Author Response to British Journal of Sociology Symposium for a Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism

I am immensely grateful to John Solomos, Tanisha Spratt, and Gala Rexer for their insightful and brilliant engagement with my book, A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism. My response will proceed as follows. I will begin with a summary of my book that highlights elements of relevance to the reviews. I will then elaborate particular points in conversation with my interlocutors. First, I will discuss my application of racial capitalism and why I find it theoretically generative. From here I will expand on gendered racial capitalism, specifically Black masculinity. Third, I will explore the significance of commodification within this framework. Fourth, I will situate questions of complicity, resistance, and survival when thinking about Black masculinity in racial capitalism. Finally, I will reflect on my role as an ethnographer and the ethnographic method more generally. A Man among Other Men examines Black masculinity in racial capitalism. I investigate Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire's economy of entrenched un- and underemployment while also attending to overarching structural conditions that transcend that city to consider the experience of racial capitalism for Black men in the longue durée. I set my lens on both men's lived experiences as well as their imaginaries and aspirations, both of which revolved around access to a normative, breadwinning masculine ideal. My double focus thus encapsulated the here and now—early 21st century Abidjan—as well as the broader chronological and geographic scope. For the here and now, I conducted ethnography, interviews, and visual analysis with two groups of men: orators, or political propagandists for then-President Laurent Gbagbo, and mobile street vendors. My fieldwork took place during a protracted civil war and over 2 decades of severe economic decline in which the formal economy contracted and informal economic activities proliferated. Côte d’Ivoire had been a neocolonial regional hegemon for its first decades of independence and experienced remarkable growth via an economy in which middle class aspiration was predicated on civil service employment. Structural adjustment gutted the civil service, leaving a material and ideological lacuna for men seeking breadwinner status. Orators were highly educated men who were destined, in an earlier era, to enter the civil service; in the new economy, they used their proximity to the regime to assert themselves as entrepreneurs who intended to capitalize on their political ties to start businesses once the civil war had ended. In continuity with colonial ideals, they sought identities as évolué (literally, “evolved”) men, but repurposed via entrepreneurial strivings. Vendors were highly stigmatized, for their informal remunerative strategies were rejected as “real” work in the Abidjanais lexicon. Moreover, despite many being citizens, they were typecast as migrants from neighboring countries and consequently denigrated as uncivilized and backwards. Vendors responded to their stigma by asserting identities located in the materialist imaginings of global Black popular culture, via consumer culture and commodified media personalities. To understand not only the material conditions but also the context of these men's aspirations and imaginaries—as well as their disappointments, I examined colonial legacies that propped up the breadwinner ideal alongside counterimaginaries of Blackness situated within histories of negation and affirmation that crossed the Black Atlantic. This structured my book in three parts: theory, history, and finally, ethnography. Vendors and orators provided a window into how a hegemonic masculine ideal was a product of the colonial project yet foreclosed for the vast majority of Abidjanais men—a condition I found repeated for Black men globally. Theoretically, I pose the predicament of Black masculinity as an identity caught between patriarchal aspiration and racialized negation. I therefore maintain the subjects or protagonists of my ethnography, the orators and vendors, were not my ethnographic objects (24–25, 246) (a point which I discuss further below). Rather, I sought to investigate capitalist hegemony as my “object”: how hegemony operates as material condition and ideological persuasion through the common sense identities of Blackness and masculinity. Understanding how orators and vendors situated themselves in Abidjan and the world, and how they evaluated their situatedness as a consequence of local histories and global circulations, was the means by which I used ethnography to build theory. Solomos remarks that my theorization of racial capitalism, applied to race and gender, “provides insights on hegemonic imaginaries” among Black men in Abidjan and elsewhere in the past and present. To this point I wish to emphasize that racial capitalism is helpful as a conceptual device for considering processes of racial exploitation and denigration in longue durée, well beyond the post-structural adjustment period. In other words, racial capitalism encompasses the colonial and postcolonial and the continuity of norms and aspirations across these eras. In my book I link economies of exploitation to economies of exclusion. For example, I compare an earlier discussion (89–90) of Jean Rouch's 1958 film Moi, un noir (Me, A Black Man) set in Abidjan to Éliane de Latour's Bronx-Barbès, filmed in 2000 (227–228). The opening scene for both films is at the city's ports, but while in the first instance the protagonists are frustrated by their day labor, in the later film the men are simply turned away with the recruiter telling a crowd of men, “Il n'y a plus de travail” (There is no more work) (227). Abidjan is exemplary as a city in which working identity overdetermines the social hierarchy, with office jobs prized above all else—this is one crucial legacy of colonial racialization that, borrowing from Solomos, “continues to shape the everyday realities of life” even in a period of crisis. But despite the enduring fact of unequal access, the Abidjan of the mid-twentieth century was nevertheless a draw for all kinds of economic activities. The experiential reality of the developmental era: being an exploited laborer in the context of an expanding wage economy, is juxtaposed to shrinking remunerative opportunities and the consequent search for alternative “itineraries of accumulation” (Banégas and Warnier 2001, 6, quoted at 129) via