This language of crisishas galvanized support, money, and a climate of emotional terrorism.

The latest killings by Black men of their wives and children have set off fierce debate across social media. In one case, men, and some women, defend the reputation of a former governor - a middle-class man who murdered his wife and then killed himself while their children were at home. In another, a Black man shot his ex, her sister, and then killed all eight of their children.

The focus and contention has been mental health and how it shapes men who go on to commit murder.

Into this space Emotional Justice invites us to recognize what this is – not Crisis, but Reckoning.

Crisis language frames men as endangered, invites rescue, sympathy, funding and an institutional response. The suggestion? Something has gone wrong with men. Society must invest, pause and rally to fix it. Reckoning is about naming how a system has reached its limit.Harm is no longer invisibilized, and accountability is being demanded. Reckoning says this is what the system produces. But who/what is the system? It is us: people sustain a system, and it is people who must dismantleit. That’s why this is a reckoning and not a crisis.

A reckoning is about an emotional relationship to power that centers domination. In this relationship domination becomes identity. It intersects with power, powerlessness, and value. What does that mean for men? Their value is connected to a power that looks like domination. This is how that breaks down:-

If they do not have that dominant power, they have no value.
If they have no value, they are powerless.
If they are powerless, they are not men.

If they are not men, who are they?

This is a 911 call for men to do their emotional work. It is theirs to do, no-one else’s.

The Emotional Justice framework offers language to support that emotional work, and this reckoning. ‘Emotional Patriarchy’: a society that centers the feelings of men, no matter the cost or consequence to women and everyone else.

That manifests in women’s relationship to labor as value, and men’s relationship to power and powerlessness as value. Women are expected to center men’s feelings of powerlessness, are considered responsible for that powerlessness, and are expected to invest emotional labor to restore men’s feelings of power.

When a man commits violence, we witness an instinctive social reaction to protect his reputation, provide explanations for his pain and contextualize his actions. Men become protectors and providers of cover for the status of other men.

And while this emotional labor is happening, and the protection of his reputation takes place, the victims are disappeared – their lives, dreams, futures, possibilities are all swallowed by societal discourse on masculinity and the ramifications of a contemporary climate.

Emotional patriarchy creates an emotional order of society that is organized around protecting male feeling and providing emotional labor to bolster feelings of worthlessness. Women are protectors and providers of emotional labor to uplift the men in their lives. This is intimacy as an institution of emotional patriarchy.

I write about this in my book: EMOTIONAL JUSTICE: A Roadmap for Racial Healing – and I do so within two different contexts, what this looks like and means for white men, and what it looks like and means for Black men. That nuance matters.

This reckoning means ending Emotional Patriarchy. It means an end tothe Emotional Justice equation for Black men who seekemotional validation from Black women and status validation from men. In other words, men care what other men think, and care about how women make them feel.

What does that mean? Their emotional umbilical cord is still tied.Untying it requires doing their emotional work. That requires emotional literacy - the ability to recognize that powerlessness is a feeling connected to circumstance, not a value that defines your worth.

That is part of the reckoning that must be named and changed. It creates chaos and trauma in cycles that elevate violence, leading to spiraling death tolls, community fall-out as Black men and women enter emotional boxing rings and do rounds going back and forth: one side fighting for the vision, life, dreams, future of the murdered woman; another yelling into an echo chamber that men’s mental healthis the real conversation.

Let’s talk deadly conflations. Men conflate logic with emotional illiteracy.That conflation is deadly. They mistake emotional suppression for rationality. That means, when they believe they are being purely logical, they fail to name, identify or recognize the emotional forces driving them. Emotional illiteracy is key to this reckoning. You can be intellectually eloquent and emotionally illiterate. You can be professionally credentialed and emotionally illiterate. The strength and eloquence of an argument, and stellar professional credentials are no match for emotional illiteracy. Society has consistently underestimated emotionality’s power to shape and to scar.

Men also conflate crisis with reckoning.That conflation has directed millions of dollars toward a misdiagnosed issue.The issue is not mental health.The issue is misdiagnosis.Violence is being framed as mental illness when it is connected to:entitlement, domination, emotional illiteracy, and identity collapse.

Masculinity is more than identity, it is a governing system shaped by an emotional connection to domination. It’s enforced young through emotional suppression, stoicism, and developing a solidarity with a brotherhood of bystanders – those are men trained to stand by while violence, horror, or trauma is perpetrated. So, some men may stand by while a living man perpetrates violence on a living woman saying ‘that ain’t my business’, but then stand up to loudly defend a dead man’s reputation who kills that woman.

Within the Emotional Justice framework, we offer a fresh framing and meaning of ‘protect and provide’. Traditionally, the meaning was about protecting and providing for women. In Emotional Justice, developing emotional literacy means reckoning withmen protecting the reputation of dead men who murdered their partners, and providing endless explanations to reason away the violence.The instinct to defend a dead man who committed murder is not about him.It is about the feelings of powerlessness that his actions trigger. So, that powerlessness finds voice through defending or memorializing his reputation.

Emotional Justice replaces Emotional Patriarchy with Intimate Revolution – that is the language to support doing this emotional work. It treats intimacy as institution that can become a space where masculinity develops emotional literacy about powerlessness, shame, rage and how that metastasizes, is professionalized or sexualized. What it also offers is a call to recognize liberation cannot come from emotional patriarchy.It is possible with Intimate Revolution. That is how and where men can – and indeed must - engage with other men.

There is no substitute for doing your emotional work. What Emotional Justice offers is a resource to do that work. What we have now is emotional carnage. There is no love, future, or freedom there.

*******************

MOVING MASCULINITY: a 10-year global lab.

MOVING MASCULINITY is an Emotional Justice Digital Village, an online vehicle where Black men do their emotional work giving voice to loss, grief, vulnerability, rage, pain, shame, in community and creativity. It is a 10-year global lab of narrative change, cultural production, capacity training and healing practice working across the US, the UK, Ghana and Cape Town, South Africa. www.MOVINGMASCULINITY.com

MOVING MASCULINITY is currently doing a global public roll-out across communities, cities, countries and continents with screenings and dialogues. On April 29^thit comes to New York. Post-screening dialogue is global education leader Diallo Shabazz with MOVING MASCULINITY founder, Esther A. Armah. ENTRY is limited so RSVP is required

https://bit.ly/movingmasculinity_newyork

‘When I was younger - particularly in high school - just as I recognized other people feared me, I feared other Black men. That was the most traumatic situation and in many ways I’ve been trying to heal from that trauma because that prevented me from forming genuine relationships with other Black men…’

He was speaking to MOVING MASCULINITY, the Emotional Justice digital village about the toll of a racist narrative he continues to heal from in order to strengthen his relationships with Black men.

