by Paul Butler
My defense of black male programs is not simply “all about the Benjamins”; intersectionality not only allows different interventions for different identity groups but also provides a basis for understanding why they are necessary. If they can be properly implemented, programs and initiatives targeting black males are appropriate as part of a comprehensive racial justice strategy. Just because one is not exceptional does not mean that one does not merit special attention. The premise of an intersectional intervention is not “best at being the worst.”
Black males also have an intersectional identity. They are black. And they are male. Their experience is unique because of the interplay between these two (and many other) categories. Scholarly analysis of the plight of the black man frequently has been limited to racial discrimination. In reality, their experience has much to do with their status as males. Only recently has analysis pointed to the ways that race and gender combine to affect African American men.
The rhetoric about black men as an endangered species must be dismissed. Black male intersectionality is a more accurate way of conceptualizing the issues. It acknowledges that black men have specific issues, but they are not “worse” than black women’s and do not require a hierarchy that displaces black women and girls.
Black male programs should be closely examined to eradicate any hint of anti-female ideology or practice. Some African American men have always supported feminist causes. After the Fifteenth Amendment extended the right to vote to black men, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass became a prominent advocate of suffrage for women. When President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative was announced, hundreds of African American men signed a letter requesting a program for African American women.29 The legendary singer and activist Harry Belafonte, speaking to a black fraternity in 2014, told them to “man up” and let their new mission be preventing abuse against women. “It is men who created violence against women,” Belafonte said. “It is men who should end the violence against women.” The Washington Post reported that the audience of black men “rose up in applause.”30
Understanding male privilege means acknowledging that black men’s issues have historically been prioritized over black women’s issues. Black male interventions should create space for African American women to be racial standard-bearers, a conversation that would position poverty and reproductive freedom as racial justice issues, in the way that advocates for black men have already done with criminal justice. Attention to women’s issues is justified in part because African American men have been complicit in their subordination. Black men are still men. The scholar Michael Eric Dyson notes, “If we have a glorified sense of our own victimization as black and brown men, what we must not miss and what we often do, is to understand that black and brown women themselves are so victimized, not only by white patriarchy but by black male supremacy and by the violence of masculinity that is directed toward them.”
In addition to fighting for African American women, an intersectional black male intervention would focus on attacking the structures, like white supremacy and patriarchy, that keep African American down, rather than just focusing on fixing black men. Imagine young men of color being schooled in the tradition of African American protest, studying how activists in New York City made the police end the stop-and-frisk program, and studying the history of the Black Panther Party (where they would learn, among other things, that most of the Panthers were women31).
Finally an intersectional black male intervention would affirm the diversity of African American men. One of the functions of white supremacy is to defeat black masculinity. I am a proud black man. I want to fight back against all the ways that white supremacy denigrates my manhood. At the same time, I worry that maleness—even black maleness—remains a problematic site for empowerment. Many African American men are thinking about new ways to define what it means to be a black man. Some brothers have always subverted the stereotypes. Little Richard, the flamboyant soul singer, wore mascara long before Prince ever picked up a makeup brush. The actor Jaden Smith and the best-selling hip-hop artist Young Thug appear on magazine covers in frilly frocks. Young Thug declared, in a Calvin Klein advertisement campaign, “In my world, you can be a gangsta with a dress or a gangsta with baggy pants. I feel like there is no such thing as gender.” The professional football player Odell Beckham Jr. breaks into an expressive dance every time he scores a touchdown. Some of the most prominent leaders of the movement for black lives, including activists DeRay Mckesson and Darnell Moore, are proud gay men, in the tradition of James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin, who was selected by Martin Luther King to organize the March on Washington. All of these brothers, simply by living their truth and not being bound by rigid stereotypes, are creating a transformative vision of what it means to be an African American man.
Some programs are beginning to reflect this new wave of black masculinity. The Open Society Foundation’s “Black Male Re-Imagined” campaign is an effort to move media portrayals of African American men beyond the stereotypes.32 Question Bridge, a video art installation that has toured the United States, is intended to “deconstruct stereotypes about arguably the most opaque and feared demographic in America.” It seeks to “represent and redefine Black male identity in America.”33 #BlackBoy Joy has used Twitter to deconstruct stereotypes of black men as thugs and gangsters by portraying joyful moments and expressions of African American men and boys.
The route from black men as “endangered species” to black male intersectionality creates equal space for African American women, and celebrates all brothers in our glorious diversity. That is the only way that racial justice will be achieved.
