, between rappers Fifty Cents and The Game. In the episode, Gangstalicious does a show in Woodcrest and gets shot and hospitalized. Riley goes to visit him and, and when the people who originally tried to

117 kill Gangstalicious return to finish the job, he and Riley ran away. It turns out that the shooting is not the product of a rap “beef,” but of Gangstalicious’s being unfaithful to his boyfriend. The episode ends with the two miraculously getting away.

Throughout the episode, Gangstalicious is represented as the embodiment of an early 2000s hip-hop moment of rap beefs and violent award shows. The initial parts of the episode functions as more of a foray into the unintelligibility of rap disputes and aesthetics. McGruder points a condescending eye towards specific aspect of hip-hop as he lays bare the performativity of hip-hop personas. Unfortunately, McGruder’s attempt to exaggerate and render absurd the distinction between the public performance of hip- hop stars and the actual lives they live is by making a gangsta rapper queer, as if to say that the two are counter-intuitive or that a gangsta rapper cannot be gay. Within this framework the proverbial “hardness” of gangsta rap is bound to compulsory, and often violent, hetero-normativity that suggests that the sexual conquests of a man demonstrate how masculine he is. The juxtaposition of hard and soft is present in the name that

McGruder gives the titled character. Gangstalicious’s name can be understood as him being delicious with clear queer investments.

The kiss at the end of this episode between Gangstalicious and his assailant/ex- boyfriend, Lincoln, is depicted as forced, disgusting and unromantic. At the end of the episode, Gangstalicious is stripped down, a fairly commonplace visual of black-on-black violence in hip-hop, and kissed by Lincoln.

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Figure 3. Boondocks: Kissing Gangstalicious

The kiss is a long passionate one, with Lincoln holding the back of Gangstalicious’s neck. However, it lacks sensuality and pleasure because Gangstalicious doesn’t reciprocate the emotions of the moment by keeping his eyes opened and the kiss ends with a long, slimy, strand of saliva connecting their two mouths together after Lincoln has pulled away. Furthermore, Riley spitting in disgust and Gangstalicious’s single

“Thuggin’ Love” are the only sounds heard while the two are kissing. The correlation between kissing and the outward performance of Riley’s disgust is important in the relationship that it has to orality and the way that it prompts a shared feeling of disgust amongst McGruder’s audience.

The kiss being a site of disgust, the song “Thuggin’ Love” queers the song the audience has heard throughout the episode and alludes to a queer eroticism and anality.

119 Sara Ahmed speaks to the relationship between McGruder’s performing disgust for his audience and the rejection of vulnerability as a viable model of resistance when she writes, “So the very project of survival requires we take something other into our bodies.

Survival makes us vulnerable in that it requires we let what is ‘not us’ in; to survive we open ourselves up, and we keep the orifices of the body open” (83). While Ahmed, doesn’t explicitly demonstrate how this focus on orifices translates to the treatment of queer bodies in a larger American imaginary that relies heavily on a homophobic epistemology, her words, here, demonstrate how the negotiation of disgust has become central in contemporary queer theory exploration of shame and abjection.19 Ahmed follows up this conversation of disgust and vulnerability by asserting: “Given the fact that the one who is disgusted is the one who feels disgust, then the position of ‘aboveness’ is maintained only at the cost of a certain vulnerability, as an openness to being affected by those who are felt to be below” (89). If we agree with Ahmed’s assertion that the performance of disgust, in some ways, makes the subject vulnerable to a shift in the power dynamic due to their proximity with the bodies and objects that made them feel disgust, we can see how McGruder’s emphasis here on representing homoeroticism as disgusting not only renders those bodies and subjectivities vulnerable and also opens up the overarching homophobic epistemology to a type of vulnerability as well. Thus, in a roughly five second clip McGruder is able to render queer intimacy both disgusting and absurd as he outs Gangstalicious. It is important to note as well, that McGruder does this by privileging Riley’s perspective and not Huey’s, the cartoon’s moral compass. Huey’s

19 Here, I am referring specifically to the work of Kathryn Stockton and Darieck Scott and their exploration of shame and abjection as emotive responses to queer subjects 120 silence, as I will explain more thoroughly later, is unable to critique or add a layer of criticality that would supplement Riley’s homophobia.

