Please note this episode deals with sexuality and sexual violence and may not be suitable for all listeners. Some material may be triggering.
If you do find yourself triggered or having difficulty, please contact your local rape crisis center. If you need assistance locating support, please use RAINN.org in the US and Ending Violence in Canada to locate supportive services.
Kerry:
We're talking about Tamari’s book, Appealing Because He is Appalling. And it's all about the idea of Black masculinity, colonialism, and erotic racism. And this is a topic that is so near and dear to my heart. Because it's very much about how we perceive ourselves sexually, and how these ties really affect how we are showing up in these colonial spaces. How has the systematic racism, colonialism, you know, all the isms affected us, and in particular, a very forgotten piece of this space, which is the Black man. Black men have been railroaded into one real vice where, where there, I've always looked at it like we we see them, you know, in this sinister space as one product, or we see them as an infallible space and another end of that product. Like it's almost nonexistent. There's no space in between. And Tamari, I really want us to get a moment to, to unpack all of it, because there is a lot here and so much stuff that I had no idea about. And I'm sure we'll we'll get to talking. I'm sure we will. Let's get dive in.
Tamari:
Yes. No, thank you so much. I really appreciate the opportunity to be with you. And Patti again. Is this our second conversation? I think it's our second?
Patty:
Yeah, at least second, maybe third. We’re old friends now.
Tamari:
Yeah. We often do not speak about Black men and disabilities, you know, to talk about police violence, without talking about the disabling of Black men, either psychologically or physically. We're just missing a huge part of that conversation. But not just the the disabilities that arises from being incarcerated or interaction with the police. But the brilliant thing about the paper that Leroy and I wrote, and I wrote is that we take this back to slavery. And slavery was the production of disabilities. And if you look at the nature of resistance and rebellions, from slavery onward, very often you're talking about individuals that were disabled.
So if you go to Haiti, you found that Boukman and others who were the founding figures of the Haitian Revolution, those people were all physically disabled, they had either limbs that were dismembered, or some other such thing. Harriet Tubman, right, she took a piece of metal to the head and had convulsions, all her life. So disabilities is a major part of Black resistance and rebellion.
And if you know, I mean, I think we can get get to this, again, is to talk about Emmett Till, and disabilities. That is a really important piece of disabilities history that not a lot of people know. And Leroy introduced me to it. And I did a bit of research on that. And it's just absolutely amazing that this young boy had a speech impediment. So he had like a speaking disability and his mother in Chicago taught him in order to form his words, he should whistle. So that led to, uh, I forget the name of the guy that led the charge. I think his last name was Bryant in thinking that this little boy was whistling at his wife and his wife knew that that was not the case. And upon her deathbed admitted that it was all concocted. So disabilities is a major part of resistance. But it's also produced by anti-Blackness and the particular targeting of Black men.
So about me. So I'm a professor of sociology at Brock University. been there since 2006. And my areas of specialization and interest are Blackness and anti-Blackness in Western and Asiatic cultures. I do not separate the west from the east because it's all Asia people talk about the European continent. All the continents begin with “A” except for North and South America which are joined by an isthmus.
Patty:
Yeah, I saw Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, I was listening to a panel she was on and she referred to the Asian peninsula of Europe.
Tamari:
That's what it is. There's no Eurasia, it's Asia..
Kerry:
I just love that. That is a drop of knowledge. Now, you know,
Keep going, Tamari, with, with, with this interest of yours being, you know, Blackness, anti-Blackness and understanding, I really want to hold space. First off, for the topic matter that we're going to be discussing tonight. I really recognize I mean, we've we've gathered before, and I really recognize, you know, how our Black men especially, are not necessarily honored, nor do we lend voice for what their experience dealing with a colonial system can be. And I really would love for us. One we're honoring you. I'm I also want to just acknowledge the the bravery or the the fact that you're speaking out and giving us some context, because I think that it's unusual in some of the ways that we've we've been told about Black men, you know, and and what there are, and I really want you to give us some of that. What, when we talk about this book, what was your thought process and putting it together and compiling it? What is it about?
