By Liljuan Gonzalez
I remember my excitement when I taught a comparative hip hop lesson a few months ago. The objective for the class was to compare 90s hip hop to its contemporary edition through a lens of power, which led to much debate amongst the students especially as the conversation went to XXXtentacion. Some students contested that the virulent behaviors and attitudes he displayed negates his musical talent, while others argued for a separation of the two. As a girl student brought up his many violent acts, she was interjected with a loud comment that the survivor of XXXtentacion’s violence “WAS ASKING FOR IT, BRUH”.
It was then that I casually wrote on the board the primary focus for today’s comparative lesson: Misogynoir.
Misogynoir, a term coined by professor Moya Bailey and expounded upon by Gradient Lair founder, Trudy, is the intersectional anti-Blackness that Black women face as they navigate the world as both woman and Black.
In hip hop, misogynoir manifests as the derogatory and objectifying lyrics aimed at Black women in an attempt to deny them autonomy for the sake of Black men proclaiming their heterosexuality and manhood.
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In my class, misogynoir manifested in the form of the male student’s blatant interruption of a Black girl before she had the opportunity to make her thoughts known. It was his deduction of the innocence of a rap artists despite the outcries and evidence of his ex, Geneva Ayala. Black boys are predominately taught by Black [cishet] men to adopt violent behaviors and attitudes towards Black women and girls. And with exposure to mainly toxic generative masculinities, many Black men are limited to the masculinities they perform.
I teach and live on the Southside of Chicago, an area predominantly made up of low-income Black people. As a recent transplant to the city, I made sure to examine Chicago in service to better educating its children. It didn’t take me long to realize that Chicago is truly the most segregated major metro city, a crucial fact which dictates, modifies and constructs Chicago’s Southside as “dangerous.” With high unemployment rates, underfunded public schools, and a myriad of food deserts, Black folx on the Southside are forced to endure the blunt force of economic disparity and anti-Blackness.
As you walk on the Southside, it is common to see bars and bullet-proof glass within markets, fast food places, and transit areas; police cars outlining Black neighborhoods; and police with K9s walking up and down transit train stations. This is a reproduction of the carceral state, a form that manifests itself by reproducing prison-like structures in quotidian spaces to police, surveil, and restrict mobility of Black folx.
The carceral state enables formal institutions of the criminal justice system—police, lawyers, correction officers, prisons—to exert their power over people of color, with Black folx being the most recognizable scapegoat of unrefined and unrestrained aggression.
Unsurprisingly, the reproduction of the carceral state is not unique to Chicago; in fact, we see it often in Black neighborhoods throughout the country. Consequently, a reminder of how the visual representation and lived experience of Black folx is often anchored to criminality and alterity.
The physical markers of the carceral state on the Southside not only demarcate our mobility and freedom, but inform our performances as well, particularly Black masculinities.
Although there are a variety of masculinities we can adopt and perform, many of us within Black communities tend to stick to “stereotypical” roles of Black manhood—roles tending to exert dominance over others and forbid emotional exploration. However, when conceived via physical and infrastructural imprisonment, these toxic masculinities take on a new form, carceral masculinity.
Carceral masculinity is ubiquitous in many toxic masculinities, but what makes it so uniquely dangerous is its relation to imprisonment: carceral masculinity is a consequence of subjugation by hegemonic masculinities within prison and prison-like spaces.
Institutional and structural imprisonment subordinate us to limited forms of expression, access and being. With such restricted motion, negative emotions are born with no legitimate outlet or sense of change. This feeling situates many of us in a state of powerlessness, rage, and inadequacy.
I get it. I understand it. And I agree that our rage is often justified when we are constantly forced to digest anti-Blackness and to live in restricted socioeconomic climates. However, this is not an adequate excuse for us to perform carceral masculinity.
That rage many of us feel—the rage that some of us continue to bottle up inside—comes out in devastating ways, and commonly impacts members within our Black communities.
Carceral masculinity, and toxic masculinities in general, operate in a power dynamic that seeks power via conquest and subordination of the perceived weak; hence, women and children are often the survivors and victims at the hands of Black men who embrace carceral masculinity as a warped means of survival.
Black women, in particular, are one of the primary targets of such powerlessness and rage. This rage affirms some of our toxic masculinities by invading and attempting to possess Black women’s body via rape and sexual violence. It is not enough to be a man and to be powerless; our masculinity must exist in opposition and domination of “something” to validate our manhood.
Black men perpetuate this narrative by not only using possessive and violent forces to dominate Black women, but by deploying these devices onto Black children as well. In the context of Black children, we perpetuate violence by allowing and encouraging Black boys to adopt violent behaviors from carceral masculinity, and rewarding with praise and affirmation when they do so. We excuse the violence, aggression and misogynoiristic practices of Black boys as common indications of boyhood, often blanketed under the faux adage: “boys will be boys.”
On the other hand, we police Black girls’ autonomy by dictating what behaviors are acceptable and pass as “feminine” and docile; an act that subordinates Black girls to a categorical space of limited agency and initiates servile complacency to patriarchy and carceral masculinity.
Black children are also victimized by the aforementioned rage stemming from toxic masculinities often via the materialization as whuppings—a form of discipline that leads Black children to correlate love with violence and fear.
Despite the harm of performing such toxic masculinities, Black [cishet] men tend to comply with these power dynamics because for once, we are in control and feel powerful. And, quite frankly, many non-queer, non-cis Black men don’t want to relinquish this lie of power engineered by centuries-old white supremacist machinery.
Even as I say these things, I admit I am a part of these problems outlined above. I may not adhere entirely to carceral masculinity, but I still have been socialized to perform misogynoir. My role as an educator, however, helps me to disrupt this phenomenon. It enables me to provide alternatives to the Black boys I teach.
Black boys are forced to negotiate with limited archetypes of masculinity due to systematic variables, e.g. racism, poverty, etc. For them, modeling and performing misogynoir is an initiation to access the masculinity they see within their limited vicinities on the Southside.
As a teacher, I show my Black boys a different masculinity—a masculinity that doesn’t exist to negate femininity and harm Black women and children. Our classroom we share is used as a fortified space to alter baleful practices and attitudes.
There are numerous times when we, the students I teach and myself, collectively curate our classroom to reimagine and reconstruct what is and what is not. When the student made the misogynoiristic comment, I used that moment to intervene, facilitate, and dig deeper into the anti-Blackness that was said.
Although the discussion went well, the conversation did not end there. Future lessons were taught to analyze and expand on students’ comprehension of social phenomenon, e.g. misogynoir, classism, capitalism, etc. We also used creative writing to delineate the changes we wish to make in society, including actionable steps we must take first to initiate our own internal revolution.
More needs to be done to abolish carceral masculinity, misogynoir, and sexual violence, and the burden of this abolition must fall on those of us who uphold it. Some of us are completely unwilling to engage in this work, because we covet toxic displays of manhood and egregious forms of power. Yet, those are the ones we need to call out. They are our friends, brothers, uncles and sometimes our fathers.
In an anti-Black, patriarchal world, it is time for us to use the unearned benefits and advantages of being perceived as non-trans and/or non-queer men to combat the toxicity stemming from virulent masculinities and to reimagine masculinities that liberate us all.
Liljuan Gonzalez is an educator, writer, and an education graduate student. He dreams of reconstructing education to make it culturally relevant and inclusive of black students with disabilities.
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