A Performative Autoethnography of Five Black American Men 1032303743, 9781032303741

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A Performative Autoethnography of Five Black American Men

In this book, Stefan Battle weaves together autoethnographic narrative and ethnographic performance material from his own life and those of four other Black men, to show the untold impact of racial trauma on these everyday lives. By engaging readers with these experiences, stories, and pain, the book aims to help to stop racial trauma and heal the race-based grief of the many Black men who need to speak out against racial injustice in the United States. Battle organizes the book as a performative account of a one-day workshop that he might teach to college students or other adults. He uses individual activities including an interview with a White woman regarding her relationship to race and racism, a staged reading in which five Black men share their stories, an audience discussion about race and racism, and Battle’s performative talk, sharing the author’s desire for people of all races to self-reflect and then talk among themselves about race and racism. Battle’s powerful book reveals that each Black man’s unique story is important and that understanding something of a person’s hidden context for processing the traumas of racism can lead to new understanding and healing. To this end, Battle examines issues such as Black men’s mental health and the wider societal systemic racism in the US that provokes tension and harm to the racial victimization of Black men. Suitable for students and scholars of qualitative research and autoethnography in the social sciences, communication studies, education, social work, and Africana or Black studies, this book will

also be of interest to anyone seeking to better understand and engage with the Black male experience in the US. Stefan Battle is the chair and a professor at Rhode Island College School of Social Work BSW Program in Providence, Rhode Island. He was a fellow in 2021 at the Kennedy Center Playwright Intensive. As a newly founded playwright Stefan uses arts and humanities combined to create plays as scholarship to discuss the social injustices of race and racism.

Writing Lives Ethnographic Narratives

Series Editors: Arthur P. Bochner, Carolyn Ellis and Tony E. Adams University of South Florida and Bradley University

Writing Lives: Ethnographic Narratives publishes narrative representations of qualitative research projects. The series editors seek manuscripts that blur the boundaries between humanities and social sciences. We encourage novel and evocative forms of expressing concrete lived experience, including autoethnographic, literary, poetic, artistic, visual, performative, critical, multi-voiced, conversational, and co-constructed representations. We are interested in ethnographic narratives that depict local stories; employ literary modes of scene setting, dialogue, character development, and unfolding action; and include the author’s critical reflections on the research and writing process, such as research ethics, alternative modes of inquiry and representation, reflexivity, and evocative storytelling. Proposals and manuscripts should be directed to [email protected], [email protected] or [email protected] An Autoethnography of African-American Motherhood Things I Tell My Daughter Renata Ferdinand Narrating Estrangement Autoethnographies of Writing Of(f ) Family Lisa P. Z. Spinazola and David F. Purnell An Autoethnography of Letter Writing and Relationships Through Time Finding our Perfect Moon Jennifer L. Adams A Performative Autoethnography of Five Black American Men Stefan Battle For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Writing-Lives-Ethnographic-Narratives/book-series/WLEN

“In A Performative Autoethnography of Five Black American Men, Stefan Battle invites readers into the richly complex narratives of five Black men. Battle’s expert use of performative writing and alternative autoethnography inspires readers to develop what he refers to as an “I-Thou relationship with Black men”—all with the intent on inspiring meaningful racial change. Once you start reading, you won’t want to stop.” — Annemarie Vaccaro, Associate Dean and Professor, College of Education, University of Rhode Island, USA “A Performative Autoethnography of Five Black American Men is a touching, daring, and disquieting book. Stefan Battle uses the emancipatory potential of autoethnographic performance to raise consciousness of real-life, racially-charged experiences that have shaped the lives of five Black men including his own. Their honest, vulnerable, edifying performance evokes the kind of deeper understanding of racial trauma so necessary for enabling acts of kindness, consideration, and self-reflection. The stories of these five men will tug at your heart, and broaden your appreciation of what it can feel like and what it may mean to experience the fear and pain of race-based trauma, especially for adult Black men seeking to live and communicate authentically. Suffering through harrowing, grieffilled experiences, these men find it increasingly difficult to speak up voluntarily and not feel silenced by indoctrinated assumptions of how they will be regarded and responded to if they do. These spellbinding

stories of pain, humiliation, and trauma inspire a moral reckoning of how we can use autoethnography as a means of healing so that all of us will want to sit down, listen to, and do something about the vexing existential realities revealed in this performance.” — Arthur P. Bochner, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, University of South Florida, USA “Anchored in rigorous qualitative inquiry, A Performative Autoethnography of Five Black American Men examines the poignant and painful lived experiences of everyday racism endured, resisted and transcended by Black men. Their voices, contextualized by friendship and mutual support capture many of the challenges that Black men and women, boys and girls, endure in US schools, communities and institutions reflecting the devastating impact of white supremacy, color blind racism and neutrality on people of color. By anchoring his analysis in a theatrical narrative (script), Battle is offering a gift to readers by allowing them to view the harm done by well-intentioned/race neutral white teachers, colleague and “friends.” This text is a contribution to social work education and all disciplines committed to anti-racism by inviting readers to examine their own complicity in Anti-Blackness while providing a framework for repair and transformation.” — Dr. Anthony De Jesús, MSW Program Director, University of Saint Joseph

A Performative

Autoethnography of Five Black American Men

Stefan Battle

Designed cover image: Stephen Schildbach/Photodisc via Getty Images First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Stefan Battle The right of Stefan Battle to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-30374-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-30375-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-30477-7 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003304777 Typeset in ITC Legacy Serif by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To Michael, my husband and the better half of me. To Dean, my nephew, the future of Black boys and men.

CONTENTS

Foreword Acknowledgements

xii xiv

Introduction

1

1 An Autoethnographic Interview with Beth Hewett

4

2 Wishes by Black Men18 Stefan’s Introduction 18 The Staged Reading: Wishes by Black Men20 Act 1: Oppression 21 Act 2: Powerlessness 40 Act 3: Picking Our Battles 48

3 The Audience

61

4 What I Wish People Knew

78

5 Author’s Notes Black Theater The Creation of a Staged Reading Autoethnographic Performative Writing My Wish

Index

100 102 104 107 110

112 xi

FOREWORD

A Performative Autoethnography of Five Black American Men is Stefan Battle’s performative autoethnographic study of racially charged experiences of Black men. Through this book, Stefan’s and other Black men’s experiences have touched me, mentoring me in my human journey since I hadn’t given race and racism the depth of thought they merit. In keeping with Stefan’s self-revealing work and in the spirit of performative autoethnography, he interviewed me for the book, seeking the perspective of a White woman and giving me the opportunity to explore my own relationship with race and racism. What, he asked of me, is my place in the story of a racially divided America? Having worked with Stefan for eight years during which I mentored him in writing and he mentored me in racism, I now see the need for real atonement in how people of different races treat each other. I’m talking about all races here. I’ve become more attuned to anti-Blackness, anti-Brownness, and anti-other skin colors for people of indigenous cultures, Asian cultures, and, well, everyone else I’ve missed here. Whatever skin color clothes our human bodies, we remain human at the DNA level (and, yes, we all have a bit of Neanderthal in us, too). In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell explained atonement as at-one-ment.1 He spoke primarily of the resolution of the superego and the repressed id, the father (God) and the hero-person (sin). To atone is to make amends and reparation. If atonement also is to become at one with the other, then a first step requires making amends, to atone, xii

Foreword

with people of all races and cultures through conscious awareness of our racial thoughts, acts, and sins. Being open to at-one-ment racially means opening oneself to one’s own history and learned tendencies. Such awareness stems from observation, self-education, and humility. It enables a personal evolution and deep change toward people of other races and cultures. A Performative Autoethnography of Five Black American Men’s Lives takes readers into Stefan’s and other Black men’s grief-filled pain and provides a way through it to potential atonement. I’m honored to have been invited to explore my own White female need for atonement with racial division, distancing, and blundering. Beth L. Hewett, PhD, CT, CCISM

Note 1 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 130.

xiii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With sincere gratitude, I thank the following people: Beth Hewett, for her unconditional support and contributions over the past five years in assisting me to develop this book as a source of valuable and intimate knowledge about Black men for multiple readers, including those in schools of social work, education, and other disciplinary majors. Besides being a vital source of ideas, mentoring, and editing, as a White woman, Beth has been courageous in talking openly to me about her personal encounters and thoughts on racial relations and being vulnerable with Black folks and other people of color. Art Bochner, for his mentoring and tutelage in helping me become a writer and first-time book author. I  had the great fortune to meet Art and his wife Carolyn Ellis at a conference five years ago. Since that first meeting, Art has been an instrumental and encouraging champion with this book project. I don’t have enough words of appreciation to offer him. Hannah Shakespeare, Lucy Kennedy, Zoe Thomson, and Matthew Bickerton, for their leadership as the literary editing team for this book. Christina Lengyel for her work as the indexer. Her thoughtful approach to the index and her ability to capture even my voice in her selections resonated performatively with this book’s intent. Tony and Madeline DeJesus, for their support, commitment, and openness to debut Wishes by Black Men on the campus of the University of Saint Joseph Department of Social Work  & Equitable Community xiv

Acknowledgements

Practice in West Hartford, Connecticut. Molly Driessen and Don Siler, faculty at the university who participated in the staged reading production. And finally, Amy Taylor for her administrative and organizational role with the preparation of the staged reading debut. Godfrey Simmons, Jr. (Director) and Rhoda Cerritalli (Managing Director) both of the HartBeat Ensemble, for their support in making the theatrical debut of Wishes by Black Men come to fruition. Kevin Booker, Jr., Ym, Michael Turner, Jesse White, and Patrick “Rico” Williams, for their brilliance as actors portraying the roles of the characters in the staged reading. They made this play and its message come alive to its first audience. The four Black men who allowed me to tell their stories in the staged reading Wishes by Black Men. Thank you for contributing and sharing of yourselves. But more importantly, thank you for trusting me to tell your individual stories through an adaptation of your own words.

xv

I did my best; God did the rest. Hattie McDaniel (1895–1952)

INTRODUCTION

A Performative Autoethnography of Five Black American Men is organized as a performative narrative account of a fictional one-day workshop that I might teach to college students or other adults. As a Black man who is a professor of social work, I created the book and workshop themes to focus on social injustices of race and racism as they regard Black men specifically. These themes provide a platform for education and awareness, with the goal of opening space for participants to have genuine conversations about Black men’s racial trauma. Through them, I invite listening as well as talking in the attempt to develop dialogue. My primary aim for this book is to use performative writing to deepen and develop understanding of Black men’s lives through various dramatization mediums. The book is organized as an agenda for the fictional construct of a workshop presentation. Each chapter, labeled as an activity, appears as an essential action for the workshop. Although any of the activities can be read independently, the book makes the most lyrical sense when activities are read sequentially. Activity 1, “An Autoethnographic Interview with Beth Hewett,” is a transcript of an interview with a White female friend, Beth Hewett, and me. In the workshop construct, I provide this interview by email to participants to pre-read prior to the workshop. It appears here as the book’s first chapter. In this interview, my long-time friend Beth considers her own and her family history, reflecting on her relationship to race and racism. The interview’s context is that we met up in Baltimore, Maryland, DOI: 10.4324/9781003304777-1

1

Introduction

where she lives and where I was attending a social work conference. Beth and I  explored her relationship with race and racism with autoethnographically told stories. This interview models the kind of racial discussion I think Americans need to have: White to White, Black to White, and people of every race with each other. The interview transcript as presented here is discussed briefly in Activity 4, the chapter presenting my talk that ends the workshop day. Activity 2, “Wishes by Black Men,” begins the workshop itself. The staged reading Wishes by Black Men is the core activity around which the workshop day revolves. I  wrote this staged reading from the lived experiences of four Black research participants given the pseudonyms Edmond, James Henry, Elijah, and Mitchell; my own story comprises the fifth Black man, simply named the Storyteller. Activity 5 explains the methods for this research. The interpersonal conflict themes of oppression, powerlessness, and picking battles naturally separated the five Black men’s lived experiences into three acts. Although each man’s personal context is unique, their lived experiences have striking similarities. For the workshop construct, the staged reading is presented performatively as a video. I invite readers of the book to imagine not just reading the staged reading but also viewing it as a live performance. Such imagination would allow readers to hear the different voice tonality and expression of each character and their different facial expressions and body language. After a break for workshop participants to refresh themselves, I move into Activity 3, “The Audience.” This activity involves a post-performance discussion after the staged reading video with the workshop audience offering me—as workshop facilitator and playwright—their reactions, attitudes, and emotions regarding the Black male characters’ stories of emotional, physical, and cognitive racial assaults. For the workshop construct, I would invite participants into a live conversation after watching the video. For book readers, this chapter features a discussion developed from actual people who responded to the staged reading after its debut. Just as each Black man in the staged reading has his own context, which means his story must be taken seriously, so too the workshop audience responds with their own valid, enlightening racial and lived experiences. Following a lunch break, Activity 4, “What I  Wish People Knew,” begins. This autobiographical solo performance occurs as a talk that would be experienced uniquely in the workshop construct but would be read as presented in the book. I use this solo performance to express 2

Introduction

my wishes for people, especially White people, to know me better. Here, I  wish for them to understand my experiences of implicit and explicit racism. As I would in a college/university class for social work students, I reveal my Blackness to help them understand the important work on which they will embark, advocating for marginalized people who are unjustly discriminated against and oppressed merely because of their skin color. My stories unveil my racial and sexual identities. Telling these stories have been challenging for me, raw like the unpeeling of a pungent onion that leads to tears with hope for healing old wounds. Toward the end of this talk, I use my interview with Beth Hewett (see Activity 1) as a model for how White people—and all people—might talk with Black and other people in openness, humility, and the capacity for relation. I present it here for workshop participants and readers alike to have an example of how my wishes might be fulfilled. Finally, Activity 5, “Author’s Notes,” ends the workshop and the book proper. These notes explain some of my writing processes stemming from an understanding of Black theater and performative autoethnography. As a takeaway for participants within the workshop construct, I distribute these notes as a handout; for book readers, they explain my work more academically. I invite readers to enter the lives of five Black American Men, wishing with me that America achieves genuine racial change.

