Episode 12: The Morehouse Man with Saida Grundy

Tell this to Morehouse students all the time, I say you should be very concerned that people who have such disdain for black people have such interest in you.

Hello, welcome.

I'm Adrienne Daub.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

Today we are talking to Seda Grundy, who is the author of a really amazing book of sociology called respectable it is about the politics and paradox in making the morehouse man about respectability politics and masculinity at uh morehouse college and seda i'm so happy to have you with us thank you so much for joining us today thank you guys this is really exciting for me i have no idea how you all came across this book but you say all the most flattering things to me when you say you you want to talk about gender politics and black masculine.

I mean, I have to say, the book's been on my radar for a little while, and we knew the moment I cracked it open, I was like, oh, yeah, this is extremely our shit.

We need to talk to her right away.

Well, this podcast, I mean, it's, you know, for me, knowing this podcast exists is really amazing.

It's really inspiring to see academics do like the stuff that we care about.

And you all have such a breadth of just

really caring about knowledge far beyond sort of the disciplinary sort of boundary, right?

Which I think all this stuff, when it actually gets into the real deal steps of the capital types of politics, that stuff really matters.

Well, thank you.

And I think it's been interesting for us to come across your book because, you know, talking about gender conservatism with Adrian, especially in like this moment, this like post-2016 moment, we've talked a lot about whiteness, you know, how gender conservative has been

has been used and is being used to reify whiteness and to try and find its barriers.

And you've come at this in a very different way.

So can you tell us a little bit about your own history with Morehouse?

So the reason I like the title of your podcast so much is because, you know, when you talk about getting in bed in the right, you have to also have to talk about what bedfellows the right makes.

And when it comes to black masculinity, it makes bedfellows across the left and the right for this idea of fixing black men into sort of respectable black men.

So young black men in particular in this country are looked at as a problem population, but that has consequences for all young black men, not just those who are in peril.

And so I took really the other side of that paradox of black men and talking about black men who are, you know, upwardly mobile, who are college educated, who represent the crust of the sort of the foothills of making a new black male elite, right?

And so it really is what happens when you think you're fixing the problem of young black men by by creating solutions to that problem right

and in that i swing a really hard feminist axe and i say that there's actually problems created from narrowly defining what masculinity is acceptable for black men who are good air quote black men and this is something you have a little bit of experience with way too much

You're an alum of Spelman, right?

So your early intellectual life was shaped by proximity to this institution.

Yes, so you know, black colleges like Spelman, like Morehouse, like Howard, like Hampton, they have a very outsized sort of influence on Black communities.

In fact, there's lots of literature about Black colleges are not just educational institutions, they're also community institutions, they also create Black politics, they have a larger role to larger communities than even, you know, white elite schools do, right?

And so,

Morehouse's sort of looming presence, his looming influence on what black manhood should be is far larger than the campus.

So, you know, even as a little girl, my, you know, I have, you know, multiple uncles who went to Morehouse.

Morehouse was always a thing, right?

We see it on episodes of the Cosby show.

We see it in reference to all these black male leaders who come out of Morehouse.

You can't talk about MLK without talking about Morehouse.

He and his father went to Morehouse.

Julian Bond went to Morehouse.

You know, the list goes on.

Even currently, Raphael Warnock, Herman Kane, which we don't,

you can't win them all.

But there's a very long list of black male elites in their fields.

Either those are civil politics elites, business elites, etc.

So when I was at Spelman College, I started Spelman fall of 2000 to date myself.

One of the first things that happened when I was a sophomore was a vicious homophobic attack on a student named Gregory Love.

This made national news, partly because it was the first time that the state of Georgia was going to try a hate crime.

They had a new hate crime statute.

Gregory Love goes into the shower of his dormitory and he peers over one of the stalls.

He says, I was just looking for my roommate and I, you know, I couldn't find my glasses.

I couldn't really see.

In that stall was a young man named Aaron Price.

Aaron Price goes ballistic.

He's yelling all these homophobic epithets.

He goes back to his dorm room.

He gets a baseball bat and he comes hunting for Gregory Love.

And he beats, he almost murders Gregory Love, right?

I think the charge was an attempted murder.

It was beyond manslaughter.

He leaves Gregory Love on the floor, you know, head fractured.

The response that I noticed as a 19-year-old at this point, I was writing for Morehouse's student paper, the response to me was really troubling because it wasn't, wow,

this should be a point to look at ourselves.

How can an institution so invested in the best of black men also be creating the worst of black men in terms of violence or be creating an unsafe space for these types of black men, right?

You know, part of going to a black college is it's a very utopic experience.

I mean, I always say that my experience at, we call it spellhouse.

The two colleges are so close, Spellman and Morehouse that we often call it spellhouse.

Socially, it's kind of the same institution.

I always say that spellhouse for me was what what white people must experience in America.

It was all about, you know, it was just, it was all about us.

It was like, I was like, oh, this is how they feel about America, right?

And to realize that it wasn't that utopic experience for queer black people, for low-income black people, for gender non-conforming black people, that to me was just unacceptable because it meant so much to me to be safe there.

So Morehouse's response to this huge case that blows up around Aaron Price is sentenced to 14 years and then inside of jail, he gets into another incident in which there's years added on to a sentence.

Their response was, well, should we segregate, you know, the gay population?

You know, should we, you know, should we maybe put an extra, you know,

extra part of the application for gay students of black?

This was absurd to me.

And it told me that they could not understand that their institutional process is what created this.

This was not an aberration, right?

Their idea of what black manhood was allowed someone to say, you don't belong here at the expense of your own life, you don't belong here, right?

