JOURNAL/ OF
10.1177/0095798405274721
Laubscher
TOWARD
BLACKAPSYCHOLOGY
(DE)CONSTRUCTIVE
/ MAY 2005
PSYCHOLOGY
Toward a (De)constructive Psychology
of African American Men
Leswin Laubscher
Duquesne University
Recent psychological theory and research about African American men are overwhelmingly cast in crisis terms. Within such theory and research, the experimental mainstream and Afrocentric psychology seem diametrically opposed to each
other with respect to causes and reasons for the crisis as well as strategies for intervention and remediation. The author argues that, such surface differences notwithstanding, both proceed from an unquestioned assumption of an essentialized,
endangered, and embattled African American masculinity, the consequence of an
epistemological similarity that is deeply implicated in the representational politics and discursive construction of African American men. In response, the author presents an outline of a discursive and cultural psychological alternative to
studying and understanding African American men.
Keywords: African American; masculinity; men; cultural psychology;
Afrocentricity; discourse
In the past few decades, there has been a resurgent interest—both popular
and academic—in the African American1 man as research subject and ocular
object. This interest is overwhelmingly cast in the language of crisis, from
media representations of a population violently out of control to academic
descriptions of African American men as “endangered” (Gibbs, 1988) or
“disappearing” (Blake & Darling, 1994). This article desires to enter that discussion in a way that complicates, questions, and amplifies it. To that end, the
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article was supported by a generous grant from the Philip H. and Betty
C. Wimmer Family Foundation. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Leswin Laubscher, Department of Psychology, Duquesne University, 600 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15282. E-mail: [email protected]
JOURNAL OF BLACK PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. 31 No. 2, May 2005 111-129
DOI: 10.1177/0095798405274721
© 2005 The Association of Black Psychologists
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author proceeds to provide a brief topographical overview of the academic
literature, especially the psychological. In keeping with the geographical
metaphor, the contours of that literature are then subjected to a critique that
attempts to read both what it reveals and/or discloses as well as what it conceals and/or elides. Alternative epistemological and methodological positions are presented in response to this critique. This article takes its title seriously, hoping to deconstruct prevailing psychological discourse about
African American masculinity such that new, perhaps constructively liberating, pathways2 are illumed.
MAINSTREAM PSYCHOLOGY AND
THE AFRICAN AMERICAN MAN
The social science literature in general and psychology in particular characterize the African American man as one beset by a multitude of problems.
Hence, terms of reference or thematic tropes frequently cohere around the
rhetoric of crisis. It is a pathologizing, deficit literature (Mizell, 1999), a register “of the failures and dysfunctional behavior of Black males” (Gordon,
Gordon, & Nembhard, 1994, p. 522). In this sense, the formal (academic)
psychological literature seems in comfortable lockstep with popular representations on television, in the lay media, and the North American populace
at large of the African American man as absent, destructive, violent, or otherwise unable to function healthily and responsibly. A slew of demographic
and social statistics (e.g., life expectancy, substance abuse, homicide and suicide, health, unemployment, incarceration, or educational statistics, all of which
show disproportionate trends in comparison to most other racial/ethnic
American groups) are often offered as seemingly incontrovertible evidence
for the extent to which African American men are spiraling downward (Gibbs,
1988; Rasheed & Rasheed, 1999). 3
Having entered the language of crisis, the literature frequently proceeds to
offer some or other explanation for this state of affairs. The noted cultural
critic Cornel West (1994) remarked that such explanations seem to converge
around two poles. On one hand, there are those who emphasize structural strictures and impediments (e.g., poor education and institutional racism), whereas
on the other hand, there are those who privilege behavioral roadblocks (e.g.,
the waning of the Protestant ethic) to the life chances of Black America (West,
1994). Gordon et al. (1994), after an exhaustive review of the social science
and psychological literature concerning Black men, argued for a thematic
aggregation around the demographic, psychosocial, political/economical,
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and/or educational. A political/economic explanation, for example, may
attribute social ills to racism and/or economic inequality, whereas a psychosocial argument may offer the so-called breakdown of a (stable) Black
nuclear family structure as the primary causation. Moynihan’s (1965) oftquoted report on “the Negro family” acts as a benchmark for propositions
like the latter, and although Gordon et al. (1994) averred that explanations
like Moynihan’s have fallen out of academic vogue, it continues to enjoy considerable potency in the discursive currency of the everyday, where a return
to (healthy) family values is offered as a solution from the pulpits of the president and the church alike. The assumption, thinly veiled, is that societal ills
(including and especially that of the African American man) are attributable
to family structures that fall outside the heterosexual, nuclear family norm.
