The sperm bank is the pair’s Plan B. Plan A entails Wahlberg and the bear breaking into Tom Brady’s house and stealing some of his spunk as he sleeps. When they lift the sheets, staring at his crotch, they’re bathed in the golden light of video game treasure. In another movie, this might be a clever conceit. Here it feels like paranoid propaganda, a deluxe version of what entertainment and politics have been doing for more than two hundred years: inventing new ways to assert black inferiority. Now a teddy bear has a greater claim to humanity than the black people it mocks.
This is what’s been playing out in our culture all along: a curiosity about black sexuality, tempered by both guilt over its demonization and a conscious wish to see it degraded. It’s as old as America, and as old as our movies.
The national terror of black sexuality is a central pillar of the American blockbuster. In 1915 D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation envisioned a post–Civil War country run by feckless white abolitionists, nearly ruined by haughty blacks and then saved by the Ku Klux Klan—a mob whose energies are largely focused on rescuing a white woman from a half-black, half-white lieutenant governor’s attempt to force her into marriage. That’s just the plot; Griffith’s genius was at its most flagrant in the feverish surrounding details. The country isn’t even done being rebuilt in The Birth of a Nation, and here comes the KKK, already determined to make America great again. The movie crackles with sensationalist moral profanity. Many of the black characters, for starters, are played by white actors, all having a grand time making randy savages out of their roles.
This was American cinema’s first feature-length masterpiece. A full century later, it has lost none of its hypnotic toxicity. Even now, to see this movie is to consider cheering for the Klan, to surmise that every black man is a lusty darkie unworthy of elected office, his libido, his life. Its biases are explicit and electric. Griffith established a permanent template with this movie, not just for filmed action but for American popular and political culture—a fantasia of white supremacy, black inhumanity, and the tremendous racial anger that’s still with us today.
Look at Governor Paul LePage of Maine, who, speaking at a town hall meeting in January, blamed invading dealers for the state’s drug problem—men with such cartoonishly “black” street names as “D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty.” They come north for business, he said, and “half the time, they impregnate a young, white girl.”
LePage might have been channeling Griffith—or cockamamie pseudoscience like “The Negro as a Distinct Ethnic Factor in Civilization,” a 1903 article in which the Baltimore doctor William Lee Howard argued that integration was impossible, not simply because black people were savages but because they were savages who hungered to rape white women. “When education will reduce the large size of the Negro’s penis,” he surmised, “as well as bring about the sensitiveness of the terminal fibers which exist in the Caucasian, then will it also be able to prevent the African’s birthright to sexual madness and excess.”
Finding the source of this fear isn’t difficult. You can read the history of the black penis in this country as a matter of eminent domain: if a slave master owned you, he also owned your body. Slaves were livestock, and their duties included propagating the labor pool. Sex wasn’t pleasure; it was work. Pleasure remained the prerogative of white owners and overseers, who put their penises where they pleased among the bodies they owned. Sex, for them, was power expressed through rape. And one side effect of that power was paranoia: Wouldn’t black revenge include rape? Won’t they want to do this to our women?
So from the time of slavery to the civil rights era, with intermarriage illegal, black men faced every possible violence, including castration and far worse, as both punishment and prevention against even presumed sexual insult. An exchange as common as eye contact, as simple as salutation, could be construed as an assault. Black men were bludgeoned and lynched for so little as speaking to white women. In 1955, while visiting Mississippi from Chicago, Emmett Till was kidnapped, tortured, and shot for supposedly whistling at a white woman. As a boy, I was told that story the way you warn a child about traffic lights, seat belts, and talking to strangers. Till’s age ensured that you never missed the point: he was fourteen.