And so, that's, you know, sociologically, you know, that's what I became really entrenched in.

I was, of course, writing for the student paper at the time, and I was really pretty indictful of Morehouse.

And then, on some Jedi mind trick, I came back my senior year and was Miss Morehouse College, the queen of the campus.

So, it's like, I got the,

I got this, uh, I got Morehouse from all sides.

I got to represent the college, but I also got to really understand intrinsically sort of how their cultural curriculum was just as important as their academic curriculum.

And Adrienne, this might be a good point for you to jump in because Seda structures her book around Morehouse's pursuit of respectability for black men.

But it's not just respectability politics the way we might usually be accustomed to using that in the vernacular.

It's a very specific kind of respectability that Sate is talking about.

Yeah, and you already kind of allude to what's so cool about your book, the idea that there's a gender curriculum on top of a, like you say at some point, you can fail at masculinity, right?

You can get expelled for failing at masculinity, which is really remarkable.

Like, that's, I think that gets at what Moira was mentioning, that like you're thinking about respectability politics in a way that I found very enlightening, but also clearly goes beyond what we tend to use it as in everyday parlance.

So you do kind of distinguish between respectability politics in general, sort of the idea that we can get out of oppression by good behavior, basically.

And what you call reactive respectability, which you say is a political project and it's institutionalized and organized.

And

I take it to mean that basically it is only embodied in a second step.

As you were saying, the Morehouse structures preceded basically the way these two men ended up living it in conflict basically can you say a little bit more about where did you get this idea for reactive respectability how is it institutionalized yeah so one shout out to black historians because i might be a sociologist but i'm really a closeted historian and i'm working on a way to tell my parents but really it's black historians have been talking about these campaigns that we've had historically really you know pre-emancipation and post-emancipation in which you have to understand so coming out of of slavery, you know, the 15th Amendment bifurcated the race.

So black men had the right to vote and black women didn't.

So black people are in this very, on the sort of fence about their citizenship.

And so there's almost instantaneously abolitionists who are now like, okay, we put ourselves out of business with, you know, the slavery thing.

Now let's switch to what we're really about, which is sort of moralizing black people.

So out of slavery, the campaign around black morality was fierce, right?

Michelle Mitchell, I believe she's still at NYU, has a book called Righteous Propagation, and it really heavily influenced me.

I read this as a grad student, and I was like, oh, this is the bar for me as a black feminist scholar.

And her argument there was just, as I've said, that abolitionists who were a racial coalition instantly took to, okay, black people have to sexually behave their way into citizenship.

So that means no marrying young.

You know, you know, it's funny that we talk about teen pregnancy now.

They talk about teen marriage a lot coming out of emancipation.

About women, black women could not occupy the domestic sphere in the same way because so many black women worked, but it almost doubling down on the femininity of black women because we worked, right?

Black men who were really under siege because they were voting, right?

There was a whole campaign around what was, you know, a proper behavior of black men.

So that has really never died.

That was a

reactive respectability campaign because that was the political exigency of emancipation and of suffrage, right?

If black people are going to vote, we have to behave in a way that says we have earned this.

What we see in my book is just a really contemporary iteration of that.

And it's very important that we're in 2023 now because my book really starts in about 1983.

So 1981 is the largest tax cut.

on in modern history, right, on record.

It's Reagan's tax cut.

It really collapses the black working class into the black poor.

All these social safety debts for black households disappear.

The other thing that happens is it really, again, bifurcates the race in terms of, it's the first time we see black poverty being feminized.

Black poverty now takes on the look of women-headed households and the cultural consequence of that economic warfare.

on black on the black working class.

So, you know, I always tell my students, open your smartphone right now.

There's 150 jobs a woman used to do that are replaced with automation, right?

All these jobs we used to have in the urban sector are eviscerated by neoliberalism and regonomics.

The response to that is not from black leadership like, oh, wow, this is a real crisis of the black poor, particularly black women.

The response is, weirdly enough, an attraction to regonomics in terms of this is an opportunity for black men to get into the boardroom.

And if we can just put on the pinstripe suits, you know, and really that what's best for the race is what's best for the top of the race.

So another book that really influenced mine was Kathy Cohen's Boundaries of Blackness.

Kathy Cohen's a political science at Chicago.

She's my Beyoncé.

Kathy's book.

argues that, you know, so Michael Awkward is a political scientist as well.

They're friends.

And he has this really, really well-known theory called linked fate.

And he's describing why black people vote so similarly across region, across religion, across ethnicity.

Black people tend to vote in large blocks.

The reason for that, he said, was we believe that what happens to the least of us happens to all of us, that we have a linked fate ideology about the race.

But Kathy Cohen comes along and she says, Well, if that was the case, then AIDS would have been at the top of the ballot for black political agendas, right?

Because AIDS, you know, patient zero was a white male, we believe, but patient one was black, right?

aids devastated black communities right and again regan did nothing about that so she says if that were the case then every pulpit every barbershop every you know jesse jackson everyone else would have been talking about aids but who was aids affecting the hyper marginalized black people queer urban and poor All I did was really invert Kathy Cohen's book and say it's not that the political agenda just hyper-marginalizes black people sort of the bottom of the pile it's usurped by black people at the top of the pile which are black male elites which we tend to say that the what's best for the race is what's best for its college educated black men well this might be a good moment to turn to morehouse itself which is like creating that black male elite and also creating the priorities that put them at the center of discourses about black thriving.

So can you walk us through the history of the institution really really quickly?

Yeah, um, so this is there are some things I learned about Morehouse that Morehouse doesn't tend to know about itself.