This is what I call ‘EMOTIONAL INHERITANCE’ – what is passed down – not simply regarding physical inheritance – traits, features – that we usually identify, but the world of the emotional. Emotional Inheritance is about how your soul is shaped – that could be by the men who made and shaped you, the racist narratives imposed, taught and enforced all around you. Emotional Inheritance shapes you, shows up in your emotional world, in how you see yourself, in how you see others.

Ibram explains: ‘…When people view me as dangerous, they create dangers for me. So, then I have to create safety for myself because the fears of other people are creating dangers for me. It results in me having to operate in a way in which every day is Halloween in the sense that I’m wearing a costume that scares people. ..’

LISTEN TO IBRAM X KENDI IN FULL ON MOVING MASCULINITY

https://www.movingmasculinity.com/ibram

Ibram X Kendi is one of seven Black men from across the US and the UK from the worlds of education, literature, film, academy, activism and education; there are men who are straight, gay, formerly incarcerated, and spanning various geographies. They are sons, some are fathers. They’re Black men who are part of the MOVING MASCULINITY EMOTIONAL JUSTICE DIGITAL VILLAGE.

They are:-

IBRAM X KENDI | DARNELL MOORE | DIALLO SHABAZZ | SIMON FREDERICK | WADE DAVIS II | CEDRIC BROWN | MARLON PETERSON

www.movingmasculinity.com

*******************

MAY I CRY? NEW TRAILER!

MOVING MASCULINITY’s new trailer just dropped. Check it out.

WATCH THE NEW TRAILER

*******************

NEW PARTNERS ALERT!

LOS ANGELES AND ACCRA

We’re excited to welcome Black Emotional And Mental Health Collective (BEAM) based in Los Angeles and led by YOLO AKILI ROBINSON; and Brain Fitness Africa based in Ghana, led by LIZETTE BIZERI as new partners to MOVING MASCULINITY.

As we continue to build out the MOVING MASCULINITY 10-year global lab, our approach is on the ground partnerships and collaborators to shape our path and honor our vision as we scale.

*******************

SCREENING 1

COUNTDOWN TO MOVING MASCULINITY ACCRA

APRIL 18

THE MIX, OSU, ACCRA

We are counting down to MOVING MASCULINITY ACCRA, the debut of our global screening and dialogue tour.

Seats are going fast, so if you haven’t already, make sure you RSVP.

Here’s the link:- https://bit.ly/movingmasculinityaccra

*******************

SCREENING 2

COUNTDOWN TO MOVING MASCULINITY NEW YORK

APRIL 29

DOLBY THEATER, 1350 AVENUE OF THE AMERICAS, NEW YORK

Our New York screening is a gathering at the Dolby Screening Room with refreshments and small bites to welcome this intimate public conversation on Black masculinity in America.

Our post screening dialogue features the narrator and film-maker ESTHER A. ARMAH in conversation with global education leader: DIALLO SHABAZZ.

NO ENTRANCE WITHOUT RSVP: Here’s the MOVING MASCULINITY NEW YORK RSVP LINK → https://bit.ly/movingmasculinity_newyork

MOVING MASCULINITY

A Film Narrated & Directed by Esther A. Armah

On Memory | Masculinity | Race | Emotional Justice

Weaving Poetry | Sound | Story | Ceremony

Featuring Black men ages 16 – 60 talking loss, grief, pain, shame, vulnerability, rage, freedom, love.

A GLOBAL SCREENING & DIALOGUE TOUR

Accra | New York | Los Angeles | Cape Town | Chicago

The AR15 is an assault weapon that fires multiple rounds at breakneck speed doing lethal damage. Global contemporarywestern white masculinity is an emotional AR15. It is an assault weapon of emotional ammunition, loaded and pepper spraying rounds that turn into policy, threaten thriving futures and jeopardise collective, global safety.

The emotional AR15’s ammo is unexpressed grief, unnamed trauma, pain, entitlement, accountability-free accountability, bone deep loneliness , infantilization – all loaded into a male body stuffed and suppressed, and then pepper sprayed in leadership, labor, governance, worship and institutions of liberation.

This western white masculinity as an emotional AR15 has turned too many men into emotional terrorists. They weaponize their fear,wreak havoc, face no repercussions and argue that it is their lives, their worlds, their needs that are going unmet, crashing, abandoned in the steady march towards something resembling an expanded humanity.

There is no leadership, salvation, thriving or healing in this contemporary version of white masculinity. IjeomaOluo’s book ‘MEDIOCRE: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America’ lays this out powerfully.

In America, pedophiles, criminals, and staggeringly blatant mediocrity shapes policy and lectures the rest of the nation on greatness, glory and a return to a historical brutality still buried in bones and blood, now reframed as ‘not that bad’.

It is a shit-show.

Kids. That was the chosen language of the US Vice-President about grown white men indulging in violence and violation via Telegram exchanges.

2,900 messages. Two thousand nine hundred. That’s declaration and deliberation.

This wasn’t a leak, it was the evidence of a legacy. A chat history of ism’s. Racism, anti-Semitism abounded. And, there were the rape jokes.

Led by a 31 year old white man - a former chair of The New York State Young Republicans - in a bid to rally support for his campaign to become chair of the National Young Republicans Organization, reported Politico and Al Jazeera. The chat was made public, sparking headlines, outrage, and condemnation.

I want us to examine the emotionality of what happened, and contextualize that.

This was Emotional Inheritance in practice. It revealed how white masculinity revels in practicing and perpetuating brutal harm and is lethally skilled in avoiding accountability. This use of language as weapon and shield are the chosen tools of a Republican party filled with white men & their rabid pursuit of unfettered power.

Let’s break down Emotional Inheritance.

Emotional Inheritance is what white masculinity hands down generation to generation. White man to white man. Right now, that inheritance is shaping the west’s contemporary political landscape, with global repercussions. This inheritance reveals the shape-shifting forms of white supremacy. It is as atsunami of emotional terrorism in practice.

This accountability-free accountability in white masculinity is one of the ingredients of an Emotional Terrorist. They harness manufactured innocence as a shield, and then scold those who demand consequences from harmful violence as willfully obscuring the ‘kid-like’ nature of the 2,900 texts. That’s what JD Vance did in his press conference responding to the revelations. ‘…the reality is that kids do stupid things, especially, young boys. They tell offensive jokes, that’s what boys do, ” said Vance.

