By Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr. Ph.D
Last week, soon after I popped my cocktail of Tylenol and antibiotics, trying to nurse an infected wisdom tooth before its necessary and imminent extraction and while facing the everyday realities of Black suffering and death, I would not stop getting notifications. Typically, my social media is relatively “dry”—a number of loyal friend commentators, a few colleagues, and a host of super supportive aunties. I could not imagine why I was getting a bombardment of tags all of a sudden. Had I missed something? Was there a call for a different mobilization in my community? Something distinctive from the previous messages and invites I had seen? Were folks warning me of some immediate danger?
As I opened my Facebook and Instagram accounts, I realized that other Black men were tagging me in the “I am a Black Man” challenge, whose purported focus was uplifting all Black men. The hope: a flood of positivity in a sea of anti-Blackness. The most common caption read:
“I am a BLACK MAN!…I build…I do not tear down other BLACK MEN!…I have felt the pain of being torn down and I have decided I will be deliberate about building others! All too often, we men find it easier to criticize each other, instead of building each other up. With all the negativity going around let’s do something positive.”
We then were encouraged to upload a picture of ourselves and to tag other Black men encouraging them to do the same.
As a slight detour from the general purpose of this reflection, I think it is important to add, at the outset, that there are additional, critical, and necessary conversations to be had around the social constructedness of gender, performativity, and the supposed connection and alignment among genders and sexes. Here I do want to suggest that the stability of categories such as “male” and “female” are undone under further analysis and only become “real” not because of some inherent truth or naturalness behind the terms, but rather because of enshrined, ritualized gender norms and actions. This necessary conversation would complicate our articulations around what even makes a “man” or “woman.” And, yes, to be clear, while these terms may be socially constructed, made by us, built like our homes, we do live within them. But that’s beyond the scope of this essay. For deeper analysis, see, for instance, the work of Sojourner Truth, Hortense Spillers, Kai M. Green, and C. Riley Snorton.
Returning to the topic at hand, there is no wrong in supporting Black men. We need that. As one of the greatest neo-griots and filmmakers of our time, Marlon Riggs, has reminded us, “Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act,” yet in this moment I couldn’t help but to be discomforted and frustrated with this specific challenge. My spirit was vexed. It is not that I don’t love Black men or that I am unappreciative of the many Black men who tagged me in the post. That is the furthest thing from the truth. It is, however, that I do want something much, much more expansive for all Black humans. Something more than what I perceived in this challenge as a respectable, performative masculinity that builds Black men, while erasing other Black folks.
Over the decades we have witnessed the patterned, practiced cruelty of white people and cops, who trivialize all forms of Black life. Yet much of our galvanizing has coalesced around the executions of Black men. While necessary, it is incomplete, as it often has overlooked the murders specifically of Black women and Black trans individuals. Omissions of this magnitude instigated the necessary start of the #SayHerName movement, which focuses on state-sanctioned violence and fatal acts of police brutality against Black women. Black men loving Black men is necessary; it isn’t, however, altogether solely sufficient for the revolutionary moment we currently occupy.
For me, our revolution requires a clear, concentrated, and committed love and support for Black women, Black Trans* folks, Black gender non-conforming folks, Black queer folks, and yes, Black men. It’s a rich Black love that knows no top and has no bottom. It’s a deliberate love that refuses the powerful seduction of well-meaning erasure, knowing Black people’s garment of fate is ultimately stitched together.
Some halfway through 2020, we are confronted with a global pandemic that lays bare the assaultive, subtle, and explicit dictates of institutional and structural white supremacy: its desire for premature Black death and gratuitous Black suffering. We know that with COVID-19, Black people are disproportionately more susceptible to both contract the virus and die from the virus due to centuries long protracted state disinvestment, neglect, and systematized suffering.
We are also in the midst of a global rebellion that advances the central notion that Black people already inherently know true: that our lives matter. The current protests are part of a larger historical constellation of protests and refusals against police brutality, the prison industrial complex, militarism, and a system of “law and order” that crushes Black life and normalizes Black death. A system that protects and serves white people, their property, and in the words of philosopher Charles Mills white peoples’ “consensual hallucinations.” More pointedly, the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police offer and his accomplices has lit a match under a populace who can’t rely on and be lulled asleep by the trappings and comforts of pre-COVID distractions.
So, it makes absolute sense that other Black men would call for some positivity and uplift. We need it. We all do. Yet, as we seek uplift for “us” it is absolutely critical that we not forget about the members of our community who have often been told to “wait,” “hold on,” “follow us,” or in fact, have been told nothing. Taken-for-granted. Used. Erased from collective visions of freedom, joy, and healing. Or, been told by us what those things look like for them, as we placed them on a gilded pedestal.
What might it look like and feel like for Black men to take our eyes off ourselves for a moment and dream with and support Black women, Black Trans* folks, Black queers, Black gender fluid people, and any combination of the aforesaid, who are in this fight for justice with us? How might we build with and not just over their lives? As I reflect on the murder of George Floyd, I cannot help but to think of Breonna Taylor, whose life and light, too, was recently extinguished by police who make no difference between her or George Floyd, only seeing the commonality of perceived criminality and perpetually condemning them and us as nonhuman in their eyes. And, as such, Floyd, Taylor, and a multitude of other Black lives deemed unnecessary and unneeded by the police and larger white populations. Superfluous.
What does it mean for Black men to think in mind and hold in our hearts Ilyanna Dior, a Black transgender woman who was viciously attacked by several men in St. Paul recently? Taking seriously her life or Mya Hall’s life would mean we not shy away from “criticism,” as was suggested in the social media campaign, but rather we move towards accountability and extending care as we work to excise within us the saturating anti-Black transmisogynistic and transantagonistic socializations we’ve been taught, that we enact, and that we reproduce.
What might it mean for us to be deliberate about being in community and communion with those we have historically (and presently) fundamentally forgotten? Who too have felt pain, but may not be buoyed by intracommunal patriarchy? What would it mean for us to take seriously the lessons of our ancestors: Sojourner Truth, Audre Lorde, Lorraine Hansberry, Marsha P. Johnson, Claudia Jones, Fannie Lou Hamer, Septima Clark, and Toni Morrison, and other living elders who have warned of a revolution that’s not so revolutionary because it betrays an intersectional analysis and politics? A revolution who desires, dreams, understands, and lives, as the members of the Combahee River Collective asserted that, “our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”
As I turned off my phone and the pain slowly mellowed, I was convicted to re-write the caption that inundated my timelines. I needed to write one that honors the life I want to live, the work I want to do, and most importantly the people I want to love. It reads:
I am a queer, cisgender…Black man…I build and learn and fight and love and laugh and make mistakes and grow. I work for Black freedom and joy and healing. I do not tear down other Black men! Or, Black women! Or Black gender nonconforming or gender fluid or Black queer humans! I strive to operate in truth, accountability, and radical love. I have felt the pain of being torn down and I have decided I will be deliberate about building WITH others and supporting and defending ALL BLACK LIFE, BLACK LOVE, BLACK JOY, BLACK PEACE, BLACK PASTS, BLACK NOWS, and BLACK LATERS.
This is our moment to deconstruct and reconstruct, conjure and create, build and birth a movement—in large and small things, in the streets, our homes, and across the screens—that holds all Black people’s humanity and healing. All Black lives. All the Black time.