While the episode unintentionally points to the performance of closeted queer bodies in a society that assumes the default is heterosexuality, it fails to contemplate the way that all hip-hop masculinities are queered through a historical and cultural matrix of the American imaginary that renders black male sexuality as inherently deviant.

Throughout the show’s three seasons, McGruder focused on various aspects of black male sexuality and while some episodes reproduce what Angela Davis refers to as the myth of the black rapist, none of them fully embrace or imagine the possibility of queer love. Often times the representations of black sexuality sought to minimize the impact of homosocial spaces and moments of homoeroticism; like in the episode titled “The Health

Inspector” where the threat of being raped by an absurdly large penis by black inmates fuels the laughter and plot. However, it is the follow up episode in season two of “The

Story of Gangstalicious” that fully realizes the homophobic epistemology that is imbricated in McGruder’s continued obsession with exorcising the black male queer body from hip hop.

The second part of “The Story of Gangstalicious” aired during the second season as episode 15, and like the first episode it began with a preface about the fictitiousness of the rappers and the regions they represent, in a way that conveyed McGruder’s own caveat about the episode: “the following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual

Gay-Ass rappers is coincidental” (:05). McGruder’s preface here is important to the narrative landscape of the show. It primarily operates as an extra-diegetic space where

121 McGruder breaks the fourth wall of the television show to speak directly to his audience—although it is important to note that he does not read the statement, it is put on the screen as his own personal thoughts and words. Here, McGruder uses the vernacular of hip-hop to assuage his ridicule in the first episode and to assert from the outset a homophobic epistemology that he fully supports. Furthermore, unlike the preface he gives in the initial episode, McGruder does not seem overly concerned about being approached and threatened by his audience, and his use of queer-antagonistic language,

“gay-ass,” demonstrates that he either assumes that his audience is all heterosexual or that he is only interested in speaking to those who are. Regardless, McGruder makes his personal politics very clear at the beginning of the episode, in a way that functions as a warning for some of his viewership.

McGruder spends the bulk of the episode queering the landscape of the hetero- patriarchal diegetic space in Boondocks. As evidenced by his preface, this queering is not meant to disrupt the compulsory heterosexuality that the television show and comic strip always promote, but to serve as a scapegoat for the problems within today’s hip-hop and youth of color. He makes this scapegoating clear when he begins the episode with

Gangstalicious’s new music video for his single “ Homies over Hoes” where the lyrics and music video maintain a queer undercurrent and the refrain in the chorus is “do the homies.” The song uses the beat from D4L’s 2005 hit “Laffy Taffy,” a chart topping song about women shaking their buttocks for men. Conversely, Gangstalicious’s music video creates a hyper-masculine dance of chest bumping while the song rejects the presence of women in order to create and maintain homosocial spaces. Here, McGruder revitalizes a

122 portrayal of gay men as inadvertently misogynistic in their competition with women, and specifically women of color, for black men. The misogyny that Gangstalicious uses in the song anchors the poor treatment of men of color throughout the episode as the song becomes popular (even when female characters are not depicted, most Boondocks episodes include moments of misogyny thinly veiled as a commitment to a hip-hop aesthetic). Embedded in Gangstalicious’s “Homies over Hoes” is the sentiment that even a queer hip-hop will find women of color unnecessary. Interestingly, the emphasis on men during the videos removes the hypervisibility of the video vixen. Thus, the rampant misogyny generally attributed to hip-hop in these spaces is usurped by “Homies over

Hoes” to service homophobia.

The song ends with a screenshot of Huey’s face. Huey’s befuddled look arguably conveys a sentiment of disgust and disbelief of the queering of hip-hop, and I would add here, the diegetic space of the Boondocks, distances the show’s use of SCR from

Gangstalicious’ concept of hip-hop. His look and the theme song that follows serve as a corrective model of hip-hop masculinities when the fight sequences and radicalism of

Asheru’s song is juxtaposed to the queer space of “Homies over Hoes.” As the video ends with Huey’s face suggesting befuddlement, the show’s intro song comes on as a sort of corrective model of hip-hop based on a compulsory heteronormativity that is intended to counter the queer space that Gangstalicious creates with his song. McGruder’s opening preface and Huey’s face followed by the theme song adequately segment the queer space of the music video, and demonstrates that it will be used as a way to draw the boundaries of “normative” black life.

