WHAT WE ARE NOT
“Men that have low and flat nostrils (that is the African) are Libidinous as Apes that attempt women.” Quote from an Englishman, Essays (Baldwin, 2021, pp. xix-xx in Douglas., 2018, p. 33).
The success of the institution of slavery demanded dehumanizing stereotypes of the enslaved human beings, with an urgent need to disengage the “Negro” from his or her humanity. White culture thus, mounted a vigorous attack upon Black sexuality (Douglas, 2018, p. 33).
If Black women have been stereotyped as matriarchs (mammies and or big mama’s), Sapphires, castrators. breeders, unwilling mistress, prostitute, Jezebels and Welfare Queens (Cannon, Townes, & Sims, 2011, p. 38; Douglas, 2018, p. 50-52), for centuries black men have been stereotyped as lewd, lascivious, and sexually proficient with black male sexual prowess almost being a legend in white cultures. The black male body is fetishized. This is what is called “fetishization of black masculinity”. This is how white people objectify black men as more masculine and sexually potent than white counterparts. It claims that there is an inherent “biology” to the “blackness” of Black men that makes them more muscular, more dominant, more athletic. The size of a black man’s manhood (penis) are bigger (obsessed) over and this apparently betray their monstrosity. The over-sexualisation of black masculinity has, historically, led to intense surveillance and intervention over black male bodies.
These assaults are rooted in ideologies and attitudes derived both from the earliest encounters between Europeans and Africans. To justify slavery, white missionaries and traders fabricated an “obscene mythology” which absolutized superficial differences in pigmentation on skin colour, culture and religious orientation. In this mythology, black skin rendered black men and women synonymous with animality and bestiality, ignorance and stupidity, depravity, and immorality (Douglas, 2018, p. 32).
Going back to the 19th century, the English Victorian eugenicist Francis Galton would make pseudo-scientific claims that black men were “savages”, with
“anatomical differences” from white men, such as penis and pelvis size. So white men were concluded as morally superior to black men because they were more sexually controlled.
Citing Foucault’s analysis of sexual politics, Womanist theologian Rev. Kelly Douglas Brown (2018, p. 34), argues that “the gathering of dubious scientific data is essential if not inevitable in the exercise of power.” That such “will to knowledge” provides power knowledge” to justify the inequitable exercise of power over other human beings. Thus, the power knowledge of white culture provides “scientific evidence” necessary to depict Black people as sexual deviant and anomalies, and thus as inferior beings. This undoubtedly is what is reflected in Western Culture and Western Christian traditions.
The “Violent Buck” has becomes the pseudonym for black men. The portrait of black masculinity perpetually constructs black men as "failures" who are psychologically "fucked up," dangerous, Violent, sex maniacs whose insanity is informed by their inability to fulfil their phallocentric masculine destiny in a racist context. Much of this literature is written by white people, and some of it by a few academic black men. The survival of White hegemony is linchpin by exploiting this myth. White cultural assault upon Black bodies and intimacy continue to impact Black lives (Douglas, p. 33). According to Bell Hooks (2014, p. 89), “black people have not systematically challenged these narrow visions, insisting on a more accurate "reading" of black male reality.” By acting in complicity with the status quo, many black people, according to Hooks have passively absorbed narrow representations of black masculinity, perpetuated stereotypes, myths, and offered one-dimensional accounts” (Hooks, 2014, p.
89).
A Womanist ethic of justice responds from its own well of history and socio- political methodology (Cannon); Like African Biblical Hermeneutics, An African diasporic hermeneutics forges a reading to interrogate and engage the biblical text, colonial and postcolonial subjectivities and cultural assumptions, as well as lived experiences that encompass varying Africana contexts and Diasporas. In order to do this, it deploys methodologies, exegetical analyses and critical and constructive communal epistemologies. Framed by historical, literary, cultural and theological engagements of issues around wealth and power, gender, sexualities and masculinities, as well as the crises of war and mass violence. With a commitment to Africana & African Diaspora-conscious epistemologies and methodologies, and the impact on biblical studies (Mphahlele & Ngwa, 2019).
This is the lens I would be using today as I attempt to present a 7th century Black African prophet, whose name transliterated means “GOD IS BLACK (NEGRO) OR THE NEGRO GOD” and who firmly established his identity as “the son of a Black man, Cushi (meaning, a Cushite, a person from Cush/
