“An Air of Expectancy”

Abstract

This qualitative study explores formations of masculinity among students at a historically black all-male college, offering insights into how the institution crafts the manhood of its students in accordance with gender and class ideologies about black male respectability, heteronormativity, and male hegemony. While a plethora of studies on poverty, deviance, and marginalization have highlighted black men “in crisis,” this article examines middle-class black men and explores sites of conflict and difference for this latter group. Three critical insights into middle-class black masculinity are revealed by this approach: first, that men are institutionally “branded” through class and gender ideologies; second, that the exceptionality of high-achieving black men is politicized to endorse class conflict with other black men; and finally, that sexuality and class performances are inseparably linked through men’s sexual consumption of black women.

Keywords

black masculinity middle-class black men hegemonic masculinity gender performance heteronormativity Morehouse College historically black colleges and universities

It cannot be said that black men have been understudied by ethnographers. Indeed, ethnographic approaches to black men have been stimulated by their almost axiomatic relationship to studies of urban poverty, incarceration, unemployment, academic underachievement, and social marginalization. These works have provided up-close and humanized understandings of the broad array of social ills that has been dubbed the “crisis of the black male” (Anderson 1999, 2003, 2008; Billson 1996; Liebow 1967; MacLeod 1995; Majors and Billson 1992; Young 2004; Venkatesh 2000). Ethnographers have uncovered cultural sites of black masculinity on street corners, within formal institutions, and among peer groups. The lives of these men have in turn been used to uncover the cultural and structural constraints that limit black men from accessing normative gender models and participating in the American cultural mainstream. These nuanced and intimate portraits of male life have illuminated many of the hidden mechanisms through which black men navigate their positions in the social world.

In much of this work, however, the social ills facing low-income and working-class black men have been presented as the problems faced by black men as a group. These canonical ethnographies of black male marginalization have not been balanced by a more rounded portrait of black men’s experiences. Many of these works have overlooked the simple but salient truth that black men are a varied population who also exist within the middle class. For upwardly mobile black men who operate within rather than at the margins of mainstream society, models of deviance from normative gender frameworks and of incongruence with the dominant culture are inapplicable. The question of how middle-class black men perform and conceptualize masculinity remains unaddressed.

This ethnographic study interrogates the experience of gender, class, and masculinity for men at a black institution whose mission is to provide them with the social capital and resources required to participate fully in the middle class. By enlarging the lens through which we examine black masculinity, we can gain insights into the differences among black men, possible sites of conflict between them, and the gender and class performances and ideologies of men who are firmly in the cultural mainstream. In contrast to scholarship on the “crisis of the black male,” which repeatedly addresses young black men as a national problem, this project asks how black men experience an institution that bills them as solutions to that problem.

Morehouse College

These words are engraved in white marble under the towering copper likeness of Dr. Benjamin Elijah Mays, the sixth president of Morehouse, in the hallowed courtyard of the nation’s only all-male historically black college.

There is an air of expectancy at Morehouse College. It is expected that the student who enters here will do well. It is also expected that once a man bears the insignia of a Morehouse Graduate, he will do exceptionally well. We expect nothing less. . . . May you perform so well that when a man is needed for an important job in your field, your work will be so impressive that the committee of selection will be compelled to examine your credentials. May you forever stand for something noble and high. Let no man dismiss you with a wave of the hand or a shrug of the shoulder.

The men who walk the grounds of this campus are confronted daily by these words and must determine for themselves what it means to meet the expectations of an institution that defines its mission entirely in terms of their manhood. How do young men understand, navigate, and make meaning of their experiences at an institution that is wholly invested in producing men in accordance with middle-class ideologies at a time when the national discourse repeatedly points to a dysfunctional relationship between black men and the cultural mainstream?

To address this question, this project examines the lives of young alumni who attended Morehouse between 2000 and 2007. Since its founding, Morehouse has defined its mission as advancing black men into the professional middle class. With black males’ rates of graduation and college enrollment on the decline since the mid-1980s, the college positions itself as an institution whose successful alumni are exceptions to troubling national statistics (Lemelle 1995; Mauer 1999; Staples 1982). This study delves into the lived experiences of men who attended Morehouse at a time when their upward mobility was set against a backdrop of systemic class and racial warfare against black men. This approach assumes that these men shared a common experience, not because they all have middle-class backgrounds (they do not) but because they have a mutual interest in upward mobility by virtue of enrolling at an elite institution of higher education. For these men, the college years involved not simply a coming-of-age process but an assiduously crafted class and gender project orchestrated by an institution with a distinct mission. In listening to their stories, we can critically examine how gender and class intersect as these men seek the resources and capital to participate in the cultural mainstream and the crucible role played by an institution that is committed to inculcating black male respectability.

Gendering the Black Middle Class

The parameters of the black middle class cannot be defined in socioeconomic terms alone; cultural and educational criteria are equally important. Scholars have established white-collar employment as the benchmark of middle-class status for African Americans in the post–civil rights era (Blackwell 1985; Higginbotham and Weber 1992; Kronus 1971; Lacy 2007; Landry 1987; Oliver and Shapiro 1995; F. H. Wilson 1995; cf. W. J. Wilson 1978). The preeminent works on black upward mobility (Gaines 1996; Landry 1987; Pattillo-McCoy 1999) have acknowledged the pivotal role that higher education plays in class advancement. For African Americans, a college education has long been the single most definitive cultural marker of upward mobility, and college-educated blacks have traditionally been viewed as bettering social conditions for the race as a whole (Du Bois 1903; Green 1977; Gaines 1996). Historically black colleges and universities have long upheld their role as agents of socialization and ideological indoctrination about middle-class behavior for their upwardly mobile students (Frazier 1954). Colleges and universities continue to serve as critical thresholds of class identity.

