by Paul Butler
The focus on black men at the expense of black women is not a relic of the 1960s. A June 2013 cover story in Newsweek magazine by Joshua Dubois entitled “The Fight for Black Men” employed many of the “brothers gonna work it out” rules. It states, “When one single group of people is conspicuously left behind, it never bodes well for society as a whole. In many ways, black men in America are a walking gut check; we learn from them a lot about ourselves, how far we’ve really come as a country, and how much further we have to go.” This is an example of Rule #1: fixing the problems of African American males is a way of establishing racial justice overall.
Dubois writes:
We focused our social investments in this period—our brief War on Poverty—on women and children, because men were supposed to figure it out. But in the 1970s and 1980s, many of these black men didn’t. Just like their great-grandfathers never fully figured out how to teach their sons about manhood while being lashed in a field. Just like their grandfathers never completely figured out how to pass on lessons about building wealth when theirs was stolen through peonage and sharecropping.
But black women are as injured by white supremacy as black men. Intersectionality certainly helps us understand that African American men can, and do, experience different injuries, and that therefore different kinds of remedies might be necessary. My concern is not about claims that black men have been specifically disadvantaged by discrimination but rather with the implicit ranking of black male harms as more severe than black female harms.
Sometimes the endangerment narrative is meant literally. In an article titled “Screw the Whales, Save Me! The Endangered Species Act, Animal Protection, and Civil Rights,” Joseph Lubinski recommended the founding of a coalition of animal rights groups and civil rights activists. The idea reached its logical conclusion in a satirical documentary broadcast on the cable station Comedy Central in 2012 in which comedian D.L. Hughley lobbied the Environmental Protection Agency to have black males placed on the endangered species list.9
Here are the problems with thinking of African American men as an “endangered species.” First, African American men are not dying off; as with other people of color, their numbers are actually increasing. In 2014, for example, the life expectancy of African American men increased to 72.2, while that of white people decreased, to 78.8. Even if the term “endangered species” is meant more symbolically, it objectifies black men in a way that does not advance their cause. There is something at once aggrandizing and victimizing about describing African American men as an “endangered species.” “Species” connotes an otherness, as though black men are not human beings. It is dehumanizing, implying an analogy to animal conservancy rather than a response to social injustice as it impacts human beings. It draws on a long history of analogizing African Americans to nonhuman animals.
“Endangered” is more suggestive. Among other things, it stakes a claim in the debate about the cause of the problems that African American men face. Some people have attributed blame to African American men. The 1995 Million Man March—the largest political formation of African American men in history—was framed as a day of “atonement.” Exactly what black men were supposed to atone for was left unstated.
In the same vein, in a Father’s Day speech, President Obama criticized “too many” black fathers for “abandoning their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.” In a bit about interracial homicide in the Comedy Central program DL Hughley: The Endangered List, Hughley states that black men are “the only species in history complicit in our demise. The passenger pigeon didn’t have shit to do with making himself extinct.” Hughley is right that we typically do not blame endangered animals for their own potential extinction. “Endangered” communicates that the danger comes from without, not within; it seems more of a structural critique than a behavioral one. Unfortunately that idea has not traveled to black male programs, most of which focus on changing how black men respond to society rather than how society responds to black men.
Still, apart from being too naturalistic, the endangerment narrative gets the problem wrong. Survival is an act of resistance. African American men are still here; they, along with African American women, have survived in a country that for most of its history has been extremely inhospitable to them. As a group, African Americans have survived slavery, de jure segregation, and terrorism by white supremacists. “Endangered species” is inexact enough that it is careless. It is bad history and bad science. It is patriarchy masquerading as racial justice.
ARE BLACK MEN REALLY THE WORST OFF?
Policymakers often use the rhetoric of black male exceptionalism to justify racial justice programs and initiatives. For example, Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl A. Racine defended the city’s establishment of a $20 million boys-only public school, with no equivalent school for girls, by arguing that, as the lowest performing demographic, African American males require particularized academic support.10 Similarly, in an amicus brief in Fisher v. Texas, a coalition of “black male achievement” organizations “acknowledged that many young Americans other than Black male youth face serious life course obstacles in need of attention, but . . . the depth and breadth of the negative life outcomes experienced by Black males [are] sufficiently grave to warrant independent investigation and policy prescription.”11 Former White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, responding to critics of the My Brother’s Keeper initiative, stated that President Obama’s “approach is to create a society where nobody gets left behind, and right now our young boys of color are falling farther and farther behind than everybody.”12
The claim that black men are in a state of crisis is, upon a review of the evidence, entirely sound. Black men are 6.7 times more likely to be incarcerated than white men, and 14.3 times more likely than black women. And black men are 4.3 times more likely to drop out of high school than white men, and 2.5 times more likely to drop out compared to black females.13
But African American women, who after all live in the same communities as African American men, are in a state of crisis as well. Black men actually do better than black women by several important measures. For example, black women have lower incomes than black men, and are more likely to live below the poverty line than black men.14 African American women drop out of high school at higher rates than both white men and women.15 And black girls are also suspended from schools more than six times as often as their white counterparts.16 In what is frequently seen as an indicator of social status, African American women are the least likely of any women of color to marry outside their race. In 2013, one out of four black men married a person of a different race, compared with only 12 percent of black women.17
The point I am making here is not that it’s a “race to the bottom” between black women and black men. In fact, I am anxious to avoid this type of comparison. The point is that we need to be thoughtful about the way that interventions supposedly designed for racial justice are framed. The focus on black men only distorts the pervasiveness of white privilege, which harms black women as much as it harms black men. Policies that ignore this fact not only make the plight of African American women invisible, they often lead to the wrong kinds of solutions for black men.