123 McGruder’s preoccupation with locating and exorcising a gay black masculine presence in hip-hop throughout this episode echoes E. Patrick Johnson’s sentiment of

“Manifest Faggotry,” or the obsession with the queer Other as a form of loss and as a way to create cultural boundaries: “their performances exemplify the complex process through which black male heterosexuality conceals its reliance on the black effeminate homosexual for its status” (74). Here, McGruder functions in the same capacity as

Eldridge Cleaver, “Men on…” from In Living Color, Amiri Baraka, and others that

Johnson asserts speak for and about blackness and maintain a preoccupation with the black queer Other. This preoccupation and obsessive hatred acknowledges the congruence between what Johnson locates as the black effeminate homosexual and the assumption that this would render the black male body vulnerable. The obsession with vulnerability and these queer bodies is the product of queerness being associated in dominant narratives with whiteness and femininity in problematic ways that preclude black gay men—and all queer people of color—from issues of visibility, access, and safety. It also precludes these black arbiters/vanguards from imagining the potentiality of the queer bodies to be agents of change. These are Johnson’s words,

The representation of effeminate homosexuality as disempowering is at

the heart of the politics of hegemonic blackness. For to be ineffectual is

the most damaging thing one can be in the fight against oppression.

Insofar as ineffectiveness is problematically sutured to femininity and

homosexuality with a black cultural politic that privileges race over other

categories of oppression, it follows that the subjects accorded these

124 attributes would be marginalized and excluded from the boundaries of

blackness. (51)

For McGruder, part of the work early on in the episode is to “reduce”/demonstrate how a queer presence in hip-hop correlates to an effeminate homosexuality that would trouble the “hardness” of hip-hop. McGruder is able to achieve this most successfully throughout the episode with Gangstalicious’s new line of clothing.

McGruder makes Gangstalicious most effeminate and thus ineffectual through his clothing line, an intersection between a queer fashion culture and the capitalist consumption of hip-hop culture. McGruder exaggerates Gangstalicious’s sexuality and fashion sensibility by using reductio ad absurdum to make a queer hip-hop aesthetic seem unviable, and endemic in today’s hip-hop, as if it were some kind of disease. For instance, there is a moment when Gangstalicious is showing his new clothing line on the

Regis and Kelly show. The line featured an extra long white tee down to the ankles with a rectangular cut around the buttocks and was explained by Gangstalicious as a quick way to get to your firearm. Another outfit is modeled with a man wearing a halter top, skirt, and pearl necklace. The dialogue around this last outfit focused solely on the pearl necklace as a double entendre for a man ejaculating on someone’s chest and didn’t mention the halter-top and skirt. This scene becomes antagonistic because it suggests that queer bodies are sexual deviants because of their insatiable sexual appetite, and that this deviance would create a clothing line that would hyper-sexualize a hip-hop culture and aesthetic for a queer gaze. McGruder’s use of absurdity to create a homoerotic fashion sense in hip-hop rejects the possibility of there already being a homoeroticism in hip-hop

125 that could queer the iconography of the culture. However, the homosociality and often- shirtless men that stand erect on the cover of magazines and albums create in themselves a homoerotic gaze that neither threatens hip-hop as a whole nor mandates exposed buttocks and pearled necklaces to queer these spaces. In addition, this scene also suggests that there is little distinction between gender presentation and sexuality.

Riley has a mental and physical transformation the longer he wears clothes from

Gangstalicious clothing line and listens to his music. This transformation is emblematic of the ways that McGruder feels a queer presence in hip-hop would devastatingly queer the youth. Riley, being the more impressionable of the two brothers, responds without reflection to the changes in the hip-hop landscape that Gangstalicious is creating mainly by adopting stereotypical attributes of gay culture. Riley turns more effeminate throughout the episode, wearing the skirt and halter-top from Gangstalicious’s line.

