While there has been much written about the experience of African-American men, a similar body of literature does not exist for issues of black masculinity in a British context. In Britain there has been a pathologised approach which sees black masculinity as constructed within a deviant youth subculture as a substitute for powerlessness. As bell hooks argues: ‘The portrait of black masculinity that emerges in this work perpetually constructs men as “failures”, who are psychologically “fucked up”, dangerous, violent sex maniacs whose insanity is informed by their inability to fulfill their phallocentric masculine destiny in a racist context.’

Power is central to any discussion of black masculinity, but different from the wider gendered power relations in society. Black masculinity can be best understood as an articulated response to structural inequality, acting out and subverting hegemonic definitions of power and control, rather than an alternative to them. Living in a culture where racist colonisation has designated black men as more body than mind, I am witness to, and participant in, the black bodily experience as collective memory. The severing of the mind from the body and the soul suggests a fragmentation of identity in the construction of black masculinities.