Despite the indictments, rejection, and fear directed toward Black males, many people desire to get close to them. Just like the crisis of Black males itself, that desire has existed for at least three decades. However, this desire has nothing to do with experiencing intimate connections to these men. Nor does it have to do with developing close friendships with them. Instead, the desire to get close to these men reflects a strong societal yearning to peer into their social worlds and explore their everyday lives. It is a voyeuristic enterprise.
This curiosity has been fueled by the legacy of four decades of ethnographic research on these men, beginning at a time when research on low-income communities was deemed essential for solving social inequality (O’Connor 2001; Quadagno 1994). America's “War on Poverty,” launched by President Lyndon Baines Johnson in the 1960s, provided the impetus for such research as much of its focus ultimately turned to racial inequality and the urban sphere. For many, scholars and lay people alike, this was a time to learn about how the other half – America's racialized downtrodden – actually lived.
Many of the studies discussed earlier that commenced in the 1960s, and well as some others, offered intense and elaborate research, analysis, and argument about the cultural dynamics shaping the lives of low-income African Americans. This research was produced amidst a socio-political climate that affirmed that the situation for urban-based, low-income African Americans needed intervention, and some redress was found in observational studies on street corners, neighborhoods, and communities. The prosperity and vibrancy of the American economy in the early 1960s buttressed the blossoming idea that, if understood and addressed assertively, poverty could be obliterated, or at least managed effectively in US society (Hodgson 1976; O’Connor 2001). Under the pretense that the social problems afflicting African Americans, especially those residing in disadvantaged urban communities, could be fixed once they were better understood, the 1960s-era research agenda turned to detailed considerations of people who seemed so divorced from the American Dream.
A strong and enduring premise for the research at this time was that the cultural dimensions of African American life could be thoroughly documented and then addressed. The calling of that day was to make sense of what appeared to outside observers to be extreme (but also, in some cases, rather subtle) differences in the behaviors of such people when compared against a constructed middle-class normative referent. As some of this behavior was considered fatalistic, one of the key issues of concern for researchers and the general public was how such behavior could be transformed so that urban, low-income African Americans could better attain the good life that they, and other Americans, so deeply desired. Behavior became a logical point of emphasis for these researchers as the urban American landscape became populated with underemployed and unemployed African American men whose idleness was reflected by their congregating in highly visible public spaces (i.e., parks, vacant lots, etc.) and on street corners. If such men were not visibly idle in the midst of occupying public space, they presumably were involved in gangs and illicit activity, and that was, simply enough, taken to be inappropriate behavior.
Moreover, the gaze toward Black men at that time was fueled by terms like “subculture,” which were employed as scaffolding for discussion of the presumably unique and different norms, values, and attitudes demonstrated by these men. Rainwater and other social scientists argued for a consistent and robust notion of lower-class subculture (Berger 1960; Bordua 1961; Cloward and Ohlin 1960; Cohen and Hodges 1963; Coser 1965, Gans 1962, 1969; Miller 1958; Rainwater 1970; Rodman 1963; Suttles 1968; Whyte 1943). The idea was advanced that subcultures were created by members of subordinate social groups contending with the difficulty of achieving the goals and desires that the larger social system considered legitimate (Abrahams 1964; Hannerz 1969; Liebow 1967; Riessman 1962; Schultz 1969). These goals and desires either were beyond the means of members of the lower echelon group, or not attainable in the ways that they were for those in more privileged positions (Rodman 1963).
This kind of vision of low-income African Americans was not very distant from that cultivated by adherents to the culture-of-poverty thesis. Anthropologist Oscar Lewis coined the term “culture of poverty” (1959, 1961, 1966). Although he said much less, and also something a little different, about the culture of poverty than has usually been attributed to him, his use of the term solidified social scientific and popular conceptions of the power of cultural forces for determining the social outcomes of those living in poverty, and his sustained portraits of the racialized poor, and Black men in particular, as culturally distinct from others.
