#2160—CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY—VOL 34 NO 4—FILE: 34403-reviews
366–Inequalities
a generational rebellion among middle class
blacks against their fathers’ apparent acco-
modationism. Two equally rich historical
chapters on historically black colleges and
the Harlem Renaissance round out the book,
and suggest the “discontents” to black middle
class manliness. In the writings and lifestyles
of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean
Toomer, and others, Summers finds a “rebel-
lion against bourgeois manliness” (p. 199).
And in the student cultures at Howard and
Fisk, he found a spirited youth culture, Greek
letter fraternities, and sexual adventurism
(and manly predation).
But here again, the rebellion also rehears-
es white generational rebellion from an earli-
er decade. The Harlem Renaissance, for
example, with its emphasis on breaking sex-
ual taboos, exploring new cultural forms
(like jazz and “modernist” poetry and litera-
ture), and its flirtation with Socialism, sounds
very much like the Bohemian radicals of
Greenwich Village. (Sure, there are differ-
ences, but my point is their generational
rebellion provided the rhetorical materials for
the subsequent one.) They, too, “ridiculed
the gender roles that accompanied middle-
class respectability” (p. 198)—20 years earli-
er. And his descriptions of student culture at
Fisk and Howard will sound awfully familiar
to anyone familiar with student cultures at
predominantly white schools at the turn of
the last century.
Just as, ultimately, the black middle class-
es were “incapable of completely moving
beyond the social meanings of manhood as
they were defined by the dominant culture”
(p. 153), successful in forging a distinct iden-
tity as black men “different from a normative
white bourgeois manliness only in degree,
not in kind” (p. 65), so, too, is Summers only
partly successful in demonstrating his claim
of an independent black male subjectivity in
which racism, and its attendant gendered
stereotypes, does not over-determine the
construction of black male identity. “Black
men,” he concludes, “engaged in their gen-
der identity formation in relation to, and in
tension with, the dominant culture and its
gender ideals” (p. 290).
Hegemonic constructions are just that—
they set the terms of discourse, frame the dis-
cussion, and assert the chronology, but the
“other” still searches for the seams, the fis-
sures, in order to anchor its resistance. When
Contemporary Sociology 34, 4
the great sociologist E. Franklin Frazier wrote
in 1925 that “[n]o longer can men say that the
Negro is lazy and shiftless and a consumer,”
there was no doubt about the racial identifi-
cation of those “men.”
One may not be able to use the master’s
tools to dismantle the master’s house, Audre
Lorde once famously wrote. But denying the
solidity of that house and, more important,
the way it is reflected in every architectural
textbook, in every home decorating advice
column, and the way it structures the materi-
als selection for every building supply depot
and contracting agency will also do little to
dismantle the specific vernacular architectur-
al style, nor in any way dilute its sway.
Black Sexual Politics: African Americans,
Gender, and the New Racism, by Patricia Hill
Collins. New York: Routledge, 2004. 374 pp.
$26.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-415-93099-5.
RACHEL E. LUFT
University of New Orleans
rluft@uno.edu
For the last 15 years Patricia Hill Collins has
been one of the defining voices of contem-
porary feminist and race scholarship. Along
with theorists such as Kimberle Crenshaw
and Paul Gilroy, Collins has articulated a gen-
eration of work on gender and race into a
theory and politics of intersectionality. So
foundational is the notion of intersectionality
to contemporary sociology that it has
become the sine qua non of race/class/gen-
der discourse. Despite its popularity and per-
suasiveness as an analytic concept, however,
intersectionality remains an elusive accom-
plishment: Sociology is still finding its inter-
sectional legs when it comes to turning
intersectional principles into sociological
practice. In Black Sexual Politics, Collins
models the practice of intersectionality by
examining race, gender, and sexuality with-
out ever getting distracted by race-only, gen-
der-only, or sexuality-only fictions. Every
question she raises, problem she addresses,
and case study she examines is always raced,
always gendered, and always has a sexual
orientation.
