A brief commentary on the necessity and the impossibility of black men's participation in the development of black feminist theory and politics, Black Men, Black Feminism examines the basic assumptions that have guided-and misguided-black men's efforts to take up black feminism. Offering a rejoinder to the contemporary study of black men and masculinity in the twenty-first century, Jared Sexton interrogates some of the most common intellectual postures of black men writing about black feminism, ultimately departing from the prevailing discourse on progressive black masculinities. Sexton examines, by contrast, black men's critical and creative work-from Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep to Jordan Peele's Get Out- to describe the cultural logic that provides a limited moral impetus to the quest for black male feminism and that might, if reconfigured, prompt an ethical response of an entirely different order.

This book offers a critical survey of film and media representations of black masculinity in the early twenty-first-century United States, between President George W. Bush's 2001 announcement of the War on Terror and President Barack Obama's 2009 acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. It argues that images of black masculine authority have become increasingly important to the legitimization of contemporary policing and its leading role in the maintenance of an antiblack social order forged by racial slavery and segregation. It examines a constellation of film and television productions-from Antoine Fuqua's Training Day to John Lee Hancock's The Blind Side to Barry Jenkin's Moonlight-to illuminate the contradictory dynamics at work in attempts to reconcile the promotion of black male patriarchal empowerment and the preservation of gendered antiblackness within political and popular culture.

This book presents a critical framework for understanding how and why race matters past, present, and future. The readings trace the historical emergence of modern racial thinking in Western society by examining religious, moral, aesthetic, and scientific writing; legal statutes and legislation; political debates and public policy; and popular culture. Readers will follow the shifting ideological bases upon which modern racial theories have rested, from religion to science to culture, and the links between race, class, gender, and sexuality, and between notions of race and the nation-state.
The authors of "Racial Theories in Context" discuss the relationship of racial theories to material contexts of racial oppression and to democratic struggles for freedom and equality:
-First and foremost in this discussion is the vast system of racial slavery instituted throughout the Atlantic world and the international movement that sought its abolition.
-Continuing campaigns to redress racial divisions in health, wealth, housing, employment, and education are also examined.
-There is a focus on the specificity of racial formation in the United States and the centrality of anti-black racism.
- The book also looks comparatively at other regions of racial inequality and the construction of a global racial hierarchy since the 15th century CE.
Jared Sexton is an associate professor of African American studies and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. A graduate of the University of New Hampshire, he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

Despite being heralded as the answer to racial conflict in the post-civil rights United States, the principal political effect of multiracialism is neither a challenge to the ideology of white supremacy nor a defiance of sexual racism. More accurately, Jared Sexton argues in Amalgamation Schemes, " multiculturalism displaces both by evoking long-standing tenets of antiblackness and prescriptions for normative sexuality. In this timely and penetrating analysis, Sexton pursues a critique of contemporary multiracialism, from the splintered political initiatives of the multiracial movement to the academic field of multiracial studies, to the melodramatic media declarations about "the browning of America." He contests the rationales of colorblindness and multiracial exceptionalism and the promotion of a repackaged family values platform in order to demonstrate that the true target of multiracialism is the singularity of blackness as a social identity, a political organizing principle, and an object of desire. From this vantage, Sexton interrogates the trivialization of sexual violence under chattel slavery and the convoluted relationship between racial and sexual politics in the new multiracial consciousness. An original and challenging intervention, Amalgamation Schemes" posits that multiracialism stems from the conservative and reactionary forces determined to undo the gains of the modern civil rights movement and dismantle radical black and feminist politics. Jared Sexton is assistant professor of African American studies and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine.