DECONSTRUCTING TYRONE: A NEW LOOK AT BLACK MASCULINITY IN THE HIP-HOP GENERATION | NATALIE HOPKINSON AND NATALIE Y. MOORE (CLEIS PRESS)
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But while evenhandedness can be a virtue, it can easily tip over into a bland refusal to explore difficult positions–or to take any position at all. Tyrone’s authors are journalists (Moore teaches at Columbia College and writes for, among others, the Chicago Tribune; Hopkinson is a staff writer at the Washington Post), and they’ve essentially stitched together a book from a bunch of moderately insightful feature stories. There’s a chapter on Kwame Kirkpatrick, the young, black, and (allegedly) hard-partying mayor of Detroit, another on being black and gay, one on female strippers and their dads, one on buppies raising boys, and so forth. The style is chatty, informed, and ultimately positive, mining the middlebrow ground shared by All Things Considered and Oprah. There are a few forays into more “literary” territory–in describing video performer Melyssa Ford, for example, the authors inform us that “Her long ponytail sways gently like spring leaves on a maple tree.” Luckily, these moments are rare.
Though the book isn’t exactly thoughtful, it does contain a lot of suggestive tidbits. It’s interesting to hear, for example, that black gay male style is much more typically masculine and less stereotypically gay than it was a generation ago. It’s interesting to be introduced to Etan Thomas, a professional basketball player who has also made a name for himself as an activist poet. It’s interesting to learn that Jay-Z tells white people in his audiences not to chant along to “Nigga What, Nigga Who.” It’s interesting to find out that black men with high incomes are less likely to marry than middle-class black men. And of course the interviews with strippers and video chicks are interesting–or, at least, even in the authors’ studiously unexploitative prose, they make sensational copy.
In the not too distant past, any book that treated black men as human could have claimed a righteous, even subversive, agenda. But that’s no longer the case. American institutions–schools, housing, prisons–remain racist and discriminatory. Yet the rise of a fairly stable black middle class has meant that African-Americans are now simultaneously an oppressed minority and just another demographic marketing niche. Race sells, at least to a certain audience. It’s a product as well as a problem.
