We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity is a 2004 book about masculinity by feminist author bell hooks. It collects ten essays on black men. The title alludes to Gwendolyn Brooks' 1959 poem "We Real Cool". The essays are intended to provide cultural criticism and solutions to the problems she identifies.
Hooks suggests that black men are forced to repress themselves in white America. She suggests the ways in which racist and sexist attitudes developed in American culture have criminalized and dehumanized black men, and the ways in which these myths have harmed the black community. Hooks states that she believes that hip-hop as a whole strongly reflects imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
bell hooks
”bell hooks” is the pen name used by Gloria Jean Watkins. She was an American author and social activist who was Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She was an American author and social activist who was Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She is best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class.
Summary
"Preface about black men: don't believe the hype" addresses the public perception of black masculinity and its stereotypes. hooks opens by critiquing Ellis Cose's The Envy of the World: On Being a Black Man in America. She argues Cose limits his cultural analysis of race in America by refraining from discussing contemporary political issues, neglecting Malcolm X and W. E. B. Du Bois's theories of civil rights, and offering few means of subverting racial stereotypes and social issues. Black men suffer, in hook's view, from what she terms imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. She writes: "Allegiance to sexist thinking about the nature of leadership creates a blind spot that effectively prevents masses of black people from making use of theories and practices of liberation when they are offered by women." hooks uses examples of her family life, specifically her father and brother, to document "patriarchal domination" of black male thought, and argues for radicalized intersectionality. "Anyone who claims to be concerned with the fate of black men in the United States," hooks writes, "who does not speak about the need for them to radicalize their consciousness to challenge patriarchy ... colludes with the existing system in keeping black men in their place, psychologically locked down, locked out."
"Plantation patriarchy" centers on African masculinity that predated the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. Rather than subjugating indigenous people along racial lines, hooks claims African explorers of the Americas inherited patriarchal practices against women. She discusses gender relations under slavery and, while affirming Frederick Douglass's and Martin Delany's support of the equality of the sexes, argues black men in general held patriarchal attitudes toward their spouses: "[Freed male slaves] wanted black women to conform to the gender norms set by white society. They wanted to be recognized as ‘men,' as patriarchs, by other men, including white men. Yet they could not assume this position if black women were not willing to conform to prevailing sexist gender norms". hooks continues by arguing these problematic notions became the norm in black men from the early 20th century to the present day. To argue this point, hooks cites the discrepancies between Amy Jacques Garvey's activism and her husband Marcus's, and the scholarship of others who researched black gender roles in the United States. Some of it hooks found insightful, such as E. Franklin Frazier's The Negro Family in the United States, while others she found distasteful, such as Norman Podhoretz's My Negro Problem—And Ours. hooks criticizes the latter along with Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family for positing black men were sexually more potent than white men, and/or emasculated by women for by their breadwinner status.