Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 900

A Most Respectable Outing: Why Jason Collins’ Historic Announcement May Change Very Little by Kwame Holmes

A Most Respectable Outing: Why Jason Collins’ Historic Announcement May Change Very Little
by Kwame Holmes | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Though you couldn’t tell from the overwhelming media attention and, to paraphrase Mark Anthony Neal, a nation-wide collective backslapping, Jason Collins is not the world’s first black gay man.  It is important to say this, because while Collins’ announcement fundamentally intervenes into the nation’s notion of who participates in men’s pro sports, we can not ignore that it matters immensely to a range of folks that the first openly gay professional athlete is black.  Despite evidence that black voters support gay and lesbian rights, and have recently moved towards support for same-sex marriage, black communities continue to be pathologized as less accepting of gays and lesbians than other demographic groups. 
African Americans’ overrepresentation within masculinist spaces like professional athletics seems to confirm this impression. When it comes to discourse around “black homophobia,” commentators rarely distinguish between the basketball court, hip hop, or simply “the block”–interchangeable sites which seem to repel not only the explicit infiltration of gay men, but a wide range of progressive liberalisms in which gay identity now comfortably resides.  At the same time, there is reason to think critically about the excitement that surrounds Collins’ announcement (an excitement I share). While it may be a historic watershed in the nation’s understanding of black sexuality, or force a reconsideration of black masculinity, I also worry it reinforces an already class-stratified understanding of black sexuality that goes back to the turn of the twentieth century.
Let me be clear. I am not here to pillory Jason Collins.  We know from decades of black feminist scholarship that, in deciding to tell the world he is black and gay, Collins is bravely volunteering to enter one of the nation’s oldest and most potent mine fields, the public consumption of black sexuality.  In recent years black male same-sexuality has emerged alongside black single motherhood, as particularly implicated in the devastation and destruction of the African American community. The ongoing HIV-AIDS epidemic within African America has made black men who have sex with men (or MSM)--regardless of whether they self-consciously identify as gay, bisexual, “DL” or same gender loving (SGL)— as murderous carriers of disease.  Anxiety around declining black marriage rates has added a new layers onto black Americans’ feelings about male homosexuality, which, alongside interracial marriage, marks some black men as eager to “jump ship” and betray their racial obligations to black women.  In an age inflected by rhetorics of austerity, the anti-black racial project of mass incarceration only heightens concerns around black hetero scarcity. In turn, those concerns are bolstered by widespread belief that even the most masculine black men can succumb to same-sex activity, even romance, during their time behind bars.  The stakes of the black community’s engagement with same-sex desire are, to put it mildly, quite high.
In a world where black masculinity seems always under attack, sports culture is one of a dwindling set of spaces where it seems not only ever-ascendant, but unbreakable in the face of declining black male employment and heightening black male disfranchisement. As Rod McCollum notes on Ebony.com, almost four-fifths of NBA players and two-thirds of NFL players are black.  Jason Collins has punched a hole in the hermeneutically sealed heterosexuality of “the locker room.” An intervention that Chris Broussard and Larry Johnson’s unfortunate comments indicate was sorely needed. And yet, his announcement, almost immediately, repairs that gap by his seeming desire to signal himself as exceptional, both in terms of his class position and as an anomalous de-sexed gay man.
Forced to grapple with the complex, at times contradictory, history of the racialized politics of sexuality in the United States, Collins’ Sports Illustrated editorial takes refuge in the secure bunkers of class signification.   At the very start of his essay Collins narrates that the first person he told about his sexual identity was his aunt, Teri L. Jackson, a superior court judge in San Francisco.  Immediately, Collins signals to readers that trailblazing, economically successful black people have surrounded him throughout his life.  Soon after, Collins references his gay uncle, who lived in the rarified, elite queer air of Harlem, and reminds readers of his matriculation at Stanford University.  Collins casually mentions that the decision by his college roommate, Congressman Joe Kennedy, to march in a gay pride parade inspired him to start the process of coming out.  Indeed, close to the beginning of Collins’ 12 hour takeover of traditional and social media, President Obama, Michelle Obama, former President Clinton and Chelsea Clinton released statements or tweets congratulating him for his bravery; the later referring to Collins as “my friend.”  If that doesn’t signal ones position among the elite, what else does? 
