In Bed With The Right - Episode 12： The Morehouse Man with Saida Grundy

00:00:00.000 tell this to Morehouse students all the time, I say, you should be very concerned

00:00:03.100 that people who have such disdain for Black people have such interest in you.

00:00:20.780 Hello, welcome. I'm Adrienne Dobb. And I'm Moira Donegan.

00:00:24.240 And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

00:00:26.320 Today we are talking to Seda Grundy, who is the author of a really amazing book of sociology

00:00:34.000 called Respectable. It is about the politics and paradox in making the Morehouse man, about

00:00:42.700 respectability, politics, and masculinity at Morehouse College. And Seda, I'm so happy to

00:00:49.100 have you with us. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you guys. This is really exciting

00:00:53.200 for me i have no idea how you all came across this book but you say all the most flattering

00:00:58.180 things to me when you say you want to talk about gender politics and black masculinity i mean i

00:01:04.880 have to say the book's been on my radar for a little while and we knew the moment i cracked 0.97

00:01:09.000 it open i was like oh yeah this is extremely our shit we need we need to talk to her right away

00:01:13.420 i mean it's you know for me knowing this podcast exists is really amazing it's really inspiring to 0.94

00:01:20.760 academics do, like the stuff that we care about. And you all have such a breadth of just really

00:01:27.620 caring about knowledge far beyond sort of the disciplinary sort of boundary, right? Which I

00:01:34.240 think all this stuff, when it actually gets into the real deal steps of the Capitol types of

00:01:39.640 politics, that stuff really matters. Well, thank you. And I think it's been interesting for us to

00:01:44.800 come across your book because, you know, talking about gender conservatism with Adrienne, especially

00:01:50.380 in like this moment, this like post-2016 moment, we've talked a lot about whiteness, you know,

00:01:55.620 how gender conservative has been used and is being used to reify whiteness and to try to

00:02:01.000 find its barriers. And you've come at this in a very different way. So can you tell us a little

00:02:05.240 bit about your own history with Morehouse? So the reason I like the title of your podcast so much

00:02:11.380 is because, you know, when you talk about getting in bed in the right, you have to also have to talk

00:02:15.560 about what bedfellows the right makes. And when it comes to black masculinity, it makes bedfellows 0.79

00:02:21.540 across the left and the right for this idea of fixing black men into sort of respectable black 0.97

00:02:27.840 men. So, so young black men in particular in this country are looked at as a problem population,

00:02:33.080 but that has consequences for all young black men, not just those who are in peril. And so I took

00:02:39.660 really the other side of that paradox of black men and talking about black men who are, you know, 0.81

00:02:45.400 upwardly mobile who are college educated who represent the crust of the sort of the foothills 0.79

00:02:51.400 of making a new black male elite right and so it really is what happens when you think you're 0.92

00:02:57.480 fixing the problem of young black men by creating solutions to that problem right and in that i

00:03:04.840 swing a really hard feminist x and i say that there's actually problems created from narrowly

00:03:10.780 defining what masculinity is acceptable for Black men who are good, air quote, Black men.

00:03:16.720 And this is something you have a little bit of experience with. 1.00

00:03:20.020 Way too much.

00:03:23.300 You're an alum of Spelman, right? So your early intellectual life was shaped by proximity to

00:03:29.120 this institution. Yes. So, you know, Black colleges like Spelman, like Morehouse, like Howard,

00:03:35.540 like Hampton, they have a very outsized sort of influence on Black communities. In fact,

00:03:40.240 there's lots of literature about Black colleges are not just educational institutions. They're

00:03:45.400 also community institutions. They also create Black politics. They have a larger role to

00:03:50.120 larger communities than even, you know, white elite schools do, right? And so Morehouse's sort

00:03:56.580 of looming presence, his looming influence on what Black manhood should be is far larger than

00:04:03.440 the campus. So, you know, even as a little girl, you know, I have, you know, multiple uncles who

00:04:08.100 went to Morehouse. Morehouse was always a thing, right? We see it on episodes of the Cosby show.

00:04:13.000 We see it in reference to all these black male leaders who come out of Morehouse. You can't 1.00

00:04:16.680 talk about MLK without talking about Morehouse. He and his father went to Morehouse. Julian Bond

00:04:21.720 went to Morehouse. The list goes out. Even currently, Raphael Warnock, Herman Cain, which

00:04:26.960 You can't win them all. But there's a very long list of black male elites in their fields. Either those are civil politics elites, business elites, etc. 0.66

00:04:40.700 So when I was at Spelman College, I started Spelman fall of 2000 to date myself.

00:04:47.220 One of the first things that happened when I was a sophomore was a vicious homophobic attack on a student named Gregory Love.

00:04:57.000 This made national news, partly because it was the first time that the state of Georgia was going to try a hate crime.

00:05:04.000 They had a new hate crime statute.

00:05:05.480 Gregory Love goes into the shower of his dormitory and he peers over one of the stalls. He says, I was just looking for my roommate and I, you know, I couldn't find my glasses. I couldn't really see. In that stall was a young man named Aaron Price. Aaron Price goes ballistic.

00:05:25.140 he's yelling all these homophobic epithets he goes back to his dorm room he gets a baseball bat

00:05:32.360 and he comes hunting for Gregory Love and he beat he almost murders Gregory Love right I think this

00:05:38.960 I think the charge was an attempted murder it was beyond manslaughter he leaves Gregory Love on the

00:05:44.720 floor you know head fractured the response that I noticed as a 19 year old at this point I was

00:05:50.580 writing for Morehouse's student paper, the response to me was really troubling because

00:05:54.860 it wasn't, wow, this should be a point to look at ourselves. How can an institution so invested in

00:06:01.860 the best of Black men also be creating the worst of Black men in terms of violence or be creating 1.00

00:06:07.640 an unsafe space for these types of Black men, right? Part of going to a Black college is it's 1.00

00:06:13.700 a very utopic experience i mean i always say that my experience at we call it spell house the two 0.53

00:06:21.400 colleges are so close spellman and morehouse that we often call it spell house socially it's kind of

00:06:25.480 the same institution i always say that spell house for me was what white people must experience in

00:06:31.560 america it was all about you know it was just it was all about us it was like i was like oh this

00:06:37.780 is how they feel about America. And to realize that it wasn't that utopic experience for queer

00:06:47.020 black people, for low income black people, for gender nonconforming black people, that to me was

00:06:52.420 just unacceptable because it meant so much to me to be safe there. So Morehouse's response to this

00:06:59.340 huge case that blows up around Aaron Price is sentenced to 14 years. And then inside of jail,

00:07:06.080 he gets into another incident in which there's years added on to a sentence their response was

00:07:11.700 well should we segregate you know the gay population you know should we you know uh

00:07:16.260 should we uh maybe put an extra you know uh extra part of the application for gay students 0.98

00:07:21.820 this was absurd to me and it told me that they could not understand that their institutional 0.89

00:07:27.440 process is what created this this was not an aberration right their idea of what black manhood

00:07:34.540 was allow someone to say you don't belong here at the expense of your own life you don't belong here

00:07:40.580 right and so that's you know sociologically you know that's what I became really entrenched and I

00:07:45.860 was of course writing for the student paper at the time and I was really pretty indictful of

00:07:50.760 Morehouse and then on some Jedi mind trick I came back my senior year and was Miss Morehouse College

00:07:57.860 the queen of the campus. I got Morehouse from all sides. I got to represent the college,

00:08:06.360 but I also got to really understand intrinsically sort of how their cultural curriculum was just

00:08:13.640 as important as their academic curriculum. And Adrienne, this might be a good point for you to

00:08:18.580 jump in because Seda structures her book around Morehouse's pursuit of respectability for Black

00:08:26.420 men. But it's not just respectability politics, the way we might usually be accustomed to using

00:08:33.020 that in the vernacular. It's a very specific kind of respectability that Seda's talking about.

