Black masculinity, work, and mental health: A sociohistorical conversation.

By: Perre L. Shelton

Here’s the hard truth: The African American male body was never intended to participate in paid labor in the U.S. What are the vestiges of that reality today—including those that are implicated in organizational hiring practices, African American male retention, and the capacity of the African American male to feel whole in the workplace?

In 2018, African American male unemployment was nearly 41% higher than the national average. This has, of late, been treated as a success story given that the rate of unemployment for African American men was previously just over 44% higher. That is, despite programs such as Affirmative Action, African American men continue to be underrepresented in various industries. Could there be some element(s) of our systems of employment (from education to recruitment) that don’t comprehensively address the particularities of the African American male experience?

It could be that attempts to fit into the status quo of what a man’s relationship to work “ought to be”, as dictated by the larger society, is thwarted by a strong legacy of racial discrimination; a legacy which shows up in more subtle ways than the more overt forms of discrimination around which we have historically centered discussion as a society. Further, a social demand to perform as a man by defining one’s maleness based on his capacity to find meaningful work—coupled with the barriers of finding that work on behalf of African American men—could be contributing to a version of masculinity rooted in toxicity against others. It is to, perhaps, adopt and adapt the same vitriolic barriers that deny them opportunities for reasonable upward mobility, and assert those new-found feelings of power against others that they deem more vulnerable; such as, for example, women and LGBTQ individuals. As a point of reference (because this a sociohistorical phenomenon), in a 1971 conversation with James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni highlighted that African American men struggle to compartmentalize the negative treatment they experience at work and project their frustrations with their bosses and overall employment circumstances unto their wives and children. It is my conjecture here that, as a sociohistorical phenomenon, even since 1971, this challenge has yet to be fully addressed.

Throughout, Giovanni argues, “…let’s say a guy is going with a girl…Maybell…Maybell gets pregnant and all of a sudden you can’t speak to Maybell because you don’t have the money for a crib…she doesn’t need a crib. The baby’s going to sleep some place…the baby’s going to eat something, but what she needs in that moment is a man…which is not necessarily a provider…and Black men refuse to function [as a man that is caring and present] because they say I want to bring the crib when I come…bring yourself…”

Baldwin argues that “the standards of a civilization into which you were born are first outside of you, and by the time you come to be a man, they are now inside of you…in this civilization a man who cannot support his wife and his child is not a man…I can’t come with nothing.”

A fundamental line of inquiry must be forged to examine the root of some of the social and psychological underpinnings of these outcomes for African American men. That line of inquiry has to do with how they have negotiated and internalized masculinity in the context of historical racism against African American people and other environmental stressors. That is, the intersection of coping with historical racism and environmental stressors crossed with the internal representation of his masculine gender performance. Hypermasculinity and violent masculinity, inflicted on others in the African American community are often replacements for emasculation at the hands of an oppressive society (Orelus, 2010). This dynamic of “othering” as a function of masculinity—freedom to express one’s masculinity, in turn, conflated with the liberation of the entire African American community (Ongiri, 1997)—can be seen throughout the rhetoric of many prominent African American leaders (Ongiri, 1997).

The internalization of social standards for African American masculine gender performance could be mediating the extent to which serious mental health conditions go untreated. Black masculinity could be co-functioning as an expressive space serving African American male resilience and simultaneously an incubator for mental and behavioral health challenges that are expressed through interpersonal and community relationships. Note that this is not to problematize African American men as inherently pathological; it is instead to suggest that the sociohistorical circumstances surrounding the development of African American masculinity in the United States as an available construct has hindered the extent to which African American men are able to access the tenets of a healthy functioning psyche.

