Not Staying in Their Place: An Historic Analysis of Mechanisms of Controlling Movement of Black Men in America through the Lenses of Social Identity and Gender

Introduction

As this manuscript is being finalized, the trial of former White Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, charged with murdering 46-year old George Floyd in May of 2020, is underway. Mr. Floyd was killed on a Minneapolis street corner in full view of other citizens and at least three police officers. As he lay prone on the pavement, hands cuffed behind his back, Mr. Chauvin pressed his knee into Mr. Floyd’s neck for more than 8 minutes as Mr. Floyd pleaded that he could not breathe. How does public control of a Black man’s space to the point of death become normalized in American society?

Tracing the history of their diminishment and criminalization in America, this article examines mechanisms for controlling the public and private spaces of Black men, linking contemporary practices to plantation life of the 18th and 19th centuries. The article contextualizes this control in restrictive identity constructs of Black masculinity by hegemonic White masculinity. The authors contend that 21st century methodologies for controlling the space and movement of Black men and contemporaneous conceptualizations of Black masculinity are mediated by centuries of White supremacy founded on slave-based identities and gender templates articulated and enforced through White patriarchy. Following a brief review of the literature conceptualizing Black masculinity, a sampling of contemporary methods of controlling the space of Black men is discussed. The remainder of the article is devoted to outlining how hegemonic practices implemented with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia in 1619 concretized into legal, political, and social structures designed to keep Black males under the control of White patriarchy.

While the focus of this article is on Black men, the intent is not to minimize or ignore ways in which Black women and other women of color have historically experienced policing and discipline of their space, bodies, and gender representations. In fact, these phenomena appear to be proliferating. Recent scholarship concerning this topic is abundant: see Collins (2000), Faschin-Varner et al. (2017), Shaw (2005), Stephens and Phillips (2003), Welke (1995), and Kwate and Threadcraft (2015) among others.

Through the Lenses of Social Identity and Gender

Two pertinent lenses through which the history and experiences of Black men in America can be understood are those of social identity and gender which, like race, are socially constructed categories. The constitution of Black and White masculinities in relation to one another and to other gender identities—and the contestation between them over time—are central to that understanding; they are as relevant today as they were with the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the colonies. So, too, are the processes through which different social identities were formed. Patriarchy is the overarching structure under which all these processes have taken place.

Enslaved Africans arrived in the colonies from different societies and cultures. It was here that a collective Black American social identity began forming, in relation to White elites, and in the context of plantation life. Available autobiographical writings of free and enslaved Black men suggest their notions of masculinity differed significantly from those held by White men. Many of the African men had come from societies in which the division of labor along sex lines indeed existed, and where men usually held a higher status. However, this higher status did not necessarily imply the right to dominate women, nor did it mean it was permissible to use violence in order to establish patriarchal power (Hooks, 2004, p. 3).

White elites, early in the settlement of the British colonies, gained power and wealth through the acquisition of land and slave-based agrarian production. The 17th century struggles of White men to form an identity which simultaneously paid homage to their Englishness, included dawning ideals of freedom and equality, and incorporated race-based slavery, continue to this day to impede opportunities for African American men.

Controlling the Space and Movement of Black Men in the 21st Century

White Europeans Meet Black Africans: The Birth of American Plantation Culture

The control of the private and public spaces of Black men in America in the 21st century can only be understood in an historical context of fear and White supremacy. As American slave-based plantation culture evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries, it embodied deep fears of the violent potentiality of African men based on their appearance, sexuality, language, and systems of belief. White men saw Black men as a threat (in terms of appearance, sexual power, and physical strength) to their own masculinity, and their attempts to diminish, control, and disenfranchise Black men were their way of reacting to this perceived threat. While specific laws and frameworks have changed over time (from slavery, to segregation, to imprisonment and disenfranchisement), they all result from the same source: a perceived threat to White masculinity and continuous attempts to assert its superiority.