00:08:37.020 Yeah. And you already kind of allude to what's so cool about your book, the idea that there's

00:08:41.640 a gender curriculum on top of, like you say at some point you can fail at masculinity, right?

00:08:47.300 You can get expelled for failing at masculinity, which is really remarkable. Like that's, I think

00:08:51.660 that gets at what moira was mentioning that like you're thinking about respectability politics in

00:08:56.700 a way that i found very enlightening but also clearly goes beyond what we tend to use it as

00:09:02.940 in everyday parlance so you do kind of distinguish between respectability politics in general sort of

00:09:07.360 the idea that we can get out of oppression by good behavior basically and what you call reactive

00:09:13.720 respectability which you say is is a political project and it's institutionalized and organized

00:09:19.280 And I take it to mean that basically it is only embodied in a second step.

00:09:24.200 As you were saying, the Morehouse structures preceded basically the way these two men ended up living it in conflict, basically.

00:09:31.300 Can you say a little bit more about where did you get this idea for reactive respectability?

00:09:35.120 How is it institutionalized?

00:09:36.980 So one, shout out to black historians because I might be a sociologist, but I'm really a closeted historian and I'm working on a way to tell my parents.

00:09:45.320 But really, Black historians have been talking about these campaigns that we've had historically, really, you know, pre-emancipation and post-emancipation, in which you have to understand, so coming out of slavery, you know, the 15th Amendment bifurcated the race. 0.55

00:10:03.380 So Black men had the right to vote and Black women didn't. 0.63

00:10:06.700 So Black people are in this very, on the sort of fence about their citizenship. 0.77

00:10:11.480 And so there's almost instantaneously abolitionists who are now like, okay, we put ourselves out

00:10:17.060 of business with, you know, the slavery thing. 0.66

00:10:19.360 Now let's switch to what we're really about, which is sort of moralizing Black people.

00:10:24.600 So out of slavery, the campaign around Black morality was fierce, right?

00:10:29.420 Michelle Mitchell, I believe she's still at NYU, has a book called Righteous Propagation, and it really heavily influenced me.

00:10:35.760 I read this as a grad student, and I was like, oh, this is the bar for me as a Black feminist scholar.

00:10:43.060 And her argument there was just, as I've said, that abolitionists who were a racial coalition instantly took to, okay, Black people have to sexually behave their way into citizenship.

00:10:55.800 So that means no marrying young. You know, you know, it's funny that we talk about teen pregnancy. Now they talk about teen marriage a lot coming out of emancipation about women. Black women could not occupy the domestic sphere in the same way because so many black women worked. But in almost doubling down on the femininity of black women because we worked. Right. Black men who were really under siege because they were voting. Right. There was a whole campaign around what was, you know, a proper behavior of black men. 0.75

00:11:25.420 So that has really never died. That was a reactive respectability campaign because that was the political exigency of emancipation and of suffrage, right? If Black people are going to vote, we have to behave in a way that says we have earned this.

00:11:40.080 What we see in my book is just a really contemporary iteration of that. And it's very important that we're in 2023 now because my book really starts in about 1983. 0.97

00:11:50.760 So 1981 is the largest tax cut on in modern history. Right. On record is Reagan's tax cut. It really collapses the black working class into the black poor. All these social safety debts for black households disappear.

00:12:04.960 The other thing that happens is it really, again, bifurcates the race in terms of it's the first time we see black poverty being feminized. Black poverty now takes on the look of women headed households and the cultural consequence of that economic warfare on black on the black working class. 0.80

00:12:25.540 So, you know, I always tell my students, open your smartphone right now. There's 150 jobs a woman used to do that are replaced with automation, right? All these jobs we used to have in the urban sector are eviscerated by neoliberalism and Reaganomics. 0.98

00:12:41.180 the response to that is not from black leadership like oh wow this is a real crisis of the black 0.87

00:12:47.120 poor particularly black women the response is weirdly enough an attraction to Reaganomics in 0.68

00:12:55.800 terms of this is an opportunity for black men to get into the boardroom and if we can just put on 0.70

00:13:01.080 the pinstripe suits you know and and really that what's best for the race is what's best for the 0.83

00:13:06.360 top of the race. So another book that really influenced mine was Kathy Cohen's Boundaries of

00:13:12.700 Blackness. Kathy Cohen's a political science at Chicago. She's my Beyonce. Kathy's book argues

00:13:19.920 that, you know, so Michael Awkward is a political scientist as well. They're friends. And he has

00:13:24.800 this really, really well-known theory called linked fate. And he's describing why Black people 1.00

00:13:30.180 vote so similarly across region, across religion, across ethnicity. Black people tend to vote in

00:13:36.000 large blocks. The reason for that, he said, was we believe that what happens to the least of us 0.99

00:13:40.900 happens to all of us, that we have a linked faith ideology about the race. But Kathy Cohen comes

00:13:46.460 along, she says, well, if that was the case, then AIDS would have been at the top of the ballot for

00:13:52.420 black political agendas, right? Because AIDS, you know, patient zero was a white male, we believe,

00:13:57.720 but patient one was black, right? AIDS devastated black communities, right? And again, Reagan did 0.53

00:14:05.380 nothing about that so she says if that were the case then every pulpit every barbershop every you

00:14:11.600 know jesse jackson everyone else would have been talking about aids but who was aids affecting

00:14:15.760 the hyper marginalized black people queer urban and poor all i did was really invert kathy cohen's

00:14:24.720 book and say it's not that the political agenda just hyper marginalizes black people sort of the

00:14:30.480 bottom of the pile, it's usurped by Black people at the top of the pile, which are Black male

00:14:36.860 elites, which we tend to say that what's best for the race is what's best for its college-educated 0.98

00:14:42.540 Black men. Well, this might be a good moment to turn to Morehouse itself, which is like creating 1.00

00:14:48.360 that Black male elite and also creating the priorities that put them at the center of 0.83

00:14:55.340 discourses about Black thriving. So can you walk us through the history of the institution really

00:15:00.040 quickly. Yeah. So this is, there's some things I learned about Morehouse that Morehouse doesn't

