Barack and Curtis: Manhood, Power and Respect

Whether or not one likes his politics, the success of Sen. Barack Obama has been a boon to those of us who do battle against the lie that the only way that black boys can gain respect is to conform to the myth of the hypermasculine thuggish black man. As a mother, daughter, sister, cousin, niece, friend, (former) wife, and lover of black men, I know that this lie is killing us. I know that our corporate media system is complicit, and that motivates much of the work that I do as an educator. In 2005, I wrote:

[T]he predominant media image of a black man who becomes successful through education and hard work is of an emasculated Babbitt in black face -- unsure of himself, and of limited use to anyone. Against that media landscape, black parents who are trying to raise their children to resist the fools' gold of the Stagolee myth face staggering odds.

Now, filmmaker Byron Hurt, producer-director of "Beyond Beats and Rhymes" the documentary on hip-hop, has released a riveting filmic statement on the meaning of Barack Obama as a representation of constructive black male power. The documentary, "Barack and Curtis: Manhood, Power, and Respect" can be viewed in its entirety below:

Writing for Vibe.com, Duke University professor Mark Anthony Neal discloses one of the film's key insights:

As Chris Rock surmised some time ago, niggas don't get assassinated, they get shot--and there always been more of a chance that the Senator from Illinois's fate would be decided by a bullet intended for a nigga, as opposed to that intended for the candidate, because quiet as it's kept--Harvard pedigree notwithstanding--Obama never stops being a black man. And this is perhaps the implicit message of Byron Hurt's recent film short Barack & Curtis: Manhood, Power and Respect. The film is a brilliant and thoughtful intervention on the subject of black masculinity at a moment when Senator Barack Obama is poised to redefine black manhood for much of the world.

This reality is perhaps why Neal refers to himself as a "ThugNiggaIntellectual" a self-designation I don't like, but I certainly understand. Were W.E.B. Du Bois alive, he would doubtless call it a gendered form of double-consciousness --

[T]his sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

Du Bois, writing in 1903, described the yearning to be both a Negro and an American. Even then, in his short story, "Of the Coming of John," he saw the dilemma of the black male intellectual. (He wrote also of the damnation of women, but that is a different essay.) Just as Maria Niles wrote recently of Obama, the educated black man has to be careful not to be seen as angry.

On the other hand, the archetypal black thug portrayed by gangster rappers such as Curtis (50 Cent)Jackson, is defined by little more than his anger and cunning. As one of the commenters in the film notes, one would never know that this is a man with the business skills to snag a $400 million stake in Vitamin Water, or create the successful G-Unit clothing line. At the same time that Jackson is complicit in his own commodification, the argument goes, he is trapped by it.

Hurt's film is giving bloggers a lot to think about. Some, such as IceDotCom, are upset that Hurt dared compare Obama to Fiddy:

Just hand McCain the election why dontchya.

On the other hand, M Dot at Model Minority muses:

Young Birkhold holds it down with the George Bush/50 Cent
analysis. When he said that that Hip Hop does the dirty work of, say
it with me now, White Supremacist Patriarchal Capitalism, I shuddered.

That, right there, is the money quote. There is no denying that the misogynist hypermasculine images in the worst of hip-hop (NOT all hip-hop-- don't even go there) are a byproduct of a centuries-old system of racist, sexist media production. That is the difference between the fictions created by the Fiddys of popular culture and those created by their idols: the film gangsters of an earlier era. Jimmy Cagney and his peers did not need street cred to get a woman or have a career.

And yes, I know that women and people of color participate in the creation of these images, just as women and people of color participated in the creation of the images of Toms, coons, bucks, mammies, and tragic mulattoes in an earlier media era. Today's performers do it for the same reason that their forbears did it a century ago: because they think it will sell outside of the black community.

However, the difference is that in the days of Jim Crow, there was a positive black cultural infrastructure to help teach young black people that there was a difference between the mask they were expected to project to the world and who they were inside. In our post-modern world with its loss of foundational narratives, that message is often as difficult to discern as musicality in a Lil Wayne song.

Whatever the outcome of next month's election, that Barack Obama has reached this height offers new hope that one can finally be both a black man and and American without being consigned to the fate that awaited Du Bois' tragic hero, John, whose effort to live up to the ideals of Victorian manhood leads to a confrontation with a lynch mob:

Amid the trees in the dim morning twilight he watched their shadows dancing and heard their horses thundering toward him, until at last they came sweeping like a storm, and he saw in front that haggard white-haired man, whose eyes flashed red with fury. Oh, how he pitied him,—pitied him,—and wondered if he had the coiling twisted rope. Then, as the storm burst round him, he rose slowly to his feet and turned his closed eyes toward the Sea.

And the world whistled in his ears.