Claude Neal was twenty-three—a farmhand in Jackson County, Florida, who in 1934 was accused of raping and killing his white boss’s twenty-year-old daughter, Lola Cannady. He was moved from jail to jail so white lynch mobs wouldn’t find him before the trial. But eventually they tracked him down in Alabama, holding the jailer at gunpoint and absconding with Neal. The news of his capture attracted a bloodthirsty crowd of as many as three thousand. Lest a riot ensue and someone get hurt—someone besides Neal—he was lynched by a group of six, who then dragged him behind a car to the Cannadys’ farm, where Lola’s family members took turns slashing and shooting his corpse. Onlookers stabbed at it, spit on it, ran their cars over it. His body was then driven back to town and strung up in an oak so that the full mob could have its way. People skinned him. His fingers were cut off and, eventually, jarred. He was set on fire.
In 2011 Ben Montgomery rereported Neal’s murder for the Tampa Bay Times. His article contains a passage in which one of those first six assailants recalls what happened that day: “Well, I guess we was pretty liquored up, and I ain’t like that no more, but we cut off his balls and made him eat them and say they was good. Then we cut off his pecker and made him eat it and say it was good.” The nadir might have been castration, but the bottom was reached well before Claude Neal was turned into a string of just-married cans, before his humanness was mistaken for a knife block, a sheet of shooting-range paper, kindling. Maybe he did take that poor girl’s life, but we’ll never know: he never went near a courtroom. There’s no unremembering that his own life ended as a chew toy for hellhounds.
The warning in these stories is obvious: be careful near white people. The warning between the lines isn’t hard to spot, either: be careful because your sexuality, to them, is hazardous.
It’s funny how often we’re forced to remember that. This year, the second season of Lifetime’s UnREAL, a juicy scripted drama set behind the scenes of a Bachelor-like reality show, introduced a black bachelor in order to toy with America’s dubious assumptions about the sexual prowess of black men. (The real show turned out to be as self-incriminating as the fictional one.) In September, Lena Dunham made an irritating paradox of those assumptions when she took public umbrage after the football player Odell Beckham Jr. paid her insufficient attention at this year’s Met Gala, a perceived slight that seemingly devalued her worth as a white woman. It was a twenty-first-century offense that seems as if it could have been taken in the nineteenth.
The nation’s subconscious was forged in a violent mess of fear, fantasy, and the forbidden that still affects the most trivial things. A century after Griffith, you’re free to go to a theater and watch Chris Hemsworth throw his legs open and parade his fictional endowment, while sparing a thought for what it would mean if a black star who goes by the Rock were to do the same. By the end of the 1960s, some black people were wondering that about Sidney Poitier: How much longer would a forty-year-old man have to stay a movie virgin? How many more times could he be made a mannequin of palatable innocuousness? In 1967, after black neighborhoods across the country burned in race riots, Poitier slapped the face of a haughty racist at the emotional apex of In the Heat of the Night, when he was just about the biggest star in Hollywood and at the peak of his talent. By the end of the year, though, in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, he was back to his serene, tolerable self, playing the only kind of Negro a liberal white family could imagine as worthy of its young daughter: Johns Hopkins– and Yale-educated, excruciatingly well-mannered, neutered.
In his cultural history of the penis, A Mind of Its Own, David M. Friedman includes part of a letter that a Pennsylvania lieutenant named William Feltman wrote in 1781 after a dinner on a Virginia plantation, during which he was served by teenage boys whose penises were visi
ble beneath their clothes. The plantation’s owners seemed to assume the casualness now reserved for all those white movie and TV penises, but Feltman was agog: “I am surprized this does not hurt the feelings of the fair Sex to see those young boys of Fourteen and Fifteen years old to Attend them, [their] whole nakedness Expos’d, and I can Assure you It would Surprize a person to see those damn black boys how well they are hung.” Abolitionists and others loosely sympathetic to black people were equally enthralled, writing stories that made heroes of slaves with names like Selico, Itanoko, and Zami—men who were excellent lovers and, also, immodestly well-hung.
Reading about yourself in this way—reduced—is disorienting. I don’t feel that way, like a savage, a Selico, a walking schlong. I know the fantasy exists. It renders black men desired on one hand and feared on the other. But that’s a script for somebody else’s movie, one that blaxploitation films began to flip not long after Poitier showed up for dinner and, arguably, because he did.