This inheritance has a singular skill. Rich, white privileged men make themselves the constant victim, while they simultaneously target vulnerable, marginalized communities with gleeful venom. In this current Republican party, these ingredients are combined to name, and shape, what it describes as leaders. These leaders are emotional terrorists. They must be named and known as such.

That emotional inheritance is also a narrative of identity for white men as winners, conquerors, saviors, leaders. I call it ‘the leader vs learner’ binary. It is one where the leader = the knower, solver, doer to be listened to, heeded, and followed; and everyone else – all women, Black and Brown folks are learners who need to be taught, shown, whose behavior, actions, words, need constant adjustment without which there will always be issues.

This playbook of white masculinity of Emotional Inheritance and Emotional Infrastructure is the existential threat to America’s political landscape.

It means ‘leader’ is not a title or a position based on merit and expertise, it’s an identity, the way you see yourself, are seen and expect to be seen. That flatlines learning. It also creates an emotional relationship to power that is always – and only – about dominion, not development. It turns the importance of earning authority into the expectation that it is inherited. That expectation shapes history, causes harm and dominates our contemporary political landscape.

This notion of power as dominion is protected by and provided for by a western white masculinity – Left and Right, Progressive and Republican. The latter worships this unfettered power, and the former wishes for this ‘winner’ power. This is a lethal yearning for the Progressive Left as it leads to the dismissal of entire lived experiences that represent chapters of American history in pursuit of being a ‘winner’. We saw that in the interview by Ezra Klein – darling of the progressive Left – and award-winning writer Ta-Nehisi Coats. Klein belittled history and humanity in his unrelenting pursuit of being right, and being a winner. For the Right, it means the US’s Vice President names a 31-year-old, grown white man in his political party, who holds a leadership position and was responsible for racist, sexist, anti-Semitic venom on a text chain, as a ‘kid’ prone to saying dumb shit.

There’s dumb, and there’s deadly.

White masculinity’s emotional inheritance of dominion, not development teaches boys and shapes men with a rabid need to constantly and consistently fight, hold onto and protect this type of power. For them itis the only power worth fighting for and holding onto. It is not just the horror of protection from accountability and the freedom to wreak havoc, it is that they areusing language that can become policy, law, and practice. Their power shapes futures and threatens freedoms. That is deadly.

There are other elements to this Emotional Inheritance.

The Brotherhood of Bystanders. These are the men who stand by, but don’t stand up and don’t stand for anything that may jeopardize their position. Silence is always strategy in this brotherhood. For this 2900 exchange, there were those who witnessed it– like Trump administration official, Michael Bartels – who, according to Politico, didn’t write much – but critically did not object either. We witness this deadly Brotherhood of Bystanders showing us what the next generation of Republican leadership looks like. And as with all fascistic spaces, it is never solely the bully with the mic who jeopardizes collective safety, it’s the silence of those who surround him.

And there are the racialized ingredients in this Emotional Inheritance.

White men infantilize white male perpetrators of harm to avoid accountability,and they adultify Black boys to decimate the second chances that come with actual childhood.Further, treating Black boys like grown men, and grown white men like little white boys maintains threat and terror as mundane battlefields the world must now navigate. There is also the ongoing legacy of untreated trauma from the killing of a black boy, Tamir Rice, playing with a gun. This, as actual grown white male mass shooters armed with guns, rage, and whiteness are defended by other grown white men.

Ultimately, white masculinity demands to be served not scrutinized. IjeomaOluo’s book ‘MEDIOCRE: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America’ lays this out powerfully.

The stakes are stark. The landscape is shrouded in scattered emotional gunfire.

White masculinity cannot and should not be trusted or looked to for any transformative leadership at this time. The emotional inheritance of white masculinity across the political landscape is weapon and ammunition. That means battlefields, casualties, and graveyards. It’s beyond time to name there is no humanity-serving future in contemporary western white masculinity.

Moving Masculinity is an invitation. I ask what becomes possible when men are given permission to feel, to connect, and to move beyond what they have been taught, toward what they truly need.

CONCEPTUAL INTENT

My journey into photography started with a quiet struggle inside my own home. Where I come from, work is something you can see, touch, and count. A good job is one with clear hours, strong hands, and steady pay. Jobs like driver, mason, electrician—work that builds, fixes, or carries. In many families like mine, making art, like taking pictures, is often seen as something shaky. People wonder, “How does this put food on the table? How does it build a house?” It doesn’t fit easily into our understanding of real man’s work—work that requires sweat, endurance, and brings direct reward.

No one in my house shouted or fought me over it. The resistance was quieter: a doubtful look, a careful question, a heavy silence. They weren’t asking, “Why do you like this?” They were asking, “How will this help you live?” In a world where a man is measured by what he can provide and what he can bear, photography seemed like a distraction. Choosing it meant I was still their son, but I was stepping into a kind of work they couldn’t fully recognize.

Taking the pictures for Moving Masculinity, something changes. The camera becomes my cover and my key. It lets me look deeply without having to explain. I can pause on a way of standing, a look that turns away, a space between two people. I can take the unspoken feelings we all know and turn them into something you can see, a tight shoulder, a distant gaze, a patient slump. Through the lens, just paying close attention becomes its own kind of work.

For me, the process is as important as the images themselves.

PERSONAL CONTEXT & EARLY INFLUENCES

The way I take my pictures is part of this story. I started with an old manual camera, a Canon AE-1. To use it, I had to learn patience, care, and precision. That discipline - learning a skill through steady practice - feels familiar. It is how manhood itself is often taught: through repetition, attention, and control.

Later, when I moved to digital cameras, the technical part became easier. This freed me to focus on the human part: to truly see the person in front of me, to notice the small things - how they stand, the look in their eyes, a moment of quiet strength or softness. My camera became a tool for connection, for capturing the fluid and real experience of being a man.

The work continues after the picture is taken.

In the editing process, I sit with the images. I bring forward the quiet details: the light on skin, the texture of cloth, a subtle gesture that tells more than words. This is where the feeling of the moment is shaped into a story you can feel.

NEGOTIATING TRADITION & ARTISTIC CHOICE

In my family, we keep things inside as a way of taking care of each other. We stay quiet to keep the peace. We bear things patiently to show our strength. We hold ourselves tight to avoid shame or making small problems big.