More than any group in U.S. history, African Americans have had their advancement yoked to notions of gender normativity, respectability, and sexual propriety. Prescriptions on black sexuality and gender performance have never been partitioned off from racial uplift ideology. Social historian Michele Mitchell (2004) notes that as early as Reconstruction, both black and white former abolitionists ran obsessive campaigns to politicize blacks’ sexual propriety, thrusting the topic into public discussions of citizenship and labor as well as marriage and morality. Throughout the Jim Crow era and well into the twentieth century, black elites promoted a public discourse that conflated the advancement of the race with adherence to bourgeois morality and emphasized the patriarchal family as the cornerstone of black progress (Gaines 1996). These gendered notions of racial uplift have become synonymous with the expansion and stability of the black middle class. Contemporary African American leaders have articulated a “self-help” politics of securing class advancement by espousing the dominant values and behaviors of whites, especially as they pertain to respectability and gender (Collins 2004). Conversely, because black leaders have been preoccupied with the ability of black men and women to measure up to dominant standards of patriarchal families, “failure” to subscribe to these gender models has been used to explain a host of social problems including poverty, joblessness, and low educational attainment (Moynihan 1965; see Cohen 1999; Gaines 1996; Collins 2004).

The emphasis on patriarchy within racial uplift ideology has repeatedly centered on black male leadership as the political vehicle to class mobility and race betterment. The undeniably bleak upward trend rates of black male violence, incarceration, unemployment, and nonresidential fathering have spiked a moral panic that tethers the current conditions of the race to a current cohort of young black men “in crisis.” Alarm has most often presented those issues affecting low-income black men as conditions suffered by the black community collectively, subsuming the barriers encountered by educated, middle-class black men and marginalizing the gender-specific problems faced by black women. As Cathy Cohen explains, contemporary discussions have repeatedly emphasized the responsibility of communities, institutions, and racial leaders to embrace conformity to mainstream middle-class gender constructs to produce and sustain normative patriarchal citizenship and “respectable” black males (Cohen 1999; see also Hammonds 1997).

“The College of Choice for Black Men”

Morehouse College is an important site at which to explore the relationship between gender and class for black men, considering its storied relationship to the black middle class. As the alma mater of both Martin Luther King Sr. and Martin Luther King Jr., Spike Lee, Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, and former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher, the college is nearly synonymous with upward mobility. Its national reputation for consistently producing substantial numbers of distinguished professionals has allowed Morehouse to laud itself as “The College of Choice for Black Men.” Located near downtown Atlanta, Georgia, the institution enrolls nearly three thousand undergraduates, 93 percent of whom are black or African American. It is the nation’s largest all-male college and has conferred bachelor’s degrees on more black men than any other college or university in the United States. From its founding in 1867, just two years after the end of the Civil War, Morehouse has been deeply involved in producing black male leaders and professionals.

Like those of many black colleges, Morehouse’s student body is drawn from backgrounds that range from low-income to affluent families. While working-class students seeking entry into the middle class make up a sizable portion of its student body, it has historically enjoyed a reputation as the school for the favored sons of the black elite and for forging the identities of black male professionals. Class acculturation at the college, then, is not simply a process of introducing low-income men to normative middle-class behaviors, as many Morehouse students’ backgrounds are already congruent with the class ideologies promoted on campus. This study hones in on the ways in which the experiences of men at Morehouse exceed mere class socialization. In these men’s lives, the college serves as a cauldron for gender ideologies as well, where “doing” black manhood is mapped onto performances of racial respectability and middle-class identity (West and Zimmerman 1987).

Given the emphasis placed on performative respectability, in recent years the college has been embroiled in a series of incidents that have shaken the college’s reputation. When Morehouse was celebrating its fourth Rhodes Scholar in 2003, a student was brutally beaten on the bathroom floor of his dormitory because of suspicions of his homosexuality.¹ Just as the Martin Luther King Jr. papers were being bestowed to the college in 2007, the body of a tortured and murdered student was found stuffed in the trunk of his car. Four of his fellow Morehouse students were convicted of the crime.² From the narratives and experiences of Morehouse graduates, we can understand these incidents as outcomes of a specific climate of hegemonic masculinity and social class indoctrination at play on the campus. In the ideological pressure cooker that has been built up around black male advancement in a time of widespread crisis, aggressively policed codes of class and gender emerge and are vividly apparent in men’s experiences. It is precisely the college’s location at this nexus of extreme incidents and diverse and conflicting identities that makes it ripe for ethnographic study. It is, ironically, within the homosocial and racially homogeneous space of a black men’s college that the nuanced details of ethnicity, sexuality, class, and hegemony can be distinguished more clearly for black men (Bird 1996).

