Commendable but a Bit Light Weight

First let me say that any academic text that gives voice to my black gay brothers and sisters is commendable, given the deaf ear usually turned to such voices. However, I can't give "Hate Abercrombie" more than three stars because it offers fairly straightforward observations that most thinking black gay folks have swapped over their own happy hour tables and coffee klatches.

Though the title essay and most of the others are interesting and provocative, McBride does little more than provoke. He provides neither unifying theory nor original response. The result is a work that is neither academically original nor politically impactful.

McBride apologizes for the personal-anecdotal slant of his writing, but unlike the writers that he quotes--Baldwin, hooks and Hemphill among others--he muffles his personal outrage and its transgressive power in hyper-academic babble. The resulting text is needlessly inaccessible to novice academics and mainstream African-Americans, but not quite "deep" enough for hardcore academia.

In my opinion, had McBride's book not dealt with such a specialized academic niche (black gay studies), it would never have made it into print in its current form.

Don't get me wrong, McBride is a talented observer and competent writer, but he should pick a genre. I'd be happy to see him hone his intellectualism so that he earns a place next to hooks and West; but it would truly thrill me to see him aim his pen toward the thinking black mainstream and become the fiery transformative essayist that I suspect that he is at heart.

Getting Serious About Intersectional Analyses

Dwight McBride, in his book, Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch, pens a work that attempts to transform African American Studies while firmly positioning himself within it, arguing that it is crucial that black gay men and black lesbian be acknowledged and made visible parts of the black community.

Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch is organized into three sections: the first proposes different applications for serious analyses of race and gender; the second foregrounds politics, particularly of the emerging field of black queer/gay and lesbian studies in relationship to the heretofore emphasis within African American Studies of race as a lens of analysis instead of a truly intersectional approach which also looks centrally at sexuality (along with gender and class); lastly, the third section focuses more specifically on McBride's theoretical and academic lineage of thinking about race and sexuality.

Early in the book, McBride furthers his claims to the necessity of being able to hear the voices of black gay men and black lesbians )imagine "the black community"; he is firm in his desire to get others to recognize the diversity that the black community already contains in our everyday realities, and to abandon the false perception of a monolithic black community. He makes evident his deep investment in "the black community" and to African American Studies, while also making clear his politics of location as a black gay man within white-dominated academia, offering a poignant and persuasive personal perspective, as well as a critical analysis for such change in African American Studies.

While not all the essays in this book seem to me accessible to students in Introduction to African American Studies or Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Studies courses, a good number of essays are, and would be a great addition on syllabi.

the gay bruthaman breaks it down!

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This book consists of diverse musings from Dr. Dwight McBride, a gay black man and the chair of African-American studies at Northwestern. He covers myriad topics such as Toni Morrison, the "Ellen" coming-out episode, gay personals websites, and much more. He bar-hops a lot too.

McBride brings up several concerns consistently, and these are the areas where black intellectuals have consensus. He assesses and envisions both the present and future of African-American studies on college campuses. He is forthrightly in support of affirmative action. He is very concerned about who gets to speak and who is taken as truthful in our society. (He does not mention postcolonialist theory but I wondered if he borrowed some of these ideas from Bhabha and Spivak.) He throws around a phrase "compassion fatigue," a very right-on concept in this post-PC, Bush the Second era.

I absolutely love the cover art here. It takes "Paris is Burning" and gives it a butch twist. I have got to find out more about the photographer. In the same way that lay reviewers screamed to know more about the cover work on Siobhan Somerville's "Queering the Color Line," I think other readers and viewers will be equally curious here.

The title of this book is bold. As much as members of the Left condemn multinational corporations, there is a reason to fear them too. I guess McBride is not worried that Abercrombie won't seek revenge upon him. (He never mentions that hit pop song from 1999, capitalist and diva!-tized. It both imitates and stands against the class-privileged, spoiled youth that might did the clothing chain.

McBride refers to the black, gay demographic study "Say It Out Loud!" in several places. That study clearly stated that the grand majority of LGBT blacks don't like the word "queer," yet he freely and frequently uses it here. That must be a sign of spending most of one's time on a college campus.

In the book "A Latina in Hollywood," Dr. Valdivia has chapters that are specific to LatinAs and many that apply to women across racial categories. Similarly, McBride talks about many black, gay matters, but he also focuses on non-gay-specific black matters. When the subtitle states "race and sexuality," it really implies "race AND/OR sexuality." I think this is a great way for double-minority scholars not to be doubly ghetto-ized when it comes to their opinions and ideas. I support this flexibility and think that those interested in intersectionality might find it particularly useful.

McBride is great at bringing up race and sexual orientation matters simultaneously. He notes how a mainstream press article on "the lack of black men" really means the lack of STRAIGHT black men. He calls out heterosexism that many readers wouldn't have bothered to consider. In saying that it takes longer than one sound hued vision here.

Still, there are times when he could have employed that same double vision and failed to do so. He assesses Dr. Cornel West, a heterosexual black male scholar and never mentions how valiantly pro-gay West has been for years. He analyzes Toni Morrison but never mentions that several black gay writers have deemed her work homophobic (Crichlow and Simmons, for example). He repeats the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas controversy but never mentions that foes accused her of both being a lesbian and lusting after a male boss. When discussing the Ellen episode, he mentions Oprah Winfrey as the racial signifier, but never mentions Jenny Shimizu, who made the show for me, a Japanese-American lesbian model who shattered the show's problematic tendency to make all the lesbian characters white.

Even more, I had problems with this book structurally. In a beginning chapter "Straight Black Studies," he mentions heterosexism in black studies for a second and then proceeds to discuss James Baldwin at length. He could have put his musings in the last chapter, another Baldwin essay. With a title like that, you would have thought he'd add to ideas from Simmons' "Some Challenges Facing the Black Gay Intellectual" but he disappointingly fails to do so. His chapter on Anita Hill says NOTHING on the matter that Morrison's anthology "Racing Justice, Engendering Power" hadn't. It was really just a way for him as a black gay man to say, "Yes! I support the sisters."

His largest chapter is subtitled "Race in the Gay Marketplace of Desire." Much of what he says is on point and will open the eyes of many. However, he says that he is going to mention extremely explicit things about himself. He quotes Reid-Pharr and Gary Fisher to ease the reader in and then he says rather tame things about himself. His confessions are not half as erotic as things written Pharr's "GBM: Essays," I do think the texts have much in common. I think the editors of this series want scholars to throw in everything and the kitchen sink. Lay readers will like the second part of this book while the first and last parts may confuse them. Bringing up Hugo, Sisyphus, Marx, and several others demonstrates that McBride has much cultural capital and is not limited to race or sexual orientation as topics.