You're Dying, My Love: Returning to 'Who's Killing Us? Black Cis-Het Men'
“One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene.” — James Baldwin
Gender violence within antiblackness is so complex that it continuously moves us into a deeper spiral of contradictions and impossibilities. Every Black person dies in the death work of gender. Every Black person plays a role in maintaining the minstrelsy of gender. And when the dynamics of power, privilege, and access are constantly fluctuating — we can’t agree on who to protect first, or what to leave behind.
In my prose piece, ‘Who’s Killing Us? Black Cis-Het Men,’ some of the responses included that the writing was more violent than white supremacy because it framed Black cisgender straight men’s identity as terrorizing and nothing else. The poem was never written to educate or perpetuate the very antiblackness I seek to intervene, but rather explicate the visceral realities of gender violence that demands that Black cis-het men cannot divorce their identity performance from death sport. To be a Black cis-het man means that you are allegiant to executing brutality as your identity, as your allegiance, as your personality.
Black cis-het men’s identity and sustainability is directly rooted in Black death.
Black cisgender heterosexual men actively and overwhelmingly prey upon and assassinate: Black trans people, Black intersex people, Black queer folks, Black women, Black children, Black men, Black people. There is no negotiation around this reality. The allegiance to masculinity as cannibalization, as assault, as entitlement without labor, as infantilization with control, as unequipped dominance, as necro-arousal, as murderous incompetence, as calculated contradiction, as deadly — is the commitment to killing any and everyone who is Black.
The honesty is abrasive because the truth is that Black cis-het men cannot be faithful to anything beyond violence within the antiblack gender constructs. Can Black cis-het men become something else? Always. Yes. Please. If not for anyone else, do it for yourself. Because when killing and dominance are the beginning and limit of ‘manhood’ — it’s corrosion from the inside out. You’re dying, my love.
‘Who’s Killing Us? Black Cis-Het Men’ was never written to do the work to explain every specificity of antiblack gender violence. Yet, it’s been demanded that I provide my reasoning, my trauma, and my entire racial analysis in order to prove that my work isn’t violent. If this poem is the first time you’ve read something on Blackness and gender, I can’t help you. If you hate-read the piece because your predisposition of feminists or non-men is antagonistic, I can’t help you. If you misread the piece and concluded that I want Black cis-het men harmed, I can’t help you. If you think I hate Black cis-het men, I can’t help you. If you think I’m worse than antiblackness, I can’t help you.
What you’re looking for me to name is this: Black cisgender heterosexual men are violently oppressed. Black cis-het men are positioned within our society as savages, criminals, animalistic, destructive, hypersexual, violent, and a threat to the world. Black cis-het men are not the only ones to blame for intracommunity gender violence. Black cis-het men do not have access to gender (only contingent privilege + performance) under antiblackness. Black cis-het men are dying at significant rates institutionally and interpersonally. Black cis-het boys are raised in trauma, demanded to be violent even when they don’t want to be and are limited in their development to be anything else. Black cis-het men are villainized and victimized at once, by the world and by the community. Black cis-het men can be transformed. Black cis-het men are valuable [not for being cis-het men, but because they exist]. All of these things are true.
What is also true is that Black cis-het men are forced into gender constructions and emboldened to take on qualities that position them over and above all over Black people. This translates to privilege for being “men” (through cis-heteronormativity) that is contingent but comes with material access, consequences, and comes at the cost of yourself. From leadership within Black liberation spaces, Black institutions (church, HBCU’s, etc.), access to entertainment opportunities (sports, music, etc.), higher pay, and being socially positioned as the dominant and necessary gender for protection and sustainability, etc. — Black cis-het men have privilege. This privilege can be conditional, compounded, and complicated depending on the uncertainty of geolocation, body size, color, ability, class, age, time, etc. Privilege + Performance create the amalgamation of the need to seek dominance in the interpersonal and wield the aspiration* of patriarchal power everywhere.
The gender performance of being ‘Black cis-het men’ enacts death and demands your own. Unfortunately, hegemonic antiblack gender cannot hold the nuances of self-immolation, and the nuance cannot outwork antiblack hegemony. In The Will to Change, bell hooks explains that “Patriarchal assault on the emotional life of boys begins at the moment of their birth.” Under antiblackness, these understandings of patriarchy are embued with the racialization of Blackness as a slave, as other, as the violence of the world. To uphold manhood for Black people means to create ambition in an impossible game with material and deadly consequences for yourself and everyone around you. We must all recognize that we socially assassinate Black boys and men from the start of their lives and every day after it. We demand that they prepare for violence because they’re seen as violent, we internalize that they are ‘naturally’ violent because they’re boys/ men, and we demand violence from them in order to fulfill manhood/ protector/ provider/ survival/ leader/ head of household/ desirability/ legibility.
bell hooks names that, “If black males are socialized from birth to embrace the notion that their manhood will be determined by whether or not they can dominate and control others and yet the political system they live within prevents most of them from having access to socially acceptable positions of power and dominance, then they will claim their patriarchal manhood, through socially unacceptable channels. They will enact rituals of blood, of patriarchal manhood by using violence to dominate and control.” We witness this through physical, sexual, and manipulative forms of displays of power and dominance by Black cis-het men. Manhood + antiblackness operate specifically to deny humanity to Black cis-het men and also demands they become gratuitous misogynists to access any power or achievement of the identity. Thus, this creates a contradiction in how we intervene in the material and deadly consequences of this misogyny and hold the care work of Black cis-het men’s beings.