3

Activity 1

AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC INTERVIEW WITH BETH HEWETT Scene: Stefan has been attending a social work conference in Baltimore, Maryland, where his friend Beth lives with her husband Paul. Beth has played an appreciable role in helping Stefan develop this book by offering comments and suggestions. They have been friends for eight years and have developed strong trust. Stefan informed Beth that he would be coming to Baltimore for a conference but unfortunately had limited time to connect with her and Paul. Stefan and Beth agreed to meet for tea the morning of his departure back to Rhode Island so he could interview her and audiotape their discussion as research for his book. They met at Miss  Shirley’s Café on the Inner Harbor. When Stefan arrived, Beth was waiting at a private table away from others to enable the privacy to speak freely. The café smelled of fresh-brewed coffee and delectable baked goods. Hi, Beth. I’m sorry to be late. Now that I’ve checked out of the hotel, I have about two hours to spend with you before getting a cab to the airport. [they embrace with a hug and sit down] BETH: No worries. Catch your breath. [pauses] Would you like anything? STEFAN: No, thank you. I had two cups of tea at breakfast. This water is fine. Thank you for having it waiting here. Just to be sure, are you okay with me recording our conversation? [digs in his briefcase for a pen and pad to write and unlocks his phone for digital recording] BETH: Yes, please go ahead. [Stefan begins recording] What time is your flight? STEFAN:

4

DOI: 10.4324/9781003304777-2

An Autoethnographic Interview with Beth Hewett STEFAN: 2:00 PM. If the plane leaves on time, I should be home by 3:00. BETH: Oh, good! Nice, brief flight. STEFAN: How’s Paul?

He’s good! Still working and looking forward to retirement a bit down the road. We’re hoping for a little vacation sometime soon. STEFAN: Great! Please tell him I said hello. BETH: Of course. Thanks for asking about him. How’s Michael? STEFAN: Good, good. Thanks. [pauses] Thanks for being willing to be interviewed about your experiences and relationships to race. I think getting your perspective as a White woman might help give a broader picture of Black men’s trauma for the book. Black men frequently interact with White women, and sometimes, I’m sorry to say, these experiences don’t go very well. BETH: I’m glad to support you with this important project. But I have to say I’m a bit nervous, too. STEFAN: Why? We’re friends! BETH: Because I’m not proud of my background with race, at least not until the past several years. [frowns] As a White woman in suburban America, I’ve had far too few opportunities to develop close connections with people of color. No. Scratch that. I’ve taken far too few opportunities when they were presented to me, which makes me a racially distant person. Even during my years as the wife of a US Army officer wherein equity among races is assumed to be fully realized, I knew few people of color on personal levels. When I worked with a Black woman, for example, I found myself making blunders that I didn’t catch—or even understand as blunders—until too late to smooth the relationship. STEFAN: It’s okay, Beth. Race issues are sensitive, I  know, and I’m not here to blame you for what you didn’t know. Let’s continue. Okay? [smiles] BETH: Okay, I’m game. I trust you. STEFAN: First, for the purposes of the interview, tell me a little about yourself. BETH: Well, like everyone, I have multiple facets. I’m a wife, mother, and grandmother; a bereavement specialist; a college-level writing educator of many years; a published author; a Catholic Christian; a fighter for access and inclusion both in education and bereavement opportunities; and a politically moderate thinker. BETH:

5

An Autoethnographic Interview with Beth Hewett

Wow! Just your normal, everyday person, right? So, what’s the first thing you think of when I say “people of color”? How does your experience with “people of color” fit into these multiple facets? BETH: I’m a person who notices color. I admit that I see color first. For a long time, I was ashamed of that fact. I made up my own little ritual to remedy my discomfort. I acknowledge to myself that I see a person’s color and then recite a little mantra to normalize my experience. I’ve used this mantra to reframe my seeing people as having a color or ethnicity other than mine, enabling me to resee them as simply individual human beings having a day in their lives. For example, when I worked in Washington, DC, and took the metro train, I would look around and say to myself: “Red, blue, white, green, and black—we’re all people.” Then, I could relax into the ride, look people in the eyes, and smile. I was so relieved when you pointed me to Elijah Anderson1 and Paul Kivel,2 who both refuted the argument that being “colorblind” is a good or even a possible thing. Colorblindness would, essentially, “render Black people invisible.”3 Despite my discomfort with seeing color so readily, I think most people do see skin color and ethnic differences quickly. Lately, I’ve come to think that what matters is whether we’re conscious of that awareness and how that consciousness enables us to act with kindness and consideration. STEFAN: I’m pretty sure you don’t need to feel shame, Beth. We live in a color divided world. I  see White versus Black quickly, too. Why should your view be any different from mine? Well, here’s a question. What do you think Black people think of you? BETH: Now, that’s a tough question because of my own family history. Can I take a minute with this one? [looks perplexed] STEFAN: Sure. Take your time. [pauses and sips water] BETH: First, I  have your book’s drafted manuscript clearly in my head. Your work has made me wonder, when I  walk down the street, whether Black people, men especially, see just another White person who presents danger to them. If they think so, I worry that they’re right. In fact, I had a big, fat hint that my own family presented danger to Black people in its own history. Before I  tell this story, please know that I  only have my direct knowledge of one piece of evidence. Please take what I’ve heard from others as hearsay from my family. I  don’t want to hurt anyone by asserting as absolute truth what I’m not 100% certain about. Despite STEFAN:

6

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being open with my family with why I  was asking questions, I’m afraid I may offend or harm someone inadvertently here. But I owe you the truth as I understand it. Twenty-two years ago, on the day my father was buried, my mother showed me and my siblings a brief article that proclaimed in its headline: “ ‘Bill Smith’ Shot a N—”; well, he shot a Black man. I think this was in the 1930s or 1940s, and the man being named was my maternal grandfather. I was offput and, I’m ashamed to say, my siblings and I laughed. I think this odd, inappropriate giggle fest stemmed from the incongruity of simultaneously burying my father and reading this ugly story. I wasn’t even certain the article’s statements were true. I didn’t know what to do with that information, so I tucked it away. Since then, I’ve searched for that news clipping multiple times, but I can’t find it anywhere, so I assume my mother destroyed it before her death. Why not? When she brought it out to find out what her adult children thought about it, she heard laughter instead of serious talk. Out of respect for her, I won’t give my grandfather’s real name. However, I  recently questioned multiple extended family members about this article, and they’re deeply divided about whether it ever existed or, if it existed, whether it stated the truth. (My one living brother and I both know it existed; we held it in our hands and read it.) From what I’ve been told, my grandfather was an initiate into the Ku Klux Klan. The clipping likely was from a KKK newsletter as its headline used the word “n—” and even named the street on which he lived. I don’t know whether the Black man he shot lived or died. I think the shooting was alleged to be because of an attempted burglary. I haven’t been able to find a public news account of this shooting. My grandfather wasn’t prosecuted for it. Another family member recalled as a child seeing a KKK armband in a family trunk stored on the front porch, and another recollected a KKK book that the teenage daughters were encouraged to read. Yet another family member remembered being told about the shooting as part of a KKK initiation and about my grandfather’s choice to leave the Klan and join the Masons instead. He remained in this organization for life, rising high in its rankings and living the rest of his life as an apparently faithful Christian. None of them agree about the others’ memories or what such memories might mean. My 7

An Autoethnographic Interview with Beth Hewett

mother also had shared with one of her siblings that she had found a photo of my grandfather as a young child standing beside a lynched Black man. Mary-Frances Winters4 indicated that 4,743 lynchings occurred in the United States between 1882 to 1968. Was this one of them? I looked up the last recorded lynching in the state of Pennsylvania, and it was in 1911, making my grandfather just six years old if this photograph indeed was of him. This information sickens me. STEFAN: That’s dark stuff, Beth. I’m not critiquing you, but it’s dark and makes me furious. My apologies for my reaction. BETH: Please, no apologies necessary. I feel disgusted and a little scared telling you this, Stefan. It’s like I’m betraying my own family by telling you this story especially since I don’t know the entire truth; I don’t know the “why” of it all, and that bothers me. But somebody has to come out and own the ugly; we White Americans can’t all claim total familial innocence—or else, who did these things to Black Americans? STEFAN: Well, thank you for that. I  don’t blame you, but I  feel angry anyway. BETH: I know. I know. And here I am talking with you about the kind of horrors the people in your book fear. So, what the hell? This is my family we’re talking about here. I want to know what caused such hatred. Albert Bandura’s social learning theory clearly stated that children learn from and emulate their models, most often their parents.5 If my dates regarding the lynching photo are right, then my grandfather certainly could have learned hatred of Black people as a child. His family would have had to travel 50 miles from their hometown to witness the lynching. As for his adult KKK initiation attempt, what was he thinking? Was he even thinking? What the hell can I even make of this story? Speaking openly about this evidence isn’t about shaming my family but about me coming to grips with the evils of racism that is in all humans. Some people fight that evil within themselves, some remain unaware of it, and others give it full permission to wreak havoc. Ethnic cleansing and genocide are incredibly evil acts of racism. Systematic killings intended to destroy a people and its culture have happened well before the twentieth-century’s diabolical Holocaust and continue today beyond the 1996 Rwandan genocide of ethnic Tutsi and moderate Hutu and Twa people. Currently, the US 8

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has named Myanmar (also known as Burma), China, Ethiopia, Iraq, Syria, and South Sudan as places where such atrocities are occurring.6 I raise this issue not to lessen the impact of hateful racist acts in America given the country’s treatment of Black slaves and indigenous people. In fact, I want to implicate all humans as capable of them. [angry, yet sad expression in voice] STEFAN: Thank you for sharing that, Beth. That story is from your mother’s side of the family. What was the experience of your father’s side? BETH: Good question, Stefan. On the paternal side of my family, I’ve also wondered about whether and how prejudice has had effects. My grandmother, the oldest of five children, was an ethnic Hungarian born in Brooklyn, New York, to practicing Catholic immigrants. When she was still very little, her family returned to the homeland. My grandmother told me once how her father, a soldier, returned from war—there were several wars involving Hungary and its Slavic/Russian borders at that time into which her father could have been conscripted. She was the only child to remember him and not be frightened of him in his uniform. And why not be frightened of soldiers? At least once while he was gone, my grandmother, her siblings, and mother hid themselves in manure piles to escape soldiers determined to rape, steal, and torment. When she married my Hungarian grandfather, they emigrated to America to stay. The town in which my grandfather had been born, Munkács, was fifty percent Jewish and otherwise populated with other minorities like Hungarians, Russians, Slovak, and Roma. His surname—hence, my maiden name—Lengyel is a common Jewish surname; it means Pollock and indicates both ethnic Poles and those who had lived in Poland. My grandfather’s family seems to have practiced the Russian Orthodox faith and, to my knowledge and affirmed by a popular company’s DNA analysis, weren’t Jewish. His name suggests that his family had at some time lived in Poland during times of frequently changing borders. One possible clue is that my grandfather or his extended family may have been Roma, or Gypsy; my grandmother apparently met him when providing food for Roma and other outcasts during or after wartime. My dad always called me Gypsy because of my dark hair and eyes, suggesting a comfortable relationship with the Roma. At any rate, once in America, my grandparents lived first 9

An Autoethnographic Interview with Beth Hewett

in Brooklyn, then in Philadelphia, and finally in a smaller Pennsylvania town; they raised two of three children to adulthood. One day, in extreme old age and experiencing the dementia of Alzheimer’s, my grandmother told me that the trouble with the world was because of the Jews and the Blacks. I hadn’t heard such ugliness from her before. I  know dementia can change people’s behaviors, increase fear of others, lead to people saying strange things, and free up previously strong filters. Did my grandmother really believe what she said? I  recalled her tearful distress in 1983 when we visited Dachau, during the first time I lived in what was then West Germany with my husband. As we explored Dachau’s bleakness, we stopped before an open cattle rail car, a gaping memorial to transported Holocaust victims. Grandmom caught her breath, sobbed, and turned away as my father gently escorted her out of the exhibit building. Later, she told us that years before the Holocaust, she and her family had been stuffed into cattle cars and taken—to where? From where? The details were garbled, and she carried any clarity about them to her grave. Why was her family so affected by pogroms? They were Catholic. Were there also Jews in her village who attracted the attention of a perverted government? Or was it because of the local Roma people or Roma in the extended family? Did her family simply get swept up in someone else’s troubles? Or were their troubles common to all peasants in that country regardless of their ethnicity or faith? Beginning their adult American lives in Brooklyn, my grandparents had many Jewish friends with whom they remained connected during their entire lives. I  don’t know whether they had Black friends. I  don’t recall ever seeing Black people at their house or even them talking about Black people. Does that mean they were prejudiced against Black or other people of color? In Brooklyn and Philadelphia, my grandparents were no longer just poor Hungarian peasants but on equal par with other struggling immigrants. Then and now, immigrants may settle in clusters among people from their own country—potentially fearing, disparaging, and drawing back from people of other backgrounds, cultures, and races. So, I suppose it’s not surprising that my grandparents’ closest friends tended to be people from the “old country,” too. 10

