Race, Gender, and Black Students’ Educational Opportunities Walter R. Allen Between me and the other world there is an unasked question. . . . How does it feel to be a problem? —W. E. B. Du Bois1 DU BOIS’S QUOTE provides a useful point of departure to consider the status of African American men. Distressing […]

The issue of airing our dirty [laundry] becomes more painful to us [Black people]. It’s because blacks’ image in the media is a negative one, and people feel that under no circumstance should we talk about these things [violence against women in the Black commu­nity] in a public forum. —Renee Redd128 [Many Blacks] are bothered […]

Although. . . sexual stereotypes apply equally to Black men and women, it is the Black male who has suffered the most because of white notions of his hypersexuality. —Robert Staples96 [W]hite men have a deep abiding fear that black men will take their women from them. —Editorial in The Chicago Crusader (a Black newspaper)97 […]

The Black Male/White Victimhood Narrative For many blacks, every black man is on trial. O. J. Simpson has be­come the proxy not because the black man is a criminal but because the black man is increasingly seen as a criminal by virtue of his sex and color. —Eleanor Holmes Norton55 O. J. Simpson. . . […]

Oh boy, we’re going to have to pay for this. —Anonymous Black person2 How can we possibly vote for Colin Powell now? How can we give them that much power? —Anonymous white person3 Before I discuss the Simpson case in the context of the two previously mentioned political Narratives, I want to put forward some […]

Devon W. Carbado When the names Rodney King, O. J. Simpson, Mike Tyson, Marion Barry and even Clarence Thomas become symbolic, like "Scotts — boro,” black women are left without a way to talk about how some of the Scottsboro "boys” (accused of raping two white women) actu­ally did commit acts of violence and murder […]

In a few moments of quiet reflection about the Tyson-Washington in­cident, a number of things began to occur to me that were obvious in so many ways. Only two people actually know what happened that night in that hotel room. With the passage of time and the need to en­vision the incident in the way […]

As one might expect, from the time Tyson was accused of raping De­siree Washington until he was finally sentenced, the "accusation" was a hot topic of conversation. I had a number of discussions about the accusation with other African-American males living in Indianapolis. When the accusation was first made, I asked a lot of my […]

Stories of African-American Males about the Rape of Desiree Washington Kevin Brown BECOMING AN INDIVIDUAL in American society, or any other so­ciety, is not done in a vacuum. What passes as our individual con­sciousness is developed under the guidance of cultural patterns and historically created systems of meanings. We are not free agents bound only […]

The Boxer, the Beauty Queen, and the Rituals of Gender Michael Awkward Black women were and continue to be sorely in need of an antirape movement. —Angela Davis1 To conceive of the study of men to be about liberating men is to have little interest in any area of social analysis that seriously critiques men […]