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

Abstract

During the 1950s and 1960s, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and Eldridge Cleaver initiated a literary discussion on race and masculinity that explored the undercurrents of conflict and power traversing the Beat, Civil Rights, and Black Power movements of the post-World War II era.This conversation was prescient, if sometimes also awkward and troubling, in its exploration of the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in U.S. society.Baldwin's Another Country and "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy," Mailer's "The White Negro," and Cleaver's Soul on Ice attempt to renegotiate homosocial relations between black men and white men during the post-World War II era in the hopes of moving closer to some form of racial reconciliation.To my mind, Baldwin, rather than Mailer or Cleaver, emerges as the hero of this discussion.Mailer's "The White Negro" tells us more about the repressed fantasies of white men than it does about what it means to be black.Furthermore, while Mailer can envision white men benefiting from immersing themselves in black culture, he feels threatened by black men who trespass upon white cultural territory, particularly when such trespass involves the possibility of "miscegenation" with white women.In "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy," Baldwin's efforts to do battle with Mailer's romantic racialism and his uncritical valorization of a prepolitical "rebel without a cause" masculinity anticipate positions that now form the basis for gender studies and critical race theory.This is not to say that Baldwin is unambiguous in his articulation of these positions; often, on issues of race and masculinity, he fails to disentangle himself from the very positions he is attempting to critique.Rather, I would argue that in responding to Mailer's "The White Negro," Baldwin wavers between essentialist, anti-essentialist, and strategic-essentialist perspectives.Furthermore, in his exploration of the roles that fantasy and projection play in

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