00:15:05.080 tend to know about itself. So this is actually something I've become kind of fascinated about,

00:15:09.380 like black colleges often have their sort of official histories of themselves, which are

00:15:14.320 actually really long processes of not talking about sometimes what really happened because that

00:15:19.440 was part of our survival and part of appeasing white donors. So what really found in Morehouse

00:15:26.620 college in augusta south carolina in 18 i want to say 60 1867 i want to say morehouse is founded

00:15:39.220 what happens in 1869 in augusta south carolina there's a massive race riot gust of georgia and

00:15:46.340 the town in south carolina line right across the river the cross right across the span of river

00:15:49.860 from each other and this is really a hotbed for like black free people in the south and they're

00:15:54.860 having all these conversations with Black people in the North, particularly through the American

00:15:59.000 Baptist Seminary, which is a very large organization, former abolitionists, a bunch of

00:16:04.840 religious leaders, white, Black. Some of them are involved in Howard University. Some of them

00:16:09.840 are involved in Spelman. All that to say, Morehouse's founders are under siege because they

00:16:15.800 are having conversations about the conditions of Black people in the South. That race riot runs 1.00

00:16:21.760 them out of Augusta all the way to Atlanta. Why did they move to Atlanta? Because the Union barracks 0.97

00:16:26.580 were in Atlanta. The last of the Union barracks in Reconstruction were still in Atlanta. They

00:16:31.560 moved to the highest point in the city of Atlanta for their safety. Spelman, which is founded in

00:16:36.340 1881, moves from really down the road in Friendship Baptist Church to be next to Morehouse

00:16:41.800 for safety. So the story of Morehouse, all that to say, is the story of Black safety against 0.94

00:16:48.060 violence. The institution, you know, in its 20th century iterations, it really goes, Morehouse was

00:16:55.020 not the only historically Black college for men. In fact, again, stories they don't tell, Lincoln

00:17:01.000 University in Pennsylvania was considered like the college for Black men. Lincoln University

00:17:06.720 graduated two heads of state, the prime minister of Nigeria, the prime minister of Ghana. Langston

00:17:12.080 Hughes went to Lincoln. My grandfather went to Lincoln. And so Morehouse was considered sort of

00:17:16.520 a sleepier Southern preacher centered type of college until Lincoln goes co-ed in the 1950s.

00:17:25.540 And Morehouse sort of becomes premier as this place of like, you know, once King is affiliated

00:17:30.780 with them, Julian Bond, that whole civil rights generation, Morehouse becomes very, very larger

00:17:37.140 than its size into the 1970s and 1980s. I would say that is in part because of their alliance with

00:17:46.220 right wing, you know, governance. But the story of Morehouse really is a story in which it's a

00:17:52.440 school that is very imbibed with its own sense of tradition. And kind of like, you know, people

00:18:00.480 often describe it as like a large fraternity, right? There's a brotherhood there. But often

00:18:05.280 what we call tradition and institutions isn't actually that ancient. Traditions really change

00:18:11.340 and we reinvent them and so much of what you see in Morehouse now is not something they were doing

00:18:17.040 you know in the 1930s and 40s it's what they were doing in the 1980s and that was really my you know

00:18:22.760 call to task about these things that they say we can't change this because it's tradition but

00:18:27.160 they've changed their own traditions many times over so Morehouse now is it looms large even though

00:18:32.860 it has many struggles many black colleges have struggles but Morehouse has particular struggles

00:18:37.640 because of what's going on with young Black men in high school.

00:18:40.560 It also has struggles because of its own operation.

00:18:43.740 Let's be clear.

00:18:44.380 Its own board of trustees has caused this trouble. 0.93

00:18:46.920 So some of these things are not endemic to Black men. 0.97

00:18:49.680 They are endemic to Morehouse not wanting to catch up with the times. 1.00

00:18:53.680 So that's such a fascinating walkthrough.

00:18:55.960 And it's amazing to see how you describe in the book,

00:18:58.740 I mean, the way that it is about an accommodation to kind of this donor class,

00:19:04.580 which is something that all of us who work at a university know,

00:19:07.120 except that it doesn't right at Stanford it doesn't have the additional well it has a racial

00:19:12.480 layer because everything in the United States does but it's not as explicit right like I think

00:19:16.780 you mentioned that Morehouse didn't have a black president until the 20th century which is like

00:19:20.860 kind of wild you're like so this is very this is very key so going back to King's assassination

00:19:28.100 so when MLK is assassinated in 1968 this is important to Morehouse for this reason

00:19:33.620 Coretta Scott King, his widow, wants to continue his democratic socialist justice project, right?

00:19:39.760 She believes that the solution to the race is from the bottom up, as he believed, right?

00:19:43.480 He was very leftist, right?

00:19:45.040 Yeah.

00:19:45.360 So he was very anti-capitalist, very anti-militaristic.

00:19:48.180 But another one of his lieutenants is named Andrew Young.

00:19:51.680 Andrew Young goes on to be the mayor of Atlanta.

00:19:54.180 Andrew Young has two, if not three, centers named after him at Morehouse.

00:19:58.700 Andrew Young was always considered King's right-leaning lieutenant in fact the apocryphal

00:20:05.100 story goes that when King wanted to know how a speech would go over with the right he would run

00:20:09.620 it past Andy because Andy was his sort of in-house not a Republican but a conservative right

00:20:16.440 Andy Young is extremely in bed with white donorship and I'm talking about right-wing

00:20:24.780 right donors so dan kathy ceo of chick-fil-a the walton foundation walmart the walton family

00:20:31.420 whoa dan kathy was the chair of morehouse's board of trustees until like two minutes ago

00:20:37.600 this so you're talking look there are people who would say and i tell this to morehouse students

00:20:44.540 all the time i say you should be very concerned that people who have such disdain for black people

00:20:49.960 have such interest in you right and it's because so stanford absolutely has a donor class but that

00:20:56.940 donor class tends to be affiliated with stanford right you have probably a large you know over

00:21:01.960 overwhelming majority you know alumni right yep you probably have people who you know are at least

00:21:08.240 interested in sort of getting their kids in the stanford sort of want these favors off of stanford

00:21:12.540 that's part of why they're in the donor class yeah no dad can't be sending his kids to more 0.94

00:21:17.400 house so again the idea of fixing black men into a certain type of like see you know you don't have 0.94

00:21:27.140 to address you know mass incarceration if you just say well you know the ones who are in suits are 0.66

00:21:32.040 doing fine you know it's a it's a cultural project that is really about a neoliberal idea of black 0.99

00:21:39.220 men's problems are just a matter of black men's choices yeah right they are doing this to 0.84

00:21:43.340 themselves and so yeah you have you know again uh Andy Young is really the one who's responsible 1.00

00:21:49.020 for bringing not just donorship right-wing donorship so Betsy Davos um again the Waltons

00:21:56.420 he brings all of them into Morehouse in the book I talked to young men who said yeah I was part of