An Autoethnographic Interview with Beth Hewett

Wow! It sounds like your father’s family had some difficult times. But do you think they were all racist? If so, do you think they were aware of their racism? [looks puzzled yet attentive] BETH: Do an old woman’s dementia-based statements mean she was racist? It’s difficult to be sure but knowing a little of my paternal family’s backgrounds helps me appreciate them as people with their own history and contexts. Maybe knowing more about my maternal family, its history, and their contexts would help in understanding the KKK connections—and in truth, I have only snatched memories to go on, so I’m afraid of being unfair. One family member married a mixed-race Native American from the Lenape tribe. I recall hearing that because she also had Black ancestry; some family members focused on that and speculated about whether a child might be an “n—” or an “Indian”; they insisted that the child couldn’t be White. (By the way, the child born to that union was much loved by many of the extended family including my grandparents.) I also recall male family members arguing that the “south really won the war,” which made no sense given that the Civil War had been decided a century earlier and they lived in Pennsylvania, no less. I had no idea at the time how rampant racism is in northern states. In fact, I’m only recently opening my eyes to this travesty. The town of Rising Sun—just 25 miles from my home (and another 50 miles from my parents’ childhood homes)—was the KKK headquarters of Maryland in the 1960s and 1970s, and it remains unfriendly to Black people even today. Was my entire family racist? No, not all of them. Were they affected by racism? Yes, I think so. My parents had a friend whose language was filled with swearing and who easily and often used vastly inappropriate language. I don’t recall my parents using the most offensive word in the context of people, but I never heard them correct their friend either. My parents did use a euphemism for Brazil nuts, a term I’ve seen on the internet but whose origin I haven’t found. Is it a reason or an excuse to say that was the times—the 1960s and 1970s? [tilts her head questioningly] STEFAN: Given all that you’ve shared, do you think you’re a racist, Beth? [pauses] I  only ask because of what you shared about your family. Within our families, we become conditioned to their beliefs and practices, and it takes strength to move away from those beliefs and practices. So, I ask again. Do you think you’re a racist? STEFAN:

11

An Autoethnographic Interview with Beth Hewett BETH: Oh, well, ouch. I sure hope not. But the idea today seems to be that

all Whites are racist.7 I tend to disbelieve “always/never” comments about people because they don’t seem fair or just. I’d be more comfortable saying that all human beings are given to sheltering in clans and that they seek likeness in groups. If “racist” is the correct word for that behavior, then maybe all people are racist insofar as we all notice color and ethnic difference. Anyway, at times, I  find myself filled not with so-called “White guilt”8 but with deep human shame. It’s not that I think I carry any of my ancestors’ crimes or hurtful behaviors in my DNA. I  didn’t commit them, and I can’t expiate them. I know all humans have the capacity to do evil, however, and children learn from what they’ve experienced and observed. We pass what we have learned down through the generations if we don’t self-reflect, learn to do better, and change our beliefs and behaviors. [speaks authoritatively] STEFAN: Thank you for your honest answer. [pauses] In my book, I discuss how Black children, especially Black boys, get “The Talk” from their parents for their own safety’s sake. When did you come to consciousness about race, Beth? Did you get a talk in childhood, too? BETH: Not so much a talk, Stefan, but I did begin to get new information about race in America when I temporarily moved from Maryland to Florida as a nine-year-old, and we drove to the Gulf Coast to our new home on the Panhandle, just south of Alabama. Driving through Mobile in June  1967, our parents hastily told us to lock our car doors and roll up the windows (despite the oppressive summer heat, a Chevy station wagon without air conditioning, six sweaty people, and a heavily panting German Shepherd). Much later, I realized that our drive was during the Civil Rights Era, and racial upheaval made my parents cautious. No one taught me then how much more dangerous things were for the Black people of Alabama. In our Florida school’s music class, we learned—among other songs—some plantation songs and “Negro spirituals,” many of them recounting antebellum slavery days but with no clear historical context offered. I was struck by the romanticism our textbook author expressed for Stephen Foster’s “Sewanee River” and “My Old Kentucky Home.” In Florida, I went to school with Black children for the first time, learning firsthand that they were children just like me. Although I didn’t become friends with anyone 12

An Autoethnographic Interview with Beth Hewett

in school, being an extremely introverted child, I felt no fear of or from my Black peers. Fast forward some years to school back in Maryland, and I realized by high school that there were only five Black students in the entire suburban school! The football coach was lauded as the first Black coach in the county. His players respected him, and I  never heard a bad word about him. Then, in my small liberal arts college, there were only a handful of Black students, most of them dayhops who commuted to school. When they petitioned for a Black student union, White students protested the “unfairness”; they believed that if there was to be a Black student union, there should be a White student union, too. Note that this event occurred in the mid-1970s, and even now this issue of “fairness” remains unresolved in various higher education institutions as any internet search for Black and White student unions will attest. Yet, how ignorant we were (or are?) of what those few students must have felt in a sea of White faces. I don’t recall ever taking the opportunity to talk to one of them, student to student, and I can blame my introversion only so much before I must take responsibility for being racially distant. STEFAN: So, I hear you say, Beth, that you didn’t have a wide access to Black people in your youth. And, by “racially distant,” I think you’re saying you didn’t take advantage of what you did have available in chances to meet and engage Black students. What happened later in your life? I know you’ve told me privately that you are a “racial blunderer.” What do you mean by that? BETH: I have blundered, and I have failed to talk openly to people of color. For example, while I was still in college in the late 1970s, I recall going to the Baltimore Inner Harbor, a place that many White people considered dangerous because of its high Black population. Sitting on a hill with a friend, I watched a primarily Black group of teenagers dancing in the gazebo to Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell.” I sighed to my friend that I wished I could dance like “them,” meaning the specific teens dancing in the gazebo; “they” had such inviting, alluring rhythm. My own dancing was as painful to watch as it was to experience. My friend hastily shushed me, saying I was being racist. I was embarrassed, but I didn’t understand then how such an admiring comment could be racist. In retrospect, I’d love to find this old friend and thank him for 13

An Autoethnographic Interview with Beth Hewett

this comment that haunted me for years and made me think just a little before speaking! I didn’t know then that innocent-seeming words (to me) could be microaggressive and hurtful; in fact, Winters would call my envious comment simply aggressive and insulting.9 Only a few years later, on my husband’s first Army tour to Germany, a Black neighbor and I chatted about our faith practices. I was restless, looking for a more invigorating spiritual approach, and she assured me I would find it with her church service. She invited me to attend, and I  went to the next Sunday’s service. And I  was the only White person there. People looked at me as if I didn’t belong. I looked at myself as not belonging. Deeply uncomfortable, I crept out of the church about thirty minutes into the service. I never mentioned having dipped my toe into my neighbor’s faith world; she didn’t say anything to me either. The racial distancing that occurred here was on me; it was my responsibility to talk to her after her generous invitation, and I was too uncomfortable to do it. And then later still, when I  worked with my Black colleague in Frankfurt, Germany, during my husband’s second Germany tour, I blundered again. She was an exceptionally experienced and confident office worker and workplace team leader. I was new to the workplace and to our job and far less self-assured. Although our salaries had started at the same level, she was awarded a higher raise than me after the first performance review. I was upset. STEFAN: Wait, Beth. You were upset because she was promoted or rewarded above you? Wasn’t that petty? Sorry, but what was going on there? [stares with a puzzled look] BETH: Fair enough, Stefan. She sure thought I was petty—and racist. But those really weren’t my problem. The problem I  was experiencing was embarrassment that we had started work at the same time, and I had thought I was doing okay. Clearly, I wasn’t doing okay enough because I hadn’t performed as well as she had. I wanted to know what I was doing wrong, and how I could improve my work to achieve her level. I long-distance called the home office in the US to learn more about my performance review and how I could improve, but I left the office to catch my train home before they called back. My coworker took the call and wouldn’t speak to me afterwards except to say, “But you called them, and they called back.” Later, she added: “You think you’re better than me.” I tried to explain my position multiple times. 14

An Autoethnographic Interview with Beth Hewett

I couldn’t figure out how to breech the gap from my perspective to hers because I  didn’t fully understand what was bothering her. Then, years later, it struck me: She really thought that I called the home office because I believed I was better than her and should have received the same or a higher raise because I was White. Over the years, I’ve come to understand that it doesn’t matter that she read the situation wrongly from my perspective. What matters is that I didn’t even have an inkling that we read this scenario through seriously different lenses: I saw it as a career scenario from my discomfort as a less-experienced worker with little self-confidence, while she saw it as a race-based scenario that devalued her superior skills. STEFAN: I get what you’re saying, Beth. And I see why you call yourself a racial blunderer, which is kind of humorous. But you’re being honest with yourself. Thank you for being so open and vulnerable with that story. Is there anything else you want to share before we close this interview? BETH: Yes, I have just a few thoughts, Stefan. First, all these situations are memorable—sometimes painful—for me. The reality of the KKK in my own family is a shameful wound. Additionally, my approach to race through distancing has caused me to miss signs that I needed to be more thoughtful even recently. In their teens, two of my nieces had deeply meaningful friendships with a young Black man. While I had no issues with them being White and him being Black, I should have cared enough about their experiences with him to understand that he and they suffered racial affronts and even danger on account of their relationships. For just one example, neighbors called the police several times simply because they were seen together in the front yard. I’m stunned by my lack of awareness of the price they all paid for this friendship. I’m proud of my nieces for being loving friends with this young man; their ability to navigate race far supersedes my own. By the way, this young man died too young from Lupus, a disease that disproportionately affects people of color. So, while I  acknowledge that I  have been—and likely will be again—a racial blunderer, I’m going to try not to be racially distant again. Second, your performative autoethnographic study of racially charged life situations has given me reasons for why and how race, racial distancing, and racial blundering have been significant parts of my life. Your honest reflections inspired me to be equally 15

An Autoethnographic Interview with Beth Hewett

self-reflective, offering me ways to change previously unconscious thinking and often unselfconscious behavior. Third, I think that although children learn from their lived experiences, they can do better than the worst of what they’ve learned. I know my parents did better than their own parents and grandparents. I see positive signs in my own generation, and my son’s generation has surpassed my own in racial openness, thoughtfulness, and fairness, as my nieces’ experience with their young Black friend makes clear. I believe my grandson’s generation will do even better. Finally, people are complicated, and our responses to hurt are complex. As a bereavement specialist, I  see great pain and grief in the disclosures people have made as participants in your book. How much more pain do other Black people and people of color carry from historical, generational, and present hurts? Grief, as I said in “Grief and Protest,” is about “deep inner protest against loss.”10 It’s about wanting back what we had or what we never had but should have had, as psychotherapist Francis Weller indicated.11 What have people of color lost in their lives? What should they have had in their lives that didn’t occur? What have they carried generationally as what DeGruy called post-traumatic slave syndrome (PTSS), a traumatization that has persisted to today in survival-based attitudes, behaviors, and adaptations?12 Of course, protest is happening! Shouting and even wailing collectively is protest, and such protest expresses grief; expressing grief is an act of mourning that can lead to self-healing. Finding compassion for oneself as having been wounded is part of healing the grief of racial trauma and pain. STEFAN: Thank you for this opportunity to talk together. Beth. I appreciate hearing your voice, too, as a White woman who is thinking about where you’ve come from and how you want to walk in this world. BETH: And thank you, Stefan, for this time together and for your book. Onward!

Notes 1 Elijah Anderson, “The White Space,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (2015): 10–21. 2 Paul Kivel, Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice (Canada: New Society Publishers, 2011).

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An Autoethnographic Interview with Beth Hewett 3 Mary Francis Winters, Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body, and Spirit (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2020), 192. 4 Ibid., 64. 5 Albert Bandura, Social Learning Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NY: Prentice Hall, 1977). 6 Nike Ching, “US Calls Out Genocide, Atrocities Committed in 6 Countries,” Voice of America, July 12, 2021, www.voanews.com/usa/us-calls-out-genocide-atrocitiescommitted-6-countries. 7 Kerry Connelly, Good White Racist?: Confronting Your Role in Racial Injustice (Westminster: John Knox Press, 2020); Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2018); Jean Halley, Amy Eshleman, and Ramya Mahedevan Vijaya, Seeing White: An Introduction to White Privilege and Race (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011). 8 Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). 9 Winters, Black Fatigue, 125. 10 Beth L. Hewett, “Grief and Protest,” Catholic Review (2020), https://catholicreview. org/grief-and-protest/. 11 Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2015). 12 Joy DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (Baltimore, MD: Joy DeGruy Publications Inc., 2017), 9.

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Activity 2

WISHES BY BLACK MEN

Stefan’s Introduction Thank you for coming to today’s workshop. We’re going to talk about and process some of the social injustices that racism inflicts on Black American men. To begin our journey today, we’ll watch a video of the staged reading entitled Wishes by Black Men. This staged reading is an important part of this workshop because it offers authentic voices and words of five professional Black men sharing their experiences with race and racism. It began as part of a scholarly research project in which four participants graciously and selflessly shared the impact of the racial trauma, grief, and pain they’ve endured as Black men. While the dialogue connecting these men as friends is fictional, their experiences expressed in the staged reading are factual. Most of their words are their own expression of their lived experiences, articulated to me through their responses to writing prompts. The Storyteller’s voice is mine, contextualizing their dialogue while expressing my own experiences and emotions about how challenging Black men’s lives can be in this country. The Storyteller’s outrage is my own. Some people will have heard some version of these stories of Black men being racially affronted before. People usually hear what they’re familiar with. However, I  want to move beyond an overgeneralized chronicle of Black men’s history that often results in an “Ah yes, that again” lackadaisical dismissal of Black men’s stories as all being the same. Therefore, I ask you to listen to this staged reading for what you 18

DOI: 10.4324/9781003304777-3

Wishes by Black Men

may not know. Try to seek out the complexities and reality of these five Black men’s stories even if sometimes you might think you’ve heard it all before. I  don’t think anyone has. Blackness—like Whiteness or Brownness—is a general racial experience but it’s also a particular one. Black men neither look nor sound precisely alike, which is a message that some people may need to hear. Neither are any two Black men’s racial traumas exactly alike, and each man has his own hidden context for processing his individual story. Those truths of difference are what make the five Black men’s stories in this performative staging so compelling: despite our similarities in terms of our Blackness, each of us has his own background and life narratives. In other words, each Black man is a person in his own right. Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher who survived World War II as a German exile, theorized an interpersonal and attitudinal relationship between two people as the I and Thou dialogue. He expressed that the pairing of three words I-Thou and I-It described how people do and don’t relate with each other.1 According to Martin and Cowan: Buber saw the meeting between I and Thou as the most important aspect of human experience because it is in relationship that we become fully human. When one meets another as Thou, the uniqueness and separateness of the other is acknowledged without obscuring the relatedness or common humanness that is shared. The world of I-It . . . lacks the essential elements of human connection and wholeness that characterize the I-Thou encounter. The I-Thou attitude is increasingly depersonalizing and alienating as it becomes structuralized in human institutions.2

