The Rocky Road of Healing Black Males
The rocky road to healing our young black men
“I fuckin’ hate my life, I hate myself, I am a piece of shit. Okay, okay is that what you want me to say. I fuckin’ hate me.” My son yelled these words after listening to my ranting about making choices after high school. I was completely shocked. I am a black mother and we do not let our children express this kind of behavior.
My son acted out his frustrations in front of me, loud and clear, and my initial anger was all over the place. I was angry with my son, how dare he? I was angry with his father, I was angry with myself, and I was angry at America for their negative depiction of black men. Did we all contribute to my son’s feelings of hate?
My son is 17 and he is a black adolescent male. His experiences in a racialized society demonstrate marked differences from his white peers. A distorted lens continues to portray his experiences, his social identity, from an antithetical perspective. Our social world continues to distort the image of black males as gun toting ignorant gangsters, as an outlined black body in white chalk, and in the death of black boys and men from law enforcement and the criminal justice system. This image takes deep roots in our mind, despite our move to change it.
We live in a southern city where there are clear demarcations between how black male youth see themselves and how society perceives them. He attends a public school that disproportionately suspends black males, where they represent a majority of young people who drop out of school or funneled into the juvenile justice system. We live in a country that continues to diminish images of black male intellectual scholars with the glorification of black males as rappers, basketball and football players. How does my son grasp a sense of who he is and where he is going in the midst of all this?
I thought I socialized my child to value his cultural heritage. His father and I both believe in the value of instilling messages of academic success and achievement. He lives in a household full of books about black history, black culture, and black perspectives. I have introduced him to powerful black men, black men with doctorates, writers, and musicians. So, if all of the evidence suggests positive ethnic identity and pride promotes wellbeing, then why would my son hate himself?
A conversation after the incident slowly revealed the answer. He said, “I know I am not like that, I know I don’t want to be that and I don’t agree with that, but still who am I?” The that he referred to were the images of black men failing in the system. All around him, from the peripheral, he saw many black men in his family enter the criminal justice system; young girls become teenage parents with absent black fathers. He was bearing a great burden and it became unbearable because he did not know if he could continue to endure. In five months, he was going to graduate from high school. He felt hatred against himself because he viewed his black body as a failure or falling object meant to get lost in the dark abyss. He knew he did want to be in the dark hole but he was unsure about how to climb from it, what did that entail? He mentioned how he found himself in a depressive state because he was battling against these messages of failure while attempting to map out his own destiny.
The day he exploded provided me with a glimpse into his internalized struggles—the war between who I want to be and how the world sees me. So many of our young black boys encounter this war and so many of them do not have the capacity to win. They do not have weapons from parents, positive mentors, safe spaces in their neighborhood to disclose emotional vulnerability and identify other possible images. They see people like Barack Obama too far in their peripheral, an unattainable role they will never play. They internalized their pain; their frustration becomes released in the forms of aggression and self-inflicted violence. They become the native son, the black boy, who inevitably becomes the victim to the darkness given to them by a larger world.
My son is fighting to take control of his mind and come out of his self-hatred. I wonder how difficult it is for society to understand this and what does it take to heal our black children. The road is not easy but we must come together across our black communities and heal our young black boys because, if not, they will become broken men.
