Several years ago I was invited to deliver a lecture at a predominantly African American Baptist church in a small city in southeastern Michigan. This lecture was a part of a special event organized by the church leadership to address the plight of Black men in the US. Since the mid-1990s it was not uncommon for many Baptist and other African American community-serving churches to host what they called “lock-ins” to examine the situation of these males. The lock-ins consisted of the male members of the church and invited guests coming together for a full evening of conversation and fellowship. Those gathered for the event would spend the night in the church in order to bond over intense and lengthy discussion about the plight of Black men and the possibilities for improving their situation. Implicit in many of these gatherings was an emphasis on what the men needed to do for one another in regard to that agenda. Thus, personal responsibility, a staple of Black church discourse, was an integral point of attention in these gatherings.
The event that I attended was not an overnight lock-in. Rather, this one involved a few hours of conversation, beginning with two presentations (including my own) and a dinner. My presentation was the second of that evening. It followed one given by a former professional football player. He talked about making the competitive nature of Black men a more positive factor in family and community settings (throughout his talk he also directed us through a lot of chanting and clapping). My presentation involved sharing some statistics and information about the state of Black men in the US, as well as in the very community where the church was located. I also shared my thoughts about what needed to be done to address the so-called crisis of Black males. I spoke about what Black men must do to take better care of themselves: socially, emotionally, and physically. I also spoke about what needed to be done in US society at large so that Black men could be viewed more appropriately, and potentially more favorably, by other US citizens.
The presentation was followed by an open conversation by the several dozen men in attendance at the church. They shared their hopes and dreams for the future. They also raised their concerns and questions about the present situation and circumstances for Black men. In the middle of the conversation one of the assistant pastors of the church took the floor and declared that he had been deliberately hiding a part of his past from the congregation and the church leadership. He said that he was an ex-convict. He explained that for a period of his adult life he had served time in a state penitentiary. The rest of the men in the room immediately fell silent. He said that he had never shared this part of his past with anyone in the church, especially as he determined to enter into the ministry sometime after his release, and wanted to pursue life as a man of God without others having insight into his profligate past. It was important to him, he said, to cultivate an identity as someone prepared to serve the Lord and not someone who once upon a time did things terrible enough to merit a prison sentence.
We were gathered in the basement of a church that was not particularly distinguishable from the kind found in working-class African American communities. It was very nondescript, and the church itself was slightly smaller than the parking lot surrounding it. It faced a row of public housing units located immediately west of it. Hence, I gathered that the head pastor did not necessarily engage the kind of vetting process in hiring his team that might be expected in a larger and more elaborate church. Therefore, I was not surprised that an assistant pastor could show up with this kind of background and not be found out. However, I was captivated by the very moment that was unfolding. That night the assistant pastor said that he felt compelled to tell those of us gathered in that basement that he was an ex-offender because that evening of sharing encouraged him to feel that he could now share with us this very private part of himself.
The effect of his disclosure was powerful and penetrating. It was clear to me that many of the men of the gathering, who had known this pastor for some time, and certainly much longer than I had, having only met him for the first time that evening, were surprised to learn about his history. More importantly, though, they were fully prepared to accept and embrace him given what he reported to us that evening. When he finished speaking he received hugs and handshakes. He also received words of encouragement and tribute for courageously sharing what he did with us. I felt a sense of gratitude for being able to witness all of this. In fact, I remember this part of the evening better than anything else that took place, or even more than the details of what I said in the course of that evening.
What occurred that night was the very act of acceptance that I hope that more Black men can receive if they courageously share who they are or who they have been with the world. As evident by his behavior throughout that evening, this pastor was a mild and courteous man. Yet, by his own account, he had been a totally different kind of person several years before that evening. Going forward he wanted to be the man who he was that evening, but also a man who could be acknowledged as having the kind of past that he had been carrying inside of his head and heart for several years. I have no way of knowing what became of him in the weeks, months, and years following my visit to the church. Nor do I know how the men (and women) of that church continued to feel about him. This vacancy of knowledge does not dismiss that what he did that evening and how he was received by others created a moment that I hope could become a reality for other Black men.
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Until he revealed his past, the assistant pastor who spoke in that small Michigan church was living a new life. He was fortunate in that he was able to create that new life himself rather than having to rely on others to accept him as a changed man. What is unfortunate for many other Black men who have had troubled pasts is that they lack the capacity to freely recreate themselves. Instead, their quest requires that others somehow commit to determining to see them anew.