Figure 4. Boondocks: Riley’s Gear

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He is seen polishing his toenails and becoming excited about shopping, while ignoring the advances of a young woman. While Riley is generally perceived as misguided and in need of mentorship from the more astute Huey, he is depicted throughout the episode as even more absurdly misled. Furthermore his adoption of what is essentially a drag performance within the epistemological framework of homophobia shifts the conversation from Riley needing help to being beyond help. In fact, the last hope that his grandfather has in “straightening” out Riley is A Pimp Named Slickback, a reoccurring character whose every word is laced with misogyny and homophobia. Thus, the solution is framed as a surefire return to misogyny and compulsory hetero-patriarchy. It is in this patriarchal economy of “pimping” that Riley is taught how to be a man. Pimp culture, it ought to be noted, has long stood as a repository for the misogyny and sexual violence in hip-hop.

Viewed against how his usual centrality serves as a moral compass that keeps the folly in check as McGruder exploits cheap laughter, Huey’s silence is deafening throughout this episode. Furthermore, much of the Boondocks potential as a satirical black cultural production arises out of this cheap laughter and the introspection that Huey then prompts amongst the viewership. However, with Huey being silent throughout much of the episode and only ever talking to exploit his grandfather’s fears about Riley in order to try and get his own room, demonstrates the true failings of SCR and the true homophobic epistemology that the McGruder gains cultural capital from throughout this episode. Huey exploiting his grandfather’s fears of Riley’s assumed homosexuality also

127 makes Huey complicit in the homophobic space that McGruder is creating. After saying he needs his own room and bathroom, Huey looks at the screen, intending to break the fourth wall, with a shrug that conveys his apathy in being complicit in his grandfather’s gay panic.

Figure 5. Boondocks: Huey’s Silence

Their grandfather’s fears are based in an understanding that the insatiability of queer sexuality would put Huey at risk of incest and rape if he continues to share a room with his brother. However, there does seem to be brief moments of introspection where Huey sarcastically engages his grandfather’s fear that the boys will need different rooms because he now thinks that Riley is gay, and Huey playfully adds yes I think I will need my own bathroom, too. At one point, Huey says, “that’s very sensitive of you” as Riley explains his continued relationship with Gangstalicious. As Huey begins to question

128 Gangstalicious’s sexual preferences, Riley grows visibly uncomfortable, and Huey redirects his queer-antagonism from Gangstalicious to Riley.

The episode then begins to shift focus on Robert Freeman as he tries to come to terms with Riley’s presumed queerness. Huey also explains later in the episode that liking a gay artist’s work does not make the fan gay and draws similarity to his own appreciation of Elton John’s music. However, this brief moment of criticality and openness to gay subjects is so short and counter-intuitive to the logic that the rest of the episode created that it in no way shifts the political scope and emphasis on heteropatriarchy that it ostensibly wants to. Furthermore, the attempt for the show to seem more open-minded towards issues pertaining the to LGBTQA and the queerness of hip-hop only comes after Robert Freeman wrestles with his own homophobia; thus making the show want to distance its own ideological stances from that of the antiquated grandfather.

Throughout the episode there are two short segments that function as forays into a queer presence in hip-hop. These segments are featured and narrated by fictitious rappers

MC Booty B and Homo D. These segments within the broader narrative landscape of the episode don’t make sense as they function more like informative pieces that would be highlighted during a documentary about hip-hop, which the episode is not. These two moments demonstrate an awareness of the homosociality and homoeroticism in hip-hop culture; however, the two rappers are again made ineffectual throughout their effeminacy, most notably through their lisp that is often associated with being gay, that it discounts their perspective.

