• DOI:10.1353/afa.2019.0027
• Corpus ID: 197851021

Meeting at the Watchtower: Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, and Racializing Homophobic Vernacular

@article{ManditchProttas2019MeetingAT,
  title={Meeting at the Watchtower: Eldridge Cleaver, James Baldwin's No Name in the Street, and Racializing Homophobic Vernacular},
  author={Zachary Manditch-Prottas},
  journal={African American Review},
  year={2019},
  volume={52},
  pages={179 - 195}
}

• Zachary Manditch-Prottas
• Published 14 June 2019
• Art
• African American Review

In his prison-time memoir Soul on Ice, Eldridge Cleaver, Black Power ideologue provocateur, attacked the racial authenticity and manhood of perhaps the most acclaimed and accomplished African American author of the decade, James Baldwin. Cleaver’s critical aim was Baldwin’s personal sexual practices and corresponding racial psychology, not his prose. Cleaver asserted that Baldwin’s sexuality was, in essence, the manifestation of a “racial death-wish” (101). He argued that Baldwin’s sexuality was a concession of his black manhood and signaled his engagement in an unachievable attempt to “becom[e] a white man in a black body” (103). Baldwin stood as the formative example of an evidential link between black male homosexuality and interracial homosocial obedience; a type of “succumb[ing] psychologically” (135) that manifested not solely as an involuntarily induced psychic condition but also as a literal act of masochistic interracial submission. Soul on Ice has acquired an infamous canonical status in African American letters as the era’s most candid and illustrative declaration of the phallocentric interplay of racial and sexual politics. Cleaver’s attack on James Baldwin is the most notorious and frequently cited example of homophobia in the Black Power era. The essay “Notes on a Native Son,” in which Cleaver addresses Baldwin, has emerged in particular as ground zero terrain for considerations of black gay men as, to borrow a phrase from Robert Reid-Pharr, intraracial abject “scapegoat[s]” (603): those sacrificed in efforts to stabilize heterosexual black masculine subjectivity and prospective nationalist collectivity. Following this reasoning, Baldwin has served as the iconic embodiment of an internal racial boundary that at once threatened and fortified the union of heterosexuality with authentic black masculinity. Marlon Ross has suggested that the consistent centering of Cleaver’s lambasting of Baldwin has overdetermined the perception of Black Power as unequivocally coupled with openly homophobic masculine posturing (“White Fantasies”). I agree with Ross that Cleaver’s position on homosexuality and his focus on Baldwin to illustrate his position has significantly, and unfairly, saturated scholarly consideration of the relationship between masculinity and the Black Power ethos. A significant consequence of Ross’s proposition is that Baldwin has been repeatedly victimized through persistent reproductions of the terms of Cleaver’s discourse. In this respect, in critical evaluations of Cleaver’s position, Baldwin’s subjectivity is ironically and repeatedly usurped by those very sexualized terms of discourse that are being interrogated. In the context of Ross’s argument, he suggests that centering Huey Newton’s speech “On the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements” would make for a vastly different narrative of Black Power, masculinity, and sexuality. In matters of gender and sexual progressiveness, Newton rightfully stands as Cleaver’s epochal