So, this is actually something I've become kind of fascinated about.

Like, black colleges often have their sort of official histories of themselves, which are actually really long processes of not talking about sometimes what really happened because that was part of our survival and part of appeasing white donors.

So, what really found in Morehouse College in Augusta, South Carolina, in 18, I want to say 60,

1867, I want to say, Morehouse is founded.

What happens?

In 1869, in Augusta, South Carolina, there's a massive race riot.

Augusta, Georgia, and the town in South Carolina are lying right across the river, right across the Savannah River from each other.

And this is really a hotbed for like black free people in the South.

And they're having all these conversations with Black people in the North, particularly through the American Baptist Seminary, which is a very large organization former abolitionists a bunch of religious leaders white black some of them are involved in howard university some of them are involved in spelman all that to say morehouse's founders are under siege because they are having conversations about the conditions of black people in the south that race riot runs them out of augusta all the way to atlanta why did they move to atlanta because the union barracks were in atlanta the last of the union barracks in reconstruction were still in Atlanta.

They moved to the highest point in the city of Atlanta for their safety.

Spelman, which is founded in 1881, moves from really down the road in Friendship Baptist Church to be next to Morehouse for safety.

So the story of Morehouse, all that to say, is the story of black safety against white violence.

The institution, you know, in its 20th century iterations, it really goes, Morehouse was not the only historically black college for men.

In fact, again, stories they don't don't tell, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania was considered like the college for black men.

Lincoln University graduated two heads of state, the prime minister of Nigeria, the prime minister of Ghana.

Langston Hughes went to Lincoln, my grandfather went to Lincoln.

And so Morehouse was considered sort of a sleepier southern preacher-centered type of college until Lincoln goes co-ed in the 1950s and Morehouse sort of becomes premier as this place of like, you know, once King is affiliated with them, Julian Bond, that whole civil rights generation.

Morehouse becomes very, very larger than its size into the 1970s and 1980s.

I would say that is in part because of their alliance with right-wing, you know, governance.

But the story of Morehouse really is a story in which it's a school that is very

imbibed with its own sense of tradition and kind of like, you know, know, people often describe it as like a large fraternity, right?

There's a brotherhood there, but often what we call tradition and institutions isn't actually that ancient.

Traditions really change and we reinvent them.

And so, much of what you see in Morehouse Now is not something they were doing, you know, in the 1930s and 40s.

It's what they were doing in the 1980s.

And that was really my, you know, call to task about these things that they say we can't change this because it's tradition, but they've changed their own traditions many times over.

So, Morehouse now is, it looms large, even though it has many struggles.

Many black colleges have struggles, but Morehouse has particular struggles because of what's going on with young black men in high school.

It also has struggles because of its own operation.

Let's be clear.

Its own board of trustees has caused this trouble.

So, some of these things are not endemic to black men.

They are endemic to Morehouse not wanting to catch up with the times.

So, that's such a fascinating walkthrough.

And it's amazing to see how you describe in the book, I mean, the way that it is about an accommodation to kind of this donor class, which is something that all of us who work at a university know, except that it doesn't, right?

At Stanford, it doesn't have the additional, well, it has a racial layer because everything in the United States does, but it's not as explicit, right?

Like, I think you mentioned that Morehouse didn't have a black president until the 20th century, which is like kind of wild.

You're like, so this is very, this is very key.

So, going back to King's assassination.

So, when MLK is assassinated in 1968, this is important to Morehouse for this reason.

Coretta Scott King, his widow, wants to continue his democratic socialist justice project, right?

She believes that the solution to the race is from the bottom up, as he believed, right?

He was very leftist, right?

So he was very anti-capitalist, very anti-militaristic.

But another one of his lieutenants is named Andrew Young.

Andrew Young goes on to be the mayor of Atlanta.

Andrew Young has two, if not three, centers named after him at Morehouse.

Andrew Young Young was always considered King's right-leaning lieutenant.

In fact, the apocryphal story goes that when King wanted to know how a speech would go over with the right, he would run it past Andy because Andy was his

sort of in-house, not a Republican, but a conservative, right?

Andy Young is extremely in bed with white donorship.

And I'm talking about right-wing right donors.

So Dan Cathy, CEO of Chick-fil-A, the Walton Foundation, Walmart, walmart the walton family

dan kathy was the chair of morehouse's board of trustees until like two minutes ago this so you're talking

look

there are people who would say and i tell this to morehouse students all the time i say you should be very concerned that people who have such disdain for black people have such interest in you right

and it's because so stanford absolutely has a donor class but that donor class tends to be affiliated with stanford right You have probably a large, you know, overwhelming majority, you know, alumni, right?

You probably have people who, you know, are at least interested in sort of getting their kids into Stanford, sort of want these favors off of Stanford.

That's part of why they're in the donor class.

Yeah.

No, Dan Campbell's not sending his kids to Morehouse.

So again,

the idea of fixing black men into a certain type of like, see, you know, you don't have to address, you know, mass incarceration if you just say, well, you know, the ones who are in suits are doing fine.

You know, it's a, it's a cultural project that is really about a neoliberal idea of black men's problems are just a matter of black men's choices, right?

They're doing this to themselves.

And so, yeah, you have, you know, again, Andy Young is really the one who's responsible for bringing not just donorship, right-wing donorship.

So Betsy Davos,

again, the Waltons.

He brings all of them into Morehouse.

In the book, I talked to young men who said, Yeah, I was part of this sort of student troop who we were just supposed to go, we were kind of like on tour and supposed to go around and impress these white donors with how clean and articulate we are.

Many, many black colleges have had very

unexpected white.