Sometimes, too, a combination of the demographic, psychosocial, politicoeconomic, and educational are offered as a complex and interacting explanatory template for the predicament the African American man is said to find
himself in (Gordon et al., 1994). There is, then, no agreement as to causation
(even though, given its naturalistic scientism, research is conducted as if a
singular cause or combination of explanatory variables can be discovered
with more or better data, better measurements, or additional research). In
fact, a wide range of explanatory models and hypotheses circulate, ranging
from the structural to the individual and from the interiorizing psychological
to the external contextual.
After noting crises and offering explanations, a number of studies proceed
to make recommendations or offer solutions. In many cases, the explanation
structures or, at least, frames the solution. Those, therefore, who attach primacy to structural explanations are wont to call for broad institutional
changes, for example in affirmative action practices or in social policies that
attempt equitable and fair educational opportunities. Those who locate causation in some psychological value-system may advocate self-help programs
and psychotherapeutic/psychoeducational intervention, among others. Not
surprising, as wide a range of interventions and solutions are offered as
explanations and causes.
Up until this point, my characterization of the narrative plot around which
mainstream social science organizes itself seems fairly straightforward and
even benign: The African American man is in crisis; as social scientists and
psychologists we would like to find out why, both for the purposes of scientific understanding and so that we can offer possible solutions, remedies, or
interventions to address this sorry state of affairs. The premise (reality) that
African American men are indeed in crisis anchors the plot. Indeed, crisis
seems such a fundamental given that even those few authors who decry the
deficit portrayal of African American men find it hard to extricate themselves
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from a seemingly impossible dilemma: to counter the argument of crisis or
even to argue against it is often to invoke the charge that one denies reality,
ignores the facts, or is out of experiential touch with the grassroots. The consequence, most often, is to call for a list of positives to offset the negative and
to research those men who do not succumb to crisis. That one should study
those who succeeded or overcame concedes a subtext; namely, that studying
them might offer clues as to what they did right. Setting aside the difficulties
with defining what it means to succeed or make it, the point is that crisis is
still responded to as a prior, defining fact of African American social life, and
the way out is presumed in cataloguing, analyzing, and describing coping
strategies of successful men such that they can be emulated or formalized in
intervention programs.
This article argues that the very notion of crisis must be given to scrutiny.
Invoking Wittgenstein (1953), if the discursive grammar of a language game
limits and prescribes the possible moves within the game, it behooves us to
examine how crisis is put into discursive play; indeed, to examine the role and
function of crisis as discourse within a broader and often invisible structuring
dynamic. Put metaphorically, questioning the frame of the mirror is not to
deny the reflection but to assert that Dorian Gray lives both inside and outside
his reflection. To be sure—inasmuch as the picture/mirror is a device by
which, through which, and even outside of which the African American man
comes to see himself—the frame as border, constituting outside and inside,
and the reflection (inclusive of looking, seeing, and [mis]recognizing),
should all be given to reflexive study.
AFROCENTRICITY AND
THE AFRICAN AMERICAN MAN
Positioning itself in opposition to the social scientific and psychological
mainstream, Afrocentricity—at first glance—seems to present a critical corrective to the deficit-centered literature and to have a proactive, even radically revolutionary, concern for the African American man in particular. A
comprehensive articulation of Afrocentricity is not possible here, partly
because of space constraints but also because it claims, encompasses, and/or
has been appropriated as all of philosophy, history, everyday praxis, spirituality, consciousness, methodology, psychology, and identity, among others.
Put another way, it has variously been deployed as ontology (even cosmology) and metaphysics as well as epistemology and methodology such that it
takes the whole of (Black) being, as well as a particular way of knowing
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(about) that being, as its charge. Whether Asante (1987, 1988, 1990), putative patriarch and/or sacristan steward of Afrocentric thought, intended for it
to be simultaneously everything and some (specific) thing is an open question. In this section, though, it is the particular use of Afrocentricity as identity—the extent to which a metaphysic of an African center allows for the
specificity of an Afrocentric self—that is given to scrutiny for the manner in
which it enters psychology as discipline and African American male
subjectivity as crisis intervention.
In short, and fully cognizant of a multiplicity of interpretative positions,
Asante’s (1987) Afrocentric charge has most often been taken up to mean
that a unique African American culture arises from the fact of African
descent, from distinct enculturative practices and/or rituals, and/or from the
cross-generational transmission of core values and ways of being rooted in
originary, preslavery cultures of the African continent of which only minor
surface manifestations have been impacted by being Africans in America.
