Black men improving your life—with just words?
My anti-social-media activities yesterday led me to the question for a generation:
Has a Black man improved your life with just his words?
Today, here in the rasx() context, this feels like the key question to ask other so-called Black people early and often. This would have been the question I would have been afraid to ask as a young man because I know what the answers would have been—especially from the Black women of my generation and beyond.
The “universality” behind my new, favorite question is this “color-blind” question:
Do you change your behavior based on new information?
All children without any identifiable learning disabilities must eventually answer yes to this question. So this “universal” question is really a question for adults—especially American adults. What I am actually asking, without seeming all-new-age-hippie, is this:
Do you cultivate a life of learning, consciously in a world of ideas?
Now do you see my daring (or, likely, from your point of view, “stupidity”)? I dare to associate Blackness with life-long learning. I dare to associate Black men (like myself) as first-class citizens in this world. What I dare to write right here is my deep understanding that black people in general and black women eagerly in particular do not voluntarily include Black men in any world of ideas—let alone theirs.
Has a Black man improved your life with just his words?
Should I want to take the child’s table at the black intellectual dinner party (the other option would be no place at all), I would do well to mention James Baldwin. But, from the crude, pretentious, twisted point of view of a fake-black person (even a feminist fake-black person), James Baldwin is not a Black man. He is more of a universal, non-gender, non-child-bearing construct that white people find interesting now and then (because he is regarded as accessible/tolerable solely because of his Francophone homosexuality). This gives the fake-black person permission to even mention his name (but not authentically engage his ideas). The treatment of Martin Luther King would be worse.
My ‘amazing’ question is not about these famous figures. My question is personal. I am taking about Black men in your personal intellectual/metaphysical life. It can get even more demanding when I ask you eliminate your childhood role models. What about the ideas of Black men in your adult life? I can become a total asshole when I narrow it down to Black men who are not a generation away from you—Black men in your own age group. Are all of us in your generation one step away from raping you?
This focus forces you (and me) to admit that you have no Black men in your life that you take intellectually/metaphysically seriously. This means you might have to develop a rationale—an ironically racist rationale—to explain this lack (because I have noticed that my Black people here in the United States are super-oversensitive about lacking things and beings—so it’s better for us to pretend—in some death-spiraling Cosby-Show cosplay—that we ever wanted/needed what we are lacking from our loving Blackness). Just like the classic white liberal, you would dare to imply that Black men are replaceable and their absence does not imply that you are impoverished. And, yes, when I write you I am referring to self-described black women.
Women (over 35) who dare to call themselves black (and even, I daresay, actively heterosexual) would understand the value of telling me to my face that I am not needed—that I am replaceable. When you are the Black woman from my life experiences, you would understand the “liberating catharsis” to finally admit openly something you have been hiding for years from this Black male thing that no longer has power over you.
(Sidebar: the self-described “black” mother of my youngest son took profound relish when she told me years ago, “I am not afro-centric.” I could feel the waves of relief unfold in her 50+ year old face when she finally admitted this to herself from the safety of a marriage to a relatively famous “black” college professor with a distinct intellectual allegiance to a formal, modern definition of Négritude. This experience set me on the path to discover that the role of some husbands in the modern woman’s life has very little to do with her inner world—assuming, of course, that secular, synth-humanist materialists have inner worlds—non-medicated with antidepressants. So, what I am “demanding” from women as a Black man is more than what is actually going on in the “real world” of some of these Facebook-genic relationships.)
Since I am no longer afraid of your answer (in large part because I am already a Black parent three times over), I will find every opportunity to provoke you. It is all in how you respond to the question:
Has a Black man improved your life with just his words?
Put down that “self-help book,” written by that tricycle-riding white dude and answer the motherfucking question! That sounded like a violent, black animal didn’t it? How can such “violent” person be aware of enlightenment?
I need to enlighten myself with a personal rule:
Do not volunteer to be the first Black male teacher in an adult black woman’s life—unless you are willing to die for her in spite of her complete ignorance of you.
You see blind kids: some “men,” deep, deep down, define dedication to a woman that really does not understand why men should exist as the very definition of manhood. This unilateral self-sacrifice almost for nothing (when sex stops being everything) is the very definition of the American/western husband. These “men” in private regard me as a “coward” for being unwilling to be bitch-made in such a way. These “men” effectively say:
You are either bitch-made or you are nothing.
Now we know why some married “men” must cheat—which makes the patriarchal/dominator-culture problem worse. Now we know why the “men” die first.
When I was kid in my all-black, purposely-segregated, K-through-5 schools, the girls were honest. They used to say with little provocation:
I ain’t thinking about you! Forget you!
I failed to respect and understand what these girls were saying to me. I did not understand that this was really the last honest communication between girls and boys. Forget about you, Black male. There is no thinking about you, Black male.