Trouble in our house doesn’t start with shouting. It starts with small things we don’t say - a look, a sigh, something left unsaid. Because we don’t have the space to just speak our minds plainly, these small hurts pile up like firewood. Then one day, a small match strikes, and everything catches fire at once. Everyone talks over each other, not to listen, but just to be heard. It’s not about fixing anything anymore; it’s just to let the pressure out. And in that fire, all the tools we use to keep peace - the silence, the patience, the self-control - they all burn away.

When the noise dies down, nothing is really settled. Hearts are sore, feelings are still heavy, but we all just decide to move on as if nothing happened. We go back to everyday life - cooking, talking, working - without fixing what broke. That “moving on” is how we survive. It’s how we keep the family going, even with cracks in the foundation. We learn from young how to carry on, to endure without talking about the pain.

This is my upbringing. This is why I see the world the way I do, and why I take pictures the way I do. The moments I capture - when someone looks away, when arms are folded, when people stand close but not too close, when they bear a burden quietly - these are not just nice poses. They are the footprints of a way of life I know deeply. They show a family and a people who survive by hiding what is soft, by swallowing trouble instead of speaking it, and by trusting the flow of everyday life more than the trouble of confrontation. My photographs are not to blame anyone. They are just to show the quiet, unspoken rules that hold our relationships - and our lives - together.

PROCESS & METHODS

Masculinity is not a solid thing inside you. It is more like a skill you pick up over time, by watching and copying. You learn it in your family, in your community, just by seeing how life is done.

You don’t learn it first from books or big speeches. You learn it with your body, by watching how the men around you move, sit, and stand. You learn from how they talk or don’t talk, when they are angry or hurt. You learn from how they work, how they provide, how they hold their pain quietly. You see what makes people nod in respect and what makes them shake their head in shame. Slowly, these lessons sink into your bones. They become your own posture, your own way of holding your face, your own way of carrying yourself in the world. Your body remembers all the teaching.

To call it embodied is to say masculinity lives in your actions and feelings. It’s in how you tighten your jaw to stay quiet, how you lower your voice to seem calm, how you swallow your emotion to keep the peace. You practice these things again and again until they feel like you. But they can also change depending on where you are. The masculinity you show at home with your wife and children might be different from what you show at a meeting with elders, or when you’re with your friends. Each place has its own rules for survival.

OBSERVING MASCULINITY IN MOTION

Seeing masculinity as something learned also means it is not one straight path. It can be full of twists. The same strength that protects your family can also build a wall between you. The same silence that keeps peace can also bury a problem. Because it is something you practice, and not a stone inside your chest, it means you can look at it closely. You can ask questions about it. You can see it for what it is: a collection of habits passed down through time, shaped by our history and our need to survive. These habits live deeply in the body, even while we are looking at them with our own eyes.

As a photographer, I am drawn to moments where masculinity is not being asserted, but felt. I pay close attention to posture, gesture, stillness, and the spaces between men - those subtle intervals where care, hesitation, vulnerability, and trust quietly surface.

Many of the behaviors I photograph - emotional restraint, silence, endurance, and control - are survival responses passed down through families and communities.

THEMES & MESSAGES

As an artist and photographer, I watch how our customs guide us, and how some of the same customs quietly limit us. I ask the difficult questions we often avoid, and name the things we learn to live with in silence. Sometimes, a community survives by telling itself gentle stories, but when those stories harden into lies, they begin to weaken us.

Community is not simply my subject - it is my method, my witness, and a central source of meaning. Community is not softness or ease; it is duty. It is the thin thread that binds one person’s life to another’s. To say you belong is to accept responsibility for how others live, struggle, and endure. What we inherit - memory, habit, pain, and pride, does not stay in the past. It shapes how we relate today, how we speak, how we withhold, how we care. When a people refuse to face what has been carried forward unresolved, they lose the moral ground to act rightly in the present.

In this sense, the artist is in service to the community by insisting on truth, even when that truth unsettles. Like love, art asks for openness and courage. It requires confrontation, not accusation. I do not speak for the people, but stand among them as a witness, refusing the comfort of shared denial.

Community itself is also a witness. It remembers. It holds contradiction, continuity, and quiet negotiations that never make it into official records. In everyday gestures, silences, and rituals, it observes itself - absorbing what is said and what is avoided.

This story is ours to tell. It is important that we are the ones to tell it, with our own hands and our own eyes, so the truth of our experience is held with the care and understanding it deserves.

ARTIST IDENTITY & PERSPECTIVE

This work is my way of dealing with what I was given. The focus, the patience, the discipline I need for photography… I learned these things at home. They taught me to endure, to be steady. Now, I use those same tools not just to endure, but to look back and to question.

When I photograph - how they hold themselves, how they move - I am not throwing away my upbringing. I am using the very things it taught me: the silence, the strength, the control. I am using them as materials to look at how masculinity is taught, worn, and carried on the body.

I am a storyteller and a witness. I see myself as a keeper of our stories. My mission is to preserve the narrative of the world I come from, its strength, its silence, its complex beauty.

My work grows from a place of reflection and empathy.

My tool is the camera, but my aim is not just to take a picture. It is to search for the deeper truths about who we are, how we live together, and what it means to be human.My eye is drawn to the quiet, in-between spaces - the places where feelings and unspoken tensions reside.

For me, photography is both a personal journey and a conversation. It is a way to talk with the people and the culture I come from. It is my method to ask gentle questions, to reveal hidden layers, and to pay respect to the real, lived experiences that shape all of us.

The camera is not a wall between me and my past. It is a bridge. It holds together my family’s idea of a useful life and my own need to speak without words. It lets me stay in touch with where I come from, while finding my own way to show what that world feels like. What was once called a hobby has become my way of seeing, remembering, and making sense of it all.

WHAT I SEE

When I look at these photographs, I see quiet strength. I see moments of softness. I see the silent negotiation inside a man’s heart. I see in a person’s posture, in their eyes, a story of holding on and letting go - the pull between the old ways and the new path, between what is expected and what is truly felt. I see myself.

Each picture holds a fragment of life: the patience to endure, the discipline to control, the quiet need to connect. This is the real, daily experience of masculinity in the world I know.

My goal is not to give you one answer or a single definition of what a man is. My goal is to show you that it moves. It is lived in the body. It can be strong and gentle in the same breath.

I want these images to create a space for you to think, to feel, and to talk. I want these imagesto help you look past the stereotype and see the complicated truth of a person’s story - the full range of feelings that guide how a man walks through his life.