129 Furthermore, the inclusion of some of hip-hop’s most notable rappers/personalities like Mos Def, Snoop Dogg, Fatman Scoop, and Busta Rhymes for different characters’ voices in this episode suggests that the political and ideological scope of the show represents more than just the musings of Aaron McGruder. Indeed, when asked in the 2006 documentary Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes about the homophobia in hip-hop Busta Rhymes responded “I can’t partake in that conversation,” and continued “With all due respect, I ain’t trying to offend nobody…what I represent culturally doesn’t condone [homosexuality] whatsoever.” Although it seems like Busta

Rhymes has undergone a change in his view of a queer presence in hip-hop, as most recently demonstrated with his comments about Frank Ocean, a singer/ rapper who in

2012 announced that he is bisexual, his initial comments speak to an enduring sentiment that rigidly locates hip-hop’s potential to resist hegemonic forces and articulate positions of those who live on the margin within a compulsory and often violent heteropatriarchy that equates queer bodies with women and women with vulnerability. Moreover, it is

Mos Def who acts as Gangstalicious within these episodes. Mos Def is the most conscious of the aforementioned rappers and his role in voicing Gangstalicious is not coincidental. The choice to have Mos Def serve as the voice for Gangstalicious throughout the episodes brings his star power into play and reiterates in an extra-digetical space that SCR is complicit in advancing a homophobic epistemology in hip-hop culture and masculinities. The episode ends with Gangstalicious going to the house of

Thugnificent, another re-occuring rapper, in order to record a remix for “Homies over

Hoes.” However when Thugnificient and his crew hear that Gangstalicious has been

130 outed as gay they pretend that no one is at home—thus ensuring that Gangstalicious will be pushed out of hip-hop.

The cultural logic of this episode, and the show more broadly, is emblematic of a larger hip-hop culture that is partially responsible for the creation of, and preoccupation with, the “down low brother” phenomenon. Central to the fear-mongering around queer bodies and the way they are deemed disgusting is the idea that closeted homosexuality is detrimental to hip-hop communities. Although the reference to these men as “brothers” suggests that there is still a way that they are embraced by Black America, these closeted gay black men are often scapegoated as the more contemporary effeminate black gay man in that they are deemed ineffectual and detrimental to black family life. The myth of the down low brother is that closeted black gay men that don’t define themselves as gay will have sex with men and go back to sleep with their wives or female partners. There is nothing new about closeted queer bodies and the way they negotiate living in overwhelmingly heteronormative spaces. That is why the process of outing in black hip- hop communities is deemed, by some, necessary, with the understanding that it is thought to protect the people against the AIDS epidemic. In Structural Intimacies, Sonja

MacKenzie acknowledges that the treatment of closeted black gay men in a society that dictates black hyper-masculine subjects as the norm, when she writes: “The down low reflects power and injustice wrought upon and reproduced within Black communities through the historical and persistent workings of structural inequalities and cultural meanings played out through the production of sexual bodies…the down low has become a terrain upon which racism, gender, and homophobia become played out within Black

131 communities” (44). This sexual, black hegemony is present in McGruder’s treatment of queer subjectivities, especially as he takes issue with the intersection of hip-hop bodies and queer bodies.

In “Pause,” McGruder satirizes Perry through his character Winston Jerome and

Winston’s female character Ma Dukes in the place of Madea. McGruder’s Boondocks generally chronicles the adventures of two young African American boys Huey and

Riley, whose grandfather, Robert Freeman, moves them from a Black urban environment to a virtually all white suburb, Woodcrest. In “Pause,” Robert tries to pursue his life long dream of becoming an actor, and sees Winston Jerome’s acting audition as the perfect opportunity to achieve this goal. Upon getting the job, he realizes that he will have to cut all ties to his family and push the boundaries of his own heterosexuality as he plays Ma

Duke’s love interest.

The episode’s attention to “pause” and “no homo” happens immediately when

Riley feels like his grandfather has said something that someone could misinterpret as homoerotic. After watching an excerpt from a Winston Jerome play, and explaining to

Huey that he is pursuing an acting career Robert says, “I’m going to really let him have it. Show him my stuff. Give that man everything I’ve got” (2:51-2:56). Immediately,

Riley tries to set his grandfather “straight” and explain the spoken faux pas he has just made. When Robert seems resistant or unable to understand Riley’s position, Riley responds, “If it sound gay, it’s gay” (3:11). The simplicity behind Riley’s reasoning and the threat of his grandson calling him “a homo” frustrates him. Robert, who McGruder repeatedly characterizes as a failed ladies man, is constantly seeking the companionship

132 of younger women, so when he feels threatened by his grandson it brings up these failings. More importantly, the threat of being perceived as gay also suggests that part of his power as the patriarch of the house is situated within his claims to heterosexuality, and he does not want to seem weak to his grandchildren. This fear ofweakness serves as the impetus for Robert’s response of “I am going to homo your ass if you don’t stop saying ‘pause’” (3:23). The threat of violence serves as a safe recourse for Robert who is a firm discipliner in the house. The scene ends with Riley’s retort “pause” as both a way to draw attention to what his grandfather has just said and to redirect his grandfather’s threat of violence.