The intense preoccupation with the public persona of low-income African American men in 1960s-era ethnography provided ample grounds for readers to conceive of such people as unlike others in mainstream America. The standard depiction, as we have seen, was that they associated on publicly visible street corners in demonstrations of bravado and swagger. As the Black Power movement came into being in the latter half of the 1960s, images of the Black Panthers marching with berets, leather jackets, and guns in hand were compounded by pictures of Black Americans rioting in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King and the perceived slowness of social change in the US. By the end of the 1960s vivid portraits of the angry Black male could be registered in any US household that had a television set.
Unlike the 1960s, when large numbers of White Americans lived in what is today known as the inner city, the 1980s notion of the underclass emerged immediately after many White Americans fled the core of many US cities (Farley et al. 2000). This meant that increasing numbers of White Americans learned about the experiences and plight of low-income Black Americans less from personal contact and observation and more from media or publicly disseminated research. Myriad images of the underclass proliferated throughout that period.
Despite the continued effort to get close to low-income African American men, a fact of modern American life is that there is extreme distance – geographic and otherwise – between them and those whose lives involve access to greater socio-economic resources and privilege. Accordingly, many of those that want to peer into the lives of these men did not desire to share in their world in any literal sense. These outsiders only wanted to know as much as they could about how these men live, and they acquired this knowledge from a very safe distance. Many in the broader American public may not personally know a socio-economically disadvantaged Black man, yet people can still articulate a great deal about their social character and their daily lives.
More troubling than the public's desire to get close to but remain physically far removed from these men is that the mechanisms of accessing them has left the broader public with a narrowly construed vision of who they are. That vision involved little to no capacity to see these men as anything but a culturally differentiated – and actually culturally flawed – segment of society. Portrayals of Black males in mainstream film did the work of vividly illustrating the very images of such men that came to mind in media and scholarly depictions of them in the age of the underclass. Tough, determined, aggressive, and dramatic Black men appeared on screens in the 1970s with the rise of Blaxploitation-era cinema. Prior to the Blaxploitation era, black actors rarely had leading roles in widely distributed films. With the arrival of the genre, they often could choose their roles, and frequently the storylines were built around their respective characters. However, these films featured black actors and were largely targeted to the African American community. During the first half of the decade, more than 200 movies of that type were produced. They broke many of the existing stereotypes of African American men in film by presenting images of Black masculinity that reflected grit and sexuality (Guerrero 2012; Koven 2010).
The males in these films often were involved in drug dealing, violence, and casual sex. The roles often included pimps street hustlers, and drug dealers. Some of the more popular films of this genre included Super Fly (1972), where actor Ron O’Neal portrayed a drug kingpin named Priest who was sophisticated, stylish, and popular with women, lived in plush comfort, drove the latest-model car, and wore a cocaine spoon as a fashion accessory. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, which starred Melvin Van Peebles, featured a hero who was raised among prostitutes and is arrested for a crime he did not commit. During his arrest, he saves a young black male from a police beating by attacking the (White) police officers. Another film, Shaft, featured Richard Roundtree as detective John Shaft, who could relate to the stereotypical street corner figures found in disadvantaged urban communities, but who could also uphold and defend the law with conviction and determination. Shaft was made on a $500,000 budget yet grossed $13 million (or close to $70 million in today's figures), indicating how much of a public appetite there was for this new kind of film portrayal, despite the relatively low budget afforded to a film with Black protagonists. Black Caesar featured actor Fred Williamson, who plays a street smart hoodlum who worked his way up to being the crime boss of Harlem. Finally, Three the Hard Way featured actors Fred Williamson, Jim Kelly, and Jim Brown as activists working to stop a white supremacist plot to eliminate all Blacks by placing a serum in the public water supply. These and other films depicted Black men as socially influential, which was a novel turn for cinema of the era, but they were also portrayed as physically powerful and intimidating, which further cemented the public script of Black men.
By the 1980s, when the age of the underclass had come into being, the cinematic imagery continued to register toughness, determination, and aggression, but often by focusing on younger adult Black males or adolescents, all of whom seemed to be wiser than their ages would suggest given the circumstances and situations bearing upon their lives. Even if some of this work ultimately was critical or challenging of the mainstream depiction of Black males, films such as Boyz n the Hood, Jason's Lyric, Menace II Society, and New Jack City brought to the screen images of gang life, drug dealing, and social conflict that were firmly embedded in the imagery that had been crystallized by the connotations associated with the underclass.
