On Black Men, our grand mindsick, our emotional health reaching levels of a health crisis, and our obligation to live well, part 1

This is the first of several conversations I will be having in this space around wellness. I am crafting a work “SanityAllBlack”, and this conversation is one that remains a theme in the work for broader discussion. Below, we are opening things up, neighbor to neighbor, and setting off, running together with this, and you should allow yourself to leave, return, disengage and obsess, in whatever way your person needs. This is not a conversation focused solely on what we do, and what we must then stop doing immediately. It is a conversation designed to understand why, and then wrapping one another in the warmth needed to have a true rap about what we then do to grow away from those ills and toward better selves, with progress. We will begin an assessment of our essential processes, and using those things available to us for change and shift. We will plant a grow a healing chamber built for us, and talk of Rapmotional Wellness (more on that later) and asserting a whole human into fully human spaces. So, be free to run with me, and us.

I wonder aloud now, who taught us how to be Black, and male. Who taught us to suffer is to be human, and that true personhood must be deferred. And who taught us how to manage rejection, and who taught us how to live with skin most hated, and doubt so true.

I ask this of my friends and family all of the time, and suggest somewhere in our conversations, that should you be Black, and here, and present, and wounded, truly wounded, then you are most profoundly sane. There is no way to feel these aggressions, and see these caricatures, and to feel this abandoned, and to see humanity stripped away from such as you, and not at times panic, and disengage, and experience fatigue and be traumatized. No, you see this human family, this one here, clearly.

I am a Clinical Psychologist, most days. I am, at all times, Black, and aware, and a father, spouse, brother, and storehouse for confusion and rage about what all of those aforementioned mean. With all of the talk of intersections, those gifted to and assumed by me often feel cluttered, opaque and far too urgent.

I understand now, in moments where I measure myself truest, that I always spent time reading the emotions of others, rather like code. I wouldn’t suggest that I understood others. Not immediately. Certainly not those who were Black and male, like myself. No. Rather, I would see these bursts of emotion growing, and then ejecting, and then spreading, and I was not always clear about what those meant, or why others couldn’t make sense of those same human strands.

I suspect that it began, as it does with so many of us, right at home. My father struck me as bright, moody, angry, hurt, afraid, resentful and anguished, often in the same 24 hour period. My older brother, 5 years my senior, wore the same armor, and carried it with the same gravity as did our father. Where my brother would find spaces away to cope, my father found a bottle, and a convenient means to slowly end a life he had no control over. I didn’t fully appreciate Bipolar Disorder as a child, though I was looking at the energy it built and alternatively drained from beings rather like myself. It scared me then, as I had no answers for it. I bang hammers at it now, as I have the ammunition, true aim, and remember the face of my father. But those years back, as a child…

I remind myself of what that felt like, then, as a child, Black and male, to feel so powerless, to be unable to “fix” two men that I cherished. Wondering aloud why they couldn’t, and wouldn’t, fix themselves. Wondering why prayer wasn’t doing more to fasten the ground shifting beneath my burning feet. Wondering why my mother, always ready with an answer, an admonishment, a firm hand to guide, had no means to save my father, and why she couldn’t clearly see the turmoil that would be my brother. This theme of requiring a sister/mother/matriarch to steady the ship would be a crashing theme in the lives of so many like me, but we should come back to that, lest you feel attacked, which is not my intent, and tune me out prior to us finishing this first shared verse, which would be unfortunate.

I spent weeks looking in my eyes in the morning, searching for evidence of those same threads. I still have mornings where I check, just to be sure they aren’t there. That mindsick. That steady and vigilant emotional unwellness that seems so tethered to our existence. Some days, still, I wonder if it were a living thing, and knew that I could see it in others, and thus skillfully hid its presence inside of me, away from my gaze and attention.

In my lifetime, I have observed an evolution in our understanding of the social instruments designed to breed and maintain toxicity and to break and traumatize and cage the best human selves of vulnerable peoples. We know, completely, that there are apex predators who traffic in our anxiety, insomnia, stress and addiction. In that same space, we have learned that these same entities use many points of entry to poison and shape this mindsick in our systems.

I have also seen an evolution of resistance to accepting these suggestions and narratives, among many in my own tribe. In the midst of there being an expansion of spaces for spending moments of reflection with our emotional and mental health, and an assessment of the human cost of being Black and male while remaining in constant motion away from the notice of the apex predator, there remains a kind of resistance, stern and seemingly willful, to many brothers, Black men, crafting our wellness spaces.