White settler masculinity had initially been shaped largely by British patriarchy. Enslaved Black men arriving to the colonies, brought with them their own forms of masculinity based on their African cultural contexts of origin. The fact that free African explorers who had arrived to the “new world” even before Columbus had not sought to dominate and/or destroy the indigenous peoples who were living there, suggests that “their sense of masculinity was not defined by the will to dominate and colonize folks who were not like them” (Hooks, 2004, p. 3). However, “The gender politics of slavery and white-supremacist domination of free black men was the school where black men from different African tribes, with different languages and values systems, learned in the ‘new world’ patriarchal masculinity” (p. 2).

Once these two groups of men encountered each other in settler-colonial America, their self-identification and notions of masculinity proceeded to evolve in relation to one another.

White settlers bartering with Dutch slave traders in 1619 for the first enslaved Africans in the British Jamestown colony acknowledged their fears. After their acquisition, the Colonial government quickly dispersed the slaves geographically to decrease the possibility of rebellion. As race scholar Winthrop Jordan describes in his book White over Black, the outward differences between Africans and English settlers seemed to simultaneously enthrall, repulse, and frighten the settlers (Jordan, 1968, p. 34). By 1799, English physician Charles White had declared Africans “nearer to the brute creation than any other of the human species,” contending that “The PENIS of an African is larger than that of an European” (White cited in Kendi, 2016, p. 133). Disembodying the intimidating member developed as a normalized response to these fear-based reactions, and most anatomical museums in Europe preserved Black penises; White confiding that he too had one in his museum (p. 133). While indigenous peoples in the Americas seemed likely prospects for conversion to Christianity, imported Africans were heathen savages who were “in colour so in condition. . . little other than Devils incarnate” (Jordan, 1968). Various Biblical references were invoked by the Colonists to support narratives of White superiority ordained by God characterizing Islamic African nations as enemies to be captured and enslaved by Christians rather than converted. As Boles (1984) describes, by 1700 “the vague, implicit, abstract racism of the English was transformed into a far more concrete, legally precise, individually applicable societal racism that would in myriad ways poison the interpersonal relations of Whites and Blacks for the following two and a half centuries” (p. 19).

As the Virginia colony turned to tobacco agrarianism as an economic base, the free labor of African slaves replaced the initial reliance on indentured White servants. Consolidating wealth and power, Virginia slave owners became the founding fathers of a slave society in which White elite masculinity was constructed in opposition to gender and identity constructs of enslaved Black men. As White slave owners distinguished themselves from their slave property, they also redefined social identity group values to legitimize race-based ownership of humans. As these conceptualizations were incorporated into tenets of patriarchy imported from Britain, an American masculinity evolved that repelled the English abolitionist and anti-slavery movements of the early 19th century. Elevating themselves to the Virginia colony’s “most honored” position they created “an ‘internal hegemony’ of social ascendancy” validated through the diminishment of middle/lower class Whites, Indigenous and bi-racial men, and particularly enslaved African males (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005).

Central to efforts at controlling the space and movement of Black men was the systematic institutionalization of White supremacy. As early as the 17th century, the Virginia legislature incorporated fear-based constructs of Black maleness into burgeoning economic, legal, and governmental systems. Structural mechanisms for the control of the space and movement of slaves and Black freedmen along with the social narrative of White superiority worked in tandem. Opportunities for rebellion, interracial sexual acts which could result in bi-racial, freed progeny, and Christian religious conversion which could give rise to suits for freedom were negated through the legal codes. Importantly, incorporating a racial caste system into legal and societal rules also had the perceived benefit of minimizing threats to White racial purity, an increasing concern as the population of Black slaves grew. Insurrection, particularly by young male slaves, loomed large in the White subconscious. As the population of free and enslaved Africans grew, the Virginia General Assembly in 1748 passed a series of acts to control the movement, assembly, meetings, and right to bear arms of slaves, free Africans, Indigenous, and mixed-race peoples. Whites who allowed or attended unlawful meetings with Blacks were subject to fines and whippings, as were slave owners or overseers who “knowingly permit or suffer any Slave, not belonging to him or her, to be and remain upon his or her Plantation above four Hours at one Time” (Virginia, 1769, p. 260). Slaves were required to have “Leave, in Writing” to be on a plantation other than that of their owner or be whipped (p. 261). Sheriffs and “any Person or Persons whatsoever” were encouraged to hunt down and kill runaways (p. 262). Owners of slaves “notoriously guilty of going abroad in the Night, or running away and lying out” were authorized by the legislature to whip, “dismember or any other Way, not touching Life” the slaves without incurring “Forfeiture or Punishment” (p. 262).