Although McGruder allows Riley to “win” the argument with his grandfather, the viewer at home realizes that this moment was more a critique of Riley’s views than

Robert’s refusal to accept change. Therefore, by having this lesson on street propriety come from the unreliable, unrelenting Riley, McGruder asks his audience to question the sincerity of his position and the hip-hop generation he represents.

However, McGruder’s non-accusatory critique of the phrases is partially undone later in the episode when the boys go to “save” their grandfather from Winston’s compound and Robert explains why he is going to stay, saying “You remember that TV show fear factor when they made people eat goat rectums and monkey testicles whatever else to win the big prize? Well, this is my Fear Factor and Ma Dukes is my monkey testicle and I really want the big prize even if it means kissing a man. No Homo” (18:40-

18:55). Robert’s saying “no homo” at this moment in the episode merges the potential queering of his big prize for kissing a man and Winston’s actual homoerotic desire in a

133 way that supports the use of the phrase. Although Riley’s response brings back an air of absurdity when he says, “Thank you for saying no homo, granddad. That really meant a lot to me, no homo” (19:13-19:20). However, the absurdity of Riley’s “no homo” after expressing his feelings to his grandfather and giving him a hug shows that these phrases restrict the expression of emotions amongst men.

Rappers often try to stake their abilities with homoerotic rhetoric that they desexualize and make homophobic through the use of “no homo.” Most scholars are in agreement that “no homo” and its antecedent “pause” are inherently homophobic in the way rappers who use these phrases tend to other non-normative sexualities in the construction of their masculinity. Professor and public intellectual Marc Lamont Hill was one of the first to bring attention to the issues embedded in hip-hop’s obsession with the term. He writes on his website, “In some ways, 'no homo' is part of a long tradition of ghetto-language games that evince the quick wit and linguistic sophistication of black and brown people… Still, despite its intellectual and comedic richness, the 'no homo' fad spotlights our troubling relationship with gay identities” (6).

Although responses like Hill’s make up the majority of scholars who have knowledge of its use and its implications, there are others like scholar Joshua Brown that complicate that position. In his article simply titled “No Homo,” Brown states that the phrase “‘no homo’ serves as a defense to an interlocutor’s presumed attack on one’s masculinity. By using ‘no homo,’ one is preempting the verbal strike” (301). In other words, Brown understands the verbal play as a way to dissuade the attack of “your gay.”

However, implied in the attack and the subsequent defense of the insensitive “that’s so

134 gay,” which has similarly been publicly criticized by actors and singers alike,20 is that being attacked as gay both questions these rappers claim to black masculinity and therefore their legitimacy amongst their fans and their peers. In other words, as Scholar

Nebeu Shimeles suggests “what is embedded within this homophobic hip-hop discourse, the fierce institution of heteronormative … artists both incessantly reaffirm their heterosexuality through lyrical boasts of sexual promiscuity and deny all possibility of an acceptable erotic encounter between artists of the same gender” (9). Thus the rhetorical play on words, is one that uses charged homoerotic discourse with a disregard for gays because of an assumed straightness amongst the verbal jousters.

