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Turner, D. 2024. Intersectionality and stereotyping of black men: Keynote talk at ACAT conference 2023. Reformulation, Winter, p.5-8.
Dr Dwight Turner is Course Leader on the Humanistic Counselling and Psychotherapy Course at the University of Brighton, a PhD Supervisor at their Doctoral College, a psychotherapist, and supervisor in private practice. His publications include The Psychology of Supremacy (2023), and Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy (2021), which are both published by Routledge, together with several chapters in anthologies on aspects of counselling and psychotherapy, and over 50 academic papers on everything from intersectionality in psychotherapy, to dreamwork, to Afrocentric spirituality.
A leading driver in Intersectional Psychotherapy, Dr Turner is an experienced conference speaker, including numerous keynote presentations. Dr Turner has also run workshops for a wide variety of Universities, Charities, and private organisations on issues of race, difference and intersectionality in counselling and psychotherapy. Dr Turner can be contacted via his website www.dwightturnercounselling.co.uk and can be followed on social media on LinkedIn, Threads, or on Twitter at @dturner300.
Introduction
In April 2023 I was invited by ACAT to give a keynote as part of their annual conference. My keynote was designed to introduce and explore issues around intersectional identity and the stereotyping of black masculinity, in particular within the worlds of counselling and psychotherapy.
One of the interesting things about this talk, and in a way a good number of the talks that I do, is the format they take and how they come together. They will often take varying different forms and ebb and flow and grow, even up until the day of the actual presentation. This was no different with this particular talk, in that on the morning of the presentation, I found myself listening to Prince’s song Kiss, from the album Parade (Prince and the Revolution, 1986). This song is a favourite of mine as I am a massive Prince fan and re-watching the video reminded me an awful lot of how Prince’s identity, as a man of colour and as a musician of colour, fluctuated and flowed within different forms of sexuality. He was a type of artist where it was very difficult to ascertain his sexual orientation and where he very much avoided playing to stereotypical ideas of what it is or was to be a black man. Bringing this wonderful piece of music to the fore at the beginning of my talk was therefore the ideal way of introducing something more authentic and genuine and curious around black masculinity and how it is seen.
This write-up of that talk looks at the different intersectional layers that form black masculinity and also considers how stereotyping of gentrification and othering have played huge roles in marginalising some of these intersectional ways that black men may well present.
The presentation
Intersectionality is a term coined by Professor Kimberley Crenshaw, Professor Hill-Collins, Audrey Lorde, and a number of other black feminists (Carastathis, 2014; Collins, 2019; Collins & Bilge, 2016; Lorde, 1984). These feminists recognised that although they were on the side of feminism, that their struggle also held issues around race that were not considered by traditional, mainstream white feminism. Intersectionality, as a theory therefore recognises, as per Audrey Lorde’s words that we do not lead single issue lives; that we are not just male or female; that we are not just black or white.
The importance of this is to recognise that identity is incredibly fluid and when we combine within this the ideas of phenomenology, the identity is not only fluid, not only multi-faceted, but evolves and ebbs and flows throughout our lifetimes.
Simply put, who I, Dr Dwight Turner, am now at the age of 54, at the time of writing this paper, an academic, a father, an ex-husband, is vastly different to how I, Junior Technician Turner, would have been at age 21 as I stepped off the plane in Berlin, as an RAF serviceman, working as a communications systems analyst at RAF Gatow in Germany.
We change all the time and just offering you those two examples of who I was as a human being but also as a man, then highlights just how much variety in my own experience there would have been of black masculinity.
The other part to recognise here, within an intersectional approach, is something which often gets misunderstood or mis-quoted. This is the idea that as we all walk with multiple types of identities, that we all walk with both privilege and otherness. That means at any given moment I can be marked out as an outsider, as a man of colour, as son of migrants, or that I could also be seen as holding immense privilege, as a heterosexual, as able-bodied, and as an academic black man. None of us, as presented in my talk, are just one or the other, and the propensity to deny that we hold privilege and to adhere to our own sort of sense of outsiderness, is actually a form of narcissistic disempowerment, which means that we have over-identified with one aspect of identity and displaced or projected outwards another aspect onto something else.
