Before we as Black adult men can even begin to explore how to protect our youth, we need to ask the question how do we see ourselves and protect ourselves first? How can we credibly put ourselves in the vanguard of defence of others if we already feel defeated and are of the view such actions are a lost cause?
The non-acknowledgment of the humanity of individuals of colour, the State licence to inflict trauma on individuals and communities of colour based on ideologies of race enabling such practices without fear of redress, and the State’s complicity, sets the scene to explore the possibilities of agency in the lives of people of colour in society.
It is generally accepted in the academic world that ‘race’ is socially constructed. As the Nobel Prize winner for Literature (1993) and Pulitzer prize- award winner, Toni Morrison, states in her latest book, The Origin of Others (2017), ‘Race has been a constant arbiter of difference as have wealth, class and gender-each of which is about power and the necessity of control’ (p.3). She argues that ‘race’ is nothing more than ‘genetic imagination’ and asks the question of us all, ‘‘Why does it matter? What behaviour does it demand/encourage? What is the nature of Othering’s comfort, its allure, its’ power? Convincing oneself that there is a ‘natural’ divide between yourself and the ‘other’’. Ta-Nehisi Coates in the foreword to the book, one of the leading public intellectuals on the lives of Black people, argues that racism, an active process, came before the non – active invention of ‘race’. Individuals purposely created the divisions based on the spurious concoctions of ‘race’, seeking to grant such fiction a veneer of legitimacy, positing the view that their creations are a part of the natural world. ‘Facts of life’, ‘scientifically proven’, as opposed to fiction, created with a purpose.
Tommy J. Curry, Professor of Philosophy and African Studies at Texas A and M University in his book, The Man-Not: Race, Class and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood (2017), states that ‘racism is a complex nexus, a cognitive architecture used to invent, reimagine, and evolve the presumed political, social, economic, sexual, and psychological superiority of the White races in society, while materializing the imagined inferiority and hastening the death of inferior races’ (p.4).
Kevin Gannon, Professor of History at Grand View University, reminds us of the value of understanding history: ’History is not the stuff that happens by accident. We are the products of the history that our ancestors chose, if we are White. If we are Black, we are products of the history that our ancestors most likely did not choose. Yet here we are together, the products of that set of choices. And we have to understand that in order to escape from it.’ (13th, Netflix original documentary, 2016, Slavery, Jim Crow, criminalization. Links in a chain of racial inequality forged by political and economic motives).
Given the context of what has already been said about individuals of colour and ‘their assigned place’ in society, how do we as Black men, identify ourselves as individuals with some degree of power over our lives? Identity is complex, continuously evolving and academics specialising in this area, often cited as ‘intersectionality theorists’, as they seek to identify markers of difference between individuals and groups and try to tease out the primacy of differing ‘categories’, such as gender, race, ethnicity, class, income, sexuality, ability and age amongst others, and how they interact, in given contexts. The aim is to explore how this influences the ability of individuals and groups to live and function within society. When it comes to Black men however, the intersectionality theorists have a problem according to Tommy Curry (2017) cited earlier. The difficulty is simply this: the markers used as elements of identity are based on the individuals being explored recognised as human. But what if some of those subjects of research are deemed as non-human, ‘non-being’, using the words of Curry, such as Black men. ‘The Black male is negated not from an origin of (human) being, but from nihility…Nonbeing expresses the condition of Black male being-the nihility from which it is birthed’ (pp.6-7).
Given that our societally assigned position as Black adult males in society is one of ‘non-human’, ‘non-being’, how does this show itself? How do I know that I am seen as such? If recognised, how do I deal with it in a way that allows me to gain some command of my life and actions and simultaneously enables me to navigate myself within the society that I have inherited at birth? In the next three blogs in March 2018 I will seek to provide some answers from history and from today in respect of Canada, The United Kingdom and the United States of America.