Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Blog Post 4. Brains and Brawn

Intilligence is a factor in being a man. The logic for the racist sexist (all the suffixes) white master during the time of slavery  is something not dissimilar to this:
Real men have control over their sexual impulses
Black men do not have control over their sexual impulses
Therefore they are not real men. {END LOGIC}
Of course, the logic doesn't really end there because if they're not real men it follows that it is not unethical to treat them as animals (as they've conditioned them to believe). The masters superimpose sytnethic concoctions but one negative consequence of that is that everyone starts to takes that as truth (The philosophers can hash the meaning of that all day). That is how stereotypes are made. They don't prop up overnight like a starbucks, they have a long and dubious origin. Marable epmhasises that the perception of black males were that they were physically gifted (their volume and strenght) but were incapable of higher virtues. Part of this is because the slaves had been robbed of their history, taken from a continent they knew next to nothing about as the years progressed. What i am trying to say is the intilligence plays a role in mascalunity. I am saying that brawn doesn't verify one's manliness because if it did then the slaves of the past would have been considered men. Marable raises other topics that are interesting to say the least but i will stick to the point that i have made. Which is that brains is active in mascaluninity.

1 comment:

  1. Your post raises an interesting question regarding the relationship between masculinity and brains, or as you at times refer to it, intelligence. But don't you think a man needs both, brains and brawn (nice alliteration) in order to prove his masculinity? Also do the same masculine requirements apply to all men, of all races?

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