Notes
Introduction
1. John Blake, “Therapy and Theology: Atlanta’s Megafest Shows Many Sides of T.D. Jakes’ Ministry,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution June 23, 2004. 2. Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly 33.2 (1981). Baym uses this term in describing the elision of women from the American canon and in literary criticism regarding the canon. I am using the term here to describe the response of men who feel that their masculinity is being attacked by these socio- political movements. 3. Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought, Africana Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000). 4. See Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (New York: Oxford UP, 1991) 88–89. 5. Phillip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men?: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity (New York: Oxford UP, 1996) xi. 6. Henry Louis Gates, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 1997) xviii. 7. For Stephanie Brown “this unstinting relegation of black men to the ‘hinterland’ of masculinities studies makes the pioneering work of a bevy of scholars, includ- ing but by no means limited to Marcellus Blount, Hazel Carby, James Coleman, George Cunningham, Phillip Brian Harper, and Kobena Mercer, all the more vital.” See Stephanie Brown and Keith Clark, “Melodramas of Beset Black Manhood? Meditations on African-American Masculinity as Scholarly Topos and Social Menace, an Introduction,” Callaloo 26.3 (2003): 735. 8. For example, see Robert Staples, Black Masculinity: The Black Male’s Role in American Society (San Francisco: Black Scholar Press, 1982) 2. 9. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917., Women in Culture and Society, ed. Catherine R. Stimpson (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995) 7. 10. Marcellus Blount and George Philbert Cunningham, Representing Black Men (New York: Routledge, 1996) ix–xv. 11. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, eds., Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) 22. 12. bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992) 113. 148 Notes
13. Brown and Clark, “Melodramas of Beset Black Manhood?” 734. 14. See Angela Yvonne Davis, Women, Race & Class, 1st Vintage Books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). Angela Davis uses historical analysis, statistical data, literature, and sociology to link the three categories of her title. Davis’s work critiques of capitalism as an economic system that especially disadvantages women, while black men’s investment in the oppression of black women is related to their disadvantaged position as well. 15. bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2004). 16. hooks, Black Looks, 89. 17. hooks, We Real Cool, xv. 18. hooks, Black Looks, 87. 19. Ibid., 88. 20. hooks, We Real Cool, xvii. 21. Kelly Brown Douglas and Ronald E. Hopson, “Understanding the Black Church: The Dynamics of Change,” Journal of Religious Thought 56/57.1 (2001): 96. 22. See Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver, W.E.B. Du Bois on Sociology and the Black Community, Paperback ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980) 215; Edward Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America, Sourcebooks in Negro History (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) 40; and C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham: Duke UP, 1990).For Frazier, the black church became the organized venue by which free blacks could begin to assimi- late and employ accomodationist tactics. It is no wonder, then, that the black church served as the pool from which the civil rights movement of the twentieth century could rely upon for leadership. According to Lincoln, “The black church is the uncontested mother of black culture.” With the dual missions of addressing “both the spiritual and social deficits of the human predicament,” the black church according to Lincoln became “the defining referent for the black community.” Andrew Billingsley provides a com- prehensive history and analysis of the Black church as an agent of social reform. See Andrew Billingsley, Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform (New York: Oxford UP, 1999). 23. Michael Eric Dyson, “When You Divide Body and Soul, Problems Multiply: The Black Church and Sex,” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, ed. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftal (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) 326. 24. See Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001). 25. Dianne Stewart, “Christian Doctrines of Humanity and the African Experience of Evil and Suffering: Toward a Black Theological Anthropology,” The Ties That Bind: African American and Hispanic American/Latino/a Theology in Dialogue, eds. Anthony B. Pinn and Benjamin Valentin (New York: Continuum, 2001) 171. 26. See Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999). 27. hooks, Black Looks, 2. 28. See Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church. 29. Harper, Are We Not Men?. 30. David Marriott, On Black Men (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000) 104. Notes 149
31. David L. Dudley, My Father’s Shadow: Intergenerational Conflict in African American Men’s Autobiography (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1991). 32. John Edgar Wideman, Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994) 71. 33. For a discussion of the cultural processes of manhood, see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization.
Chapter 1
1. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: Bantam, 1981) 431. Future references will be to this edition and will be marked by parenthetical cita- tions of the page numbers. 2. Charles Edward Stowe, ed., The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe Compiled from Her Letters and Journals (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889) 148. 3. For a discussion on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century perceptions of race as essential to human differences and how these perceptions informed social sci- entific conceptions of race, see Michael P. Banton, Racial Theories (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987). Stephen Gould offers a treatment of biological determin- ism in Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. and expand ed. (New York: Norton, 1996). 4. For a discussion of romantic racialism, see George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Scranton, PA: Wesleyan UP, 1987). 5. Richard Yarborough describes them as “bumptious, giggling, outsized ado- lescents.” For a fuller discussion, see Yarborough, “Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel,” New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Cambridge UP, 1986) 47. 6. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Oxford UP, 1996) 41. 7. W. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Louis Gates, and Terri Hume Oliver, eds., The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999) 155. 8. Ibid. 162–63. 9. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” 41. 10. For a discussion of the ongoing tensions between biology and sociohistorical ele- ments in Du Bois’s work, see Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford UP, 1992). 11. Du Bois, Gates, and Oliver, eds., The Souls of Black Folk,10–11. 12. Dickson D. Bruce, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness,” American Literature 64.2 (1992): 301. 13. The concept of double consciousness continues to be an important concept as it relates to identity formation. See Gerald Lyn Early, ed., Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimilation (New York: A. Lane/Penguin Press, 1993). This anthology explores and debates Du Bois’s claims from many different perspectives. 14. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth, rev. ed. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993) 4. 150 Notes
