The Fascination of Some Black Men With White Male Supremacy
"It's a shame and a pitiful" (quoting my dad) on how some Black men see the world
With some Black men, two apparently contradictory positions can be true, and at the same time. One is the fact of white patriarchal anti-Blackness, a drumbeat almost as regular as police lethality, with Black men often a target of such racism. Two is that some Black men flirt too much and too often with white patriarchal anti-Black racism, often in the name of Black “manhood” and “alpha dog” hypermasculinity. All because they have no vision of a world without violence, exploitation, and abuse, because it is the only world they can imagine, the world as it is today.
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is the most recent culprit. In an interview with Fox News last week, Johnson decided not to endorse Biden or Trump in the 2024 election cycle. Johnson believed his endorsement caused “division,” something “that tears [him] up in [his] guts.” Even though his goal now “is to bring this country together,” Johnson’s main issue with where the US is in 2024 is “cancel culture, woke culture, division, etc. — that really bugs [him].”
Johnson, who embodies the Black (and Samoan) male alpha-dog mystique more than just about anyone, was truly inartful in his attempt to recognize the seriousness of American racism. All to maintain a raceless, hypermasculine image for his hypermasculine fans. Perhaps Johnson, like Michael Jordan, understands that “Republicans” (really, “white people”) “buy sneakers, too” (along with WWE and movie tickets).
This dualism between the racism Black men experience and the white patriarchal supremacy some Black men flirt with is really about the positions of relative social, economic, and cultural privilege that some Black men have enjoyed within the latticework of American racism and other -isms. To have a taste of power over other people is what fuels such contradictory thoughts and behaviors of the privileged Black male class and the Black men willing to die on hills defending them.
There are plenty of Black men without fortune and fame who have defended disgraceful folk like one-time convicted felon, serial drugger, and sexual assaulter/rapist Bill Cosby as innocent Black men who are victims of America’s racism. There was also a healthy social media defense of rapper Michael “Killer Mike” Render, the winner of three Grammys for best rap album, best rap single and best rap performance with “Scientists & Engineers.” Render was also arrested for assaulting an “overzealous” (read, “not deferential enough”) woman security guard, and all on the same night.
The same is true of the award-winning actor Jonathan Majors, convicted last year of misdemeanor third-degree reckless assault and harassment of movement coach and one-time partner Grace Habbari. Majors, who claimed there was “no question” that he had “never hit a woman…ever” wanted Habbari to “be a great woman” like “Coretta Scott King” and “Michelle Obama.” To expect any woman — Black or white — to live as if they will eventually become a marbleized object of idealization, this is the epitome of patriarchy. The court sentenced Majors to probation and one year of in-person domestic violence counseling on Monday, leaving the unrepentant Majors free to traumatize another woman in the future.
A necessary condition of elevating demur white women as part of the successful Black man’s mystique is misogyny, especially toward Black women, as white male supremacy would require. Killer Mike’s violent pre-Grammy encounter is but one example. As some noted when Jay-Z accepted the Grammys’ Dr. Dre. Global Impact Award — its third year in existence — the billionaire rap icon received an award named after a half-billionaire with a history of violence against Black women.
It’s not just the Killer Mikes and Dr. Dre’s of the world that some far less privileged Black men often find common ground. Whether it’s serial rapists like R. Kelly and moguls Russell Simmons (who currently lives in Bali in non-extradition Indonesia) or Sean “Diddy” Combs, or other violent folk like Suge Knight, 50 Cent, and one of Tupac Shakur’s murderers in Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the excess comes from attempting to live a lie. The lie includes fantasies of being emotionally strong and sexually hard, a Black man with unquestioned heterosexuality and no love for sharing ambivalence, fear, or vulnerability with anyone. One need only look at Drake’s defense of fellow rapper and convicted felon Tory Lanez as one example of those who would defend such beliefs and behaviors, and with it, Drake’s lyrical barbs directed at Megan Thee Stallion for making too much of Lanez only shooting her in the foot in 2020.
