Lifting the veil on campus sexual assault: Morehouse college, hegemonic masculinity, and revealing racialized rape culture through the Du Boisian lens

As national rates of sexual assault continue to fall, sexual assault rates for colleges and universities have remained stagnate. Subsequent focusses on campus sexual assault have continued to press a simple question: what about sexual assault on college campuses is so different that rates are not declining with the nation? A longstanding approach in the literature has turned to the contexts in which college men “do” rape culture. How men are racialized is a critically missing context in our understandings of campus gender violence. Race is one of the most pronounced ways that college men see themselves and their interactions, and yet it is grossly overlooked in extant literature. Researchers have missed an opportunity to apply race theories to college men, and thus unveil how college men’s rape cultures operate as racialized rape cultures. By interviewing 32 graduates of Morehouse College, the nation’s only historically Black college for men and a campus rife with high-profile sexual misconduct, this study finds that race is a modality through which men make meanings of masculinity, sex, women competition, and the repercussions of sexual assault in ways that perpetuate assaults on their campus. Through a Du Boisian lens of double consciousness, (in which racialized men think about themselves through the lens of the White gaze) this paper finds that rape culture is not only how these men do gender, but it is a formative means by which they do race and are racialized throughout their college experience.Accepted manuscrip

The Makings of Men: The Institutionalization of Class and Masculinity at a Historically Black College for Men.

This study explores the experiences of men at Morehouse College, the nation's only historically Black college for men. While most of the literature on young Black males has emphasized the bleak conditions facing Black men at the social margins, this work hones in upon the understudied experiences of Black men who are poised to enter the middle class. At Morehouse, men experience a process of gender and class institutionalization that seeks to “make” them into culturally mainstreamed professional class Black men. Through multiple interviews with 32 Morehouse graduates, this work uncovers how the college experience was not merely a coming of age process, but an assiduously crafted race and gender project orchestrated by an institution with a distinct social and ideological mission. Where both the sociological literature and national discourse have repeatedly pointed to a cohort of young Black males as a national problem, this study found that respondents see themselves as having been made into men who are solutions to the problem. Men at Morehouse learn both formal and hidden cultural curriculums about manhood, mainstream cultural professionalism, and racial advancement that places both the institution and their experiences squarely within the context of a larger cultural project about gender respectability for the Black middle class. Previous studies of institutionalization have often emphasized that institutions function to uniformly impose rules and constrictions on their members. However, this study shows that the resources men bring with them into the institution, or acquire or lose within the process, actually determine how they engage institutional structures, and subsequently, determine how they are institutionalized into men. In addition, this study exposes how men think about an array of problems facing both the campus and Black men on through the ideological lens of the institutional process. Recurring campus-wide issues like homophobia, sexual assault, and an alarming attrition rate, then, are not necessarily viewed by the men as problems, but are often understood as sorting devices that allow the institution to promote an exclusive singular form of “respectable” Black masculinity while systemically weeding out men who do not or cannot fit the institutional prototype.PHDWomen's Studies and SociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/108766/1/grundy_1.pd

Gendering social justice capitalism: politics and paradox in the practice of black male success initiatives

First author draf

Keynote Conversation: “The Three-Dimensional King: The Memory, the Man and the Movement”

A three part conversation about Martin Luther King Jr. that contextualizes his commemorative holiday, reclaims his radical commitment to direct action strategies, and bridges his legacy to today’s movement for Black liberation

Allyship in the time of aggrievement: the case of Black Feminism and the New Black masculinities

In 2019, Vox reporter Jane Coaston announced that intersectionality—or the idea of mutually reinforcing systems of oppression—might be most hated word in American conservatism. Even self-identified liberals have made their contempt for feminist theory and intersectionality known in their attacks on “grievance studies”. Black male aggrievement, and antagonism between black feminism and New Black Masculinities (NBM), has been nurtured by a neoliberal academy that delegitimizes critical scholarship and takes delight in conflict between progressive movements. While NBM is new in name, it relies on an old formula: a progressive anti-racist agenda anchored in an anti-feminist, conservative gender politics—Black male aggrievement. The legal roots of “aggrievement” help emphasize how NBM advocates make a claim to injury at hands of black feminism and black women scholars. Neoliberal ideologies built on divisiveness, competition over scarce resources, and a post-race and post-feminist worldview have fed gender conservative, cis-normative and zero-sum politics of Black male aggrievement. NBM, therefore, has been seduced by neoliberal project.Accepted manuscrip