America has entered

From President Obama’s landmark announcement that he supports same sex marriage to Beenie Man posting a video asking for forgiveness of his past homophobic songs, tolerance is in! However, tolerance is not justice. In fact, tolerance basically boils down to finding something unobjectionable. Tolerance is the lowest form of acceptance because it allows one to support in words but not follow up with actions. If we are not careful, our tolerance will only serve to maintain the status quo. If we want to move from tolerance towards justice, it will take more than not objecting to same-sex marriage, it’s going to take a commitment to fight injustice and create safer communities for all. Read More

In fact, I wonder, are we even talking to boys and men about sexual violence? We need to engage boys and men in conversations not just about the mechanics of sex, but the responsibilities that accompany it (beyond pregnancy and STIs). While sex and sexuality are often discussed as private, in a puritanical sense, sex and sexuality are all around us. Youth are inundated with messages about sex, violence and power. Most boys have watched a pornographic film by the age of 11. You can chose not to talk about sex and sexual violence but they’ve likely already witnessed it.

Anytime one thinks about adolescents or children, the role of peer group looms large. As an adolescent I knew which friends had access to “adult materials” and also which friends or family were having (or so I thought) sex so they could tell me what I wanted to know. It was in this private context that I was taught about “running trains.” For those not familiar, that’s a colloquial reference to multiple men having sex with a single woman in succession. I was taught that if you found a real freak, everybody could participate. When I heard Snoop’s album and they sang, “It ain’t no fun, if the homies can’t have none” that was my reference and the image that came to mind. I was casually socialized into thinking that there was no gang rape, instead there were only gang bangs. Whether it’s Kid Cudi saying “me first” on I Poke Her Face or Wale ending his verse referencing “a train” on No Hands, our boys continue to learn gang rape is just a casual part of partying and growing up.

Some scholars estimate that between 10 to 33 percent of sexual assaults are multiple assailant (gang rape). Psychologically most common to these occurrences is an emphasis on power, displaying heterosexuality to other men, and drifting – where people commit crime that they may not agree with following others in a group. In short, gang rape is a group problem that makes clear we have to collectively change how we think about what it means to be a man and the role of power in our lives. At the core of the heinous act is often an attempt to validate one’s masculinity to others. Non-participation could mean being pushed out of the group or being “outed” (read: labeled as gay and this ‘not a real man’). If we don’t teach our boys to think differently about what it means to be a man, we will continue to be plagued by this issue.

This however is not simply an issue of peers. I can recall uncles saying, “you ain’t no real man till you’ve had some” or have seen parents questioning if children “have sugar in the tank” in attempts to legislate what it means to be “a real man.” When you couple these types of messages with misinformed sexual commentary, it creates a dangerous brew. As we are teaching boys about their journey into manhood, we often start with the ideas of power and control. I can’t recall how many times I’ve been in households where a 10 year old is referred to as “the man of the house” and told to “protect his mother and sisters” (I’m not even going into family structure here, just bear with me). This gives boys the idea, from an early age, that manhood is about power over women and about protect of girls and women from dangers. What if we pushed our boys to think about power sharing with girls and women? What if we restructured journeys into manhood to emphasize that best qualities of adults are neither masculine or feminine, they transcend both? What if we actually began to listen to our kids and talk to our kids about what we want our communities to look like? What if we envisioned spaces that were safe for girls and boys and women and men?

While I spend most days trying to crack the achievement gap, I cannot help but think the same questions of how do we shape peer influence and build individual personalities that can buffer against negative messages play out in sexual violence as well. In the case of education, we haven’t figured out how to transform peer influence and that’s with a million messages saying “stay in school” and “school pays.” But education has the advantage of being on the radars of millions. In the case of sexual violence, adults suffer from a lack of communication. The teenage years are guided by adults suggesting that youth not “follow the crowd” when it comes to drinking, drugs, and other speakable maladies, but sexual violence remains silent and untouched.

