Intersectional Privilege and Oppression in the Discourse on "Endangered" Black Men.

That black males are "endangered" is a common theme in popular and academic texts in the U.S. and the U.K. Central to these texts, alternatively referred to as black male crisis narrative texts, is the presumption that black males are in crisis. For many commentators crisis narrative texts are an important means of documenting black men's economic and other woes. Critics suggest that these texts have more to do with assumptions of blackness as a masculine construct. Absent in these explanations, however, is significant examination of how crisis narrative texts challenge established understandings of intersectionality - a concept pioneered by black feminists to illuminate black women's interlocking racial, gendered, and sexual oppression. I argue that crisis narrative texts presume black males to be marginalized neither as blacks nor as males but as heterosexual black males - a category comprised of but greater than the sum of black males' racial, gendered, and sexual identities. I further contend that in constructing black men in this manner, crisis narrative authors radically broaden the boundaries of the intersectionally oppressed to include heterosexual black men. Not only that, by suggesting that it is black men rather than black women who are oppressed because others are privileged, these authors use the concept of relational difference in a way wholly unforeseen by intersectional theorists. Section one of the paper explores crisis narrative authors' presumption that black men exist at the junction of interlocking racial, gendered, and sexual oppressions. The latter half of the section details these authors' contention that black men are intersectionally oppressed because others, including black women, are intersectionally privileged.Section two concludes that crisis narrative authors not only complicate but ultimately posit a new model of intersectionality. First, by blaming black women for black men's woes, these authors suggest that intersectional theorizing need not advance a feminist agenda. Second, in discounting the notion that certain interlocking categories, such as "heterosexual man," always generate privilege while others, such as "black woman," engender oppression, crisis narrative authors destabilize intersectional theorists' assumption of a social world neatly reducible to the advantaged or the disadvantaged. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]