The changing face of black masculinity in popular culture
The presentation of multi-dimensional men is emerging throughout movies, fashion and ads
When Moonlight won the Oscar for Best Picture, it wasn’t just a stunning if stalled underdog victory, but a symbol of black men reclaiming their image in pop culture.
The coming-of-age triptych leads a new era of blackness, where on screens, in sport, over airwaves and in glossy centerfolds, black men are more than ever allowed to be vulnerable, caring and scared rather than imposing, aggressive and dangerous.
“It has taken more than 100 years to get to a place where one can see a range of black male identities in the mainstream,” says Mark Campbell, a professor with Ryerson University’s RTA School of Media.
The “democratization of filmmaking,” in which cameras are cheaper and YouTube users become stars, has allowed a greater diversity of voices.
“If you don’t like the way you’re being represented, you can become a creator much more easily,” Campbell says.
It’s what Toronto filmmaker Ella Cooper calls “kind of a renaissance.”
“Moonlight is representative of a new voice that is emerging from black artists,” she says.
It’s a voice that humanizes black men and it is needed in an era when Black Lives Matter has become a global movement against racial profiling. For many artists, 2016 and 2017 will be remembered as banner years in black representation in pop culture.
“We haven’t seen such a plethora of different takes on black masculinity,” says Toronto photographer Zun Lee, who has watched Moonlight nine times since it premiered at TIFF in September.
It shows “black men who are open to connection and vulnerability and making space for one another,” he says. “These are things that simply were not visible or considered a possibility just last year.”
The surge of images showing multidimensional black men spans all of mainstream pop culture: their sexuality and gender are fluid; they are caring and loyal teammates and fathers.
Jordan Peele’s February horror film Get Out, a kind of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner gone awry, twists genre convention. Black characters are so often the ones feared and killed off first in horror movies, but Peele’s central character Chris is permitted to be afraid and vulnerable.
In music, there is R&B singer Frank Ocean, who penned an open letter in 2012 saying his first love was a man. He also started his own record label last year called Boys Don’t Cry.
In fashion, Will Smith’s son Jaden Smith became a face of Louis Vuitton womenswear.
In sport, Toronto Raptor Kyle Lowry is partnered with Dove to promote Men+Care grooming products and celebrate a “new definition of strength: one with care at its centre.”
In television, Black-ish and Atlanta flip the myth of the absent black father and respectively star Anthony Anderson and Donald Glover as loyal working dads.
The influx of these images is a long time coming. “Since inception, black males in popular media have always been problematically portrayed for largely white audiences,” Campbell says. In the 1800s, minstrel shows by people in blackface makeup caricatured African-Americans as predators. In 1915, the landmark silent film The Birth of a Nation introduced these stereotypes to the film medi- um. In the ’70s, the “blaxploitation” genre depoliticized films of black resistance and expanded the archive of the militant black man.
“What you get is a particular kind of black figure that should be feared, that is deeply skilled at producing harm, whether in service of good or in service of evil,” says Rinaldo Wal- cott, director of the University of Toronto Women & Gender Studies Institute.
When black men see these images, they don’t always see themselves, Walcott says. Worse, “you think you’re somehow failing in your mas- culinity,” he says. “Sometimes we find ourselves living the stereotypes that have been offered to us as though (they) are our own truth.”
While many laud the “renaissance” of black-centric work that presents a softer masculinity, others are wary.
Walcott has seen it every 10 years or so — the “breakout black film” that is praised and presented as “the era of new black filmmaking” — and the same conversation occurs.
“The question is, will we get more of this?” he says. “And then, it disappears.”
Characters such as those in Moonlight come as a surprise to non-black audiences since there is a lack of varied images of black men, he says. Meanwhile, black audiences finally see bits of themselves rarely seen, but which have been demonstrated by the men in their personal lives and by some icons, Walcott notes, such as Teddy Pendergrass, Barry White, Rick James and Prince, who were not positioned as threatening or to be feared.
Surprise in seeing these more rounded images is “really telling about the society that we live in,” Walcott says. “You can work backwards from that to see why, in encounters with police, we are seen as monstrous and therefore killable.”
Indeed, these aren’t simply “the movies,” Lee agrees. It has direct implications for black lives. Two Sundays ago, he notes, the night Moonlight took home Oscar gold, was the anniversary of the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012.
The black teenager was shot dead in Sanford, Fla., as he walked home in a gated community, wearing a hoodie and carrying nothing but a pack of Skittles. His death in part inspired the Black Lives Matter movement.
“Profiling is an extreme example of how perceptions around black masculinity continue to have actual negative impacts on black lives,” Lee says. “Art imitates life imitates art. It’s a reflection of where society is overall.”
The needle is moving, he says. Slowly to be sure, but with Moonlight on top, black voices continue to amplify in protest.