Jordanna Matlon - A Man among Other Men: The Crisis of Black Masculinity in Racial Capitalism

Racialization and racism are intrinsic to capitalist development and reproduction (Robinson 2000). Race colonizes social hierarchies and strategies of capital accumulation, enabling some bodies to command property while others are commodified. Race provides the raw materials from which difference and surplus a kind of life that can be wasted and spent without limitare produced (Mbembe 2017, 34). From capitalisms originary moment reaching beyond Europe to encapsulate the land and labor of peoples it rendered subject, Blackness operated as the minor term, the acute and diminished other, of a binary worldview: white/black, civilized/savage, beautiful/ugly, good/evil. Henceforth paired, these oppositions normalized social and economic inequality within the dominant purview. Toward peoples of African descent, racialization has justified, and racism is thereby a consequence of, the exploitation of Black bodies in the transatlantic slave economy. The features of the man, his hair, color and dentrifice, his subhuman characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact: that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro labor (Williams 1994, 20). With the experiences of Black humanity in stark juxtaposition to the liberal ideology of freedom in the emergent discourse of free wage labor, the slave posed from the outset as its primitive and necessary exterior. The social is in every instance embedded in the economic.

To trace the means by which capitalism situates Black labor, and how accordant imaginaries of Blackness structure the social order and legitimize domination, is to document the hegemonic order of racial capitalism. To further demonstrate the production of consent among Black populations requires critically interrogating value creation in racial capitalism, attentive to how inclusion on one axis may preclude resistance on another. Integral to these considerations is the fact that capitalism codes labor, and economic participation generally, as masculine.

The incorporation of Black men in capitalism occurred under severe structural disadvantage, generating an enduring crisis of Black masculinity. Part I assembles the theoretical components of Blackness, and particularly Black masculinity, in racial capitalism to examine the production of hegemony and consent. To begin, I situate the two frames that compose my argument: the construction of the French West African volu, and the Black Atlantic media icon, both of which disseminated as idealized imaginaries for Abidjanais men.

In French colonial discourse, race was at the center of cultural contestation, the site of hegemonic struggle. Civilization peddled a whitening effect, ascendance up an evolutionary ladder from commodity to collaborator, the pinnacle a not quite/not white (Bhabha 1994) volu: translated, literally, as evolved. The term reflected the permeation of social Darwinist discourse throughout European societies by the late nineteenth century and the belief in the teleological journey from savage to civilized/citizen, an idea that animated Frances overseas expansion and provided an ideological framework through which to legitimize the fact of imperial rule. Consequently, those people the French colonizers decided had made the first steps out of their initial state toward becoming French were said to have evolved in comparison to their countrymen (Genova 2004, 2122). Thereafter entitled to seek the rights of a citizen, evolution presumed an inherent biological handicap of Africanity that fused colonial racial criteria and sociological criteria (Urban 2009, 452).

Acting as material and ideological interlocutors of colonial regimes in Africa, the volu was a means by which racial capitalism deploy[ed] terms of inclusion to value and devalue forms of humanity differentially to fit the needs of reigning state-capital orders (Melamed 2015, 77). The volu realized the mission civilisatrice by becoming a modern, capitalist subject: a man who would approximate the Frenchman in public and private life, providing for his wife and children with the wages he earned in the new, colonial economy. To exchange free labor in the white mans image, a capitalist realm whose parameters were defined by and largely interchangeable with the colonial statewas to become an acting subject of history. At its base membership ensured consent.

When colonial territories achieved independence, civilization, evidenced by economic and political parity and the social benefits such parity was to accrue, became the charge of the new regimes. The mission civilisatrice assumed the discourse of development. In Cte dIvoire as elsewhere in the colonies of French West Africa, or AOF (Afrique Occidentale Franaise), a peaceful transition to independence was driven by and saw the volu assume power, consolidating political and economic interests and maintaining a neocolonial relationship with France under the elite complicity of Franafrique. The public sector encompassed a somewhat wider but nonetheless minor stratum of wage earners. Neither fully bourgeoisie nor proletariat by the prototype of European industrial capitalism, this constituency of bureaucrats and unionized workers constituted a relatively privileged nucleus of the colonized population most pampered by the colonial regime (Fanon 1963, 108). The measure of a successful state and the implicit state-society social contractwould be whether modern workers livelihoods and lifestyles would proliferate widely, supplanting noncapitalist arrangements otherwise labeled nonmodern, traditional, or African. External to the wage economy, these latter arrangements, such as market trade, were relegated to what women didand posited as something other than work. The state being the major employer of wage labor, these steady and dignifying jobs became crucial sources of patronage (Cooper 1996, Mbembe 2001). At the level of man and state, global belonging was largely a question of the character of ones economic incorporation into the domestic and international realms (Ferguson 2006).

Relations between individuals and the state as well as between states were in these ways embedded in political arrangements that originated in the colonial project. In Cte dIvoire close ties to France and full coffers from a booming cocoa sector in its early years of independence enabled first President Houphout-Boigny to maintain an expansive civil service and buttressed its position as the regional hegemon, le miracle ivoirien. With a large, regional migrant population working in low-status, informal occupations, wage labor was a proxy not only for manhood but also citizenship. In Cte dIvoire the idea of civilization translated into the language of development and state-sponsored employment. Racial capitalism, with its political economy of Franafrique and impetus to civilize Africans in the image of the French colonizer, was inextricably linked to gender and nation. Being volu was a matter of mans relationship to the intertwined state and economy.

Another means of contesting Black subjugation has entailed not sociocultural whitening but rather resignifying bodily commodification as economic agency. From the outset, racial capitalism engaged a politics of representation to devalue Blackness in the world political economy, thereby aligning white supremacy and capitalist hegemony. A coalition of antiracist and anticapitalist struggles has frequently met this coupling while also lending to a common sense understanding of Blackness as oppositional to both forms of oppression. Yet asserting an equivalence between Black value and economic agency decouples antiracist and anti-capitalist agendas. Within the racial capitalist world order, these assertions appear to undermine racial domination even while its structural inequalities persist.