The ingenuity of the blaxploitation era, with all its flamboyant, do-it-yourself carnality, was its belief in black women and men and its conflation of danger and desire. The movies—self-consciously, hyperkinetically black—were at full strength from the very end of the 1960s through the first half of the 1970s, and more or less kicked off with a literal bang: Melvin Van Peebles directing himself doing the nasty in Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. If the movies are ridiculous, they’re ridiculous in the way bell-bottoms, platforms, and hair the circumference of a disco ball can now seem like camp. But back then, that was simply the way things were: baad. You went to Slaves, Super Fly, Dolemite, and Blacula because you wanted to see yourself, but also because these movies were the political repossession of toxic myths. Shaft named a detective while winking at his anatomy. Black men were swinging their dicks for black audiences. The films wanted not just to master the myth but also to throw it headfirst out the window.
But the myth has wings, and they’ve since attached themselves to white writers and directors—one or two of whom even know how to fly with them. For every couple of Seth MacFarlanes, there’s a Quentin Tarantino: someone who would consider himself an Enlightenment figure, an abolitionist, woke.
The Hateful Eight, Tarantino’s Reconstruction western from last winter, is another of his blaxploitation remixes. This one gathers a group of barely acquainted people—all positioned on negligibly opposite sides of morality, history, and the law—and traps them, Agatha Christie–style, in a shack during a blizzard. A lot of them get to spinning yarns, but only one of those stories earns a flashback: the one told by Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a cavalryman turned bounty hunter. At just about the movie’s halfway point, he tells a grizzled Confederate general named Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern) a tale about the general’s dead son. Warren says he happened upon the younger Smithers and, recognizing him, staged an act of racial retribution, which the flashback shows us. The son crawls naked through snow toward Warren’s midsection and puts his head in front of the major’s genitals. Then the score goes horror-film crazy and cuts back to Jackson, who gives the narration all the Zeusian jive that you pay Jackson to summon. With the old Confederate officer shuddering in disbelief, Warren boasts that this shivering white boy sucked his “warm. Black. Dingus! ”
In the world of this film, Tarantino is playing with the truth. He’s playing with math (I at least found more than eight hateful people). But most important, he’s playing with fire. His movie runs along the third rail of race in America: that black dingus. Who knows if Warren made this story up. Courtesy of Tarantino, he knows that nothing turns a white man red faster than a black penis. The story’s probable falseness only makes it more devastating, because falseness is what the story messes with: the fear of black male sexuality; how it’s chasing your white wives, mothers, and daughters; that the black penis can be a vengeful weapon. Opening up the threat to sons laughs at the ludicrousness of it all. That dingus is coming for everybody.
This flamboyance is partly how Tarantino’s films have come to understand black people—as mighty movie types rather than as human beings. The Hateful Eight made its defiant appearance during the centennial of The Birth of a Nation, and the movies share the same post–Civil War era. Watching Jackson stand over that bobbing white head, you feel the inversion of Griffith’s template. Tarantino orchestrated lurid, white-on-black sexual violations for Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained, so you notice the inversion of his own template, too. This time it’s black power dominating white that’s presented both as a kind of rape and a mode of justice. Tarantino revises the social parameters of the Hollywood western so that racism and misogyny are its villains. Most of that revision, though, still hangs from a black penis.
Even if you’re Tarantino and learned from blaxploitation, why propagate these myths—what the Depression-era journalist W. J. Cash, late explicator of the Confederate psyche, once called the “Southern rape complex”? Why continue to frame black power as a genital threat? For white artists concerned with black life, the myth matters, and it should: it’s a white invention. But attempts to dispel that myth tend to reinforce it, sometimes because the myth-busters’ love for black men seems indistinguishable from what’s supposedly despicable about them. Hence those cartoon hero-slaves, Selico, Itanoko, and Zami. It can be a peculiar thing being black in this country. Even the people who claim to love you are capable of these little accidents of hate—the social equivalent of finding hair in your food.
This is it, isn’t it? Here’s our original sin metastasized into a perverted sticking point: the white dick means nothing, while, whether out of revulsion or lust, the black dick means too much.