Understanding race
Given that we have now considered the idea that we walk with both privilege and otherness, we also need to understand the construct of race and racial identity. Contrary to popular belief, race is a binary construct. It is relational and is built between those who assign to themselves ideas of what it is to be a white person (and in its original form that would mean English), versus those who are deemed to not be white who are seen as less than human, as savage, and were seen as the racialised other. Race therefore combines aspects of identity which are seen as favourable and then casts out those other aspects of racialised identity, the casting being onto the racialised other.
This therefore means that whiteness and blackness in these instances are co-created constructs. In a similar vein to how De Beauvoir (2010) saw that what it was to be a woman was defined by men, the socialisation of black men often revolves around either an acceptance of their position outside or on the outskirts of white society, or on the efforts made to assimilate to become part of whiteness.
When we look at what racism actually is, racism can take many different forms. In the talk I considered just a few of these, from the more obvious ones, racialised slurs, fascism, racist jokes, hate crimes, to the more insidious and subtle ones, such as claiming colour blindness, the idea that we do not see the racialised other, even when they are right in front of us, that fear of seeing somebody who has been deemed as less than, then bringing up a certain fear within oneself or, conversely the idea that when one has the power not to see race, that one is elevated in some fashion.
There was a discussion about the white saviour complex, the constant projection of areas of poor blackness and how there needs to be somebody who is white, a popular television figure, for example, who will come in and rescue blackness, being based around the idea of white superiority, as well as class superiority. Tokenism as another form of racism also holds the idea that when, in white environments, persons of colour are invited to sit in on boards, or to play a supposedly prominent role. Those roles, those ideals, those positions, because they hold no power, then become tokenistic. The systemic structures of whiteness which have been created and designed over hundreds of years, therefore work together to marginalise, and ultimately reject those who might be seen as the racialised other. All these forms here discussed were looked at in the talk and actually are ways in which persons of colour experience marginalisation and racism.
Understanding othering
In order to understand though the processes which are put in place which mark and marginalise one group or another, we have to recognise the process that is othering. Othering from a sociological perspective is the idea that, instead of remembering that a person is a complex bundle of intersectional identities, what we ultimately do in order to make it easy to dehumanise and therefore to marginalise the racialised other, is to reduce them down into one or two core characteristics (Gabriel, 2012; Turner, 2021). In this case to see somebody as just black and just a man, thereby rejecting the part that they may play in their community, the fact they may be a parent, an academic, an elder, a youngster, whatever it might be.
Intersectional approaches in their own sort of unique way sort of give back the humanity that we all hold to ourselves. Within a racialised context, when we encounter racism, when we encounter othering as a facet of racism, what actually happens is we are dehumanised, reduced down to one or two key identities, and then projected upon, with said projections being aspects of the subject which they do not wish to own. Projection is a form of racism it is hugely important to understand. The fear that a person has of a man of colour is as much a fear designed from within citizens of white supremacy and of patriarchal supremacy, as it might be of anything real and tangible (Turner, 2023). We see this a lot played out in media and on television in the shows and the roles that persons of colour therefore might take on, be they mothers, thieves, drug dealers (Hall, 1996).
Black male sexuality
One of the other core characteristics in the othering of black masculinity is the sexualisation of black men. A facet of the experience of black men in white environments since the days of slavery, the preponderance of images and messages around the virility of black men has its roots very much in the role of black men in siring children for their slave owners (Akbar, 1984). Black men were very much used as you would cattle, and although slavery has long since passed away, the idea of the sexualisation of black masculinity is something which exists, even today, in the imaging which we often see in the media, such as the now infamous images of Linford Christie from the Sun newspaper back in the 1990s, to even personal stories that I could tell of partners, normally European, who were only drawn to me because they wanted to know “If it was true sexually”.
As stated earlier, in the othering of black masculinity, and in the reduction of black masculinity down to one or two core areas, the stereotypical idea of a black man is that one then has to perform in many ways, and this includes sexually. Sexuality though is not just about performance and is also about the clothes that we wear. An interesting idea out of colonisation actually rotates round clothing, for the women reading this particular paper, they will understand that the laws which barred women from wearing trousers were only abolished less than 100 years ago here in the United Kingdom and still exist in other countries around the world (Turner, 2022).