Hence, it is the immersion within a Eurocentric reality that leads to problematic disjuncture for African Americans at the level of description and understanding as well as at the level of practice and the everyday. For example, if
one argues for an Afrocentric self-structure, organized around the collective
and relationships, then living within an individual-centered reality will be
limiting and existentially inauthentic. Moreover, measurements which privilege an individualized, Western self will render the African American subject
deficient (in the same way, presumably, that measurement that normalizes a
self-in-relation will render the Western subject deficient).
Positing a distinct cultural orientation centered in Africa enables two rhetorical extensions. On one hand, it is to argue that dislocation to America has
not changed a fundamental cultural identity still operative in (or at least available to) African American communities in general and African American
men in particular. On the other hand, if changes are observed, especially
those that suggest a Eurocentric self, these changes are considered mainly
surface ones, manifesting in a behavioral repertoire set and/or consciousness
that is inauthentic or false given an immanentist Afrocentric core to be reanimated and awakened from dormancy by exposure to certain experiences and
information. In both cases, the notion of an Afrocentric core to identity
(including masculinity as identity) has a timeless, unchanging, and immutable quality, the essence of which is fixed (or reclaimed) in (preslavery)
Africa.
With particular respect to African American men, an Afrocentric position
might argue that the crisis they find themselves in arises from an internalization of Eurocentric values that run counter to their Afrocentric essence.
Being an inauthentic life as such, it is characterized by self-hatred and
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mentacide (suicide of the mind), which wreaks havoc with their lives (Oliver,
1989). In fact, supposedly distinctive Euro-American values and traits, when
found in African American men, are not owned or theorized as African
American at all but as a betrayal or denial of a more essential (primordial)
African worldview (e.g., Bell, Bouie, & Baldwin, 1990). The way out of this
predicament is to effect a new consciousness, as it were, by reconnecting
with that African essence. Education about Afrocentric masculinity (Oliver,
1989, p. 34, called it “manhood training”), ritualized rites of passage ceremonies (Hare & Hare, 1985; Jeff, 1994), and a general reclamation of and
immersion in core Afrocentric values and beliefs are precisely such ways out,
all promising a new code of behavioral conduct (Akbar, 1991; Madhubuti,
1990) and an end to self-destructive crises.
In spite of its rather valiant attempt at decentering hegemonic truth claims,
however, the Afrocentric position is problematic in a number of respects (see
Appiah, 1992; Bhabha, 1994; Dyson, 1993; Gates, 1989; Gilroy, 1993;
Marable, 1995; Mercer, 1994; West, 1994).4 At a broad level, the very notion
of an essential, fixed identity has come under attack, especially from poststructural and postmodern quarters. One danger of an essential Afrocentric
cultural identity, seemingly unchangeable and structurally immutable, is to
lay the groundwork for an assertion of the way we (they) are, opening up a
dangerous space for stereotype and ethnocentrism. Indeed, there is a troubling similarity to an earlier essentialized biological racism such that “they
can’t help it, it’s in their blood” becomes “they can’t help it, it’s in their culture.” In addition, by setting up cultural identity as arising timelessly from
Africa, and not (or at least minimally) from the African experience in America,
renders oppression and the play of power less visible as a structuring frame.
Bordered notions of the real, true, essential, authentic, or Africa-centered
Black man raises another concern. Setting aside the problematic (and all too
frequent) conflation of culture/ethnicity with race, to speak of an Afrocentric
worldview and masculinity as a natural/normal cultural orientation (Bell,
Bouie, & Baldwin, 1990), is also to frame the unnatural and the abnormal.
There is little room under the Afrocentric umbrella if one is Black and identifies as gay, lesbian, or even a postmodern feminist in that homosexuality is
explicitly denounced as un-African (Asante, 1988), and categorically circumscribed gender roles enforce a particular behavioral script. By fixing
what it means to be African American in distinct Afrocentric essentiality is to
relegate to the margins or abject (in Judith Butler’s [1990] usage of the term)
from Blackness those so-called unnatural Black subjects (that is, although
one remains Black in terms of pigment, one loses cultural claims to Blackness, and, although one may remain a man by some biological standard, one
ceases to be a Black man).
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The essentialist challenge has recently been responded to by elaborations
of centeredness to include polycenters or many centers (Bekerie, 1994; Keto,
1994). That one needs to look at Africa’s cultures and history from their own
locations is an agreeable assertion. An Afrocentric cultural and masculine
identity, however, assumes the shape and form of that center already such that
the study of the African location proceeds less from the location itself than
from that prior understanding thereof. Moreover, there is still a linear
assumption of an evolutionary and/or genetic metaphysic that links polycenters thematically. The essentialist critique is, therefore, not rebutted by
the assertion of polycenters. Similarly, the statement that Afrocentricity “is a
claim to place” (Bekerie, 1994, p. 132) undercuts plurality and changing
meanings in that it holds Africa as place in a static ur-metaphysic such that it
becomes a holy land of sorts writ in the permanence of a timeless bequest (a
view that authorizes rather problematic and potentially dangerous claims to
ownership, belonging, and teleologies of origin/return).
