21.
Title: [Manning the Race]: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era
Author: Marlon B. Ross
Genre: Masculinity, Sexual Cultures
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Book 7
Date Completed: April 1, 2016
Rating: ***1/2

I told my adviser that I'm afraid I'm missing the forest for the trees. I found Ross’ writing difficult to follow at times, especially in his introductions; he favors long “if not…., then …..” statements, and I often came to the conclusion of an assertion forgetting how it began. I mention this as a bit of a caveat, because I do not fully trust my understanding of the project. This is not to say that I didn’t gain anything from the reading – I found here a perspective I was looking for in an otherwise grand-narrative-dominated reading list – but that I don’t yet think I have the whole picture.

Manning the Race is an examination of the cultural and rhetorical ways African American men seek to assert a position of masculinity during Jim Crow bigotry as an infallible mark of cultural progress; a kind of racial re-branding used to humanize men of color, and reject the notion of their evolutionary inferiority.  Ross seeks cultural texts such as albums and anthologies, literary narratives, intellectual discourse, autobiography, and the men themselves to serve as representations of the myriad ways in which intelligent and creative individuals sought to become (or were named as) patrons of the race, cultivating their own achievements while bolstering the whole to stand against charges of racial adolescence.

Central to Ross’ reading is movement and migration. People move from rural to urban, South to North, and between expressive arts seeking something better, and confronting assumptions and cultural hurdles all the while. Leaders within the African American community seek to move out from under the “inferior place” to which Jim Crow assigns them (93), establishing and embracing normativity and masculinity as symbols of personhood.

In selecting this book I was hoping to find another voice to counter the white patriarchal narrative of anxiety and othering in the definition and maintenance of manliness, and Ross offers just that in what seems to be a consistent idea throughout the text: leadership, and patronage.  Many of the texts we’ve read this term forward examples of desirable masculinity in the form of isolated representations: Roosevelt, post-ranch; Tarzan; Atlas and/or Sandow; the cowboy.  These individuals glory in their representations of masculinity, holding themselves as superior to “lesser” men for their own possession of superior characteristics, and allowing others to attempt to replicate their manliness.  There is an inherentness that seems to follow most of these characters (Roosevelt had to find his manhood on a ranch, and Atlas had to develop a routine, but they both show gumption and drive to do so), and an antagonistic other against which they can be measured.

Ross’ narrative paints a far different picture – a desire to uplift/uphold/encourage a racial majority to their own improvement so that it may better reflect on the whole.  White men are obsessed with their own sense of superiority, but the singular examples held up perform a kind of anxious individual assertion of self – an anxiety that sets members within against one another, and then against the ultimate other. Ross’ leaders, however, are invest in modernity, progressive cultural shifts, and the man as part of a whole who can either continue to upward migration, or condemn communities to a fall. I’m not sure I’m articulating clearly the difference that I see, and this is something that I’d like to try to talk through – the relationship of the representative to the populace.

Similarly, I was very interested in the idea of the “cool post” – a deviant and dangerous phenomenon which must brought under control (92), but which also signifies (or is read as) a performance and a mask. It is a shadow threat onto which the fearful may project their anxieties, but one the text suggests is an appropriation of the figure so often identified in readings of American manliness – the cowboy.