Examining Black Canadian Maleness in the Era of Black Lives Matter
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“Because it’s different when you cross that border”: Examining Black Canadian Maleness in the Era of Black Lives Matter by MICHELLE DEBIQUE A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Social and Applied Sciences in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts In Intercultural and International Communication Royal Roads University Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Supervisor: Dr. David Black July 2016 MICHELLE DEBIQUE, 2016 COMMITTEE APPROVAL The members of Michelle DeBique’s Thesis Committee certify that they have read the thesis titled “Because it’s different when you cross that border”: Examining Black Canadian Maleness in the Era of Black Lives Matter and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the thesis requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Intercultural and International Communication: Dr. Julia Jahansoozi, Professor [signature on file] School of Communication & Culture Royal Roads University Final approval and acceptance of this thesis is contingent upon submission of the final copy of the thesis to Royal Roads University. The thesis supervisor confirms to have read this thesis and recommends that it be accepted as fulfilling the thesis requirements: Dr. David Black, Professor [signature on file] School of Communication & Culture Royal Roads University 1 Creative Commons Statement This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc- sa/2.5/ca/. Some material in this work is not being made available under the terms of this licence: Third-Party material that is being used under fair dealing or with permission. Any photographs where individuals are easily identifiable. 2 Abstract The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement has brought greater salience to the conceptualization of Black maleness and inspired a broader rethinking of Black maleness in relation to the North American society in general. Discussions regarding Canadian Blackness are often hampered by the country’s proximity to and influence from the United States, often neglectful in acknowledging the specific components of each country that make their respective cultures unique. Ethnographic research on a cross-section of Canadian Black men explores the manner with which race and gender intersect and illuminate the contradictions of social progress while also revealing the marked disconnection between the constructs of masculinity imposed upon these men externally by the wider white-majority society and their own individual interpretations of masculinity. This fresh consideration of the longstanding issue that is the representation, understanding, and treatment of Black men albeit in a Canadian milieu unearths the need to cultivate a new Black masculinity, one that allows Black men to be the architects of their identities as opposed to inhabitants of a social structure and is responsive to what it means to be a Black male in Canada. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: Introduction……………………………………………………5 CHAPTER 2: Literature Review……………………………………………..10 The History of Immigration in Canada and the Afro-Caribbean Diaspora in Toronto………………………………………………………………….12 Black Lives Matter--Toronto..………………………………………….17 Black Masculinity and Conceptions of Self-Identity…………………...20 Theoretical Overview…………………………………………………...21 CHAPTER 3: The Study……………………………………………...............23 Methodology……………………....……………………………………23 Data Collection………………………………………………………….24 Personal Background and Limitations…………………………………..26 CHAPTER 4: Research Findings……………………………………………..29 Perceptions of Masculinity……………………………………………...29 Self-Identification and Notions of Nationality………………………….38 Constructs of Fear and Protection ………..…………………………….41 CHAPTER 5: Conclusion……………………………………………………..44 Summary and Recommendations……………………………………….44 References………………………………………………………………48 4 Examining Black Canadian Maleness in the Era of Black Lives Matter Introduction: Society has long been preoccupied with social categories. That is, it has long been fixated on finding ways to organize both human diversity and complexity into a knowable taxonomy that can be administered by government, stratified by capital, represented in media, and experienced as if real in everyday life. In many ways, these categories, with a particular emphasis on their constructed nature, have been developed to inform the way in which we understand the world we live in and perceive the people we live in the world with. For example, social science and even public opinion more broadly have come to see gender as a construct, and as something that should be understood as being about far more than just one’s genitalia. Viewing dimensions of human identity as socially constructed categories, often with a significant performative element, has freed our understanding of who people are and how they are organized from unwanted essentialism (i.e., the habit of viewing identity as the product of ahistorical “essences” that statically determine what it means to be a particular gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.), and elevated our consciousness of the human condition in general. However and despite these gains, we have learned that many of the defining categories we both use ourselves and are defined within have often been developed using problematic logic and are subject to prejudices that seem to derive from an earlier and more regressive time. While genuine progress has been achieved in Western society as this relates to women, LGBT people, and those with disabilities, it’s in the realm of race—perhaps our most vexatious and stubborn category--where attitudes still seem attached to an earlier and on bad days even antebellum time. In particular, the anachronistic character of race falls as a burden on young Black men, who still 5 experience vilification in popular culture, suspicion in everyday life, and undue persecution in the criminal justice system to a degree that is arguably greater, with a character that is more angry, frightened and forceful, and in a manner that is more clearly necessary to the status quo than that experienced by young Black women. That is to say, when racial and gender bias intersect, as they do with young Black men, the varying speeds with which social progress touches on the elements of identity and demographic groups differentially is revealed, and a true social contradiction is illuminated. The case of young Black men, as a special case and point of view into such intersections, demonstrates that social progress is at best conditional and uneven in its reach, and it is to this much-aggrieved and salient part of the Black community that this paper gives special attention. Not since the onset of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s or the provocative beginnings of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s has society been as gripped by issues involving the Black community as it is today. Society has become particularly transfixed by the Black community’s increased mobilization across North America. At the forefront of discussions regarding this trend is “Black Lives Matter.” Once best known as a widely-circulated hashtag, Black Lives Matter now exists as a “bona fide political organization” (Garber, 2015). Organizers of the movement have been reluctant to create an agenda with a prioritized list of issues they intend to address, an openness which for many is seen as one of its greatest strengths. Nonetheless, Black Lives Matter’s most widely-recognized areas of focus have been the problematic social construction of the Black male identity (Benjamin, Constantine, Richardson, & Wilson, 1998; Carol & Frances, 2006; Curtis-Boles & Roberts-Douglass, 2013; Davis & Hunter, 1994; Greif, Hrabowski & Maton, 1998; Higgins, 2010, hooks, 2004; Hopkinson & 6 Moore, 2006; Macleod & Schneiderman, 1994), and the desire to subvert what has been described as the “institutional decimation of Black males” (Davis & Hunter, 1994). The tragic and untimely death of Trayvon Martin, a teenaged Black male fatally shot during an altercation in Florida with a neighborhood vigilante, as well as several high-profile cases (Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner in New York City, among others), served to spur the unrest within the Black community that inspired Black Lives Matter (Blow, 2015; Craen & Wing, 2015; Hutchinson, 2015; Marino, 2015; Stuckley, 2015; Tatum, 2015). In looking at the movement through the lens of Black maleness specifically, we see a very specific contradiction. Society aims to tell us that gender should not determine the trajectory of your life—gender should not be destiny--and that maleness in a world long dominated by men is associated with numerous privileges (Bowleg, Malebranche, Teti, Tschann, 2013, p.26). However, when applying this notion to Black men, we recognize that their maleness makes them increasingly susceptible to discrimination, prejudice and social interactions that are steeped in tension, conflict and brutality—factors leading to encounters between society and Black masculinity that are sometimes fatal. The United States has certainly been at the forefront of these discussions and also is home to the Black Lives Matter movement. However, in the wake of several problematic incidents involving Black men and law enforcement officials in Toronto, notably the shooting deaths of Andrew Loku and Jermaine Carby during what should have been routine police responses, it is no wonder that this Canadian city serves as the location