The boys walk
through the school quad playing the dozens, verbally slamming another boy in
absentia for being a weak “f—g” who can’t be trusted. It’s part of the
“accepted” ritual of masculine schoolyard talk, a violent dance of bonding and
ostracism that every queer and cisgender boy must navigate; one that is
powerfully dissected in Barry Jenkins’ Academy Award-winning film Moonlight.
For conscious educators who mentor and teach black boys, Moonlight’s
searing evocation of the tender, ambivalent arc of black male attraction from
elementary to adulthood was a welcome antidote to caricatures of hip hop
hypermasculinity. As educators attempt to safeguard students from the
latest criminalizing wave of Trumpist homophobia, transphobia and heterosexism,
Moonlight offers teachable moments for a humanist, culturally responsive
education that centers black queer lives.
At a recent
teacher training I conducted on creating safe spaces for LGBTQI high school
students, a teacher asked why it was necessary to “call attention” to issues of
sexuality and difference when LGBTQI students were already marginalized?
Shouldn’t educators just treat everyone with the same dignity and respect
“regardless” of sexual orientation? Educational justice activists have long
argued that the colorblind ethos of classroom instruction disingenuously
ignores how the values and mores of the dominant culture indoctrinate us into
binary norms. In her book Other People’s Children, educational
justice writer Lisa Delpit argues that mainstream classrooms are
structured around an implicit “culture of power” which disenfranchises students
of color. Consequently, a “treat everyone with dignity and respect”
approach that isn’t based on a critical consciousness about how the dominant
culture works undermines intersectional identities. In the classroom,
everyday assumptions about interpersonal and romantic relationships
“invisibilize” queer students. Classroom discussions about
traditional straight families headed by heterosexual parents and caregivers
perpetuate the idea that good, normal family units are straight family
units. Assumptions that everyone has been brought up in a conventional
family structure based on a universal nuclear family norm that is uncritically
faith-based, brand queer, foster, homeless and secular youth as other.
Moonlight breaks down these assumptions in often conflicting
ways. Though the film’s protagonist Chiron lives with his drug-addicted
mother he’s mentored and “fathered” by an older black man, played by Mahershala
Ali, who accepts him as gay. His loving surrogate family supports him in
ways that his brittle, largely absent mother cannot. Ali’s delicately
shaded character becomes Chiron’s first crush and compass, while the women in
his life are reduced to caregivers or scolds. Although its depictions of
black women play into
stereotypical binaries of black
womanhood, Moonlight succeeds in foregrounding how black queer youth are
often criminalized when they attempt to express themselves and/or
defend against bullying and harassment. The film’s evocative rendering of
black male relationships encourages discussions about the ways in which black
boys are socialized to fit into the so-called “Man Box”. These
limitations require them to act hard, emotion-less and aggressive in order to
avoid being singled out as different.
During a
recent Women’s Leadership Project student workshop on rape culture and sexual
violence featuring activist, filmmaker and TFW editor Aishah Shahidah Simmons, young men of color at King-Drew Magnet High
School in South L.A. talked about how they’re forced to conform to these roles
or risk ostracism, ridicule or violence. In Moonlight, Chiron is
goaded into fighting his campus tormentor because of a menacing environment in
which he’s constantly taunted and harassed about being gay/effeminate.
This is a familiar scenario in K-12 schools where a climate of fear and
intimidation among boys (across race/ethnicity and class) is virtually
institutionalized, embodied in sports culture and the often perilous ecosystem
of the campus quad. Yet, traditional anti-bullying training which fixates
on “dignity and respect” ignores the way strict messaging about gender
non-conformity shapes the behavior and identities of youth. Writing about
a scene in Richard Wright’s Black Boy, in which Wright kills a kitten in
order to best his emotionally unavailable father, students from my South Los
Angeles-based Young Male
Scholars’ program commented that the dominant
culture’s
failure to show loving representations of black fatherhood plays a strong role
in the sometimes aggressive relationships they have with each other. In Black
Boy, Wright learns violent masculinity navigating Jim Crow society, black
patriarchy and his family’s “spare the rod, spoil the child” religiosity.
His relationships with other boys are largely adversarial, based on boasts,
one-upping and his peers’ intimidation by his intellectual curiosity.
Early on, Wright’s father becomes the negative role model he inadvertently ends
up emulating in his struggle for daily survival. Though Wright was straight,
his childhood trajectory as a poor, skeptical outcast forced to fend for
himself and “become a man” within the context of unrelenting violence, is similar
to the young Chiron’s. Faced with constant slights and attacks, Wright
closes himself off emotionally from the world. Similarly, Chiron withdraws from
all but a few of his peers, and his muteness becomes a metaphor for society’s
failure to see or hear him. Yet, Moonlight’s concluding scene
between Chiron and his nemesis/soulmate gestures toward healing and
reconciliation. Overall, the film’s timely exploration of trauma,
tenderness and caring between men is an antidote to the heterosexist swagger of
the Trump administration. Re-visioning relationships between boys and men
and countering the violence of homophobic, transphobic and heterosexist trauma
is central to fighting sexism and misogyny. K-12 educators have a signal
role to play in shaping classroom practice, school culture and curricula that
takes up this charge, and supports the intersectional lives our youth live.
Cross-posted with permission from The Feminist Wire where this post originally appeared.
Posted by Sikivu Hutchinson
Contributor for The Feminist Wire
Feminist Author/Novelist
Twitter: @sikivuhutch
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