And so, for example, we have to go back to Jim Crow.

Some of the strongest advocates of HBCUs were segregationists, right?

Right, right.

So the making of Strange Bedfellows has always been there, right?

Mr.

Segregation Now, Segregation Forever, right?

He was extremely, I'm talking about a governor of Alabama, a presidential candidate who got shot, Wallace, George Wallace.

George Wallace was a very strong proponent of black colleges because he did not want to desegregate white universities.

So they've always had this peculiar allyship, for lack of a better word.

But particularly after the civil rights movement, you have a number of people who say the civil rights movement needs to grow up.

We need to stop marching and we need to get into this corporate space, into capitalism.

And that's how you see these inroads of very far-right, very wealthy donors interested in Morehouse College, which again, they're not interested in any other type of black student.

Yeah, I mean, I have to say that that donor list,

if I saw that at Stanford, I'd be terrified.

I mean, like, only Hillsdale College probably has that donor list.

My God.

Well, you know, so from the left as well.

So, you know, what I talk about in the book is into the Obama era, and I would say Obama sort of put his foot on the pedal of this, this idea of neoliberal fixes for black men.

So neoliberal fixes rely on these public-private partnerships.

So what, you know, black boys really need is like, you know, you know, a corporate charter school.

That's really part of the idea that black men are culturally defective.

Not that, you know, basically nothing structurally needs to be addressed.

Right.

They're culturally defective, and therefore, that's the solution.

Which is so brilliant, the way you work that out in your description of the Morehouse Man, which really comes across so nicely in the book, because it's so easy to think, like, oh, it's actually a traditionalist institution.

But this is something we found so often in the podcast that when people say, as you say, tradition, they mean the 1980s.

Like, it's not, this isn't going back generations.

This is going back one, right?

Like, it's, and you're exactly right.

It's like, it's, it's the image of black masculinity, sort of the mirror image of broken windows policing.

It's the mirror image of

the Moynihan report, et cetera, et cetera.

Right.

Like, it's absolutely, it's meant to not raise the question of like, what is it structurally that leads to different differential outcomes for American men and women according to race, but instead kind of gets fixated on exceptions and exceptionalism and gets fixated on

kind of bootstraps, you know,

pull up your pants rather than the bootstraps, I suppose.

Yes, absolutely that.

Absolutely that.

You know,

real obsession with cultural fixes to structural problems.

And it's really, you know, I think my book is the very uncomfortable admission that as much as the Moynihan report was critiqued by black feminists, it was very widely accepted among not a small portion of black people,

particularly black people in the upper middle class and elites, right?

That this idea of like, yeah, that is what I hear sort of spewed at Morehouse is like just a black face on Moynihan, right?

And this is sort of larger.

So, we're also talking about a climate black men politically that's larger than Morehouse, but particularly right now.

So, you know, Trump doubled the digits that Romney had with black men.

It's not a huge, you know, demographic, but it is considerable considering black women, 98% voted against Trump, right?

At least we voted Democratic.

So Trump did not do well with Black women at all.

We pretty much hate him, but he did have this real appeal to black men.

And when we think about, you know, I love my dear, dear friend, the political historian Leah Wright Raguer had this excellent book called The Loneliness of the Black Republican.

And I'm reading that and I'm thinking, this is a gender book.

She's not even a gender scholar, but I'm like, this to me is a, it's a book about black male attraction to the right.

What does Trump really lend black men?

Part of it is that Moynihanian thing of like, see, it's black women just won't let you be men, right?

Black women are just emasculating of you.

And what Trump sort of gave them was a sense of like,

you, you know, I,

you too can sort of be, you know, a patriarchal asshole.

It's only black women holding you back.

I always say there's like, if you were to draw a chiasmic square and you put white men, white women, black women, black men, You have white women who say, you know, if it just weren't for gender, we'd be in power, right?

So their allegiance to white men has always been there.

And then you have black men who say, if it just weren't for race, we'd be in power.

And so for both of those demographics, the appeal is not always to eradicate someone like Trump or any of these leaders.

It's that they're just one step away.

Right?

It would be, you know, even, you know, the sort, you know, I live on the internet.

And so the things I hear black men say about R.

Kelly or Cosby for a

sizable minority, a very non-silent minority of black men, the problem is not that these were cultures of harm.

The problem to them is they didn't get away with it like white men do.

So they always bring up the, you know, you know, Bill Cosby, you know, went to jail.

What about Harvey Weinstein?

First of all, Harvey Weinstein did 20 years.

Right.

He will die in prison.

I don't know where you made up this idea that Harvey Weinstein got scot-free.

But that tells me that, again, it's not, you know, intra-racial patriarchy, which is about everything you know my book was about we see a larger political movement particularly on the internet that incels is really that name doesn't capture what's happening because black men who are attracted to those ideologies they're not involuntarily celibate what they often are are black men who feel like if i could just get in a white man's seat, I too would have power.

Yeah, this might be a good moment to turn to the chapter in your book, which deals with sexual violence at Morehouse and the way that their ideology of black masculinity was actually wielded towards the impunity for sexual violence.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So this was one, the article I wrote for that chapter was the hardest writing I've ever had to do in my life.

It was one of those points where you're like, maybe this is where I tap out as an academic.

Like, I just can't do this.

But it was because I was trying to make theories that didn't exist in terms of field.

So when we look at sexual assault studies across, I would say psychology dominates it, public health, and then sociology is a little bit behind.

We very rarely, particularly when it comes to campus sexual assault, race is almost, it's just not a variable that's ever considered.

I mean, there were only four articles I came across that considered race, and those were for the victims, not the perpetrators, right?