15. Ibid., 5. 16. Ibid. 17. See Arthur Riss, “Racial Essentialism and Family Values in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American Quarterly 46.4 (1994). Riss traces Stowe’s use of racial essentialism to advance a progressive agenda. He argues that equating Stowe’s racialism with racism is shortsighted and reductive because such a claim does not take into con- sideration her advocacy of “liberal pluralism.” 18. Ibid. 19. Samuel Otter, “Stowe and Race,” The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Cindy Weinstein, Cambridge Companions to Literature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 19. 20. Michael Eric Dyson, “When You Divide Body and Soul, Problems Multiply: The Black Church and Sex,” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, ed. Rudolph P. and Beverly Guy-Sheftal Byrd (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) 312. 21. Rudolph P. Byrd, “The Tradition of John: A Mode of Black Masculinity,” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, eds. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Scheftall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) 19. 22. Kristin Waters, ed., Women and Men Political Theorists: Enlightened Conversations (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000) 230. 23. Peter P. Hinks, ed., David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2000) 45. 24. Waters, ed., Women and Men Political Theorists, 266. 25. Richard Dyer, White (New York: Routledge, 1997) 17. 26. John J. Han, “Uncle Tom as Christ Figure,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Mary R. Reichardt, The Ignatius Critical Editions (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009). 27. See Thomas J. Steele, “Tom and Eva: Mrs. Stowe’s Two Dying Christs,” African American Review 6.3 (1972): 88. 28. Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo- American Culture,” The American Historical Review 100.2 (1995): 326. 29. Ibid., 323. 30. Yarborough, “Strategies of Black Characterization,” 53. 31. James Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Contexts, Criticism, ed. Elizabeth Ammons, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994) 497. 32. Ibid., 498. 33. Anne McClintock argues that race and gender function as “articulated catego- ries” that “are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other, nor can they simply be yoked together retrospectively. Rather they come into existence in and through relation to each other, if in contradictory and conflictual ways.” Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995) 5. 34. Dyer, White, 15–17. 35. Ibid. 36. Dyson, “When You Divide Body and Soul, Problems Multiply,” 317. 37. Earl Riggins, Dark Symbols, Obscure Signs: God, Self, and Community in the Slave Mind, The Bishop Henry Mcneal Turner Studies in North American Black Religion, vol. 7 (New York: Orbis Books, 1993) 22. Notes 151
38. Dianne Stewart, “Christian Doctrines of Humanity and the African Experience of Evil and Suffering: Toward a Black Theological Anthropology,” The Ties That Bind: African American and Hispanic American/Latino/a Theology in Dialogue, eds. Anthony B. Pinn and Benjamin Valentin (New York: Continuum, 2001) 171. 39. bell hooks, “Feminism Inside: Toward a Black Body Politic,” Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art, eds. Thelma Golden and Whitney Museum of American Art. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994) 129. 40. Readers will notice that I have used mind, spirit, and soul interchangeably to distinguish between the material nature of the body and the activating sources in the body. 41. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford UP, 1985) 3. 42. Ibid., 22. 43. See Dyer, White, 14. 44. Carol E. Henderson, Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 2002). 45. See Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Pieterse traces the development and deployment of images used in the process of racial subordination of blacks. He argues that “race-thinking arose, not so much as a justification of slavery, but as a reaction to it, having rather prospered after the movement for the abolition of slavery took hold” (13). Representations, then, serve the needs of the powerful and “serve as cultural devices in settling social conflict” (13). 46. See Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1998); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); and David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991). 47. See Abby L. Ferber, White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998) and Dorothy E. Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997). 48. Cornell West, “Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject,” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, eds. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) 301–02. 49. Beatrice A. Anderson, “Uncle Tom: A Hero at Last,” The American Transcendental Quarterly 5.2 (1991): 112. 50. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, 4th ed. (New York: Continuum, 2001) 4–5. 51. According to Leslie Fielder, the American interethnic bonded pair originated in nineteenth century American literature. In Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Fiedler explores the propensity of selected white male authors of the nineteenth century—Twain, Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, Cooper—to create and place an interethnic male pair at the center of their stories. The interracial male bond was the theme to which Fiedler repeatedly returned to clarify, correct 152 Notes
wrong readings, and expand his initial findings. He first articulated his thoughts in “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in Huck Honey!” in the June 1948 issue of Partisan Review. In this article, Fiedler argues that Huck and Jim fit an archetypal pattern in which a male on the run from society turns “to the love of a colored man” who will offer comfort to the white pariah. The interethnic bonded pair, incarnated first in nineteenth-century American literature, was reincarnated in the buddy films of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries including The Defiant Ones (1958), Stir Crazy (1980), Trading Places (1982), White Nights (1985), Enemy Mine (1985), the Lethal Weapon Series (1987, 1989, 1992, 1998), Philadelphia (1993), Shawshank Redemption (1994), and Jerry McGuire (1996). 52. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, Culture and the Moving Image (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1993) 128. 53. Cynthia J Fuchs, “The Buddy Politic,” Screening the Male: Exploring Masculini- ties in Hollywood Cinema, eds. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York: Routledge, 1993) 195. 54. Hazel V. Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998) 183. 55. Ibid., 191. 56. Ibid. 57. Jacquie Jones, “The Construction of Black Sexuality: Towards Normalizing the Black Cinematic Experience,” Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993) 256. 58. See Anthony Appiah, “ ‘No Bad Nigger’: Blacks as the Ethical Principle in the Movies,” Media Spectacles, eds. Marjorie B. Garber, Jann Matlock, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (New York: Routledge, 1993) 81; Rita Kempley, “Too Too Divine: Movies’ ‘Magic Negro’ Saves the Day, but at the Cost of His Soul,” Washington Post June 7, 2003; Lucy Howard, Bret Begun, and Susannah Meadows, “Guess Who’s Coming to the Rescue,” Newsweek November 13, 2000: 14; and Christopher John Farley, “That Old Black Magic: Hollywood Is Still Bamboozled When It Comes to Race,” Time November 27, 2000. 59. Kim D. Hester-Williams, “Neoslaves: Slavery, Freedom, and the African American Apotheosis in Candyman, the Matrix, and the Green Mile,” Genders (2004), February 14, 2006
