To be clear I am not here for Nate Parker, in like manner that I am not here for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. The rising actor/filmmaker is currently gaining the support of thousands of Black Americans as the national premier of Birth of a Nation is scheduled to take place in October of 2016. Birth of A Nation illustrates the life of Nat Turner, an early Black revolutionary who led an armed revolt against plantation owners, slave catchers and the like. Interestingly, as Black America prepares to celebrate Nat Turner’s armed rebellion, many of the same demographic condemn the armed resistance of Korryn Gaines, and furthermore, justify her death at the hands of police. If nothing else, the impending celebration of Nat Turner juxtaposed against Korryn Gaines reveals how many Black Americans think about revolution and who is capable of performing such an act. Even in more recent times there remains a strong distinction between Black men who are armed and involved in a shootout with police as opposed to Black women—you will recall Christopher Dorner (Southern California, 2013) and the recent shooting in Dallas, Texas involving Micah Xavier Johnson. Both police involved shootings were largely rationalized or excused by many Black Americans with statements such as “I understand why they did it.” These Black men were seen as rational, even revolutionaries in some circles, as Gaines is refused the same.

 

Interestingly, in her work Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba, Aisha Finch argues, “the resistance part of the slave rebellion, however, has traditionally been cast as a male enterprise. Traditional narratives of slave insurgency implicitly recount not only the collective passage from passivity to defiance, but also the passage from ‘slavehood to manhood.’ In other words, to engage in armed insurrection is to give birth to a radical new masculine subject, and a particularly aggressive one at that. Together the highly visible male icon and the masculinized rank-in-file become pivotal to the slave rebellion’s conceptual existence and therefore part of the collective inheritance of slave histories. For this reason, it is important to appreciate how deeply masculinity and male embodiment have structured the way in which we think about black opposition, even as we recognize that masculinity (and aggression and violence) were hardly limited to the male body.”

 

Undergirding the narratives of Nat Turner, Christopher Dorner, and Micah Johnson are common understandings of Black masculinity and the defense of it. Now a part of century’s long defense of Black manhood is Nate Parker. I recently wrote on Nate Parker and the conversation among many Black Americans regarding his marriage to a white woman. In that blog post my point was that many Black men do not desire to challenge and change the construction of manhood for themselves, rather they come to understand and desire to perform manhood by the example of white men. More plainly stated, Black men come to understand what being a man (or performing manhood) is by way of white men; meaning the ability to possess undeniable rights, claim land and bodies without regard to existing sovereignty and ownership, and define the limits of man in relation to woman and non-hetero persons. That is to say, current understandings of manhood is bound up in the refusal, yet control of, womanliness and the outright refusal of non-heternormativity—in this way misogyny and homoantagonism come to construct the social identifier and being of a “man.”

 

Of the many things this approach to manhood permits is rape and the rationalization of it. As Birth of A Nation approaches its premier date, a court case involving Nate Parker and Jean Celestin (another Black male) from 1999 has emerged. In the case Parker and Celestin were fighting charges of a rape that took place during their time in college involving a victim who was unconscious. The victim testified in the case that she was stalked by both Parker and Celestin before the rape took place; Parker and Celestin were on the wrestling team at Penn State—the same school at which the Jerry Sandusky child rapes took place (and coincidently enough during the same time frame as well). The case ended in a peculiar way—Parker was acquitted, Celestin was found guilty (sentenced to six months after receiving letters of support from Penn State), and the victim was paid a settlement of 17,000 from Penn State. Interestingly, four years after his conviction, Pennsylvania Superior Court reversed Celestin’s charges citing ineffective counsel, requiring a retrial. However, due to a lack of witnesses (four years later) Celestine was cleared and Penn State was able to maintain its clean name (however molestation reports involving Jerry Sandusky was looming).  

 

What this trial does make clear is there was a wrong doing involving Parker, Celestin, and the victim. Moreover, what the case also hints to is the involvement of Penn State in the outcomes of the trial—Parker is cleared, Celestin is also ultimately cleared, yet the victim receives a settlement from the University. University protection of its athletes is nothing new, it is a well-known occurrence at even the smallest colleges in the United States. The resurfacing of Parker and Celestin’s case is quite interesting as it takes place not too soon after Parker stated that in an effort to preserve Black manhood he would never play a gay character. Here, yet again, misogyny and homoantagonism find their place at the foundation of defining one’s manhood. Interestingly, yet again Parker and Celestin are protected not only by the earlier intervention of Penn State officials, but now by Fox: “Searchlight is aware of the incident that occurred while Nate Parker was at Penn State…we also know he was found innocent and cleared of all charges. We stand behind Nate and are proud to help bring this important and powerful story to the screen.”

 

In an effort to keep his name clean, Parker (and his supporters, e.g. Fox, and his many fans) repeatedly assert that he was cleared of all charges by law. What I wish to point to here is the paradoxical relationship of law and Black people. While Black America seemingly understands law to be inherently bias, largely protecting the lives of white people and shaping them as rehabilitative subjects, Black society simultaneously uses law at will to defend certain Black lives, justify particular Black deaths, and render other’s lives visible through the refusal of legal justification. We allow Parker’s (and many others, e.g. R. Kelly) alleged involvement—at any level—in rape to be excused by law, we justify the death of Korryn Gaines (and many other Black women) by law, then render the lives of Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin, and others visible by the refusal of law. What is interesting here is the historical and contemporary use and simultaneous refusal of law to ultimately make visible and strengthen the lives and sociopolitical-economic standing of primarily heterosexual Black men (e.g. Clarence Thomas) among Black Americans. (this is not to say that white America does not use law for the same purposes in terms of its interests in Black life. Clearly both Penn State and Fox had/have a vested interest in both Parker and Celestin, but that is not my focus here and white individuals and/or structures protecting Black bodies for their own economic gain is a well examined topic).