ABOUT ALEX KWESI AFARI

Alex Kwesi Afari is a Ghanaian photographer whose images are the visual spine of MOVING MASCULINITY: the Emotional Justice Digital Village, founded by Esther A. Armah. His images have been the visual soundtrack for Emotional Justice in Ghana for almost a decade, and are featured on multiple projects including: #IamUNLEARNING, Black Is, The L Word.

On A Personal Note

The BBC. BAFTA, harm, humanity, and global Black Masculinity….

What does it mean to heal harm, and heed history? I’m a former BBC journalist, and their failure to remove language that is a horror story for global Black people is reflective of their structural failures on race, racism, and accountability. That two Black men were expected to remain calm and carry on is also reflective of a world where Black trauma is expected to be absorbed, the truth untold, and the toll unnamed. It is part of how we strip humanity from Black men. We can’t heal a harm we don’t name, or heed a history we don’t know.

Esther…..

*****************************

Masculinity. Power. Trauma. Healing. MOVING MASCULINITY is an invitation to shape a notion of power that centers domination, to one that centers development. We treat masculinity as a governing system that embodies how power – and powerlessness – functions, fails or flourishes. Healing with the framework EMOTIONAL JUSTICE is a call to move from data and theory and into the world of practice and world-building.

With MOVING MASCULINITY THE EMOTIONAL JUSTICE DIGITAL VILLAGE, the focus is to build Emotional Infrastructure. The world of social, emotional learning and leadership spoke eloquently of ‘Emotional Intelligence’. Can you have emotional intelligence without emotional literacy? We live in a society where you can be intellectually eloquent, professionally credentialed and emotionally illiterate all within one body. This is about POWER and POWERLESSNESS; it’s about humanity – who is afforded it, and who has been stripped of it. Re-assigning full humanity means doing emotional work… step into the world of MOVING MASCULINITY.

SAVE THE DATE: APRIL 2026

2 Cities | 2 Countries | 2 Continents

NEW YORK CITY & ACCRA

THE GHANA SCREENING

YOUR SPECIAL INVITATION:

MOVING MASCULINITY

An Artist Statement | A Film Screening | A Panel

FEATURING

ALEX KWESI AFARI | KOBBY GRAHAM | SAMUEL LAMPTEY | DERICK BOTSYOE | WILLIAM PLANGE

Masculinity in Ghana is shaped by tribe, culture, history and ethnicities. Those influences powerfully form a masculinity that is practice, policed and performed. We’re excited to engage with the visual lens of Alex Kwesi Afari as he walks into his world of masculinity with MY LENS, and hear from KOBBY GRAHAM, Cultural Strategist, Scholar, Writer; SAMUEL LAMPTEY – Act for Change working on Men’s Programs; DERICK BOTSYOE, Men For Social Change; WILLIAM PLANGE – No Human Is Useless. This panel reflects our focus on walking in and with community to drive change.

VENUE | TIME | DATE

THE MIX, OKODAN ROAD, OSU, ACCRA

APRIL 18^TH 6PM

ENTRANCE IS WITH RSVP ONLY

RSVP LINK:- https://bit.ly/movingmasculinityaccra

THE NEW YORK SCREENING

YOUR SPECIAL INVITATION:

MOVING MASCULINITY

A Narrated Film on Memory | Masculinity | Emotional Justice

Weaving Poetry | Sound | Story | Ceremony

Narrated & Directed by Esther A. Armah

Featuring:-

IBRAM X KENDI | DIALLO SHABAZZ | DARNELL MOORE | SIMON FREDERICK

WADE DAVIS II | CEDRIC BROWN | OBBIE WEST

THE SCREENING & DIALOGUE

April 29^th at 6pm

Dolby Screening Room

1350 Avenue of the Americas

New York

ENTRANCE IS WITH RSVP ONLY

RSVP Link:- https://bit.ly/movingmasculinitynewyork

Masculinity in America is shaped by legacies of untreated trauma from enslavement and white supremacy. The legacies linger. They stripped humanity from Black men, and created delusional notions of supremacy within white men. America is haunted and hunted by both. This film centers Black masculinity and is an invitation to reassign a full humanity. That means naming the harm to be healed, and reckoning with the history that haunts.

Hello to our global Emotional Justice Global Community. 2026 is well and truly here. I’m so excited to welcome you into the world of MOVING MASCULINITY THE EMOTIONAL JUSTICE DIGITAL VILLAGE.

The masculinity crisis has been declared. There are headlines, data, theory and opinions. What’s the way out though? Emotional Justice decided to build a pathway out. And this newsletter introduces you to this work, this world, this practice.

Come on in and check it out.

*****************

MOVING MASCULINITY

The Emotional Justice Digital Village

What is it?

MOVING MASCULINITY: The Emotional Justice Digital Village is safe space where global Black men do their emotional work. It’s about reassigning full humanity to a Black masculinity long stripped of it. That means developing emotional literacy as part of a healing that is sustainable and transformative.

MOVING MASCULINITY

The Breakdown

THE FORMAT

It blends art, film, poetry, sound, story and dialogue to create a healing practice that names emotional inheritance and reckons with silence, suppression, and a legacy of untreated trauma shaped by systems of harm that are societal, political, structural, global and familial. The work is a multi-sensory resource for Black men to do their emotional work – it is theirs to do, no-one else’s - and confront the impact of that inheritance. It features Black men from the ages of 16 to 60. Filmed and recorded across the US: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, London, Accra.

THE ROOMS

Inside the digital village are four rooms—COMMUNITY, DAMAGE, HEALING, DREAMING. Each one is an intimate space where global Black men explore and reveal the emotional terrain shaped by loss and shaped by possibility.

1. DAMAGE

2. COMMUNITY

3. HEALING

4. DREAMING

The aim is simple: build an online safe space where Black men identify, name and express emotion, and move a masculinity taught to suppress feeling toward one capable of articulation, connection, and transformation. MOVING MASCULINITY is about intimate revolution for men. It is about building Emotional Infrastructure through The 3Es: Emotional Literacy | Emotional Worldview | Emotional Accountability.

Inside the four rooms, the work unfolds through Black men’s stories in forms that meet them where they are. In DAMAGE, two filmed poems move through tenderness and turmoil. In COMMUNITY, Black men share voice notes on loss, grief, love, pain, power, vulnerability, rage and regret. HEALING holds a short film of a man confronting the emotional inheritance passed down by his father and grandfather, and his struggle to choose a different path. DREAMING offers a new masculinity affirmation ceremony through an intergenerational dialogue between a 16-year-old boy and his elder—one exploring the boy he is and the man he’s becoming, the other reflecting on the boy he was, what he was told, taught and saw about masculinity, and the man he became. Together these rooms build a space where emotional literacy grows, loneliness eases, and the long habit of suppressing emotion begins to loosen. Each room is an invitation into the private, often hidden interior lives of Black men, and the possibility of transforming them.