I became familiar with Morehouse as an undergraduate at the neighboring all-female Spelman College. Through my years of observing the institution, the men within it, and the unique array of masculinities on the campus, I became interested in how black men come to experience class and gender. As an undergraduate, I was actively involved in Morehouse student life, serving as a columnist and editor for The Maroon Tiger, the official student newspaper. In my senior year I was elected Miss Morehouse College, a position that placed me at the epicenter of student life while requiring me to serve as a ceremonial representative of the student body to the outside community. In many ways I am an authentic insider, having experienced the campus’s culture firsthand and having been actively involved in re-creating, challenging, and navigating that culture both as a student and as a member of the close-knit group of Spelman and Morehouse alumni. I am deeply connected to these men not only because of our similar collegiate experiences, but also because of the lifelong interpersonal relationships that I share with them as friends, colleagues, and members of my family.

At the same time, I am also an outsider to this community, as a woman, an unapologetic feminist, and an independent researcher from a predominantly white institution. In studying my peers, I have negotiated my insider-outsider status at every turn. While ethnographic study has a long tradition of researchers who belong to the mainstream studying subjects on the margins, my position as a woman studying men who occupy positions of power in almost every realm of my social and professional life required a constant balancing of my various identities. While I acknowledge the risks my participants took in being honest and forthcoming about their experiences within a small and tightly knit community, I also felt a great risk of being ostracized from this community because of my feminist aims, or of incurring professional consequences because I might tell an “unfavorable” story about the college. I have been publicly vocal about what I feel are Morehouse’s very serious and long-standing issues with homophobia, and these opinions have put me in jeopardy of losing access to the college and its resources. Doing this work has frequently located me at the emotional cusp of telling a story about a community of men I love, but also being fiercely critical of what I feel are problematic class and sexual politics within that community.

Interviewing Morehouse Men

I conducted individual, in-depth interviews with eleven African American men who ranged in age from 24 to 31 and had attended and graduated from Morehouse between the years of 2000 and 2007. Most of the men reported being raised in middle-income households, with white-collar professional parents to lower-middle-class and blue-collar families with parents in civil service occupations. Only one participant reported growing up poor. Most were raised in two-parent households, either with both birth parents or with a birth parent and a stepparent. Two men noted that their single mother was their family’s main breadwinner. All of the men, save the two most recent college grads, were enrolled in or had completed graduate studies, and some held doctorates. Three of the men were gay, though only two had been out throughout their college years. The remaining eight men reported being straight. Two of the men were married at the time of their interview, while a third cohabitated with a same-sex partner. Only one had children. All of the men were currently working in salaried professions or were enrolled in professional degree programs.³

As graduates, these men do not represent the many men who dropped out, who were pushed out (because of their incongruence with decorum codes, rules, and the campus culture), who left because of financial or personal difficulties (including those who took semesters off and found barriers to reentry), or who transferred elsewhere. It is important to note that the college had a nearly 60 percent attrition rate when these participants were enrolled. Such a low graduation rate has substantial effects on the culture of the institution and the men who remain to complete the process.

By comparing and contrasting accounts of their experiences from secondary school through the college years and in their current lives as young alumni, I pieced together the story of a culture and place as they remember it. The ethnographic field is not Morehouse College itself, as the institution continually evolves and has responded to changes that occurred after these men had left. Rather, the field is a culture re-created by these alumni’s own memories; acted on by their ability to make meanings of these memories; and revisited, navigated, and negotiated through their development as young men. Interviews began with my asking about their home community and family life through high school and their preparation for college. Questions regarding their college years covered initial experiences at Morehouse, the organized rituals of student orientation, dorm and residential life, dating and sex, power and popularity, violence and intimidation, and classroom and academic experiences. Finally, men were asked for their thoughts on black manhood as it applied to them, to what they were doing after college, and to how they see their experience now as alumni compared to when they were students, as well as how black manhood pertains to the world outside the college. As participants were encouraged to recount personal stories in these interviews, additional topics of discussion emerged. Interviews typically lasted between two and three hours.

These individual narratives frame a larger picture in which these men’s varying identities meet and interact with an institutional culture that has both material and ideological structures and specific social aims, a process that Pierre Bourdieu (1990) described as habitus. Through the analysis of these men’s narratives, it becomes clear ethnographically that the institution is the mechanism through which class ideologies become organized into prescriptions about race, gender, patriarchy, and masculinity. These instructions to students are both explicit, in dress codes, intolerance for broken English or slang, and decorum guidelines, such as “Morehouse men always walk on the outside of a lady”; and implicit, such as speaking and dressing like professional men and having heteronormative sexual relationships. In this gendered culture, masculinity is not established only through power or goods, but it must be performed. “Doing” gender, then, implies a process of interaction whereby men and women learn to perform an appropriate gender within particular contexts (West and Zimmerman 1987). The instructions men receive at the college entangle what it is to do “proper manhood” with what it is to act and be culturally middle class. The men who are subjected to this ideological instruction in turn make meanings of what it is to be middle-class black men through the college’s endorsement of certain types of manhood.

“Meaning making,” in this phenomenological approach, allows room for exploring the lived experiences of research subjects and better understanding the ways in which they make sense of their social relationships (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Schutz 1967). All people make meanings of their lives, experiences, and relationships, both with other people and structures and through other people and structures (Garfinkel 1967). For my subjects, these meanings subsequently inform how they do masculinity in their own lives as they compare themselves to these institutionalized ideals of manhood. This study recognizes the agency and diversity with which individuals negotiate and construct their own meanings of race, class, and masculinity. Acknowledging this form of agency allows for a critical examination of race, class, and gender that does not rely on the determinism of structural theories alone. It is exactly these variations between the structural constraints of the institution and an individual’s agency in constructing meaning out of their participation in the institution for which this work helps to account (Bourdieu 1990; Chavous and Cogburn 2007; Davidson 1996; Morrill and Fine 1997; O’Connor 1997, 2001; Weiler 2000; Young 1999).