However, in an episode like “Pause” what becomes didactic instruction for the viewer is not the desire to critique the phrases “pause” and “no homo” but the show’s participation in the ritualistic, homophobic practice of outing people. In hip-hop, the practice of outing serves as the ultimate way of policing black masculinities in hip-hop by suggesting that someone’s claims or proximity to gay romance or same sex love negates their masculinity and any claims they have to being relevant as a rapper (Hill 384). Marc

Lamont Hill writes of this phenomenon, “In many instances, lyrical outings are performed merely in order to gain the upper hand in a rap battle, rather than to create genuine speculation about another person’s sexual identity. Under such circumstances, the artist’s outing rhetoric is relatively superficial, playful, and largely unpersuasive”

(388). In The Boondocks, a similar dynamic is at play where McGruder is using his

20 Both Hilary Duff and Wanda Sykes have spoken on behalf of the “That’s So Gay Campaign” for Think Before you Speak. Similarly, Grant Hill has spoken up for the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and the Ad Council on a similar campaign. 135 outing of Perry as way to police Perry’s proximity to hip-hop. McGruder tries to “out”

Perry in three ways: by citing his misuse of hip-hop bodies, by citing his misuse of religion, and by his sexuality.

The use of disgust with the figure of the badman/ thug in Aaron McGruder’s

Boondocks demonstrates the refusal to embrace vulnerability as a viable epistemology that would counter black hegemonic masculinities that define themselves against vulnerability. However, in refusing the possibilities of vulnerability by engaging a more nuanced depiction of queer bodies and subjectivities, especially, as it pertains to a hip- hop aesthetic and hip-hop masculinities McGruder illustrates what I will here ague is the anachronistic fear that vulnerable black masculinities somehow supports a white supremacy heteropatriarchy when in fact, the rejection of vulnerability reproduces the patriarchal and paternalistic formations of white hegemonic masculinities. Furthermore, until socially conscious rap can articulate a queer epistemology that isn’t afraid of being called gay, nothing in hip-hop will change. In refusing, vulnerability and in fearing the association with effeminate black gay men, the moral panic and obsession with down low black men, McGruder inadvertently demonstrates how vulnerable these men feel they are in a hip-hop space that gives cultural currency addicted to hardness and compulsory heterosexuality is questioned.

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5. Conclusion

Throughout this project I have focused on the use of affect and caricature in representations of black masculinities in satire, especially on how satirists imagine vulnerable black men who don’t rely on patriarchy and paternalism as ways to create their masculine performance. The vulnerability of these black male characters is what is made most bare through the use of absurdity, parody, and irony. I have argued that notwithstanding their unresolved vulnerability, the transgressive, boundary disrupting import of black manhood represented by the men discussed is left untouched. The textual and visual explorations of the characters’ sincerely felt emotions do not merely divert audiences from wit and humor but endorse masculine vulnerability. By privileging “soft” men susceptible to unprovoked attacks creates a new model of black masculine practice in the texts studied.

In this work I have demonstrated how the psychology of emotions is paired with masculine characterizations that are normalized throughout satirical works. Within these pages, I have illustrated how the feelings of disgust, shame, hope, and submissiveness coupled with a character’s interiority exemplifies for the reader more nuanced masculinities that are highly self-reflexive and are highly self-effacing. Thus, late 20th century and early 21st century satires succeed in performing vulnerable masculinities through their use of emotions.

137 I have shown how African American satirists evoke racial caricatures to create psychologically emotional characters that try to understand their proximity to historical legacies of racism and the present day shifting American landscape. Within this work, I focused on the significance of the Sambo, Uncle Tom, Badman, and Buck for African

American satirists to engender the specific historical narratives of vulnerability to help reimagine black masculinities.

This project has also been equally attentive to the representation of blackness and race because the performance of racial authenticity is inextricably bound to issues of masculine performance. We see in the Sambo and Uncle Tom chapter, for instance, how disrupting the reader’s notions of blackness also destabilizes the masculinist presence in discourses of black racial authenticity. The alternative representations of black masculinities analyzed refute racist jokes and reaffirm the centrality of subversiveness in the black humor tradition.

This project did not seek to define satire or operate as a study interested in primarily exploring the underpinnings of the tradition of African American satire. By interrogating the psychological effects of the characters, the telos of this project is interested in how the texts complicate the reader’s notions of black masculinities.

Throughout this work, I oscillate from literary to visual satirical texts to illustrate the pervasiveness of the psychology of emotions among various forms. In doing so, this project is less concerned with generic form than it is with the cultural significance of using satire as a tool to re-conceptualize black masculinities.

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