Black men are like people of any racial category. They often are objectified as an “It” in interpersonal relationships rather than being seen inherently as a “Thou,” a “you.” Sadly, humans of all races objectify each other. The remedy is to engage in relationship as I to Thou, leading to deeper connection with others. I invite you to use this staged reading as an entrée to an I-Thou relationship with Blacks, Whites, and people of all races, ethnicities, and cultures. Not ignoring but recognizing, acknowledging, and accepting each of these five American Black men as a “Thou” rather than an “It” can help to heal racial traumas. 19

Wishes by Black Men

The Staged Reading: Wishes by Black Men Let me introduce you to the characters.3 Edmond is an associate professor for a college master of social work program. James Henry is a writer/editor at a college communication and marketing office. Double names are a southern tradition, which allows James Henry’s character to represent some southern Black men. Elijah is an associate professor at a university school of education. Mitchell is an adjunct professor of social work at a community college. The Storyteller is the playwright and a professor of social work at a Rhode Island college. The storyline is that of a longtime friendship between Edmond, James Henry, Elijah, and Mitchell. It began in elementary school and continues today. The men meet every Wednesday morning for coffee at Seth’s Café. The establishment is ten years old and located in downtown Northampton, Massachusetts, a popular and familiar New England college town. The proprietors are two Black women who are first cousins— Dominique and Ashley. The cafe is popular among the college students in the area. There is always a rich diversity of Black, Brown, and White people coming and going inside the café, often engaged in friendly and healthy conversations. The café décor is Afrocentric with Motown music playing low enough for people to have their conversations.4

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Wishes by Black Men

Act 1: Oppression Three of the four cast members enter through the theater aisles for the first scene. Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” is playing at a medium volume and audible both to the audience and the participants on the stage. The three men greet each other as Black men often do—one at a time, each man grabs the other’s hand and pulls him into his own chest while patting the other’s back with his free hand. The first to greet are Edmond and James Henry. Then Elijah and James Henry greet. Once on the stage, they briefly go off stage, each returning with a coffee mug and small plate of pastry to support the impression that they’re in a café. This café setting is referred to often throughout the staged reading. The friends each sit on a director’s chair looking at the audience, acting as if they are looking out a picture window to the street. Referring to the audience as “looking out the café’s picture window” is another pretense. As Gaye’s song is slowly lowered to silence, Edmond sips his coffee and turns to James Henry and Elijah. EDMOND: Where’s Mitchell? JAMES HENRY: He should be here soon. I called him before I left my apart-

ment, but he didn’t answer. He probably overslept or was in the shower when I called. He’ll be here! So, what’s going on, men? ELIJAH: Nothing much. JAMES HENRY: What about you, Edmond? EDMOND: Oh, nothing much. About the same as Elijah. JAMES HENRY: Wow! You both sound like you could just go back to bed. Edmond smiles at James Henry. Well, on my way here this morning, I was thinking. [looks somber and puzzled] And I don’t know why, man, but it’s on my mind that I’m feeling oppressed. It doesn’t matter that I’m an educated man. What seems to matter is that I’m a Black man. EDMOND: Where in the hell did that come from? ELIJAH: I don’t know. I  was just walking here to meet you all and that started the thought playing in my head. JAMES HENRY: Are you all right? [stares and looks mystified] ELIJAH: Of course I’m fine, man! But you both know with the political and racial climate in our country, our Blackness and especially our gender take center stage. I’m feeling oppressed more than ever. Sometimes I’m so full of emotions and pent-up frustration that I want to yell! [expresses the word yell as an actual loud yell] ELIJAH:

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Wishes by Black Men

Yeah, I get it, brother. I’ve always felt oppressed. Even as a kid, I believed that as an African American male, I needed to achieve at a high level and couldn’t let myself fail or be mediocre. My family worried that I wouldn’t be successful, so I needed to be the best I could for them. But I believe that much of the oppression I experience as a Black man is from the low expectations White people have about me. They think I can’t be successful and make something positive of myself. So, I have to work even harder to prove them wrong. STORYTELLER: It’s interesting how Elijah identifies himself as “Black” and Edmond uses “African American.” Elijah and I are close in age, so when we were growing up, “Black” was our racial identification. In the 1960s and 1970s, using the racial identification of “Black” changed how we felt about ourselves. Phrases like “Black is beautiful” gave us hope and pride as a group and more so as individuals—particularly for Black men—the labeling was a source of empowerment and positivity.5 The lyrics from James Brown’s song “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” was a revolutionary song for Black people, particularly Black men. This song was a new wave negro spiritual in the late 1960s, written to move us away from the pervasive oppression created by so many White people—past and current. As to family and others having super high expectations for Black men but equally high worries for us, I get it! My mother and sister gave me clear messages about always needing to be one step better than White people. They seemed to feel that Black people, especially Black men, had to constantly prove themselves to be accepted by White people. There was no room to be mediocre. There’s truth to this supposition, and in my home, it began with getting a good education. The educational system is badly skewed to White success. So, the women in my family were especially focused on my constant achievement. Black women in some Black families are the matriarch and foundational rock. It isn’t surprising that my mother and sister carried on this role and duty. Don’t misunderstand me. I came from a two-parent home with a mother and father; however, if you’d known my family, you’d see my mother and sister had an exceptionally strong presence. Daddy was quiet, but when he had something to say, we listened. It was exhausting to have to keep achieving all the time! For Elijah, Edmond, and me, we had to work harder because these inequities EDMOND:

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were a source of our oppression. Our goals have always been achievement and success. To be better than others. Nothing less than that. But what a heavy load to carry all the time—for anyone. JAMES HENRY: We’ve all had to work harder than White people to be accepted or do things to belong. [pauses] I  appreciate you starting this conversation, Elijah. Let me share a story with you both. ELIJAH: I aim to please! JAMES HENRY: Shut up! [jokingly comments] Back in the summer of 1990, I was an intern for a newspaper in Mobile, Alabama, or, as my mom calls it, “Alabackwards.” I  was one of only three men of color in a newsroom of 100 people. STORYTELLER: Yep! White people will look at you in a setting like that as if they’re thinking, “What are you doing here?” Yet, they say they want to include us in their work environment. They say they want diversity and equity. They do the training to be racially open and accepting in the workplace. But then these same White people often appear to feel suspicious when you’re around, as if you don’t really deserve it. Their facial expressions are priceless! [laughs, yet he’s serious] But there are serious issues when there’s a high White-to-Blackratio at work. One is a lack of access to the “old boy” network in which coworkers share similar characteristics with appearance, ideas, and how they engage.6 Here’s an example: I was hired as an assistant professor at my current college in 2013. I was the only Black faculty member in the department for a long, long time. The White faculty in the department had been together for more than ten years. Many of them have since retired. The changing of the guard was starting to happen. But when I got there, their collective Whiteness made me feel left out of the network that colleagues should share. Even though they had good intentions of wanting to diversify the department, I often felt like a guest. The atmosphere felt unwelcoming, so I kept silent. JAMES HENRY: As I  think back on that early job as a young reporter, I remember how eager I was to do just about anything to prove I was worthy of being in the newsroom. I  laughed at inappropriate and racist jokes to fit in. I bit my tongue over and over to belong. I knew I should’ve spoken out. I wanted to speak out. But I was afraid of not belonging, not fitting in. So, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have the experience or the confidence to suggest the newspaper should invest in diversity and sensitivity training. 23

Wishes by Black Men

Elijah puts his hand on James Henry’s back to express comfort and empathy. Wow, man. I am sorry! That sounds tough. It sounds like you feel bad about keeping your mouth shut. But do you really think diversity and sensitivity training would’ve cut it? Sometimes I’m just struck by thinking that I’m a Black man—first and foremost. This means I’m exposed to the same intolerance and possibility of violence as most every other Black man in the country. My education doesn’t matter. So, what the fuck! [pauses, then asks emphatically, expressing some worry] Where the hell is Mitchell? He’s never this late. JAMES HENRY: How the hell should I  know? [looks both worried and irritated] I’m telling you a story. EDMOND: Sorry. I’m just concerned. [looks apprehensive] ELIJAH: Stop worrying about Mitchell. He’ll get here. JAMES HENRY: You’re worried? ELIJAH: Do I look worried? [speaks sarcastically] I want to go back to what I was talking about. JAMES HENRY: Okay. [looks somber] ELIJAH: I’ve got to say. Today’s racism feels bolder than ever. It doesn’t seem to matter that I have a doctorate and that I own a home and that I’m gainfully employed. It doesn’t fuckin’ matter that I am an accomplished Black man, a successful man. White people seem to believe less of me anyway—just because I’m a Black man. So, whatever I do doesn’t matter. I’m judged by my Blackness. EDMOND: Preach, my brother! Preach! Yep! I  hear you! I  was a firstgeneration college student, and I didn’t have family role models for going to college other than a cousin. The unwritten hope and expectation from my family was that I would at least graduate from high school and get a job. Such a low expectation. So, even though my family pushed me to achieve, they didn’t expect that I  could ever attend, let alone graduate, college. And look at me now. I have bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees. STORYTELLER: Like Elijah, I did my job. I was able to do my job in becoming a well-educated Black man because I was fortunate to have role models in my three siblings who attended and graduated from undergraduate and graduate schools before me. There was no room for negotiation in my parents’ home about going to college. I was going! I  sympathize with Elijah and Edmond for that continuous ELIJAH:

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need to always be proficient, never able to take a break or get off that merry-go-round for just a little while. On another note, Elijah might not realize just how rare home ownership is for Black families. According to the Winters Group, home ownership is just as unlikely now as it was in 1976, fifty years after the federal Fair Housing Act.7 Let me tell you one story. Carlette Duffy, a Black woman homeowner in Indianapolis, Indiana, wanted an appraisal for her home. She received two home appraisals in 2020. Both came in under $225,000. Because of her own suspicion about racial discrimination, she asked a White friend’s husband to pretend that he owned her home. She wasn’t surprised to find that the third appraisal came in at $259,000.00. Duffy did this homeowner switch to prove that the Fair Housing Act isn’t fair to all.8 So, tell me. [holds out his hands and asks emphatically] What the hell is that about? EDMOND: I really appreciate what Elijah just said. I took pride in working hard and striving for excellence in the classroom and athletically in sports. I always felt that in school—you know, undergraduate through graduate school—I had to work twice as hard for success and felt the weight of having to prove my competence to White people. And because White America won’t necessarily acknowledge my achievements, I guess I have to keep reassuring myself that my hard work paid off by reminding myself that I have these degrees. It may sound arrogant, but hey, someone’s gotta recognize my hard work! Why shouldn’t it be me? It sure as hell won’t be any White people! Like Elijah was saying—our education doesn’t matter. Whatever we do, our Blackness will always be judged and measured, and we’re likely to fall short because of that. STORYTELLER: I can just hear my mother and sister telling me the same things! [looks frustrated and speaks the next two sentences woodenly, one at a time] “You’re Black first. Work twice as hard.” As Ernest H. Johnson said more than 20 years ago, “Attending college does not permit [Black] males to escape second-class status in America, or the frustrations of racism. It does not matter how much education a [B]lack man has, where he went to college, or how much fame and fortune he has attained, he can expect to suffer racial injustices based entirely on the color of his skin.”9 Sadly, Johnson’s words were true years before he said them, and sometimes it feels like they still ring true today. Sometimes, it feels like nothing’s changing for us Black men. 25

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My time with the newspaper came after what some White people have called the “good ole days.” Well, I’ve tried to steer clear of those people. They were outrageously vocal about the “good ole days,” but those days were when no people of color were considered their work peers or even called their colleagues. And even in my time, did they even see me? If they saw me, did they regard me as their peer? Their jokes suggested they didn’t. If they really saw me, they might have seen the Black man under the submissive, embarrassed smile. ELIJAH: You know, some people say that being gay shields a Black man from negative outcomes connected to his race. They think being gay leads to questioning our masculinity overall, reducing our Blackness and, therefore, our potential to be powerful Black males. It’s a kind of othering that invalidates the impact of negative stereotypes normally associated with Black men—that they’re aggressive, athletic, threatening, non-intellectual animals. I think that’s bullshit. EDMOND: I agree, my friend! That is bullshit! ELIJAH: Yeah, my being gay lets me move in some White circles because of this mystique that some White people have about me being Black, male, and gay. This combination seems to give some White people a weird urge to bond with me when they wouldn’t want to if I wasn’t gay. EDMOND: Really? ELIJAH: Really! But little do they know that I still find myself suffering under a general grey cloud of racial oppression and questioning of my masculinity. EDMOND: Wow! Elijah! Man! Of all the years we’ve know each other, I can’t remember you ever opening up and speaking so frankly and honestly about what it’s like to be in your skin as a gay, Black man. I should have known. ELIJAH: How would you have known? We’ve been friends for years. You both see and love me for who I am. EDMOND: I am just sorry. ELIJAH: Stop it! There’s nothing to be sorry about. It is my reality. It’s tougher than I ever imagined. JAMES HENRY: That’s just a lotta shit to keep bottled up inside. Thanks for sharing. ELIJAH: You’re welcome, and enough about this. JAMES HENRY:

