"Straight Black Men Are the White People of Black People*,"...the Fuh?!?!?!
*Several months ago, VSB/The Root published an article entitled “Straight Black Men Are the White People of Black People.” (https://verysmartbrothas.theroot.com/straight-black-men-are-the-white-people-of-black-people-1814157214). This post is a response to that article.
To compare ANY population to white people in America is already a gargantuan task. But then to claim that an example of another over-indulged, under-indicted, rapacious and predatory population completely devoid of self-awareness and self-restraint could be [any kind of] Black men in America…I. Just. Cannot. Practically speaking, it would require Black men in America to have 1) fully invaded new territories, completely overtaking and all but eradicating whomever had settled and were extant prior to their arrival; 2) imported new people from other territories expressly for the purpose of enslavement so as to profit financially, socially and politically by any and all forms of output derived from said enslaved bodies; and finally 3) devised a mythology which somehow virtuizes the manifold crimes and deceits propagated to paint right and proper all of the wrong, deliberately, strategically and maliciously committed solely for their own selfish purposes. And most importantly, it would require Black men in America to have never been victimized by the foregoing centuries’ long campaign of violation against them, in the first place.
It should be noted that this reflectionandreform.com post in no way wishes to endorse abusive or criminal behavior, irrespective of whether or not the purported perpetrator has himself been abused. But let’s deconstruct the title of the original VSB post “Straight Black Men Are the White People of Black People”: the term people in any community includes males and females (and naturally all those along the gender spectrum). But VSB single out Black men as culprits of inappropriate behavior against Black women, specifically Black men’s unwillingness to be objective about the many ways their behavior can be menacing and even deleterious to the rest of their own people. Whether or not this argument has merit is NOT the subject of this article. The friction between Black men and women in American society is real. But it was not authored by Black men. Strictly speaking, it would be impossible for Black men to be the totality of any people making up a community; the most they could be is the male portion of said community. For better or for worse Black people exist in a hetero-normative society, the primary building block of which is the nuclear family. But again, for all of the centuries that Black people have been in this [Brave] New World, Black would-be nuclear families have received none of the same superstructural supports protecting and maintaining them which other social groups rely upon as a fundamental tenet of existence. What is more, absent the foundational nuclear family, singular Black individuals have never been protected by the same social safety net which has provided for the basic human rights white men, women and children have come to expect over as many centuries. In fact, Black men, then women and children have been regularly sacrificed wantonly to satisfy the comfort—and pad the coffers—of an abusive white society which manufactures, then mines criminality amongst Black people to appease the conscience of a hegemony already self-conscious about its inability to rectify its crimes against Black people (George Stinney, Jr., Emmet Till, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice); thus, the strategy to drown out the conversation regarding retributive justice by incessantly creating criminality and wrongdoing on the part of its victims.
While whites were riding the crest of wealth-creation via Homesteading Acts (granting free land), FHA support (institutionalizing never-before-seen mass home purchasing on credit to the tune of $120 BB worth of mortgages in the first 30 years of its existence alone), and the provisions of the GI Bill (allowing for substantially reduced or even free advanced education, totaling $14BB for mostly white soldiers), Blacks were caught up in the undertow of separate and inherently unequal, sharecropping, poll taxes, grandfather clauses—societally imposed poverty and powerlessness. Black people were strategically and willfully prevented from thriving and flourishing, then subsequently derided and disparaged for not having done so. If I had a dollar for every time I heard a Black person criticize other Blacks by saying, “I know the deck is stacked against us, but that’s no excuse for us to…” I would probably be too distracted by my millions to focus on justice for Black people. The fact is, knowing we have been cheated means recognizing that the sustained systemic and systematic cheats over all the centuries we have been imports into the Western Hemisphere are what is responsible for the aberrant, anti-social behavior Black people railroaded into poverty and powerlessness frequently display toward one another. Moreover, parroting the internecine sentiment to forbear this type of abuse as a member of the abused population 1) is delusionally un-self-aware, in much the same way Black slave traders who trafficked in their own flesh for profit, presumed that the norms of justice which they relied on for their own safety and protection would be upheld right before they found themselves in the ship’s hold bound and shackled to the catch they themselves had bound and shackled, 2) it gives consent to be abused, and 3) it enriches whites exactly as the inequality was always intended, at our expense. By criticizing and condemning ourselves, we excuse the cheats and justify the abuse against us. Furthermore, we give the abusers permission to keep doing the same to us. As the fictional father in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout aptly observes: “Black people are in dire need of a lot of things, but acrimony is not one of them.” All outrage and consternation must be directed at the hegemony responsible for creating the crisis in the first place.
What VSB/The Root astutely isolate—by accident or on purpose—is how easily abused people, i.e. Black men in America become enmeshed in pathologies making it possible for them to more easily harm themselves and those nearest to them, i.e. Black women in America. But in focusing on the many ways that hurt people (Black men) hurt people (Black women), they failed to indict the principal offending party: the white hegemony peopled and powered primarily by whites, for the benefit of whites. White people in America either passively stood by and watched other white people in America actively abuse Black people, or actively abused Black people in America for their own social, economic, and/or political gain. According to Bryan Stevenson's Equal Justice Initiative, 4,000 lynchings occurred in the United States from 1877 to 1950. This was on average a murder per week, every single week, from 1 Jan 1877 to 31 Dec 1950 somewhere in America. No charges were brought. No damages were repaired or repaid to the victims’ families, though they were faced with the additional economic burden of getting along without the deceased’s potential earnings or support. This crime spree against defenseless [mostly male] Blacks waged by rabid, racist whites was often an expression of justice, literally perpetrated by agents of the law whose role in society was to establish order…by constructing a campaign of terror against innocent citizens…going unpunished…often being celebrated...profiting in the process.
Black men’s bodies have been preyed upon and pattyrolled every single one of the 398 years they have been between the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. The Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas Blackmon in Slavery By Another Name traces how Black men were systematically abducted by local law personnel for the purpose of being sold/leased into the criminal justice system as convict labor, irrespective of whether or not they had committed any crime, or even whether or not a crime had been committed at all. Though Blackmon’s research spans roughly Reconstruction to WWll, then inexplicably ends, I have heard personal accounts from the Black men in my own family born in the teens of the last century, the 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s and I feel confident that the kind of policing my male relatives have experienced is no less predatory than the treatment of the victims of Blackmon’s book. With Mass Incarceration and the Prision Industrial Complex fairly well documented, along with the regular and repeated murder of unarmed Black men by public employees and even private civilians who see themselves as protectors and keepers of the peace, it is reasonable to assume that as we approach 2018 it is still open season on Black males.
Just to reiterate: given the asymmetry of experience, outcomes and opportunities for Black men vs. white people in America, and the sheer impossibility of any group of Black men aggregated to create ‘white people in America,’ the equivalency of “straight Black men to white people” the VSB article puts forth is preposterous.