The Makings of Men: The Institutionalization of Class and Masculinity at a Historically Black College for Men.

Abstract

This study explores the experiences of men at Morehouse College, the nation's only historically Black college for men. While most of the literature on young Black males has emphasized the bleak conditions facing Black men at the social margins, this work hones in upon the understudied experiences of Black men who are poised to enter the middle class. At Morehouse, men experience a process of gender and class institutionalization that seeks to “make” them into culturally mainstreamed professional class Black men. Through multiple interviews with 32 Morehouse graduates, this work uncovers how the college experience was not merely a coming of age process, but an assiduously crafted race and gender project orchestrated by an institution with a distinct social and ideological mission. Where both the sociological literature and national discourse have repeatedly pointed to a cohort of young Black males as a national problem, this study found that respondents see themselves as having been made into men who are solutions to the problem. Men at Morehouse learn both formal and hidden cultural curriculums about manhood, mainstream cultural professionalism, and racial advancement that places both the institution and their experiences squarely within the context of a larger cultural project about gender respectability for the Black middle class. Previous studies of institutionalization have often emphasized that institutions function to uniformly impose rules and constrictions on their members. However, this study shows that the resources men bring with them into the institution, or acquire or lose within the process, actually determine how they engage institutional structures, and subsequently, determine how they are institutionalized into men. In addition, this study exposes how men think about an array of problems facing both the campus and Black men on through the ideological lens of the institutional process. Recurring campus-wide issues like homophobia, sexual assault, and an alarming attrition rate, then, are not necessarily viewed by the men as problems, but are often understood as sorting devices that allow the institution to promote an exclusive singular form of “respectable” Black masculinity while systemically weeding out men who do not or cannot fit the institutional prototype.