HERE’S THE SITE:- www.movingmasculinity.com

*****************

MOVING MASCULINITY

THE PUBLIC ENCOUNTER

Throughout 2026 MOVING MASCULINITY moves from digital village into public space. We call it :- THE PUBLIC ENCOUNTER.

GHANA | NEW YORK | SOUTH AFRICA |

THE SITES

Across Ghana, New York, and South Africa, this public encounter is a single journey with multiple stops, stretching across communities, cities, countries and continents. The roll-out is an encounter with art, film and dialogue—experienced as:-

THE STILLS: The journey begins with Ghanaian photographer Alex Kwesi Afari’s photo exhibition featuring Black men in Accra in a range of emotional expressions. These stills are storytellers of emotion. They hold signs that act as invitations to action - calls to move a masculinity that has been paralyzed and pathologized toward one of possibility, peace-building and emotional literacy.

THE SCREENING: After moving through the photographs, audiences enter a 45-minute screening that travels through MOVING MASCULINITY’s four rooms—COMMUNITY, HEALING, DAMAGE and DREAMING—woven together and narrated by founder Esther A. Armah. The screening gives shape to the emotional world the digital village holds, showing the interior lives of Black men as they reckon with inheritance, conflict, tenderness, rupture and possibility.

THE SESSION: The experience concludes with a facilitated dialogue exploring masculinity, history and emotional inheritance. This session opens up how systems shape emotional habits, how silence becomes legacy, and what it takes to chart a different path. It gives audiences space to grapple, question and connect the work to their own worlds.

2026 PUBLIC ROLL OUT SCHEDULE

We built a global distribution pipeline across communities, cities, countries and continents to take the work from the digital to the communal; and to curate and create conversation within community in order to serve and scale.

APRIL 18^th APRIL 29^th SEPTEMBER TBC

ACCRA, GHANA NEW YORK, USA CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA

ACCRA, GHANA

APRIL 18^th

We begin THE PUBLIC ENCOUNTER at The Mix in Osu, Accra, Ghana.

Featuring Ghanaian photographer ALEX KWESI AFARI.

A post-screening dialogue exploring healing and masculinity in Ghana, reckoning with tribe, family, culture and history, led by KOBINA ANKOMAH GRAHAM.

COME SEE THE ART | COME WATCH THE SCREENING | COME LISTEN TO THE SESSION

PLEASE RSVP:- https://forms.gle/z7TmALN2ELHJNBtF9

MOVING MASCULINITY

The Global Lab

What is It?

The Global Lab is a 10-year initiative of CULTURAL PRODUCTION, NARRATIVE CHANGE, HEALING PRACTICE AND CAPACITY TRAINING. Our global sites are across the US, the UK, Ghana and South Africa.

It is housed within THE ARMAH INSTITUTE of EMOTIONAL JUSTICE, and expands and extends to men of all races, faiths, and cultures.

It comprises the following:-

· THE NARRATIVE ARM

· THE PRACTICE ARM

· THE CULTURAL ARM

THE NARRATIVE ARM

UNFOLD: notes on MOVING MASCULINITY is the multi-media narrative arm that lives on Substack. It features notes, essays, audios, open letters and video from multiple contributions enriching, expanding and extending the intellectual arm of this work.

THE PRACTICE ARM

MM16: capacity training is building emotional infrastructure as leadership development strategy. This is online training that explores from the classroom to the c-suite.

MM16: community is a space of reflection and healing in spaces of faith and community organizations.

THE CULTURAL ARM

The Dreaming Ceremony Memory Set is a guide for families to hold the masculinity affirmation ceremony for Black boys turning 16. It comprises the embossed questions, the designed t-shirt and the information to share images as we build a global Black boyhood ceremony of celebration, possibility and freedom.

MOVING MASCULINITY: The Global Lab

https://www.movingmasculinity.com/thegloballab

The Moving Masculinity project has been far more than a professional assignment; it has been a profound, necessary confrontation with the multifaceted nature of my own identity.

When Rene Payne contacted me to collaborate on this website, I didn’t just see a digital platform in development, I saw an invitation to participate in a sacred act of storytelling. As a Black Caribbean-American man navigating the complexities of life in the United States, this project felt deeply intimate. It was an honor and a blessing to step into this role, but it was also a responsibility that I carried with the utmost reverence.

“I didn’t just see a digital platform in development, I saw an invitation to participate in a sacred act of storytelling.”

My primary contribution to the website was centered on translating the vision of the founder, Esther Armah, into a digital experience that felt as tactile and soulful as the stories it holds. To honor Esther’s vision, an earnest commitment was required to ensure the perspectives of Black men were represented.

In a world that often flattens our existence into a monolith of hyper-visibility or complete erasure, my goal was to create a website that served as a sanctuary of nuance. Every design choice, every page, and every line of text had to serve as a bridge between how we are seen by the world and how we truly are.

“In a world that often flattens our existence into a monolith of hyper-visibility or complete erasure, my goal was to create a website that served as a sanctuary of nuance.”

A Personal and Collective Journey

Working on this project forced a level of honesty and care that I had to draw from the deepest parts of myself. It became an ever-unfolding therapeutic session that required me to tap into a collective well of memory. As I built out the architecture of the site, I wasn’t just thinking about users or interfaces; I was thinking about my father, my brothers, my cousins, my uncles, and my colleagues. I was thinking about the quiet strength of the men who raised me and the resilience of the Black men I walk alongside today in America.

“As I built out the architecture of the site, I wasn’t just thinking about users or interfaces; I was thinking about my father, my brothers, my cousins, my uncles, and my colleagues.”

The process shaped me by demanding a vulnerability I didn’t always know I was ready to give. It allowed me to reconcile the various versions of masculinity I’ve witnessed. The tenderness, the stoicism, the joy, and the struggle. By centering these themes, the project became a mirror, reflecting my own lived experience back at me in a way that felt healing. It helped me realize that our identities are not static artifacts but are constantly in motion, shaped by history and redefined by the grace we extend to ourselves.

“It helped me realize that our identities are not static artifacts but are constantly in motion, shaped by history and redefined by the grace we extend to ourselves.”

The Vision Moving Forward

This experience holds a special place in my heart that will remain long after the launch. It has reshaped how I view my role as a creator, teaching me that the most powerful work happens when the personal and the professional are allowed to bleed into one another.

