Black Masculinity and the Production of White Masculinity

Since the advent of the film industry, the portrayal of the black individual has primarily been dictated by the desires of white filmmakers and audiences-starting in the early 1900s with the cinematic introduction of the tom, coon, tragic mulatto, mammy and the brutal buck, and stretching on through the 20s, 30s and 40s with the representation of blacks as jesters, servants, and entertainers, respectively. Each depiction of the black individual was "colored" by an underlying agenda-usually dealing with efforts to reestablish white superiority or assuage white guilt over the licentious history of slavery in the United States. In this paper, I plan to identify and address the ways in which the manipulation of black masculinity, whether through the use of hyper-sexualization or hypo-sexualization, in two of the most famous films in the history of the film industry-the first full-length feature, D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), and the first "talkie," Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer (1927)-was used to reassert a sense of white masculinity and to promote the white power structure.

According to Guerrero, Griffith's representation of blacks in The Birth of a Nation drew upon the prevalent psychological need for both southern and northern whites to "suppress the expansion of black civil rights and political power" developed during the period of Reconstruction, and played up the "potent sexual paranoia blackness and difference generated in the minds of racists" (Guerrero 12). Particularly vulnerable was the psyche of the southern white male, who had lost his traditional role as family provider when he lost his slaves, and consequently both his livelihood and his masculinity (12). As Guerrero writes:

The insecurity and economic turmoil rampant throughout the postbellum (sic) South had undermined the white southern male's role as provider for his family; thus he sought to inflate his depreciated sense of manhood by taking up the honorific task of protecting White Womanhood against the newly constructed specter of the "brute Negro" (12).