Notions of hegemonic masculinity linked poor and elite White men as allies. By promoting the saliency of White masculinity over class, poor White men were co-opted into participation in the evolving institution of White Supremacy. Control of Black men’s movements, whether enslaved or freed, protected the White Planter’s source of free labor in the fledgling market economy already producing great wealth for the landed elite. As poor Whites accepted the narrative of White supremacy constructed by the White Planter aristocracy, their social group affiliation reoriented away from class and toward their Whiteness. Even the most economically disadvantaged White freemen saw themselves elevated above “the most talented slave. . . defusing White social tensions and allowing the growth of White democracy” (Boles, 1984, p. 21).

White elites developed a binary meaning of Black masculinity; enslaved men were benign, docile and intellectually inferior and simultaneously violent, hyper-sexualized and devious. In contrast, White males were heroic, genteel, and intellectually superior. By 1800 the land-wealthy plantation aristocracy solidified control over large regions of the United States, normalizing a racial hierarchy central to American identity in both Northern and Southern states: the social and intellectual inferiority of people of color which justified discriminatory treatment and diminishment under legal codes.

Institutionalizing Control of Space and Movement

As Planters formulated structural and legal mechanisms to maintain control of the increasing population of slaves, which by 1860 had reached more than 4 million people, the control of the space occupied by enslaved Africans became instrumental. Within the private spaces of the plantation, rape, flogging, burning, child abuse, and even murder by planters and slave traders was accepted. To prevent violence erupting within the plantation domain, a system of control including overseers, shackles, chains, dogs, whips, and instruments of torture developed. Resisting White characterizations of docility, enslaved Black men regularly rebelled, flouting rules controlling space, leaving plantation boundaries to form “free” or “maroon” communities. A review of 134 runaway slave notices from 18th century newspapers revealed that 76% of runaways were under the age of 35% and 89% of them were men (Blassingame, 1972, p. 114). Captured runaways were beaten, imprisoned in stocks, unable to travel to see their wives or families, and at times were fitted with metal helmets protruding from which were prongs that held small bells to preclude their escape.

While in the plantation work spaces, Black men were brutally regulated by overseers and masters and forced to maintain the downcast eyes and docility of a “Sambo” construct of their masculinity. Following the end of the workday which lasted from sunup to sundown and half a day on Sundays, some freedom was afforded in and around the slave quarters for socialization. Even family life lived out in the private spaces of the slave quarters, however, was subject to White patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity. Sexual relationships within the context of plantation culture were indicative of White privilege and Black marginalization and powerlessness, reflecting the White male hegemonic masculinity. Black men had power in their families only to the extent that slave masters allowed. As Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) describe, in the patterns of hegemonic masculinity “one is not free to adopt any gender position. . .possibilities are constrained massively by embodiment, by institutional histories, by economic forces” (pp. 842 and 843). In other words, Black men’s freedom to define and practice their own masculinity was limited, and their ability to exert their masculinity and dominance over their own wives and children was contingent upon the power exerted upon them and the leverage given to them by their White masters.

Black males were characterized as “bucks,” a descriptor for male deer. They were impregnators of females who had no authority or standing socially, economically, or legally either within or outside the enslaved family. Through the hegemony of the White plantation master, Black males were emasculated, devoid of power to protect their wives, children, or mothers from sexual molestation or torture. Central to constructions of White elite masculinity were conceptualizations of the honorable slaveholder and the dishonorable slave (Greenberg, 1996). Greenberg (1996) describes a complex interrelated system of events, gestures, and discourse which developed around the competing yet co-existing themes of slavery and honor in the 19th American South. This language was adopted into the normative identity construction of Southern slaveholders as a moral, behavioral, and cognitive adaption to slavery.