64. Robyn Wiegman, “Negotiating America: Gender, Race, and the Ideology of the Interracial Male Bond,” Cultural Critique 13 (1989): 89. 65. See Susan Jefford, The Remasculization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989). Jefford defines the recuperative process as the remasculization of American culture aimed at sustaining the gender hier- archies necessary to the political and economic functioning of America. The premise that informs Jefford’s work is that white men felt threatened by the civil rights and women’s rights movements of the 1960s. 66. Kim D. Hester-Williams also makes this observation about Edgecomb. See Kim D. Hester-Williams, “Neoslaves: Slavery, Freedom, and the African American.” 67. In Gender Trouble Judith Butler explores the connection that the symbolic phal- lus maintains to the penis: “The law requires conformity to its own notion of ‘nature’ and gains its legitimacy through the binary and asymmetrical natu- ralization of bodies in which the Phallus, though clearly not identical with the penis, nevertheless deploys the penis as its naturalized instrument and sign.” Judith P. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Thinking Gender (New York: Routledge, 1990) 135. 68. Debra Walker King, Body Politics and the Fictional Double (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000) vii–viii. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Williams writes that this scene recalls the fear of black male rape of white women and miscegenation, and serves to comfort the white man’s fears even as it uses the object of his fear: “This sexless interracial kiss seems to want to master prophy- lactically the White man’s fear of the black man’s sexual threat to ‘his’ women. Like the compromising touch to Tom Hank’s penis, the kiss disavows the very forbidden desire it enacts, asserting transcendent purity in the face of lurid, inter- racial carnality.” See Williams, “Melodrama in Black and White” 18. 72. David Marriott, On Black Men (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000) 68–69. 73. Austin Sarat, When the State Kills, 232. 74. Ibid. 75. Williams, “Melodrama in Black and White,” 19. 76. Marriott, On Black Men 27. 77. Ibid., 20. 78. Karen Sanchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition,” The New American Studies: Essays from Representations, ed. Philip Fisher, vol. 5 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991) 250. 79. However, thinking of Tom as weak does not consider the complexity of his char- acter. He risks his life to save Eva, and his death is the result of his refusal to reveal to Legree the whereabouts of Cassy and Emmeline. 80. See Marriott, On Black Men. 81. When I accompanied a group of undergraduate students to the photographic “Without Sanctuary” lynching postcard exhibit sponsored by Emory University and Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in 2002, I was struck by the number of black students who became emotional after seeing lynching photographs of black men who looked like members of their families. Viewing these images pulled the students into a preexisting relationship between whiteness and blackness that these images reify. In Practices of Looking (2001), Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright describe this interplay as occurring between “spectatorship, power, 154 Notes
and knowledge.” The gaze, then, describes a relationship between subjects and objects, between us and that which is not us. 82. Ed Guerrero, “The Black Man on Our Screens and the Empty Space in Representation,” Callaloo 18.2 (1995): 399.
Chapter 2
1. “Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper,” Promise Keepers, November 5, 2005 Available: http://www.promisekeepers.org/about/7promises. 2. “Minister Farrakhan Challenges Black Men: Transcript from Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Remarks at the Million Man March,” October 17, 1995, Cable News Network, , October 11, 2006 Available: http://www-cgi.cnn.com/US/9510/ megamarch/10–16/transcript/. 3. Judith P. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Thinking Gender (New York: Routledge, 1990). 4. Phillip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men?: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity (New York: Oxford UP, 1996) x. 5. T. D. Jakes, He-Motions Hi-Lites at New Birth in Atlanta, GA, rec. February 2004, DVD, T.D. Jakes Ministries, Dallas, TX, 2004. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. See Scott Billingsley, It’s a New Day: Race and Gender in the Modern Charismatic Movement (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2008); Shayne Lee, T.D. Jakes: America’s New Preacher (New York: New York UP, 2005); Hubert Morken, “Bishop T. D. Jakes: A Ministry for Empowerment,” Religious Leaders and Faith-Based Politics: Ten Profiles, eds. Jo Renée Formicola and Hubert Morken (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001); and Jonathan L. Walton, What This!: The Ethcis and Aesthetics of Black Televangelism (New York and London: New York UP, 2009). 9. My own thinking about this scripture does not lead me to believe that Paul is advocating androgyny. Rather, he makes the point that faith and salvation are available to all believers because “God is no respecter of persons.” 10. Evidence of Jesus’s siblings comes from the question the Nazarenes asked about Jesus: “Is this not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary, and his broth- ers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And his sisters, are they not all with us?” See Matthew 1:25; 13:55, 56; Mark 6:3. We can conclude that in addition to his mother and stepfather, Jesus had four brothers and at least two sisters. 11. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18.2 Part I (1966). 12. See Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro- American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford UP, 1987). 13. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985) 19. 14. Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Atlanta GA: Scholars Press, 1989) 13. 15. Jacquelyn Grant, “Black Theology and the Black Woman,” Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966–1979, eds. James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, vol. 1 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1979) 218. Notes 155
16. For explications of Black Liberation Theology, see James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, C. Eric Lincoln Series in Black Religion, 1st ed. (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970) and Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans, The C. Eric Lincoln Series on Black Religion, 1st ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972). 17. James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Seabury Press, 1969) viii. 18. James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (San Francisco: Harper, 1975) 17–18. 19. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 92. 20. According to theologian C. Eric Lincoln, “the black church is the uncontested mother of black culture.” See C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African-American Experience (Durham: Duke UP, 1990). 21. Andrew Billingsley, Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform (New York: Oxford UP, 1999) xxiv. 22. See Walter C. Daniel, Images of the Preacher in Afro-American Literature (Washington, DC: UP of America, 1981). 23. Johnnetta B. Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities, 1st ed. (New York: One World/Ballantine Books, 2003) 104. 24. Ibid., 105. 25. Gail Malmgreen, “Domestic Discords: Women and the Family in East Chesire Methodism, 1750–1830,” Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Patriarchy and Politics (London: Routledge, 1987) 56. 26. Cynthia A. Woolever, “Generations of Women in Church,” 2001, Hartford Institute for Religion and Research, July 3, 2007, Available: http://hirr.hartsem .edu/research/women_religion_articles.html. 27. Ibid. 28. David Murrow, Where Are All the Men?, Church for Men, June 27, 2007, Available: http://www.churchformen.com/index.php. 29. Felton O. Best and Charles Frazier Jr., “Introduction,” Black Religious Leadership from the Slave Community to the Million Man March Flames of Fire, ed. Felton O. Best (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998) 6. 30. In God Gave Us the Right (1999), Christel Manning interviews women from the Jewish orthodox religion, conservative Catholic women, and evangelical Christian women to see the divergences and convergences of these conservatives. She con- cludes that not all conservative women are alike, but that they generally accept leadership as falling to the man within the public sphere. See Christel Manning, God Gave Us the Right: Conservative Catholic, Evangelical Protestant, and Orthodox Jewish Women Grapple with Feminism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1999). 31. Jawanza Kunjufu, Adam, Where Are You?: Why Most Black Men Don’t Go to Church (Chicago: African American Images, 1994). 32. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “Plenty Good Room: Adaptation in a Changing Black Church,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 558 (1998): 113. 33. Julia Duin, “Provocative Pentecostal,” Insight on the News September 14, 1998. 34. Diane Weathers, “Bishop T. D. Jakes on the Power of the Family,” Essence December 2001: 158. 156 Notes