6
Nothing Works: Why the Chokehold Can’t Be “Reformed”
Well, if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the law’s protection the most!—and listens to their testimony. Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person—ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it.
—James Baldwin1
Much of the conventional wisdom about racial justice is wrong. The civil rights movement did not do nearly as much good for African Americans as many people think. Having more black police officers does not mean that cops treat African Americans better. When the federal government takes over a police department, it does not necessarily improve the situation it seeks to address. About half the time, police violence actually increases after an intervention by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Why don’t most Americans—and especially most white Americans—understand, despite having had a black president, how little progress this country has made on race? It’s because, as Malcolm X told an audience in Harlem, “You been hood-winked! Bamboozled! Led astray! Run amok!” The prominence of celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé, and Shonda Rhimes obscures the reality that black women on average are among the poorest people in the United States. What some scholars have described as our “celebratory tradition” of describing racial advancement is ahistorical and not evidence-based.
I want to disrupt the celebration. I don’t relish the role of Debby Downer, the party pooper from the Saturday Night Live skit. My goal, however, is to help free my brothers from the tight grip of the Chokehold. Many people of all races share that goal, and the United States is now focused on race in a way that it has not been since the 1960s. Criminal justice has been the main source of concern. But, as I will demonstrate, the idea that the system can be reformed is shortsighted. If black lives are to matter, we must dream bigger.
WHAT, EXACTLY, IS THE PROBLEM?
Many people regret some racial effects of police practices, including that unarmed African Americans are disproportionately killed by the police, and tha
t there are vast racial disparities in arrest and incarceration rates, although people differ about what causes these circumstances. As we think about whether the problems can be fixed, we need to be clear on what it is that needs fixing. Among the many who agree that something is broken, there is no consensus.
Some people say it is African American men, and others say it is police departments. Still others view the project of reforming a police department as enabling a system of white supremacist law enforcement to operate more effectively. These very different sets of critics are too often lumped together into one category of reformers. This is not helpful to any of their causes.
Let’s examine the four leading articulations of the crisis.
CRISIS 1: BLACK MALE BEHAVIOR
If more African American men obeyed the law, they would not have to worry about being shot by police or being stopped and frisked. The problem is the antisocial way that many black men perform masculinity. Throughout this book we have seen several versions of this critique. Bill O’Reilly stated that “Young black men often reject education and gravitate towards the street culture, drugs, hustling, gangs. Nobody forces them to do that. . . . It is a personal decision.”2 After George Zimmerman was acquitted for killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American teenager, CNN anchor Don Lemon said black male teenagers could “fix the problem” by pulling up their pants.3
During his first presidential campaign, Barack Obama joked about the work ethic of “gangbangers,” mocking them as saying, “Why I gotta do it? Why you didn’t ask Pookie to do it?”4 Similarly, in a speech at an African American church, President Obama said, “Too many fathers . . . have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. . . . You and I know how true this is in the African American community.”5
If the problem is African American male behavior, one obvious response is to attempt to modify black male behavior. This is, as chapter 5 suggests, one of the goals of black male “achievement” programs, like the White House’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative.
CRISIS 2: UNDER-ENFORCEMENT OF LAW
In Race, Crime, and the Law, law professor Randall Kennedy writes that “the principal injury suffered by African Americans in relation to criminal matters is not overenforcement but underenforcement of the laws.”6 As an example of “racially selective underprotection,”7 Kennedy points to the South’s practice––during both the slavery and Jim Crow eras––of not seriously prosecuting black-on-black violence.8 More recently, he notes, blacks do not demand more law and order because they “fear racially prejudiced misconduct by law enforcement officials. History reinforced by persistent contemporary abuses gives credence and force to this fear.”9 This is the race problem that President Donald Trump has identified. He believes that “crime and violence are an attack on the poor.”10
In this way of thinking, law enforcement is a public good. For a group to complain about having too much of it would be like complaining about having too many public parks or libraries. In the words of President Trump, “The problem in our poorest communities is not that there are too many police, the problem is that there are not enough police.”11
Some scholars have asserted that many African Americans endorse this point of view. Exploring the support in Harlem for tough law enforcement in response to a heroin epidemic in the 1970s, Michael Javen Fortner found that “mass incarceration had less to do with white resistance to racial equality and more to do with the black silent majority’s confrontation with the ‘reign of criminal terror’ in their neighborhoods.”12 James Forman has documented a similar dynamic in crime policy in majority-black Washington, D.C.13
If under-enforcement is the problem, then more enforcement is one solution. This brings us Chokehold police tactics like stop and frisk. According to former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, eliminating aggressive policing strategies such as stop and frisk would result in “far more crimes committed against black and Latino New Yorkers. When it comes to policing, political correctness is deadly.”14
Sometimes proponents of this viewpoint recognize that increased enforcement may create tension in relations between blacks and the police, but they view this as a cost of increased public safety. Bloomberg, for example, asserted that police departments must balance competing considerations: the “right to walk down the street without being targeted by the police because of his or her race or ethnicity” and the “right to walk down the street without getting mugged or killed.”15 “Both are civil liberties—and we in New York are fully committed to protecting both equally, even when others are not.”16
CRISIS 3: POLICE–COMMUNITY RELATIONS
Perhaps the most common articulation is that the crisis concerns the relationship between the police and the African American community.