We should slow our pace here for an instant, as there are several essential tenets that need to be laid bare as we make our way. First, we as Black men use the pairing of those two, Back and male, as a sword and shield, some manner of honorific, and thus often believe that we must restrict membership, practically and spiritually. I defy the notion, as it has led to only a breaking of our psyche and a distance from our family systems which leads to the near psychosis we see in those frequently isolated from their human anchors and foundation. Rather like prisons, but more on those later. Chiefly, male, man, he, him…all human concepts. All historically inaccurate with regard to knowing humans. All binary, and thus all broken when considering that we know human experiences to be remarkably fluid, and profoundly grounded in the mandate to evolve. For us here, we will think of Black men as any beings born with our skin, and in our families and communities, who think of themselves as such. Let us not waste time on where those borders lie.

Second, we will need to accept that we are obsessed with expressions of sexuality, masculinity (so-called), power and privilege that are inherently White and male. A significant patch of cloth formed over our psyches leads toward us desiring a lesser version of their place. We, through our generations of trauma and torment, have reached a space where we wish to grow tooth, claw and instinct that, if not rivaling theirs, would allow us to lord over an ecosystem where we would be some bastard version of an apex. We will make little progress if we do not see that we have made the life of the White male a Demigod, and spend much of our waking and fantasy existence making it our personal hero. Progress comes anchored in mindfulness.

Third, we have made our mindsick, and much of its depravity, a true living space. We have arrived at a space where we craft an ultimatum, submitted to Black women and children, and elders, demanding that they keep our worst secret, endure it without remark, and enable us in our spiral. We will accept here, that Black women/mothers/children/elders calling for us to return to them well, are not attacks, but the true signs and signals of love and worry and hurt and vulnerability that they are known to be. We will shift from crafting false combative narratives toward developing a skin which allows us to see criticism from family as the desire of our loved ones here, and ancestors, as fertile soil to be rested and grown in.

We need not argue these. They are with us. The matter before us is more how than what and why. What and why matter, most certainly, but our focus, in part, is to shape, then engage, the how.

Wherever there is poverty, the world over, across the span of humanity, there is desperation, and taking, and trauma, and emotional and physical tribalism and combat for absent resources. The indictment of our society comes in the form of the reality that poverty has always been inked and lashed to Blackness, and an entire system of currency printed in Anti-Blackness. We remain poor, and erased, and forgotten, because our society wills it to be so. With that poverty, with that neglect, and outright assault, comes the expected trauma, and anxiety, and depressed mood, and…still resilience.

We know this, and of whence this mindsick came. We know that the trauma is multi-pronged, and flexible, incorporating schools which serve the primary function of pens, prisons designed to extend the warranty of slavery, industries which treat the sensibilities and bodies of Black men as beasts to be conquered, sequestered, paraded and hung.

You are not to blame for any of these. You are free of any guilt for these indecencies, indignities and flagrant harms being visited upon you.

For process, I would ask that you share these fears in person. I would ask that you share the worry, constant and growing of being a boy, now man, raising and protecting, providing and learning, the doubt…all of it, with us, all of us who know you, in a space. Collected, with others, where you can unload that energy, and be charged with fresh, clean air to breath.

See, our sons are watching, thus my recommendation above. They are immediately following our example of shutting all of this fear and hurt into a corner, letting the tension build, and projecting it out to others, our family others, our sister others, who want only to see us well. And they raise their voices so, as well, often means safe, and safe is urgent, and immediate, and is a shout rather than a laugh. Our sons should see process. and thus we must adjust our understanding of process. In processing emotionally, an embrace is a sharing of warmth. And you, and our sons, need that to carry their burden, and to aid you in carrying yours. An embrace is made to convey a love of the other, and a valuing of their presence. We then, in process, need to begin to allow ourselves to be loved, and to open ourselves to all forms and expressions of love. As we are, as in this crisis, we, and our sons, see our lives as disposable, and even our deaths, bodies broken, as currency.

In processing, we will need to craft space, psychic and physical, where we project our voices and persons, in total, free of concern about judgement and rebuke. We must feel the pull from our ancestors, and descendants, to tell our part of our family history, out loud, flowing. We have templates, rap being one. A space where we shout out our strength, and rename ourselves, and demand that others know that we are here. I have expanded this process, and call it Rapmotional Wellness. A process where we can journal, spit GetBetter bars, cry and chant, and assert, and dream, and make meaning, and craft texts of growth and being.

We will not be conceptual and purposefully vague on this trip. We will be direct with one another. We will see that our wellness is a steady thing, that we are never cured, that our person requires continued care and sustenance, that love and hope are to be felt, and not answers for our condition or the ills wished and exercised against our person, and that we are but children here, and can always learn and grow.

Part 2 soon come.