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Wishes by Black Men EDMOND: Well, hey, I’m straight. ELIJAH: That’s not news. [smiles] EDMOND: Shut up! [smiles back] I am trying to say something. [pauses] I’ve

never had to worry about those two worlds like you do, Elijah. ELIJAH: You mean because you’re straight? EDMOND: Yes! [pauses] People assume because they know I’m straight that I’m naturally a masculine Black man. But for you as a gay, Black man, you’re probably right that your masculinity is always in question just because you’re gay. ELIJAH: Exactly! EDMOND: What the hell is that about? As Black men, we live in two worlds. First, our Blackness as men and then the desire to be accepted and belong among White people. Isn’t that enough for you to contend with in life? Being gay makes it harder, I guess. But don’t you have enough to deal with by being a Black man living in a racist White America? Damn! [speaks the word loudly and emphatically] JAMES HENRY: You know, I’ve never really had a chance to talk about these things with other Black men. I turned the other cheek with my so-called colleagues. I’m feeling ashamed of that but talking with you all is making me feel a bit better about my past responses to racist talk. I wonder: What would my African American forefathers have done in my situation? What would they have taught me? Would they have shown me the need to speak out or told me to just sit back and ignore the racism in my workplace? Would they have taught me to talk to my supervisor? Or would they have told me just to disregard those jokes and toughen up? I just don’t know. STORYTELLER: James Henry, Edmond, and Elijah are opening up and unmasking their intimate feelings and struggles about being Black men. They’ve never spoken this way to each other, and their friendship goes back many years. I’m wondering why today is the first time these feelings and struggles have come up. I suspect it’s the severe racial divide in the US And, it could be how Black men are treated by the White police, the “Blue.” It could also be that growing up Black taught them to be guarded with their feelings. Has being guarded been a personal protection like wearing a face mask for COVID? Yet, as they tell their stories, they gain a sense of relief as they unmask themselves, like shedding deeply embedded discomfort about themselves. [pauses] 27

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Here is a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem written in 1896. It’s called “We Wear the Mask.” The poem seems appropriate for these conversations. It’s also appropriate for Black men in general given the haunting expressions of racism we must contend with. We Wear the Mask We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask! [Actors join in, speaking this last line together]

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Dunbar’s poem refers to the internal and external cries of pain stemming from Black men living in White spaces, wanting to belong and be accepted but knowing we won’t be as James Henry, Edmond, and Elijah described so perfectly. We wear the masks to get along with White people, giving up being true to ourselves at the same time. Like we would check a coat at a restaurant before sitting down to have a meal, we check our very selves at the door, crossing the threshold in a mask to counteract our true selves. [pauses] Well, like Elijah, I’m gay. Being a gay, Black man can cause other Black people to see and treat us as not being an authentic Black man. Whatever that means. They look strangely at us and, in some cases, treat us as outsiders. We don’t belong. We’re not fulfilling the Black masculinity image that’s expected by our Black community. Some of us—like me—also fall in love with a person outside of our racial group. For some Black people, this is taboo. In some cases, it’s

Wishes by Black Men

like being disloyal to the Black race. Laura Cathcart Robbins10 talked about loving and being with a White man and questioned whether she’s less Black because of her intimate relationship with a White man. Why do Black people or any people of color need to question or negotiate their loyalty to their race because of wanting to love and be in love with a person outside of their race? Is this some type of double-bind discrimination? Should I  deny myself loving Michael, my White husband? Hell, no! He makes me incredibly happy. Why should we have to decide between White or Black? I’ve heard Black women talk about Black men regarding their unavailability by saying, “He’s gay, he’s married, or he’s into White women.” We’re scrutinized even by our own race. Michael and I dated for two years before marrying in 2019. We each had dated men outside of our race. In a subconscious role, I’ve become the scout in our relationship. Michael doesn’t know this about me. But, like a Black James Bond, I scout out any potential unfriendliness in settings where he and I travel together. My racial antenna could go up when I sensed any disturbance in the force, as they say in the Star Wars films. Sometimes, as Black folks, we need to mock, poke fun at, or create humorous narratives about our unfortunate and uncomfortable circumstances with racism to not always be angry or even to cry. Regardless of whether you like my film references, I hope you get what I’m saying in my goal of protecting Michael and my relationship from people’s cruelty and unkindness. This level of protection is needed because of the ignorant and narrow-minded attitudes of some people even in the 21st Century. Let me tell you a quick story. In the fall of 2016, the dedication for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, was celebrated. Twice I’ve had the opportunity to visit the museum. My second visit was with Michael, who wasn’t yet my husband. We traveled to DC in the spring of 2019. While standing in line to enter the museum I noticed a Black and White, straight couple. How do I know they were a couple? Well, the dead giveaway was the hand-holding. The Black woman and I had noticed one another across the zigzagging line. We nodded and smiled at one another as a sign of solidarity or as a way of saying, “I  gotcha!” Her partner and Michael didn’t notice our non-verbal

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communication. Our nodding felt comfortable and familiar, and it resembles the Black folks’ ritual hug-handshake.

WHY SHOULD I DENY MYSELF HAPPINESS JUST BECAUSE MICHAEL ISN’T A BLACK MAN? WE LOVE WHO WE LOVE, AND NO ONE HAS THE RIGHT TO USE THEIR IGNORANCE AND BIGOTRY TO QUESTION LOVING SOMEONE WHO’S NOT OF YOUR SAME RACE. PERIOD! DROP THE MIC!

EDMOND:Man, oppression can pop up when you least expect it. I’ve been

a young leader. I was appointed assistant principal at 31 and a principal at 32. And I had to deal with the expectations and pressures of others who questioned my age, race, and qualifications for the job. Against all odds, I succeeded in navigating those expectations and pressures. I was then leading other educators who had a variety of years’ experience—many with more experience than me. I worked hard and was able to craft great interpersonal relations with the educators and staff. My leadership purpose was to be mission-driven and mission-oriented in highlighting the importance of transforming the lives of all children. Black children, too! BUT LET’S REMEMBER THIS: Because I’m Black and male and in a leadership position, new oppression, new odds can crop up in any moment. One major success doesn’t change that I’m in a lifelong war with oppression and some White people’ feelings about me as a Black man. The stakes of oppression get higher as I move up the leadership chain. To be honest, I get defensive when I’m with certain White people. It’s uncomfortable and can hurt the mission, which hurts me, too. JAMES HENRY: Edmond, you said oppression pops up anywhere, anytime. I  agree. [pauses] There were times when I  didn’t think the newsroom oppression would ever lessen. Within that racist workplace, I was having an equally rough time as a young reporter. I realize now I was both a part of that work environment and trying to develop my career in a White world. It wasn’t quite like your situation, Edmond. But you were moving into White spaces of leadership as an assistant principal and then principal—that’s a success! Not that I’m trying to compete with you or anything. But, and maybe this is the point, we were both developing careers in White spaces where you didn’t see many Black men. Okay, here’s an example. [pauses slightly] Part of my job was to call people to set up interviews at their homes or in some public space. 30

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The starkest racist experience I remember is when I called a White woman and, in my best professional voice, I arranged an interview at her home. I sensed after hanging up with her that she might think I’m a White man, too. She was just too willing and agreeable to have me come over to her house, especially as a strange man. I really thought her comfort in having me coming over to her house was because she thought I was White. [pauses slightly] Because I’m extremely afraid of other people’s dogs, I asked her if she had a dog. She said yes and that the dog was harmless. I said to myself, “Okay, but—” When I got there, I rang the doorbell. I could hear the dog barking. It sounded vicious, and I felt scared. The woman opened her front door but not the screen door. The look on her face when she saw me was priceless. [grins sarcastically] STORYTELLER: Okay! Let’s stop right here! I think I know where this story’s going for James Henry. Already, it sounds like one of my own experiences. I  worked as a guidance counselor and school social worker for eight years. One of my school districts was White with few students and faculty of color. One year, prior to school starting, a sixth-grade mother called to make some changes to her daughter’s middle-school schedule. This was my first year in the district, and I was pleased to be able to assist her quickly. In appreciation for my help, the parent unexpectedly came to the school, bringing me a potted plant. I was delighted by her thoughtfulness. The secretary rang my office phone to let me know the parent was in the main office and had something for me. I hung up the phone, opened the door, and walked down the long corridor past the assistant principal’s and principal’s offices. From a distance, I could only see the mother’s backside. She was a tall and slender woman with a short brunette haircut. She was dressed professionally, so I assumed she was on her way to work. As I approached her, I said, “Mrs. ____.” She quickly turned to acknowledge my presence. [takes a deep breath] As soon as we locked eyes, she looked surprised and stuttered, “You’re Mr. Battle?” Her tone sounded like “What the fuck? No! Not you!” Our conversation was cordial, but I was acutely aware she was surprised and didn’t expect a Black school counselor. We were both intensely uncomfortable. But the advantage I  had with knowing and being uncomfortable—if there’s really such a thing as having an advantage with discomfort—I knew 31

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what had just happened between us. Like James Henry, I’ve been down this road before of White people thinking they were getting a White interaction and discovering they weren’t. ELIJAH: Wait! She just stood there? JAMES HENRY: Yep! ELIJAH: For how long? JAMES HENRY: Not too long. ELIJAH: Okay. What happened? JAMES HENRY: Well—. [interrupts himself] Hey, guys, I’m really worried about Mitchell. He should’ve been here a long time ago. ELIJAH: Go ahead, man. [looks at James Henry]. JAMES HENRY: I’ll finish my story later. I don’t want to control the conversation. Didn’t you want to say something, Elijah? ELIJAH: Yeah! But I’m good. No. Finish your story. JAMES HENRY: No. I want to hear what you have to say. Please. ELIJAH: Okay. So, I recently decided to donate my car to charity and commute to work. In the last three-to-four months, I’ve been commuting to work by train. It’s much more relaxing, and I often get work done on the train. But, if I’m honest with myself and you guys, a large part of why I stopped driving has been the increase in police violence against innocent, unarmed Black men. STORYTELLER: You see! That’s exactly what I was saying earlier about the White men in “Blue” and us Black men. Even though some Black police officers have been involved in the shooting of Black men, I have seen that White police officers are dominantly reported by the media as shooting Black men. ELIJAH: Well, I found myself wanting to minimize the possibility of having any reason to interact with the police. I realized the only time I’d be likely to interact with a policeman is if I’d be pulled over for a traffic violation. I felt very uneasy any time I noticed a police car behind me. I’d get paranoid that they might be running my license plates and looking for reasons to pull me over. The simple act of not driving reduces the threat for me. STORYTELLER: Black men are 20 percent more likely to be pulled over by police and three times more likely to be killed by police.11 Selling his car might have saved Elijah’s life! I wonder if he simply didn’t want to be another George Floyd. 32

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Edmond looks down at his watch and then looks at Elijah and James Henry. EDMOND: Listen, I’m really concerned. Where the hell is Mitchell?

They all look away from the audience and at each other. JAMES HENRY: Let me call him again.

James Henry picks up his cell phone to call Mitchell. The phone rings as Elijah and Edmond turn away from the audience and are facing James Henry as he calls. Mitchell finally answers after four rings. MITCHELL: Hello?

Man, where the hell are you? [speaks sternly] Do you know we’ve been waiting here at the café and worried about you? MITCHELL: I’m sorry! I’m coming. I was on a phone call with a colleague from the community college. JAMES HENRY: That was one hell of a long phone call, man! [gives a “what the fuck” look] Do you know it’s been 45 minutes and there’s been no word from you? What the fuck, Mitchell? [sounds excitedly angry] JAMES HENRY:

Edmond and Elijah start to laugh because they can overhear the conversation between James Henry and Mitchell. MITCHELL: I know! I know! I’m sorry! I really needed to take that call. My

colleague was in a crisis with a student. Those people are always in some sort of crisis. Can’t they handle their shit on their own? For God’s sake! They’re adults! Please, man! [pauses briefly] Listen, I don’t want to talk about them. You need to get your Black ass down here now! We’ve been waiting. You know this is our check-in time with each other. When are you coming? MITCHELL: I’ll be right there! Please stop yelling at me. JAMES HENRY: I haven’t begun to yell! I’ve got more when you get here! Trust me! MITCHELL: Okay. Stop yelling at me, dad! JAMES HENRY: Don’t get cute with me, Mitchell! [speaks angrily] MITCHELL: Yes, dad! JAMES HENRY: Mitchell! [speaks extremely angrily] JAMES HENRY:

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Edmond and Elijah can’t contain their laughter. James Henry shouts at them. He looks at and speaks to Edmond and Elijah while still on the phone with Mitchell. JAMES HENRY: Stop laughing! This shit isn’t funny! Lately he has been doing this shit a lot. Last week, we were supposed to meet for lunch. He kept me waiting at the restaurant for 30 minutes. Finally, he shows up, apologetic for being late. Again, I was worried about him. Did something happen to him on the way to meeting me? Or, what? MITCHELL: I can still hear you! Edmond and Elijah laugh even harder in unison as they can hear Mitchell. James Henry returns to talking with Mitchell while glaring at Edmond and Elijah. He sounds less angry, as if the air has gone out of him. Stop fuckin’ being cute with me! When are you getting your ass down here? MITCHELL: I’m on my way. Order me a cup of coffee. JAMES HENRY: I did. It’s cold! MICHELL: I’m on my away! [speaks emphatically] JAMES HENRY: Don’t play with me, Mitchell! Get your ass down here! JAMES HENRY:

Mitchell now seems a bit angry and ends the call abruptly without saying goodbye. MICHELL: I am coming!

Elijah turns to James Henry and speaks gently. ELIJAH: You were really scared, weren’t you?