Tamari:
You know, so my main thought processes was that I went through my undergraduate years, taking courses in feminism, and women's history. And my my second published essay was a critique of first wave feminism in Canada. Talking about, looking at the first wave feminists in Canada, they were really anti-immigrant. They're really hated Chinese people. They were eugenicists. They hated mixed race unions and couples, and they particularly hated Black men and white women. And they were all about this Nordic Anglo keeping Canada white. And if anybody's going to get the vote, it should be them, it should be them because they're the models of civilization.
So I went through studying this stuff. And then I kept thinking about my experiences growing up in Toronto. And as a young adult, going to nightclubs and something just didn't sit right with me. Because, you know, I had experiences where I have to wonder what explained it.
Like if, you know, I gave one instance in the introduction, where walk into a club, downtown Toronto, was about 22 years old. And, you know, young white woman, looking my age walks directly in front of me, like, and I you know, I couldn't get up, get away from her because she's like, walking right in front of me, right? So I just walk into the club, like, what's going on here, right? She just walks right in front of me, looks me in the eyes, and clutches my testicles, and my penis, and squints and then gives me that look, and then lightly squeezes and then walks off and what what the fuck just happened? Like, this doesn't make any sense, right? So of course, my night was ruined.
But as an undergraduate student, I'm thinking, Okay, this doesn't fit with the narrative that men are the ones that dominate women, men are the ones that objectify women, it just didn't fit in my experience. And the more brothers that I spoke to, the more I kept hearing the same thing. But there was nothing in the literature that would help me to explain what this was.
And so I actually intended to write my dissertation on this very topic. And so I approached a white feminist scholar who does at when I was a student at OISE, whose specialization is gender, sexuality. So I thought, Okay, this is this is someone that I could work with, who can help me process like, what theory can explain my experience and experiences of other Black men? So I sat down with this person who I hoped would have been my supervisor. And I explained my my interest in this topic. And this white woman just looked at me and busted out laughing and said, Now you know how we feel. Like oh, shit, okay.
So there's no way that I can write a dissertation that would deconstruct this phenomenon, because I will be basically assailing feminist theory. Right so it that idea never left me. And so when I just went I was theorising you know how to go about doing this book, I thought, You know what, I'm not going to do a sole authored book, I put out a call for papers, I reached out to people around the world. And this was starting in about 2013, 2014. And so the book has been, this particular book in this formation has been in progress that long, because I knew from my readings that these dynamics were taking place elsewhere around the world and across time, and that in some situations, it had like really national significance and importance.
Like in Japan, which was a country basically occupied by the United States, from like, 1853, when Admiral Perry went into Tokyo Bay with his Black ship, right, this Black ship, and his bodyguard were like these African American guys that were six foot five, ebony Black, super muscular. And the Japanese were like, you know, five foot three. And so they're looking up with these giants. Who were the body guards for Admiral Perry, and it's like, oh, shit, if this little white guy is commanding these big negros, then we better listen to him.
So Blackness became this weaponization, to help the Japanese to understand that you should submit now or else we're going to set these guys after you. Right? So Black masculinity in Japan has this interesting history of being the symbolic front edge of US domination and conquest in the country that got really ramped up and amplified with the, with the with the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and then the occupation of Japan thereafter.
So I really thought that I needed not to write a sole authored book, but to bring in other people from different regions of the world, so that we can understand what the dynamics are, how they look differently, how they look similar. And just to have a better understanding of what this issue is that we're dealing with, where we just like lack the capacity to see Black men as fully human beings.
Patty:
The one thing that I was really into that really intrigued me was the discussions about queerness, and about anti queer beliefs and attitudes throughout the Caribbean, because I see a lot of parallels with how that takes place. How that has taken place in Indigenous communities as well. So can you because I think you contributed to one of those essays as well.
Tamari:
So those were two two separate essays. One is by Kumar McIntosh. And he was addressing the issue of anti queer representations in newspaper cartoons in Jamaica. And he did a really nice deconstruction of how that anti queer representation fits in with respectability politics and this kind of light skinned politics. And this the colonial narrative that gay men or gayness is somehow antithetical to what it means to be Jamaican. Right. So he does a really nice paper in deconstructing how class bias is part of the colonial logic and mentality that leads to that sort of representation.
