CRISIS vs RECKONING
name the issue; do your emotional work
Masculinity is not in a crisis. This is a reckoning.
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.
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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 29thit 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