What the fuck do you think? [sounds angry and weary] Of course, I was worried about him! I am worried about you two as well! I am worried about all Black men! Don’t you know? Our weekly get together assures me that you guys are fine. I know I can call you all any time and you will answer. Not like Mitchell. [speaks sarcastically] But I need to see and touch you all to know you are alright. With all the shit happening to Black men—just walking or running down the street minding your own damn business as a Black man can cause you some type of fuckin’ harm. Like Ahmaud Arbery.12 That’s why I’m so upset with Mitchell. He doesn’t seem to get my worry. I know his job is important to him and all, but he should’ve called. If something was to happen to him or to either of you, I  would lose my

JAMES HENRY:

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shit! I would simply lose my shit! [now speaks gently] You guys are my brothers; you’re my family. I love you guys. EDMOND: We know man! We get it. Calm down, James Henry. He’ll be here. Just calm down, please. [motions with hands, palms pressing downward in a “calm down” movement] James Henry turns off his phone and walks off stage to get a cup of coffee for Mitchell. He brings it back and puts it on the table in front of the empty seat. He sighs and looks a bit deflated. The cast returns to looking through the picture window at the audience. Edmond puts his arm partially around James Henry’s shoulder and pulls him closer to his body to give a hug of comfort. Now that we know Mitchell is okay, can we get back to our talk? ELIJAH: Sure. EDMOND: You know, I also felt the pressure of being an African American male and being a positive role model for others. EDMOND:

James Henry pushes Edmond away from the hug position and interrupts in an angry voice again. Edmond throws his hands and arms up in the air with the expression that says, “I tried.” How can we be positive role models when White people mistreat and continuously disrespect us? [pauses] So, let me finish my story about the White woman I  was trying to interview. You’ll see why I’m so upset. Anyway, she obviously had mistaken me for a White man over the phone. I  kindly asked if she still wanted to conduct the interview, and before I knew anything, she opened the screen door and out flew a pit bull charging at me. Panicked, I took off as fast as I could and climbed a tree, as the dog nipped at my heels trying to take a huge bite. I screamed at the woman, who wasn’t even trying to restrain her dog. ELIJAH: Shit! Seriously? EDMOND: Shit! What the hell is that! ELIJAH: Man! Racist colleagues. Racist White woman and her untrained dog—or was it trained to run after people like us? It’s the 1950s and 1960s racial assaults and attacks in the south repeating themselves. Just this past week, there was a report of a Black man being shot 20 times in his grandmother’s backyard for simply holding something JAMES HENRY:

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in his hands that the police thought was a gun. It was a cell phone, for crying out loud! These events seem never ending. They keep happening. They demonstrate the reality that we don’t belong. And they creep ever closer to you and me. James Henry, even though we were laughing at your conversation with Mitchell, we know your fear for him is fuckin’ real! Neither of us said it out loud, but we were worried, too. It’s no joke! We were all worried about Mitchell and where he might be. I think the three of us were wondering individually whether some sort of harm had happened to him on his way to the café. We just didn’t want to go there with an awful story. So, if the truth be known, we all were scared. This fear that we’re forced to live with is unbearable. Often, we assume the worst. EDMOND: You’re right, Elijah. You are right! Anyway, going back to our discussion before, I do want to say that at my school, the students and their parents looked up to me. I think one reason is because I often was dressed for work in a dress shirt, tie, and suit. I didn’t perpetuate the stereotyped [uses air quotes] “unprofessional Black man” image. My persona was clear. As a Black man, I carry myself with pride, dignity, and integrity, just like you guys and Mitchell. Despite what James Henry was saying before about the difficulty of Black men being role models, you three are my role models [chokes up with his words] and I’m profoundly proud to know you for these many years. Elijah walks over and hugs Edmond. No words are exchanged. Edmond regains his composure and continues his dialogue with Elijah and James Henry. You know, one of my fondest memories of that time is when some children would say, “Mr. Edmond, you look like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” Now, I don’t look anything like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but the image of Dr. King was another reason for their respect. I was positively shaping their lives, their families’ lives, and the teaching faculty. I was teaching them that a Black man does not need to and should not ever embrace anyone’s negative image of him. Images that people, especially White people, have about Black men do not define me. Instead, I established a clear persona by exuding confidence, competence, and compassion, and by being an effective leader, projecting that I belonged just like any White principal would belong.

EDMOND:

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Well, man, you can be proud of that. But I couldn’t be the White reporter for that woman no matter what I wore or how I carried myself. I just keep going back in my memory to how that woman encouraged that vicious dog to go after me. It was traumatizing. I can see it and feel it even now, and it makes my heartbeat fast even now. My fear comes right back, and I’m there again—up a tree with her standing and looking. The main thought racing through my mind was, “This must be what Black people back in ‘Alabackwards’ experienced when Bull Connor sicced dogs and aimed water hoses on African Americans protesting for their civil rights.” Woo, that’s some fucked up shit. Knowing this doesn’t help my blood pressure. ELIJAH: I see all these attacks as a form of oppression. This fear of what could happen at any moment for any reason contributes to me feeling depressed. It’s a kind of depression that makes it hard to focus on work and everyday responsibilities. I  know most of my White counterparts aren’t experiencing this. They’re not afraid to drive to work like me. They’re not donating their cars just to be safe. They navigate through their days with no fears of race and racism. I can’t! And I feel even more depressed knowing I can’t. EDMOND: Elijah, I’m so sorry that these moments cause such a depressive state for you, my brother. I can understand the depressed feeling you’re talking about, though. You know, as one of the few African American educators in the city where I was a principal, I’ve had to build connections among the Latino student body and their families, the predominately White teaching staff, and the African American and White students and their families. I had to try to meet all their different needs simultaneously. But first, I  had to gain their trust. I constantly must work hard against my own Blackness because of some White people’s negative ideas of Black men. You know what I mean? That’s the oppression I was feeling then and even now. ELIJAH: I couldn’t agree more! JAMES HENRY: Even the situation with the White woman—she maintained that her dog had never acted that way before. But without a doubt, I knew she’d opened that screen door on purpose just because I’m a Black man. Once again, as you talked about with your Blackness, my Blackness was being attacked. And I felt extremely oppressed by how she allowed her dog to chase me as I climbed a tree for safety. I shouted to her to call the dog off, but she just stood there. And, to JAMES HENRY:

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make matters worse, when I got back to the newsroom, my bosses brushed this off as a harmless, isolated incident. I was livid but felt helpless and hopeless at the same time. My frightening and incredibly dangerous experience was invalidated. With the woman’s hateful actions and then my colleagues not acknowledging the seriousness of what had happened to me, I  was dismissed twice in one day. Oppression won. ELIJAH: Of course, oppression won. When doesn’t it? Oppression affects not only our mental health as Black men, but our physical health as well—like with your blood pressure, James Henry. I  get tired easily and sometimes it’s hard to eat right and get exercise because I feel too fuckin’ sad. To counteract these effects, I’ve decided to work on a meditation practice, take up yoga, and eat a plant-based diet. I just won’t let oppression win and make me sick. I need to enjoy life regardless of the arrows White people shoot at me. EDMOND: Yeah, man. I agree. Like you, I understand that I have to take action to care for myself and others. I realize the seriousness of my role in overcoming the negative stereotype and perceptions about being an African American male. I’ve worked hard to be accessible, sensitive, caring, and professional in my role as an educational leader. But I need to do more to tend to my physical and emotional self. I’m not there yet because I’m still struggling, brother, with how to navigate what feels like constant negativity and stereotyping. JAMES HENRY: You two are right. I also need to take care of myself. I get stuck sometimes in traumatic memories like being chased by a pit bull. It was just another day working in a city that shamelessly showcased no remorse for racial conduct affecting Black men. STORYTELLER: There were days not so long ago when Black men were lynched just for looking at a White person the wrong way. The stories these men have just shared indicate that a lot has changed since Jim Crow, but not enough has changed for Black men living in a racist America. Sadly, our stories aren’t just tales. Each story represents recognizable humans, people who share the grief and mourning of their racial trauma. I’m so aware that our stories will repeat themselves unless many things change. As we Black men tell our individual stories and share our lived experiences, we’re trying to make a necessary shift from hopelessness to hope. When more people understand us as unique individuals, as people with a background and 38

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context, Black men can better mourn and heal the grief of racial trauma. James Henry turns and looks at Elijah and Edmond. Edmond looks both weary and disgusted. EDMOND: Where the hell is Mitchell? His coffee couldn’t get any colder.

They all look down at the coffee mug. The scene ends and the three pendant lights dim over the cast while a jazz interlude plays to prepare for the next scene. ***

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Act 2: Powerlessness The lights return, and the jazz interlude ends. James Henry has left to run an errand but will return. There’s still no sign of Mitchell as his coffee mug awaits him. Edmond and Elijah remain at the café. ELIJAH: Do you want any more coffee? EDMOND: Yeah. Sure. Thanks.

Elijah walks off stage and returns with hot coffee mugs for himself and Edmond. Their talk begins while sitting and sipping their coffee. Both are facing the audience through the picture window. James Henry was really upset with Mitchell. [gently places a coffee cup in front of Edmond] EDMOND: I know, man. [picks up the coffee cup and takes a sip; pauses brief ly] He sure was, but I  can understand James Henry being upset and afraid. I’m worried and afraid about sometimes walking down the street, entering a store, or driving my car—like you. I  think, “Will today be the day I  get assaulted for just being a Black man?” ELIJAH: Yep. [sips his coffee] I  know, man. [pauses again] No matter how much we Black men are educated or try to better ourselves, White people always ostracize us as not belonging. [pauses] I  really hope Mitchell gets here before James Henry gets back. [looks puzzled] EDMOND: I know. ELIJAH: I don’t want them to have another scene in the café like they did on the phone if Mitchell doesn’t get here before James Henry gets back. ELIJAH:

Elijah looks out the picture window to see whether Mitchell is coming. I thought James Henry was going to go through the phone and slap Mitchell. [chuckles] EDMOND: Oh my God! You’re so right. It looked like his eyes were going to bulge out of his head while he was talking to Mitchell. [chuckles] He was becoming so red in the face you could see the redness, and he’s as Black as me. [begins laughing] So, you know he was really upset to get that red! [laughs harder] Edmond and Elijah laugh together. 40

Wishes by Black Men ELIJAH: Those two are like brothers. [smiles to Edmond]

Yes, they are. Oh, my. [laughing slows to a halt] So, we were just talking about White people wanting us to be in their workspace but seeming to be suspicious of us at the same time. ELIJAH: Yep! Fucked up! EDMOND: It is seriously fucked up, my brother, but their attitude leads me to feeling and thinking about being powerless. ELIJAH: What do you mean? EDMOND: Well, it feels like sometimes White people want us in their workspace, but they are suspicious of us at the same time. That makes me feel powerless. It feels like sometimes White people need us for their convenience to show off to their other White colleagues: “Look at us! We’re into diversity and inclusion.” [waves his hands in the air to mimic and mock these statements] Well, don’t do me any favors! [looks disgusted] Don’t hire me for your convenience or need. Don’t manipulate me by using my skin color to make you feel better about yourself as a White person. I’m not your token. In two different professional settings, I felt my immediate White bosses were intimidated by my intellect, ability to connect, and competence. One boss was very insecure working with me for whatever reason. Again, not my problem! I  felt as though I  was walking a tightrope in interactions with him. Multiple times, he directly came out and asked whether I wanted to take his job from him. Can you believe that, Elijah? ELIJAH: Of course I can, Edmond. Some White people don’t know what to make of us or how to engage with Black people in general. And when it comes to Black men. Please! [pauses] Forget it! [pauses] They are completely lost. [chuckles slightly] EDMOND: So true. I  later learned that that boss thought that I  was hired to replace him. I, on the other hand, just wanted to do my job! I didn’t give two shits about his job or diversity and inclusion. [sounds sick and tired] I’m tired of people of color being the poster child for diversity and inclusion. [now sounds angry] ELIJAH: You know what, Edmond? Feeling powerlessness can be uncomfortable and dangerous at the same time. Let me tell you why and how. EDMOND: Shoot! EDMOND:

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I was a junior in high school, very excited about what the future might hold. I was president of “Youth Alive,” which was a studentrun Christian club, and highly active in the teen ministry of the Brooklyn Tabernacle, a charismatic church. During Easter break that year, I  went to visit my grandparents in Providence, Rhode Island. My maternal grandparents and paternal grandmother lived just a short distance from each other. One afternoon, after spending time with my Nana and Grandpa, I walked to the bus stop and waited for the bus that would take me to the other side of town where my Grammy lived. After a short time, the bus arrived, and everything was fine until what seemed like a hundred police cars descended on the bus, forcing it to pull over. All the passengers on the bus—including me—looked out the window with concern and excitement, wondering what all the commotion was about. Looking out the window, I  saw a White police officer walk over to the bus right in front of where I was sitting. He pointed directly at me through the window, saying, “Put your hands in the air.” I looked behind me to see who he might be talking to, and then it dawned on me that he was talking to me and that I  needed to comply. Then another White officer came on the bus and told me I  needed to come with him. Again, I  complied, this time with my heart racing, wondering what I could have done. I didn’t have time to think about the powerlessness and humiliation of being forcibly removed from a public bus. Once outside, I was handcuffed and put into the back of a police car. I was driven downtown. Remember, my grandparents knew nothing about what had happened to me. There was no time to call them. Having them worried escalated my powerlessness and made me sick. I believe at some point I must’ve been read my rights, which I’d seen enacted on hundreds of TV police dramas. However, I didn’t make use of my right to remain silent. I  questioned the officers politely and calmly about why I’d been taken into custody. At that moment, I became aware of the racial dynamics. The officers, who again were both White, were clearly surprised and annoyed not only by my questions but at how competently I asked and spoke to them. You could see in their faces this look of bewilderment and puzzlement as to how I presented myself to them. It was like they were saying to themselves: “Oh, shit! What do we have here?” [chuckles] I wanted to say:

ELIJAH:

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“I’ll tell you what you have here. An educated and competent Black man, you dumb ass!” STORYTELLER: You know what? [pauses] We Black men really don’t all look alike. [speaks sarcastically] Once, I worked with a White woman who constantly called me “Larry.” Larry was another Black guy who worked in a different department than I in the same social service agency. I constantly corrected her. First, I would tell her, “He’s taller than I” and then, I would continue, “He’s bald.” Seriously! It didn’t feel like she was even trying to correct herself or that she felt bad for her mistake. I really believe she just thought I’d respond to the name “Larry” because he and I were the only two Black male social workers working in the agency! Why not, right? I wonder if anyone ever called him “Stefan.” [offers an inquisitive look and a laugh] Some White people seem to think that all Black men act and speak unintelligently. Some of them are surprised when they discover we can put together a declarative sentence and use big words like—ignorant. [smiles harshly] There’s a caustic racism implicit in thinking all Black males are illiterate or incapable of speaking mainstream English dialects. I’ve dated White men before and each one said something like, “You don’t talk or act like a Black man.” Once I was presenting research at a conference and an older White man approach me to say, “You sound intelligent.” There’s supposed to be a compliment hidden in these statements, but there wasn’t. These statements offend me because everyone has subdialects available when the context calls for using them. Elijah’s ability to speak well to the police shouldn’t have shocked them even though he presented himself as an extraordinarily competent teenager. Frankly, our elders have taught us to maintain our dignity especially when faced with a racially traumatic incident. They have taught us how to avoid unforeseen and unjustified consequences. Black people refer to this teaching as “The Talk.” “The Talk” happens when Black children are taught “how to avoid—and survive—police encounters.”13 This talk is especially significant for Black boys and young men, but it’s also becoming a part of Black girls’ and women’s lives. Having “The Talk” and associated lessons are intended to increase young Black folk’s chances of living—of growing up to adulthood. 43