There is, in fact, a troubling homology between the ethnocentric, racist,
and colonial charge that Africa has no philosophy and the Afrocentric project
that asserts an ontological sameness across a continent so vast, ancient, and
varied. Whereas the colonial gaze reduced Africa to a homogenous barbarity,
the Afrocentric project reduces it to ontological homogeneity and simplifies
a variegated African experience to an essentialized list of command(s)ments.
Inasmuch as Karl Jaspers’ (1951) sense of philosophy as that metaphysical
ordering that arises from peoples’conscious and existential engagement with
their surroundings is wholly denied by the colonial project (mostly on rather
spurious grounds of written vs. oral traditions), the Afrocentric project assaults
this understanding of philosophy for the manner in which it arises from the
diverse engagements of African peoples with context and history. Difference
is eradicated in both discourses, and the search for a singular essence is the
modernist glue that binds these seemingly Manichean enemies together.
Against this backdrop, even though there is a much more comprehensive
attribution of the causes of crisis to an oppressive White supremacist structure, the Afrocentric project also takes the crisis of African American men as
starting point and provides a salvific, essentialist intervention in response to
an exordial crisis. In addition, although there is a sustained articulation of the
violence that inheres to life in a Eurocentric world, positing dysfunction as
false or inauthentic living to be remedied by a change in the African American man’s consciousness seems to place the responsibility for change foursquare on the victim, in a manner of speaking. Although the perpetrator is
charged, (s)he/it is not called to accountability in the processes of hegemony,
representation, and the circulation of power nor held to responsibility in
change. Perhaps, though, a more important consequence of taking crisis as a
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real and existent departure point is the manner in which it silences the many
ways in which living in America is modified, responded to, and taken up by
African Americans other than (or in addition to) crisis. These everyday, complex, ambiguous, creative, and dynamic ways in which people live and conduct their lives are subordinated to a rather prescriptive, removed, and
even elitist notion and articulation of what it means to be African American.
Jackson’s (1997) assertion that “the major project confronting the African
American intellectual is liberating the masses from ignorance and negative
self-evolvement” (p. 747) not only recycles notions of the talented tenth but,
perhaps more seriously, also echoes the very rhetoric of Black dysfunction
and inability to respond to their surroundings adaptively, proactively, and
agentically.5 Indeed, the Afrocentric rejoinder to critiques of essentialism,
that truth (or the true) is a matter of communal understanding, is violated by
the notion that the community/majority lives a false truth/consciousness in
Eurocentric America. One is left, therefore, with an articulation of the true by
a knowing elite able to pronounce edicts of behavior that qualify one as truly
African (American) or not. Contrary to the claim that Afrocentricity is a theory of transformation and of “being a subject . . . exercising one’s agency”
(Bekerie, 1994, p. 148), it seems in fact an ideology about how to be a subject
wherein one’s agency is specifically and particularly circumscribed.
In the end, then, I share Cornel West’s (1994) characterization of Afrocentricity as a “gallant, but misguided” project both in general and more specifically for its position on African American masculinity. Yet, when I argue that
there is a similarity between the mainstream and the Afrocentric project in
terms of its search for psychic and cultural essences, and although I indict
both for a complicit relationship with hegemonized modes of signification
and representation and for coauthoring the very crisis they purport to (objectively) examine, I do not propose that they (or the effects of their respective
authorities) are the same. The Afrocentric attempt to contest a hegemonic
history and unsettle its European center is laudable so that an admittedly
polemic comparative descriptive might hold that the Afrocentric project is
gallant but misguided, whereas the mainstream psychological project is
misguided and collusively duplicitous.
AN ALTERNATIVE: DISCOURSE, THE BARBERSHOP,
AND PERFORMATIVE MASCULINITY
I have argued that the two most influential academic responses to African
American masculinity in psychology, that of Afrocentricity and an experi-
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mental mainstream, both proceed from an unquestioned acceptance of the
Black man in crisis. Indeed, the framing context for both responses seems to be
variations of the questions “Why is the Black man in crisis?” or “What is (are)
the Black man’s problem(s)?” I continued to argue that this stance is shaped by
particular epistemological assumptions, notably in the essentialized positivism of rational-empiricism that directs the truth of a Black man in crisis to the
extent that the world yields itself for explanation in mirror correspondence.