Control of the movements of enslaved Blacks in public spaces served as a symbol of their inferiority. It was in public spaces that masters suspected revolts or plans for escape would be conceived, and violent attacks including sexual assaults against White women carried out. In fact, freedom itself was a crime for Black slaves whose incarceration and identification as “property” was in perpetuity. As enslaved Black men earned the trust of their masters and were granted limited access to public spaces in their work assignments, they frequently used such access to facilitate freedom for themselves and other slaves. The inability of Whites to control Black men’s access to public spaces activated deeply held fears of Black men as rapists of White women. The bodies of White women were to be protected because of their symbolism of the virtue, values, and purity of whiteness; their belonging and relationship as cultural currency to White men. The rape of White women dishonored their husbands, fathers, or brothers, becoming an important component of the fears of Whites over slave insurrections. If consensual sex did occur between a White woman and a Black man, honor conceptualizations required it be considered rape. In contrast, as benefitting their hegemony, White men were not punished for the rape of Black women who, as “property,” had no rights to refuse. Black men were frequently condemned to death for sex with White women. By 1823 the death penalty for rape, which had earlier been suspended in Virginia, was re-imposed only for Black men, freed and slave, who raped White women.

By 1840 Virginia was operating under martial law, with state and federal militia engaged in controlling slaves while local White men grouped together as “patrollers” in order to arrest and punish Blacks who violated laws against assembly or travel in public spaces. Hunting for worship services as they were being conducted, patrollers would severely beat and arrest those caught worshipping.

Though plantation slavery ended with the American Civil War and emancipation, the control of the movement of Black men in public and private spaces continued. As slavery evolved into a quasi-slavery share-cropper system, White elite males continued to dominate what remained of the tattered Southern social, economic, and political system. “States’ rights” evolved into the central explanation for the Confederate states’ secession from the Union, replacing the moral rationale of White dehumanization, subjugation, and enslavement of African Americans. By 1880 the per capita income of the southern states had plummeted to one-third that of the rest of the country, leaving the system of White privilege malleable to change (Boles, 1984). Nevertheless, the United States failed to excise embedded racism at perhaps the ripest moment in the nation’s history other than in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution. White Southern constructions of Black masculinity and fears regarding Blacks’ freedom of movement and rising civic and social participation were met with sympathy by many Northerners who were anxious for national reunification. The trade of cotton provided wealth not only to the Southern planters, but also to Northern industrialists, who were convinced that cotton production was essential to America regaining economic health following the Civil War. As historian Foner (1988) describes, “long before the war, a community of interest among Eastern merchants, financiers, cotton manufacturers, and Southern slaveholders” had developed an alliance well-known to abolitionists (p. 220). This coalition of “financiers and merchant capitalists” helped support the Southern war effort (p. 220). Northern economic interests had a “stake in speedy reunion” and Northern states who raised the issue of Black enfranchisement saw it fail repeatedly at the ballot box (p. 220). White, male supremacy reunited the broken Union, as “transactions” and “deals” were made between men (Northern and Southern White men, in this case) at the expense of Black men and women.

White reconciliation allowed a successful backlash of Southern control and contestation over public spaces in response to former slaves’ expression of their freedom through movement. A desire, however, for national reconciliation was not the only factor facilitating the emergence of segregation. The patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity of the now impoverished Southern White male aristocrat demanded a defense of the “sacredness” of White womanhood and the purity of the White race in the face of increasing public race mixing. Traveling and migrating in search of work or lost family, Blacks’ visibility in public spaces was interpreted by Southern Whites as “aimless wandering,” confirming stereotypes of their lack of responsibility and productivity without coercion. As Boles describes, “Blacks’ moving about - and mobility was normal for free labor in the mid-nineteenth century - was interpreted as irresponsible behavior; every slight infraction of the old slave etiquette was seen as evidence of Blacks ‘not staying their place’” (Boles, 1984).

