This Thing Called Hegemony

EXCERPT From a Research Paper Titled "MAN UP Brother MAN UP: A Critical Response to Cool Pose"

This Thing Called Hegemony
According to Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, there exists a class struggle, a conflict of sorts between the elite, or their oppressor and the underclass or the oppressed. Through the control of various religious educational and media institutions a hierarchical social control transmits ideology of the elite or oppressor. Coined, "hegemony," this struggle is constant between the classes (Gramsci, 1971). Examining hegemony through a racial lens, we're able to see, what is the opposite of white, not only in skin but additionally in philosophy, ideology, and even one’s language, must be negated. Again, this functions as a requisite for social control. Hall (2003) interprets media as the primary apparatus in this cycle of control and domination employed by those in power to “broadcast” various discourses, at will. Adjacent to agenda setting theory, which doesn’t tell one how to think but what to think about, Hall focuses his discussion on the issue of race. He states:
What they “produce” is, precisely, representations of the social world, images, descriptions, explanations and frames for understanding how the world is and why it works as it is said and shown to work. And amongst other kinds ideological labour, the media construct for us a definition of what race is, what meaning the imagery race carries, and what the “problem of race is understood to be.” They help to classify out the world in terms of the categories of race. (p. 90)
These same negations in turn serve as the foundation for the social classification of different peoples, otherwise known as the social constructions of race (Bonilla-Silva, 2003). According to Bonilla-Silva, "Race as well as gender has various social realities which produces real effects on the actors racialized as "black" or "white.'" If we extend these raced realities into the category of "black folk," this reality transforms into a negative personification of invisibility. As bell hooks (1992) states in her essay, “Representations of Whiteness in the Black Imagination:
Since most white people do not have to "see" black people (constantly appearing on billboards, television, movies and magazines, etc.) and they do not have to be ever on guard nor to observe black people to be safe, they can live as though black people are invisible, and they can imagine that they are also invisible to blacks. Some white people may even imagine that there is no representation of whiteness in the black imagination, especially one that has been based on concrete observation or mythic conjecture (p. 168-169).
In Black Skin White Masks, Franz Fanon (1953/1967) roots this invisibility to colonialism in his chapter, "The Negro and Psychopathology."
In magazines, the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Sprit, The Bad Man, the Savage are always by Negroes or Indians; since there is always identification with the victor, the little Negro, quite as easily as the little white boy becomes an explorer, an adventurer, a missionary "who faces the danger of being eaten by the wicked Negroes. (p. 146)
Fanon believes there is a systematic attack on the Negro from all points and it begins with the conditioning on black children. He refers not only to the Tarzan stories but specifically targets the French educational system that praises all things European and condemns all things Antillean.
The Antillean has therefore to choose between his family and European society; in other words, the individual who climbs up into society-white and civilized-tends to reject his family-black and savage…. (p. 154)
Fanon continues this logic to up to where the Negro is reduced to the biological, to nothing more than a genital. (p. 165) Furthermore, in the eyes of the oppressor, the Negro (male) is perceived a sexual beast with a lusty uncontrollable appetite beyond that civilized white human being. One could say that Fanon accepts this sexual reduction but only inversely. What one does not understand, he destroys. For what one envies, he mocks. And thus there is this proliferation --this animalistic sexual myth of the Negro, for the purposes of this discussion, the Negro male.
Taking this invisibility at face value, we see that it cloaks opportunity, accessibility, and life chances to the point where many African-Americans live on the margins of reality. In a gendered sense this marginality has pitted man against women and transversely brother against sister. In a society where the dominant “other” maintains a firm grip on power, we can see how that power enables the ability for one to construct social hierarchies. In American society we see the social hierarchies placing White men at the top of the racial and gender pyramid. In stark contrast the African-American man is placed at the bottom. It if we look at hegemonic masculinity as, Patricia Hill Collins (2004) suggest, in the pretext of racial superiority we can link this raced masculinity to the physical strength, the bravado, exclusive heterosexuality, suppression of vulnerable emotions such as remorse and uncertainty, economic independence and authority over women and other men and intense interest in sexual conquest . In short these essentials are emblematic of masculinity through the eyes the dominant other. Anything less is considered inferior, subordinate and deviant.