My hope for the Moving Masculinity website is that it continues to evolve into exactly what it needs to be for every Black man who engages with it. Whether it serves as a moment of reflection, a source of community, or a spark for personal growth, I hope it communicates one clear message: Your story is seen, it is honored, and it matters. This project is my love letter to the men in my life and to the brothers I have yet to meet, and I am eternally grateful to have played a part in bringing it to life.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Vincent Brathwaite is a UX Design Leader and CEO of Gidens. He is the WebsiteDesign Collaborator on MOVING MASCULINITY The Emotional Justice Digital Village.

www.movingmasculinity.com

From Commission to Calling

In mid-December of 2024, I was invited by Esther Armah to help develop a public-facing digital home exploring Black masculinity through a multimedia lens. What emerged as Moving Masculinity quickly revealed itself to be far more than a website. It became a living, breathing digital village, a place where Black men could gather, reflect, exchange ideas, challenge one another with love, and be held in the fullness of their humanity. From its earliest conception, the project carried the weight and promise of something communal, ancestral, and future-facing all at once.

“It became a living, breathing digital village, a place where Black men could gather, reflect, exchange ideas, challenge one another with love, and be held in the fullness of their humanity.”

At this stage of my career, I have learned to pay close attention to alignment, to projects that arrive not only with urgency but with intention and spiritual clarity. Moving Masculinity came to me during one of those seasons. My deep admiration for Esther’s vision, voice, and unwavering commitment to truth made this an assignment I felt called to steward rather than simply execute. This work required reverence, listening, and care beyond conventional design practices.

Lineage, Responsibility, and Personal Stakes

As a Black woman, designer, and director, my relationship to this project was both professional and deeply personal. I was raised with a strong and affirming example of Black masculinity. My father was a loving husband to my mother, a devoted father, a businessman, and a servant leader. That lineage shaped my understanding of the importance of safety, care, and accountability for men. It also shaped how seriously I felt this responsibility, not only for the men whose stories are shared here, but for my husband Steve and my son Marcus, who will be watching, learning from, and inheriting what this site represents.

Design That Refuses Harm

Moving Masculinity explores grief, tenderness, power, empathy, accountability, and healing, not by centering the language of “toxic masculinity,” but by creating space for connection and wholeness. It acknowledges the legacy of untreated trauma while refusing to reduce Black men to it. As Website Director, my role was to ensure that the design did not cause harm, that it listened first, held gently, and allowed room to breathe. Every visual choice, interaction, and flow was guided by the same questions: Does this feel safe? Does this feel human?

“My role was to ensure that the design did not cause harm, that it listened first, held gently, and allowed room to breathe.”

This intention is reflected in the brand identity itself. Moving Masculinity is visually grounded in the afro pic mark formed by the two M’s, drawing from African-inspired and Adinkra symbolism. The circular head represents wholeness, continuity, and self-awareness, while the afro pic signifies care, preparation, and cultural pride passed down through Black ancestral lineages. Together, these elements frame masculinity as rooted yet evolving, balanced and intentional, and guided by embodied memory. Within this form, the mirrored M’s also subtly echo the shape of a woman’s breasts, an intentional reference to nourishment, mothering, and the often-unacknowledged role of nurturing in the formation of masculinity. The mark is not decorative; it is declarative, signaling lineage, grounding, and the possibility of growth.

Midwifery, Memory, and Collective Making

There is a sacred responsibility in creating spaces designed to hold men, especially Black men, with care. In many ways, Esther, my administrative assistant Judy Allen, and I approached this work as midwives, positioned to help birth something larger than ourselves. Through God’s grace, the project has been carried to term with professional rigor and spiritual sensitivity, fully aware that what we were shaping would extend far beyond the launch.

That alignment continued with the broader gifted creative partnership, including Vincent Braithwaite, whose lived experience as a Black Caribbean man, as well as his talent in UI/UX design and technical vision, brought essential depth to the work. His empathy and precision helped translate intention into a site that feels alive, responsive, thoughtful, and grounded.

The stories themselves, including Brotha Notes, How We Hold It, reflections on emotional inheritance, affirmations for Black 16-year-old boys, and explorations of tenderness and turmoil, reshaped me. They expanded my understanding of how to honor Black men not only through language, but through structure, pacing, and visual care.

“This project affirms that design can be an act of love, that holding space is a discipline, and that when we lead with heart, humility, and intention, what we create can become a place of healing for others and for ourselves.”

ABOUT THE WRITER

RENE PAYNE is Founder of Included by Favor, and the Website Director for MOVING MASCULINITY: The Emotional Justice Digital Village.www.movingmasculinity.com

The chorus that describes masculinity as in crisis has failed to diagnose the issue. Power, a notion of it that is domination, the emotions that conjures, the loss of that, and white men’s relationship to this notion of power. That is the correct diagnosis.

When Misdiagnosed Masculinity Becomes Political Violence

With a correct diagnosis, a change can truly come.Without it, we continue to tunnel through cycles of data that spell doom, and offer solutions that are cruel interventions centering interfering with women’s bodies, a nation’s freedom, and thriving Black and Brown families. All this drowning and devastation to reclaim this notion of power that centers dominationcannot shape a future for any collective humanity.

From Domination to Development

We need a notion of power that centers development, not domination. What then,would the change that serves a masculinity of development be? Emotional Infrastructure.

Emotional Infrastructure: A Leadership Strategy

Emotional Infrastructure is the next frontier in leadership development strategy. It comprises 3 elements: - Emotional literacy, Emotional accountability and Emotional worldview – ‘the E stream’. Emotional infrastructure is how masculinity institutionalizes wellness within organizations.

Power, Titles, and Organizational Culture

The holders of titles, the shapers of organizations,the heads of teams all require emotional infrastructure in order to transform organizational cultures. Emotional infrastructure transforms a relationship to power.

How Power Is Taught: From Classroom to Boardroom

As global educator leader Francesca Adedeji argues, boys learn about power from the classroom. These are lessons about violence, control, domination, and supremacy. Those lessons are embodied in masculinity. They metastasize in their bodies, and are professionalized into male leadership. The teams they lead, the organizations they run, the boardrooms they sit at all tell the story of this lesson about power as domination, not development.