entrepreneurial and consumerist strivings. “If yesterday's drama of the subject was exploitation by capital,” writes Achille Mbembe (2007, 3, quoted at 65), the tragedy of the multitude today is that they are unable to be exploited at all.” Seeking dignity via work or despite its lack further reinforces the role of ideology alongside base material need. The theory of racial capitalism insists that capitalist accumulation involves racial (de)valuation. Solomos notes my key concept of a “survival-status nexus” that situates “commonsense imaginaries about race, class, and gender within a broader social and political context.” Indeed, the double aim of survival and status that I explore among the vendors and orators in my study reinforces the material and ideological. In a crisis Abidjan, spaces of work and leisure were deeply entangled as production, consumerism, and commodification blurred not only as remunerative strategies but also as status identities. Within this constellation, all three became means for asserting one's position in a social network which was itself a necessary consideration for everyday survival. As AbdouMaliq Simone explains in the context of the urban periphery, “the operations of markets, commerce, and entrepreneurship depend more on the management of social relationships than they do on the specificities of goods and services” (Simone 2010, 228–29, quoted on page 197). As I explore further below, the survival-status nexus underscores the significance of hegemony when considering how under devastatingly precarious conditions, Abidjanais men remained, quoting Solomos, “active agents in constructing their identities and sense of belonging.” Agency and belonging, as forms of expression or resistance, must be contextualized within a totalizing system of global capitalism. For as Spratt recognizes, at root of the tension between “complicity and resistance” lies in fact the “complex interplay between survival and resistance.” Solomos and Rexer both reflect on my use of an intersectional analysis to deepen insights about racial capitalism. My study of Black masculinity connects African continental and diaspora strivings and links accounts of Blackness negated and affirmed to a breadwinning identity—the core masculine identity under capitalism—and its absence. It is context-specific to time and place—the everyday experiences of marginal Abidjanais men—while not losing sight of a larger structuring relationship that Black masculinity has to racial capitalism via race and patriarchy. I therefore demonstrate that lived experiences of race and gender are directly related to structural conditions and historical legacies. Rather than interracial, interpersonal everyday relations, in 21st century Abidjan racial capitalism largely manifested as symbols, associations, and aspirations of manhood, citizenship, and urban belonging. Thinking with Hortense Spillers, Rexer makes the powerful observation that in the core of my book “lies a careful analysis of Blackness as the abject other, which takes seriously that this condition of infrahumanity is also gendered.” While Spillers investigates how “the transatlantic slave trade ‘ungendered’ the female Black body,” I examine this (re)gendering via a study of Black masculinity. Just as the denial of Black femininity was anchored in exploitative logics that “reduced Black women's bodies to their capacities for (re)productive labor,” Black male bodies, absent the ascribed ideals or economic attachments of the colonial capitalist regime, were rendered deficient. The promise of the breadwinner norm as part of the civilizing mission was a gendering promise, a means of bestowing masculine status and therefore full humanity by attaining the patriarchal dividend. To be évolué was to gain a proximity to Frenchness/whiteness—what Spratt (below) names as racial passing—by fulfilling a productive identity in the colonial economy. In the postcolony this tradition lingers as the full rights of citizenship and modern belonging have remained inextricably linked to the salary. What was the bounded domain of a rights- and status-bearing colonial economy transformed, upon independence, into the formal economy. Rexer observes that my ethnography “reveals how race and gender fold into each other in complex and historically contingent ways” that are not only “foundational to European modernity, but also…continue to shape our present.” Nodding to my reference to Stuart Hall's classic statement that “race is the modality through which class is lived” upon which I add that gender is “surely the modality through which race is lived” (5), she informs us that Paul Gilroy (1994, 99) made this reformulation first—and I thank her for pointing me to Gilroy's text, as in my book I credit Chandan Reddy, who spoke it to me in a personal communication. The passage from Gilroy is written in the context of musical traditions of the Black Atlantic world, and so it is of added relevance because it speaks critically to how iterations of Black masculinity, not only in the media icons I discuss but also in évolué, breadwinning masculinity, underscore Black men's shifting identities as producers, consumers, and what I call commodity subjects: men who repurpose commodification as agency. My analysis of Black masculinity encompasses the longue durée of racial capitalism, through both economies of exploitation premised on a productive, breadwinning identity and economies of exclusion that also extol economic participation via consumerism and commodification. I address how far earlier than this current period of exclusion, Black men, persistently shut out of steady, dignifying work, have either been commodified themselves or have used consumerism as an alternative mode of incorporation that bypasses the breadwinner ideal. This raises key points about the contextual nature of commodification and complicity, resistance and survival. Spratt captures this dynamic well when she connects my discussion of the commodification of Blackness to “Blackness as a relational category deeply entwined with labor.” To rephrase, racial capitalism helps us think about Black masculinity as devalued laborer, commodified body, and fraught consumer. In economies of exploitation that began with chattel slavery, Black bodies were doubly labor and capital. In economies of exclusion, the role of capital endures with the resignification of branding as evidence of consumer capacity and status. With regard to the privileged breadwinner identity, Spratt builds on my reference to évolués as practicing a