“Branding the Man”

At the college, black manhood is institutionalized through rituals, traditions, rules, and instructions about propriety that are deeply rooted in normative gender ideology. Context and environment can dictate the resources that men do or do not have in engaging and navigating this process, as studies of gendered organizations have repeatedly shown (Acker 1990; Britton 2000; Leyser 2003). Ethnographic inquiry reveals the paradox that, on one hand, the college exerts substantial control over aspects of their lives, while, on the other hand, men have some resources and agency in how they negotiate these structural constraints.

Many of the elements of this process of “making men” are evident in the material constraints that reflect normative gender ideologies, such as dress codes. Other elements are more ideological in the form of norms, values, and instructions on behavior. At times, men expressed how unbearably constricting the institution was for some students. Miles, who grew up in a low-income family in an industrial midwestern city with his cousin, recalled his cousin’s decision to withdraw from the college: “I mean a lot of people didn’t fit. Like, my cousin went to Morehouse; he was like a year or two behind me. He was from East St. Louis, and he didn’t like it because he was like ‘I can’t do anything here. I can’t smoke’ (he smoked), ‘I can’t have girls over, I can’t do this, I can’t do that.’ . . . So he ended up transferring home. Some people just don’t fit in.”

Patriarchal class ideologies at Morehouse, as at all U.S. academic institutions, limit resources and power for some students while providing resources, power, and privilege to others (Hubbard 2005; Weiler 2000; Weis and Fine 1993/2005). The process of “making men” weeds out certain types of men while endorsing and empowering others. Material and ideological constraints not only serve to instill class and gender normativity but also latently function as a sieve to sift through types of identities and performances that resist conformity to institutional norms. Many of the participants were not opposed to these constrictions. Even after noting his cousin’s negative experience, Miles emphasized the utility of norms as a filter for nonconforming men within the college: “I still tell people there’s a big difference between a man of Morehouse and a Morehouse man. Because a lot of folks would come there, either they would be very immature, or they wouldn’t fit, or they’d get into trouble, and you would see them doing these things like their freshman year and you would think, ‘God, what’s wrong with this cat? Like, why did they let him in here?’ And by senior and junior year they would be gone. So it’s like, I guess they had a way of getting rid of riffraff, you know what I mean?”

Here the distinction is made between a “man of Morehouse,” who has attended the college or is currently enrolled, but is not an alumnus; and a “Morehouse man,” the dignified mark of a graduate. The distinction differentiates those men who successfully navigated the process from those who, for any number of reasons, did not make it through the system. The term “Morehouse Man” (distinguished with capital letters) was also invoked ubiquitously in these interviews to refer to a mythical prototype of the college’s ideal of masculinity. Various nuanced details were offered to describe this paragon’s speech, dress, occupation, family, and so forth. All of the men seemed to have a clear understanding of what the Morehouse Man is. Two respondents explained in separate interviews:

Art:

They talked about the Morehouse Man, as their product, that’s what they produce. They get young black men that are talented and when they graduate they become Morehouse Men, which are recognizable by the way they walk, by the way they interact, the way they conduct their business, the way they speak.

SG:

Did they explain how they walk, interact, and speak?

Art:

Yes, yes, they did. . . . Morehouse men didn’t “walk,” they “sauntered” was one.

Julian:

The Morehouse Man was one who was serious about the way he conducted himself in his professional and civic endeavors. He was one that spoke with insight, with modesty, with pride. He left a mark in every circle he stepped in. There was something special about a Morehouse Man.

The gendered traits of those men who advance through the man-making process are assigned terms through symbolic language and shared meanings in the institutional culture that are congruent with the qualities of a Morehouse man. The prototype of the Morehouse Man comes to typify one who not only successfully navigates the institutional process but also embodies it. An alumnus may be lauded as a “true Morehouse Man” even though the prototype to which he is being compared is a mythic—and therefore unattainable—ideal of manhood. The Morehouse Man typifies a model of masculinity to which real men must subscribe to complete the process. These traits are easily recognizable as the Morehouse “brand.”

Quality control of this brand is not left to happenstance, and men on the campus police one another. This policing can take the form of aggression, intimidation, humiliation, or, in some cases, even violence as men desperately seek cultural compliance from other students around them or push noncompliant men to leave. Because gender and class performances have the narrowest codes of compliance within this culture, they are the most aggressively and consistently policed. These codes tell men not only what the Morehouse brand is but also what it is not. Men emulate the prototype and police one another’s speech, walk, dress, and behavior in the man-making process. Although some men actively resist this intervention, others have conformity aggressively imposed upon them.

Sonny, a lower-middle-class graduate of an elite prep school, jocularly recalled an incident that he witnessed during New Student Orientation (NSO), the week when first-year students are initiated into the institution by upperclassmen and administrators through a series of intense and highly intimidating activities that participants consistently described as “a fraternity” and frequently called “hazing.” Adam, an Afro-Caribbean student from a college preparatory boys’ academy, recounted his immediate impression of the college: “Morehouse is a big frat, and I didn’t realize how institutionalized the brotherhood was. . . . Morehouse was not just about going to college, it was about going to Morehouse College.” At this threshold to the man-making process, new students have their masculinities policed to ensure that they adhere to the gender and class codes that the college endorses. Even hairstyles that are out of favor with the middle class come under scrutiny and are subject to intervention.