What the Data Really Tells Us

There are copious amounts of data that have led to the declaration of masculinity in crisis. What story does the data tell? A single story about loss of power, domination and how that leaves men feeling, and how those feelings are harnessed and weaponized. The loss of power makes men scared and threatened. They take their fear and feelings of threat, do not name them as theirs, but instead weaponize them into narratives of external threat and fear. They point, they accuse, they label, and then they act. That action threatens safety for so many. This is unexamined fear, scaled through power, that produces policy that leads to sustained systemic damage.

Weaponized Fear and Leadership Harm

That is what happens to a leadership connected to a relationship to power that centers domination, and rejects development. What I mean when I say development is emotional literacy. Without emotional literacy, this leadership risks being an emotional terrorist. That’s when we harness emotions of fear and threat, weaponize them and then lead teams, organizations with those tools. Patriarchy calls them strength. Emotional literacy understands them as insecurity. Strength doesn’t weaponize, it engages and explores, it co-exists, it collaborates, it honors and uplifts.

Before Emotional Intelligence

The historical language has been ‘emotional intelligence’. Can you be emotionally intelligent, if you’re not emotionally literate’? You can’t. Historical language must be replaced with best practice from accurate diagnosis of contemporary leadership harm. From the classroom to the c-suite, the boardroom, the courtroom, this notion of power that centers domination threatens the health of institutions and diminishes thriving across teams.

White Masculinity as an Emotional Regime

The emotional worlds of western white masculinity are not regulated, they are dominated by external narratives – fear as weakness, insecurity as unmanly. In the contemporary classrooms of the digital world they are imposed on by external forces – often white, male and psychological. That imposition doesn’t recognize the world of emotions as part of humanity. No. They are a tool to be harnessed and weaponized in service of white supremacy.

Credentialed but Emotionally Illiterate

When it comes to male leaders with position and titles in corporate spaces, across sectors, in our movements, our spaces of labor, leisure and learning, those named as leaders are often Intellectually eloquent but emotionally illiterate;professionally credentialed but emotionally illiterate;ideologically sophisticated but emotionally illiterate.

Emotional Governance and World-Building

This white masculinity is an emotional regime tied to supremacy.The contemporary leadership harm is a failure of emotional governance. How do you govern what you have not named? Emotional Infrastructure is world-building as a collective project that serves a full humanity. That is Emotional Justice within a masculinity focus.

MM16: Applied Emotional Infrastructure

MM16 is innovative capacity training for male leaders by the MOVING MASCULINITY: global lab housed within The Armah Institute of Emotional Justice. Its focus is Emotional Infrastructure as leadership development strategy. This is a global lab; our MM16 training siteshonor the context and specificity of masculinity within geographical, historical, societal locations. The MM16 sites are in the UK, the USA, and in two African nations; Ghana and South Africa. Francesca Adedeji is MM16’s UK Site Director and a Global Educator Leader.

We must move masculinity. Moving Masculinity requires developing emotional literacy for boys and men so pathways to power aren’t littered with dangerous dreams of subjugation, exploitation and extraction. Those dreams become collective, policy nightmare in the hands and minds of contemporary western white masculinity.

Black Masculinity must move to become a space of development, not dominion.

So, what am I saying? Black masculinity must take its own lead, make its own way and do the emotional work of healing for their own humanity, and a collective thriving future. Masculinity must move, and Black men must move it for themselves and each other first. That is about re-assigning a full humanity to a people stripped of it.

White masculinity is toxic. It carries a poison that requires excavation – and there doesn’t appear to be any white men willing to do the excavating – only an ongoing centering. Fuck that.

Black masculinity is traumatized. It needs a healing, one that reassigns a full humanity that has been stripped.

Black masculinity faces a future where light, possibility, change is possible. That light brightens when emotional labor is being done. It doesn’t brighten without it. Black masculinity must heal harm and heed history. It cannot heal a harm it doesn’t name, or heed a history it doesn’t know. Black masculinity can only heal a legacy of untreated trauma by doing the kind of sustained, rigorous, emotional work that is generations deep. It is individual, collective, communal and intersects the individual with the institutional. Self-care alone isn’t – and never has been - it.

Black men must become their own first responders. That means developing emotional literacy. In other words, learning to name the panorama of emotions they feel in order to express and regulate them. It means an end to fighting to reclaim a relationship to power that centers dominion by standing on the backs of Black women.

White masculinity has lost any moral, institutional authority to move masculinity in a direction that serves anyone except wounded egos, accountability-free accountability, and a lethal willingness to readily, steadily and tragically reload their emotional AR15s and point them at all women, and Black and Brown people just to feel powerful again.

It’s beyond time to wrestle back higher ground from the digital masculinity mayhem, and the poison it spews. I have come across so many thoughtful, moving, powerful committed spaces, platforms and conversations of Black man doing emotional work on themselves, as therapists, with their families, through podcasts – all of which offer critical hope. Folks like Kier Gaines, King Jay Barnett, Dr. Joel Tudman to name just a few.

My invitation is to take a much bigger swing –and move global Black masculinity. Do it by gathering, engaging, exchanging and building. Build Emotional Infrastructure – digitally, communally, globally. Build a foundation that is a digital village; a space of refuge, safety and intimate revolution. Build safe space to do your emotional work as Black men among and between each other.

And that is why we built and are launching MOVING MASCULINITY: an Emotional Justice digital village where Black men come do their emotional work. It is a space of storytelling, video, memory, audio and exchange, in service of supporting a safe space and building a healing practice. Check out MOVING MASCULINITY.

Healing with the Emotional Justice framework means moving masculinity from damage to dreaming. We create a space of process and practice.

In that space, Black men name the damage, nurture new connections among, between and within global Black men across generations. They navigate the emotional inheritance – what’s passed down Black man to Black man spanning histories, systems, societies, families and survival modes of silence and suppression.

And dream – step into a full humanity of dreaming, shaping their joy, having rest, honouring ancestral pain while moving towards new possibility and promise. Dreaming is part of the architecture of healing within a Black masculinity: joy and justice.

This is MOVING MASCULINITY.
From Damage to Dreaming

• Name the damage – the untreated trauma

• Nurture new connections – build and share between brothas

• Navigate emotional inheritance – recognize – absent or present – that you are shaped by the Black men before you

This is Emotional Infrastructure. It comprises Emotional Literacy, Emotional Worldview, Emotional Accountability as crucial steps in healing. No quick fixes or steps missed, it is process and practice.

Throughout the history of the Black community’s liberation, we build together. In the work of Emotional Justice, we do not do each other’s emotional labor. Each of us has our particular emotional work to do. Black men’s emotional work is theirs to do, it is no-one else’s.

Let’s move global Black masculinity.

Come on in. . www.movingmasculinity.com