As Collins narrates his journey to self discovery, his middle-class origins enable him to more easily articulate “universal” concerns that align with the cultural longings of white middle-class life than would be possible for many of his heterosexual black team mates who hail from working-class backgrounds. Collins, of course, is who he is, and his relatively privileged background in no way detracts from the courageousness and historicity of his announcement.  At the same time, his decision to become engaged to a woman is framed as the natural result of the pressures placed upon men of his social position.  Nor was Collins forced from the closet by mannerisms perceived as feminine, or the natural intra-racial surveillances which operate in neighborhoods with limited private residential space; environmental realities which Marlon Ross notes make the metaphor of “coming out the closet” incommensurate with most working-class African American’s life experience.  Rather, his narrative includes the trappings of bourgeois life: a lone pure bred German shepherd, an empty pool, a deserted mansion -- a series of concentric chokers, if you will, that signal the vast emptiness of his closeted existence, and yet simultaneously enfold him within media friendly material wealth.
Meanwhile, anyone hoping for salacious tales of Collins numerous affairs with fellow players, closeted celebrities or any living breathing man was left sorely disappointed. In a classic example of what historian Darlene Clark Hine first identified as a culture of “dissemblance” among middle class black women, Collins deploys what appears to be an excess of transparency—we are clued into a profound internal spiritual struggle—while keeping any manifestations of his same-sex desires glaringly opaque.  Rather, Collins editorial suggests that rigid, masculine discipline of sports-culture so completely excises same-sex desire that he remained unselfconscious about himself before his 30s.  Perhaps such a claim could stand, uncomplicated, a century ago.  Then, black elites (like their white counterparts) in the Young Men Christian’s Association movement hoped that homosocial male sports cultures would uplift poor African Americans; redirecting male sexual energy towards more productive pursuits and civilizing them for their active participation in marriage and productive labor.  Indeed, Collins ability to “fool” everyone, including his twin brother, by embodying the reserved, upstanding sportsman, is as much a classed performance as it is a gendered one.  But in a world of Shawn Kemps and Kobe Bryants, the public is entirely aware that the regimentation of sports culture does not limit the seIn implying, whether intentionally or not, a preternatural ability to resist his desires, Collins implicitly reassures anxious team mates concerned that his eyes may have lingered upon their naked bodies in the shower or the locker room - as well as, of course, the team owners who will determine whether he plays ball next year. His apparent chastity also distances himself from his colleagues whose sexual exploits have integrated them into longstanding critiques of the failure and dysfunction of working class black family life.  In an odd twist then, Collins decision to out himself as a desexualized gay man, positions him as significantly more “respectable” than black male athletes who have been “irresponsible” parents.  If Charles Barkely demanded that we not see him as a role model, Jason Collins unapologetically asks that we do, and in doing so, he asks us to reconsider very little of our preconceived notions of proper forms of black male sexuality.
Once we view Jason Collins’ coming out narrative as a story of a maturing middle class identity—which culminates in the irrepressible desire for a monogamous commitment or “settling down” as he puts it--it becomes easier to understand his outing—and the auxiliary demand for universal adulation on the part of the media—as part of a well tread genre of black politics.  As a number of historians have noted, Rosa Parks was by no means the first African American in Montgomery to resist Jim Crow on the city’s public bus system.  Movement leaders decided that Claudette Colvin, a young Montgomery activist who placed her body on the line to oppose racial segregation in March of 1955, was an unsuitable symbol of racial progress because she had defiled that body through pre-marital sex and pregnancy.  Though operating in an entirely different time and context, Jason Collins’ announcement does not merely hit the familiar beats of respectability politics, its historicity also relies upon a collective forgetting; this time of trailblazing black gay men from Bayard Rustin, to Joseph Beam, Crystal Labeijia and Essex Hemphill; an inadequate list at best. Yet those men, for a variety of reasons never could or wanted to embody the perfect storm of middle classness and sexual chastity performed by Jason Collins.  Many of them chose to indulge in homosocial contact away from the only territory where such contact is historically and almost universally sanctioned, the sports arena.  In that sense then, the historic import of Jason Collins announcement may be less a sea change towards sexual liberation for black people, and more a signal that now, certain black gay men can be assimilated into the trappings of liberal, middle class American life.
***
Kwame Holmes is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African studies at the University of Virginia. Next fall he will be Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He is currently at work on a book manuscript Chocolate to Rainbow City: Branding “Black” and “Gay” in Washington, D.C. 1957-1983.