Sonny:

I don’t share this with non-Morehouse people. . . . We’re sitting there, we’re all under the tent and it’s really late or whatever, and this dude starts walking around and he’s like ‘Brothers, I fear there is one amongst us! I have heard there is one amongst us!’ and we were like ‘Who?! Where?! Where?!’ . . . because then I’m nervous that it’s me! I don’t know what it is but I’m like ‘I’m it!’ . . . So, they brought a brother up to the front and I remember specifically to this day, he had more an S-curl [processed hair style] type of thing, and they started singing the song and it was like ‘Jherri curls and shower caps, Morehouse men don’t look like that!’ [repeating] . . . and in a matter of like 30 seconds the entire tent was chanting that, so then they pulled out some clippers! I don’t know if they were battery operated, but they shaved that boy’s curl!

SG:

And his reaction?

Sonny:

He didn’t have much of a reaction. If you’re a 17-, 18-year-old kid and there’s about six hundred or seven hundred people—because you also have upperclassmen there chanting some shit to you—you’re not gonna have much of a reaction at all. He was probably morbidly terrified! But, you know, so, I remember that.

Nearly all of the participants referred to this notion of manufacturing the raw material of young boys into the branded product of Morehouse men. While the institution remained visibly and actively committed to inculcating specific norms, there were noticeable variations in these men’s narratives about who the consumers of this branded product are. Some noted that they felt the college produces leaders for “the black community.” Others were more critical and insisted that the college grooms its students primarily for acceptance into white-dominated professions. For Clayton, who grew up in a predominantly black rural farming community, the prevalence of discussions among students about white Americans and the consistent attention paid to preparing for life in the white-dominated mainstream were a surprise. Morehouse “was the first time it ever seemed to me that black people were invested in the business of white people. . . . It was certainly clear that after these four years I was going out into a very very white world, and was going to have to negotiate with a very very white world.” It is exactly at this paradoxical location between black communities and the white mainstream’s view into black life in America that so many upwardly mobile black men locate themselves. It is because of the peculiarity of this location that the branding of their gendered and classed positions deserves focused and specific sociological attention.

Politicizing Exceptionality

Running in ideological parallel to the notion of “branding the man” is the college’s own complementary term, “the Morehouse Mystique.” Like the brand, the mystique refers to a set of distinguishable traits that the college encourages its students to acquire, but also claims that they possess in some form by virtue of participating in the institutional process. Unlike the brand, however, the term “mystique” is used in recruitment materials and fund-raising campaigns. The college’s official website reads:

There is a world of professions and universities to choose from, and today, black men have access to them all. But many of the best and brightest choose Morehouse. . . . So, why do black men still choose Morehouse? No doubt, it is the excellent liberal arts education and an environment that is conducive to academic, social and spiritual growth. But there are many great schools out there, so there must be something more? We call that something the “Morehouse Mystique.” The phrase is not easily defined or understood, but it’s also not just a clever slogan. The Mystique is joining a brotherhood like none other. And after being ignored, stereotyped or marginalized, it’s about finally finding that “home” that, deep inside, you always knew existed, where you are the heart, soul and hope of the community. And where you are not alone.⁴

The vivid imagery alludes to a symbiotic selection process. Not only does the college sift through competitive applicants, but high-achieving black male students who are in great demand at institutions across the country are themselves choosing among schools that compete for them. In 2007–2008, U.S. high schools failed to graduate 53 percent of black males who enrolled in them.⁵ These epidemic dropout and pushout rates have created a shortage of black male students enrolled in higher education, and retaining them is also a problem (Harper 2004). The nation’s only college for black men has not been exempt from these issues. Morehouse’s strategy for recruiting high-achieving high school seniors has changed as the population of high-achieving black males has shrunk at the same time that black youths are in high demand by predominantly white institutions.

Morehouse’s Web site attempts to attract students through an emotional appeal that speaks directly to a common experience of isolation in the academic lives of high-achieving black boys. This recruitment material assumes, perhaps rightly, that a persistent narrative of loneliness has marked the academic experiences of college-bound black youths. When asked to describe their high school experiences and interactions with other black boys their age, participants frequently described themselves as either having been different and removed from others in their school, part of a small group of high-achieving black boys, or the only high-achieving student among their black male friends. Art, who attended an elite parochial academy, was the only black male in his graduating class of 330 students. The appeal of a black men’s college was a conscious priority in most of the participants’ decisions. Art explained, “When you’re the only black male in your class you feel kind of lonely, in terms of, you know, when you’re making arguments or discussing issues, you want someone from a similar background to be able to speak with you. That’s something I never really had, and I knew I’d be just awash with that at Morehouse.”

In the carefully crafted recruitment literature issued by the college, this experience of loneliness, which should be primarily attributed to the failings of the secondary school system, is translated into the language of black male exceptionality. The college postures itself as a destination for exceptional and high-achieving black males through the lure of surrounding them with a “home” community of others like them. This statement draws directly on the perception of a crisis among young black males. This evokes an image of prospective Morehouse students being victimized by the problems of a broader cohort of black males who are “ignored, stereotyped, or marginalized.” Once safely within the campus gates, however, references to the common ground they share with other black men stops there. While the Morehouse Mystique beckons to prospective students through shared experiences of marginalization, it also intensifies the notion that men who have undergone this institutional process are distinct, exceptional, and markedly different from black men outside the institution.