The ability to see Black males anew is the crucial first step in eradicating the doom. There exist models for how this can be done, and some of them remain in contemporary cinema, this despite the centrality of cinema in fostering some of the problematic imagery associated with Black males. In 2017, the Academy of Motion Pictures awarded the Oscar for Best Picture to Moonlight. The film, directed by Barry Jenkins, was based on a play entitled, In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue (written by Tarell Alvin McCraney). Moonlight tells the story of a Black man named Chiron, focusing on three periods in his life: early childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Chiron first appears as a shy and withdrawn child who is fearful of bullies. He is befriended by a drug dealer (played by 2017 Academy Best Supporting Actor award winner Mahershala Ali), who demonstrates a warmth and compassion to him that is not associated with the hard and rugged lifestyle of such men. That drug dealer, Juan, becomes a father figure and a huge source of support for the frail and confused little boy. Chiron is also friends with another Black boy, Kevin, with whom he engages in a sexual act when both boys are teenagers. As an adolescent, Chiron struggles with his sexuality, his mother's drug addiction, her commitment to prostitution, and her negligence of him throughout the film. Ultimately, Chiron gets arrested for violently attacking one of his bullies, and he next appears in the film as an adult male, with considerable and solid girth, who has also become a drug dealer.
The complex character portraits in this film are only minimally conveyed through this summary. Indeed, that complexity is best revealed through viewing the film itself. What Moonlight delivers is the complexity of Black male characters that seems to be denied the very real Black male bodies that live their lives in the US. Among other accomplishments, Moonlight effectively conveys Black male hetero- and homosexuality, aggression and passivity, and anger and fear, all of which are contained in different ways within each of the two Black male bodies (Juan and Chiron). The remarkable statement that this film makes is that Black men, who are on the surface troubled, threatening, violent, and angry, can be loving, sensitive, insecure, and vulnerable. In many ways, Moonlight makes the point of the very pages of this book.
Of course, the reason why the public can become so immersed in film is because the images are necessarily distant from the reality. Cinema provides us with the opportunity to encounter characters, circumstances, and events without having to immediately and intimately experience them: we don't have to risk close encounters with the characters. What we must do in moving beyond the damnation of Black men, however, is to prepare ourselves to more fully and directly encounter these individuals. We must more fully and immediately include Black men into our communities, our civil society, and into our vision of humanity and of the human condition in the US.
A new vision of Black men is in order. Ultimately, what is required is a vision of Black men as vulnerable rather than only threatening. That vision is one that must be cultivated and embraced by those outside of the category of Black men. It is one that does not have to deny that which is unpleasant, objectionable, or discouraging about the kinds of activities and involvements that have constituted the lives of many Black men. However, that vision must be comprehensive of these men's inner thoughts, feelings, and interpretations about themselves and their conceptions of their place in their social worlds. It must be a more complete vision of their humanity, which includes more than what they have done or failed to do, but how they think about these aspects of their lives and how they regard the efforts and failures of their past and present lives. This vision need not rest on excuses and vindications, but rather on a more wholesome perspective that includes the behaviors and thoughts of these men that are ignored or else rendered as superficial or irrelevant when the current vision of them is as less than fully capable of engaging the modern world.
Reshaping the public image of Black men involves recasting the gaze upon them. It involves moving away from the kinds of social-problems logic that have driven the last 30 years of their public imagery and allowing a broader, deeper, and more complex portrait of Black masculinity to surface. A large part of doing so means engaging a broad conversation about the constitution of healthy contemporary African American masculinity. Much has been said in scholarship about what such masculinity should consist of and reflect (Collins 2005; Hunter and Davis 1992). In this work an explosion of new portraits and images has emerged that has created space for men who are quite distant from the traditional depictions of Black masculinity. Included here are gay, bisexual, and transgender men, and those who do not embrace aggression or popular notions of toughness. The mandate asserted by these scholars and others is to invite these men into normalcy.
Also included is a challenge to the notion that healthy masculinity requires the status of head of household rather than partner in the management of the household. It means that Black boys are to be regarded as children, and not men in children's bodies. Therefore, the still problematic feelings of threat extended to adult men should not be brought to bear upon young males who have yet to live life as adults. It also means the freedom to express and address vulnerability in its various forms, whether associated with social relations, sexuality, health, physical and mental ability, or otherwise. The new imagination of Black males should encourage re-thinking of these men as not simply troubled or potentially troubling individuals who are eternally configured as needing to make societal amends, but as individuals who must be given the opportunity to learn how to effectively contribute to and draw from their families and communities in order to become healthy, proactive, and productive individuals.