form of “racial passing” (11) to consider how these complicated dynamics operate “as a mechanism for ensuring conformity and complicity within colonial regimes.” Indeed, thinking about racial passing as what Spratt refers to as a “broader structure” and ideological device underscores how hegemony and consent/complicity operate on the axes of race and gender, work and domestic life. Breadwinning is positioned at the nexus of évolué identity and thus key proof of successful racial passing, or what in colonial terms would be referred to as “civilized”. It inhered a relationship to the colonial regime and later, the maintenance of neocolonial ties. It moreover inferred distance from Blackness by acculturating to Frenchness/Whiteness, ensured a patriarchal dividend, and involved the accumulative logics of global capitalism by creating a sociocultural divide between informal and formal economic activities. I therefore explain how colonized, racially marginalized men were, quoting Frantz Fanon (1967, 100, quote at 11), pressured to “turn white or disappear.” Spratt notes that while racial passing is most commonly associated with aesthetics, here it involved “ideological and behavioral conformity,” and were expressions of complicity “pivotal for sustaining colonial regimes” (see also my discussion of complicit masculinity on pages 13–14). To this important point I will add that the aesthetic register was also crucial for my analysis of racial capitalism, with Part II, “Between Place and Imaginaries” inquiring how negations and affirmations of Blackness articulated hegemonic and counterhegemonic projects. The very invention of Blackness to satisfy the logics of transatlantic chattel slavery and the colonial figure of the évolué represented the negation of Blackness and acculturation into whiteness, or racial passing. A counternarrative that celebrated Blackness—consider for example Black Power and Black Is Beautiful—was in direct response to this history. However, I argue that a consequence of this dialectic of negation and affirmation of Blackness in racial capitalism produced a synthesis whereby affirmations of Blackness detached from anti-capitalist struggle: what I call Blackness commodified. I therefore argue that the commodification of Blackness as seen in dominant iterations of Black popular cultural icons, whereby the most famous artists become ubiquitous as “brands themselves” (Chang 2005, 447; quoted at 62) represented a hegemonic counterimaginary that loses the fact that the “value of Blackness as a commodity is derived from the very devaluation of Black life” (54). Furthermore, structurally most Abidjanais or Black men in general will never be able to achieve the status of either évolués or media icons. At the same time, they are tropes that offer specious models of possibility, with men like them (or at least men who look like them) getting fabulously rich through means other than wage labor. I link this to longer histories of Black diasporic achievement, whereby Black men were largely barred from well-paid, dignifying salaried jobs, and instead found success in sports and entertainment. This model is increasingly familiar on the African continent, with, for example, footballers signed to European teams embodying the dream of many a young man on the urban periphery. Spratt asks whether, then, complicity or a response to and as quoted that tension highlights the complex interplay between survival and resistance.” Rexer remarks that my of subject in an economy of and with the of under conditions of underscores the of thinking about resistance to capitalism when capitalist means and and the very terms of as a and as a What it when involves branding it with that further the accumulation of capital into the of that are either or on the of not What when the only to is by the to so that will the of quoted at This quote from a I during my is to of “the ethnographic is In what it what it at the same time or a analysis of in the informal economy would not have me to understand the aspirations, or marginal Abidjanais men, which I would have been able to place experiences within colonial histories or Black Atlantic experiential to a broader theorization of Black masculinity in racial capitalism. But I to be more on an I had with upon being about social and of that on Rexer in response and a to the of engagement I will that was that was the these are not ethnographic I would but ethnographic a for that and the response to that lack the vendors in because they both the means and status to have I this all on the but I to it from each man I spoke to how it and made with, or distance from this ideal. as as the was because of the experiential fact of what was unable to do with the not A related that has been to me was how I that were being with In fact I was not in the to a from these for For from the fact that they simply not have what they made in a day or or they were to me an it became over that the men when I were the their in the more their would (see to on page But I was not an to the of Abidjanais men or a to they were able to a I as a was that on both it was not Rather, for men to from day to I was to from their what they to be a while a sense of dignity in a conversation with a Black To was a study of aspirations, and disappointments, and the imaginaries alongside experiences that as well as to their precarious The of ethnography, like to study the must be our common This was never a to be is to the historically and situated dynamics of be they or that these In the of thinking ethnography I wish to with a on colonial histories the as I do to build theory, but this time the ethnographic its legacy in colonial and the between the ethnographer and her is ethnography are to the between the promise and lived reality of masculinity among racially marginalized for example, is one in which Black men their it is in the and of Black that Paul as into the of race, class, and But that is also one of among a of men who are themselves in their for to consider the of ethnography is to the of it is directly from men who the of humanity rendered to understand how they to themselves and to forms of that in and of their It would be a social to their the is our as in an colonial history, the is to our relationships in the I in life. This the questions and and to as I have our ethnographic It is to processes of than to a an the of who would in the same to each ethnographer and in It is to that dignity be as important as and to an as that a of which our but a not to this as no were or during the current