In this section, I report on an ongoing study (Laubscher, 2004) to demonstrate some alternative ways to narrate what it is to be an African American
man in contemporary America. The focus is on illustrating broad epistemological processes and assumptions and not on the specifics of the study,
which—on completion—will be reported elsewhere. In short, though, I spent
several months in two barbershops located in an almost exclusively African
American neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The intent remains to
provide an interpretive reading of African American masculinity by treating
the barbershop as meaningful text situated, and situating itself, within discourses of gender and race/ethnicity, among others. Although it is not my
intention to revisit the arguments as to the merits of a human science psychology generally or a poststructural, critical, discursive, and/or cultural psychology more particularly (see Burr, 1995; Cole, 1996; Gergen, 2000; Potter,
1996; Rosenau, 1992; Shweder, 1991; Walsh, 1995), placement there allows
for a research direction and entry that is decidedly different to that of the
experimental mainstream or the Afrocentric. Inasmuch as one is sensitized
now to all of the what, how, and where of enunciation, the research question
can be reframed into, for example, “How is the Black man made to be in crisis?” or “How is crisis created/constructed/represented from inside and outside the African American male experience?” In responding to this different
kind of question, a hermeneutics of suspicion, as it were, understands both
that people are active agents and that they act in contexts not entirely of their
choosing. As such, people “seize meanings from their environments, but the
range of meanings to be seized is discursively constructed, and this ‘seizing’
alters the mental life of individuals as well as the social world within which
meaningful performance is situated” (Laubscher, 2003, p. 10). A space is
thus opened within which our terms of reference for phenomena are sustained by social processes, suspended in spatial historicity, and located in social
practices.
I am not arguing that there is no crisis or, more appropriately, that African
American communities and/or African American men, particularly, do not
make meaning of their worlds in terms of crisis (in fact, there was a rather decided articulation of the Black man in crisis by many men in this study) but
that the processes whereby we have come to accept crisis as trope be exam-
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ined alongside the actual ways with which people engage each other and the
broader world. To simply assume an a priori, real world of crisis obscures the
constructedness of that world and absolves it from complicity in the making
of mind and behavior as performance. Hence, in my study (Laubscher,
2004), crisis as trope remains open to examination not (only) as a function of
being an African American man but the African American man as a function
of, and functioning within, representations of himself in crisis (put another
way, W. E. B. Du Bois’s [1991] century-old question, “How does it feel to be
a problem?” [p. 1] is not to assert that one is a problem but primarily how one
is made, or marked, to be a problem). bell hooks (2004), echoing this insight,
wrote that
a crisis in the black male spirit . . . [is] not because black men are an “endangered species”; rather it is a crisis perpetrated by widespread dehumanization,
by the continued placement of black males outside the category of human—
which is precisely what happens when anyone deploys the phrase most commonly used to speak of animals, endangered species, when describing the lot
of black men. (p. 134)
It is clear that the relationship between a theory of truth and the methods
and procedures of knowing is a political one for its imbeddedness is in representational and/or discursive meaning systems, a point Foucault (1972,
1980) made articulately and comprehensively for the manner in which power
circulates, surrounds, and produces subjects in regimes of truth.
Compelled to investigate African American masculinity in spatio-historical
context; in communal relation; and as meaningful, purposive performance, I
selected the Black barbershop as research space. Historically and presently,
the Black barbershop emerges as a crucial pivot for the African American
narrative specifically and the North American generally. As entrepreneurial
community fulcrum (one that, for example, enabled the first Black university,
Wilberforce, started by Messrs. Woodson and Vashon, both barbers), site of
resistance (the barbershop was a crucial and frequent stop on the underground railroad not only as haven but also actively as transformative identity
in a shave and a new haircut), or aesthetic location (Langston Hughes, James
Baldwin, August Wilson, and Toni Morrison, among others, have all situated
it dramatically; see Harris, 1979, for an examination of the barbershop in
Black literature and Diawara, 1993, for references in film and television),6
the barbershop is referenced frequently and consistently. All the academic
and intertextual evidence notwithstanding, however, there remains a rather
straightforward litmus test for the importance of the barbershop in the African American community—ask almost any Black man.