Public awareness and comprehension of the situation of African American men must be re-oriented such that the range of issues and concerns pertaining to this constituency (e.g., fatherhood, employment, educational attainment, incarceration, and physical health and well-being) is considered in an integrated and mutually reinforcing way. Shifting the public conversation in media, policy, and other arenas must be done in ways that do not allow for a collapsing back into simplistic indictments of these men as adherents to flawed or profligate value systems and normative orders. Instead, and as evidenced by Smittie, Milton, and some of the other men introduced in the preceding pages, the objective must be to better document and advance understandings of how choice-making is situated in cultural systems of meaning-making that are not inherently degenerate. What must be acknowledged, accepted, and validated are visions of Black men as vulnerable beings that require safe spaces for coming to terms with their vulnerabilities in healthy ways.
One step toward achieving this end is that researchers and others must commit to the idea that the street must be rethought as a site for the cultural expression of Black masculinity. The critical challenge at hand, then, is first to more seriously separate out as analytically distinct how these men engage the street in terms of their behavior, and how they mentally and emotionally engage it. When more attention is given to that latter domain of engagement, a different, broader, more penetrating, and more essential plane for the cultural analysis of these men comes into being. It provides a space for others to consider that many of these men are reflective about different aspects of their lives, unsure and uncertain about some of what they have to confront and experience in their lives, and critically questioning about some aspects in ways that their prior behavior alone could not possibly reveal. In making this step one certainly must take seriously that African American men, themselves, often think about the contemporary street corner as a threatening site. Their own reaction to that space involves acknowledging the risks that are involved in spending significant time there (Anderson 1999; Venkatesh 2000; Young 2004). Thus, the reaction of outside observers, as well as many African American men, is that the modern urban street corner is no longer a safe site for the reconstitution of identities, but rather the cementing of devalued identities and images of these men (Oliver 2006; Payne 2006, 2008).
Rethinking the place of the street in the lives of Black men means reconsidering not only the inaccuracies of a street-centered focus, but how blinding such a focus has been for thinking about other dimensions of these men's lives. A part of the contemporary situation for these men, then, is the absence of public or institutionalized spaces for constructively working out and resolving tensions, perceived inadequacies, and self-misunderstandings about being fathers (and this is a problem that may be most effectively addressed by faith-based institutions, which, by their very nature, can provide such safe spaces and opportunities). They often find little support in formal organizational spaces, such as child welfare agencies or the legal system, where they (wrongly or rightly) perceive their interests to be suppressed by the attention given to women and children (Edin and Nelson 2013; Hamer 2001; Waller 2002). Hence, these men not only endure consistent social exposure as so-called “failed fathers” in their communities, but lack the means to express and resolve challenges to their capacity to serve as effective fathers because they recognize no formal or institutional outlets to do so (that is, unless they have access to social programs aimed at resolving these problems – and far too many low-income men lack such access).
What was easily ignored in emphases on low-income, urban-based African American men as representatives of the underclass is that such men construct senses of self and maintain identities that extend beyond what can be associated with the streets. One reason why the street-centered depiction is so problematic is that it became a public image associated with more urban-based men than it could appropriately be applied to. That image also prevented a more thorough and complex cultural portrait of these men from emerging such that the broader public often read them as wholly focused on hostility, threat, and anxiety. What this meant for low-income African American men who inhabited much of the urban space was that, even if they did not fully embrace this kind of depiction, often adapted styles of interaction and public engagement that provided measures of security and stability in communities from the 1970s to the 1990s were savaged by the proliferation of crack and increasing rates of crime. Hence, a more aggressive pursuit of how these men articulate meanings about the various features of their lives is in order.
Furthermore, the importance of securing safe spaces for discussing, questioning, and reconsidering healthy masculinity is counteracted by their living in spaces that are replete with the kinds of dangers, threats, and turbulence that have been well documented in social-scientific research on the contemporary urban community. Such space often demands that the young men who inhabit it take care to present and preserve public images of themselves as secure, vigilant, and truculent. The emotional consequence of maintaining these dispositions is that such men do not find value in, and therefore do not easily embrace, insecurity, hesitancy, and timidity as parts of their public persona. However, the very experience of coming into manhood is riddled with various emotional dynamics that require physical and emotional space for such considerations.
Without having the social space to approach, consider, and resolve or manage the tensions associated with masculinity (and when living in communities and households where there is limited, if any, access to the material resources that are associated with successfully engaging that role), there is ample opportunity for these men to react toward their partners, children, or other people in ways that further threaten their capacity to function. Hence, the opportunity to talk about and act on their concerns, anxieties, and insecurities, especially with other men of the same status and condition, is the first of many steps to take.
