Our notion of Manhood was never made for Black Men, and so, we should be done with it
Ultimately, we are tethered to our traditions, we Americans. Brutally, and joyously tethered and wedded to these living and breathing tropes, all of them resting in those days when all things were golden, and our greatness was ever but a step away.
The American psychology requires that longing backward glancing, it seems. It requires that each subsequent generation sees how it has compromised the fabric of our sacred and gilded ways. These, our young, these many changes, these supposed new ways of thinking and feeling, they are regressions, and are damning us, should you believe the rantings of our psychology.
Our psychology leads us toward making monuments of these human concepts that we have built. There are core American values. There are core American ways of being and believing. There are wonders to build, and sacrifices to be offered, and zealots to recruit, for all of these many concepts that are fueled by the American insecurities, imagination, and psychology.
Manhood is one of those concepts that we study most closely in the wild, and make no mistake, we allow it to roam wild and free in our consciousness. It is a rather misunderstood colossus, and we have crafted tale after tale of what it is, and is becoming, and perhaps that is why we excuse all of its wanton destruction. We know that the being of manhood treats us all farthest away from it with cruel disdain, demands that we look away as it approaches, and yet, we refuse to cage it, restrain it or simply divest ourselves. Our psychology it would seem, has some addiction to it.
It can’t simply be that it is history, can it? History is full of tropes that we made ready to move on from, but, manhood has refused to be a stationary target. The old, damaged codger that it is refuses change. It does evolve, however. Make no mistake. It has developed a vocabulary for meeting, gaslighting and drowning all challenges to its presence, and necessity. A wily trope, this manhood. Dangerous, and wily.
I’ve wondered aloud, for many years now, why Black men rush forward so, with sword and shield, when questions of manhood are raised, or when any exploration of the reality of manhood, is engaged. We, devoutly, fight a fight that no one truly appears to be having. That isn’t an indictment. Consider it more an understanding born of compassion and camaraderie. I fully believe that a motivation, often unconsciously, in our defense of all that we know to be manhood stems from the ambrosia we feel in those rare moments when we experience the privilege that accompanies the drug that is manhood. The state of existing in the spaces of manhood have a profoundly opiate like effect. We, so rarely charged up with power in social spaces, which to live there, forever. We, often unconsciously, crave the experience of our White, full privileged counterparts, believing, knowing, that they stream manhood directly into the visor before their eyes upon waking. They can break it down, rock it up, take it intravenously, drink and bath in it, pull it on as a robe. We bask in those scraps when they enter the square, and we idolize that decadence.
The danger begins and lies there, truly. We should be vigilantly mindful of that, this desire. We want a version of this drug fit for our psychology, and have spent all these many generations in various forms of captivity working to manufacture some synthetic version of manhood suited to our psychology.
There will never be one, you know. There is the punchline. Full stop. Manhood, as we know it in this context, here as it is obsessed over by the American psychology, was never for us. It was crafted, always, to allow for domination. For the acquisition and protection of resources, for the exercise of power over the vulnerable, for the ownership and oppression of our ancestors, for the creating of systems within systems, and classes within those systems, for the movement of and control of bodies, for the advancement of the wants and ways of White men, and for the maintenance of supremacy.
Considering all of that, how could such a tool ever be adjusted for the minds and hands of Black men? We, Black men, in the fantasies of the American psychology, were always intended to be an asset to be exploited, a beast to be managed, and a burden to be dismissed. We, ourselves, meditate on manhood as some form of unifying force. We see it as some libation from a fountain which we can all partake, and that, ultimately, is a flaw in our psychology. We badly need for this to be so. We need to believe that we have access to these very many items that make one a man, and that there is equality waiting as a reward should we represent the best version of these ideals. If we simply give the American psychology the version of us that it wants, we will be given full partnership. We are painfully mistaken, and wounded, and grasping at that fantasy, always.
We offer our bodies, and sexuality, and virility, and aggression, as prayers, hoping they will be well received. They are consumed, yes. Laughed at, yes. But they are never given true value, not in the ways we believe, and never will they be. Manhood, as our American psychology represents it, is not as much a static way of being so much as it is a cloak of human privilege. It will never be afforded to us, not when our lives, our very persons, are assumed to belong to the privilege. The bull lives on the farm, and has a role in its ecosystem, but it will never be the farmer.
We can’t, we Americans, point to any point in history where our notion and golem of manhood has ever served any substantive growth purpose for all of our humanity. It has been used as a marker, as a standard, as a set of criteria to establish place and position, to award status and to check the advancement of the vulnerable horde, but never has it served to evolve us as a nation family. Never. It has never even mimed any desire to serve us all, yet we lust for it, with our whole selves.
When the only realized versions of manhood trot out, and feed onus all, and then swagger away, we trot out from the shadows and our various hiding spaces, and mimic what we have seen. We work our jaws, and beliefs and muscles in the same manner as the power that we just observed, for power, and hording, and having resources and influence over minds and bodies, is always right to the American psychology. We are, we Black men, willing to self immolate if it means claiming some connection to manhood, as our psychology knows it. We, without true access to it, have created some big box version of the thing, this concept, and have, with a chain firmly lashed round our neck and foot, deployed it. It wears and fits us badly, the strain dragging upon us on the one, and suffocating us on the other.
There is opportunity here, if we are willing to see it. There is the space we are already beginning to exist in, if we would allow it. There is the chance to build our own personhood, and that might mean evolving our concept of our humanity so far into the future, that we simply do away with any need, use of or defining of manhood, or anything other than developing, fully realized, individual personhood, as a necessary concept. There is nothing natural about manhood, not as it is wielded here, weapon-like. There is use for the human and person, and all of the many complicated identity and knowing questions therein. It is that time.
We have relied on our fragmented understanding to abuse and beat boy children into something rather like a traumatized soldier, failing to know love, and connection, and feeling entitled to their full range of human emotions. It has benefited us none. And so, we must live and breath into our own.
We must find the version best fitted for us, and for our families, and for our immortality, and for the next journey we are being made ready to take. Manhood is not for us, it is for only the one, and only in those spaces, and we are star children. The versions of concepts best made for us can’t be found in any human language, not comfortable, and so, we must make them. This has always been our way.
We must journal, and write, and meditate on, and idolize our best and future selves, our afrofuture, our heroes and struggles and epic tales must be crafted with an understanding and commitment to who we must become, and not what we wish to acquire.
I see this latest skirmish, and how so many of us run to the front line, at the ready. I see how we are ready to conflate the abuses of this society on our persons, with a father’s willingness and understanding to support the developing personhood of his child. I can’t imagine very many greater demonstrations of love than to affirm a person’s evolving sense of themselves, as they are becoming themselves. Not when the alternative is to do what this conqueror of manhood has always done to us here. It has muted our development, and will. It has castrated our becoming, and somehow we still want its ways and weapons. In that way, manhood as it lives in our American psychology, has scarred us.
I want us to surrender our weapons and dedication to manhood, here, and drop that flag and standard. Our best survival depends on our willingness to do so. We must throw away what all we have been fed around this history being rich, and our status being our goal. There is more, and we are struggling, always on fire. We are humans first, and must explore that, and build and affirm that. I see no other way, for manhood, in the bastardized and noxious form it has been held above our heads for worship, is not our answer, we Black men.