This exceptionality is deeply anchored within a politics of respectability. The gender and class ideologies behind exceptionality can politicize these men’s achievements into both endorsements of patriarchal models of racial leadership and reactions to the perceived failures of low-income black men. In recounting their experiences with campuswide events, most often in the form of weekly convocations, mandatory ceremonies, and guest speeches sponsored by the administration, respondents recalled a pervasive rhetoric of the leadership and exceptionality of Morehouse men.

Clayton:

Morehouse is always about extolling that you have to be a leader. If everybody’s a leader then who is going to be led? It’s the Messiah Complex. . . . There was always that conversation: “We were supposed to be leaders. We have to lead our community. Men have to stand up and be at the head.” I think that’s important and it’s perfectly fine to say to somebody, but in my experience women were just as capable of leading as men. I wasn’t going to stand up and say “Oh, you shouldn’t say that,” but I didn’t think that necessarily because I was a male that I needed to be leading.

Miles:

So, like, a lot of stuff that we had to do was like going in and listening to different speakers. And they’d be essentially telling us, “Oh, there’s so many black men in jail” or “Oh, there’s so many black men who aren’t doing anything. They’re shiftless, lazy Negroes,” you know. “Oh, y’all are the cream of the crop, y’all are the best that black America has to offer,” like, “You’re gonna go and do great things.” . . . I think that they taught us to think that we were better than a lot of folks, just based upon the school that we went to, and a lot of people believed that! They’d be like “I go to Morehouse!” like, “You’re supposed to like me,” “You’re supposed to revere me!”

Miles’s recollections of a schoolwide convocation typify the class ideologies that pervade notions of exceptionality. Here, the college positions its students as exceptional because they have evaded the most common social problems besieging low-income black men. By denouncing the images and conditions associated with the crisis of black men and condemning men who are afflicted by these conditions, the notion of exceptionality endorses class hegemony. Under this guise, not only are the men who are being made middle class within the institution crafted to represent and embody normative black male respectability, but respectability is ideologically achieved in part by repudiating marginalized low-income black men. Serious ambivalence emerges in how these men think about their low-income counterparts.

Paternalistic references to black men and communities outside of the institution recurred during the interviews. When asked to describe their perception of the role of Morehouse men in the larger black community, several respondents said that Morehouse graduates serve as “fathers.” One participant referred to Morehouse men as “caretakers of the black community” who are “standing up and being the father figure.” While this description may seem innocuous to those who support the idea that male leadership is critical to racial advancement, this patriarchal imagery infantilizes other members of the community. The question must be raised: in what ways does this patriarchal ideology subordinate black women and marginalize other black men?

Class Hegemony and the Consumption of Women

In the respondents’ narratives, one of the most conspicuous ways that class hegemony was accomplished was through constructing a hierarchy of women from nearby campuses. As gender relations are themselves bisected by class, men in this study validated their class dominance by ranking female students along a sexual hierarchy (Donaldson 1993). No single point was reiterated as consistently, and nearly identically, by the straight participants in this study as a mantra about sexually ranking and consuming female bodies. In this exclusively male college, the homosocial life of dormitories, shower rooms, and dining halls is starkly different from the off-campus setting, given the presence of young women just steps away at the other member campuses of the Atlanta University Center (AUC). Interaction with female students is mandated, as new students are assigned and paired with a “Spelman Sister” during orientation week. Adam, who had told his family he was gay just before enrolling at Morehouse, recalled this compulsory ritual with discomfort and noted that the hyper-heteronormative experience of boy/girl pairing refastened some of his closet doors. Ironically, many heterosexual participants noted that one of the immediate appeals of selecting the all-male college was the anticipation of increased access to young black women, notably the nearly two thousand women at all-female Spelman College as well as thousands more on the coeducational campuses of Clark Atlanta University and Morris Brown College.

These three institutions have a long history of class differences. Both Spelman and Morehouse have been heralded as professional training grounds for the black upper and middle classes. Their endowments far exceed the endowments of similarly sized historically black colleges. When Clark College and the all-graduate Atlanta University (where W. E. B. Du Bois was famously on the faculty) merged in the late 1980s to form Clark Atlanta University, the student body primarily consisted of lower-middle- and working-class students. Of the three colleges, Morris Brown is the sole institution that was founded by ex-slaves. Morris Brown has long held to its unstated mission of educating poor and first-generation college students, though recent decades have brought financial woes. The class conditions that formed the foundations of these institutions continue to inform the current climate of intercampus relations in the AUC.

To be a student at any one of these institutions is to be taught about the class-infused social dynamics among the schools. This class indoctrination was imparted to one participant during his very first week on campus:

SG:

Were there any activities during NSO that made you feel uncomfortable?

Art:

Probably . . . just being on the bus and hearing what the elders [upperclassmen] had to say about how Morehouse men are relative to Spelman women and Clark women and Morris Brown women. Building a hierarchy among the women in the AUC, with Spelman being your sister, your wife, and then Clark women being, I don’t know, your girlfriend, and then Morris Brown women being at the bottom of the totem pole—being like your jump-off, your object, your sexual plaything.