Concern rests not in how males manage social interaction in public spaces but rather in how to devise means and measures to assess any individual and collective emotional impact of consistent subjection to character assassination. The existence of character assassination may not result in any explicit impingement upon individual behavior or conduct. However, the extreme surveillance of and critical social judgment made about the conduct, action, or disposition exemplified by Black males may be causal factors for a range of unhealthy emotional and physical states of being.
We must acknowledge that they maintain outlooks and attitudes that are masked by the public sentiment about them. Accordingly, a unique vantage point that offers much virtue is looking at how Black males assess the American Dream. We must learn to believe that Black men believe in the American Dream. Yet, we must learn precisely how they construct their commitments to it (around family, community, identity, and employment). The effort is a core matter at the heart of investigations of their interior thinking. Yet it cannot easily be discerned from observation or survey-based inquiry. Returning again to the examples provided in previous chapters, we see that observing Smittie's behavior on the street corner with the young men who threatened him in no way reveals how much he took into account what the potential consequences of his actions would be and how he felt about his behavior. What he actually did to defend himself at the time was not consistent with his understanding and moral vision of the situation. Furthermore, the contemporary lifestyles of Blue the mover and the assistant pastor in no way revealed who they were in their pasts. Yet their pasts consistently stayed in their heads and served as an impetus for their more current everyday behavior.
When focused on behavior at the expense of a broader and more complete portrait of Black males, it becomes harder for others to fully absorb the depth of the tribulations that such people face and how much value is placed on Black boys living long enough to become young men. Indeed, the movement from childhood to manhood, itself, can be better understood as a hope and aspiration rather than a normal process. Becoming a man is an achievement that is not taken for granted in many struggling African American families. That case was made in the widely and critically acclaimed documentary Hoop Dreams, which was a hugely successful endeavor that grossed more than $11 million worldwide (1994). This documentary provided insight into the lives of two young Black boys as they moved from talented basketball-playing middle-school youth to their early college years. Neither came close to playing in the NBA (National Basketball Association), but the film tells a compelling account of how social relations, human capital, community structure, and luck and misfortune come together in the lives of two young Black men aspiring to fulfill their dreams.
In what would be an easily overlooked segment of the documentary for sports enthusiasts, the mother of one of the boys, Arthur Agee, is baking a cake in celebration of Arthur's upcoming 18th birthday. As she talks about him, she mentions that an 18th birthday is a big deal. It is such a big deal, she explains, not simply because it is an indication of her son becoming a man, but also because it is a birthday that is not guaranteed for many young African American males. She is preparing to celebrate him, in large part, because he soon will survive to become 18 years of age. When taking this kind of orientation into account, one must reconsider the unique ways in which life is valued and managed by young Black men who are subjected to economic constraint and disadvantage.
Too often, the flawed understanding of how these individuals assess the American Dream is that their visions are tied to the social worlds of professional athletics or Hip Hop culture. However, the American Dream for Black males is not all about a desire to live the fast life because the effort of such males to think only for today is a reality precisely if they cannot imagine a coherent tomorrow. Immediate gratification can be understood, then, as not resulting from an inability to defer to the future but an inability to embrace the notion that a future is even attainable.
To be sure, the challenge of embracing that notion does not mean that Black males simplistically commit to fatalism. Thus, an effort to demystify the character of Black males must first involve acknowledging that fatalism is an incomplete conceptual scheme for encapsulating the social outlooks of the racialized poor (Rios 2011; Venkatesh 2000, 2006; Young 2004). These studies and others (Fergus et al. 2014; Noguera 2008; Wilson 1996; Young 2004) indicate that Black males do not necessarily reject mainstream institutional spheres such as schooling but rather have negative experiences with individuals in these spheres. The result is that they face problems with their encounters with schools, employers, and legal authorities such as the police, but not with schooling, employment, or the institution of law in a general sense. Research reveals that such males do value schools, jobs, and family; yet they struggle with their personal experiences in each of these and other domains (Lewis-McCoy 2014; Noguera 2008; Venkatesh 2006; Wilson 1992; Young 2004). Hence, it is too simplistic to regard this population as engulfed in thinking that the world is against them and that they react with aggression and hostility because they believe there is nothing that they can do to change these conditions.