00:22:02.620 this sort of student troop who we were just supposed to go we were kind of like on tour

00:22:07.800 and supposed to go around and impress these white donors with how clean and articulate we are

00:22:14.980 many many black colleges have had very unexpected white and so for example we have to go back to

00:22:26.420 jim crow some of the strongest advocates of hbcus were segregationists right right right so the 0.69

00:22:33.700 making of strange bedfellows has always been there, right? Mr. Segregation Now, Segregation

00:22:38.300 Forever, right? He was extremely, I'm talking about a governor of Alabama, a presidential

00:22:43.720 candidate who got shot, Wallace, George Wallace. George Wallace was a very strong proponent

00:22:49.320 of black colleges because he did not want to desegregate white universities. So they've

00:22:56.680 always had this this peculiar allyship for lack of a better word but particularly after the civil

00:23:04.380 rights movement you have a number of people who say the civil rights movement needs to grow up

00:23:08.720 we need to stop marching and we need to get into this corporate space into capitalism and that's

00:23:13.900 how you see these inroads of very far-right very wealthy donors interested in morehouse college

00:23:20.380 which again they're not interested in any other type of black student yeah i mean i have to say

00:23:24.660 that that donor list if i saw that at stanford i'd be terrified i mean like only hillsdale

00:23:30.300 college probably has that donor list my god you know so from the left as well so you know what i

00:23:36.400 talk about in the book is into the obama era and i would say obama sort of put his foot on the pedal

00:23:41.400 of this this idea of neoliberal fixes for black men so neoliberal fixes rely on these public

00:23:47.020 private partnerships so what you know black boys really need is like you know you know a corporate 0.93

00:23:51.740 charter school that's really part of the idea that black men are culturally defective not that you 0.97

00:23:58.400 know basically nothing structurally needs to be addressed right they're culturally defective and 0.99

00:24:04.460 therefore that's the solution which is so brilliant the way you work that out in their description of 1.00

00:24:09.020 the morehouse man which really comes across so nicely in the book is it's so easy to think like

00:24:13.100 oh it's actually a traditionalist institution but this is something we found so often in the

00:24:17.020 podcast and when people say as you say tradition they mean the 1980s like it's not this isn't going

00:24:23.000 back generations this is going back one right like it's and you're exactly right it's like it's it's

00:24:28.040 the image of black masculinity sort of the mirror image of broken windows policing it's the mirror 0.52

00:24:33.140 image of of the Moynihan report etc etc right like it it's absolutely it's meant to not raise the

00:24:41.260 question of like what is this structurally that leads to a different differential outcomes for

00:24:46.220 American men and women according to race, but instead kind of gets fixated on exceptions and

00:24:53.420 exceptionalism and gets fixated on kind of bootstraps, you know, pull up your pants rather 0.59

00:25:00.660 than the bootstraps, I suppose. Yes. Absolutely that. You know, real obsession with cultural

00:25:06.040 fixes to structural problems. And it's really, you know, I think my book is the very uncomfortable

00:25:10.640 admission that as much as the Moynihan report was critiqued by black feminists, it was very

00:25:16.280 widely accepted among not a small portion of black people, particularly black people in the upper

00:25:22.060 middle class and elites, right? That this idea of like, yeah, that is what I hear sort of spewed

00:25:28.140 at Morehouse is like just a black face on Moynihan, right? And this is sort of larger. So we're also

00:25:34.800 talking about a climate black men politically that's larger than Morehouse, but particularly

00:25:39.680 right now so you know trump doubled the digits that romney had with black men it's not a huge

00:25:46.040 you know demographic but it is considerable considering black women 98 voted against

00:25:52.580 trump right at least we voted democratic so trump did not do well with black women at all we pretty

00:25:57.860 much hate him but he did have this real appeal to black men and when we think about you know i love

00:26:04.120 my dear dear friend the political historian leah wright regore had this excellent book called the

00:26:08.440 loneliness of the black republican and i'm reading that and i'm thinking this is a gender book she's

00:26:13.540 not even a gender scholar but i'm like this to me is a it's a book about black male attraction

00:26:19.860 to the right what does trump really lend black men part of it is that moynahanian thing of like

00:26:27.940 see it's black women just won't let you be men right black women are just right of you and what

00:26:35.680 trump sort of gave them was a sense of like you you know i you too can sort of be you know a 1.00

00:26:43.280 patriarchal asshole and it's only black women holding you back i always say there's like if 1.00

00:26:48.120 you were to draw a chiasmic square and you put white men white women black women black men 1.00

00:26:54.420 you have white women who say you know if it just weren't for gender we'd be in power right so their 0.68

00:27:00.560 allegiance to white men has always been there and then you have black men who say if it just 0.88

00:27:04.500 weren't for race, we'd be in power. And so for both of those demographics, the appeal is not

00:27:10.640 always to eradicate someone like Trump or any of these leaders. It's that they're just one step

00:27:17.280 away. It would be, you know, even, you know, I live on the internet. And so the things I hear

00:27:25.980 Black men say about R. Kelly or Cosby, for a sizable minority, a very non-silent minority 0.99

00:27:34.080 of black men the problem is not that these were cultures of harm the problem to them is they 0.87

00:27:39.620 didn't get away with it like white men do so they always bring up the you know you know bill cosby 0.94

00:27:44.520 you know went to jail what about harvey weinstein first of all harvey weinstein did 20 years right

00:27:48.360 he will die in prison let's i don't know where you made up this idea that harvey weinstein got

00:27:52.680 scott free but but that tells me that again it's not you know intraracial patriarchy which is about

00:28:00.860 everything you know my book was about we see a larger political movement particularly on the

00:28:07.160 internet that incels is really that name doesn't capture what's happening because black men who

00:28:13.720 are attracted to those ideologies they're not involuntarily celibate what they often are are

00:28:18.380 black men who feel like if i could just get in a white man's seat i too would have power yeah this 0.85

00:28:24.680 might be a good moment to turn to the chapter in your book, which deals with sexual violence 0.94

00:28:31.220 at Morehouse and the way that their ideology of black masculinity was actually wielded towards

00:28:38.000 the impunity for sexual violence. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So this was one, the article I wrote 0.69

00:28:46.180 for that chapter was the hardest writing I've ever had to do in my life. It was one of those

00:28:50.160 points where you're like maybe this is where I tap out as an academic like I just can't do this

00:28:54.480 but it was because I was trying to make theories that didn't exist in terms of field so when we

00:29:02.060 look at sexual assault studies across I would say psychology dominates it public health and then

00:29:07.760 sociology is a little bit behind we very rarely particularly when it comes to campus sexual

00:29:12.380 assault race is almost it's just not a variable that's ever considered I mean there were only

00:29:18.440 four articles I came across that considered race. And those were for the victims, not the

00:29:23.340 perpetrators. Right. Right. And so there was no consideration. Now I'm a masculinity scholar at

00:29:28.440 my, you know, at my inception. Right. To me, masculinities, hegemonic masculinities, as we

