The Wayward Scholar

But we can never go nowhere unless we share with each other
We gotta start making changes
Learn to see me as a brother instead of two distant strangers
And that’s how it’s supposed to be
                     How can the Devil take a brother if he’s close to me? – 2pac, Changes

It is widely understood in radical black thought, black feminist/womanist, intersectional feminist and critical race and justice theory or critique that liberation for oppressed and vulnerable populations is specific and contextual. We must first center the lives, experiences and violence that are faced by women of color if we are ever to see an eradication of institutions that operate within injustice. The true and complete liberation of black (and brown) female-gendered, feminine bodies is non-negotiable.

I recognize that the struggle against oppression can be un/gendered and therefore is unique in some ways for everybody and every body. Since the days of the middle passage, Black women have been reduced into nothing more than a birthing canal for capital. They are positioned as machines to sustain the persistence of a brutal imagination by birthing black bodies, black terror/ists. But seeing I am neither female nor feminine bodied I cannot speak to this experience, only of.

However, black men navigate the world marked as the black terror that must be either controlled or destroyed. We see this articulated staggering numbers of unarmed black men shot and killed by the police, we see this in the gross rates of mass incarceration and the celebration of black athletes until they have the audacity to take a knee and assert themselves as men. Even with these high numbers of state-sanctioned violence*, we also must take note that the leading cause of death for black men are homicides by other black men.

What does this mean with how we care for one another? What does this say about how we protect one another? Regardless of the messiah male figures that seem to lead our social movements and civil rights victories, many of our greatest thinkers, activists and fighters for bettering Black America have been our women. They fight for us and they continue to fight for us, even when they do not fight for themselves. They draw power and strength from sisterhood, an association or unification of women in a common cause and a bond between women who support the Women’s movement.

There are studies and research that could describe how women are particularly good at forging these necessary bonds with one another. Is there a way for me to be inspired by these relationships and intimacies without co-opting our sisters? Can we achieve a new degree of care and do the comprehensive work to sustain a true movement to protect and love one another without asking women to make choices between black/sisterhood.
It is too rare to find fraternalism that isn’t rooted in hegemonic masculinity and/or brutal violence. It’s not to say that we aren’t doing anything, only to say that perhaps we are not doing enough for each other. Perhaps we could be doing more. We first learn of love by fear of the belt, switch or extension cord and we learn to express love without love through hazing rituals in all spaces, not exclusive to academia and Greek fraternity.

I suffer without us. There are too few therapists to treat our mental illnesses, too few doctors that do not declare our pain endurance as beyond mortal men, too few employment opportunities that persist upon allowing us to exceed expectations and rise. Too many that are demand manual and physical labor that are too often unpaid and too often un-safe, un-clean merely designated to demand our mental un-doing.

There are too few images of black men being joyful without disruption, too few self-help books for black men to consult for depression or anxiety that are not overtly political (at best) or infantilizing (just pull your pants up) at worst. Too few spaces and places for black men to claim as our own…that do not demand the intellectual, psychic, emotional or bodily labor of black women to create.

In the absenteeism of real, radical love and care from the world it’s easy for us to turn inward – outward, away from, instead of to-ward each other. Our silent head nod of acknowledgement is a beautiful gesture of recognition, to say “I see you.” It’s time that we do more than see each other. It is our relationships and bonds that we have with one another that enable us to succeed. We don’t always have to like each other but we must learn to love one another, unconditionally. Instead of seeking ways to create distance from each other, we need to actively seek ways of coming together.

In what ways can we imagine celebrating ourselves and each other, to support black male achievement and to alleviate black pain and suffering?

I want us to create real spaces of black fraternity, a movement in which we physically use our bodies to resist by holding onto one another. Where we may practice fellowship, the belief, feeling or hope that all people should regard and treat one another as equals. Brotherhood.

*Typically, a backlash about NFL players taking a knee to protest police brutality and the second-class status that black men, women and children endure would not constitute as state sanctioned violence. However, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, sent multiple tweets in 2017 condemning the protests, effectively co-signing as the U.S government any and all present and future injustices/ violence directed towards the players.