35. Leon J. Podles, The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity (Dallas: Spence Publishing Co., 1999). 36. John Eldredge, Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2001). 37. Jakes, He-Motions Hi-Lites at New Birth in Atlanta, GA. 38. Ibid. 39. See Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001). 40. Ibid. Putney explains that the term “muscular Christianity” was initially used by a book reviewer to describe the absurdity of a philosophy set forth by adventure novelist Charles Kingsley in Two Years Ago (1857) that emphasized the physical as well as the spiritual cultivation required to become a Godly man. 41. Donald E. Hall, Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 2 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1994) 7–8. 42. See Putney, Muscular Christianity. 43. Ibid. 44. Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, 1st ed. (New York: W. Morrow and Co., 1999) 606. 45. Nina Baym, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly 33.2 (1981). Baym uses this term in describing the elision of women from the American canon and in literary criticism regarding the canon. I use the term here to describe the response of men who feel that their masculinity is being attacked by these sociopolitical movements. 46. Faludi, Stiffed, 229. 47. “McCartney at Center of Controversy Again,” Minneapolis Star Tribune July 29, 1992. 48. See On Jews, February 27, 2006, Anti-Defamation League, October 11, 2006, Available: http://www.adl.org/special_reports/farrakhan_own_words2/farrakhan_ own_words.asp. In a section entitled “Farrakhan in His Own Words,” the ADL provides excerpts of Farrakhan’s speeches in which he references Jews. 49. “Minister Farrakhan Challenges Black Men.” 50. “Men with a Mission: Promise Keepers Is Attracting Crowds with a Christian Message That Emphasizes Male Bonding, Racial Harmony and Family Ties. But Not Everyone Is Applauding the Movement,” The Atlanta Journal Constitution June 27 1995. 51. Billy Hawkins, “Reading a Promise Keepers Event: The Intersection of Race and Religion,” The Promise Keepers: Essays on Masculinity and Christianity, ed. Dane S. Claussen (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000) 183. 52. Bill McCartney, “The Coach’s Burden,” Christianity Today May 18, 1998: 30. 53. Bill McCartney, Sold Out: Becoming Man Enough to Make a Difference (Nashville: Word Books, 1997) 180. 54. Billy Hawkins, a participant-observer at the 1996 reconciliation rally, takes note of the ways in which whiteness and maleness were privileged in the rallies in ways that reinscribe their power. Hawkins, “Reading a Promise Keepers Event,” 191. 55. Kim Martin Sadler, Atonement: The Million Man March (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 1996). 56. See Faludi, Stiffed. Notes 157
57. About the Potter’s House, November 19, 2002, T.D. Jakes Ministries, Inc., June 29, 2006, Available: http://www.thepottershouse.org/PH_about.html. 58. “Bishop T.D. Jakes to Mentor 25,000 Men on Maximizing Their Manhood,” The Jacksonville Free Press August 23, 2000. 59. Shayne Lee and Phillip Sinitiere offer a context for thinking about Jakes and other “holy mavericks” as participating in the religious marketplace of ideas. See Shayne Lee and Phillip Sinitiere, Holy Mavericks: Evangelical Innovators and the Spiritual Marketplace (New York and London: New York UP, 2009). 60. Walton, What This!, 112. 61. “About the Potter’s House.” 62. Tim Madigan, “T.D. Jakes: Self-Made, with God’s Help,” Fort Worth Star- Telegram June 11, 2006. 63. Cole and Guy-Sheftall, Gender Talk, 125. 64. Shayne Lee notes the “implicit difference between the passive title ‘Woman Thou Art Loosed’ and the virulent symbolism in ‘Manpower!’. . . .” See Lee, T.D. Jakes, 133. 65. T. D. Jakes, So You Call Yourself a Man? A Devotional for Ordinary Men with Extraordinary Potential (Tulsa, OK: Albury Press, 1997) 45. 66. Lee, T.D. Jakes, 131. 67. Ibid., 139. 68. Renita Weems, “Black America and Religion,” Ebony November 2005: 123. 69. Scott Thuma, David Travis, and Warren Bird, “Megachurch Research,” Hartford Institute for Religion and Research, July 3, 2006, Available: http://hirr.hartsem. edu/org/megachurchesdefinition.html. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Lee, T.D. Jakes, 5. 73. Ibid. 74. Jadell Forman, “Taking Religion to the Masses: T.D. Jakes,” Texas Monthly 26.9 (1998). 75. Ibid. 76. I borrow this phrase and linkage between consumerism and masculinity from Faludi’s study of the Promise Keepers. See Faludi, Stiffed, 259–60. 77. Lauren F. Winner, “T.D. Jakes Feels Your Pain,” Christianity Today February 7, 2000: 59. 78. Walton, What This!, 110. 79. Eaton Maynard, “Bishop T. D. Jakes Discusses Mega-Churches,” The Sacramento Observer September 22, 2005. 80. Lee, T.D. Jakes, 186. 81. Madigan, “T.D. Jakes.” 82. Jakes, He-Motions Hi-Lites at New Birth in Atlanta, GA. 83. Winner, “T.D. Jakes Feels Your Pain,” 59. 84. T. D. Jakes, He-Motions: Even Strong Men Struggle (Grosset & Dunlap, 2004) 228. 85. Ibid., 229. 86. T. D. Jakes, “The New Face of Affirmative Action,” Sentinel March 6, 2003. 87. Jakes, So You Call Yourself a Man?. 88. Maynard, “Bishop T. D. Jakes Discusses Mega-Churches.” In this article, Jakes argues that he did not come to defend the megachurch phenomenon but to define himself and it. 158 Notes
89. Ibid. 90. Winner, “T.D. Jakes Feels Your Pain,” 59. 91. Walton, What This!, 115. 92. Jakes, He-Motions Hi-Lites at New Birth in Atlanta, GA. 93. “About the Potter’s House.” 94. Duin, “Provocative Pentecostal.” 95. Jakes, He-Motions Hi-Lites at New Birth in Atlanta, GA. 96. This story was originally told by Jim Bakker, former head of the PTL Club and recently paroled inmate, at Jakes’s Back to the Bible Conference. Jakes justified giving Bakker that platform because Bakker had paid his debt to the society and God had already forgiven him. Jakes goes on to say that “Jacob was an ex-con and a jailbird, and Moses was a murderer on the run when God called him to the ministry. Jeremiah wrote the book of Lamentations from a jail cell, and the Apostle Paul wrote most of the Pauline epistles while he was locked up and incarcerated. Even Jesus himself was incarcerated before he was crucified which is executed and if we can preach about them; then surely Jim Baker can stand up in this church.” Jakes, He-Motions: Even Strong Men Struggle 3–6. 97. Ibid. 98. Jakes, He-Motions Hi-Lites at New Birth in Atlanta, GA. 99. Shayne Lee also makes this argument concerning Jakes. Lee compares the femi- nist Jakes with the antifeminist Jakes. Whereas Lee focuses more on women, I focus on men in my analysis of this point. See Lee, T.D. Jakes, 126–39. 100. T. D. Jakes, Megafest 2004: The Kid and the King, Manpower at MegaFest 2004, rec. August 2004, DVD, T.D. Jakes Ministries, Dallas, TX, 2004. 101. Jakes, He-Motions Hi-Lites at New Birth in Atlanta, GA. 102. Jakes, Megafest 2004. 103. Essex Hemphill, Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry (New York: Plume, 1992) 8. 104. Jakes, Megafest 2004. 105. See Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, 1st ed. (New York: W. Morrow, 1996). 106. Jakes, He-Motions Hi-Lites at New Birth in Atlanta, GA. 107. Ibid.