And what I really like about his paper is that he does not go down that rabbit hole of mass constructing all homophobia and all anti queer politics in Jamaica, somehow inherent to the culture and pervasive to the people. Because, I can tell you that in my experience, when I like so for example, there's a JA Rogers right, the one of the most famous Jamaican historians ever who was like one of the leading figures in the Harlem Renaissance. He's got like a bunch of books, race of class, recent race, not race and class. I forgot the other part of the title is a three volume set. It'll come to me in a minute because actually cite him. In one of his books, I think volume two or three, he talks about homosexuality in Jamaica, and he's writing about this in 1943. And what he ended up saying is that when the British ships, the British warships come to dock in the harbor, the pharmacies sell out of unguents. And like I read this a long time ago, and then I reread it incredibly impressive. For the book, and I didn't know what the hell an unguent was, it’s gel basically. Right?
So Jay Rogers is writing about this in 1943. Right, that it was same sex relationships was just a fundamental part of the culture as it is everywhere else. But there's, something happened. Post 1945 Post 1980, post IMF Post World Bank really eviscerating the economic life of Jamaica. Right. And so we have lost the capacity to look at gender and sexuality politics, outside of economics. But when you factor in economics, when you factor in the history of buck breaking in Jamaica and elsewhere in the Caribbean, that homophobia takes on a particular valence and a narrative, that it has different meanings and practices on the ground.
When you look at Dancehall culture, transgender gay men, they are a big part of Dancehall culture. So how does it come to be that in Dancehall culture, you have an acceptance of homosexuality, but in formal politics and its articulation, you have a different narrative. And I don't think that the Western narrative of framing Jamaica as a homophobic space is in fact, accurate and a really useful analysis in articulation of what gender and sexuality politics looks like in Jamaica. So I think Kumar's chapter does a wonderful job of deconstructing that homophobia and that queer/anti queer politics, without castigating the totality of Jamaican culture.
The other paper by Zizwe Poe, um not Zizwe Poe. Sorry. That's their, that's the father.
I keep getting the father and son mixed up (Watufani M. Poe). So his paper looks at queer politics in Cuba, and in Brazil, just about the time of 1888. And shortly after, when slavery was abolished in the Spanish Dominions was 1888, rather than 1865 in the US, and 1833, in the British dominions, so think about that. 1888. That's just like, so someone alive in Brazil now has a grandmother, or grandfather, who was directly enslaved.
So he writes this wonderful analysis of literature and some of the first novels that were based on same sex relationships between African and European males. But he also does another wonderful piece of work of looking at the Inquisition. And a lot of what was involved in the Inquisition was these records about aberrant sexual behavior. So, he does an amazing chapter deconstructing all of this. And I think his core point is that this idea that same sex male relationships is somehow anathema to Blackness, really does not understand Black history and African history. And this is like a raging debate where some people are saying, Africa didn't have homosexuality. And other people are saying, well, when you look at the archaeological evidence, the narratives from the first the Spanish, the Jesuits and others, it's very clear that they were same sex relationships and that there were transgendered males who were core parts of their communities.
So when you look at the historical evidence, and you look at the narratives from the enslaved Africans in the Americas, it makes it very clear that homosexuality was a fundamental norm, a regular part of relationships. But at the same time, his work demonstrates that African males were definitely sexually assaulted by slave masters and other white males. And this is one of those aspects of slavery that is only not, I'm sorry, that is only now beginning to get it's just do in terms of research.
Kerry:
For me as we're we're unpacking this, there's, there's this sense of like heaviness that I feel because I recognize, you know, I have Black sons. My father is a Black man, and you know, this doing them this justice of holding the space. And speaking about this, you know, I when I was reading through the book Tamari what really touched me it was a triggering moment because you mentioned it in the foreword, you know, it's in the forward where you talk about this sense or this, the the the statistics about Black men and sexual assault, and we have so not put those two pieces together. And I really want us to dive into that. Tell us what the truth of that matter is? How are how is that showing up? As well in the way Black men are, are, are showing up just how are they in conjunction to this reality against these numbers? I don't even want to go there. I'm gonna let you do it.