Here, class hegemony is indoctrinated first by conveying that men at Morehouse have a heterosexual prerogative of choosing which female bodies to consume. Second, women are ranked along a class hierarchy in which those at the historically working-class college are reduced to sexual objects to be exploited, while women at the middle-class college are elevated to coveted positions as potential wives.

This ranking of black femininities also serves the function of subjugating the black men who correspond to these women’s class positions. When a Morehouse man exploits a working-class Morris Brown woman, he is simultaneously exerting class and gender dominance over Morris Brown men by relegating the women these men may deem potential partners to sexual playthings. In this sense, the hierarchical ordering of women sets up a competition through which heterosexual men achieve sexual validation (Donaldson 1993; Messner 2004). Achieving hegemony over other men through the subjugation and consumption of women enforces the masculine predominance of men at Morehouse over those outside the college. This ranking is common language that respondents use to speak about institutionalized dominance over women as well as other men. During separate interviews, both Miles and Sonny relayed nearly identical narratives about this hierarchy. Miles said, “I think that Morehouse arrogance is not an imagined thing. Like it’s a very real thing, and I think it’s a product of something they instill. . . . Because you’ve heard the thing where ‘Spelman women write with pens, and Clark women write with pencils and Morris Brown women write with crayons’ and stuff.” Similarly, Sonny stated, “Of course in NSO we learned the pen, pencil, and crayon thing.” When I asked him to explain, he responded, “Morehouse men always carry a pen, Clark men carry a pencil and Morris Brown men carry a crayon.” Noticing here that men had been substituted for women in this statement, I inquired about any corresponding narrative pertaining to women. “Oh, absolutely! Absolutely!” Sonny replied without hesitation. “What was it? You marry a Spelman woman, you date a Clark girl, and you fuck Morris Brown women.”

Ranking female and male students on other campuses was one of the most consistent themes in narratives about Morehouse. The correlation between creating sexual hierarchies of women and achieving class hegemony over other men is so strong that Miles recalled these mantras interchangeably and Sonny cited them as complementary. The infantilization of low-income black men is as visible as the class ideology behind the sexual consumption of female bodies. Within this trope, heterosexuality itself is deployed as a mechanism of class domination by straight men. The interdependence of class and sexuality that is readily apparent in the lives of these men has been continually overlooked in studies that neglect the myriad ways class differences inform black male sexuality.

Implications

Although black male college graduates have been fetishized in the popular imagination as success stories of individuals beating the odds, there has been little empirical effort to understand their experiences. Being socialized into the mainstream in an institution such as Morehouse has potent consequences for how black men conceptualize and perform class, gender, and sexuality. Middle-class black men are not exempt from the gendered effects of the crisis of black masculinity. The class ideologies that back notions of respectability and male hegemony can place upwardly mobile black men in direct conflict with their perceptions of the behaviors and images of black men in crisis. Within Morehouse’s culture, the masculinities of low-income black men were repudiated. Class and gender differences among black men should be examined carefully to reveal how black men think about other groups of black men and women. Until these issues are more fully addressed, critical sites of interaction, competition, and conflict will remain hidden.

Previous approaches to young middle-class black men, particularly within quantitative studies, have relied too heavily on college completion as a measure for the success or failure of black men to attain upward mobility. Higher education is commonly upheld as the panacea for drawing black men out of the social margins and into positions where they can access the material and economic resources of the mainstream. To understand the social processes black men experience in college, in-depth ethnographic study is needed. It is also through ethnographic study that we can best recognize and admit when and where these processes are problematic.

The experiences of men at Morehouse cannot represent the collective experiences of upwardly mobile black men as a group, and indeed the college’s notion of exceptionalism is distinctive. Yet this study reveals several of the sources of gender ideologies among these aspiring men. Institutions play an indispensable role in inculcating gender and sexual ideologies within a class context. Examining how men understand a process that uses gender and class instructions to craft their manhood puts middle-class black masculinity under a critical lens. More extensive research on the intersections of class and gender in the lives of black men is necessary to help complete this picture.

Footnotes

Notes

References

Acker

Joan

. 1990. Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: A theory of gendered organizations. Gender & Society 4 (2): 139–58.

Anderson

Elijah

. 1999. Code of the street: Decency, violence and moral life in the inner city. New York, NY: Norton

Anderson

Elijah

. 2003. A place on the corner: A study of black street corner men. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Anderson

Elijah

, ed. 2008. Against the wall: Poor, young, black, and male. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Berger

Peter L.

Luckmann

Thomas

. 1966. The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Billson

Janet M.

1996. Pathways to manhood: Young black males struggle for identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Bird

Sharon R.

1996. Welcome to the men’s club: Homosociality and the maintenance of hegemonic masculinity. Gender & Society 10 (2): 120–32.

Blackwell

James E.

1985. The black community: Diversity and unity. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Bourdieu

Pierre

. 1990. The logic of practice, trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

10.

Britton

Dana M.

2000. The epistemology of the gendered organization. Gender & Society 14 (3): 418–35.

11.

Chavous

Tabbye

Cogburn

Courtney D.

2007. Superinvisible women: Black girls and women in education. Black Women, Gender, and Families 1 (2): 24–51.

12.

Cohen

Cathy J.

1999. The boundaries of blackness: AIDS and the breakdown of black politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

13.