A renewed vision of Black men also includes a more thorough understanding of their capacity for transformation. Men like Blue, Chris, Smittie, and Milton, and the assistant pastor of the church that hosted me for my evening lecture, are all examples of men who have transformed. Other Black males have done so even if they have not been recognized for doing so. For instance, researchers have noted that Black fathers have engaged in nurturing roles for several decades, as their emotive and caretaking contributions have been vital to fulfilling family needs (Hamer 2001). This is particularly true of low-income biological fathers and social fathers who provide extended kin care for family members. For instance, Hamer (2001) finds that low-income nonresident fathers prioritize role modeling and caregiving when they discuss their contributions to their children's lives. Interestingly, much of the public conversation regarding “new fatherhood” and paternal responsibility focuses on precisely this kind of fathering within the married, nuclear-family context. But this focus on nuclear families limits our understanding of the myriad ways Black men practice expanded fatherhood. Again, we have limited knowledge and understanding of married, heterosexual Black fathers’ experiences, particularly ones who are not low-income. Research gaps such as these may account for why Black fathers, in addition to still being problematized as in “crisis,” have not been held up as, in fact, exemplars of engaged fathering.
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Every tradition of inquiry on Black people, whether focused on men or women, includes some notion of what constitutes a healthy Black individual, and those notions change over time. My investigations of the early (and later) traditions of Black sociological thought were designed to explore what notions of healthy or positive Blackness were promoted and embraced over time and why (Young and Deskins 2001). I pursue this work so that, in my own efforts to make sense of contemporary Black men and Black masculinity, my work is informed by the idea that these efforts are situated in space and time, and thus susceptible to being re-thought and reconfigured in light of later social, political, and intellectual developments. The aim is to change the nature of the conversation about Black men, to foster new understandings of agency as it pertains to the case of Black men, and to bring to public attention various questions about the culture, identity, and public representation of such males. Accordingly, a renewed vision of Black men must also include space for depictions that allow for more than the normatively heterosexual imagery that has rather problematically stood the test of time as the only normative framework for such men (Drake 2016; Neal 2013).
The long-standing belief that the social worlds of African American males is so distant from those of other Americans is a legacy of the vision of the inner-city as an “other” kind of place that is not a part of “our” community. We must adhere to and advance the notion that Black males share membership in our national community. Black men have not rejected society as much as we have rejected them from full membership in society. We have done so because it appears to be easy to get along without them – socially and economically, if not culturally. Essentially, we must unlearn what we think we know about them and be prepared to think anew.
The ensuing challenge for researchers and interested parties, then, is to re-envision black males as complex human beings – a mixture of socially defined positive and negative attributes, much like other people – rather than wholly unworthy. It means embracing a vision of them as adherents to the same cultural schemas that apply to many Americans – as committed to the value of family, education, employment, and socioeconomic opportunity – even if actions sometimes surface due to the denial of the capacity to access these desires and outcomes. It means that the existence of Black males in trouble or who are troubling should not be the bedrock for interpreting the character and dispositions of all such males, nor should it be the basis for a default depiction of Black males as inherently flawed people, where the stereotypical portrait looms large. For the sake of Black males, the effects of their character assassination mandates further, more intense, and more specific forms of study. However, the public acknowledgment and acceptance of an alternative image of Black males and Black masculinity requires work, and a part of this work requires better apprehension of how and why Black males “feel” as they do and not just focusing on what it is that they do. A suspension (but certainly not abandoning) of moral judgments must give way to investing more immediately in understanding how and why these outcomes emerge.
The change necessary to allow Black men to prevail must take place in the arenas of policy and civil society, but also in the broader public consciousness as well. This effort must involve re-imaging these men not solely as sources and progenitors of social problems, but as people who are equipped to read and interpret much about who they are and why they made the behavioral choices that they did. These men are reflective, contemplating individuals who are not simply viscerally reacting in opposition to a social world that they perceive to be hostile and uninviting. Surely, they are complicated people, but not so much because they inspire intrigue over why they seemingly commit so much crime, or engage in so much violence, or seem so detached from and uninterested in their children. What is complicated about these men, I submit, is that they maintain a stronger moral and cognitive fiber than is often attributed to them. They possess a capacity to realize the effects of their actions, and construct judgments about them. They do so to an extent far beyond what has been implied in much of the contemporary public debate about them. Consequently, if Black men are to prevail in modern society, they must be more fully accepted as members of civil society. They must be seen not solely as people in need of intervention and correctives, but as people capable of participating with others in the improvement of their social position and correcting the problems they face – some of which is really a problem that others have with them and that needs to be addressed head on with courage and conviction.