How do we name the experience of patterned misogynistic gender violence from Black cis-het men and also hold the tension that Black cis-het men are being killed for their gender performance? How do we hold the tension of having privilege [that shapeshifts and doesn’t always materialize into sustainable institutional power] and the fact that Black cis-het men are victimized for how that privilege is deployed? How can we get free if Black cis-het men do not account for how they are deputized into being a killer via manhood, and name how that allegiance to manhood is killing yourself and everyone else?
In writing this, I find myself wondering if anyone will engage this piece as a demand to save Black cis-het men rather than an attempt to “dehumanize” them through critical honesty. Even when the acknowledgment and centering of Black cis-het men’s trauma and victimhood happens, it is seemingly insufficient to conclude that Black gender-oppressed folks see and recognize their pain. Even when we hold the tension that Black cis-het men do not have access to gender the way white patriarchy deludes them into believing, it is only then used as an excuse to ignore privilege and remain unaccountable in divesting from gender violence.
We organize for your safety and justice, you take the credit. We educate, you co-opt the analysis for your victimhood against and over ours. We write poetics about our pain, you say we’re the enemy. We shoot back, you tell us we were always the oppressor. We give an inch, you take every ounce of our energy. We give a mile, you say it never happened.
What say you, Black cis-het man? What do you really want? Do you want us to hold you, see you, and name the ways the world is trying to kill you? Do you want us to be honest? Do you want us to die for you? Do you want a servant to your pain and nothing else? Do you want to kill us without complaint? Do you want to die without intervention?
We all have a duty to breaking these chains of antiblack gender. But there are barriers to communication and coalition if we cannot see how sexism, misogyny, queerphobia, and transphobia prevent understanding, safety, intervention, empathy, and liberation. Our death is always guaranteed here. To give birth to death doulas, we have to acknowledge the provisions** of the afterlife*** and the discontents of gender. To find breath, we must relinquish what submerges possibility. We cannot do that if we’re not honest about how many of us are making homes out of cemeteries.
To be ‘cisgender’ means genitals and bodily function become the manuscript, gender can be predicted and foreshadowed, the performance of gender becomes a group sport, transness must be cannibalized and pathologized, deviance must be beaten out of you, and desire becomes undone and remade to ensure what is “natural.” To be ‘straight’ means everything queer must be stigmatized, punished, dissected, shamed, publicly denounced, severed from your flesh, and camouflaged in others around you. To be a ‘man’ means to be hypermasculine, strong, a provider, a protector, competitive, sexually dominant, and powerful. To be ‘Black’ is to fail all of this and be punished for the attempt.
Who are you without manhood? Who are you without gender as a performance, role, and ascription to your body? Who do you love without gender? What weapons can you put down without gender? What do you create without gender? What do you relinquish without gender? Where do you belong without gender? Who are you?
The paradox of white supremacist patriarchy and antiblack gender constructs is that the prognosis of our flesh can create the defense mechanism by capitulating to the sickness as an inevitability. Violent gender construction under antiblackness creates a foreshadowing of a self-fulfilling prophecy that leaves many Black cis-het men obligatorily accepting themselves as murderous monstrosities. This monstrosity is not only carried out because of their own embrace of the identity but also that other Black people and the world demand it from them. What we feed will always eat in famine.
We demand violence and hegemonic masculinity from Black cis-het men because manhood is nothing without it. We reward brutality from Black cis-het men because we desire it, aspire for it, begrudge it, require it, and predict it. We internalize and perpetuate the idea that it’s who they are, who they should be, who they have to be, who we need them to be. We shame men who fail to be violent, to be masculine, to be emotionally devoid, to be cisgender, to be straight, to be “real men.”
When the world won’t let you access your emotional capacity, or create a sanctuary for you to be honest — it often leads you to surrender to rage as a full-time sensation and communication style. When the world affirms you for violence with legitimacy, with attention, with relationships, with reverence, with honor, with visibility, with desirability — it forces Black cis-het men to violently and compulsorily accept the idea that sadism is the only way of surviving. This comes with material consequences— Again, I ask: How can we get free if Black cis-het men do not account for how they are deputized into being a killer via manhood, and name how that allegiance to manhood is killing yourself and everyone else? How can you sustain an identity that demands death?
You’re dying, my love. We all are.
_________
*’aspirational patriarchy’ referenced from Dr. Tamura Lomax
**’provisions’ referenced from Hortense Spillers’ ‘provisions of patriarchy’ in ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book’
***’afterlife’ referenced from Saidya Hartman’s ‘the afterlife of slavery’ in ‘Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic’