RACE, SEX, and SUSPICION: the Myth of the Black Male

RACE, SEX, AND SUSPICION: The Myth of the Black Male D. Marvin Jones PRAEGER RACE, SEX, AND SUSPICION RACE, SEX, AND SUSPICION The Myth of the Black Male D. Marvin Jones Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jones, D. Marvin. Race, sex, and suspicion : the myth of the Black male / D. Marvin Jones. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–275–97462–6 (alk. paper) 1. African American men. I. Title E185.86 .J6515 2005 305.38’896076-dc22 2004017782 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2005 by D. Marvin Jones All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2004017782 ISBN: 0–275–97462–6 First published in 2005 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10987654321 Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 1. The Blessings of History 15 2. Gangs of New York: The Story of the Jogger Trial 41 3. What’s My Name? The Politics of Reception and the Politics of Rap 55 4. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner 71 5. Will You Let the Tiger Loose? The Rhetoric of Race in American Criminal Trials 87 6. Crimes of Identity: the Birth of the Racial Profile 103 7. Don’t Hate The Player, Hate the Game: The Black Male As Athlete 125 Notes 147 Bibliography 197 Index 209 Between me and the other world there is an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All nevertheless flutter around it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way...how does it feel to be a problem they say... W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk Preface As a black male I have tried to come to grips with why, unless I’m wearing a suit, whites generally will not sit beside me on the train, why when I walk down the street lined with cars I am treated to a sym- phony of automatic door locks going off, why I cannot catch a cab in New York. I see myself in the vignette told about Miles Davis, who, living in a predominantly white neighborhood, was reduced to having to telephone the police to warn them whenever he went out. I see myself in the experience of Al Joyner, an Olympic bronze medalist who no longer drives in Los Angeles because of police harassment. I see myself in the experience of Earl Graves, Ivy League graduate, ele- gantly dressed businessman, publisher of Black Enterprise magazine being stopped and frisked briefcase in hand by policeman searching for a criminal described only as a black man with short hair. I am haunted by the story told by Mr. Stuart about a black man in a rumpled jogging suit who robbed him and his wife, killed her and shot him, and escaped in the darkness. After a serious manhunt for the man in the rumpled jogging suit, he was later revealed to be a fiction, made up by Mr. Stuart to cover his own murder of his wife. Susan Smith told a similar story about a black man wearing a watch cap who hijacked her car and kidnapped her two small kids. It turned out the black male kidnapper in the watch cap was a cardboard cutout of a bo- geyman. The real kidnapper was Susan Smith herself: She invented the mysterious black male to hide her own Medea-like murder of her kids. Why were Mr. Stuart and Susan Smith believed? viii preface It may have something to do with what Jesse Jackson said: he feels relieved, walking in his Chicago neighborhood, when he finds that it is a white man that is walking behind him. Apparently, in the words of Cecil Taylor, we are as males black even to ourselves. I experience these narratives not merely as familiar, troubling anec- dotes, but as memory. I remember Miles Davis and Al Joyner and Earl Graves; I also remember Emmet Till and the Scottsboro Boys. I remember walking behind others and sensing their fear. I remember these stories as stories both about my own identity and about identity as trope. It cannot be a reaction to me that causes white women to clutch their pocketbooks. If they knew me they would know that I am chron- ically, laughably shy and that I cannot even play basketball. If they knew me they would know how poorly their mythology fits my life. But then, as Ralph Ellison has noted, they cannot know me, they cannot see me. Myth is that which erases both history and lived experience. My father’s life, Earl Graves’s life, my own life as a person, are each a single erasable page, the palimpsest of Derrida, on which what we have written, what I have written, is erased. On that page is im- printed an “already read text”1 about a figure, a black male figure always wearing a watch cap, always walking behind people, always causing fear. Introduction My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented. —Hortense J. Spillers, “ ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe’: An American Grammar Book” One of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century is the African-American male—“invented” because black masculinity represents an amalgam of fears and projections in the American psyche which rarely conveys or contains the trope of truth about the black male’s existence. Ralph Ellison deemed the African- American male invisible. In fact, the African-American male is a number of things, invisible and overinterpreted among them. —Kobena Mercer, “Engendered Species: Danny Isdale and Keith Piper” While the private lives of black men in the public eye...have been exposed to glaring media visibility, it is the “invisible men” of the late-capitalist underclass who have become the bearers—the sig- nifiers—of the hopelessness and despair of our so-called post- Modern condition. Overrepresented in statistics on homicide and suicide, misrepresented in the media as the personification of drugs, disease and crime, such invisible men, like their all-too- visible counterparts, suggest that black masculinity is not merely a social identity in crisis. It is also a key site of ideological represen- tation, a site upon which the nation’s crisis comes to be drama- tized, demonized, and dealt with. —Deborah Pothrow-Stith & Michelle Weissman, Deadly Consequences Of course, there is no such thing as “the black male.” 2 race, sex, and suspicion Whether portrayed in blackface, shuffling along in the minstrel plays of the nineteenth century, or as the “gangsta” of rap music, sporting a row of gold teeth and baggy pants, or as a dangerous sus- pect justly shot nine times by Brooklyn police who went to the wrong house; whether he is made to appear as a cunning, crooked, and ulti- mately demonic cop in Training Day or a subservient, uneducated chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy; whether he is demonized on the cover of Time magazine, a Mr. Hyde–like face glowering in blackened shades above the caption “An American Tragedy”; whether he is face- less, appearing now as one of the bad boyz of the hood spread-eagled over the police car on the evening news; or whether he appears as a disturbed personality, wearing eyeliner and holding a baby out of a window, the black male is a social construct. The black male has become metaphorical, a way of personifying social and historical forces, of painting a pariah’s face on the problems of drugs, disease, or crime. Listen to Ed Koch, former mayor of New York: Today, most whites, myself included, would feel very un- comfortable in a totally black neighborhood, particularly at night. So the fear is not irrational.... In New York City, 57 percent of those in prison are black and 35 percent Hispanic. According to Department of Jus- tice statistics, 45 percent of violent crimes are committed by black males, who are only 6 percent of the population. And black males aged 15 to 24, who are 1 percent of the population, are responsible for at least 19 percent of the mur- ders...unless the cancer is identified you cannot treat and remove it.1 One could easily get the impression that black males have a defec- tive gene, or are carriers of a social virus that makes them particularly prone to crime. Of course, being black and male has no more to do with who is likely to commit a crime than Italian nationality has to do with who is likely a member of the Mafia. In the United States the blacks arrested for violent crime constitute only 1 percent of the black population and 1.7 percent of black males.2 In the mayor’s depiction of the black male he makes the part—the 1 percent—stand for the whole. In rhetoric this type of image is referred to as metonymy. Koch’s metonymic image bears a striking resemblance to a character created by Richard Wright in Native Son. The protagonist, Bigger introduction 3 Thomas, kills his white mistress as a result of a peculiar combination of racism and fear. Mayor Koch treats real black males as if we were fig- ures in Wright’s protest novel, as if we were all potential Bigger Thomases: we all have a dangerous tendency to be violent, bad, and lacking in moral dimension.

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