Review of Marlon B. Ross: Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era.

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: 

Despite the "mild trendiness" (398) that the topic of African American masculinity has acquired over the last decade, it remains a site in which much ground is still uncovered. Marlon B. Ross's comprehensive study Manning the Race, with its focus on the Jim Crow era, is an ambitious attempt to address this lack by charting in amazing detail the diverse and often competing discourses that laid out and shaped notions of a reformed African American masculinity in post-reconstruction America. Thus Manning the Race "explores how men of African descent were marketed, embodied, socialized, and imaged for the purpose of political, professional, and cultural advancement during the early decades of the twentieth century," and how these men "have attempted to formulate and re-form their experiences, roles, and self-concepts as men in a variety of genres, media, and social practices" (1). By pitting these discourses and practices against those of the Jim Crow regime, with its insistence on an ideal of normalized (i.e. white patriarchal) masculinity impossible for black men to live up to due to the restrictions placed on them, Ross on the one hand makes apparent how this regime was itself primarily "a sexual system of oppression" (2; Ross's emphasis). On the other hand he illustrates how black men challenged and often managed to displace the "gender and sexual norms" (3) on which this system operated in their attempts to reform the race through a reformation of black men in various (discursive) fields. As Ross not only draws on race theory and masculinity studies but ties his analysis of African American masculinity closely to the concerns of black feminist theory as well as sexuality and queer studies, he is at the same time able to show how African American men have often based their effort of manhood reform on the exclusion of or triangulation with others - American Indians, African American Women, Jews, criminal or "sexually deviant" men - and thereby adhered to and strengthened rather than subverted the sexual and gender norms of Jim Crow.