 

This careful and deliberate masculine use of law and its resulting preservation of heterosexual Black men is then paired with popularized understandings of Black liberation and resistance efforts, as mentioned earlier. Nate Parker employs his imagination to depict an impossibly queer Nat Turner—he must be heterosexual, he must have a wife by his own will, and children at his own decision; it is impossible that Nat Turner may have performed colonial dissemblance in the midst of plantation coercion, it is impossible that Nat Turner performed a divergent masculinity. It is impossible that standing immediately next to Turner in the revolt may have been a Black woman to his left, and his loving same gender or trans partner to his right. Turner, for Parker, must be rigid and brought into sharp relief by the rejection of the feminine and non-heteronormative—as Parker himself stated he will never play a gay role (or non-heteronormative role) because the Black man must be preserved. What if the impetus for Turner’s revolt wasn’t the whippings he encountered or other wrong doings he suffered but rather in its place, as Aisha Finch offers in her work, “rape, sexual assault, pregnancy, birth control, and so forth as pivotal to the organization, form, and outcome of slave insurgencies?”  For Parker, a Black man as non-heteronormative and not the central cause of a rebellion not only misrepresents who Black men are, but moreover would risk including same sex love and desire in the fabric of masculinity—and this for him must not be, because it forces a redefining of terms, a departure from what is means to be a ‘man’ as defined by the white male and, most importantly, would force Parker, Celestin, and many others to define themselves in ways other than those which exclude, relegate, and marginalize. As a result, Nate Parker is permitted to speculate the archive of Nat Turner in favor of heterosexuality and conventional understandings of manhood in order to validate himself and others—what he sees is what Nat Turner must be, because Turner was a “man” and Black masculinity is at “risk” and must be “preserved.” 

 

Interestingly, when asked about the rape case recently this was Parker’s response:

“I will not relive that period of my life, every time I go under the microscope,” he said. “What do I do? When you have a certain level of success, when things start to work, things go under the microscope and become bigger and bigger things. I can’t control people; I can’t control the way people feel. What I can do, is be the most honorable man I can be. Live my life with the most integrity that I can, stand against injustice everywhere I see it, lead charges against injustice, against people of color, against the LGBT community. That’s me. The black community is my community, the LGBT community too, and the female community. That is my community. That’s me, it’s who I am…I was sure it would come up…I stand here, a 36-year-old man, 17 years removed from one of the most painful … [he wells up at the memory] moments in my life. And I can imagine it was painful, for everyone. I was cleared of everything, of all charges. I’ve done a lot of living, and raised a lot of children. I’ve got five daughters and a lovely wife. My mom lives here with me, I brought her here. I’ve got four younger sisters. Women have been such an important part of my life. I try, every day, to be a better father to my daughters, and a better husband.””

 

Not only does Parker refuse to acknowledge what took place, he establishes his manhood in the right to do so along with the seemingly difficult task of managing and owning women—this is what it is to be an “honorable man” and “live with integrity.” Moreover Parker claims the Black, LGBTQQI, and ‘female’ community for himself—he is because they are, and in so many ways this position of Parker’s is both true and not true at the same time, as he makes himself center and visible as others become invisible and marginal. He owns and tells the victim’s story, he centers his burden, and what becomes most important is that he has moved on. 

 

Here is my point: we must envision a new reality for ourselves. We cannot continue in this type of manhood which insist on a conventional understanding of what it means to be a man (or otherwise). This is perhaps the genius of stars like Cam Newton, Jaden Smith, Odell Beckham, Jr., A$AP Rocky, Dwyane Wade and many others—who are challenging and undoing, via dress and the open visibility of their authentic selves, popularized understandings of what it means to be a man while giving us living renderings of carefree Blackness. The redefining of manhood has significant stakes in the work of freedom and liberation for Black people. What does freedom look like, what does liberation look like? I have said this elsewhere, but it is worth repeating here: the freedom of Black people cannot simply be a white structured society ran by Black people. We must envision new forms of power (if it is to exist at all in our new world), new forms of exchanges, new practices of gender.  

 

What if Nat Turner was a Black gay man? What would that mean to our understanding in the struggle for freedom and liberation? What would it mean for Nate Parker and this film (other than its non-existence)? What we must ask ourselves in these moments leading up to the release of Parker and Celestin’s film is what are they asking us to envision? How is their work and dramatized speculation of history complicit in the restrictive nature of the very chains we seek to free ourselves from? What nation is Parker and Celestin interested in birthing, and does it come into being by way of the relegation and exclusion of particular persons? These are the stakes. What are the implications of Parker’s work and imagination, his freedom dreams? One thing for sure is that these concepts for Parker are forged in a toxic-thread bare masculinity that we can no longer afford to carry if we are to reach freedom.

 

What we do know is that for the victim life became unbearable. In 2012 she killed herself. Her cause of death from the coroner: “major depressive order with psychotic features, PTSD due to physical and sexual abuse, polysubstance abuse.” The words of the victim’s brother ring clear and reveal a truth about the American legal system and its propensity to provide backdoors: “he may have litigated out of any kind of situation, my position is he got off on a technicality.”