Endangered Black Men
I have had pleasant experiences in my life. I am a child to two beautiful humans; born out of the harmony of their holy matrimony. I am a brother to two siblings who were gifted to me by Power (Mark 14). I am an uncle; life yearning for itself has catapulted my DNA into the future and behold, I have a nephew! Throughout my life I have given and received love from God’s most pristine, sublime, and enchanting creatures— women. I’ve taught the babe and the elderly as a teacher. I didn’t merely transfer knowledge, rather I surgically removed rust that kept their hearts and minds from churning. As a preacher, my elocutionary exposition illuminates the One who reveals Himself as the supreme God (Genesis 1). These moments mentioned are a zenith of my life experiences. As a singular being, my life consists of various experiences that contribute to my existence. These experiences help to sculpt my identity because they give my life meaning. My individuality is vain without my cognizant involvement in the world around me. My life, therefore, is saturated with purpose and generativity. I carry the previously mentioned titles with dignity, like a king marching into war. For they clothe me with splendor and glory. Yet, at the age of 5 and 20, in America, I have never experienced what it means to be a Black man. The confusion of my existence lies not in my own individual experience, rather in the collective experience of other Black men. While I am an experience within myself, I look around and observe no commonalities with others that look like me. So I question, even while looking in the mirror, who am I?
My individuality is vain without my cognizant involvement in the world around me.
After a short but eventful life upon Earth I concede that my life and all those who look like me inspired Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Although fictitious in nature, the book carries a sobriety only adequate for reality. In the book he reveals the thought I’ve had once I reached the age of reason:
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”
How can I enjoy the pleasures of life if, from the moment I breathe air, I am a threat to the vitality of life? My enigmatic existence is only conducive to enigmatic perspectives. I’m sure if Pharaoh were living today, Black men wouldn’t be a minority, rather we would be extinct. Our oppression wouldn’t be passively systematic, rather it would be an overt, laudable holocaust. Malcom X testifies to this point with his fiery elocution in his Message to the Grassroots:
“When we come together, we don’t come together as Baptists or Methodists. You don’t catch hell ’cause you’re a Methodist or Baptist. You don’t catch hell because you’re a Democrat or a Republican. And you sure don’t catch hell ’cause you’re an American; ’cause if you was an American, you wouldn’t catch no hell. You catch hell ’cause you’re a black man.”
The determining factor of my virulent existence is based upon God’s intentionality in the giving of my skin—nothing leprous or transmittable—my skin color clothed upon me by the one and only God. (To hate, demean, or express prejudice against one who doesn’t look like you is to shake your fist at the Creator— thus, your sin only multiplies.)
As an American, life is occasionally comfortable. I live in the wealthiest and most powerful nation to ever exist in history. The liberty awarded to my nationality allows me to perennially dance at the American masquerade. Yet, as the adroit, hip-hop feminist Joan Morgan once taught, “It is unnatural for masks to cry.” Thus, no tears flow from my eyes as a man. No tears race to express my pain as an Afro-American. There is no color which can paint the burden of my humanity. I am not only emotionally constipated, but a dullard, unable to describe the pain like a newborn babe. The ironic thing about this ordeal is that my ancestors have fought for centuries to exist. African slaves never had an opportunity to dialogue with their oppressors about the impending business transaction which included life. I guess their eternal souls were darkened under their melanated skin. The things in the dark are things that aren’t acknowledged. How can you begin to dialogue with those who do not acknowledge your life or voice? What tools of persuasion or educational methods can I use to reveal my humanity to those who have hardened their hearts to my existence?
There is no color which can paint the burden of my humanity.
Centuries later, here I am, confused, trepidatious, and precarious of my own existence. I do know that I exist, because René Descartes taught me, Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). My existence isn’t bound up only in my melanin. It can’t be that simplistic or determinative of how I live my life. I am confused because Fredrick Douglass sagaciousness could not explain my humanity. I am precarious because even Martin’s mesmerizing oration could not persuade America that I am a human. I am trepidatious because it is the 21st century and I still lack language which is centripetal to my survival. Yet, I and others like myself are reprimanded when we choose violence or rap music to express our volcanic emotion.
Why hasn’t anyone intentionally taught me how to be a man? I am no unthinking animal, who instinctively understands what is required sometimes even seconds after birth. Who is to blame for my unchivalrous, apathetic, hyper-sexualized psychology towards Black women? It was and is my ignorance that perpetuates the neglect of the one who is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. Why has the word nigga become a term of endearment when it was used as a sadistic chant to murder the body and soul of my ancestors? Academic answers will not suffice! These questions should not be answered in a Ph.D thesis, left to collect dust on the bookshelves of those whose hopes dwindle under reality. The answers to these questions will open the door to the closet that hides our mess. My misconstrued identity corroborates my self-deception. It permeates in the Orient as well as the Occidental. It slithers into our homes under the guise of entertainment. It is a subtle, psychological cancer and it has stained our hearts. Solomon says there is nothing new under the sun, and it seems that it is time to resume excavation of Black life. My conscience demands that I carry the philosophy of a comprehensive Black man’s existence farther than the whale’s migration. And when death arrives, I will hand off this beautiful burden to the next generation with hope that every tongue will confess that the Black man is a man!
“I came into this world imbued with a need to find meaning in things. My spirit was filled with a desire, to get to the very source of the world. Instead of which, I found myself to be an object amongst other objects. Inclosed within this crushing object hood, I turned to my neighbor. His gaze was a liberation restoring to me a likeliness I thought I had lost. By taking me out of the world, he restored me to it.”