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My experience is that you’re right about White people in their not expecting us to be educated and competent. No matter how much I tried to reassure my boss that I didn’t want his job, it didn’t matter. I always tried to do my job with excellence, and I always felt I had to constantly reassure him that I wasn’t trying to take his position. I felt like I was walking a tight rope. I felt powerless because of his insecurities about me being Black and competent. Maybe it was a worry about my Blackness and the agency wanting to diversify staff that threatened him. Just a feeling. I don’t know. ELIJAH: Insecurity is part of what made me feel powerless if we consider being Black a reason to feel uncertain in an uneven power-based situation. So, Edmond, when I was arrested, I was a student at the Bronx High School of Science, one of the most prestigious high schools in New York City. I had to do well on a very competitive exam to get into the school. We’ve already talked about the constant need to do well as a Black man. Well, I  was the third son of college-educated parents, and every inflection of my voice reflected that fact when speaking. The police had arrested the wrong kid, and they knew it in an instant. EDMOND: Of course, they did, my brother! ELIJAH: And knowing this more than likely made them feel embarrassed and angry. They had the power, but I  had the integrity of being articulate and innocent. They couldn’t easily pretend I  was someone I wasn’t. Well, I guess they could. [speaks slowly, thinking] I was arrested anyway. STORYTELLER: One time, an older White man said to me: “You speak like you’re educated.” Wow! Think of that—educated! [his sarcasm is tinged with anger] This is an example of what Mary-Frances Winters called a microinsult, an “interpersonal communication conveying stereotypes, rudeness, and insensitivity and that demeans a person’s identity.”14 Actually, Winters was more direct than that. She deleted the word “micro” to call it what it is: an insult. [stated emphatically] It’s just plain insulting to think of Black men as stereotypically uneducated, criminal, or scary. Such insults will lead to feelings of powerlessness. I mean, how can you fight that kind of thinking? Some White people’s ideas and thoughts of Black men are so embedded inside them. Really, how can you change their thinking, especially if this is all they know or were taught about us? EDMOND:

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Yes, you did have the integrity. I think the inequality of their power over you is what created this pervasive sense of powerlessness for you. [pauses] For me, in a different work setting, I  had a boss who delegated responsibilities to me and other members of the team unequally. The boss didn’t hold some Black individuals accountable for their work productivity, and I felt as though I was given more strenuous and more complicated assignments. I think he thought I would make a connection with those people because they were the same color as me—Black. So, what was I supposed to do? Help the Black people unable to keep up with their work by doing the work for them? What message does that send to them about their ability to learn their jobs? What message does that send about me? If my boss was trying to compliment me in some way, he failed. ELIJAH: Yeah, failed totally. For me, being arrested created a frightening sense of helplessness. I was just a Black teen, minding my own business. When we arrived downtown, I was placed in a cell and, after some time, another White detective came into the cell and asked, “Is it possible that the woman’s items could be returned?” When I  explained that I  didn’t know what he was talking about or why I  had been taken into custody, he also looked surprised by how I  spoke. Again, another White cop with the misconception about us. STORYTELLER: You see! [looks angry] Many White people just make assumptions about Black men. In the White detective’s mind, there wasn’t much possibility Elijah was the wrong Black man. It wasn’t until Elijah spoke to him that the detective might have said to himself: “Oh shit! Here’s a well-spoken Black teen. He couldn’t be the one who did the crime.” But what if Elijah wasn’t well spoken or educated? Isn’t it still possible that he didn’t do the crime and the detective picked the wrong Black man? Mary Francis Winters might call this error part of the “Blame a Black Man Syndrome” in which not only are Black men incarcerated “at three times their representation in the population,” but they’re easily mistaken for one another and viewed as all looking the same, which is a microinvalidation or just plain invalidation.15 The social imagery and characterization of Black men seems to be etched in White people’s racial consciousness. Again, it’s difficult, maybe impossible, to move some White people away from their belief systems. EDMOND:

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Wishes by Black Men EDMOND: Elijah, I can’t imagine how you didn’t just scream at them: “You

have the wrong guy, you idiots!” [speaks emphatically and with anger] I can’t compare my lifetime of powerlessness just chipping away at my career with the horror of your arrest. But I know Blackness and feeling powerless has affected us both. In another work setting, I had a boss who reassigned the major components of his job to members of the team. He rarely was in the office and often ran errands during the workday. My team had very competent people, and we handled all the responsibilities just fine. Yet, because of this situation, which was totally unfair, as the only Black man in the office, I felt powerless to speak up. I couldn’t confront this situation because I was afraid of being the only one. I was afraid of repercussions. ELIJAH: I get uncertain about stuff, too, Edmond. What the detective said when interrogating me chilled me to the core because I began to realize that they considered a White woman’s experience more important than my literal truth. They were taking her word for it. While I was waiting for the bus, she drove by, saw me, and thought that I was the guy who had snatched her purse and ran. And this all happened a few days earlier! Like I said before, we don’t all look alike! [speaks forcefully with anger] Really, I get her wanting her purse back. It had some mementos from a recent vacation and all she wanted was to have the items returned. But, in fact, I hadn’t even been in Providence when the mugging had occurred. No matter! Three months later, I had to appear in court. I’ll never forget hearing the clerk read, “The State of Rhode Island vs” me. I’d always loved Rhode Island as the place where several generations of my family had lived, and now instead of being the place for loving family, it was the place where all the state’s power was brought to bear against me. The judge threw out the case, stating he didn’t believe I’d stolen the woman’s purse. I  think he—fairly enough—judged the case on my family’s socio-economic status, my academic achievements, my religious affiliations, and my speech as a form of cultural capital. In fact, in terms of class, I was positioned higher than the woman who was accusing me. However, in the 32  years that have passed since then, I’ve often reflected on the fact that this woman—because she was White—was able to have me taken into custody, locked in a cell, and forced to appear in court. Just a simple phone call, mind you. Thankfully, the contents of 46

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a purse were all that was at stake, but what if the charge had been more serious? One White officer told me that I wouldn’t be released until I was 21 years old. I don’t know if he said that to scare me, but I now know that there are many people—a good number of Black males—in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. White Americans have had complete freedom to treat Black men however they want with no remorse or consequences. Remember Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy who was brutally killed by two White men after being accused of flirting with a White woman in 1955? Those men weren’t ever charged. This experience ruined Rhode Island for me. I can’t go there without thinking of the fear and shame of being arrested. Any wonder why I don’t want to drive and potentially face White cops? Edmond is silent; he looks intensely and compassionately at Elijah. What if I didn’t have the forms of cultural capital that signaled they’d made a mistake? What if the police officers’ anger had resulted in my being physically harmed or killed? At almost 50 years old, I’m as powerless now as I was then. I can’t stop the same thing from happening to me again or to those I love. Ultimately, having a doctorate, being a college professor, being a member of the LGBT community, or even having married a Jewish White man . . . none of these things will save me if someone doesn’t care to see me as an equal man. Above all these things, I’m a Black man living in the United States. And that may be my downfall. STORYTELLER: What Elijah lost isn’t surprising for many Black men. Blacks represent most of the wrongfully charged and later exonerated people in the United States.16 This period of his life is something he can never get back, and his racial trauma will always resonate for him. He was embarrassed, shamed, intimidated, and his tender memories of safe visits to Rhode Island for time with his beloved grandparents were stolen from him. Was there restoration? Was there justice to make him “whole”? No. I think Black men want to heal. But it’s hard to forget such cruelty at times. ELIJAH:

Edmond and Elijah stare out into the audience. The lighting over the cast’s heads dims while Mitchell’s cold coffee mug still waits for him. A jazz interlude plays in preparation for the next scene. ***

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Act 3: Picking Our Battles The lights return, and the jazz interlude ends. James Henry has not returned from doing his errand. Mitchell finally arrives and enters the café [stage] through an aisle of the audience. Mitchell gives Elijah and Edmond the customary Black man’s greeting. Mitchell looks at both Edmond and Elijah. Noticing James Henry’s absence, he seems inquisitive because he had been so anxious for Mitchell to be here. MITCHELL: Hey, I’m sorry for being so late. Where’s James Henry?

OOOOO, man! You’re in trrrroooouuuubbbblllleeee! [looks at Mitchell with an “I wouldn’t want to be you” glance] MITCHELL: What do you mean? What did I do? EDMOND: Man, you didn’t call or let us know where you were. And then when James Henry called, you said you would be here soon. This isn’t soon my brother! That call was a half-an-hour ago. MITCHELL: I know. I’m sorry. [sounds somber] I got caught up in a conversation with a faculty colleague that went a lot longer than I anticipated. Then, I needed to write a quick email. As department chair, there’s always work that needs to be done. ELIJAH: Well, be prepared for James Henry to be pissed at you. EDMOND: He was really worried and scared not hearing from you. MITCHELL: I know. But I told him over the phone what happened. EDMOND: Yeah, we heard it. But man. [pauses] I  don’t think he cares about your reasons. James Henry is dealing with some serious shit with fears for Black men and how we’re targeted. For him, you could have been in trouble. Mitchell, James Henry has always looked up to you, man, as a type of big brother. Didn’t you realize that? MITCHELL: No. EDMOND: Yes. [pause] I’m not saying he doesn’t care for Elijah and me, but it is clear to us there was this respect and affection he had for you. He’s an only child. I think he needs that one-on-one role model with a Black man—that’s you, not all of us. We love him. Don’t misunderstand me, but it’s been you who has played this big brother role. [pauses] So, we think that’s why James Henry went off on you the way he did. What do you think, Elijah? ELIJAH: Damn right! I couldn’t agree more! He loves you, Mitchell. I know he loves us, too. But he loves you like a little brother loves his big brother! That’s particularly important since his father’s death. He idolized his father. ELIJAH:

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Okay. [pauses] This is starting to come together and make sense to me. We talked last week. I  could tell he’s struggling with fear and anger about all the killings of Black men the last few years. I think we all are; but I think maybe James Henry is more aware of it, though, and more expressive with his feelings than the rest of us. Where is he? EDMOND: He went to run an errand. He should be back soon. MITCHELL: Okay. Hey, I’ll be right back. I’m going to get some fresh coffee. This mug’s cold. MITCHELL:

Mitchell begins to walk off stage to get coffee, but Edmond stops him. Here, take back this cold coffee back that James Henry got for you. And you kept referring to him as “dad” on the phone. MITCHELL: Yeah, I was playing with him. He needed to chill, man! EDMOND: We know. [pauses] But wait. [pauses again] Didn’t you hear what Elijah said about the death of James Henry’s father? MITCHELL: What about it? EDMOND: Don’t you remember, man, that James Henry lost his father when he was a teenager? MITCHELL: Yeah, I  do remember, but damn it! Saying “yes, dad” was a joke. I was just playing, guys. ELIJAH: We know and it was funny—to us. [smiles warmly at Mitchell] EDMOND: Yeah! It was funny, but James Henry sure didn’t see it that way. MITCHELL: Wait. [pauses] What does Elijah referring to James Henry’s father’s death have to do with me trying to lighten things up? EDMOND: Man, it was when his father was dealing with cancer. MITCHELL: Yah. EDMOND: And James Henry started to connect more closely to you as a big brother. He was looking to you to fill that void for him. He needed a strong, Black male figure in his life, and that person was you. [pauses while looking at Mitchell] Remember how much he was struggling? MITCHELL: I do. Shit! [pauses] I  remember us hanging out. He talked about hearing his father crying out in pain at night. We spent a lot of time together during his father’s illness and death. EDMOND: Right, man. For James Henry, not knowing if you were okay brought back feelings from a terrible time. He couldn’t control the narrative of his father’s illness and death. Again, we think that’s why EDMOND:

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he flipped out on you on the phone, man. He needed to know you were okay. And calling him “dad”—just wow! MITCHELL: Okay! I get it! I get it! EDMOND: Don’t get defensive. Just listen. MITCHELL: Sorry. I feel like an ass right now. EDMOND: Well, I  can’t help you with that. You feel what you feel. But calling him “dad” wasn’t funny; it disrespected and dismissed his feelings. MITCHELL: Yeah, I get it. Calling him “dad” wasn’t funny; it disrespected his feelings. I tried to be funny, but, well, I was trying to make an uncomfortable situation be less uncomfortable. Thanks for spelling it out for me, man. EDMOND: Hey, I  am a social worker. That’s what we do, my brother! [laughs softly to break up the tension] Mitchell takes the cold coffee cup from the bar table surface and walks off stage. Before leaving, he asks Elijah and Edmond. MITCHELL: You guys want anything? EDMOND: Nope. ELIJAH: No, thanks.

Edmond slides over to sit next to Elijah so both cast members are sitting together when Mitchell returns. The fourth seat is awaiting James Henry. All three cast members are facing the audience. MITCHELL: So, what are we talking about?

We’ve wrapped up some thoughts about oppression and feelings of being powerless, and how hard they can be to fight both in our careers and in our lives. This led us to how we pick our battles as Black men.