Chapter 3
1. Stephanie A. Frederic, The Donnie Mcclurkin Story: From Darkness to the Light, DVD, Image Entertainment, USA, 2004. 2. Ibid. 3. Bil Carpenter, Uncloudy Days: The Gospel Music Encyclopedia (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2005) 283. 4. Ibid., 282. 5. Frederic, The Donnie Mcclurkin Story. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999) 6. Notes 159
10. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1st American ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) 43. 11. Johnnetta B. Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities, 1st ed. (New York: One World/Ballantine Books, 2003) 115. 12. Richard Dyer, White, (New York: Routledge, 1997) 17. 13. Delroy Constantine-Simms, “Is Homosexuality the Greatest Taboo?,” The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, ed. Delroy Constantine- Simms, 1st ed. (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2001). 14. Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church, 25. 15. Ibid., 26. 16. Ibid., 29. 17. Ibid. 18. Cheryl Sanders, “Sexual Orientation and Human Rights Discourse in the African-American Churches,” Sexual Orientation & Human Rights in American Religious Discourse, eds. Saul M. Olyan and Martha Craven Nussbaum (New York: Oxford UP, 1998) 180. 19. Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church, 90. 20. Ibid., 94. 21. Peter J. Gomes, The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart, 1st ed. (New York: W. Morrow, 1996) 170. 22. Ibid., 158. 23. Jennifer L. Morgan, “ ‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder:’ Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770,” Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture, ed. Kimberly Wallace- Sanders (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002) 39. 24. See Robert Staples, Exploring Black Sexuality (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006) 111–12. 25. See Michael Eric Dyson, “When You Divide Body and Soul, Problems Multiply: The Black Church and Sex,” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, ed. Rudolph P. and Beverly Guy-Sheftal Byrd (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) 312. 26. Phillip Brian Harper, Are We Not Men?: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity (New York: Oxford UP, 1996) 10. 27. Dutchess Renee Jones, “Homosexuality and the Black Church: Perceptions of Church Leaders,” Dissertation, The University of Tennessee, 2001, 3. 28. John F. Harris, “God Gave Us ‘What We Deserve,’ Falwell Says,” The Washington Post September 14, 2001. 29. Ibid. 30. Phelps, Sr., Fred W., “WBC Will Picket______, Ph.D. She’s a Multicultural, Diversity-Celebrating Blabbermoth,” November 13, 1996, Westboro Baptist Church, June 15, 2007, Available: http://www.godhatesfags.com/fliers/flier archive.html. 31. Colbert I. King, “Gays, God and Bishop Owens,” Op-Ed, Washington Post May 13, 2006. 32. Valerie G. Lowe makes this observation of black preachers who condemn homo- sexuality but do not provide a venue for people to struggle out of the homosexual lifestyle. See Valerie. G. Lowe, “Homosexuality and the Black Church: Let’s Stop Hiding from the Pain,” Charisma Magazine October 1998: 86. 160 Notes
33. See www.keithboykin.com and www.jasmynecannick.com. 34. Frederic, The Donnie Mcclurkin Story. 35. Barbara L. Frankowski, “Sexual Orientation and Adolescents,” Pediatrics 113.6 (2004): 1828. 36. Ruth Hubbard, “The Search for Sexual Identity: False Genetic Markers,” New York Times August 2, 1993. 37. Frankowski, “Sexual Orientation and Adolescents,” 1828. 38. See Daryl Bem, “Is EBE Theory Supported by the Evidence? Is It Andorcentric? A Reply to Perplau Et Al.,” Psychological Review 105.2 (1998), and Gilbert Herbt, “A Comment on Cultural Attributes and Fluidity of Bisexuality,” Journal of Homosexuality 10.3 (1984). 39. Donnie McClurkin, Eternal Victim/Eternal Victor (Lanham: Pneuma Life Publishing, Inc., 2001) 135. 40. T. D. Jakes, He-Motions: Even Strong Men Struggle (Grosset & Dunlap, 2004) 158–59. 41. Ibid., 159. 42. Dyson, “When You Divide Body and Soul, Problems Multiply,” 324. 43. Ibid., 325. 44. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953) 15–16. 45. E. Patrick Johnson, “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark: Expanding Notions of the Sacred in the African American Gay Community,” The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, ed. Delroy Constantine-Simms, 1st ed. (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2001) 95. 46. Jeffrey Q. McCune, “Transformance: Reading the Gospel in Drag,” The Drag Queen Anthology: The Absolutely Fabulous but Flawlessly Customary World of Female Impersonators, eds. Steven P. Schacht and Lisa Underwood (Binghampton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2004) 160. 47. Ibid. 48. McClurkin, Eternal Victim/Eternal Victor, 39. 49. Keith Boykin, “Confessions of Donnie Mcclurkin,” November 19, 2002, February 3, 2011, Available: www.keithboykin.com. 50. See Carpenter, Uncloudy Days. 51. Rhonda Graham, “And the Choir Sings On,” The Wilmingston Delaware Sunday News Journal October 23, 1994. 52. Marlon T. Riggs, Black Is—Black Ain’t: A Personal Journey through Black Identity, DVD, California Newsreel, San Francisco, CA, 2004. 53. Ibid. 54. “Fact Sheet: HIV/AIDS among African Americans,” October 6, 2006, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, October 11, 2006, Available: http://www. cdc.gov/hiv/topics/aa/resources/factsheets/aa.htm#2. 55. Eve Sedgewick describes the term “open secret” as a “condensed way of describ- ing the phenomenon of the ‘glass closet,’ the swirls of totalizing knowledge-power that circulate so violently around any but the most openly acknowledged gay male identity.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990) 73, 164. 56. For more discussions of the DL, see Keith Boykin, Beyond the Down Low: Sex, Lies, and Denial in Black America (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005); J. L. King and Courtney Carreras, Coming Up from the Down Low: the Journey to Notes 161
