Patriarchy produces the suffering of Black cishet men as the most legible kind of Black suffering, not because of its Blackness but because of the borrowed institutions of cisness and hetero-/sexuality by which cishet men become enfolded into the Human-symbolic order.

Black feminism does not argue that Black cishet men are disproportionately violent or that they are incapable of suffering violence. it argues that the capacity for one’s violence to be considered is predicated on one’s un/gendered racio-sexual subjectivity.

though Blackness marks ones excoriation from human-symbolic order which sustains claims to subjectivity, Blackness also produces sexuating and/as gendering difference whereby Black flesh is manipulated and called upon to bring coherence to colonial gender categories.

so black un/gendered subjects, say a Black Man, is only a Man insofar as “he” helps elaborate what being a Man is not, which, by the ceaseless negation of “his” (un)gendered position, fashions gendered subjectivity for the Human-World. this is what ungendering means.

the Black is violently incorporated into the symbolics of gender only to clarify that the Black is not a gendered subject, or a subject at all. this, in turn, produces gender-subjectivity for the World.

Black men, in their cisheterosexuality are laying claim to a gender-subject

what does that mean? it means Black cishet men are saying there is a way to be a gendered-subject that does not require absolute, totalizing violence. that’s still up for debate for some.

however, the point: cisness and heterosexuality are LEGIBLE gender-subject coordinates.

when the Black is violently incorporated into gender symbolics it is to make coherent cisgender and heterosexuality, in the first (not the only) instance. laying claim to those coordinates borrows the ethical grammar that supports them, an ethical grammar written in black flesh.

when one says one is cis and/or het one is saying I am within the realm of gendered sexual thinkability. that thinkability is predicated on Black unthinkability. to be Black and claim cis +/or het is to beat back one’s own unthinkability through gendered subjectivity.

it is assumed by black feminism that beating back one’s own unthinkability is a necessary survival strategy, however when one is a cishet Man in Patriarchy—a system organized around cisheteromanhood—one’s gendered-subjecthood is written over and against the Black Womxn.

that is to say: the tools by which cisness and heterosexuality are both written are fashioned in and through misogynoir by necessity. this is why the most common ways by which both are performed/written through the body is at the expense of Black Womxn.

the meaning of the terms cis/het are produced by ungendered Black flesh, which reached material apogee in the figure of the Black fem/me. when Black cishet men try to borrow those meanings they have to borrow their violent institution, which allows cis/het to make sense/meaning

Black men are not the only people who lay claim to gender subjectivity by clamoring for space w/in coordinates of cisness and heterosexuality. however, Patriarchy established Men as final and first beneficiaries of Gender, with cisness and heterosexuality as originary currency.

to be a Man—the gender-subject of immanent concern within Patriarchy—one has to demonstrate investment in cisheterosexuality. for a Man’s investment he is allowed legibility as subject paradigmatically built into every concept of ethics and philosophy of suffering.

Blackness always already bankrupts the Black Man’s investment in gendered subjectivity but it does not preclude him from appropriating the violent tools of cisness and heterosexuality, the only person against which he can wield them with any symbolic integrity being blk fem/mes