00:29:33.880 know it, it's all about the variations amongst men. Right. So to treat men as some sort of

00:29:40.080 monolithic college campus demographic, to me, was ridiculous. We know in the literature on 0.89

00:29:47.360 campus sexual assault coming you know out of the 80s really that men rape in context right so

00:29:54.160 alcohol infused parties are one context fraternities are a context and for me the argument

00:30:00.220 was that race was another context because race also organizes not only how men sort of move

00:30:05.720 throughout campus spaces they organize their friend groups but more importantly they organize

00:30:10.560 their ideas about gender, right? They organize their ideas about what being well-behaved is,

00:30:18.080 what a good man is, and what the consequences are of sexual violence, right? So I wanted to

00:30:24.080 make clear in that chapter, which I think I did, that college campuses are really a rehearsal 0.74

00:30:29.120 ground for white men who learn the purchase of white masculinity and what they're getting away

00:30:33.540 with, right? Brett Kavanaugh at every stage of his education learned over and over again,

00:30:39.040 i'll get away with this right right no one there is no accountability for me and so black men have

00:30:44.800 a very different idea because they are tied to that larger project about how black men are seen

00:30:50.580 so you know my argument in that chapter at its core was that we already know from the literature

00:30:57.540 that sexual assault is a way of doing gender right it's a way that men even men who don't rape

00:31:03.240 understand that they have power over people who can be raped which is men you know includes other

00:31:08.920 men includes non-binary people includes women but race is also what's being made in sexual assault

00:31:14.760 where men learn how they'll be held accountable how they'll be seen and they're also learning

00:31:20.460 the gender politics because sexualist violence overwhelmingly is an interracial project

00:31:26.220 overwhelmingly people are assaulting people of their own race and so that's really you know

00:31:32.340 looking at Morehouse for that was really, Morehouse has a sexual assault problem. I'm not

00:31:38.800 making this up. The New York Times reported this. Chronicle of Higher Ed reported this.

00:31:43.780 Morehouse kind of has a sexual assault problem, like the Catholic Church has a child sexual 0.56

00:31:47.580 abuse problem, in that it systemically not held accountable the perpetrators. This has been going 0.64

00:31:54.940 on since, you know, I was a student and since before. And when I was a student, you know,

00:31:58.800 women had some you know we could articulate these things in the generations before they probably

00:32:04.060 felt as though they had no support right now i would say that spelman students are so like they 0.80

00:32:11.200 have like guerrilla feminism so now there's this thing of like oh your institution won't hold you

00:32:15.820 accountable but we absolutely will nice so you know in looking at that you have to look at 0.51

00:32:23.380 how do black men in using Morehouse as the case how do they think that sexual violence

00:32:31.320 informs their ideas of what black manhood is and that's what really you know that's you know those 0.74

00:32:37.620 sort of what I found in the findings was really that sexual assault was informing

00:32:41.620 their sense of black manhood as much as it was informing their sense of you know black womanhood

00:32:53.380 what's the content of what they're being informed about black manhood because i was

00:33:10.560 really struck by an anecdote in your chapter where you talk about like the specific elitism

00:33:16.060 of going to morehouse as being seen among this subculture there as justifying sexual assault

00:33:22.780 He says, like, I think one of the students says, like, at least it was Morehouse.

00:33:26.180 Yeah. 0.93

00:33:27.020 Sperm. 0.98

00:33:27.860 Oh, yeah.

00:33:29.140 I mean, that was a jarring, you know, quote for me, too.

00:33:32.880 But, you know, part of what we have gender asymmetry for Black college students and part of the cultural, you know, consequence of that is, yeah, you get this idea that Black men are this sort of chosen people in, you know, in college.

00:33:46.540 That somehow they should be treated with more impunity, as you saw in the chapter.

00:33:50.720 the idea that sexual assault and sexual violence is not about the harms that it does to the victims

00:33:58.780 particularly black women but it's about sort of the harms it does to black men right that they

00:34:05.500 saw gender violence as a consequence for their image and i think it was really important to

00:34:11.400 understand that you know white men in college campuses who are perpetrators are probably not 0.93

00:34:17.240 thinking like damn this really like this is gonna be bad for white men it's probably not thinking 0.73

00:34:23.860 that but you have this very it's larger than the perpetrator when you have this real coalition of 0.99

00:34:31.180 men who are protecting the perpetrator because of what it says more largely about black men and

00:34:35.640 black men have a very particular history with you know as Angela Davis said so well gender violence 0.72

00:34:41.800 was used as a touchstone for white terrorism right now ironically white men were overwhelmingly 0.99

00:34:47.660 raping black women but the idea that black men were rapacious and that they were predatory 1.00

00:34:53.120 was used repeatedly to attack black communities and families and so that is all true both things 0.96

00:34:59.860 can be true is what i think i was trying to say in that chapter that yes there is a racialized

00:35:06.660 terrorism of black people's sexualities right we are particularly impugned for our sexuality

00:35:11.360 and also black men can do harm to black women complicating how that sort of you know that 0.97

00:35:18.780 makes up the sauce of how they see themselves in that so one of the things i tried to do in that 0.93

00:35:24.120 article was to expand past how the literature typically deals with gender violence in terms

00:35:29.180 of like typically it's like we know now that you don't ask respondents this is like sociology

00:35:35.440 methods 101 for your listeners when you're interviewing about things like violence or

00:35:40.700 trauma you don't ask those things directly because one we know that both men and women 0.77

00:35:47.340 and non-binary people are so bad at actually defining what what non-consensual acts are

00:35:54.280 that it doesn't actually yield great data to be like tell me about a time you raped 0.88

00:35:58.400 yeah like it doesn't do anything so we basically ask these questions and the the theory from

00:36:05.000 anthropology is where violence is violence will emerge right that that if you just ask people in

00:36:10.980 the context if violence is there it will emerge in the data and my whole idea was this kept coming

00:36:17.620 up in context where I was talking about other things so I would be talking to them about things

00:36:22.020 like punishment like you know how was you know how strict was the college and they'd be talking

00:36:26.680 about well there was a time my buddy got put out you know for you know the girl lied or you know

00:36:32.360 you know it what they would say uh sex gone wrong was their sort of mediation of it that to me was

00:36:41.040 like oh they're taught they're thinking about sexual assault in the context of punishment 0.91

00:36:45.100 right that when you are a good black boy when you're a good black man you have gotten to college 0.87

00:36:51.440 by avoiding all the things that penalize other black men or trying your best to avoid the 0.87

00:36:56.560 behaviors that you see black boys getting punished for in K through 12, which are a 0.92

00:37:01.860 slew of things we punish black boys for, right? And so their idea was like, no, we're good guys. 1.00

00:37:08.680 And they couldn't sort of connect the idea of being well-behaved to sexual harm. And they

00:37:17.080 certainly couldn't connect it for their friends, right? And so this idea that like, you know,

00:37:21.900 Well, we don't need, you know, rape prevention strategies because Morehouse has none. Morehouse still does not have a single rape crisis counselor on campus. They don't even have an LGBTQ counselor on campus. The idea that we don't need any of that stuff because good black men don't rape. And no means no. And that's what we mean. No means no is not sufficient. Right. We all know that. But that to them was like good black men don't rape. So we already know we're well behaved anyway.