TimesCast: William C. Rhoden on Jason Collins

TimesCast

The Times's William C. Rhoden discusses the coming out of Jason Collins and how the N.B.A. player's decision could ripple through the world of sports.

Anthropology and Caribbean History: A Conversation with Sidney Mintz

Franklin Humanities Institute

Sidney Mintz, who has profoundly shaped Caribbean Studies, reflects here on his intellectual trajectory, his life and his fieldwork.
Other participants in this conversation include Eric Mintz (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), Laurent Dubois (Romance Studies and History; Haiti Lab), and Deborah Jenson (Romance Studies; Haiti Lab).

“I’m Black and I’m Gay”: The Everydayness of Jason Collins (the Remix) by Mark Anthony Neal

“I’m Black and I’m Gay”: The Everydayness of Jason Collins (the Remix) by Mark Anthony Neal | from the Square
As a lifetime New York Mets fan, I rarely need to be reminded that spring training signaled the beginning of a new baseball season. Yet, for a few years, I could have been reminded by the seemingly annual press conferences from Mets catcher Mike Piazza in which he announced to the world that he was not gay. That Piazza felt compelled to hold a press conference to announce such non-matters, speaks both to the proverbial stakes for male professional athletes (particularly in the so-called four “major” sports), and the absurdity of the national discourse regarding sexual identity.
There was no such press conference for Jason Collins, a twelve-year journey man in the National Basketball Association—just a Sports Illustrated cover story in which he admitted that he was “Black” and “Gay.” Indeed there was a mundane quality to Collins’ admission—it’s not like Collins is the first Black and Gay person to walk the earth. Perhaps, far more remarkable is that Collins has survived the last few seasons as a Black athlete who sits on the end of the bench, in a position that long served as the NBA’s quota program for a league that is still to visibly “Black” for some.
This is not to say that Collins’ “coming out”—a term that really just reproduces the very marginalization that homophobia constructs in the first place—was not brave and that the kudos that he’s received from Team Obama and high-profile colleagues like Kobe Bryant (only a few years removed from his own courtside use of a pejorative directed at Gays) and the always-already surreal Metta World Peace, were not thoughtful. It stands to reason, though, that President Obama will not be making a call to every Black man or women who will admit to a friend, family member, clergy leader or employer that he or she is gay—or more importantly, he won’t be calling those who will be shunned from the comforts of family and community because they did.
But what exactly are we really celebrating in highlighting the decision of one Black and Gay man to tell the world how he has lived everyday for much of his mature life?
As is too often the case in these matters, the attention that Jason Collins is getting is really about the need of our society to pat ourselves on the collective back for being open and tolerant enough to allow a veteran basketball player, close to the end of his career, to tell us that he is Black and Gay. In this regard, I’m not impressed. Nevada State Senator Keith Atkinson recently also admitted that he was “Black” and “Gay” to his legislative colleagues during a debate on Same-Sex marriage, which apparently doesn’t make us feel as good.
The everydayness of Jason Collins' life as a Black and Gay man does not match the spectacle of the larger culture’s response to it. As Sharon Patricia Holland notes in her recent book The Erotic Life of Racism , “quotidian racism”—or for our purposes, quotidian homophobia—“can seem rather unremarkable.” Embedded in this disconnect is the way that the spectacle of this particular “coming out” scene is a by-product of the everydayness of the homophobia, racism and sexism that the spectacle labors hard to obscure.
To be sure, Jason Collins represents an important moment in professional sport in the United States. As he symbolically raised his hand, hopefully he will find others willing to raise their hands alongside him and encourage a generation of younger athletes to be comfortable enough in their own skins to feel free to express whoever “they be.”  Until then I’m just waiting for the press conference or cover story that announces that such things no longer matter.
***
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of several books, including  Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities  (NYU Press, 2013), and the host of the weekly webcast Left of Black.

Forgotten Women of the War on Terror: Author Victoria Brittain on the Wives and Families Left Behind

Democracy Now
As pressure grows for President Obama to close the Guantánamo military prison, we speak with British journalist Victoria Brittain who has closely covered the military prison for years. Her latest book is Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror . "Some of the women that I've written about are the wives of Guantánamo prisoners. One, in particular, who is like chapter one of the book, is one of my closest friends, and I kind of lived alongside her and her children through a very long period when her husband was in Guantánamo. And she had absolutely no information about why he was there, when he might come back, no contact with him whatsoever," Brittain says.

