Cornel West MAYBE A MILLION black men will march on Washington. Coming after the O. J. Simpson verdict, the March promises to be a pivotal moment in our nation’s life. As the writer Greg Tate has rightly noted, the verdict "may represent the first time in history that a majority black jury has wielded an […]

Why I Didn’t March A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO, with pride and without hesitation, I participated in the inspiring 1963 March on Washington, holding the hands of my two children, Stephen and Karen, then aged 11 and 8. I was exhilarated by the occasion, proud to be a participant, and ad­mired all of […]

Racial Solidarity or Division? Focusing on the Million Man March, Part I represents an attempt to articulate the importance of the March as a sociopolitical Black com­munity event. The essays in this part raise two interrelated questions: (1) Did the March transcend Minister Louis Farrakhan and his politi­cal ideology? and (2) Did the politics of […]

The preceding discussion is intended to frame this collection and to provide a point of entry for reading the essays. The remainder of this introduction sets forth the structure and organization of the book. The essays are organized into four parts. While each part has a certain thematic coherence, the authors speak from different and […]

I want to offer two final, interrelated explanations for why Black women’s experiences and Black gay experiences are often peripheral — ized in antiracist discourse. First, male heterosexuality is normalized in antiracist discourse, as it is in other discourses. To be male and het­erosexual is "normal" and "natural." Consequently, men are pre­sumed not to have […]

By and large, Black gay and lesbian experiences are marginalized in or excluded from antiracist discourse. The marginalization is achieved—wittingly or unwittingly—through the heterosexualized nature of some, though certainly not all, Black political engagements. Consider the Black civil rights intervention into the military’s "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" policy. The intervention was not to support gay […]

Why, then, do Black men occupy a privileged victim status in an­tiracist discourse? How has this come to pass? The dual effect of in­tentional sexism and functional sexism provides a partial explana­tion. Intentional sexism here refers to political or legal efforts within Black liberation movements that are intended to subordinate Black women’s experiences or that […]

Heterosexual Black men occupy a privileged victim status in an­tiracist discourse. This is quite apparent in the antiracist discourse about crime and in antiracist responses to domestic abuse. A central project of antiracist discourse is to reveal the extent to which Black men are victims of "a racist criminal justice system." Given the statis­tics for […]

Where and When Black Men Enter We are a collective of Black feminists who have been meeting to­gether since 1974. . . . The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to strug­gling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular […]

I have many people to thank for their help in writing and editing this volume. I would first like to thank the contributors for permitting me to share their work with you. I am grateful for the assistance of the coeditors of the Critical America Series, Professor Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, of the University […]