In general, masculinity refers to the negotiation of the self through the lenses of sociocultural and sociohistorical expectations of one’s gendered male body (Ferber, 2007). Consequently, to understand African American masculinity, one must understand the social, cultural, and historical conditions under which expectations of African American male bodies were formed. The earliest interactions of African American men with U.S. society and cultural norms was in the context of transatlantic chattel slavery. African people from various parts of the African Diaspora interacted with the region now named the United States before European settlements were formed (Setima, 1996). However, with the establishment of European settlements, African (turned African American) male bodies were pressed into representations of deviance and inherent pathology (Adbur-Rahman, 2006; Dyson, 1993). Simultaneously, the black male body was seen as powerful enough to sustain inhuman labor; albeit a powerful body that required adjudication and regulation from White society (Dyson, 1993; Orelus, 2010). In fact, some have argued that it is nearly impossible to fully understand African American masculinity without unpacking the history of slavery, colonization, and other post-emancipation forms of social control (e.g., Orelus, 2010).

Black masculinity, therefore, was shaped in the milieu of a vitriolic relationship between U.S. society and the black male body, so that the black male body was inherently a space of aggression, its size and proverbial “darkness” symbolic of danger (Ferber, 2007; Richardson, 2007; Wilson, Hugenberg & Rule, 2017). The paradox about the black male body is that as much as it is dreaded, it is also admired, revered, and commodified in U.S. culture (Ferber, 2007). The black male body in the context of an oppressive sociocultural infrastructure is simultaneously an intrapsychic desire onto which fear is projected as a way of managing the cognitive dissonance between admiring black male bodies and the sociocultural status quo (Mattei, 2008).

As the human psyche is naturally one of an incorporative nature (Bowlby, 1969), internally representing the outside world in which one interacts, the African American man’s negotiation of self in the context of Black masculinity is one that inherently responds, through rejection or acceptance, to the premise that the African American male body is, at once, both dangerous and desirable for utilitarian means. Given these psychosocial, cultural, and historical accounts, the vestiges of an internalized masculinity rooted, most fundamentally, in trauma, could produce a wide variety of resulting challenges within common social institutions. Thus, masculinity, in these terms, can be conceptualized as a psychologically constrictive force that may result in a set of unhealthy externalizing behaviors, including increased aggression toward intimate partners or substance use. It could also lead to more dissociative behaviors, including emotional stoicism and a limited range of emotions. An avoidance of emotional expression as a function of masculinity can also lead to deficits in cognitive developments—specifically in the area of language (Lindquist, MacCormack & Shablack, 2015). One does not have to develop language about an internal emotional experience that one is told doesn’t or shouldn’t exist.

Additionally, cultural mistrust of services to address psychological needs has its root in sociohistorical events that led to a sense of cultural mistrust (Keating & Robertson, 2004; Whaley, 2001). Historically, the medicopsychological industry has unethically experimented on the bodies of African American people. Additionally, psychological services have framed the stress-responses and decompensation of minorities in terms of a purely intrapsychic pathology instead of incorporating the reality of minority stress experienced in a society perceived to be oppressive (Meyer, 2003).

The mental health of African American men has far too long been a subject of neglect as noted in the paucity of research as well as the research of the understanding of the detrimental health outcomes for this population. It is of critical importance that we improve this discourse so that appropriate treatment models are employed by clinicians and diagnosticians. It is also important that these models be implemented as part of a broader project to improve the working conditions and educational outcomes of African American males. It is imperative that we continue to explore the internalization of masculinity and its intrapsychic binds that travel with the African American male and contribute to their distress. We must provide relevant treatment and reject any attempt to treat without cultural understanding and sensitivity. We must also consider what upward mobility and a way forward looks like. Without an empathic and informed approach to the experiences of African American men, we are continuing a legacy of trauma that is recycled and reiterated in the African American male treatment of those close to them. Caution: Do not use this work to vilify or justify your fears of African American men. Instead, use this piece as an opportunity to ask him if he is okay, and give him space to be able to say “no, I need help.” Additionally, use this piece to hold him accountable when he is vitriolic to others of his community; remind him that his rage is a product of his fear, and that both can be healed.

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