This small army of hypermasculine Black men and their entourage of wannabes has been around all my life, my dad and late stepfather included. Like so many other Black men, they put up a thick wall of faux bravado to intimidate all those around them while abusing the women and children in their lives. Add three years spent as a Hebrew-Israelite family and years around Black evangelicals, Five Percenters, more straight-laced Nation of Islam Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other believers steeped in hypermasculinity. It's a wonder I’m not an atheist.
I’m reminded of their existence anytime I agree with or defend any sense of the world Black women have. On Twitter in 2021, in response to sportswriter Jemele Hill’s and anti-rape activist Sil Lai Abrams’ tweets about Black men wanting to fully access white male supremacy and patriarchy, I tweeted
Absolutely. It is painful to see it and respond to it, nearly every day. Y'all know us better than we know ourselves!
For my agreement, I received these responses from a hypermasculine brotha.
I say this not as an insult but from one black man to you. Grow a fucking spine…
Well I am also 6’5 and know not to say weak things like black women know us better than we know ourselves.
At least he didn’t call me a “bitch-ass [n-word],” something those who dehumanize “spineless” and “weak” Black men often say. Of course, they never quote Tupac’s lyrics from “Keep Ya Head Up,”
And since we all came from a woman, got our name from a woman and our game from a woman
I wonder why we take from our women, why we rape our women, do we hate our women?
Yes, Tupac’s lyrical genius also made him a contradiction in his own depictions of Black women, especially on his All Eyez on Me album, released months before his murder in 1996. But this doesn’t negate Tupac’s recognition that for some Black men, their misogynoir and hypermasculinity aligns well with white male supremacy and the need to police the words and actions of Black women and all they otherwise see as “weak.”
There is also the tendency for some prominent Black men to seek noxious and almost unconscionable alliances with openly racist and hypermasculine politicians. These are contrarian moves in an attempt to present themselves as mad geniuses. Killer Mike has been doing exactly this in his tacit endorsement of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a man who engaged in massive voter suppression against Black voters to win his election over Stacy Abrams in 2020, and in his support for Republican Hershel Walker’s run against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in 2022. “I’m a Southerner. I’m a Black man…But my state is pretty conservative, always has been. So, as a Southern man, I connected pretty much instantly with [Kemp]...and he seemed to be a principled human being when I talked to him,” Killer Mike said.
More recently, rapper and entertainer Snoop Dogg gave a thumbs-up to Donald Trump. “He ain’t done nothing wrong to me…He pardoned Michael Harris,” Snoop Dogg told the UK’s Sunday Times, adding that he has “nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump.” This u-turn after years of berating the former president, all because Trump pardoned Death Row Records co-founder Michael “Harry-O” Harris during his last hours in office in 2021. Convicted of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and running an international drug trafficking operation, Harris was in year 33 of a 25-to-life sentence at San Quentin State Prison in California when Trump commuted his sentence.
Although nearly everyone deserves a second chance, doing an about-face on the evils of Trump because he pardoned one of your boys? Really? As long as an unabashed white supremacist helps out a fellow Black man, no matter how detestable, that person’s racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia matters not.
Many Black men, whether affluent or ordinary, understand that in an otherwise anti-Black world, their manhood is the one privilege they can exploit. But regardless of which Black men are acting out of some form of internalized anti-Blackness and hypermasculinity, though, the root of this is white supremacist racism and misogyny. That some Black men succumb to this worldview should not be a surprise. The white male gaze has been a withering one for four centuries.
Do we really want a world that remains this way, and for another 400 years? Perish the thought of a post-climate-change, post-apocalyptic world this side of a hypermasculine warlords’ version of Mad Max: Thunderdome. Getting to a post-Western world will depend in no small part on Black men to think through their masculinity and worldsense in ways completely independent from a white male supremacist model of dominance and exploitation.