HOW SOME BLACK MALE PROGRAMS HURT BLACK MEN
Shortly before his presidency ended, Barack Obama met with young black men in North Carolina who had participated in My Brother’s Keeper. The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates was also present. The men told the president how, through mentoring or job training programs, they had the opportunity to go to college or get a job. The president replied, “It doesn’t take that much. It just takes someone laying hands on you and saying ‘Hey, man, you count.’”18
But the issues faced by all African Americans, including young black men, require much more than a laying on of hands. The deprivations faced by black men are not due to a lack of self-esteem. In fact when Obama asked the young men in North Carolina what message they would give to policymakers, one replied that they
still had to live in the same neighborhoods where they had gotten in trouble. “It’s your environment,” he said. “You can do what you want, but you still gotta go back to the hood.”
Not long after Trayvon Martin was killed, a series of high-profile police shootings and other acts of violence against African Americans took place in cities across the country. When President Obama was asked how the White House was responding, he frequently invoked his My Brother’s Keeper initiative, which focuses on mentoring, job training, and college prep for young men of color. But Trayvon Martin did not need a male role model. He was on his way to his father’s house when he was killed. Michael Brown, the unarmed black man killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, was supposed to start college the week after he died. It is far from clear what a program premised on black male achievement has to do with the problem of state and private violence against black men. Unless, of course, one thinks that African American men bear some responsibility for that violence.
In a speech about race and policing at Georgetown University, FBI Director James Comey asked, “Why are so many black men in jail? Is it because cops, prosecutors, judges, and juries are racist? Because they are turning a blind eye to white robbers and drug dealers?”19 Comey answered his own question by saying, “I don’t think so” and that “what really needs fixing” was being addressed by My Brother’s Keeper, which is “about doing the hard work to grow drug-resistant and violence-resistant kids, especially in communities of color, so they never become part of that officer’s life experience.” Comey attributed the involvement of young black men in the criminal system to their “lacking role models, adequate education, and decent employment.” The problem is, as the FBI director sees it, that black men “inherit a legacy of crime and prison. And with that inheritance, they become part of a police officer’s life, and shape the way that officer—whether white or black—sees the world. Changing that legacy is a challenge so enormous and so complicated that it is, unfortunately, easier to talk only about the cops. And that’s not fair.” Comey’s use of the word “inherit” implies a kind of genetic determinism, consistent with stereotypes about black men as natural-born thugs. But his idea that, to resolve the crisis in policing, the focus should be on repairing African American men rather than the police is consistent with the ethos of many black male achievement programs.
The rhetoric of black male exceptionalism seldom involves critiques of patriarchy or white privilege. In some ways it resonates more with the ideology of conservatives than with a progressive vision of social justice. Indeed many of these programs became popular at the same time that the right wing was complaining about a breakdown in traditional gender roles and “a war against boys.”20
It follows, then, that some black male achievement programs appear to be premised on the Chokehold construction of black men as violent, hyper-masculine criminals. Other interventions supported by some of the programs can be seen as implicit behavioral critiques of black men as dysfunctional or pathologic.
