Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

by Mychal Denzel Smith

Homophobia is a social lubricant for straight men. But what do we gain from such deep insecurity about the perception of our sexuality? Or more importantly, what do we lose? We miss out on tenderness, on the opportunity to forge bonds with one another on the basis of openness and compassion. We qualify our greetings, compliments, and affections for one another to ensure they aren’t read as sexual, and in the process cheapen them. And how much brainpower are we wasting by policing everything we say for the slightest sexual connotation?

At greater issue, though, is what all this says to gay men: You are not a part of the brotherhood. Your existence is not only illegitimate, it is a threat. If ever the threat becomes too much, it will be eliminated. Our fear should be yours.

As if the greater concern was that of black women’s health, because HIV/AIDS is so prevalent among gay men who could then transfer the disease to their women partners. Maybe, but when have we ever prioritized the health of black women?

If everyone was so offended by these men keeping their sexual identities secret, what were any of us doing to ensure it was safe for them to “come out”?

inviting in.” It’s a meaningful shift in language that no longer places the burden of bravery on the marginalized to “come out” to a hostile world. “Inviting in” recognizes that it isn’t the marginalized who should be responsible for the terms of their own identity, but those who have made that identity dangerous to embrace.

It’s not only a matter of popularity that keeps us from caring whether or not an openly gay male (because the other side of homophobia in sports is the assumption that most women athletes are lesbians) has success in a sport such as tennis or soccer.

Football, basketball, baseball, and hockey are spaces where men prove their manhood.

He hit on something else all too familiar: unrequited love. It’s universal. But when it’s a young black man associated with hip-hop speaking on his love for another man, it seems unique.

For a people who have historically had their families destroyed because they were considered property and sold away at the discretion of a slave owner, and later through state-sanctioned violence and economic depravement, the longing for the bonds of family are deep, true, and unwavering. But what we haven’t done is consider that “family” does not have to look like a husband-and-wife turned father-and-mother, with a hierarchical structure that places the husband/father in the position of leadership, his word the final say in any decision making. Through circumstance, we’ve built family structures that look nothing like this yet still romanticize the patriarchal model, implying the deficiency of all others.

There’s no room for redefinition of masculinity from this view because it’s one of the key traits of masculinity—strength—that will save us. We can’t afford any weakness in the face of white supremacy. True niggas can’t be gay because gay isn’t strength.

Black gay men—weak, deceptive, traitors, invisible. Yet they have and continue to stand up for a black liberation that has failed to imagine them.

“Black liberation is love. And love is the radical act of removing any barrier that keeps us apart. We will, in fact, never collectively get free if our politics are weakened by lovelessness.”

We haven’t been brave enough to love the black gay men who have invited us in. We’ve attempted to define them out of the movement. We greeted...

We have the capacity for self-reflection if we’re willing to tap into it. President Obama evolved. Amiri Baraka did, too. They did so through hard listening and wrestling with their own discomfort. They let go of long-held beliefs. They recognized there were real lives bei...

We were a “laugh to keep from crying” kind of family. It’s not an ideal way to reach out in a time of need. Laughing to keep from crying only helps when everyone knows what you’re laughing about.

But with so much stigma surrounding mental illness and mental health care, this hasn’t become a staple of our advocacy. And even where there’s acknowledgment that mental illness is real, it takes a backseat to issues like police violence, poverty, and incarceration. We fail to make the connection between these things and the prevalence of mental illnesses within our community. How many of us are watching the latest video of police assaulting or killing a young black person and slipping into depression? How many of us are being sent to prison, locked away in solitary confinement, and coming out on the other side suicidal? How many of us experience anxiety and paranoia from the stress of poverty, and lack of food, and exposure to the daily violence that becomes an outgrowth of our attempts to survive? The everyday condition of blackness in America is enough to drive you crazy, but without those connections, we’ve been lacking in advocates.

She taught me not to be ashamed, she gave me the language of “living with” instead of “suffering from” and “I have” versus “I am.”

What would happen if we reframed the way we understand black male life in a way that took mental health seriously? If we looked outside and didn’t see ruthless gangbangers but teenage boys left hopeless and giving themselves suicide missions. If instead of chastising young men for fighting over sneakers we asked why they feel worthless and unseen without them. If we didn’t label them junkies but rather recognized their need for affirmation. If we held our boys close when they cried instead of turning them away to face the frustration, pain, and sadness “like a man.” If we believed black boys were worthy of second chances that didn’t involve prison cells. What if? We might start to worry. Then we might start to heal.

Being born to an unwed couple doesn’t mean that you never have a relationship with your father.

To say that these other family formations are inherently deficient because there isn’t a father who sits atop a hierarchy of familial relationships is to say no one else is capable of providing adequate love to a child, while also teaching the children who grow up without that idealized nuclear-family model that their lives are somehow wrong. Raised to believe that they missed something vital, no matter how much love was present in their lives, it’s not a surprise if children without fathers in their homes have more behavioral problems.

