Moving beyond pathological framing that circumscribes Black men involves a deliberate mental effort. It means being prepared to see more of Black men than is immediately apparent. An important step toward doing so is attending to how some of these men argue for and attempt to reconstruct their own public identities and, as we shall see later in this chapter, by how they strive to serve other Black men who prototypically appear to be in crisis. Whatever their approach happens to be, their struggle is immense.
The first type of effort, the reconstructing of one's own identity, was conveyed to me during my service as a consultant for the Transitional Jobs Reentry Demonstration Project. The project, administered by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, involved an analysis of the re-entry experiences of male participants in a transitional jobs initiative. Aside from receiving the temporary subsidized jobs, the men received support services, and formal job placement assistance (Redcross et al. 2010). My role in the evaluation of the four-city project was to periodically interview and shadow 10 men in each of the project's focal cities (Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul).
Felon, just the word, period, frightens people because they don't really know. Some people don't give you a chance because of the word “felon.”
(“Basil”)
I did my crime so long ago and I served my time, but I still have the “X” on my back …I ain't hurt nobody or kill nobody, so it shouldn't be held against me for life for something that I was doing when I was young.
(“Terrance”)
People don't see me as just an ex-offender anymore; I am their coworker, or the guy that's good at driving or greeting the customers. [Being a former inmate] means that I'm not doing the things that I used to do. I'm bettering myself. A life of crime wasn't for me. It's not for me now, but back then when I was offending, I didn't care about it. I just wanted to commit crimes. Now, I know because I'm better out here than in there [prison], and everybody needs me out here. I'm useless in there …My family, when things go wrong or support or something, whenever they need something, they need me here, or even just to talk to them, or even just family gatherings, they'd rather see me there than coming up to see me [in prison] …[People] respect me for what I'm doing and how I was able to make that change.
(“Chris”)
I met Basil, Terrance, and Chris in 2008 while working on the Demonstration Project. In looking back on my three years of fieldwork there, this was my first research opportunity to focus exclusively on the kinds of Black men that seemingly were most doomed in the US. The crimes that the Black men that I encountered in this project were convicted of included homicide, burglary, assault, and narcotics distribution. Accordingly, some of them typified the most ominous kinds of Black men that others could imagine. Yet, my work in this project necessarily required an effort to look beyond their pasts and to consider how they contended with the possibility of a better future. This effort included having the chance to witness their efforts to act outside of the boundaries of the imagery often associated with the criminal element, especially Black male criminals.
Basil, Terrance, and Chris were former drug dealers who also spent much of their adolescence and young adulthood engaged in a wide variety of other illegal activities. Basil and Terrance were not successful in finding full-time work during my involvement with them for the assessment. That being the case, their comments reflect the kind of despair and frustration that comes with the absence of such an opportunity. More importantly, these remarks recall the ease with which Black men can be pegged as unworthy people and the deep emotional impact that such treatment can have. When put on paper, it is difficult to pierce through their comments to understand that the pain and suffering they were experiencing results from such stigmatization. Of course, some may feel that these men deserve to be so stigmatized. Yet, the problem at hand is not only one of whether these men deserve an opportunity to move beyond their pasts (after all, they did serve their sentences after being sanctioned for their transgressions). The problem is also a matter of what it means for Black men to bear the consequences of being perceived as criminally inclined, or unworthy of the kinds of self-improvement opportunities that most people would seek.
Sociologist Devah Pager has studied extensively how Black men, irrespective of their particular pasts, are assumed to be actual or potential criminals by employers who encountered them in interview settings (Pager 2007). Through a series of audit studies, she uncovered the extent to which merely appearing at an interview allowed Black men to be regarded by the interviewer as an actual or potential criminal, even if the constructed resume for those individuals was of equal quality to the White American men who were included in her audit studies of how potential employers react to Black men. The story of Theodore (a pseudonym), also a participant in the re-entry project, makes the case as well:
The biggest crock that they can give you in the world is that a man can be convicted in these courts, and then serve his time and he's paid his debt …Though I made those decisions to do those crimes and got myself in those situations, I'm still paying another debt each time they say no or each time they turn me away …It kind of fulfills the dream that people make us out to be and that's why they turn us away …I'm five years from 50. I'm getting scared, like, how long can I keep struggling? I'm getting up there.