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Having selected the barbershop as research space, having provided a discursive genealogy for it, and perhaps even motivated why it is an adequate
space within which the phenomenon can be studied—in other words, arguing
for its presence—I also examine the barbershop as absence and margin. For
example, although I argue for its pivotal importance within the African
American community, one would be hard pressed to make such a claim, by
academic accounts, of that community. An experimental research center vanquishing the descriptive margin does not adequately explain this silence; the
so-called Black church, for example, has been told endlessly, and the disciplines of sociology and anthropology certainly had access to ethnography as
description. There is, I proffer, an intimate back and forth between keeping
(White) academics out of the barbershop by Black men themselves and hesitancy on the part of the (White) mainstream to engage a congregation of
agentic Black men (of course, there is ample writing about the prison as collection of Black men, but it is evident how this manacled site allows mainstream speech). In addition, I argue that it is also a silence that speaks to
whom produces knowledge and how that production has been constructed as
knowledge-worthy. To the extent that academics write about what they know,
the paucity of research and writing on the barbershop is consequently also a
statement about the absence of African American men from the academy
such that they can present their lives and situated experiences for study as
well as epistemological censure against sites like the barbershop as disclosive of a Platonic psyche.
As much as the discourse of a general barbershop insinuates itself into the
study, however, I entered particular barbershops within a specific local community. This space, then, needed to be told in an emic manner—after all, performing masculinity took place in a decided here. Yet the study also revealed
quite early that that here was not static and that it would be a dire mistake to
take the four walls of the barbershop as containing border for the hermeneutic. At times, there was a seemingly firm boundary around inside/outside, and
here/there (e.g., only certain men were allowed to gamble inside the shop); at
other times, easy categorizations of inside/outside were not possible (e.g.,
some women would not set foot—perhaps even be allowed—in the shop, but
they were brought into the shop through commentary and conversation after
being observed through the large windows that both allowed and disallowed
access and blurred inside/outside); at still other times here included a concentrically broader Hill District, Pittsburgh, North America, or Blackness as
ontic facticity. Here as text, consequently, required different interpretative
moves. As defined barbershop, the text was both talk and artifact. For example, in one barbershop, the customer’s hair is cut with his back to the mirror,
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allowing him and the barber to face and interact with the rest of the men in the
shop. On completion of the haircut, the chair is swiveled so that the end product is viewed in the mirror. As process, there is a statement here as to the primacy of interaction above the instrumentality of the haircut itself. In addition, however, in this particular case, the mirror the customer is swiveled to is
framed by pictures of African American sportsmen and entertainers like
Mike Tyson, Michael Jordan, George Benson, Nas, and so forth. Literally, as
one looks at oneself in the little open space in the middle of the mirror—seeing how good a Black man one has been made to be—other Black men frame
the ideal in a halo that is both burden and liberation.7 As broader outside, artifact became increasingly less available. For example, as the weather
improves, the action moves outside where chess and checkers tables are
arranged on the sidewalk or a changing but continuous group of men congregate, a lively to-and-fro with passersby and each other its hallmark. Yet,
although the sidewalk, passing car, and barren field next door are still tangibly open to observation, the next corner, the car’s destination, and the
landscape of the not-immediate becomes intangibly abstracted into talk.
To be methodologically reflexive is also to be sensitive to the fact that an
embodied, corporeal researcher enters the research space. This entry, therefore, is given to part and parcel study. For example, I identify as a South African man of color (and in South Africa would be identified as Coloured, an
Apartheid grab bag that marked the descendants of the Khoi and/or those of
mixed racial heritage—where mixed refers to sexual liaisons between European colonizers and indigenous peoples and between peoples of color considered of culturally different backgrounds such as Malay slaves and Zulus).
In the United States, however, the complexities of my presence as history and
dwelling are not available, leading to a rather schizophrenic relationship with
whom I am or where I am from. Indeed, who I am and where I am from is continually made and remade depending on my surroundings (Laubscher &
Powell, 2003) so that I am often spoken to in Spanish in predominantly
Latino neighborhoods, as frequently assumed to be Indian (South East
Asian), Palestinian (and Muslim) in Detroit, or asked, on Chicago’s South
Side (overwhelmingly African American) which of my parents were Black?
As research strategy, then, initial acceptance and trust came from my sharing
very, very early that I am South African and that I opposed Apartheid
actively, even being jailed for this opposition; in effect, unable to be recognizably African American in pigment and accent, a certain hospitality accrued to
my being African and one of “Mandela’s children.” Of course, this strategy
privileges the auditory. On going to one of the barbershops for the first time, I
parked my car and proceeded to walk a block down the road. Approaching a
busy corner, two men came walking up to me, reaching toward me in the
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expectation that I would speak to them. I greeted and passed them, their faces
quizzically pulled into a momentary frown. Later, I checked my own interpretation of the event against those of the men in the barbershop, and the
meaning was clear enough: I did not belong on that street corner by my physical features, the only reason I was presumed to be there being to buy drugs.
The men that approached me (and whom I got to talk to later) stated in no
uncertain terms that the only occasion those groups marked as other (mostly
Whites) have to venture into the African American neighborhood is to solicit
drugs. Of course, the discursive possibilities are apparent in who (and how)
ultimately constructs and maintains the Black drug dealer (and the so-called
drug crisis). The researcher, consequently, cannot be a disembodied, objective observer but has to listen to his or her situated, corporeal presence.
