A FUTURE FOR BLACK MASCULINITY
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