Tamari:
So the thanks for asking that question. So I'll just give like a little bit of these statistics from Canada. In the city of Toronto, right. Black men are 4% of the population. But of all complaints of sexual assault against the police, to the Special Investigations Unit, they represent 25% of all complaints. Right?
I will, I will, I was asked to be on a supervisory committee for a student. That was her thesis was looking at strip searching in the prisons. And I thought, yeah, great, I have no problem being on this committee, I could be very useful. And at a certain point, I had to say to the supervisor and the student that look, I have to withdraw from this committee, because I just can't process this notion that's being constructed, this narrative, that somehow strip searching of women in prisons is somehow much more egregious, harmful and devastating to them than it is to males. I showed the student that 80% of all strip searching that occurs across the province of Ontario, with the bulk of it being done in Toronto, 80% of all persons strip searched by the cops are males. But when you look at the report from this, this this agency in Toronto, they don't actually say any percent of males are strip searched, they say 20 to 25% of females are strip searched. So you have to do the math. Right. So even at that level, those people that are compiling the data, simply refuse to see that 75 to 80% of all persons strip searched are males, and therefore they're not obligated to do any further research and inquiry in terms of what the impacts are. Right.
Now, when you when you, the data out of the United States, right, is that and we don't we don't have this data in Canada, the data out of the United States is that there are as many men raped in prison, as there are women in free society that are raped. Prisons are a rape factory. It is probably no less the case in Canada. Prison is also rape factory for women. We tend not to think and when you read Angela Davis's work, for example, in her book on prison abolition, right? She talks about sexual violence in the prison, but make no mention that males are predominantly the victims of rape in prisons. But she also doesn't talk about women as being raped by other women in prison. So whether you're talking about males or females, prisons, are rape factories, no matter which way you cut it, right.
And I think one of the the points that I tried to make in my introduction, and in that preface is that to some extent, we really need to take a step back from sharply linking these essential categories of male and female with privilege and victimization, vis a vis, sexual violence, right, it really disables our capacity to see that there's a way in which sexual violence works, that disables our capacity to understand that the rates of intimate partner violence and sexual assault is higher among same sex relationships, meaning, lesbian, gay and trans.
So where then do we go, if we can have a rational conversation about power, because we're too busy fixating on what the genitalia of the people are to presume that they either are, should be punished more frequently? Because they're males, or that they're more victims because they're females and require special treatment? Right. So this is not to disavow the violence to women, but it's to say that we need to shift the dial like something is happening And we're losing the capacity to have meaningful conversations that help us to understand what sexual violence looks like, and how it functions in the lives of males.
Because we're only, researchers are only now beginning to gather the data, and it's principally in the United States. And what they're saying is that we have missed this significantly, in terms of the impact on young boys that are sexually assaulted, and males that are sexually assaulted both by males and females.
Kerry:
I really enjoy this line of conversation, because what comes up for me when I hear these stories is how, how much, you know, you know, men, and Black men in particular, are just simply, you know, not even in the picture, you know, this sense of once again, the erasure around how we have allowed Black men to show up. And then let's think about the how that picture that erasure is affecting the ways that our Black men are interrelating, are being, you know, judged in society in a particular way. Because normally, we don't see Black men as being, you know, the victims of the assault. And yet, there's this, you know, huge picture of them being the person who offers the assault. And I really want us to break that down, because that goes into some things. And Patty, I know you had something to offer to that.