Acceptance, Healing, and Honest Love, 1st ed. (New York: Crown Publishers, 2005); and J. L. King and Karen Hunter, On the Down Low: A Journey into the Lives of “Straight” Black Men Who Sleep with Men, 1st ed. (New York: Broadway Books, 2004). 57. Lester Strong, “Fighting Demons,” A&U Magazine January 2005. 58. Boykin, Beyond the Down Low, 150. 59. Ibid., 128. 60. Ibid., 149. 61. Johnson, “Feeling the Spirit in the Dark,” 95. 62. Dyson, “When You Divide Body and Soul, Problems Multiply,” 311. 63. Ibid., 310. 64. “Coretta Scott King Outspoken on Gay and Lesbian Rights,” Chicago Tribune April 1, 1998. 65. Michael Foust, “Atlanta: Black Pastors Rally to Oppose Same-Sex ‘Marriage,’ ” March 26, 2004, Baptist Press, June 27, 2007, Available: http://www.baptist- press.com/bpnews.asp?ID=17941. 66. “Born Again Christians Just as Likely to Divorce as Are Non-Christians,” September 8, 2004, ed. David Kinnaman, The Barna Research Group, October 18, 2006, Available: http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate& BarnaUpdateID=170. 67. Molefi K. Asante, Afrocentricity, New rev. ed. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1988) 57. 68. Ibid. 69. Stefanie Dunning, “Parallel Perversions: Interracial and Same Sexuality in James Baldwin’s Another Country,” MELUS 26.4 (2001): 98. 70. Frederic, The Donnie Mcclurkin Story. 71. Ibid. 72. Dunning, “Parallel Perversions,” 98. 73. For examples of these testimonials, see www.exodus-international.org, the website for Exodus International. According to the website, Exodus is one of the largest “nonprofit, interdenominational Christian organizations promot- ing the message of Freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.” 74. James Baldwin, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” James Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1998). 75. Frederic, The Donnie Mcclurkin Story. 76. Frankowski, “Sexual Orientation and Adolescents,” 1827. 77. Frederic, The Donnie Mcclurkin Story. 78. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, eds., Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001) 19. 79. Katherine Volin and Lou Chibbaro Jr., “Minister’s Fiery Anti-Gay Sermon Riles Activists,” Washington Blade Online, Local News July 15, 2005, November 11, 2006,
84. Cornell West, “Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject,” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality, eds. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001). 85. Ibid. 86. Victor Anderson, “Deadly Silence: Reflections on Homosexuality and Human Rights,” Sexual Orientation & Human Rights in American Religious Discourse, eds. Saul M. Olyan and Martha Craven Nussbaum (New York: Oxford UP, 1998) 189. 87. Cheryl Sanders, “The Role of Religion in Electoral Politics,” October 21, 2004, Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett, ed. Gilliss, Trent. American Public Media, October 27, 2006, Available: speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/ otheramerica/essay-sanders.
Chapter 4
1. “Bishop T. D. Jakes’ Full Statement,” Dallasnews.com, February 15, 2009. 2. T. D. Jakes, He-Motions Hi-Lites at New Birth in Atlanta, GA, rec. February 2004, DVD, T.D. Jakes Ministries, Dallas, TX, 2004. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Patricia Rickels, “An Interview with Ernest J. Gaines,” Conversations with Ernest Gaines, ed. John Lowe (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995) 129. 7. Karla F. C. Holloway, “Image, Act, and Identity in In My Father’s House,” Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines, ed. David C. Estes (Athens and London: U of Georgia P, 1994) 181. 8. Valerie Melissa Babb, Ernest Gaines (Boston: Twayne, 1991) 104. 9. Ernest J. Gaines, In My Father’s House, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf: distributed by Random, 1978) 123. Future references will be to this edition and will be marked by parenthetical citations of the page numbers. 10. Frank Pittman, Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the Search for Masculinity (New York: Putnam, 1993) 25. 11. Ibid., 120. 12. For Bly’s articulation of this argument, see Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990). 13. Valerie Babbs writes, “The extremes epitomized by Philip and Robert are fore- shadowed early in the novel through their vastly different introductions.” Babb, Ernest Gaines, 99. 14. Mary Ellen Doyle identifies the narrative as having three parts: “[T]he suspense about Robert X’s identity and concern with this minister (chapters 1 through 4), Phillip’s internal and external attempts to grapple with his son’s return (chap- ters 5 through 8), and his pursuit of Chippo Simon and his confrontation with his own soul (chapters 9 through 11).” See Mary Ellen Doyle, Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2002) 157. 15. Daniel White, “ ‘Haunted by the Idea’: Fathers and Sons in In My Father’s House and A Gathering of Old Men,” Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines, ed. David C. Estes (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994) 162. Notes 163
