By Donnie Moreland
I remember a friend of mine once told me she couldn’t “see” Black men. She would further explain how cisgender heteronormative Black men have always revolved around her relative to abandonment, neglect, violence, selfishness, warped intention and other harms, which rendered her incapable of referring to the proximal emotional space between her, and us, as inherently safe. As a cis-het Black man, hearing this was difficult to stomach.
Often, the word see relates to existence. I recognize that she was neither a solipsist—a believer of her existence being that which she could only be sure about—nor was she suggesting anything about our aliveness or value as cis-het Black men. She was more so observing something about our morality, or lack thereof, in proximity to community. She was asserting that from her experience the components for which we require to be of service to community, we rarely endorse, and the components for which we predominantly contribute serve as harms.
It’s only after what has occured with the recent cultural scandalizing of Malik Yoba—pulling me to reinvestigate my own past—that I must honor that there is something about us cis-het Black men with which we wrestle to be realized moral agents. To be collectively aware of right and wrong, as it relates to the agency of other Black people and assuming accountability when responsible for harms against the Black spaces for which we occupy.
For Yoba, his history of sexual abuse against Black trans women, and children, surfaced putting into question if he was using Black trans bodies as a shield from inevitable scrutiny, and a demand for him to be held accountable. For myself—as a social advocate—the words by which I spoke about care, support and community were an affront to gather attention, and adoration, for filling an organizing space unoccupied by cis-het Black men. In both cases, we put on masks made up of other persons to assume positions of service, which we cared little about in comparison to what was of value per our moral make up.
The question of existence is a question of being, and being, no matter how you define it, requires attributes to determine if that object meets the prerequisite to be considered existent relationally to others. This is an incredibly soft ontological—the study of being—observation because the point isn’t to engage in some dense metaphysical diatribe, but describe the general conditions by which it is possible to question existence. When we consider cis-het Black men, and the attributes of our existence, we find our moral make-up to run parallel with the philosophy of patriarchy which is made up, in part, by a moral nihilism. But how did we arrive here?
The post-Slavery self making of Black men, at no implicit fault of our own, was always going to include the residue of the systems which opposed our human-ness but was somehow, via emancipation, charged with adopting us into the borders of a white supremacists state. Of which, to be fully autonomous, we would have had to reconcile the costs of geo-ethnic transmutation of persons transported across the Atlantic, and their offspring. Along with this reconciliation, we would’ve had to devise ways to cope with the traumatic shift from property to person (as recognized by the state) by which now we were a part—but still unseen. But this could not have been expected from the newly emancipated given the shock of transition where surviving the threat of white violence, and locating loved ones, was priority in adjusting to a post-Slavery experience.
As James Baldwin suggests in a 1971 conversation presented by Soul! (PBS) between he and Nikki Giovanni, “…the standards of a civilization into which you are born, are first outside of you. And by the time you get to be a man, they are inside of you.” In not reconciling what was imported onto us, from the systems of patriarchy which endorsed our captivity (and still does), we became susceptible to adopting components of white cis-het male performances of masculinity.
What has occurred, as a consequence, is a type of cognitive dissonance which suggests that as western men, of which we are, we are due particular gender oriented privileges, but as Black citizens, also recognizing socio-political privilege as something lost on the marginalized. Thus, the experience of cis-het Black maleness becomes a duplicitous one of being socially oppressed in proximity to white maleness, but endorsing a type of gendered supremacy as part of community—i.e, philosophies such as moral nihilism. Moral nihilism, according to Marc Krellenstein in his article Moral nihilism and its implications, suggests that there is no objective right or wrong, and that we cannot discern behavior from any moral rule. This philosophy is a slippery slope to hedonism, or a value system based on one’s relationship to their own pleasure and social desires.
In discussions of intra-communal gendered oriented violence for which cis-het Black men dominate as culprits relative to other members of the Black family, our endorsement of this social pattern has to do solely with what services egoist fantasies. When discussing community, and communities of the oppressed, we must ask ourselves if what is required of service from those who populate our community, runs parallel to that which makes a moral nihilist. The answer is no! Even in our best attempts at contributing to community needs—our solutions seem to center around our value of those needs. Resolutions are often based on power, and the acquiring of capital and political gain, which often have little to do with the needs of others: healthcare, sexual health education, emotional management, gender equity, interpersonal reparation, etc.