Patty:
Well, because I mean, early on in the book, you make the point about, you know, there is no universal manhood, masculinity and, you know, universal men versus universal women. You know, and I've heard that in, you know, from a number of Indigenous feminists as well, you know, rejecting this universal womanhood. You know, so this idea of the, when we talk about like this universal womanhood and this universal manhood, we're not able to talk about these other things. And you know, you also make the point you know about we know that men get sexually assaulted we joke about them in prison, don't pick up the soap you say, right, how often to cops threaten person that they're interrogating, or whatever with “Yeah, you're gonna go to jail, and you're gonna get raped? And how are you going to like that?” And it's like, Dude, I stole Skittles, like, why are you doing this? You know, like Mariame Kaba uses that language too, “How do you be a, you know, call yourself an advocate against sexual violence and then send people to rape factories,” right? How do you? How do you do that? How so we know that men are sexually victimized and Black and Indigenous and making up the bulk of the prison population in Canada. And yet, we still call the cops on them. How is that not sexual violence,
Tamari:
it's hard not to understand it that way when you frame it that way. And that's because you're rethinking the narrative. And you know, as Patty, as you were relaying that, that perspective, I was thinking about Omar Khadr. Like this was a 16 year old boy in Guantanamo Bay, and the CIA interrogators in order to get this child soldier, a child, who should never had been incarcerated, to get him to confess, they said to him, we're going to put you into a US prison with four big Black men and you know what they're going to do to you.
So even at that level, the idea that rape is an instrument of control in prisons is one thing. But to use this as a means of threatening a child, to say that a Black man, this is how we’re going to punish you, if you don't confess. That just shows the extent to which of phenomena called sociogenic.
This myth of the Black man as a rapist is so pervasive in the culture that we need to begin to clearly name what I'm calling the Black phallic fantastic, which is the idea that Black men are hypersexual, they've never seen a and typically it's, you know, heterosexual. So they've never seen a woman that they would not want to sleep with. And especially if it's a white woman, oh my god, right? They're hyper sexual. They always want sex. Second, they're priapic they have large penises. Oh, everybody knows that. It's just like this thing. That's a part of the culture. I've had Black women complain to me that their white female work friends ask them if it's true. And how would they know? Because they have Black sons. So white women are asking Black women if it's true, a white woman who might be have a spouse who was a Black man or any other woman, other women what women would ask them, Is it true? Right
So we demean, and we discipline men for having locker room talk. But we know that white women and other women do this. Right? So that's the priapic myth. And the other is that well, we're prone to rape. If, if the accusation is made, it's reverse onus that dude has to prove that he didn't do it. This is just how pervasive these these three aspects of what I'm calling the Black phallic fantastic are and it's mobilized in different ways throughout the culture at different levels.
And right now, I'm just about to launch my, my research project for a book, that my next book, calling it sex tropes in trauma, the intimate lives of Black men, and I want to understand how do these tropes affect you? Right, because I've been talking to enough Black men to be disturbed by what by what I'm told, that's for some of them, their quote, unquote, first experience is being 5, 7, 8, 12, 16, years old, right, and being introduced to sex, very often by older girls, and grown women. But the older these guys get, the more they frame it as an experience. So they don't even have a language, to name having their sexual sovereignty, their autonomy removed from them, while as youngsters.
And what I'm what I want to get at is, like, how has this affected your life, if you have had any of these experiences, whether it's with the tropes, or with actually having your autonomy being taken from you, because we don't have a language for it. And I think that's one of my, that's my mission, really, with this next book, is to help to develop a language. And I think this will lead Black men to be able to live more full lives with higher quality, intimate relationships, if they can deconstruct these tropes and the trauma with their partners.
Kerry:
Oh, okay, Tamari, I have you just sent chills down my, to my very core, I am really, really resonating deeply with so many of the things that you said, one being that I work very closely with Black men, with couples. And it has been my experience as well, that that this this sense of the Black man, or, you know, having these very early sexual experiences, and somehow, as you said, it is created to, you know, we know that when we go through trauma, we, we have different levels of acceptance of what that traumatic event is, and, and depending on how you react, you may freeze, or you numb out and then I believe that it's reinforced by our societal norms that tell our men that, you know, they're allowed to have these sexual conquests. And yet, I too, have noticed at an alarming rate that I see are Black men are having these experiences as young as five, the median age that I have seen is around 12, 13. That seems to be a median age. And the how that has shown up is a lot of these same people end up in my chair afterwards.
And I find that there's been this, there's been several disconnections in the way that the perceptions of sexuality, this idea of even being able to associate the trauma, I do a lot of work around just even opening that door to recognize that there might have been, you know, what, do you know at 12. You don't know these things at 12, curiosity maybe, but what do you know? You know, it's speaking that language and giving them that language.