In contrast to the other men, Chris represents an alternative story. Soon after being released from a Wisconsin penitentiary, he was fortunate enough to get placed in a transition job in a supermarket. Accordingly, he has spent his post-incarceration time working as a delivery man and stock person. Aside from his remarks that appear at the start of this chapter, he told me that having a job meant that not only did he become a new man to himself, but others learned to accept him as someone different than who he used to be. That latter transformation is crucial for the quest of ensuring Black men are not doomed. Chris’ account of public identity transformation is the extreme version of the kind of transformation that must be afforded to Black men more generally in society. The first step in undoing the consequences of the long-standing gaze upon Black males is the very demystification of the negative image cast upon them.
Implicit in Chris’ story is that he found himself successfully immersed into the social world of people other than Black Americans. Even though that immersion was only by way of working in a high-end supermarket that catered to more privileged people (it was one with a delivery service), it created a platform by which those others could see him differently. His employers knew of his background (because his ability to garner that employment was based upon his being an ex-offender), so they experienced first-hand the transition of his public identity from negative to positive. Such transformation is not easy, nor does it unfold in the same way for every Black male fortunate enough to engage it. Hence, the critical work to be done begins with those who stand apart from Black men preparing themselves to re-think them. This means developing a mindset about Black men that allows for redemption rather than for permanent indictment. It also means opening up consideration of their behavior as not always reactive or focused on the destructive, but rather as produced out of fear or uncertainty as much as (and sometimes more so than) deliberation.
* * * * *
The hard work required to reconstitute the image of Black men is revealed in the efforts of two older Black men that I encountered while doing research in Chicago. These men were, to use the vernacular that they employed about themselves, “old heads.” The concept of the old head has been written about by sociologist Elijah Anderson, who describes old heads as fathers, uncles, grandfathers, or neighbors, figures who serve as models of success in past years, and who can often provide wisdom and counsel for younger generations of men and women (Anderson 1999).
In his own work Elijah Anderson has been concerned that old heads were not paid much attention by the younger generation, who are caught up in more immediate gratification and campaigns for respect. This respect was not garnered in the same way when the old heads were young. Instead, at that time they went to work in the industrial sphere and earned respect by bringing home a salary and providing for their families. Anderson makes the point that such work tends not to be available nowadays, nor do the interests of the younger generation allow them to heed the kinds of advice given by many old heads.
The two men I introduce here are not quite the kinds of old heads that Anderson talks about. In fact, each of them was much more like the troubled youth that Anderson says now avoid the advice of the older generation. I have told much about their story before (Young 2007), but say some other things here in order to build a case about what is at stake in thinking anew about Black men. The first “old head,” Smittie (a pseudonym), was in his mid-forties when I first met him in the mid-1990s. He was born in New York City but raised in Chicago. As a young child he moved with his family into the Henry Horner Homes on Chicago's Near West Side. Smittie's father was killed by one of his former wives (not Smittie's mother). Smittie grew up with mom and stepdad and had eight siblings in the family. The conditions of a crowded household were compounded by his stepfather's physical abuse of his mother, which Smittie said persisted throughout his childhood.
Since his adolescence in the 1960s, Smittie has been a gang member in a faction of the Vice Lord Nation, an associate of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party and a participant in some of their community organizing efforts, a full-time employee for nearly a decade in domestic service at the Playboy Club of Chicago, and since the mid-1980s chronically unemployed.
Milton (also a pseudonym) is close in age to Smittie. He never knew his father, and throughout his life his mother worked as a domestic or in retail services. He has eight brothers and sisters. Other than Milton, only one sibling has completed college. The rest have work histories ranging from steady blue-collar employment to chronic unemployment.
Milton grew up in various South Side Chicago neighborhoods until his teenage years when the family settled in the working-class community of Englewood. Although he reported being a solid student academically, Milton was better known as a standout high-school athlete in the early 1960s. He played both basketball and American football and was actively recruited by various major American college programs in both sports (he informed me that his basketball skills were far superior, and these drew the majority of the recruiters’ attention). However, unlike more recent times when professional sport careers are contemplated by talented high-school athletes, Milton knew of very few people who ever made it to the professional ranks from his background in the 1960s. Hence, he determined to embark upon his quest for a new and exciting experience away from the blight of Chicago that did not include preparing for sports.
