The toxic elements of Black and Brown cultures of hypermasculinity are born in part out of the impact of low wages, where the option of a woman not needing to supplement the household income was never on the table. Where the only response available to overly aggressive law enforcement was protest, but protest rooted in an expectation of potentially lethal consequences. This is a culture where women were largely in charge not because they had fought to be, but because the men in their lives and communities were being imprisoned or killed with little rhyme or reason. The consequences of white supremacy inside communities of color has been exceptionally harsh, especially since the war on drugs began. Mass incarceration has damaged so many communities, removing many of the more traditional social customs around family from the realm of possibility. For the men who were left, being respected often centered on what was happening inside their homes because there was no chance of it outside.
Too often the role of crime in low-income communities is rendered as laziness or a refusal to take care of a family, or otherwise situated in narratives that ignore how much of masculine identity centers on being a provider and a protector. It’s difficult to do either when you can’t get a job, and yet the pitfalls of resorting to vice are increasingly obvious. If you’re absent from your family and community for years because of incarceration, then when you do return, you are unlikely to have the skills needed for any kind of healthy progressive relationship. You are even less likely to be able to get a job that lets you support yourself, much less a family.
In many ways, the patriarchal standards that formed in the aftermath of the war on drugs are different from the ones our grandparents and parents experienced. With the removal of so many from the community to serve jail sentences that spanned decades instead of months, families had to restructure themselves. New standards developed that were less about traditional nuclear families living in isolation and more about intergenerational and interdependent living. Everyone needed to work as inflation rates rose and Black wealth did not.
New standards ratified the idea that Black women working was the norm, but with so many men incarcerated, heterosexual women in particular often felt they had to compete for partners by tightly adhering to the most patriarchal of standards—standards they felt were of utmost importance to the men—to offer to work, take care of all household duties, to be submissive . . . the list is more than any two women could reasonably be expected to do. Yet the “pick me” culture, a phenomenon where some women announce their willingness to adhere to these arbitrary standards, is evident on Twitter and other social media sites. And it’s a direct result of what has come to be a dearth of available options on account of forces dating back to the excision of men from communities of color during and after slavery.
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OTHER WOMEN have rejected the idea of needing anyone, and of course that’s seen as a rejection of traditional family life inside and outside the community. But being a single woman for longer or being a single parent isn’t a failure on the part of women in these communities. Their choices are a reaction to the external pressure of white supremacy and the internal pressure of a form of feminism born in the crucible that is survival. The newer standards of expecting Black women to uphold traditional gender roles, to cater to and care for the men in their homes no matter how tired they might be from their own work, was intended as a way to reclaim masculinity lost to oppression. However, those standards not only carry all the historical baggage of sexism, they also ignore the ongoing impact of current events on the women being subjected to them. With all Black and Brown youth at risk of being profiled as criminals, all marginalized people likely to be treated with disrespect and, increasingly, dehumanization, the space to actually examine and correct these issues inside the community is limited. Pressure from outside increases pressure on the inside, Black women face one of the highest rates of intimate partner violence, and they are blamed for everything from lower marriage rates to high crime.
And yet the new Black patriarchy doesn’t work to heal the community. For the boys who subscribe to it, their ideas of respect have become so skewed that they are killing or dying over the most ridiculous conflicts. Homicide rates have declined substantially in communities of color, but the rate of shootings is still catastrophic, with teens in particular facing the greatest levels of risk.
Tackling hypermasculinity and toxic masculinity is a key part of ending the present crisis of gun violence, but obviously that isn’t the only crisis inside communities of color. It is a clear mistake to focus on only one aspect of the patriarchy without being willing to interrogate the ways that other forms influence the rates of violence and trauma marginalized women and girls in particular are facing.
The ways that boys and girls handle the trauma inflicted by exposure to racist patriarchal notions can be very different, but internal cultural expectations are often gendered in ways that can feel isolating for those who don’t fit into the strictly defined lines that can be the only space that’s left.
For girls of color, especially Black and Latinx girls, there’s not only the issue of navigating the projected hypersexualization of their bodies and the assumptions that they are somehow destined to fail, there’s also the expectation that they perform emotional and social labor at the expense of their own girlhood. Adultification (the racist practice of seeing children of color as significantly older than they are) removes the possibility of innocence from young girls, especially Black girls. It shows up in many facets; one of the most bizarre is perhaps the response of white Hunger Games fans to the death of the character Rue, played by Amandla Stenberg, in the movie. Instead of the deep grief that fans reported feeling while reading the book, seeing Rue on-screen as a visibly Black girl had many commenting that they felt nothing. Or that her death was less meaningful to them because Rue was being played by a Black girl.
Some fans of the movie tweeted things like “Awkward moment when Rue is some black girl and not the innocent blonde girl you picture,” and “Why does Rue have to be black? Not gonna lie, kinda ruined the movie.” Despite the character being described in the text as having dark brown skin. Even a fictional Black girl wasn’t immune to racism.
Though the existence and consequences of adultification likely affect all communities of color, the research around this phenomenon has primarily centered around Black communities. A report released in 2017 by Georgetown Law’s Center on Poverty and Inequality called Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood found that all of the 325 adults in the study felt that Black girls seemed older than white girls of the same age. It also found respondents believed Black girls needed less nurturing, protection, support, and comfort than white girls. Adults in the study from all backgrounds (75 percent of them white, 62 percent of them women) saw Black girls as more independent and more mature. They also assumed that Black girls knew more about adult topics and sex.
It’s unlikely the respondents were conscious of why they felt the way they did, as unconscious bias is heavily informed by the messaging that we pick up from the world around us. From an outside perspective, it seems likely to me that their attitudes reflected a wider cultural message. Much like the people who responded so angrily to the character of Rue, they likely had never seen Black girls portrayed as innocent and thus did not ask themselves why they felt that innocence was beyond them. But older studies show that this is a common form of dehumanization experienced by Black children. And that it has negative effects on their experiences with authority figures, who are less inclined to protect them, nurture them, or help them achieve their goals.