Right.

And so there was no consideration.

Now, I'm a masculinity scholar at my, you know, at my inception, right?

To me, masculinities, hegemonic masculinities as we know it, it's all about the variations amongst men, right?

So to treat men as some sort of monolithic college campus demographic to me was ridiculous.

We know in the literature on campus sexual assault, coming, you know, out of the 80s really, that men rape in context, right?

So alcohol infused parties are one context.

Fraternities are a context.

And for me, the argument was that race was another context because race also organizes not only how men sort of move throughout campus spaces, they organize their friend groups, but more importantly, they organize their ideas about gender, right?

They organize their ideas about what being well-behaved is, what a good man is, and what the consequences are of sexual violence, right?

So I wanted to make clear in that chapter, which I think I did, that college campuses are really a rehearsal ground for white men who learn the purchase of white masculinity and what they're getting away with, right?

Brett Kavanaugh, at every stage of his education, learned over and over again, I'll get away with this.

Right.

Right?

No one, there is no accountability for me.

And so black men have a very different idea because they are tied to that larger project about how black men are seen.

So, you know, my argument in that chapter at its core was that we already know from the literature that sexual assault is a way of doing gender, right?

It's a way that men, even men who don't rape, understand that they have power over people who can be raped, which is men, you know, includes other men, includes non-binary people, includes women.

But race is also what's being made in sexual assault, where men learn how they'll be held accountable, how they'll be seen, and they're also learning the gender politics because sexualist violence overwhelmingly is an intra-racial project.

Overwhelmingly, people are assaulting people of their own race.

And so that's really, you know, looking at Morehouse for that was really, Morehouse has a sexual assault problem that I'm not making this up.

The New York Times reported this.

Chronicle of Higher Ed reported this.

Morehouse kind of has a sexual assault problem like the Catholic Church has a child sexual abuse problem in that it's systemically not held accountable the perpetrators.

This has been going on since, you know, I was a student and since before.

And when I was a student, you know, women had some, you know, we could articulate these things.

In the generations before, they probably felt as though they had no support.

Right.

Now, I would say that Spelman students are so like they have like guerrilla feminism.

So, now there's this thing of like, oh, your institution won't hold you accountable, but we absolutely will.

Nice.

So, you know, in looking at that, you have to look at how do black men, in using Morehouse as the case, how do they think that sexual violence informs their ideas of what black manhood is?

And that's what really, you know, that's, you know, those sort of what I found in the findings was really that sexual assault was informing their sense of black manhood as much as it was informing their sense of, you know, black womanhood.

What's the content of what they're being informed about Black manhood?

Because I was really struck by an anecdote in your chapter where you talk about the specific elitism of going to Morehouse as being seen among this subculture there as justifying sexual assault.

He says, like, I think one of the students says, like, at least it was Morehouse

sperm.

Oh, yeah, I mean, that was, that was a jarring, you know, quote for me too.

But it, you know, part of what we have gender asymmetry for black college students and part of the cultural, you know, consequence of that is, yeah, you get this idea that black men are this sort of chosen people in, in, you know, in college, that somehow they should be treated with more impunity, as you saw in the chapter.

The idea that sexual assault and sexual violence is not about the harms that it does to the victims, particularly black women, but it's about sort of the harms it does to black men, right?

That they saw gender violence as a consequence for their image.

And I think it was really important to understand that, you know, white men and college campuses who are perpetrators are probably not thinking like, damn, this really like, this is going to be bad for white men.

They're probably not thinking that.

But you have this very, it's larger than the perpetrator when you have this real coalition of men who are protecting the perpetrator because of what it says more largely black, black men.

And black men have a very particular history with, you know, as Angela Davis said so well, gender violence was used as a touchstone for white terrorism, right?

Now, ironically, white men were overwhelmingly raping black women, but the idea that black men were rapacious and that they were predatory was used repeatedly to attack black communities and families.

And so that is all true.

Both things can can be true is what I think I was trying to say in that chapter, that yes, there is a racial lies terrorism of black people's sexualities, right?

We are particularly impugned for our sexuality.

And also,

black men can do harm to black women, complicating how that sort of, you know, that makes up the sauce of how they see themselves in that.

So one of the things I tried to do in that article was to expand past how the literature typically deals with gender violence in terms of like, typically it's like

we know now that you don't ask respondents this is like sociology methods 101 for your listeners when you're interviewing about things like violence or trauma you don't ask those things directly because one we know that both men and women and non-binary people are so bad at actually defining what what non-consensual acts are that it doesn't actually yield great data to be like, tell me about a time you raped.

Like, it doesn't do anything so we basically asked these questions and the the theory from anthropology is where violence is violence will emerge right that that if you just ask people in the context if violence is there it will emerge in the data and my whole idea was this kept coming up in context where I was talking about other things so I would be talking to them about things like punishment like you know how was you know how strict was the college and they'd be talking about well there was a time my buddy got put out you know for you know the girl lied or you know it you know it what they would say uh sex gone wrong was their sort of

mediation of it that to me was like oh they're taught they're thinking about sexual assault in the context of punishment

right that when you are a good black boy when you're a good black man you have gotten to college by avoiding all the things that penalize other black men or trying your best to avoid the behaviors that you see black boys getting punished for in K through 12, which are a slew of things we punish black boys for, right?

And so their idea was like, no, we're good guys.

And they couldn't sort of connect the idea of being well-behaved to sexual harm.

And they certainly couldn't connect it for their friends, right?

And so this idea that like, you know, well, we don't need, you know, rape prevention strategies because Morehouse has none.

Morehouse still does not have a single rape crisis counselor on campus.