Rather than attend college, confusion and curiosity about the world led Milton to leave high school before graduating and enter the military. He believed that this would allow him to explore his curiosity at the expense of the federal government. Milton enlisted in the US Marine Corps and planned to earn his GED (general equivalency diploma) there. Instead, he soon found himself in combat in Vietnam.
While in Vietnam, Milton began ingesting narcotics, beginning with marijuana, which over the next few years led to an addiction to heroin. From the late 1960s until the early 1980s he sold drugs, stolen goods, and involved himself in various kinds of underground economic activity. Milton told me that he figured that he made close to half a million dollars selling narcotics. As he was an addict throughout that time, he was in no shape to save any of it. Instead, by 1980 Milton had a criminal record and had experienced a revolving-door pattern of short-term incarcerations. By the late 1980s he determined that he would have to change his life or he would face death on the streets of California, where he was then living. Choosing the former, he borrowed the car of a drug supplier and drove himself to a rehabilitation clinic. Since that time, things turned quite positive for him. He successfully completed rehabilitation and then completed his studies for his GED. Within several years he enrolled and completed studies in a California community college. Thereafter, he enrolled and received a degree from a four-year higher educational institution. He then completed some graduate study, and in the 1990s he entered into the ministry.
While starting out in similar states of constraint, Smittie and Milton experienced very different life paths. As youth and young men, both struggled in dealing with circumstances that threatened their already precarious chances to get ahead, including getting into trouble with the law. Smittie never really overcame instability and turbulence, but Milton did. Aside from their early years, where the two men also stand on similar ground is in their efforts to deal with the younger Black males in their lives. What they say about that topic informs greatly about the prospects of changing societal images of Black males.
Smittie has four nephews. When I met him he was living with his mother and one of them. He is now an “old gangster,” too old to be heavily involved in gang activity, but familiar enough to the young breed that were active at the time when we spoke. He told me, “I have three generations of gang fighters, gang members in my family now. And I spawned that …I'm so embarrassed by it though, I mean the kind of problems that they could bring to the family, you know, the grief and shit. I mean, that's a terrible sight – seeing one of your people laying up there with a hole in his head or back, or cold dead.”
The contradiction that he has lived and that he now sees in his nephews about being in a gang ruptures any sense that these men can be thought of as simply good or bad. Their life circumstances left them with limited choices. They were involved in the gang life for survival, but as Smittie knew full well, risked survival as a result of their immersion within it. As he said:
They have to protect themselves in the community, you know. It's basically a protection thing. People will try to intimidate you. They will take from you. They will abuse you physically. So you know, if you live through it, then you have accomplished a lot. You survived it. But a lot of times they don't. They don't live through it, you know, because of the mentality of a lot of our youths today.
Smittie's comments need to be taken in the context of his own past experiences as a gang member. As he saw it, the mere existence of gangs was not the problem. Smittie was an elder and a respected figure in that world. I witnessed this by how much deference he received from younger men in the community as I conducted fieldwork with them. His concern for the younger men was about the absence of formal opportunities for employment and thus the availability of more free time for frivolous gang activities that could bring harm or sanction to gang members. In Smittie's mind this was the root cause of the wanton violence that he believes that modern gangs promote. He told me that increasing the opportunities for these young men would allow them not to have to be so deeply embedded in neighborhood gangs and the exacerbating aggression and violence that came with it. As he said:
There's some guys so crazy now with the different organizations out here. They just kill each other just for any, I mean anything. Just name it and they'll do it. …And a lot of these young brothers don't have the opportunities to grow because they're so caught up with that peer pressure. And they'll never grow out of it because like I say once you get trapped into the organizations, it's just a matter of time before you're either dead, or you kill somebody or somebody kills you. You know, I mean it's just that obvious.
Smittie and many men like him have a vision of what is going on and what needs to be done for Black men in crisis. Yet, men like him are often not recognized as such. Including the perspective of men like Smittie in the public conversation validates their identity as something other than men in trouble, but men who are sensitive, aware, and, if given opportunities, agents who can respond to the conditions and circumstances in their lives.