00:37:48.220 This might be a good moment to turn to how Morehouse's conception of good Black men and good Black men's behavior, like really becomes constituted in a kind of gender conformity, because you talk about problems faced at Morehouse by students who transition. And Adrian, I thought you had a really good perspective on this as well.

00:38:08.520 yeah that chapter to me was so so eye-opening and and it really gets at this right i mean like a lot

00:38:15.020 of universities and colleges in the united states struggle with especially single sex ones you know

00:38:20.080 struggle with these issues obviously but i think you make a very convincing case that they're just

00:38:24.880 additional layers here and they're super interesting like because as you say adherence

00:38:29.240 to manhood at morehouse holds equal footing with academic instruction because manhood can be failed

00:38:33.960 And they very clearly treat it that way, right?

00:38:36.760 There's this interesting thing that students who transition during their time at Morehouse

00:38:41.220 since 2019 can be in a situation where they have to plead their case to a three-panel...

00:38:46.220 To the president of the college.

00:38:48.140 Which is great.

00:38:49.060 First...

00:38:49.560 Actually trained in these things.

00:38:52.440 Which is amazing to...

00:38:53.720 So for our listeners who do not themselves teach at a college, to anyone who teaches

00:38:57.680 at a college that's recognizable as a disciplinary committee.

00:39:00.560 Like, this is what we do to students who have cheated.

00:39:03.400 it is very clear like it's very legible and that's yeah that's that's the solution they found

00:39:09.880 yeah absolutely your gender identity was the wrongdoing we're gonna bring you before tribunal

00:39:15.420 which is more than they do for students who perpetrate sexual assault you know again when

00:39:20.980 i say they have a catholic church problem one of the things i found was that students who

00:39:24.880 are perpetrators are brought before this tribunal that also includes other students oh lord so it's

00:39:31.700 like your roommate is being like nah he's good and also to hell with the anonymity of the victim

00:39:40.360 my god right and again they say these things like no you know this is what you know every 0.80

00:39:45.620 black college does it is not because we need to understand the context morehouse enacted a trans

00:39:50.620 policy because spelman enacted a trans policy right policy is considered as progressive as

00:39:56.900 the seven sisters policy so it's the seven sisters you know the smiths the wellesleys

00:40:00.420 They've already been doing this. And their policy, I think, is the best one you can have, which is we accept women, we graduate anyone, right? It's as simple as that. There's no, there's no, you need to prove yourself. And their idea of accepting women, let's say you transitioned as a child, they would say there's enough sort of gender identity there to say that you have a lived experience as a woman.

00:40:23.220 Now, Morehouse turns around again because the pressure was kind of on once Spelman had a policy and Morehouse, instead of just copying and pasting Spelman's policy, which they could have done and they could have copied and pasted Smith's, but those are progressive policies and they have in them a very intrinsic idea about gender fluidity.

00:40:44.960 right which morehouse does not accept morehouse turns around and says ha ha we're gonna you know

00:40:50.980 they make like news for this because this is they're saying this is very progressive right

00:40:55.460 and they say morehouse will accept you know trans men but any other transitioning students you know 0.74

00:41:02.360 if you're like a femme transitional you have to go before this tribunal of the president and prove 0.84

00:41:07.560 that you you know can stay here and we have the right to put you out now i want to make this clear 0.98

00:41:12.300 They were patting themselves on the back for solving a problem they never had. Morehouse has never had not one trans man apply to Morehouse College. What they do have is a very sizable population of genderqueer students, many of whom are fems, many of whom are identified women, right?

00:41:32.040 so they didn't address the issue that they actually have right in fact they made that 0.90

00:41:38.540 even worse and they pat themselves on the back for a group of students they've never had this

00:41:44.340 you know what what you've said was so important to me the idea that you can fail masculinity

00:41:48.560 means that you know in in sociology of education we always say that you know colleges have hidden

00:41:54.420 curriculum all institutions have hidden curriculums and that the educational institution

00:41:59.080 at an educational, you know, at a college would be primary and that the other stuff would be

00:42:03.580 secondary. But I think that this really flipped it on its head, that really it was the cultural

00:42:08.000 curriculum that was just as primary as the academic curriculum, because you could fail

00:42:12.800 the cultural curriculum. So Morehouse's, you know, trans students and not just trans,

00:42:18.660 really genderqueer, because remember they're in Atlanta and Atlanta is like black San Francisco, 0.91

00:42:24.740 It was like a hotbed of black queerness. I would say Atlanta and New Orleans, maybe, but really Atlanta because it's so much larger. And so Morehouse is basically, I always found this funny. Maybe because I think the world is queer, I found this funny. 0.94

00:42:40.140 more of those always approaches atlanta as though it is you know battening down the hatches of 0.99

00:42:47.060 atlanta's queerness of like all that all that gay black atlanta you know that that's our problem 1.00

00:42:53.960 is we're just trying to keep those floodgates out i'm sorry i wish our listeners could see 1.00

00:42:58.940 say it as hand gestures of trying to push away this imaginary flood of black gayness 0.99

00:43:07.880 with, like, such enthusiastic force. 1.00

00:43:15.260 Oh, I just spilled, hold on, I just spilled my coffee.

00:43:18.020 Oh, no.

00:43:20.260 Oh, I'm sorry. 1.00

00:43:21.160 All in an attempt to stave off the queer Atlantans, yes. 1.00

00:43:25.440 I know, right? 1.00

00:43:27.040 Spilling this cream into my floor.

00:43:29.200 All that to say.

00:43:31.620 So, you know, the city of Atlanta is sort of the other character

00:43:37.400 in this book morehouse also has a long relationship to atlanta there's a really great book by kevin

00:43:42.980 cruz the historian called white flight and it's about atlanta is atlanta because atlanta made a

00:43:50.600 compromise not the booker t washington compromise they made a compromise as a city that they were

00:43:57.160 going to have a black power structure and a white power structure morehouse was intrinsic to fueling

00:44:03.540 that black power structure. Morehouse has produced multiple mayors of Atlanta. And there's also just 0.91

00:44:08.620 this symbiosis between black leadership in Atlanta and Morehouse. So as Atlanta has changed,

00:44:16.820 it's very interesting that Morehouse has gone from, we are sort of the seed of Atlanta's,

00:44:23.080 you know, greatness to this idea of like, there's all these parts of Atlanta we don't want in. 0.91

00:44:28.620 I found this very interesting that Morehouse, you know, I had a respondent who was a straight

00:44:32.780 cis male who said the college is in the closet about how many students are in the closet wow

00:44:39.920 that morehouse has this huge queer undercurrent it's a reputation they hate about themselves

00:44:47.040 right all the other schools joke about how gay morehouse is you know all the other you know 0.97