The legal scholar Verna Williams has shown how the drive for single-sex public schools in the inner city, while presented as in the best interest of black boys and girls, “posits black males as dangerous and threatening,” “irresponsible and undependable,” and “oversexed.”21 Created to help “at-risk boys,” these schools often emphasize black gender stereotypes in their curricula and student discipline systems, and reinforce “a vision of masculinity that focuses on disruptive behavior, athleticism, and being ‘bad.’”22 Many single-sex schools for African American boys rely on regimented discipline systems that have resulted in hyper-masculinized environments in which “Men [are] either positioned as the protector and provider, or as the predator.” Thus in these environments intended to help black boys and girls, there is in fact little flexibility about what it means to be a black “male.”23
Many other programs for black men contain elements of behavior modification interventions for African American men. The mentoring program of 100 Black Men of America, Inc., includes workshops that focus on social and emotional skills, moral character, and work ethic. The United Negro College Fund Black Male Initiative states that strong African American male initiatives should incorporate activities that help young men “better handle frustration and anger.” New York’s Young Men’s Initiative (YMI) references training men for careers as commercial truck drivers, but not doctors, artists, or professors.24 Indeed $52 million out of the $127 million allocated to the YMI program is spent on males placed under the authority of the correctional system.25 Certainly some money should be spent on helping people who have been incarcerated successfully reenter society, but the program’s allocation of 40 percent of its funds to criminal justice–based interventions seems excessive, unless, perhaps, one sees a close relationship between law enforcement supervision of African American men and public safety.
In this regard it is worth noting that New York City’s Young Men’s Initiative was created during a time in which the New York City Police Department was defending its aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics, which, as chapter 3 describes, disproportionately burdened young African American and Latino men. Mayor Bloomberg’s private foundation contributed millions of dollars to the city’s black and Latino male youth initiative, at the same time that the mayor vigorously defended the stop-and-frisk program. The Huffington Post reported, “In a speech brimming with vitriol, Mayor Michael Bloomberg took aim at all who have criticized the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy, accusing them of encouraging a lawless mayhem state. Mayor Michael Bloomberg unleashed a 45-minute tirade in defense of the police tactic.” The New York Times reported Mayor Bloomberg responded to critics of the city’s stop-and-frisk policy by stating that “They just keep saying, ‘Oh, it’s a disproportionate percentage of a particular ethnic group.’ That may be, but it’s not a disproportionate percentage of those who witnesses and victims describe as committing the murder. In that case, incidentally, I think we disproportionately stop whites too much and minorities too little.”26
It is revealing that black male achievement programs have not engendered the same kinds of conservative backlash that other race-conscious remedies have. For example, they have not generally been challenged by the conservative groups that have attacked affirmative action programs. I would argue that this is because the patriarchal rhetoric of these programs resonates with conservative values. Jonah Goldberg, writing in the National Review, stated that conservatives should support black male achievement programs, despite the usual right-wing antipathy to race-based interventions. Goldberg noted, “A strong male role model can tell boys to ‘act like a man’ in ways women can’t. Sure, a woman can say the words, but she can’t be a man. For some boys, particularly ones without fathers at home (the majority of at-risk youths), that’s still a huge distinction.”27
TOWARD BLACK MALE INTERSECTIONALITY
Gender is a social system that divides power. . . . Women, by contrast with comparable men, have systematically been subjected to physical insecurity, targeted for sexual denigration and violation; depersonalized and denigrated; deprived of respect, credibility, and resources; and silenced—and denied public presence, voice, and representation of their interests. Men as men have generally not had these things done to them; that is, men have had to be black or gay (for instance) to have these things done to them as men.
—Catharine MacKinnon28
There is nothing inherently wrong with interventions that are designed for African American men; indeed, if done right, these programs have the potential to be transformative. As this book has pointed out, some of the issues that black men experience are based on race and gender, and attention must be paid to both those aspects of their identity (as well as others like sexual orientation, disability, age, etc.) in order for them to succeed. But these programs should not pit men against women in the fight for racial justice. An equivalent amount of resources should be devoted to black women. Any government office, business, or foundation th
at sponsors an intervention for African American men should also sponsor one for African American women. The programs should receive equal funding. This equality goal will strike some as impractical and will raise feelings of a sense of sacrifice in some advocates for black men. It is a key component, however, of an intersectional strategy for black male interventions.
Civil rights law contains a model of this kind of approach: the regulations implementing Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 establish general standards for public schools receiving federal funding, allowing gender-segregated programs as long as “substantially equal” provisions exist for the other gender. It’s a gender version of “separate but equal.”
Why defend black male programs at all, if there are so many potential problems and if, as a practical matter, there are not likely to be the same number of programs for black women? Let’s keep it real. Black men are still black. Many black women accrue some benefit when black men are better educated, are less likely to be incarcerated, live longer, and so on.
I realize that there is no guarantee that, if funding exclusively black male programs were not an option, funders would reallocate resources to black women. It would be revealing if funders did not, because it would demonstrate that they were more interested in black men than in racial justice, or at least less interested in racial justice if that includes black women. But that revelation would be at the expense of black male programs. I understand that some will view strict equality as too idealistic a standard in a community—the African American community—where the need is so great and the resources so limited. Any charity that thoroughly interrogates the motives of its donors is bound to be disappointed by some of them. But in the end, I am simply not persuaded by a “money is green” argument against any standards or ethical expectation of donors to racial justice projects.