What is required to address the needs of community is a type of moral agency—the propensity to determine what is and isn’t beneficial to self and others—and to be accountable for the decisions pertaining to our moral judgements. This necessitates a moral imagination, or as defined by philosopher Mark Johnson, the means by which we “envision the full range of possibilities in a particular situation in order to solve an ethical challenge.” A moral imagination indicates an empathy by which we consider the experiences, conditions and our relationship to such in order to establish change, or make obligatory adjustments to our behavior. All this being done in an effort to satisfy the needs of others, along with the moral dimensions of our own condition.
A proper moral imagination isn’t something I have always propagated. The friend of mine who suggested she couldn’t see Black men was a big part of my community advocacy efforts in Houston, prior to my relocating to Minnesota in 2018. At community meetings, of which I promoted my intent of working with Black men to alleviate gender violence in community, she noticed that when engaged with other cis-het Black male community advocates, they rarely looked her in the eye. They focused solely on me. But this is due to her not being alone in the matter of “seeing.” As cis-het Black men, we didn’t see her either.
I’d go so far to suggest that we didn’t want to. Even in matters of gender oriented violence, I worked with women as long as they validated my filling a gap left by an absence of cis-het Black men. I wanted to service the community how I believed Black folk should be serviced, not by what those who I exploited in my mission statement needed of me. I wanted to be commemorated for just “showing up” and sharing in the womanist discord in a manner more mimicry than anything else. And even though my friend stood at my side, she may as well have been ten paces behind me given how I saw her as no more than a prop to suggest some kind of measure of solidarity with Black women. I didn’t see her, thus I wasn’t performing the task of inquiring how my posturing in service, affected her or any other Black woman for that matter.
I’ve realized that the moral imagination, and not the performance of being morally imaginative, is a non-negotiable attribute of existing in service of community—as it demands a morally rigorous investigation of our relationship as proponents of matters such as sexual shaming, gender oriented violence, etc. Generally, our moral rigor and empathy, extends as far as our own moral associations. We’ll perform these investigations to seek solutions on matters of salvaging the cultural imprints of sexual predators such as Bill Cosby. Or demand others be morally rigorous in their utilitarian assessments of a type of “greater good” when measuring the community efforts of a man such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Often times ignoring his documented histories of adultery and womanization. This, again, goes only so far as to serve our own value system, and less to establish benefit for community—promptly dismantling any notion of ourselves existing as proponents of good, or of service, in community.
It is when we attempt to be realized moral agents that we further illuminate our moral framework. When Malik Yoba thought to use being “trans attracted,” as a means of social advocacy, he was doing so in an attempt at adopting womanist theory to curb community violence. For Yoba, and myself, what was discovered was something about, and beneath, our intent which calls into question the quality of care by which we can actually offer.
We illustrate further, our harm, when we react to being indicted for our wounding intentions. Yoba stormed out of an interview with The Root—their staff enduring quite a tantrum. Members of my organization, when inquiring if I cared more about community needs or my own desires, were subject to the same. Both cases are on par with what should be expected. Given the conditions of the moral nihilist, as one object or party is excluded from being realized moral agents, they are then reverted back to children. The inability of a child to discern right from wrong makes them ineligible from investigating, with any type of moral imagination, the needs of others. It makes sense that if we are agents of moral nihilism, in contention with moral agency, that we would react as adolescents might to any moral indictment.
With that said, these words do not serve as an indictment of character—or a judgement of goodness and badness in the elementary forms for which we understand good and bad. I’m inquiring about what makes up cis-het Black men because I am one. I write now, instead of performing community advocacy, because my intentions in service were gratuitous, and in meditating on what makes us allows me the answer to the question of why I misappropriated community as I did. Why I couldn’t see others as more than set pieces in patriarchy’s theatre. Why so many other cis-het Black men see others in so far as they fit into the fantasy of some Black utopian society, in which we determine what (and who) is, and isn’t, of use in that world. I ask these questions about us, not to agitate, but because in serving ourselves we only remain objects for which our kin are best left blind to in the struggle for liberation.
Reading Suggestions:
“Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects,” Christina Sharpe (2010)
“The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace,” John Paul Lederach (2003)
“Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman,” Michele Wallace (1979)
Donnie Denkins Moreland Jr is a Minnesota based mental health advocate and writer. Donnie holds a Master’s Degree, in Film Studies, from National University and a Bachelor’s Degree, in Sociology, from Prairie View A&M University. Donnie has contributed to Black Youth Project, A Gathering of the Tribes and Sage Group Publishing.