Black Sexual Politics is a post civil rights
analytical status report of the “ideas and
social practices shaped by gender, race, and
#2160—CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY—VOL 34 NO 4—FILE: 34403-reviews—page
sexuality that frame Black men and women’s
treatment of one another, as well as how
African Americans are perceived and treated
by others” (p. 6). Opening with a reference
to the civil rights movement, the context of
Collins’ analysis is the new racism that fol-
lowed: ongoing racial disparity in the face of
the “seeming absence of a color line” and its
attendant cultural contortions. While focusing
on late twentieth century racial projects, she
takes guidance from an earlier generation of
Black humanists such as James Baldwin and
Audre Lorde.
Calling for a “progressive Black sexual
politics” as antidote to the new racism,
Collins examines a variety of social phenom-
ena with a lens that is Black-centered and yet
attentive to “heterogeneity within African
American populations,” that is both feminist
and nonheterosexist: she identifies HIV/AIDS
as an example of new racism and therefore
presents men on the “down low”—Black
men who live straight lives but covertly sleep
with men—as a manifestation of racism as
much as of homophobia; discusses conflict-
ing norms of Black femininity by historicizing
class and regional differences across Black
communities, contrasting early twentieth cen-
tury northern mores of respectability to
southern working class non-European, non-
puritan expressions of sexual autonomy;
introduces Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, in
which the Supreme Court struck down an
antisodomy law, as an example of civil rights
for African Americans; and problematizes
Black self-help literature and contemporary
versions of nationalism alike for turning to
the patriarchal family as resistance to racism.
There is no default sexuality in this book, no
monolithic Black community, no privileging
of race over gender or vice versa.
As is true for many comparable works of
such breadth, the primary contribution of
Black Sexual Politics is not so much new data
as it is the skillful synthesis and application
of post civil rights critical scholarship on con-
temporary culture, whether J-Lo, the prison
industrial complex, hip-hop, or sports. The
result is a race/class/gender/sexuality text-
book on Black life that displays the ongoing
relevance and utility of such scholarship
when alchemically transformed through
intersectionality. Indeed, I often thought
while reading the book that it would be an
excellent way to introduce students to
Inequalities–367
race/class/gender/sexuality for it brings the
principles and data up-to-date. While some
specialists may be frustrated at the book’s
limitations in their area, its range of subjects,
literatures, and data sets—from talk shows to
the 2000 Census—makes for a strong inter-
disciplinary study.
The book is divided into three sections,
each of which has three chapters: “African
Americans and the New Racism,” “Rethinking
Black Gender Ideology,” and “Toward a
Progressive Black Sexual Politics.” So thor-
ough is Collins’ multiple frameworks that I
could not tell when one section ended and
another began: They all take up closely relat-
ed issues through different subjects with a
slightly different emphasis. I found most use-
ful and refreshing her analysis of the rela-
tionship between racism and heterosexism.
Arguing that “In the United States, the
assumption that racism and heterosexism
constitute two separate systems of oppres-
sion masks how each relies upon the other
for meaning” (p. 88), Collins points to its
implications: “A discourse that constructs
Black people as the natural essence of hyper-
heterosexuality and White people as the
source of homosexuality hinders developing
a comprehensive analysis of Black sexuality
that speaks to the needs of straight and gay
Black people alike” (p. 106).
For Patricia Hill Collins, a progressive pol-
itics of Black sexuality is about the possibili-
ty of forging a new and much needed terrain
of solidarity between and among groups. As
a sensuous, cultural kind of politics that nev-
er strays far from a good structural analysis,
Collins’ Black sexual politics reminds me of
Paul Gilroy’s planetary humanism. Both
come from a strongly humanist tradition, and
both attempt to go beyond the commodified
and romanticized elements of Black culture
that circulate in a global market while staying
firmly planted in Black experience. While
Gilroy seeks a postmodern world beyond
race, however, Collins is seeking a politics of
“soul” in a “nascent Black body politics.”
Contemporary Sociology 34, 4