Those with no connection whatsoever to communities like the one where Smittie lives may see the answer in the mere elimination of gangs as the solution to the problem. Clearly, as Smittie saw it, the legacy of their existence dismisses any notion that they can simply be made to disappear. The realities of his and other Black males’ lives in Chicago meant that for him, gangs were a critical resource in an otherwise resource-depleted environment. They provided protection as much as they facilitated danger and, as they saturated the social world of low-income Chicago, Black men who resided there had to be content with them. For Smittie, then, the flawed logic of avoidance was replaced by an emphasis on cautious action and forethought as the best mechanisms for survival. Smittie elaborates on his perspective by telling the following story:
So one night about ten-thirty I was waiting on the Madison Street bus. I always have a seven-inch knife in my pocket, for these particular situations. A group of young kids came by ranging from the age of about 10 to about 15, but it was about seven or eight of ’em, right? And one of them asked me, “What was I riding?” – meaning what gang was I in. I told him, “The Madison bus to work, to take care of my family.” I told him, “The Madison bus.” He said, “You are a smart M-F, you know?” And I said, “Look brother, please, get you some business. I'm on my way to work.” One of them picked up a 40-ounce beer bottle and hit me in my head with it. Now, by that time I done pulled my knife out and I grabbed him. He was ten years old. And I threw this kid on the ground and I was fitting to stab him. And I looked at him, and I said, “It would be a waste of my life if I hit this kid in his head with this knife.” And he was, “Please mister, don't kill me. Please don't kill me.” And meanwhile his buddies had ran off and found sticks and stuff. And I actually ran from these kids so I wouldn't hurt them, or I wouldn't get hurt.
Smittie obviously had no reservations about possibly getting violent with these youths. As a young man who once stood in their position, he was quite familiar with the kind of situation that he faced and how he had to respond to it. He knew he was faced with a group of youth who were looking for trouble. Yet, his willingness to handle the situation in the manner that he did also demonstrated that he was very much a part of their social world and cognizant of how to best operate in it.
In telling his story, Smittie reflects much of what distant observers might consider to be a part of the problem with Black males. He was unwilling to back down. He was aggressive. Most importantly, he was prepared to respond to counter violence with violence. He clearly did not exhibit weakness nor timidity. What he also expressed in telling his story, however, was that he was not uncritically prone to violence. This old head and former gang member knew full well what he was doing to protect and defend himself at the particular point in time that he did it, and he knew what it would mean in a larger context if he had to fully act out on what appeared to be his initial intentions. Part of the damnation of Black males rests in their being regarded as uncritically violent. However, Smittie was far from uncritical that evening. He was both conscious of the scenario he found himself in and conscientious about how he would manage it. It is that blend of response that would have been lost if Smittie was forced to act on his initial impulse, and criminal charges were to have come his way. If the latter were the case, he would have been pegged as another dangerous Black man acting irresponsibly to do harm to others and possibly himself.
Another one of his stories also makes this case for how insight into his conscientiousness adds more depth to his character. Here Smittie tells about the tribulations of trying to support and guide one of his nephews. His general approach to the four of them, as he put it in a grandfatherly tone, was to keep them from being “stuck on stupid and looking for dumb.” In trying to help one nephew in particular think about the potential bad choice he was preparing to make concerning a personal conflict, Smittie said:
I had to actually drive him down on the ground physically. He had a gun. He was gonna shoot somebody over ten dollars. This was Sunday, yesterday. And I'm trying to tell him, you know, you're reacting, you're not thinking. You know, and I took the gun, you know. He actually buckled up at me. He wanted to fight, and I'm looking at him and I'm saying I see myself in him, you know. He's reacting and not thinking, you know. Over ten dollars. So what did I do? I took the gun from him. Gave him ten dollars and kicked him out. Told him I don't want to talk to him anymore. And then he came back, later on about nine or ten o’clock, “I'm sorry, I won't do that no more.” I told him, “You know, you don't react. You think first. There's a lot of goddamn humps in the ground out there in Burr Oak (cemetery) from people reacting and not thinking.” You know, I try to express that to him. You know, because I can't stop them. I can't. I mean, they've grown. I can only tell them what not to do. I'm saying, I don't want to see them in these positions (of getting into unnecessary trouble), but if they got to be there, if you gotta be there, you gotta be smart. You can't be stuck on stupid looking for dumb. Straight up you have to be smart. That's as simple as that.