Collins

Patricia Hill

. 2004. Black sexual politics: African Americans, gender, and the new racism. New York, NY: Routledge.

14.

Davidson

Anne Locke

. 1996. Making and molding identity in schools: Student narratives on race, gender, and academic engagement. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

15.

Donaldson

Mike

. 1993. What is hegemonic masculinity? Theory and Society 22 (5): 643–57.

16.

Du Bois

W. E. B.

1903. The talented tenth. In Washington

Booker T.

., The Negro problem: A series of articles by representative American Negroes of today. New York, NY: James Pott.

17.

Frazier

E. Franklin

. 1954. Black bourgeoisie. New York, NY: Free Press.

18.

Gaines

Kevin K.

1996. Uplifting the race: Black leadership, politics, and culture in the twentieth century. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

19.

Garfinkel

Harold

. 1967. Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

20.

Green

D. S.

1977. W. E. B. Du Bois’ talented tenth: A strategy for racial advancement. Journal of Negro Education 46 (3): 358–66.

21.

Hammonds

Evelynn M.

1997. Toward a genealogy of black female sexuality: The problematic of silence. In Feminist theory and the body: A reader, eds. Price

Janet

Shildrick

Margaret

, 249–59. New York, NY: Routledge.

22.

Harper

Shaun R.

2004. The measure of a man: Conceptualizations of masculinity among high-achieving African American male college students. Berkeley Journal of Sociology 48 (1): 89–107.

23.

Higginbotham

Elizabeth

Weber

Lynn

. 1992. Moving up with kin and community: Upward social mobility for black and white women. Gender & Society 6:416–40.

24.

Hubbard

Lea

. 2005. The role of gender in academic achievement. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 18 (5): 605–23.

25.

Kronus

Sidney

. 1971. The black middle class. Columbus, OH: Merrill.

26.

Lacy

Karyn

. 2007. Blue chip black: Race, class, and status in the new black middle class. Berkley, CA: University of California Press.

27.

Landry

Bart

. 1987. The new black middle class. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

28.

Lemelle

Anthony J.

1995. Black male deviance. Westport, CT: Praeger.

29.

Leyser

Ophra

. 2003. Doing masculinity in a mental hospital. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 32:336–59.

30.

Liebow

Elliot

. 1967. Tally’s corner: A study of Negro streetcorner men. Boston, MA: Little, Brown.

31.

MacLeod

Jay

. 1995. Ain’t no makin’ it: Aspirations and attainment in a low-income neighborhood. 2nd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview.

32.

Majors

Richard

Billson

Janet M.

1992. Cool pose: The dilemmas of black manhood in America. New York, NY: Touchstone.

33.

Mauer

Marc

. 1999. The crisis of the young African American male and the criminal justice system. Washington, DC: U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

34.

Messner

Michael A.

2004. On patriarchs and losers: Rethinking men’s interests. Berkeley Journal of Sociology 48:76–88.

35.

Mitchell

Michele

. 2004. Righteous propagation: African Americans and the politics of racial destiny after Reconstruction. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

36.

Morrill

Calvin

Fine

Gary Alan

. 1997. Ethnographic contributions to organizational sociology. Sociological Methods and Research 25:424–51.

37.

Moynihan

Daniel Patrick

1965. The Negro family: The case for national action. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor.

38.

O’Connor

Carla

. 1997. Dispositions toward (collective) struggle and educational resilience in the inner city: A case analysis of six African American high school students. American Educational Research Journal 34 (4): 593–629.

39.

O’Connor

Carla

. 2001. Comment: Making sense of the complexity of social identity in relation to achievement. Sociology of Education (Extra Issue):159–68.

40.

Oliver

Melvin L.

Shapiro

Ton M.

1995. Black wealth/white wealth: A new perspective on racial inequality. New York, NY: Routledge.

41.

Pattillo-McCoy

Mary

. 1999. Black picket fences: Privilege and peril among the black middle class. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

42.

Schott Foundation. 2008. Given half a chance: The Schott fifty state report on public education and black males. Available from http://www.blackboysreport.org/files/schott50statereport (accessed 25 October 2011).

43.

Schutz

Alfred

. 1967. Phenomenology of the social world, trans. Walsh

George

Lehnert

Fredrick

. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

44.

Staples

Robert

. 1982. Black masculinity: The black male’s role in American society. San Francisco, CA: Black Scholars Press.

45.

Venkatesh

Sudhir A.

2000. American project: The rise and fall of a modern ghetto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

46.

Weiler

Jeanne D.

2000. Codes and contradictions: Race, gender identity, and schooling. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

47.

Weis

Lois

Fine

Michelle

. 1993/2005. Beyond silenced voices: Class, race, and gender in United States schools. Rev. ed. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

48.

West

Candace

Zimmerman

Don H.

1987. Doing gender. Gender & Society 1 (2): 125–51.

49.

Wilson

Frank H.

1995. Rising tide or ebb tide? Recent changes in the black middle class in the U.S., 1980–1990. Research in Race and Ethnic Relations 8:21–55.

50.

Wilson

William Julius

. 1978. The declining significance of race. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

51.

Young

Alford A.

1999. The (non)accumulation of capital: Explicating the relationship of structure and agency in the lives of poor black men. Sociological Theory 17 (2): 201–7.

52.

Young

Alford A.

2004. The minds of marginalized black men: Making sense of mobility, opportunity, and future life chances. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.