I think it's such a powerful space, because so many of us and, and in particular, Black men don't. And I it's funny, I'm really interested and working on developing a course myself a system to offer some of the healing spaces that we need to around it. And it is novel, allowing even to connect into that emotional space that allows men to feel safe enough to even be able to acknowledge it is is some work that definitely is needed. And I am just commending you if this is you know that that's the next step for you. As you taking this further what.
How is, when we talk about this. How is Black men? How are Black men sitting in it? Do you know what I mean? Like we know that we have the you know, you have the Black phallic fantastic. Can you dive in and explain that just a little bit more like break that down? Because I really want people to understand and hear this. Like, when you mentioned this theory, I went, Wow, this is it. This is it. Can you really break it down for us?
Tamari
Okay, so thanks for the question. So, what I've done is I've taken the three major sexual stereotypes about Black men, because Fanon, Baldwin, who are the core theorists that are used in this book, all of their work deals with those three tropes or stereotypes. Others do it also, right, Chester Himes, Calvin Harrington, others do it. But there's something about the way in which James Baldwin was so persistent and so pervasive. And he was a cultural critic/psycho analyst who took these sexual stereotypes that are in the ether in the popular culture. And he brought it down to the level of daily practice. And he often used his own experience. And Fanon took it from the vantage point of the psychoanalyst’s couch. Right, who would psychoanalyze Western culture. And of course, the problem with Fanon is that he never applied his own theories to himself, whereas Baldwin did.
So there's a whole space and a gap in Fanon’s articulation of these tropes, right? That not even those who focus on his work, have paid close enough attention to, to see that Black Skin/White Masks, for all else that it was, it was an autobiography. Fanon was making self, making sense of himself as a colonized man, who could not get out of the space of colonization. Right? So this, he was literally working a lot of this stuff out through his patience. And this is what came through in Black Skin, White Masks, but I don't think a lot of his experts, those people who specialized in his work have paid close enough attention to that.
So what I did was I took these three tropes, the hypersexuality, right? Because you know, this presumption that well, Black men always love sex, and you say sex, you think Black man, you think big penis, you think Black men. You think rapist, you think Black men. And this is what was core to the work of Baldwin throughout much of his body of work, and also Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. And what they were getting at was, how do we deconstruct this, so that Black men can be seen as human beings and live human lives, and that others will not depend on defining who they are by imposing those sorts of tropes on Black men so that they can see themselves as innocent.
So what I did was, I said, Look, how far does this go back? And you got to go back to Greece and Rome. And people some people might say, oh, Tamari, you're taking it way too far. Well, okay. Well, you go to some of the Roman baths in North Africa. And you look on the, you look at the frescoes or reproduce some of those in the book, where did those come from? That was Romans reproducing those narratives of priapism as applied to Black men. But here's the twist. Priapism on the African significant signified barbarism. On a Roman is signified responsible use of power.
Because for the Romans, the penis was an instrument. The phallus was an instrument of power. The bigger the better. On an African or barbarian it connoted savagery, and sexual irresponsibility. This was part of how Rome envisioned African men because it also served as a symbol of fertility. So kind of like the the lawn jockeys, you know, holding up the candle, right? You rub the head for good luck on your way out of your house. Okay, those symbols, those frescoes of African males that were priapic, those were meant to connote fertility, but it also meant to connote barbarism on the African. Those things function together.
You go back a little further with Galen, the Greco Roman physician, he said that there's certain things that are unique to Africans, right. One of them is their large penises, and that they're hilarious. What what where would he get that idea from the Greeks and the Romans had a conception of moral geography where you were geographically that signified your moral qualities and characteristics, Mediterranean - Middle Earth. Those were the people that were rational, balanced, reasoned, they had equilibrium. People in the south or oversexed, people in the North, the Nordics, people, they said that they were frigid, and stupid. So all these Nordic people taking Greece and Rome as their inheritance. The Greeks and the Romans despise them. Right?
So when you go now to like the, the, the 17th, and the 18th and 19th century in Europe, who were they reading? They were reading Plato, of course, but they were also reading Theadorus of Sicily. They're reading all these other Greco Roman, Greek and Roman philosophers, geographers, that located race, with geography with moral characteristics, and they always associated hypersexuality, rape propensity, and large penises with Africans.
