A Grammar of Black Masculinity: A Body of Science

Abstract

Science, as it developed in Europe and the U.S. during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, set out to capture, to describe, and to catalogue what was considered the “natural” black male body. Scientists succeeded not merely in describing such a body but, in effect, in producing this body and therein in creating a particular social (and psychic) reality for black men (and women). This scientific grammar of black masculinity allowed the dominant culture to discriminate dark male bodies (i.e., to set them apart from white male bodies) and to control them for materialist and psychological reasons.