Indeed, it demands a reflexive stance that recognizes that Verstehen is not
reproduced in an original meaning of the action but is participative and produced in dialogue (Gadamer, 1975). So, for example, although I invited all
the barbers and whomever else was interested to a luncheon when the
research was completed and where I shared the hermeneutic and asked members to respond to and shape it, this process was a continuous feature of the
research. The sense of myself as all of participating actor, (Black) foreigner,
and storyteller making negotiated sense of the tale in interaction is brought to
bear on this stance toward the text—one that is of necessity descriptive,
interrogative, reflexive, and dialogic.
Finally, what happens after the research data has been collected is crucially important. Much has been written about action research, participative
research, community research, and the like (e.g., Greenwood & Levin, 1998;
Reason & Bradbury, 2001)—all of which advocate varying degrees of commitment and responsibility to the research population and sample after the
data has been gathered. Space prevents a thorough examination of such
issues, other than a referral to the sources referenced above, and a reassertion
that this “after” is less coda than conjugate and kept flexibly present throughout. Hence, although the luncheon referred to in the paragraph above also
served to initiate a closer business, support, and friendship network among
barbers from three shops in the area, some of whom came together there for
the first time, another example involves an extended dialogue between the
men in the barbershop and a few of my graduate students who visited with
me. At one level, one can characterize it as a pedagogical experience, which it
was, but at another, it was powerfully political in that dialogal sense where
the gaze of the (White) academic is returned such that it was not (only) about
what it meant to be a Black man in a Black barbershop but, very particularly,
also about what it was to be a White (and Black, and South African), male
student visiting a Black barbershop. And there, in that moment and in the gift
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of the face and facing, was the breath of the other that whispered the promise
of hospitality and a justice toward the not yet.8
IN CONCLUSION
I have argued that the literature concerning African American men is predominantly crisis or pathology centered but that this need not mean a real
world of crisis inasmuch as the literature reflects a mirror image of some
organic, objective reality. Instead, I offered that a closer analysis of epistemological assumptions reveal a complicity in constructing this very world of crisis such that the question becomes to what extent the literature represents (as
opposed to reflects) the Black man in crisis. What seems at stake is not crisis,
per se, but representation and articulation of crisis in Stuart Hall’s (1996)
sense of articulation as “a connection . . . of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute or
essential for all time” (p. 141). There is, therefore, no necessary belongingness between the elements, in this case African American men and crisis, but
that they have been articulated in discourse as real and seemingly unquestionably essential. Crisis is made to attach to the African American male in a
particular historical time and place within particular lines of tendential force
(Hall, 1994; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001), regimes of power and knowledge/truth
(Foucault, 1980), or out of and by difference (Derrida, 1976, 1982). An entry
that is deconstructive, critical, reflexive, and discursively attuned now draws
to itself the possibility of resistance to oppressive representations and
signifying practices or rearticulation against the valorized grain (Hall, 1996).
NOTES
1. The term African American is not used to affirm or validate race as biological signifier.
Mindfully aware, though, that “racism has made race real without making it true” (Bernasconi,
2001, p. 206), the challenge is to use the term in a way that simultaneously acknowledges it as
phenomenologically “real” without being essentially “true.” The use of African American to denote ethnicity (or culture) does not quite satisfy this charge, largely because it is frequently used
in ways that are very similar to the essentialized usage of race. Instead of being determined from
within (blood), one is now determined from without (custom or culture), and a carceral rhetoric
emerges that folds the racial axiom (“that’s the way they are, it’s in their blood”) into the ethnic
(“that’s the way they are, it’s in their culture”). Instead, the author uses the term African American in Bourdieu’s (1984, 1990) sense of habitus. Originally used with respect to social class,
some authors have applied habitus to ethnicity and identity formation (e.g., Laubscher, 2003;
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May, 1999). As such, habitus comprises a set of embodied dispositions inclusive of a material
form of life “turned into second nature,” it is recursive in that it is both a product of socialization
and continually modified by experiences of the outside world, it reflects the social and cultural
position of its construction as well as its transformations in current circumstances, and it is
mindful of the interrelationship between individual action and group mores (May, 1999).
2. The allusion here is to the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1950), who titled a collection of
his later essays Holzwege (a wood path in the forest, although a recent, and in my view unfortunate, English translation [Heidegger, 2003] is titled Off the Beaten Track). Thought is likened to
fragmentary paths in the forest—not converging, seemingly leading nowhere, and opening up in
another’s neighborhood. We learn, then, not only by studying the path but also by finding oneself
in unexpected places and trusting the call to thought as choice points opened up in ever-new
clearings. In a more postmodern reading of Holzwege, the emphasis is less on atomistic disintegration than hermeneutic plurivocality.