Former slaves’ access to public spaces was resisted through “Black codes,” laws to prohibit such “vagrancy” which served as the basis for Jim Crow segregation. Besides sidewalks and streets, access to other public spaces were also contested. In December 1868, a riot nearly broke out in Columbia, South Carolina when Charles Minort, a bi-racial restaurateur and minor politician seated himself and his wife in the front row of a theatre, a section traditionally reserved for tardy White ladies (Williamson, 1965). Common carriers including steam ships, rail cars, and street cars, became sites of contestation. White and Black women began to travel together in first class train cars, interrupting “the commitment of White society to preserving White hegemony embodied in the ideal of White womanhood” (Williamson, 1965). By 1900, the Supreme Court had ruled “separate but equal” legal, giving states authority to deny or disenfranchise Black men from the rights provided in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and through the 15th Amendment (Welke, 1995).

Violent control of spaces occupied by Black men occurred not only in the South, but in Northern and Western states as well. In 1911 in Coatsville, PA, a Philadelphia suburb with more than 200,000 active Klan members, Zachariah Walker, a Black man accused of murdering a White security guard, attempted suicide while in police custody. After being admitted under armed guard to the local hospital he was dragged into the street—still attached to his hospital bed—by a White mob and burned alive (Rucker & Upton, 2007, p. 96). Race riots became common at the turn of the century with White mobs attacking Black neighborhoods and lynching Black men in New Orleans; New York City; Springfield, Illinois; Atlanta, Georgia; Greensburg, Indiana; and Brownsville, Texas (Rucker & Upton, 2007, p. 620).

A resurgence of White supremacy in the 1920s took the form of White ethnic riots and lynchings. The iconic, racist film “Birth of a Nation” released in 1915, portrayed Black males as morally inferior and criminal, graphically confirming visceral White fears of the Black rapist trope. Echoing earlier constructs of Black men as violent threats to the superiority of White masculinity and White feminine purity, this justified lynching and in some cases demolishment of entire Black communities. Sparked by the newly re-emerged Ku Klux Klan, Whites not only controlled the movement of African Americans but rendered them unsafe in normatively protected public and private spaces. In January 1923, a mob of White men began a murderous spree against residents of the majority Black community of Rosewood, Florida. Like in similar cases, the catalyst of the Rosewood violence was a White woman reporting an attack by a Black man. After a local Sheriff blamed the assault on an escaped work-crew prisoner, White vigilantes searching for the accused prisoner broke into private homes and ultimately killed Black residents including an elderly woman. After unsuccessfully torturing various Black citizens suspected of harboring the accused prisoner, the mob was joined by White vigilantes from Northern Florida and Southern Georgia. The town of Rosewood was burned down after 5 days of violent White rioting.

By the middle of the 20th century, racial control had been reestablished over Black Americans through Black Codes and Jim Crow segregation. Blacks’ gains in civil rights, equal protection under the law, and access to economic, social, and legal parity during reconstruction were essentially nullified. Not until the 1954 Supreme Court Brown V. Board of Education decision, did racial boundaries begin to soften. As the international politics of the Cold War increased international criticisms over American racism coupled with the emergence of the Civil Rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King the Civil Rights Act of 1968 was passed. Like 19th century Constitutional amendments, this Federal intervention drastically reduced Southern states’ mechanisms of control of Black males in public spaces, to the outrage of White Southerners and in defiance of their political system. By the 1990s the American political system had a fully fleshed out “law and order” as an approach to continuing the control and disenfranchisement of Black males through the “three strikes” laws.

Conclusion

More than a century following the demise of the Southern plantation, its foundational beliefs, characterizations, and structures continue to underlie constructs of Black masculinity and treatment of Black men in the United States. Control of public and private spaces remain both gendered and racialized. The hegemonic masculinity of White patriarchy legally isolates, criminalizes, and disenfranchises Black males using practices perfected over centuries of degradation. Racism has been the bedrock of American society since its birth and runs deep in its institutions as well as in the attitudes of its citizens; nevertheless, political figures have allowed, enabled, and encouraged or discouraged it to varying degrees. As long the power to control space and movement remains relegated to racist and patriarchal systems and structures, the templates imposed on the constructions of Black masculinity in America will remain unchanged, mitigating opportunities for millions of men of color.