WA LTER R. ALLEN is a professor of sociology at the University of Cal­ifornia, Los Angeles. Dr. Allen’s research and teaching focus on fam­ily patterns, socialization and personality development, race and eth­nic relations, social inequity, and higher education. Among his more than fifty publications are The Color Line and the Quality of Life in America […]

In some ways, the "identity privilege" lists in this essay represent the very early stages in a complicated process of dismantling male het­erosexual privilege. The lists reveal that our identity privileges are le­gitimized through the personal choices we make everyday. All of us make choices that facilitate discriminatory practices. Many of us get married and/or […]

I am a Negro Faggot, if I believe what movies, TV, and rap music say about me. Because of my sexuality, I cannot be Black. A strong, proud, Afrocentric Black man is resolutely heterosexual, not even bi­sexual. Hence I remain a Negro. My sexual difference is. . . a testa­ment to weakness, passivity, the absence […]

It’s up to him [man] to say where his masculinity and femininity are at. —Helene Cixous48 Thus far I’ve suggested that, though the issue is far from uncontro­versial, men can be feminists. I’ve suggested, too, that a male fem­inist project should not attempt to replicate "female feminism" in the sense of trying to articulate the […]

A fundamental goal of male feminism should be to facilitate the process of men unbecoming men, the process of men unlearning the patriarchal ways in which they have learned to become men. Ever since Simone de Beauvior articulated the idea that women are not born women, but rather become women, feminists have been grap­pling with […]

It might indeed be the case that "men’s relationship to feminism is an impossible one,"2 that men cannot be feminists. This "impossibility thesis" is quite arresting. There is, however, an explanation: Women are the subjects of feminism, its initiators, its makers, its force; the move and the join from being a woman to being a […]

Straight Out of the Closet: Men, Feminism, and Male Heterosexual Privilege THE ESSAYS IN this collection reveal how Black men prioritize and negotiate gender and sexuality in their antiracist politics. The collec­tion does not, however, constitute a Black male feminist text. For one thing, not all the essays reflect feminist ideological commitments. For another, not […]

Expert Witnessing in the Case of Rap Houston A. Baker, Jr. I WANT TO say a few things about an essay I read in the Boston Re­view (December 1991) entitled "Beyond Racism and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew" by Kimberle Crenshaw. I came upon the essay with an open mind and read it, […]

The Too-High Price of Prestige Derrick Bell IT IS NOT pleasant to consider that one’s protest action can cause more consternation to those you consider to be on your side than it does to those you know are in your way. As Camus warned, we must often go forward "with weapons in our hands and […]

James Cone has been hailed as the father of contemporary Black liber­ation theology, which emerged out of the Black church in response to the Black Power movement of the 1960s. Among Black theologians he is one of the first to take a public stance against sexism in general and sexism in the Black community and […]