ReelBlack: Harry Belafonte on Southern Segregation, South African Apartheid & Nazism

ReelBlack
Artist & Activist HARRY BELAFONTE discusses the idea of Post-Racial America in this excerpt from the Montclair Film Festival's Q&A for SING YOUR SONG, the documentary of his life. Photographed on 4.28.2013 by Mike D. for Reelblack, Inc. The 2nd annual Montclair Film Festival runs April 29- May 5, 2013. For more information, visit www.montclairfilmfest.org.

ReelBlack: Harry Belafonte on Post Racial America

ReelBlack
Artist & Activist HARRY BELAFONTE discusses the idea of Post-Racial America in this excerpt from the Montclair Film Festival's Q&A for SING YOUR SONG, the documentary of his life. Photographed on 4.28.2013 by Mike D. for Reelblack, Inc. The 2nd annual Montclair Film Festival runs April 29- May 5, 2013. For more information, visit www.montclairfilmfest.org.

On the Season Finale of ‘Left of Black’ Guest Host Alondra Nelson Talks with Mark Anthony Neal about His New Book ‘Looking for Leroy’

Left of Black S3:E28 | On the Season Finale of ‘Left of Black’ Guest Host Alondra Nelson Talks with Mark Anthony Neal about His New Book ‘Looking for Leroy’


Guest host and Columbia University Professor Alondra Nelson sits down in the Left of Black studios with Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal to discuss his new book Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (NYU Press).
Nelson is associate professor of sociology and gender studies at Columbia University and the author of the award winning Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and the forthcoming The Social Life of DNA: Race and Reconciliation after the Genome (Beacon Press).  Neal is the author of several books including New Black Man (2005) and Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic , and the host of Left of Black.
***
Left of Black is a weekly Webcast hosted by Mark Anthony Neal and produced in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.
***
 
Episodes of Left of Blackare also available for free download in @ iTunes U

A Conversation with Mark Anthony Neal at the Jane Addams Hull-House in Chicago on May 1st

Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities A Conversation with Mark Anthony Neal
Moderated by Barbara Ransby, Professor Gender and Women's Studies,  African American Studies & History at The University of Illinois at Chicago
Date & Time
Wednesday, May 1 | 6—7:30 pm, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum 800 S. Halsted, Chicago, IL.
Admission Free.
RSVP at Here 
Books will be available for purchase and signing.

Mark Anthony Neal’s  Looking for Leroy  is an engaging and provocative analysis of the complex ways in which black masculinity has been read and misread through contemporary American popular culture. In examining figures such as hip-hop entrepreneur and artist Jay-Z, R&B Svengali R. Kelly, the late vocalist Luther Vandross, and characters from the hit HBO series The Wire, among others, Neal demonstrates how distinct representations of black masculinity can break the links in the public imagination that create antagonism toward black men.
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African and African-American Studies at Duke University, where he won the 2010 Robert B. Cox Award for Teaching. Neal has written and lectured extensively on black popular culture, black masculinity, sexism and homophobia in Black communities, the history of popular music, and Black digital humanities.
He is the author of five books, What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture(1998), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2002), Songs in the Keys of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003), New Black Man: Rethinking Black Masculinity (2005) and Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities, which will be published in April of 2013 by New York University Press. Neal is also the co-editor (with Murray Forman) of That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, 2nd Edition (2011).
Neal hosts the weekly video webcast, Left of Black in collaboration with the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University and is the founder and managing editor of the blog NewBlackMan (in Exile).
You can follow him on Twitter @NewBlackMan.
Co-sponsored by The Public Square, Young Chicago Authors, UIC School of Art and Art History, Social Justice Initiative, IRRPP and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.

TimesTalks: The 'Central Park Five' Interview

TimesTalks
Ken Burns, co-director and author Sarah Burns, Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Jim Dwyer, who covered the case and is interviewed in the film, and the exonerated, including Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise. The panel engages in a conversation about the issues raised by "The Central Park Five," the award-winning documentary about the horrific crime that occurred in Central Park in 1989, the rush to judgment and the lives of those wrongly convicted.