and Martin Delany's support of the equality of the sexes, argues black men in general held patriarchal attitudes toward their spouses: "[Freed male slaves] wanted black women to conform to the gender norms set by white society. They wanted to be recognized as ‘men,' as patriarchs, by other men, including white men. Yet they could not assume this position if black women were not willing to conform to prevailing sexist gender norms". hooks continues by arguing these problematic notions became the norm in black men from the early 20th century to the present day. To argue this point, hooks cites the discrepancies between Amy Jacques Garvey's activism and her husband Marcus's, and the scholarship of others who researched black gender roles in the United States. Some of it hooks found insightful, such as E. Franklin Frazier's The Negro Family in the United States, while others she found distasteful, such as Norman Podhoretz's My Negro Problem—And Ours. hooks criticizes the latter along with Daniel Patrick Moynihan's The Negro Family for positing black men were sexually more potent than white men, and/or emasculated by women for by their breadwinner status. "gangsta culture: a piece of the action" discusses economic barriers black men face in greater depth, focusing mainly on the 1960s. hooks argues that patriarchal notions of manhood have equated financial excess as the masculine ideal. As a result of this and a disdain for hierarchical power structures within the working economy black men turn to alternative professions: professional sports, music (jazz, blues, and hip-hop mostly) and crime. hooks cites Muhammad Ali as an influential figure in "assert[ing] a black male identity distinct from the stereotype" of silent, emotionless, and materialistic male leaders." At the same time hooks argues white supremacists have portrayed Ali as a "silent symbol of brute strength without an intelligent voice ... the eunuch who comes when his master speaks." To remedy this hooks calls for black communities to affirm the legacies of Ali, Malcolm X, and King, Jr., to challenge equating wealth with masculine success and unemployment as failure, and to lessen the influence of film and television that, hooks argues, trains black youth to join violent street gangs. The following chapter, titled "schooling black males" discusses a similar phenomenon with education. Black boys are discouraged from reading by the scarcity of books in many black families and communities, unspoken racial hierarchies in many public schooling, and