Abstract: In the wake of the killings of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Mike Brown, and Eric Garner, mass protests continue to emerge. Across the country, blacks and non-blacks, men and women, rich and poor are seeking justice. Responding to the cultural and political climate recent scholarship address several key areas, ranging between reform and radical activism. However, there are several limitations to the current discussions. One of the most critical concerns is the need for a more nuanced understanding about race, class, and gender dynamics and the interplaying enactment of these critical dimensions, particularly involving power, state violence, patriarchy, and prescriptive inscriptions of masculinity. In response to the limitations of the current discourse surrounding these injustices, I suggest that using an Africana womanist perspective as a tool to raise consciousness is a more effective approach to broaden and deepen understanding about the state-sanctioned violence against black Americans. Africana womanism, problematizing racialized manhood in these cases, provides a communal focus, though primarily focusing on masculinity but also opening the critical possibilities to understand womanhood. Unpacking the bodily situatedness of black manhood also helps to open pathways to illuminate the interconnectedness of gender, class, and race, and how the black body, whether male or female, is an embodied critical site, symbolically signifying the interlocking race-class-gender prevalence in both black manhood and womanhood.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-03-11
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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