3. In addition to Gibbs (1988) and Rasheed and Rasheed (1999), the reader is referred to Majors and Billson (1992), White and Parham (1990), and Johnson and McCluskey (1997) for psychological theory and research on African American men. Wilkinson and Taylor (1977), even so
many years later, remain an important source, whereas William Pinar’s (2001) imposing tome
contains a comprehensive review of Black masculinity.
4. The astute reader will notice that the critics listed here are all men of color. There is all too
often a clear (even if frequently silent) warrant that authorizes critical authenticity on the socalled fact of Blackness or, with reference to this article’s subject matter, the fact of Black manhood. Mentioning these particular critics here, as I do, is an attempt to name and expose this dynamic—to make it strange, as it were. Moreover, I wish to emphasize the multilayered nature of
these authors’ critiques of Afrocentricity—for example, Gilroy’s (1993) anti-antiessentialism
takes a different form from Mercer’s (1994) antiessentialism or West’s (1994) postmodern
pragmatism.
5. As an aside, Jackson’s (1997) bona fides as a vanguard intellectual is seriously undercut by
his article, a seriously flawed, muddled, simplistic, and wholly unsatisfactory reading of both
Hegel and xenophobic internalization.
6. As early as 1912, William Foster, one of the pioneers of African American film, produced a
film entitled, quite simply, The Barber, set in an early 20th century barbershop (Gilbert, 1994).
More recently, films like Coming to America (Folsey, Wuchs, & Landis, 1988), Malcolm X (Lee,
Worth, & Brown, 1992), and Barbershop (Teitel, Tillman, Brown, & Story, 2002) have used the
barbershop as a pivotal setting and symbolic space with and within which to punctuate the plot
and action. In Coming to America (Folsey et al., 1988), for example, the barbershop is where the
African Eddie Murphy is made African American both physically, through his haircut, and culturally, through his immersion into a particular world of discourse. In Malcolm X (Lee et al.,
1992) as well, the barbershop functions as a transforming and transformational site wherein one
can be remade, both with a can of lye and a hearty dose of commentary. The recent controversy
around the movie Barbershop (Teitel et al., 2002) also highlights the importance of this space for
articulation. In truth, when the reverends Jackson and Sharpton criticize Cedric the Entertainer’s
character for making less than salutary remarks about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, the
rhetorical response (“Is this a barbershop, or what? If a Black man can’t say anything here, where
can he?”) highlights a tension between the privacy of the barbershop as African American country club and a dangerous celluloid publicity about what Black men are up to in this sacred and
sacrosanct space.
7. In an earlier draft of this article, a peer reviewer commented on the fact that positive representations of African American men are available, for example, in sport. I spend quite some time
responding to such representations in the specific account of the study (Laubscher, 2004). Suffice
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it to say, though, that seemingly positive representations of African American men are considered for their position within discourses of power/knowledge and representational regimes.
Hence, I argue that such supposedly positive representations cover over a long history of the
Black body as fetish. Since the auction block, between the body as machine for capital and stark
animal and naturalistic presence (which also gives in the sexual—fear and fascination—that
turns the Black body into a (12-inch) penis from which White women have to be protected and
whereby castration has to be part of the lynching) to the spectacle of Black bodies in the boxing
ring and the contemporary basketball court, I maintain that these representations are not all that
liberating or positive at all (of course, some athletes—Muhammad Ali, e.g.—and entertainers—
Paul Robeson, e.g.—manage, at great risk and against great odds, to resist, subvert, and problematize the dominant representational interpellation, but such figures are few and far between).
Moreover, to the extent that the athletic (and the entertainer; “they sure got rhythm and can put on
a mighty good show”) is credentialed and authorized, it does so at the cost of the intellectual, cognitive, or industrious (which White supremacy apportions to itself or as it suits its agenda to other
“others”; e.g., an industrious, hard-working, intellectual, smart, Asian, model minority). After 3
years working in Chicago’s South Side, almost all the African American boys there wanted “to
be like Mike,” insurmountable odds notwithstanding, whereas almost none wanted to be like
Cornel West, W. E. B. du Bois, or Henry Louis Gates. “Cultures of domination,” bell hooks wrote
(2004), “make desire for that which is despised take on the appearance of care, of love” (p. xii).
8. The face, the breath of the other, facing, and the justice of the not-yet all allude to the work
of the philosophers Emanuel Levinas (1969/1992) and Jacques Derrida (1994, 2000).
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