If we are going to provide a safe environment for boys and girls as well as men and women, we cannot afford to be silent. We cannot afford to flinch and/or turn away when they are honest about what they’ve learned about sex, relationships, and power – even if when we hear  our “messed up” messages that we’ve passed echoing back at us. We have to stand and have real conversations about gender violence and its severe consequences for all involved. This summer, I’m Program Coordinator of the B.R.O.T.H.E.R.S. (Boys Rising Organizing to Help End Racism and Sexism) where we will be working with adolescent males to become allies against sexism and gender based violence. Sexual violence is a collective issue and one that is sadly often framed solely as a “women’s issue.” I hope this post helps to highlight the extreme need of men and boys to be allies against sexual violence, if not we’ll find our boys and men being allies against it.

For resources on coping with and ending sexual violence:

A Long Walk Home

Men Can Stop Rape

RAINN

If you can’t see the video, click here.

p.s. I’ll be awaiting some angry comments … I said awaiting, not necessarily replying to them ;)

For more than a year, I’ve entertained way too many conversations about the shortage of Black men and Black women who remain hopelessly single. I tend to avoid these conversations, because it seems little can come of them other than hurt feelings and finger pointing. Well while reflecting on Ujima, I wondered how the principle could help this discussion given my inbox and twitter feed was abuzz with a recent story on the “crisis” in the Black community. I am certain that the blame game that comes around from discussions of relationships nor is it something that is unique to Black folks. I however realize it can come into special relief when we begin to talk about the numbers of Black women and men that are not married or the number of “out-of-wedlock” births that we have. The “crisis” of the Black family is not new, the placing of blame on Black women is not new, blaming men is not new, but the repackaging of it continues to draw attention and the opposite of productive discussion, mainly it ends up being a new opportunity for us to sidestep personal work, overlook progress, and undermine community work.

The principle of Ujima asks that we all acknowledge our role in the current condition and collectively work to repair it, this seldom happens in the current discourse. The recent Washington Post profile of Helena Andrews and the Nightline segment on unmarried Black women have kept us consumed with chatter. The Nightline segment features a number of sisters talking about the dilemma of being single and successful and then they’re joined by relationship guru comedian (who is asked to speak on a serious social issue) Steve Harvey. Harvey offers some commentary on the women’s aesthetic beauty, says older men failed to socialize younger males, and then tells the sisters to date older men to fulfill what the story purports as “missing.” The story created quite a buzz and part of it, I’d say, is due to the way the piece is framed. The piece highlights an ever declining population of marriagable men and high achieving women, pitting men against women in a zero sum game which results in a decaying Black family. When I saw the piece I didn’t get bent out of shape about it and reach for a lighter to reignite the battle of the sexes,  instead I saw a more promising narrative on mate selection, accomplishment, and community. This was, in part, because I listened to the voices of the sisters, rather than the voice that framed the piece. If you listen to the women’s testimonies they articulate clear expectations, a desire to settle down, but not the desire to settle. Quite the opposite of what is popularly emphasized where sisters have unrealistic standards, are hungry to trap men, and emasculate the men in their lives. Their voices and stories, like so many that I’ve read or watched on the topic, get twisted and are used to suggest there is more space for discontent and disunity than for collective work and responsibility.

The reality, as I see it, is that the changing forms of family, gender, and community mandate that we not look at each other and assume we will replicate the systems of the past. This doesn’t mean a total disavowal of what we had, but it often means me must acknowledge what we used in the past may not work today. In order to begin collective work we have to agree upon a problem or set of problems, which I’m not sure we do. What if what one called a problem another saw as an evolution and a success? Too often we assume marriage is the bedrock for a strong community, however family is much more-so. And family, for African-Americans and people of African descent has been defined in many ways that clash the mythos of the nuclear family. Are we ready to begin the work of collective uplift be acknowledging we may not be all shooting at the same target of family? Are we ready to acknowledge the role that emotional scars hold for men and women in choosing partners? Are we ready to move beyond discussions of “baby mama” drama and enter the work of  co-parenting? These are some of the questions and topics I’d love to see tackled so that we may truly begin to see our brothers and sisters problems as our own, as well as, our brothers and sisters strengths as our own. From there we can begin to do the work of collective work and responsibility for the Black community.