These films were part of a more general proliferation of Hip Hop culture, which became a staple referent for Black urban life in the 1980s and beyond. Some have argued that the early years of Blaxploitation films profoundly impacted contemporary Hip Hop culture as several prominent artists, such as Snoop Dogg, Big Daddy Kane, and Ice-T, adopted various personas exemplifying the kind of character made prominent in those films. The emergence of gangster rap in the 1990s exacerbated the imagery of aggression, hostility, social threat, and extreme indulgence that had been codified in the rise of the underclass.
Film makers such as Spike Lee (in Do the Right Thing) and John Singleton (in Boyz n the Hood) strove to problematize the narrow image of Black masculinity that was promoted in many of the other films produced at the time of their efforts. However, their contributions did not disrupt the overall pattern of introducing a particular image of Black masculinity and Black men into the gaze of a public that otherwise did not have to invest in intimate nor long-term associations with the very people to which this imagery was connected.
The legacy of such portraits of Black men and black masculinity did more than create a consumable image for majority America. It also presented Black males with a public image and identity of Black masculinity that they had to contend with even if they did not endorse it. That black males often believe that they must exemplify or validate various kinds of vulgar or rugged masculinities that have been associated with them, even if they do not personally adhere to these depictions, has been well documented in social-science research (Ford 2008, 2011; Hunter and Davis 1992). In some cases, their doing so often appears to them as a prerequisite for attaining the social and physical security necessary to engage everyday life in turbulent communities (Anderson 1990; Ford 2011; Majors and Billson 1992). This very imagery also came to surface in highly problematic ways in intimate relations (Neal 2006, 2013).
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The research and policy creation that took place during the middle of the twentieth century opened the door onto Black life for much of white America. Despite very noble and deliberate efforts to correct the malaise of the social condition for African Americans at that time, a consequence of directing attention to that constituency was an intrigue, if not infatuation, with the African American urban scenario. A primary point of attention in looking at that scenario, whether through civic initiative, media, or cinema, was the Black male. What ultimately became an iconic image of Black males came into being and was proliferated.
The principal effect of this proliferation was misunderstanding, even as mainstream America was strongly invited to absorb an image of Black males. What was ignored during this transmission of images was the extent to which Black men embrace a rich multiplicity of roles in their communities that transcend the highly stigmatized imagery associated with them. They are brothers, fathers, sons, neighbors. Yet the image of them that is crystallized denies them any public identity that does not reference their being a social problem. Consequently, they are viewed through a highly judgmental lens, often derived from a narrow focus on their behavior as the only dimension of their humanity made available to outside observers.
There is more to the culture of low-income African American men than four decades of public attention has brought forth. The flawed public depiction of Black males is a consequence of the extreme preoccupation in the US with their behavior and lifestyles rather than with their interpretations and analyses. The limited knowledge circulated to mainstream America about them too easily leads to a general public sentiment of despair and hopelessness for those most sensitive to their plight. For those less compassionate, the promotion of rugged black masculinity and all that is associated with it leads to anxiety, anger, and rebuff. Whatever the case may be, each type of response blinds the public to envisioning Black males in alternative, and much healthier and appropriate, ways.
Black males have been subjected to extremely negative readings of their social behavior and their dispositions. They also have been assumed to maintain flawed and fatalistic social outlooks. Often, these accounts are presumptions rather than directly informed understandings because the external parties that make them do not necessarily have access to the inner feeling and beliefs of Black males. Rather than coming from intimate knowledge about them, these accounts of their outlook are constituted from the images construed from their behaviors and public identities (Young 2004). The challenge, however, is to look both at and beyond their behavior. Investing in more thorough understandings of how African American men think and feel is a necessary corrective to academic and public attention to how they appear and act in public. Indeed, the very claim that these males have feelings – sometimes in regard to their relationships to criminal activity, violence, and the possibilities of death or substantive bodily harm, but also to family, peers, and community more generally – and that these feelings carry an intensity and complication not fully revealed by their public actions, and that they think about their social realities more provocatively than may be realized when focusing only on their actions, necessarily invites a bold rethinking of them.