The end of the Second World War saw a “crisis of white masculinity” brought on by social, political, and economic change. He Thinks He’s Down explores the specific phenomenon of white men appropriating Black masculinities to benefit from what they believed were powerful Black masculinities. It reveals the intricate relationships between racialized gender identities, appropriation, and popular culture during the Civil Rights Era.

Drawing on case studies from three genres of popular culture –the literature of Mailer and Kerouac, fashion in Playboy magazine and action narratives in Blaxploitation films – Katharine Bausch untangles the ways in which white male artists took on imagined Black masculinities in their work in order to negotiate what it meant to be a man in America at this time. In so doing, Bausch argues, white men’s use of Black masculinities drained Black men of their political and racial agency and reduced them once more to little more than stereotypes.