They don't even have an LGBTQ counselor on campus.

The idea that we don't need any of that stuff because good black men don't rape.

And no means no, and that's what we mean.

No means no is not sufficient, right?

We all know that.

But that to them was like good black men don't rape.

So we already know we're well behaved anyway.

This might be a good moment.

to turn to how Morehouse's conception of good black men and good black men's behavior like really becomes constituted in a kind of gender conformity.

Because you talk about problems faced at Morehouse by students who transition.

And Adrian, I thought you had a really good perspective on this as well.

Absolutely.

Yeah, that chapter to me was so, so eye-opening.

And it really gets at this, right?

I mean, like a lot of universities and colleges in the United States struggle with, especially single sex ones, you know, struggle with these issues, obviously.

But I think you make a very convincing case that they're just additional layers here and they're super interesting.

Like, because as you say, adherence to manhood at Morehouse holds equal footing with academic instruction because manhood can be failed.

And they very clearly treat it that way, right?

There's this interesting thing that students who transition during their time at Morehouse since 2019 can be in a situation where they have to plead their case to a three-panel

president of the college, which is great.

First of all,

actually

trained in these things, which is amazing.

So, for our listeners who do not themselves teach at a college, to anyone who teaches at a college that's recognizable as a disciplinary committee like this is what we do to students who have cheated it is very clear

like it's very legible that that's yeah that's that's the solution they found yeah absolutely your gender identity was the wrongdoing we're going to bring you before a tribunal which is more than they do for students who perpetrate sexual assault you know again when i say they have a catholic church problem one of the things i found was that students who are perpetrators are brought before this tribunal that also includes other students.

Oh lord.

So it's like your roommate is being like, nah, he's good.

And also to hell with the anonymity of the victim.

My God.

Right.

And again, they say these things like, no, you know, this is what, you know, every black college does.

It is not because we need to understand the context.

Morehouse enacted a trans policy because Spelman enacted a trans policy.

Right.

Spelman's policy is considered as progressive as the Seven Sisters policy.

So it's the Seven Sisters, you know, the Smiths, the Wellesleys, they're already been doing this.

And their policy, I think, is the best one you can have, which is we accept women, we graduate anyone, right?

Just as simple as that.

There's no, there's no, you need to prove yourself.

And their idea of accepting women, let's say you transitioned as a child, they would say there's enough sort of gender identity there to say that you have a lived experience as a woman.

Now, Morehouse turns around, again, because the pressure was kind of on once Spellman had a policy.

And Morehouse instead of just copying and pasting Spellman's policy which they could have done and they could have copied and pasted Smith's but those are progressive policies and they have in them a very intrinsic idea about gender fluidity right which Morehouse does not accept morehouse turns around and says ha ha

we're gonna you know they make like news for this because this is they're saying this is very progressive right and they say morehouse will accept you know trans men but any other transitioning students, you know, if you're like a femme transitional, you have to go before this tribunal of the president and prove that you, you know, couldn't stay here.

And we have the right to put you out.

Now, I want to make this clear.

They were patting themselves on the back for solving a problem they never had.

Morehouse has never had not one trans man apply to Morehouse College.

What they do have is a very sizable population of genderqueer students, many of whom are femmes, many of whom are identified women, right?

So they didn't address the issue that they actually have,

right?

In fact, they made that even worse and they patted themselves on the back for a group of students they've never had.

This, you know, what you've said was so important to me, the idea that you can fail masculinity means that, you know, in sociology of education, we always say that, you know, colleges have hidden curriculums.

All institutions have hidden curriculums and that the educational institution at educational, you know, at a college would be primary and that the other stuff would be secondary.

But I think that this really flipped that on its head, that really it was the cultural curriculum that was just as primary as the academic curriculum because you could fail the cultural curriculum.

So Morehouse is, you know, trans students and not just trans, really genderqueer, because remember, they're in Atlanta and Atlanta is like black San Francisco, right?

It's like a hotbed of black queerness.

I would say Atlanta and New Orleans, maybe, but really Atlanta because it's so much larger.

And so Morehouse is basically,

I always found this funny.

Maybe because I think the world is queer.

I found this funny.

Morehouse always approaches Atlanta as though it is, you know, battening down the hatches of Atlanta's queerness of like, we can't let all that, all that gay black Atlanta, you know, that's our problem is we're just trying to keep those floodgates out.

I'm sorry, I wish our listeners could see Seda's hand gestures of trying to push away this imaginary flood of black gayness

with like such enthusiastic force.

Oh, I just, I just hold on.

I just spilled my

attempt to stave off the queer Atlantans.

Yes.

Spilling this cream into my floor.

All that to say.

So,

you know, the city of Atlanta is sort of the other character in this book.

Morehouse also has a long relationship to Atlanta.

There's a really great book by Kevin Cruz, the historian called White Flight.

And it's about Atlanta is Atlanta because Atlanta made a compromise, not the Booker T.

Washington compromise.

They made a compromise as a city that they were going to have a black power structure and a white power structure.

Morehouse was intrinsic to fueling that black power structure.

Morehouse has produced multiple mayors of Atlanta and there's also just this symbiosis between black leadership in Atlanta and Morehouse.

So as Atlanta has changed, it's very interesting that Morehouse has gone from we are sort of the seed of Atlanta's greatness.

to this idea of like there's all these parts of Atlanta we don't want in.

I found this very interesting that more, you know, I had a respondent who was a straight cis male who said the college is in the closet about how many students are in the closet.

Wow.

That

Morehouse has this huge queer undercurrent.

It's a reputation they hate about themselves, right?