This held similar connotations when we factor in ideas around race and racism. For example, in order for a man of colour to begin to be seen as anything near civilised, he had to give up what might have been traditional dress and he would have to instead choose to wear trousers. The fact that the genital area was clothed and sheathed in a certain way, and how this was then designed to present an idea of cultural superiority and maturity, is something which we often fail to recognise when we look at the role of clothing in the racist experiences of the racialised other.
To understand these sorts of experiences for men of colour, to recognise that actually they are as much bombarded by ideas and messages about how they should present as black men, through the media, through compatriots, through colleagues, even through friends, is to understand the weight of racism that they carry at all times. These wounds will therefore, understandably, sit in the unconscious and another facet of the talk that I gave was the exploration of both drawings and in particular dreams of those who were designated as the racialised other.
Dreams of Black Men
The scene begins with me driving my car to a hotel. I park up in a space near the entrance and go inside. After I have looked around a bit I look out of the large window to see that I have left my dog, a brown labrador, tied to the car. As it is a grey day the dog is laying down underneath lest it rains. A white woman in her 40s with curly hair appears along with two burly white bald men. The woman squats over the car and urinates onto the dog. I am furious and rush outside to rescue the dog, but the two men get in the way, manhandling me roughly. I know they are bigger than me and that I am outnumbered but I fight for my dog as I suddenly wake up.
This dream of my own experience as the racialised other, and my own sort of internalised racism, when worked with offered a doorway to understanding and reducing the impact of these internalisations. Although a very graphic and very painful dream, working with the fact that actually this dream is provoked less by external forces but more by the internalisations of my experience as a black man, helped me to actually ground myself in the reality that I was every part of this dream (Hamilton, 2014; Jung, n.d.). The fact that I was fighting for my instinctual part was core here. The part of myself which is real, which should not have to hide underneath a car; the fact that I am the woman squatting over said dog, and that I am also the white bouncers who protect her whilst she does this. Both of these talk about the internalisations of an external experience of the conjunctia between patriarchy and white supremacy which actually reinforces racist ideas and ideals and the oppression of black men.
Summary
Although this talk was less than an hour, and involved some very interesting questions from an audience, what it did do was stimulate interesting debate and discussion about the weight of experiences of black men, the sexualisation of black men, and the ways in which we can work with the internalisations both creatively and through dreamwork, of those experiences as black, sexualised, marginalised men.
References
Akbar, N. (1984). Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery. New Mind
Beauvoir, S. de. (2010). The Second Sex. Alfred A. Knopf
Carastathis, A. (2014). The Concept of Intersectionality in Feminist Theory: The Concept of Intersectionality in Feminist Theory. Philosophy Compass, 9(5), 304–314. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12129
Collins, P. H. (2019). Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory. Duke University Press
Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2016). Intersectionality: Key Concepts. Polity Press
Gabriel, Y. (2012). The Other and Othering - A short introduction. Yannis Gabriel Website. http://www.yiannisgabriel.com/2012/09/the-other-and-othering-short.html
Hall, S. (1996). Critical dialogues in cultural studies. Routledg.
Hamilton, N. (2014). Awakening through dreams: the journey through the inner landscape. Karnac Books Ltd
Jung, C. G. (n.d.). The Concept of the Collective Unconscious CARL JUNG
Lorde, A. (1984). Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference. Sister, Outsider.
Revolution, P. and the. (1986). Parade (p. 1). Warner Bros
https://www.discogs.com/master/16132-Prince-And-The-Revolution-Parade
Turner, D. D. L. (2021). Intersections of Privilege and Otherness in Counselling and Psychotherapy (1st ed.). Routledge
Turner, D. D. L. (2022). #DecoloniseThis I: Clothing and Colonialism. Dwight Turner Counselling. https://www.dwightturnercounselling.co.uk/2022/04/28/decolonisethis- i-clothing-and-colonialism/
Turner, D. D. L. (2023). The Psychology of Supremacy. Routledge