Cleveland police chief Calvin Williams said, “If we don’t ensure that our officers and our community have a better relationship, then a lot of what we’re trying to implement . . . is going to be hard to do.”17 Likewise, a federal investigation of the Cincinnati Police Department determined that officers had “superficial relationships” with the community.18
The Obama administration most often talked about criminal justice reform through this frame. It created the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, which is designed “to improve relationships and increase trust between communities and the criminal justice system.”19 The initiative’s website highlights three areas “that hold great promise for concrete, rapid progress.”20 They are reconciliation, procedural justice, and implicit bias.21
This frame focuses on fairness rather than race per se. Former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder said that reform should ensure “that everyone who comes into contact with the police is treated fairly,”22 that reforming drug sentencing laws “presents a historic opportunity to improve the fairness of our criminal justice system,”23 and that preventing felons from voting is “unfair.”24
In this construct, the race problem arises when law enforcement officers treat people of color differently.25 The fix is the traditional civil rights–based approach of attempting to eradicate the discrimination. One of the main tools civil rights activists seek to use to repair police–community relations is the intervention of the U.S. Department of Justice. I discuss this remedy at length below. Here I want to note that this is the response that tends to be championed by mainstream civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
CRISIS 4: ANTI-BLACK RACISM/WHITE SUPREMACY
At the same time that police violence against African Americans commands substantial attention in the media, a group of blacks and sympathetic allies who hold radical racial ideologies have ascended to prominence. These activists, scholars, and journalists represent the most radical movement among African Americans since the Black Panther Party of the 1960s. Their critique of criminal justice generally, and police practices specifically, creates the fourth explanation of the crisis. It views police brutality against blacks as a symptom of structural racism and white supremacy. To describe this point of view, I will focus on the movement for black lives and the work of the scholar Michelle Alexander and the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates.
The movement for black lives is a collective of individuals and community organizations who have come together “in response to the sustained and increasingly visible violence against Black communities in the United States and globally.”26 Black Lives Matter is the best-known organization in the collective. According to its website, “#BlackLivesMatter is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society. Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes.”27 Its activists intend to “broaden the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which Black people are intentionally left powerless at the hands of the state” including “Black poverty and genocide,” mass incarceration, and discrimination against the LGBT community and undocument
ed immigrants.28
In The New Jim Crow, one of the most influential books about race in many years, Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration is a form of social control of blacks.29 Alexander proposes a multiracial coalition to address the causes of mass incarceration.30 She argues that unless the root causes are addressed, even if mass incarceration is defeated, another mechanism for controlling African Americans will rise in its place.31
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a leading public intellectual on race relations in the United States. In his best-selling Between the World and Me, he writes, in an open letter to his son, “all you need to understand is that the [police] officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.”32
Coates situates his critique of the police in a historical context. He notes, “White supremacy does not contradict American democracy—it birthed it, nurtured it, and financed it. That is our heritage. It was reinforced during 250 years of bondage. It was further reinforced during another century of Jim Crow. It was reinforced again when progressives erected an entire welfare state on the basis of black exclusion.”33
This frame advocates broad economic and political transformation, extending well beyond police reform. For example, the Movement for Black Lives website states:
The violence inflicted on Black communities goes far beyond police brutality. It can be seen in the continued suppression of our history, the exploitation of our culture, and the reality that many of our people live in communities that have been systematically denied resources and jobs. The violence includes inadequate health care, dirty water, failing schools, and a lack of resources. Every day we contend with the indecencies of racism and poverty, which wear on our spirit and make our communities more vulnerable to state violence and fuel community conflict. These varying forms of violence are perpetrated by government and corporate institutions and actors, at both the local and national level.34