One night, when I was twenty-four and living in San Francisco, I met a handsome white guy visiting from Germany. We stood near a window in a crowded bar and talked about an art show he’d just seen. Eventually I brought him to my apartment, where, after removing some of his clothes, he eagerly started to undo my pants. But then he stood there for a moment and gave my crotch a long, perplexed look, like Geraldo Rivera did when, after months of buildup, he opened what turned out to be Al Capone’s empty vault. He replaced his clothes and, before exiting, explained himself: “That’s not what I expected.”
I knew what he meant. He was expecting a Guinness Book of World Records penis. He wasn’t the only one—just the last to do it with such efficiently rendered disappointment. That hurt, but I remember being amused that, for him, all our attraction came down to was what someone had told him my dick should look like. I remember standing there, half dressed in my living room, and actually saying out loud, “Why does he know that?”
But everybody knows. Anytime a pair of pants is prematurely rezipped or the line goes dead in a sex app’s chat window, I always know: He was expecting a banana, a cucumber, an eggplant, something that belongs to either a farm animal or NASA. He was expecting the mythical Big Black Dick (which, online, people just call BBD). That presumption is something you tend to prepare for with interracial sex—that your dick could either render the rest of you disposable or put your humanity on a pedestal, out of reach. That it could make you a Mapplethorpe.
Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book: ninety-seven black-and-white photographs taken between 1977 and 1986, before and during the AIDS crisis. In the photos, black men sit and stand and contort themselves for portraits, from entirely nude to fully clothed. There are looks of defiance, happiness, and rapture; in a few, there’s no “look” at all, just a man in profile, say, his eyes closed, his skin emitting something lunar. There are photos of backs. There’s one of two feet, where the light makes the striations in the toes seem like a glacial landmass. There’s a bare rear that looks like ripe fruit, another that evokes a Rorschach blot, and one more, taking up the entire lower half of the frame, that looks like a hippopotamus.
Some of the photos are meant to be erotic, and all are meant to seem worthy of being looked at. They’re born of the same curiosity and f
ascination as the black characters in Tarantino’s movies. Sometimes what’s in the frame can seem hard to work out, almost intentionally miscomposed; in some early pictures I’m not sure Mapplethorpe always knew the difference. In many, though, he obviously did. With Man in Polyester Suit, he nailed it. Taken in 1980, the photo is still the star of the Black Book group. A gentleman stands in a matching blazer, vest, and trousers, filling the frame from midchest to just above the knee. The image has the basic cheesiness of a department-store catalogue photo—a headless person, not quite facing the camera, arms at his side, his brown hands open. His zipper is open, too, and out of it hangs his penis. It’s veiny, uncut, positioned almost equidistant between the hands and bigger than both. Its droop brings it close to Dalí’s melting clocks. My favorite detail is the bit of white shirt coming through the zipper. It makes the penis look as if it were getting out of bed. An everyday object—the male power suit—gets a scandalous comic assist.
Man in Polyester Suit is one of the great jokes on American racism, one misconstrued as pornography and therefore as exploitation. Is that America’s problem or Mapplethorpe’s? (Or, for that matter, Tarantino’s?) Are these guys doing social politics or fetishization? The difference between fetishization and romance is that only romance really cares what its object wants. Mapplethorpe and Tarantino both have complicated relationships with that difference.
To spend time with Mapplethorpe’s work now is to find in it a kind of distorted love—what that German guy came all the way to America to discover. Mapplethorpe found most bodies beautiful and otherworldly, but especially black ones. He lit dark skin so it looked like wet paint and arranged subjects until they became furniture or evoked slave auctions. That naive, dehumanizing wonder complicates what, at the time, was the radical, defiant feat of inscribing black men—black gay men—into portraiture. It strikes a peculiarly foundational American note: this was another white man looking at black men, with effrontery but also with want. You can locate a sense of ownership, of possession, in many of the images. Two of Mapplethorpe’s last relationships were with black men. Any eroticism in the photos might have come from the possibility that, sexually, he himself was possessed.
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