Empowering H.I.

M:
Saving Our Black Boys Through Positive Male Mentoring

Prologue: The Struggle is Real

Here we are in 2018, living in what so many people call a “Post-Racial
Society”. Living in a world 155 years after Abraham Lincoln signed the
Emancipation Proclamation, and 53 years after Lyndon B. Johnson and
the United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1965. And
yet, in 2018 we are still arguing about whether the United States of
America has a “Race Problem”. Race is defined as “a class or kind of
people unified by shared interests, habits, or characteristics”.
(Merriam & Webster). Problem, as a noun, is defined as “a source of
perplexity, distress, or vexation.”(Merriam & Webster), and as a verb to
mean “difficult to deal with.” So, if we combine these three definitions
we can define Race Problem as “ a source of perplexity, distress, or
vexation, based on a class or kind of people unified by shared
interests, habits, or characteristics, which tends to cause them to be
difficult to deal with.” In his 1903 masterpiece Souls of Black Folk, Dr.
W.E.B. Dubois ponders over the question “How does it feel to be a
problem?” To this question he answers “being a problem is a strange
experience, -- peculiar even for one who has never been anything else,
save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of
rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a
day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I
was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark
Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee
wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads
to buy gorgeous visiting-cards -- ten cents a package -- and exchange.
The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my
card, -- refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me
with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like,
mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by
a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep
through; I held all beyond it in common contempt and lived above it in
a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.” It was not in
adulthood, but in his youth, that Dubois realize that the color of his
skin not only set him apart from his school mates who did not look
like, but that the color of his skin made them uncomfortable
interacting with him. The pure innocence of youth seems to bring
about a certain level of brutal honesty. Today’s black youth are
introduced to at a young age and reminded almost daily that they live
in a country that, even after their kind have inhabited that country for
almost 400 years, views their existence as a problem. From the time of
involuntary servitude of, to their fight civil rights and modern times,
white America has engaged in a full-blown assault of the African
American, specifically its male. Policies are formed at all levels of
government to target him and put him in prisons so that the rich can
make a profit, to allow him to get an education but receive less
funding and aid than his white counterparts, for him to be struck down
by police and his killer go unpunished and his family never receive
justice, and day in and day out, members of another race deny his
human dignity and his god given rights. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in
his book Why We Can’t Wait, encouraged African Americans to
condemn the notion that they are second class citizens and to develop
a sense of self-worth, a sense of what he called “somebodiness”. But
after 55 years, the words of the great drum major for justice, although
they remain to be true, need to be reiterated to our Black Youth today.
Society has attempted to use our history to support the notion that the
fight for civil rights and the fight for equity is a war that has been
fought, won, and remains in the past. The truth is, the war never died,
but its leaders, one by one, did. The “Post-Racial Society” I spoke of
early on is merely a myth. The generations after Dubois, King, Malcom
X and others were bamboozled into believing that we should mistake
their progress for an end to the struggle for equality in all aspects of
human life. Instead of reaching a place of complacency and a certain
level of comfort in our progress , we must continue the fight and
engage on a new battle fight and begin the war of a new era. Although
there are many battlefronts to this war, the author wishes to
concentrate on one specific front, the raising of a new level of black
conscientiousness. Though obvious and blatant to some, the war
engaged on black males may seem foreign and oblivious to many, even
those of the black race. And, just as oblivious to some is the target of
this war: our black boys. This book is an attempt to not only raise
awareness of the plight that our black boys face, but to also give a
solution to how we as men can uplift these young men to higher
social, economic, and intellectual status. I believe, through giving
boys role models through positive male mentoring, we can begin to
help save our boys. Our boys are growing with fathers who are absent
from their lives voluntarily, through incarceration, and even sometimes
death, leaving them with no male figure to help guide them through the
avenues of life. Many mothers and grandmothers across the nation do
the best they can, but the truth is there needs to be a positive male
role model in our young men’s lives to teach them and give them an
example of positive manhood. Contrary to popular belief, no matter
how strong a woman is, how strict and how tough a mother is, there
are some things about being a man that mama can not understand and
mama will never understand. The male youth, as he makes the
transition from boyhood to manhood, goes through a period of
physical, mental, and emotional transformation that, if no positive
male influence is available, can be a period of great stress and
anguish. The young man seeks to understand himself and the world
around him and where he fits in. His body is changing and he begins to
have urges and feels sensations he has never felt before. He mentally
throws away the approval of his family to seek out the attention and
approval of his peers. And if he is not carefully guided and aided in his
actions, his adolescent years can be some of the most challenging
years of his life, greatly affect his later life, and even prematurely end
his life. The young black boy normally attempts on the challenge of
helping himself mature. The sad reality is, he is fighting an internal
struggle to find himself, and an external struggle of him against
society. He takes upon himself the incredulous task of finding his own
way as first, a man, then, secondly as a black man. He ought not have
to endure this journey alone. In my own life, I can be a living testament
to the fact that had I not had the positive influence, of my father,
grandfather, uncles and others my life would be drastically different.
As a black community, we as black men must re-adopt the philosophy
of the old saying that “It takes a village to raise a child.” Whether a
child is ours through our own reproductive act, or a family member, or
just happens to stumble and fall into our lives we must develop the
mentality that all black boys are OUR black boys. If we truly want to
see a change in our communities, this must be our mantra as black
men who have achieved some success and have accomplished
somethings in our life. However, I am not naïve enough to know that
adopting this mentality, in it of itself, is a struggle. Some of our boys
have been along in the wilderness for so long, lacking love, guidance,
and discipline that these things become like foreign pathogens to
them. They do not take heed to sound counsel nor constructive
criticism and continue to rebel, sometimes even worse than before.
We must be willing to endure the pain of this struggle so that we may
begin to reap the benefits of progress. And what a struggle it shall be!

The struggle in tough. The struggle is heart breaking. The struggle is

indeed real!

Act I: How Did We End Up Here?

One of the issues I believe plagues African Americans today and has
been plagueing them for generations is a lack of knowledge of our
past. For most of us we have heard common sayings all our lives like
“If you don’t know your history, you’re bound to repeat it” and “If you
don’t know where you’ve been, you won’t know where you’re going”
yet, we as a society of black folk have yet to put that into practice
when teaching our children their history, most likely, because it was
not taught to us ourselves. I believe this is important because contrary
to popular belief, there has been a significant amount of psychological,
sociological, and economic, mental, and emotional damage done by
the hundreds of years African Americans spent in both forced
servitude and oppression. The purpose of teaching this history should
not be for us as black people to dwell and hold on to the past. The
purpose of teaching our children this history should be enlighten them
and encourage them to use their heritage to search for their own self-
identity, for even though we endured a great deal of pain and suffering
throughout generations the story of the African American is not one of
great tragedy but of great triumph. We have overcome many obstacles,
which is a feat that should be talked about and celebrated. If we
expect to empower the next generation of black boys, they must be
encouraged to develop a sense of pride about who they are. They must
be able to look in the mirror each day and night proud of what it is they
see. They must learn to love their self and embrace being a black
male, regardless of how the outside world may view them and their
ethnicity. But love of one’s self must begin with knowledge of one’s
self. Let us take a brief look into the history of African Americans on
the North American Continent.