Kerry:
And, and what that brings up, interestingly enough, where I went with that is into the Middle Eastern slave trade. It's not something that we very often discuss, but the fact that, you know, the, you know, the Middle East, or moving into that part of the world that they were having, you know, they were slaving enslaving Africans for about 500 years before the Middle Passage started, you know, and we also don't talk about that in that realm of the slave trade, that element of creating eunuchs. So so many of our Black men were actually castrated. And so I think that's very interesting to note that, you know, this idea of power when you when you bring up this the sense of the Greco, the Greco Roman era, considering penis size, being about power, I find it very interesting that the very first thing that would happen when they enslaved our people or Black men, that the first thing that went was the penis.
Tamari:
So that's an interesting observation and let me add a bit more to that. Right. When you look at the enslavement of African people, by Arabs, mostly and to a lesser extent, what we now call India. One of the interesting things is that is the demographics, the Trans Saharan and the Trans Indian Ocean enslavement of African people, two out of every three African taken was a female. The other 1/3 were males. And they were chiefly used in military service, but also in the bureaucracy as eunuchs. The Khalif of Baghdad in the 10th century, he had something like 10,000 or 11,000 eunuchs in his bureaucracy. 4000 were white males from Eastern Europe, the other 7000 were African males. There was a tendency to prefer eunuchs who were Africans because they will be castrated. And in the Turkish Empire in Turkey itself, like in Ottoman Turkey. The the the royal bureaucracy was literally like virtually all staffed by African males. And many Turks don't know the extent to which Africans were not only in the military, but predominated in the palace, right and among the upper classes, but we, the most Turks don't know this because they could not sexually reproduce. Ah, and so the castration centers were in Egypt, right, one of the main centers was in Egypt, in Alexandria, and in Spain.
Kerry:
Wow. See, once again, I had no idea. Thank you for that piece of information.
Tamari:
So they also had it was a it was, it was it was an art and a science. So clean shaved were those who had the both the penis and testicles cut off. And shaved were only those who had just just a testicles cut off. The mortality rate for those that were clean shaved was extraordinarily high. And in some cases, the surgical procedure amounted to no more than a stone crushing the genitals of 12, 13, 14, and 15 year old boys. Right, this was the level of barbarism and brutality, that was meted out to African males during the Saharan and the East Indian slave trade. So if those males were not used in the military, and they were, if they were used in the bureaucracy, they were very, very often castrated, the mortality rate depending on the type of the procedure was not high. And absolute disregard for the survival of the males was not a concern, because it was cheaper to replace them than to grow them.
Patty:
We often think about, you know, kind of the history of Blackness beginning with the transatlantic slave trade. But really, Africa and Europe aren't that far apart. You know, they're not that far apart. I'm like, you know, you talk about the, these tropes going back, you know, to Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome and further further back, because this is not a huge geography that we're talking about, and trade routes and relationships, and wherever, wherever Black slavery went, you know, or Afrocentric, slavery went, That's they weren't all eunuchs, as like, you say, were in the military. So they form communities that remain to this day, like in the case of, of the Siddih in India, and we forget that we get so kind of locked in our own little world, that, you know, we forget that there have been Black people in England for a very long time. You know, there have been Black people in France and Spain and, you know, kind of throughout, you know, those places for a very long time, and not always enslaved. Not, you know, you know, that's also kind of a very narrow picture that we have. And, and that's what carries forward in our current thinking about Blackness, as we only have this kind of very small, very skewed perspective of, you know, of what it is. So that's, I mean, that's something else that I really appreciated about your book is the large, global and historical context of it, that makes us see just how much bigger it is, which shows just really how absurd our current view is. And the current limitations of the way we think about Black men and Blackness in general. It's, it's ridiculous, it’s so tightly controlled this narrative, this, you know, white supremacy, white supremacist, colonial narrative, but it's ridiculous. It doesn't, it doesn't hold. The center does not hold.