All the other schools joke about how gay Morehouse is.

You know, all the other, you know, everyone,

there was a joke on Twitter.

Someone said, what's the best, you know, gay club you've ever been to?

And someone said, Morehouse College.

The idea is like, like, all gay black men have dated someone at Morehouse, but like, Morehouse will never copy.

So, what I found was, so, you know, it's kind of this kind of classic couko, right?

The idea of when you suppress something, it only flourishes.

So, they suppressed this queer culture, which meant that it's bubbling right beneath the surface.

I say that to say Morehouse likes to think of Atlanta's queerness as being outside their gates, but actually they are very active in how queer Atlanta is.

They are sort of a wellspring of Atlanta's queerness.

They are attracting all these young, bright men down to their college.

Many of them are very active at varying degrees of outness in Atlanta's queer culture and also become, you know, sort of queer leadership in Atlanta at varying degrees of outness.

Something that fascinated me, so for example, you know, when I was first interviewing students, they would say like, oh, you know, we talk about, you know, the dormitories, because you talk about physical space when you're doing ethnography.

And we talked about the dormitories and they would say, oh, yeah, that's the gay dorm.

And I'm thinking, like, oh, they're just kind of stereotyping that dorm.

And like, there's nothing really much to make about that.

You know, all dorms have queer students.

Wrong.

What I realized was

queer students, and this is the age of the internet, when they were getting accepted to Morehouse, they were going online and saying, okay, which dorm should I stay in?

So this wasn't an imagination.

There was an organized sexual culture at Morehouse in which queer students were organizing around safety, around solidarity, around community to have spaces.

In the book, you saw me talk about Part of Morehouse's ideals about black men are also very clearly articulated.

They have this thing called the five wells, that, you know, a Morhoff man is well read, he's well-dressed, he's well-traveled, he's well-spoken.

There's another well that I freaking remember,

there's five of them I know.

All that to say,

those five wells

are every middle-aged gay man in New York City.

It's like their actual ideal of like what a what a perfect man is, I'm like, pretty damn gay.

Like, enjoys the ballet and opera, yeah

Well, travel?

Like, what's the next thing going to be?

Like, you're a foodie?

Like, it's like, it's like,

but this is the, this is the great paradox in that their actual, there, um, if you got into my last chapter, I talked about it.

There's a class at Morehouse called Leadership and Professional Development.

Yeah, yeah.

It's an etiquette class.

It has no academic value, right?

It's a purely etiquette class about business etiquette.

And it was taught for decades by a legendary Morehouse professor named Mr.

McLaurin.

I don't know if I can out people.

I just don't think it was that in.

I think it was just sort of an open secret.

And again, it kind of reminds me of like Paris is burning with like, you get all these queer men who are teaching supermodels how to walk.

They were being taught masculine, you know, etiquette by gay men.

And yet that to them never registered with like, oh, maybe we need to like accept how sort of queer we are, not just sexually queer, but culturally queer.

So, yeah, that relationship to Atlanta is

to me, as it is Morehouse now,

the through line through Atlanta and Morehouse is not only the politics of the city and the institutions in terms of racial politics, but it's also the queer politics, the queer black politics are the through line.

It's fascinating.

I love this comparison with Paris's Burning, right?

Because

I just showed this to my to my students last week and they were thrilled.

But something I noticed when I rewatched Paris is Burning with my students is that this gay performance culture was very, very hyper-fixated on studying the rules of the white upper class.

And so I think what you, when you talk about Morehouse's ideal masculinity as being somewhat queer, I think, I think it's also very class obsessive.

It's very invested in suppressing class variants.

It's a ballroom culture for corporate.

Nice.

Pierce is Burning.

I also teach it to my students every year.

They love it because they say, oh, wait a minute.

Now I realize like this is copy and paste.

Like every other thing I thought, you know, from Ryan Murphy, what have you, just it all came from black, queer, you know, Afro-Latin ex people in New York City, right?

So there's a scene in Pierce is Burning where one of the categories is executive realness.

That's right.

And

Dorian Corey, legendary mother overall of the culture, grandmother, she says what they are saying is,

if I had the education, I could do that because I can look the part.

Morals would never say what they're doing in executive realness, but it is executive realness.

That class is teaching them, you know, the knots on a tie and how to hold a shrimp fork.

And also, sociologically, I get very fascinated about, like, so let's get into the weeds of social theory in terms of Du Bois.

So one of the things I talk about in the book that becomes the sort of theoretical architecture of the book is this idea that the veil, Du Bois said that racialized people, people of color, live within a veil and that they can see out of the veil, but the veil can't see into them, right?

So we have a double consciousness.

We see ourselves being seen.

all the time, right?

And that really organizes even black spaces where there are no white people.

We see ourselves being seen.

And what you have at Morehouse, because you have Black elites who are being prepared for really, you know, white dominated spaces in grad school and beyond, you have people who are sort of flush against the veil.

So their job is not just that we see ourselves being seen, is that we're the only ones that you should see.

Don't see the rest of the race.

Only see us, right?

And so this idea of, you know,

my colleague Seamus Khan has a book called Privilege.

it's about a St.

Paul's boarding school and Seamus Khan Seamus is a sociologist of elites and so I use his work a lot and he talks about the culture of elites white elites we're talking about has really changed in the 20th century that it went from you have to be born into this is sort of a you know heir apparent type thing to this meritocracy mythology about anyone can become an elite it's just about you know hard work that means that their spaces and their cultures have changed a lot so when you go to the halls of st.

Paul's which is you know one of the the upper crustiest boarding schools in the world, they're not playing Beethoven in their dining hall.