And that families with women-led households are more likely to live in poverty speaks less to the necessity of fathers and more to the fact that a single income is no longer sufficient to support a family in this country, that our economy undervalues the work of women, and that outside child care is a prohibitively expensive luxury. An economic shift to real living wages for women’s labor and a total societal investment in the well-being of all children would solve a number of the problems we think are only alleviated by fathers.

It’s hard because the “missing black father” has caused so much pain. That hurt runs through the rhetoric of every well-meaning person who has ever admonished black fathers for not being in their children’s lives. It’s the foundation of Barack Obama’s first book and the speech he delivered before the congregation at Apostolic. That pain is real and can’t be discounted, but so long as it is the only way through which we see this issue, the myth will continue to entangle us and prevent us from reckoning with what’s real. The damage isn’t done by the absence of a father, but from the feelings of abandonment.

This isn’t an argument in favor of deadbeat fathers, but a call to detach ourselves from the myth that the only and best way to raise a child depends on the presence of a man we call a father.

What’s real is that having a father in the home increases the likelihood for abuse for both the spouse and children. What’s real are fathers who are broken and showing up to fill a role that they themselves are struggling to understand. We have spent so much time valorizing the mere existence of fathers, we haven’t discussed what type of fathers they will be. We haven’t shown any concern for whether or not these fathers show up as full, healthy human beings.

He, like other black men, let the script guide him more often than not. Part of that script is producing memories through major milestones. So he woke me up at 4 a.m. on November 4, 2008, and we stood in line to make history.

it’s a response to the late Derrick Bell’s assertion that racism is a permanent fixture of American life. If racism is intractable, why waste energy fighting it, when you could be spending time doing the work of bettering yourself?

The idea being that if black people were able to disprove the racist stereotypes of black inferiority by being citizens of the greatest moral regard, the institutions of racism would no longer have any basis for their standing.

Invoking the politics of respectability now is to name a more conservative strain of thought where it is believed that if you behave “properly,” dress “well,” speak “correctly,” get the “right” education, and listen to authority, whatever racism that does exist in the world will not be an impediment to your success. If you adhere to the rules of society, your race will not matter. It’s only when we live up to the stereotypes that we limit our opportunities.

If we are starting from a moral standard that excludes blackness, in all its forms, it’s one that we can never live up to. We can not achieve respect from the system because we’ve been defined out of it before we can finish our double windsors.

Part of the reason why a new generation of thinkers and activists has rejected respectability politics is that it’s by necessity a politics of exclusion. With the goal being to gain the respect of those in charge of maintaining an anti-black, anti-woman, anti-queer, anti-trans, anti-poor system, the field of who counts as “respectable” is so narrowed that who and what you organize doesn’t make for an inclusive vision of freedom. Do sex workers count as respectable? Do drug dealers count? Do the incarcerated count? Do low-wage fast food workers count? Do single mothers count? Do high school dropouts count? And if they don’t, what issues are our politics organizing around? What future are we envisioning?

We must abandon the hierarchies. Our challenge is to take the spirit with which we have fought for black men—cisgender, heterosexual, class privileged, educated black men—and extend it to the fight for everyone else.

But by every measure, Obama also represents the most “respectable” black man this country has ever produced. And what has his respectability won him but disrespect?

He did everything. He studied hard. He went to Harvard. He got married. He had children. He worked. He dreamed big. He pulled his bootstraps all the way up from his humble beginnings to the presidency. He lived the American Dream. And he was called an African witch doctor. People asked for his birth certificate. A congressman shouted at him “YOU LIE!” He faced the most recalcitrant Republican Congress ever that was elected by a constituency that wanted to “take the country back.” If a black man can be elected as guardian of the American empire, do exactly that, and still not be shielded from racism, what hope is supposed to be left?

We make a grave mistake every time we invoke the history of oppression to diminish the reality of racism’s present. Progress is real, but the narrative of progress seduces us into inaction. If we believe, simply, that it gets better, there is no incentive to do the work to ensure that it does.

Racial politics could cut both ways, as the transformative message of unity and brotherhood was drowned out by the language of recrimination. And what had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all Americans to work hard and get ahead was too often framed as a mere desire for government support—as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child, and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself.

There is nothing wrong with promoting mentorship. There is something wrong with a president who told us for years that he was not the president of Black America but all of America, as if black people were not part of America, now putting forth his first racially specific program, and it not being any policy, but rather a spate of philanthropic endeavors. It was insulting, but right in line with his philosophy. As if he had been elected to be mentor in chief. As if mentors are all black boys need to survive. As if what he really meant was mentor as a stand in for father. As if he could save black boys by becoming their surrogate father. As if we can afford to continue believing the myth.

Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Michael Brown had a father. Tamir Rice had a father. Having a father won’t protect black boys from America.