Three Lean Cats in a Hall of Mirrors: James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and Eldridge Cleaver on Race and Masculinity

Abstract

The postwar investment in white masculinity was also propped up by an economic surplus that derived from the exploitation of black and brown people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which enabled the U.S. corporate elite to create a new American middle class, a strata of white-collar employees, comprised of young white men from working class, sometimes ethnic (Jewish, Irish, Italian, and Eastern European) backgrounds, many of whom were veterans and now able to receive university educations as a result of the G.I. Bill. Contrary to the white ethnic worker's desire to reject his "blackness," and to subordinate black men, many northern corporate elites, for reasons other than what might be described as "humanitarian," hoped to bring about a new racial equality within U.S. society. While Baldwin's "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy" does much to unsettle the false assumptions about race and masculinity on which Mailer's "The White Negro" is based, it ultimately fails to disentangle itself from the masculinist presuppositions it attempts to critique.