16. Mary Ellen Doyle, “Ernest J. Gaines: ‘Other Things to Write About,’ ” MELUS 11.2 (1984). 17. Daniel Omotosho Black, “Spiritual Deprivation and the Legacy of Black Fathers,” Journal of African American Men 5.2 (2000): 14. 18. Ibid., 13. 19. Ibid., 15. 20. White, “ ‘Haunted by the Idea,’ ” 163. 21. Alvin Aubert, “Self-Reintegration through Self-Confrontation,” Callaloo Ernest J Gaines: A Special Issue (1978): 133. 22. See Babb, Ernest Gaines, 101. 23. Karen Carmean, Ernest J. Gaines: A Critical Companion, Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers, ed. Kathleen Gregory Klein (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998) 92. 24. Franklin Abbott, “New Men: Changing Minds, Hearts and Lives,” New Men, New Minds: Breaking Male Tradition: How Today’s Men Are Changing the Traditional Roles of Masculinity, ed. Franklin Abbott (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1987) 3. 25. Carmean, Ernest J. Gaines,85. 26. Alisa Ann Johnson, “ ‘Who Can I Turn to When You Turn Away?’: Father and Son Relationships in the Novels of Ernest Gaines,” Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998, 27. 27. Holloway agrees with the community’s decision to remove Martin from his lead- ership position because of his decision-making process. Martin’s removal from a leadership position is essential for the overall health of the community because the needs of the many must outweigh the personal desires of the individual. “Recognizing that such individualism endangers everyone,” Holloway argues, “[T]he community’s act of divestiture in In My Father’s House is as critical an event in the story as the aforementioned resolution (the promise of beginning again) seems to be.” See Holloway, “Image, Act, and Identity in In My Father’s House,”189. 28. Doyle, “Ernest J. Gaines,” 73. 29. William R. Nash, “ ‘You Think a Man Can’t Kneel and Stand?’: Ernest J. Gaines’s Reassessment of Religion as Positive Communal Influence in A Lesson before Dying,” Callaloo 24.1 (2001): 358. 30. Ibid. 31. Babb, Ernest Gaines, 98. 32. Ibid., 99. 33. Moynihan cited in Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy: A Trans-Action Social Science and Public Policy Report (Cambridge, MA: M. I. T. Press, 1967) 35. 34. Charles H. Rowell, “ ‘This Louisiana Thing That Drives Me’: An Interview with Ernest J. Gaines,” Callaloo 3 Ernest J. Gaines: A Special Issue (May 1978): 40. 35. Ibid. 36. John Blake, “Therapy and Theology: Atlanta’s Megafest Shows Many Sides of T.D. Jakes’ Ministry,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution June 23, 2004. 37. Jakes, He-Motions Hi-Lites at New Birth in Atlanta, GA. 38. Doyle, “Ernest J. Gaines,” 72. 39. White, “ ‘Haunted by the Idea,’ ” 161. 40. David Marriott, On Black Men (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000) 104. 164 Notes
41. John Edgar Wideman, Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994) 77. 42. Johnson, “ ‘Who Can I Turn to When You Turn Away?,’ ” 40. 43. White, “ ‘Haunted by the Idea,’ ”164. 44. Jakes, He-Motions Hi-Lites at New Birth in Atlanta, GA. 45. Aubert, “Self-Reintegration through Self-Confrontation,” 133. 46. Babb, Ernest Gaines, 103. 47. See Holloway, “Image, Act, and Identity in In My Father’s House,” 181. 48. Alisha Johnson makes this point about the narrative inversion in her dissertation. From this point, the story is not about a son looking for his father, but about a father looking for his son. According to Johnson, “The narrative structure mim- ics the action: his segments overlap, his past collides with his present, resulting in a sudden perceptual shift within him [Martin] and the text.” See Johnson, “ ‘Who Can I Turn to When You Turn Away?,’ ” 26. 49. Rowell, “ ‘This Louisiana Thing That Drives Me,’ ” 42. 50. William R. Nash, “ ‘You Think a Man Can’t Kneel and Stand?’: Ernest J. Gaines’s Reassessment of Religion as Positive Communal Influence in A Lesson before Dying,” Callaloo 24 1 (2001): 346. 51. Frank W. Shelton, “In My Father’s House: Ernest Gaines after Jane Pittman,” Southern Review 17.2 (1981): 345. 52. Ibid., 344. 53. Holloway, “Image, Act, and Identity in In My Father’s House,” 190. 54. Rowell, “ ‘This Louisiana Thing That Drives Me,’ ” 40. 55. Doyle, “Ernest J. Gaines,” 73. 56. Johnson, “ ‘Who Can I Turn to When You Turn Away?’,” 8. 57. Wideman, Fatheralong, 65. 58. Ibid. Bibliography