Smittie told me that he was the only male relative in the lives of his nephews. As such he was about much more than trying to correct their behavior. More importantly, he suspended making moral judgments in favor of trying to provide practical guidance. The latter, he well knew, was what could keep them alive. In striving to do that, he was pursuing, in his own particular way, a moral project. It also was all that he could do given that he, himself, survived life as a gang member, possessed a rich and broad repertoire of street wisdom, and was keenly aware of the kinds of mistakes young Black men can make and, therefore, how they might be avoided.
Milton also told me that there were not many men around in his family to talk to the younger males. His filling that vacancy meant that he could marshal his past, as a former athlete, war veteran, substance abuser, and hustler, to provide guidance to the young men in his family. Milton told me that his stature in his family was heightened by his having overcome an addiction. He was, in the eyes of his relatives, a survivor. His example, therefore, was especially meaningful when interacting with the family.
Milton has more than two dozen nieces and nephews. Although he does not reside with any of them, he said that he is the point person for advice and counsel in the extended family. His presence was especially critical for the children of his siblings who have experienced substance-abuse problems as well as extreme economic hardship. He told me that he had been asked into situations that involved drugs, gangs, and the police. In one case in particular Milton talked about a nephew who is following his own early life pattern of drug abuse and distribution. Milton informed me that he caused part of this nephew's problem because he introduced him into narcotics during his own years of involvement with them. Milton said that although this nephew is aware that Milton is no longer involved in that kind of activity, he holds no illusions about being able to singlehandedly transform his nephew. As he explained:
You know, because basically what he's going through now is the same road I went through, you know, in terms of being out there in those streets, you know, on your own, and basically just looking to get high. …You know, it's like when, uh, people ask me to talk to him, I says, “Well, what am I going to tell him?” You know, he knows. I think somehow, you know, we tend to think people who are in trouble like, you know, don't know and it's something that he could tell you more about. …The last long conversation I had with him, you know, I was really shaking my head. I mean he could tell me more (than I could tell him) about the consequences, the problems, what he needs to do with his life, but right now he's just making choices.
Milton's understanding of what he believes he can and cannot do on behalf of this nephew is made clear by what more he had to say:
I mean, he just can't wake up tomorrow and say I'm not gonna do this anymore. I mean, there has to be a process. But I mean right now, he's choosing not to …I can only show him model behavior. Just, you know, let him see it. And hopefully, again, it'll just give him information that'll help him make a better decision one day. You know, maybe, maybe not.
Milton was not particularly concerned about the difficulties in trying to produce change in the young people in his life. In talking about how he approached them he said:
I share my experiences with them. And I guess my thing about kids, young people, is that, you know, the most we can do as adults is just sort of give them the information and let them know what's going on. Whether it's by way of telling them about our lives …well, I guess that's the only way to do it …so that they at some point will have a stash of options, you know, and they can at least know, you know, what they're choosing when they do become smart enough to make choices, you know, and stuff. I don't preach any particular philosophy to them, but I do model on things. …I just try to, you know, model that as a way hoping that they will see that. …Or at some point if they don't go that way, but they're caught in a situation where they can reach out and make a choice then they'll know what they're choosing.
Milton said that it is impossible to predetermine the outcomes of his efforts. As he put it:
You know, it's difficult to know. I would assume that it's just they take out things and just store it, you know, it just becomes part of other information that they get, you know, and at some point they dissect it themselves and figure out how to use it, you know.
The root causes of the current social problems in the community of African American youth was not lost on Smittie or Milton. As Smittie put it:
Money. Drugs. Uh, drugs. Definitely drugs has a lot to do with it. Just like any other enterprise or business, you want to expand it. And when you expand it you're going to run into peaks and valleys, and how do you solve that? You either climb it or go under it. And a lot of times they just go through it. …Not only with the drugs, but I mean a 14-year-old walk up to a, drive up to a burly 40-year-old man and shoot him in the back of the head [which occurred to a friend and fellow gang member of Smittie's several weeks before our conversation]? C'mon, that's ridiculous.