Kerry:
right. I love that so much, Patty, because it's true. For me, when I was reading this book, at the same way, same thing for you, even as a Black person, like just the expansiveness of this body of work, like you really do touch from so many different spaces. And it really brought home, how we, as Black people, and in particular, are Black men whose voice doesn't get heard. They are not a monolith. They are, you know, have different experiences have had, um. Even though there are commonalities, which you know, I think you're drawing in, but the there are these differences in the way that we have had those experiences. However, we don't give the voice to our men to speak it. And as you said, that language hasn't even been developed. So, you know, Tamari, I just want to really commend you for you know, doing this, to me, it's groundbreaking work. I know, we I know, there have been others that have come before, you've quoted some of my you know, I call them my hallowed babas you know, Dr. Diap, and, and others that you've quoted. But I really recognize how with there's so much more to go. And I I'm, I'm we're at our hour, so that's kind of why I'm like, Man, I feel like we've only just like we just we just did like 10 pages in like that's, that's what it feels like. And there's so much more to cover. I really would love for us to come back even to break down like this, the sense of queerness and how that has shown up that there's just so much disabilities and how that has shown up in We got to have you back Tamari?
Tamari:
Well, I would, I would definitely say thank you. And I would, I would definitely bring my colleagues with me that contributed to the book, because they have to speak to the work from their own perspective, because the work than they did was just absolutely brilliant,
Patty:
Like for myself as an Indigenous woman, and thinking about the men in our communities, and, you know, kind of their experiences, because, you know, our men are also hyper sexualized, and, you know, on the cover of, you know, those bodice ripping romance novels and, you know, and kind of, you know, play that, you know, portrayed as the, you know, the savage, and, you know, always in a loincloth with a rippling chest, right, like, it's, I don't know, like, it's always in that way, we talk about the hyper sexualization of the men and the women in two very different ways, right, like the woman is always seen as the victim. And the man is always seen as the predator. And we don't see that by framing our men in this way. And we do it ourselves. You know, because we buy into that stuff, right? Like, we've heard it from the time we were little, you know, but, you know, that is in itself a form of sexual violence, because we're putting them in this box, that is not helpful, and is not I mean,
I could just go in so many in so many ways about this, but we just had our sisters in spirit event yesterday. And the woman who and one of the women who organized it, who spoke at the beginning, she said, I know, it's called Sisters in Spirit, and we're here for our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. But we're also here for our two spirited people and for our men, and for all of those who are experiencing sexual violence and murder and going missing. This was not only for us, this is for all of us, because these things are pervasive in our communities, and whiteness, patriarchy, colonialism. That's the problem. That's the problem, not each other. And we are here together.
So thank you so much for this book, I'm gonna be unpacking this for a while.
Tamari:
Patty, if you can, if you could encourage any First Nations, male to do an MA or PhD on exactly that issue that you mentioned, it is a, it's screaming to be done. The issue of the hyper sexualization of First Nation males, it's across the 19th century, into the 20th century, it is still pervasive, it's with us. But again, we don't have a language for it, because that work is really, I think I've read just a little bit of it. There's something out there. But I don't think to the extent that people have caught on to really do that research.
Patty:
Well, I think we're very comfortable with the idea of women as victims, we're very comfortable with that. And we're willing to throw lots of money at it and special days and everything, the idea of our men being victims, we're not that comfortable with that
Kerry:
I and I, you just hit the nail on the head. And I think what is so powerful about this is when we talk about the ways that we are dissecting colonialism, we are offering up medicines, I think this is an imperative part, until we allow a space for, you know, our men to be able to shine, to be able to stand up to be able to voice and bring power to their voice in their vulnerability. Because what I think we've excluded from men is that sense of their vulnerability and the ability to be safe, to be heard. So as we develop the language as we create these truths, we as we have these conversations, this is one of the ways that we tear apart this system as it stands because it joins us. It allows us to feel it allows us to create healing. And I'm so, so grateful to know you Tamari. This is great work you're doing. I really appreciate you
Tamari:
my sisters. I want to thank you both, Patty and Kerry, this is wonderful. Thank you. I look forward to being back.
Patty:
We'll see you again. Bye bye.
Kerry:
We're doing this again. Thank you both. Bye. Good night.
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