Race And Masculinity Essay

Race is undoubtedly a significant force in defining and shaping a young man’s masculine identity. It impacts how a young man is treated as they grow up which greatly affects how they see themselves, their future, and how they conduct themselves in the world. Just as dominant social ideas place masculinity as the privileged gender and better than femininity, white has historically been the privileged race. Hegemonic constructs take this notion and normalizes white male violence in mainstream media, while it criminalizes violence in African American and Latino males. The image of the black man has been historically and socially portrayed as a criminal dating all the way back to the era of slavery. Historically, African American men have been assumed to be particularly violent, aggressive menaces to society, so “legal discourse in the old South made the African American man out to be a criminal or a rapist, justifying his hyper masculinity and thus his lynching” (Reeser 159). Rhetoric was started that minority males are criminals and the crime they committed needed to be controlled. This led to numerous policies and laws which …show more content…
Schools keep police and probation officers stationed within the school and use them to deal with “problem students” often before they have even committed any kind of crime (Rios 38). For many young boys, their school is their first encounter with a police officer where they are shamed and stigmatized and sometimes even arrested for non-criminal-justice matters that should be handled at school (Rios 57). This shame is internalized and the boys feel a need to prove their manhood to rid themselves of this shame and thus reclaim their masculinity. The hyper masculinity is what results from this and is played out in the streets of their communities and