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Abbot, Franklin buddy films, 37–38 productive fathering, 126 Butler, Judith, 4, 51 Afrocentric, 60, 106, 108 AIDS, 53, 93, 94, 100–103 Cannick, Jasmyne, 95 American Psychological Association, 96 Carby, Hazel V., 37 anxiety, 3, 5 caricatures, 25, 35 black bodies, 12 Cartesian mind/body split, 8, 33, 99 black masculine anxiety, 3 Christian embodiment, 2, 4, 10, 15, 18, homosexual, 37 29, 43, 44, 49, 51, 53, 68, 80, 84, Appiah, Anthony, 23 87, 107, 116 articulated categories, 33, 35 Christian symbolism, 55–56 Asante, Molefi, 106 church attendance, 58–59 Augustine, 9, 28, 89 Civil Rights Movement, 104–105, 130 authenticity, 3, 4, 101–102 Cleveland, James, 100–101 Cone, James, 56–57 Baldwin, James, 32, 99, 108, 134 Bederman, Gail, 5 Desert Stream Ministries, 96 Bible, 3, 8, 12, 14, 17, 58, 60, 80, 85, 93, domestic violence, 11, 85, 105 97, 108, 110, 114, 128, 132 double consciousness, 23–24, 43, 49 masculinity, 8, 53–55 Douglas, Kelly Brown, 7 sexuality, 88 the Bible, 90 biological determinism, 23 Christian dualism, 89, 92 black church, 7–9 Sexuality and the Black Church, black masculinity, 2, 4, 5, 6, 4–7, 9, 10, 86–87 12, 15, 37, 48, 52, 55, 57, 68, 77, Douglass, Frederick, 27–28 79, 91, 113, 130, 131 down low (DL), 102–103 black messiah, 10, 18–20, 24–27, 29, Du Bois, W. E. B., 8, 22–24 38, 44, 117 Dyer, Richard Black Nationalism, 106–107 whiteness and Christianity, 28–29 black savages, 27 Dyson, Michael Eric, 8, 27, 33–34, 66, Black Theology, 56, 57, 99, 122 98–99, 103–104 Bly, Robert, 65, 119 body fictions, 10, 43–44, 49 Ellison, Ralph, 78, 134 Bogle, Donald, 36 essentialism, 12, 21, 70, 78 Boykin, Keith, 95, 100, 102–103, 109 Eternal Victim, Eternal Victor, 12 Bryant, Kobe, 92 eunuch, 117, 129 176 Index
Evans, Tony, 66 Jakes, T. D., 1, 2, 10, 11, 13, 51, 60, 68, existential phenomenology, 3 83, 90, 93, 95, 111, 112, 137 Exodus International, 96 American dream, 74–75 consumerism, 73–74 Faludi, Susan, 63 crisis of black masculinity, 52–53, Falwell, Jerry, 93 79, 80 Fanon, Franz, 45 gender talk, 70–71 Farrakhan, Louis, 11, 64 He-Motions, 11, 68, 74, 132, 137 father wounds, 13, 61, 119, 123–25, 134 homosexuality, 97–98 father/son dynamic, 116, 122, 141 homosociality, 111 fatherhood, 11, 118–19, 135–36, 140 megachurch, 71–73, 76–77 female ordination, 8 son, Jermaine Jakes, 115–16 Fielder, Leslie, 37 Jesus, 57, 58, 88, 126, 129, 133 Foucault, Michel, 87 as Christian symbol, 33, 55, 87 Frazier, E. Franklin, 8, 131 as father figure, 127 Fredrickson, George, 21 messiah myth, 25 with the money changers, 9, 25 Garden of Eden, 8, 54, 55, 70 Gates, Henry Louis, 4 Kelly, R., 92 gay marriage, 104–105 King, Elder Bernice, 104 gender dynamics, 144 King, Jr., Martin Luther, 13, 56, 65, gender identity, 5, 108–10, 119 104, 120, 123, 130 Go Tell It on the Mountain, 99 Gomes, Reverend Professor Peter, 80, 90 Lincoln, C. Eric, 8 Gordon, Lewis, 3, 55 Long, Bishop Eddie L., 68, 95, 104 Gospel Music Workshop of lynching, 45, 56 America, 100 Graham, Billy, 11, 65, 69, 74 Malcolm X, 56, 130 Grant, Jacquelyn, 55 Manichean dualism, 28 Guerrero, Ed, 37, 49 ManPower conferences, 1, 2, 11, 52, 63, 67–68, 70, 73, 79 Halttunen, Karen, 30, 31, 47 Marriott, David, 13, 45, 47, 134 Harper, Philip Brian, 3, 4, 92 masculinity, 4–5 perennial crisis in black Christian, 3, 4, 8, 11, 14–15, 53, 54, masculinity, 52 68, 72–75, 79–81, 108, 111, 112, Henson, Josiah, 18 117, 121, 130 Henson, Mathew A., 18 emasculating masculinity, 6 heterosexual imperative, 13, in the church, 57–60 104–108, 113 McCartney, William, 64–65 homosexual inclusion, 93 McClurkin, Donnie, 10, 11, 12, 83, homosexuality, 12, 13, 37, 64, 67, 89, 95 83–100, 103–15 Church of God in Christ, 84 homosocial, 2, 37, 63–64, 79–81 Eternal Victim, Eternal Victor, hooks, bell, 6–7, 10, 34 84–85 hypermasculine, 4, 118 gender performance, 108 marriage imperative, 107–108 Invisible Man, 78 molestation, 85–86 MegaFest, 1, 68 Jackson, Michael, 92 melodrama, 2, 6, 38, 43 Index 177
Million Man March, 11, 51, 52, 63, 64, respectability, 12, 142 66–67 Riggs, Marlon, 101 Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, 24–25 Rustin, Bayard, 105 Moynihan Report, 59–60, 112, 131 muscular christianity, 8–9, 53, 60, 62, Sanders, Cheryl, 89, 113 63, 120 Sarat, Austin, 45–46 sexual abuse, 11, 69, 84, 86, 92, 96 Nation of Islam, 59 sexual woundedness, 13, 83 Negrophobogenesis, 48 slavery, 7, 14, 19, 26–28, 31, 32, 34, neo-Pentecostal, 1, 71 35, 59, 60, 90, 113, 128, 130, New Testament, 8, 25, 41, 54, 57, 88, 131, 136 133, 140 Souls of Black Folk, The, 23 stereotypes, 23, 25, 34, 68, Old Testament, 88, 133 91–92, 101 open secrets, 103–104 Stewart, Maria W., 27–28 Owens, Jr, Bishop Alfred A., 94 Superman, 32, 80, 137, 138 paternity, 127 Tarzan, 45 abandonment, 14, 124 Thomas, Clarence, 18, 92 patriarchy, 2, 4–7, 10, 12, 37, 60, 63, Tonex, 84 66, 70, 101, 113, 117, 131, transgression, 3, 37 136–37, 139 trauma, 14, 37, 45, 49, 60, 83, 85, Paul, the Apostle 96, 119 on church positions, 8, 54, 140 Turner, Nat, 25 on husbands and wives, 8, 54 Tyson, Mike, 92 on sexuality, 88 on the mind and body, 33 Uncle Tom pedophilia, 85, 86, 92 black messiah, 24, 29–30 phallus, 41–42, 47–48 caricature, 35 Phelps, Fred W., 93 description of body, 29 Pittman, Frank description of character, 26 Man Enough: Fathers, Sons, and the in film, 36–37 Search for Masculinity, 118 pornography of pain, 31, 47 Walker, David, 27, 28 Potter’s House, 11, 52, 68–69, 115 West, Cornel, 113 Powell, Colin, 18 white supremacist ideology, 10, 89, Promise Keepers, 1, 2, 8, 11, 51–52, 63–67 93, 121 proof-texting, 89 whiteness, 5, 6, 18, 24, 26–29, 32, 35, pseudosciences, 27 48, 56, 57, 66, 107, 116 Putney, Clifford, 9, 63 Why Men Hate Going to Church, 58 Wideman, John Edgar, 14, 145 racial determinism, 21 Wilson, Reverend Willie racialism, 19–22, 31, 91–92 Union Temple Baptist redemptive suffering, 18, 24, 51, 74, 127 Church, 110 Black Liberation Theology, 56–57 Winfrey, Oprah, 18, 40 black messiah, 24 Woman, Thou Art Loosed, 1, John Coffey, 40–42, 47–48 69–70 Uncle Tom, 29–31 Woods, Tiger, 92 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 19 Wright, Richard, 134