Both Milton and Smittie understood without ambiguity that having a presence in their nephews’ lives did not mean they were able to easily direct or influence them. Although each had much to say about how they tried to intervene in the lives of younger relatives, each also knew their limitations. Their own experiences best informed each of them about what they could expect from the young men that they tried to counsel. Their sense of limitation was a by-product of their intimate connection to and involvement in similar circumstances concerning troubled youth. More importantly, though, their accounts each encourage very different thinking about Black men who are or have been immersed into crises.
Milton's last comment in particular highlights how well each understood and connected to the young men in their lives. Each saw something more than troubled young men, even if such men often were in, or on the verge of being in, huge trouble. Each did not indict nor explicitly chastise the young men in their lives, or at least did not make such efforts the sole means by which they related to them. In short, each strove to connect with the humanity of these young men in ways that did not dismiss, but included more than, the narrow portrait of them as debauched or degenerate.
There are lessons to be learned from how they represent themselves as well as how they engage the young men in their lives. In the case of the former, Smittie and Milton believe themselves to be survivors. They are products of the kind of low-income, urban, African American communities whose residents sometimes engaged in the reckless and often self-destructive behaviors that are often associated with such places. In contending with these conditions, Milton argued quite forcefully that he made his own choices in life, including the choice to pursue the military while not yet finished with high school and to commit to ingesting narcotics over a nearly 20-year period. That mentality, together with his having survived near-death encounters in Vietnam and living for nearly two decades with his substance-abuse problem, equipped him with a wide range of experiences to think about and apply in interacting with his nieces and nephews. It also allowed him the capacity to regard himself as highly efficacious. After all, he had overcome all the negativity that he had experienced. He felt that he eventually chose to do so as much as he chose to begin ingesting drugs. Similarly, while not having overcome poverty, Smittie also saw himself as efficacious because he was a senior-level gang member who reached an age that many of his childhood associates had not, and Smittie had done so while continuing to reside in the same impoverished community where he had been born and had engaged risk and peril as a younger man.
Smittie and Milton demonstrate that being older and beyond the fast life did not have to mean a complete loss of status in that domain. Both of these men were listened to and respected by the younger people in their lives. This was due to the fact that, in the course of engaging younger people, Smittie and Milton were decidedly less judgmental than would be many casual observers of the individuals for whom they provided counsel. Neither Smittie nor Milton remained fixed on the immorality of illegal or violent activity that their relatives were immersed in, but, instead, saw those pursuits as understandable options for troubled people to pursue in deprived communities. They also saw these people, their relatives, as committed to making their behavioral choices according to their own standards and measures. The goal, as Smittie aptly put it, was simply to help them keep from being stuck on stupid, and looking for dumb.
What Smittie and Milton deliver is something other than a call for the kind of morally grounded response from younger people that is more traditionally taken to be the proper contribution of old heads (Anderson 1999). Instead, they call for the recognition that such young people ultimately will make their own choices and that while the intervention of the old head can mitigate in the presence of certain crises (as Smittie tried to do when his nephew planned to shoot someone), he cannot change the dispositions of people who do not want to change.
In arguing about the traditional old head, Anderson (1999: 71) said that such a figure's functioning centered on the transmission of values concerning hard work and other explicit characteristics. Anderson also argued that today such old heads have lost most of their esteemed social status (pp. 72, 272). However, what is gained by paying attention to these two old heads, aside from the fact that they are not of the type that Anderson had in mind in his writings, is both a deeper and more complex rendering of Black males. On the one hand, they reflect a combination of traits denied to these men when seen only as constituent parts of a great American social problem. On the other, they reflect a manner of engaging men in trouble that allows for imagining new possibilities and approaches to push past simply pathologizing Black males. Instead, their efforts invite imposing a new lens on such men – one that recognizes that they can be reflective and make choices, and that they may know more about who they are and what they choose to do then others allow them to know (even if they are not always positioned to effectively correct themselves).