They're playing Kendrick Lamar and Young Thug and Yogati because their idea is we need to learn everybody's culture so that we can be your boss.

It's like,

I need to be culturally competent and you, people, I'm going to one day own.

But Morhouse really, in their idea of the veil, it just occurred to me that they have a very convoluted idea idea of whiteness, that their idea of whiteness is stuck in like a cartoonish Gordon Gecko 1980s idea.

And many of the men, when they actually emerged into those spaces, so I had one of the one of my participants, he was a managing director at Goldman.

So he was kind of one of the most successful, you know, young men out of his class, straight out the gate.

And he was like, yo, everything Morehouse told me to expect was a damn lie.

He's like, my, I get into my, you know, first job, and my boss is a gay white male who who rollerblades to work

he's like everything they told me about this firm handshake and this was going to be a boys club about me impressing you know white men and that I needed to play their own things like they had never really thought about white women being their bosses and like oh I wasn't really prepared but that basically they had a very convoluted idea of what the other side of the veil was going to be.

So, you know, executive realness in that they're being taught, okay, you need to make small talk about Beethoven and Brahms.

Right.

Where, sir?

Like, that's, you know, like, you know, you need to, you know, learn how to, you know, take your dinner roll and not make a butter sandwich out of it.

Well, I don't know what restaurants, you know, are really serving dinner.

Are you going to

garden?

You know, like, it's not like, these are not really the sort of obstacles.

A deconstructed butter roll, maybe, with a.

A butter roll look Boosh?

Yeah, yeah,

exactly.

But this is, you know, their sort of anxiety about the white gays

to me actually convoluted the white gays.

That they, Morehouse was not actually in step with where white elites were.

Yeah, they basically were gonna succeed at the uh scene in American Psycho where they all look at each other's business cards.

Yeah,

that they're gonna be great if they ever encountered the monopoly man and had to wear a mono.

They're going to be

wearing spats on their shoes.

But the actual culture of elites in terms of how drastically it's changed the 20th century.

So, for example, I would ask them things like, you know, they were so prepared to wear a suit, right?

It's Morehouse very suit-obsessive.

It's like, you know, basically, you know, their whole thing against trans students was you can't show up to a job interview in a dress.

Right.

Basically, every argument about defending Morehouse's culture ends with the job interview question.

What are you going going to do with your job interview?

Again, this idea that what are you going to do for white approval?

First of all, there's many jobs you can show up to in a dress.

Most of the jobs in Creative would expect gender non-conforming people to dress how the fuck they want to.

That's

what we live in, right?

But also, if you show up to a suit in a suit to Silicon fucking valley, you'll be laughed out of the goddamn building.

It was preparing, I think this is the irony.

It was preparing black men to immediately become obsolete.

Right.

And what work from home culture are you wearing pinstripe suits?

Right.

Right.

I mean,

probably the top thing you would not do in most of these tech firms is ever show up in the suit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think they're.

Showing up in shoes is just a

something, right?

But like, but the idea is like, they could not see.

how outmoded

their ideas of whiteness were and that they were preparing black men for a world that no longer existed.

They are preparing black men for a world that ended in the savings and loans crash.

Right.

Now, is there a way to think about this as like a as just like watching someone perform an act of repression?

I mean, that's something that I thought about when you talked about like about the closetedness of it all.

That what you do see with a pinstrapped suit that you don't see when someone's showing up with flip-flops is effort.

You see someone real effort.

And I mean, I guess that's the other thing.

They're contending with a kind of racist stereotypes of what black men look like.

And you do mention that the policy against wearing dresses is clearly modeled on the one that is supposed to outlaw quote unquote thug outfits, right?

So it's like, I'm guessing it's mostly about pants and belts.

That, of course, is all about, that was always sort of framed as, it's about effort.

It's not like, it's not that you think, oh, I'm, I look like what they expect me to do, but I'm going to, but they're going to see that I tried.

Is that a thing that in the background here?

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're going to see that, again, like executive realness, I can conform.

Right.

You know, and that I will put in that effort to conform.

Right.

Right.

They're going to see that I won't be a problem.

You know, you'll never have to correct me on the length of my pants.

You'll never have to correct me on my shirt being untucked.

Right.

I won't be a problem.

That cultural curriculum that is so dominant in their undergrad years becomes an idea that cultural curriculum is the most important, you know, part of their adult lives, too.

Right.

Right.

Which for many of the men in my study, because black men are dynamic and they continue to evolve, some of them talk about unlearning.

Right, right.

About, you know, basically the expectations of the world that Morehouse set them up for were not the world they encountered.

And that there were many, for example, they had to unlearn the gendered expectations that Morehouse set them up with when they got married.

So, you know, for my participants who were married to women, they were like, yo, like, they're like, I basically do what my wife tells me.

We both have to change diapers.

We both have to make dinner.

You know, it's like, they're like this idea of like this black woman was gonna you know support me as a king and and you know they're like no when like when you got two kids and strollers gender roles go out the door like it's like you know again like what they were prepared for the morehouse man is a mythology and so all the accoutrements of that mythology were preparing them for a mythalized life that they did not have And the thing about the Morehouse Man as a prototype is, you know, I talk about it being akin to like, you know, a Marlborough man or a James Bond.

That these are all mythologies about men that are unattainable,

right?

No one actually embodies it, but it's held over their heads as though, like, this is, you know, you should ascribe to this and measure yourself by your distance to or proximity to this mythology, but it's not attainable.

And so it's very crushing for them

or it's liberating for them to say that was a myth.

You know,

the people who were imposing that myth did not uphold that myth.

In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalfis.