Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

He likened people using the word thug to describe him as a new way of calling black people the N-word.

It actually comes from the Hindi word

thuggee,

which means “deceiver” or “thief” o...

Calling someone a thug is putting them on a continuum that ends with a superpredator.

The bottom line: our criminal justice system too often treats black people like thugs instead of like people. So the cycle perpetuates, and both stereotypes and actual violence keep going and going and going.

Let’s Get Uncomfortable

We can’t have the stereotype of black men as inherently dangerous without President Wilson thinking Birth of a Nation was “like history written in lightning,” without all the lies and propaganda used to lynch black men, without black people being maligned as superpredators.

Clinton was confronted by a Black Lives Matter activist named Ashley Williams. “I’m not a superpredator, Hillary Clinton.

Talk It, Walk It

criminal.

“Change your thoughts and change your world.”

(sentencingproject.org).

(themarshallproject.org),

(pen.org)

Boyz n the Hood

Menace II Society.

When They See Us,

“Why do you think many African American communities are plagued with poverty, crime, and also the lack of presence of a father figure in the home? Is this all because of oppression?” —Lisa

The breakdown of the black community, in order to maintain slavery, began with the breakdown of the black family. Men and women were not legally allowed to get married because you couldn’t have that kind of love. It might get in the way of the economics of slavery. Your children could be taken from you and literally sold down the river. —KERRY WASHINGTON

Meals aside, though, I asked Earl how it had felt growing up in a single-parent home.

Sharon had joined the military to provide for her family, and that’s why she went to Kuwait, too—it wasn’t a military order but a financial decision.

Black families have much higher rates of single-parent homes. Those single-parent homes mean less income and a greater risk of poverty.

The point is not that broken families are bad: that’s obvious. The question is, who has done the breaking, and how have they done it?

Let’s Rewind

Cecar Pugh,

“man of colour,”

South Carolina Anderson District Nov. 29th 1841

[Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina]

I started with this letter because we just can’t talk about the phenomenon of broken black families without the context of slavery.

abroad marriage.

fanning flies from the owner’s table, taking care of their owner’s younger children, running errands, and eventually working in the fields like their parents.

It remained an uphill battle to unite and keep families together for many, many years.

If this book has emphasized anything, it’s that history has a huge part to play on what kind of America we live in now. What we see of the black family is the legacy of America’s first black families. So if the brokenness isn’t inherent, why has that legacy persisted for so long?

“forty acres and a mule”

(President Andrew Johnson ren...

Black ...

These impoverished conditions lasted for decades.

The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,

The Moynihan Report.

The Atlantic,

bootstrapping—

The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission,

“Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

Take note of how black people and people of color are being portrayed. I bet what you’ll see are extremes: athletes and entertainers portrayed as demigods, other black people portrayed as poor or violent or criminal.

Someone with healthy esteem may be able to, say, ignore people assuming they have no father figure or overcome the real obstacles of that situation.

But here’s a one-in-four statistic that’s way less appealing: about one in four black Americans will experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their life.

racial battle fatigue,

A study by the National Comorbidity Survey Replication and the National Survey of American Life found that almost one in ten black people actually have PTSD.

black people are 20 percent more likely than white people to suffer serious psychological distress.