00:44:52.260 everyone there was a joke on twitter someone said what's the best you know gay club you've 0.96

00:44:57.680 ever been to when someone's at morehouse college the idea is like like all gay black men have 0.91

00:45:06.100 dated someone at morehouse but like morehouse will never come you so what i found was so you

00:45:13.280 know it's kind of it's kind of classic cuckoo right the idea of when you suppress something 0.78

00:45:17.480 it only flourishes so they suppress this queer culture which meant that it's bubbling right

00:45:23.320 beneath the surface. I say that to say Morehouse likes to think of Atlanta's queerness as being 0.77

00:45:30.180 outside their gates, but actually they are very active in how queer Atlanta is. They are sort of

00:45:37.220 a wellspring of Atlanta's queerness. They are attracting all these young bright men down to 0.93

00:45:44.220 their college. Many of them are very active at varying degrees of outness in Atlanta's queer 0.97

00:45:51.760 culture and also become, you know, sort of queer leadership in Atlanta at varying degrees of

00:45:58.860 outness. Something that fascinated me. So for example, you know, when I was first interviewing

00:46:04.820 students, they would say like, oh, you know, we talk about, you know, the dormitories because

00:46:08.940 you talk about physical space when you're doing ethnography. And we talked about the dormitories

00:46:13.760 and they would say, oh yeah, that's the gay dorm. You know, I'm thinking like, oh, they're just kind 1.00

00:46:17.140 of stereotyping that dorm. And like, there's nothing really much to make about that. You

00:46:21.200 all dorms have queer students. Wrong! What I realized was queer students, and this is the age 1.00

00:46:29.020 of the internet, when they were getting accepted to Morehouse, they were going online and saying,

00:46:34.300 okay, which dorm should I stay in? So this wasn't an imagination. There was an organized

00:46:40.360 sexual culture at Morehouse in which queer students weren't organizing around safety,

00:46:45.700 around solidarity around community to have spaces in the book you saw me talk about part of

00:46:52.160 Morehouse's ideals about black men are also very clearly articulated they have this thing called

00:46:57.420 the five wells that you know a Morehouse man is well read he's well dressed he's well traveled

00:47:03.940 he's well spoken there's another well that I forget there's five of them I know all that to say

00:47:12.760 those five wells are every middle-aged gay man in new york city it's like their actual ideal 0.93

00:47:20.800 of like what a what a perfect man is i'm like pretty damn gay like it enjoys the ballet and 0.84

00:47:28.300 opera yeah well travel like what's the next thing gonna be like you're a foodie like it's like 0.60

00:47:35.320 But this is the, this is the great paradox in that they're actual, they're, um, if you

00:47:43.020 got into my last chapter, I talked about it.

00:47:45.000 There's a class at Morehouse called leadership and professional development.

00:47:48.440 Yeah.

00:47:49.060 Yeah.

00:47:49.900 It's an etiquette class.

00:47:51.200 It has no academic value, right?

00:47:53.160 It's a purely etiquette class about business etiquette.

00:47:56.180 And it was taught for decades by a legendary Morehouse professor named Mr. McLaurin.

00:48:05.320 I don't know if I can out people in that end, I think it was just sort of an open secret. 0.93

00:48:13.320 And again, it kind of reminds me of like Paris is Burning with like, you've got all these queer men who are teaching supermodels how to walk. 0.78

00:48:20.580 They were being taught masculine, you know, etiquette by gay men. 0.67

00:48:26.440 And yet that to them never registered with like, oh, maybe we need to like accept how sort of queer we are, not just sexually queer, but culturally queer. 0.53

00:48:35.320 So, yeah, that relationship to Atlanta is, to me, as it is Morehouse now, the through line through Atlanta and Morehouse is not only the politics of the city and the institution in terms of racial politics, but also the queer politics, the queer Black politics are the through line.

00:48:53.580 It's fascinating.

00:48:54.440 I love this comparison with Paris is Burning, right?

00:48:58.360 Because I just showed this to my students last week and they were thrilled.

00:49:03.300 thrilled. But something that I noticed when I rewatch Paris is Burning with my students is that

00:49:07.740 this gay performance culture was very, very hyper fixated on studying the rules of the white 1.00

00:49:18.240 upper class. And so I think when you talk about Morehouse's ideal masculinity as being somewhat 0.97

00:49:26.400 queer i think i think it's also very class obsessive it's very invested in suppressing 0.52

00:49:33.120 class variants it's a ballroom culture for corporate nice parents is burning i also teach 0.75

00:49:38.280 it to my students every year they love it because they say oh wait a minute now i realize like this

00:49:42.720 is copy and paste like every other thing i thought you know from ryan murphy what have you just

00:49:47.420 it all came from yeah black queer you know afro latin ex people in new york city right so there

00:49:53.140 is a scene in pierce's burning where one of the categories is executive realness that's right and 0.75

00:49:59.600 and dory and cory legendary mother overall of the culture grandmother she says what they are saying 0.96

00:50:09.160 is if i had the education i could do that because i can look the part morons would never say what 0.66

00:50:16.180 they're doing executive realness but it is executive realness really nice class is teaching 0.72

00:50:21.340 them you know the knots on a tie and how to hold a shrimp fork and also sociologically I get very

00:50:27.800 fascinated about like so let's get into the weeds of social theory in terms of Du Bois so one of

00:50:33.080 the things I talk about in the book that becomes the sort of theoretical architecture of the book

00:50:37.080 is this idea that the veil Du Bois said that racialized people people of color live within a 0.89

00:50:44.600 veil and that they can see out of the veil but the veil can't see into them right so we have a 0.93

00:50:49.680 double consciousness we see ourselves being seen all the time right and that really organizes 0.64

00:50:56.420 even black spaces where there are no white people we see ourselves being seen and what you have 0.80

00:51:01.980 at Morehouse because you have black elites who are being prepared for really you know white 0.71

00:51:08.220 dominated spaces in grad school and beyond you have people who are sort of flush against the

00:51:13.380 veil so their job is not just that we see ourselves being seen is that we're the only ones that you

00:51:18.960 should see don't see the rest of the race only see us right and so this idea of you know my

00:51:26.840 colleague Seamus Kahn has a book called Privilege it's about a St. Paul's boarding school and Seamus

00:51:33.080 Kahn Seamus is a sociologist of elites and so I use his work a lot and he talks about the culture

00:51:38.140 of elites white elites we're talking about has really changed the 20th century that it went from

00:51:42.720 you have to be born into this is sort of a you know heir apparent type thing to this meritocracy

00:51:48.020 mythology about anyone can become an elite it's just about you know hard work that means that

00:51:53.480 their spaces and their cultures have changed a lot so when you go to the halls of saint paul's

00:51:58.640 which is you know one of the upper crustiest boarding schools in the world they're not playing

00:52:03.980 beethoven in their you know dining hall they're playing kendrick lamar and young thug and yo

00:52:09.680 gotti because their idea is we need to learn everybody's culture so that we can be your boss

00:52:14.980 right it's like i need i need to be culturally competent in you people i'm gonna one day own

00:52:21.960 right but morehouse really in their idea of the veil it just occurred to me that they have a very

00:52:29.100 convoluted idea of whiteness that their idea of whiteness is stuck in like a cartoonish gordon

00:52:34.740 gecko 1980s idea and many of the men when they actually emerged into those spaces so i had

00:52:41.340 one of the one of my participants he was a managing director at goldman so he was kind of

00:52:46.580 one of the most successful you know young men out of his class right out the gate and he was like 0.92

00:52:51.060 yo everything morehouse told me to expect was a damn lie he's like my i get into my you know first 0.98

00:52:57.300 job and my boss is a gay white male who rollerblades to work he's like everything they told 0.99

00:53:04.880 me about this firm handshake and this was going to be a boys club about me impressing you know 0.95

00:53:09.920 white men and that i needed to play their own things like they had never really thought about

00:53:13.880 white women being their bosses and like oh i wasn't really prepared but that basically they

00:53:18.280 had a very convoluted idea of what the other side of the veil was going to be so you know 0.80

00:53:26.320 executive realness in that they're being taught okay you need to make small talk about beethoven

00:53:31.680 and brahms right where sir like that's you know like you know you need to you know learn how to

00:53:38.620 you know take your dinner roll and not make a butter sandwich out of it well i don't know what

00:53:42.980 restaurants and you know really serving dinner are you know like it's not like these are not

00:53:49.920 really yeah the sort of obstacles a deconstructed butter roll maybe with a uh

00:53:55.420 their sort of anxiety about the white gaze to me actually convoluted the white gaze that they

00:54:13.160 morehouse was not actually in step with where white elites were yeah they basically were gonna

00:54:18.160 they were gonna succeed at the uh scene in american psycho where they all look at each

00:54:22.220 other's business cards yeah they're going to be great if they ever encounter the monopoly man and

00:54:29.160 had to wear a model right they're going to be right you know wearing spats on their shoes

00:54:33.460 but they're at the actual culture of elites in terms of how drastically it's changed the 20th

00:54:38.320 century so for example i would ask them things like you know they were so prepared to wear a

00:54:43.300 suit right it's morehouse very suit obsessive it's like you know you basically you know their

00:54:48.640 whole thing against trans students was you can't show up to a job interview in a dress right

00:54:53.980 basically every argument about defending morehouse's culture ends with the job interview

00:54:58.740 question what are you going to do with your job interview again this idea that what are you going

00:55:02.900 to do for white approval first of all there's many jobs you can show up to and address most 0.98

00:55:07.720 of the jobs in creative would expect gender non-conforming people to dress how the fuck 0.99

00:55:12.660 they want to that's right it's what we live in right right but also if you show up to a suit 0.99

00:55:19.440 in a suit to silicon fucking valley you'll be laughed out of the goddamn building yeah it was 1.00

00:55:24.760 preparing i think this is the irony is preparing black men to immediately become obsolete right 1.00

00:55:31.140 in what work from home culture are you wearing pinstripe suits right right i mean probably the 0.97

00:55:38.420 top thing you would not do in most

00:55:40.540 of these tech firms is ever show up in a suit.

00:55:42.580 Yeah, yeah.

00:55:43.660 Showing up in shoes is just a lie.

00:55:46.400 You're in a uniform or something, right?

00:55:49.980 But the

00:55:50.660 idea is like, they could not

00:55:52.580 see how outmoded

00:55:54.740 their ideas of

00:55:56.680 whiteness were, and that 1.00

00:55:58.500 they are preparing Black men for a world 0.94

00:56:00.520 that no longer existed. They are preparing 0.99

00:56:02.740 Black men for a world that ended in 1.00

00:56:04.580 the savings and loans crash. 1.00

00:56:06.020 Right. Now, is there a way to think about this as just like watching someone perform an act of repression? I mean, that's something that I thought about when you talked about the closetedness of it all, that what you do see with a pinstriped suit that you don't see when someone's showing up with flip flops is effort. You see someone with real effort. And I mean, I guess that's the other thing. They're contending with a kind of racist stereotypes of what black men look like.

00:56:31.340 And you do mention that the policy against wearing dresses is clearly modeled on the

00:56:36.460 one that is supposed to outlaw, quote unquote, thug outfits, right?

00:56:40.980 So I'm guessing it's mostly about pants and belts.

00:56:43.840 That, of course, is all about, that was always sort of framed as, it's about effort.

00:56:47.680 It's not like, it's not that you think, oh, I look like what they expect me to do, but

00:56:52.580 I'm going to, but they're going to see that I tried.

00:56:55.060 Is that a thing that in the background here?

00:56:57.640 Yeah.

00:56:58.040 Yeah.

00:56:58.280 They're going to see that, again, like executive realness, I can conform, and that I will put in that effort to conform. They're going to see that I won't be a problem. You'll never have to correct me on the length of my pants. You'll never have to correct me on my shirt being untucked. I won't be a problem.

00:57:16.620 that cultural curriculum that is so dominant in their undergrad years becomes an idea that

00:57:21.840 cultural curriculum is the most important you know part of their adult lives too right right

00:57:26.040 which for many of the men in my study because black men are dynamic and they continue to evolve 0.70

00:57:30.980 some of them talk about unlearning right about you know basically the expectations of the world

00:57:36.560 that morehouse set them up for were not the world they encountered and that there were many for

00:57:40.560 example they had to unlearn the gender expectations that more when they got married so you know for

00:57:49.240 for my participants who were married to women they were like yo like they're like i basically do what

00:57:54.940 my wife tells me um we both have to change diapers we both have to make dinner you know it's like

00:57:59.560 they're like this idea of like this black woman was gonna you know support me as a king and um

00:58:05.580 you know, they're like, no, when like, when you got two kids in strollers, gender roles go out

00:58:11.400 the door. Like, it's like, you know, again, like what they were prepared for the Morehouse man is

00:58:17.060 a mythology. And so all the accoutrements of that mythology were preparing them for a mytholized

00:58:22.580 life that they did not have. And the thing about the Morehouse man as a prototype is, you know,

00:58:28.400 I talk about it being akin to like, you know, a Marlboro man or a James Bond, that these are all

00:58:33.760 mythologies about men that are unattainable right no one actually embodies it but it's

00:58:40.860 held over their heads as though like this is you know you should ascribe to this and measure

00:58:47.340 yourself by your distance to or proximity to this mythology but it's not attainable and so it's very

00:58:53.920 crushing for them right or it's liberating for them to say that was a myth you know the people

00:59:00.400 who were imposing that myth did not uphold that myth.

00:59:04.880 In Bed with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender

00:59:08.240 Research for generous support. Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

00:59:12.400 Our theme music is by Katie Lau. Our producer is Megan Kalthus.

In Bed With The Right - December 16, 2023

Episode 12： The Morehouse Man with Saida Grundy

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