ELIJAH:

Mitchell looks for nods from Elijah and Edmond, which he receives. Ah, well, I’ll start. Okay. Like most people, I believe having a good job is a stepping-stone to a better future. It’s often said that people can’t climb the ladder of success without first meeting their basic needs, and having a job is a good place to start. My skin color shouldn’t dictate my worth and value as a Black man; it shouldn’t make it easy to pass me over for raises and promotions. As one of few Blacks at my college, I’ve had to pick my battles

MITCHELL:

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time after time, year after year. I’ve often been afraid to talk about getting promoted because of the dominant culture of Whiteness in my job field. I’ve been gripped with fear whenever I thought of approaching my dean about promotions. I haven’t wanted to be perceived as an angry Black man or troublemaker. I’ve wanted to stay in my lane. Well, no, I didn’t exactly want to, but I figured it was safer. STORYTELLER: Negotiating our needs as Black men in a work setting is a constant “pick those battles” phenomenon. It’s a work in progress. I’ve wondered whether that’s because we don’t even know whether, when, and how we can ask for what we want and need in the workplace. Fear of keeping our jobs is a real phenomenon, so who wants to rock the proverbial boat? In Ernest H. Johnson’s study of Black men and healing their anger, he stated that “many [B]lack men . . . thought that some White people, particularly males, don’t want to see [B]lack men promoted to positions of authority either because that would prevent some [W] hite person from being promoted or they simply don’t want to be told what to do by a [B]lack man.”17 This is almost exactly what Edmond was saying in the last conversation about feeling and being powerless. Maybe this is true; maybe it isn’t. What seems to be accurate, however, is Johnson’s view that these conditions could make for some underlying anger in the workplace because Black men may be afraid of direct confrontation—for obvious reasons. You know, this really does sound like Edmond’s story about his boss feeling threatened by him. And, really, no wonder Edmond didn’t care about getting his boss’ job. Why deal with confrontation if you don’t need to? When will Black men get past their oppression when it comes to picking those battles with White people in the workplace—or wherever—to have our needs met? ELIJAH: Mitchell, I know what you mean. For the last 20 years working in higher education, I’ve been involved with diversity efforts of various kinds. At one point, I served as an assistant vice president for institutional diversity at a large, southern, public institution. At my current university, I’ve been involved in efforts to recruit and retain students and faculty members of color. But I recently decided to stop doing diversity work simply because I’m convinced most institutions could have more diversity if they really wanted it. 51

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The fact is that they don’t truly want diversity. They’ve used me as a token Black just like Edmond implied before. This is my new form of self-love and self-preservation. By remaining silent about diversity, I regain my personal power over the problem, and I don’t feel powerless but powerful. STORYTELLER: I absolutely love what Elijah just said about tokenism, which Mary-Francis Winters called a form of Black fatigue.18 Remember Edmond’s thoughts about this? Black people seem to be “tapped for every committee that has ‘diversity’ in the name.”19 I’m also done with attending diversity trainings to help some of my White colleagues feel better about themselves and so they can show me they’re doing the work and I can pat them on their back or stroke their ego to make them feel good! Bullshit! I live a life of racial trauma every day. Breeshia Wade cautioned that people who need to learn about diversity and their part in racial awareness and change “may struggle to sit in their own darkness because they don’t know how to be accountable.”20 As Wade further said, accountability isn’t the same as blame and shame, but it’s the work that my White colleagues need to do. Their racial unawareness isn’t my responsibility, so to subject myself to diversity trainings is an insult that I’m done doing to myself. Bravo, Elijah! I’m with you. EDMOND: Let me tell you both something. I remember a situation when I was a freshman in college. A tragedy happened in which a popular upper-class student—a White guy—was killed at a bar fight downtown off campus. There was an argument and then a fight between White and African American teens, and the White student was fatally stabbed by a member of the African American group. A White student who lived on my dorm floor could see that I was the same race and from the community that surrounds the college. He said to me, “Can’t you control your homeboys?” What kind of shit is this? This insinuation and interaction pissed me off because that student stole my identity and judged me by the misdeeds of another African American just because of my skin color. What was my battle in this situation? There was none. My color was weaponized to include me in a crime I knew nothing about. STORYTELLER: So, again. Not all Black people, especially Black men, act the same way. This is a misconception some White people make 52

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about us, condemning Black people by their color and holding them accountable for others’ choices—especially the bad choices. In the heat of the moment, these kinds of insinuations can get out of control very quickly, leading to frightening consequences. ELIJAH: At a certain point in my career, I realized I can’t make my reason for existing to be trying to convince White people to do the right thing. It’s simply too much power to give away for too little return. Any given semester, something occurs that has all the students and faculty of color up in arms over the fact that my institution is racist and not doing enough to create a safe, welcoming, and inclusive environment for people of color. Most recently, it was the school’s poorly handled response to racist graffiti on one of the ballfields. For me, picking my battles meant that I didn’t participate in any of the protests. STORYTELLER: Are all White higher education institutions the same when it comes to tackling race and racism? Seriously. [pauses] Are they? [takes a breath] My experiences mirror Elijah’s. This similarity is part of what is meant by “systemic” racism, the ingrained, inbred racism that goes unnoticed by some White people but is pervasive and quite noticeable to people of color, especially Black men. According to Mary-Francis Winters, public education in which children of color comprise the highest number of attendees still suffers from underfunding and underperformance. Black children are behind as early as kindergarten, and many remain left behind throughout their lives.21 Both outright racism and quieter, but equally insidious, microaggressions wound us. I don’t want to be White people’s teacher about this anymore, but at times, I  feel I must step in to teach those who are willing to learn! Happily, some people are willing to learn and be accountable for their racist behavior. MITCHELL: Being productive in our jobs is what matters, Elijah. At my institution, I just want to fight for equity and a fair wage for myself as a productive educator—I must start with the community of one here. Although I  received good evaluations for my efforts, I  never received a raise for them. I  was always told to “keep up the good work” or “you are a valued employee,” but the college didn’t give me an extra fuckin’ dime to show for it. I spent years convincing myself that it wasn’t my turn or I wasn’t doing my best to get noticed. Yeah, I was dumbing-down my self-worth. Not feeling equal to my White peers. How many damn times will Black men do this to ourselves? 53

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Oppression and vulnerability can work overtime for us as we try to convince ourselves that we’re worthy of fairness and recognition. It can be so hard to fight for ourselves and to make the argument—without fear of losing the war. It’s psychologically and physically exhausting as Black men to be “picking those battles.” EDMOND: Looking back on the incident in college with that White boy’s tragic death and other White people’s response to it, guys, I learned how to control my emotions and not be reactive to or enraged by hostile, racial mistreatment directed toward me about something I had nothing to do with. At the time, I had to “pick my battle” and not respond to that White student’s reference to my “homeboys” comment. In fact, I was so shocked by his statement that I was at a loss for words. Often, the ignorance of some White people requires just simple silence. MITCHELL: I admire you for keeping quiet, man. It’s tough in the face of such provocation. You know, I spent eight years without a raise while my White counterparts received theirs. I watched as new White employees moved up the ladder; all the while, I  sat there being a “good old Black boy” and thinking that maybe if I  don’t appear upset, they’ll reward me too. Man, was I ever wrong? Remaining quietly in the background didn’t get me anywhere. Although I didn’t think my supervisor was a racist or a bigot per say, I do think there was a level of unconscious racial bias that kept me from getting a raise simply because I’m Black. I always felt like I had to pass an extra test or challenge to prove myself worthy to my White supervisor. I’m ashamed to say I’ve accepted this behavior as a normal part of American culture. It’s made picking my battle much harder. STORYTELLER: Hold up! Wait! Excuse me, Mitchell! How in the hell is that not racist? You said your supervisor had an “unconscious racial bias.” You felt you had to pass a test to prove your worth to your White supervisor. Come on, man! Yes, he is a racist! You don’t need to document, defend, or explain because you’ve dealt with it before. Your lived experiences as a Black man is documentation enough. What the supervisor did is familiar and painful to many Black men. [shows his emotions to the audience] We swallow a lot of our racial trauma and let the bad behavior of some White people slide. We ignore comments simply to get along and, in some cases, to belong—or even to STORYTELLER:

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pretend we belong. Frankly, my belly is full. I’m tired of swallowing my anger and being silent in the face of White people’s cruelty and cluelessness as to how they discourage Black people, especially Black men, in the workplace and elsewhere. ELIJAH: Thanks, Mitchell. But I  didn’t come to change the institution where I  work, which in many ways is simply a microcosm of the larger society. It isn’t that I don’t care about the institution but that the best way for me to have a positive impact on its culture is for me to take care of myself. I can’t do that if I allow myself to be dragged into every racially charged Black hole that emerges. It’s too fuckin’ much! EDMOND: I really get what you’re both saying, especially Mitchell. There was a situation at my workplace where I found, and continue to find, that the expectations and standards are higher, tougher, and less fair for me as an African American. I  get asked to do more and to do my peers’ work for them. Well, I said something about this already. Remember? ELIJAH: I do, my brother! STORYTELLER: It might sound unfair of me to say, but some White people seem to enjoy having different measurements for the work performance of Black people. I once worked at a predominately White state college where my White supervisor micromanaged me all the time. He was clearly insecure and threatened by my educational abilities—I could see that by his attitude during our weekly supervision meetings. It was painful to be dictated to by him, and it was a source of festering anger, as Ernest H. Johnson rightly noted.22 He treated me like an incompetent Black man. I had a doctorate; he didn’t. The year I spent working for this state university and having the White man as my supervisor was traumatizing. He was a classic racist and really didn’t bother to disguise it. I  believe my competence—which was why I was hired—made me a threat. He seemed to think I should be beholden to him as my supervisor and I should want to follow him like a lap dog seeking approval through treats and pats on the head. ELIJAH: If striving for institutional change is what college or university is all about, it’s a difficult battle to fight. I’ve seen students of color with great promise become completely derailed by trying to change the institution rather than remaining focused on their studies and why they came to college in the first place. Similarly, I’ve seen faculty 55

Wishes by Black Men

of color put the possibility of getting tenure in jeopardy because all their energy goes to committee work around issues of diversity rather than focusing on their productivity. I’ve come to regard all of it as a trap for people of color and particularly for Black people in academia. Years ago, I  was in couples counseling trying to work on a failing relationship. The therapist told us that the relationship with all its drama and toxicity will exist until one of us decided to stop dancing. To say “I’m out. I’m done.” I simply refuse to dance. STORYTELLER: Elijah is spot on! Because my institution is primarily White in demographics, when I was first hired, I was tempted to get involved deeply in diversity ethics. I remember Black friends and colleagues telling me to get busy writing for publication instead. The tenure clock moves swiftly. Many of these friends and colleagues instructed me in how to balance the four areas for tenure and promotion—teaching, scholarship, service to college and department, and community. I  worked exceptionally hard to do all the work, but especially to publish, so I could get tenure and promotion on time. I made sure that my I’s were dotted and T’s crossed before submitting my dossier. I was told to have at least two publications in print. I had five. I planned that there would be no question about being awarded tenure and promotion. As my mother and sister said, it’s expected that I need to work harder than White people. “Remember,” Mother said, “you’re Black first.” EDMOND: My job was prestigious, and I weighed confrontation against keeping that job. I felt as though I had to pick my battles and not address what I believed were inequities based on race. Here’s one inequity example, and it speaks broadly to unfair expectations based strictly on skin color. On several occasions, my White colleagues found some students difficult to work with. They were public-school teachers unused to having African American students in their classrooms. Those colleagues had the audacity to have students re-assigned to me because I was of the same race! This was especially true of African American boys. In general, the African American male students were perceived to be hostile and dangerous, and my colleagues felt threatened in teaching them. On several occasions, these boys were transferred to me because my White colleagues thought I could connect with them. 56

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But here’s the rub: I was asked to transfer some of my easier students to my White colleagues as I  took on the more complex and timeconsuming cases. What the fuck! If I called them on what I recognized as racist and unequal work distribution, then I am not picking my battles wisely. I might be picking a battle that could be detrimental to me as Black man who wants to keep his job. Remember the idea of White fragility?23 This is their protective shield to not deal with the obvious when it comes to race and racism. STORYTELLER: Oh, boy! Returning to when I was a guidance counselor/ school social worker, I’ve observed and experienced White teachers’ negative attitudes, unskilled interactions, and simple avoidance when dealing with Black boys in the classroom. Just like Edmond, too many times I’ve observed White teachers who seem uncomfortable interacting with students of color, especially Black boys and young men. Mary-Francis Winters explained that “research shows that nonBlack teachers have lower expectations of Black students than Black teachers,”24 but we all know there are fewer Black teachers. This means that we need to understand better why some White teachers are so reluctant to interact directly with Black boys and young men. Maybe they lack training and experience with Black people, but another real possibility is that they want to avoid the racial and social complexities and differences. Their professional development training must begin to account for learning about and actively practicing how to work with Black students overall and Black boys particularly. MITCHELL: Hey, what time was James Henry coming back? I owe him an apology [looking at Elijah and Edmond]. James Henry returns from his errand by entering through an audience aisle, a different one from the one Mitchell used [if possible]. Mitchell looks at James Henry. MITCHELL: So, where’d you go? JAMES HENRY: Say what! [sounds angry and anxious] Where did I go? Where

the hell have you been, Mitchell? You just getting here? ELIJAH: Mitchell, I told you he was going to be pissed! [enunciates the word p-i-s-s-e-d as if each letter is a separate word] MITCHELL: No, no. I’ve been here for a while talking with Edmond and Elijah. 57

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A while! Just a while? I thought you said you were on your way after we got off the phone. MITCHELL: Well, I  didn’t get away that fast, okay? Look, man, I  know I owe you an apology and for what it’s worth, I’m really sorry I upset you. I should have called. JAMES HENRY: Damn right you should have! I was scared. You know how it is around here with people, man, especially White people being unsympathetic to Black men and our Blackness. I would lose my shit if something happened to you. MITCHELL: You’re right! I agree! I am really, really sorry. JAMES HENRY: Thank you. Be careful! MITCHELL: I will, little brother. I will. STORYTELLER: To admit any wrong or to apologize threatens White people’s privilege. This problem is part of Breeshia Wade’s message that blame and shame aren’t necessary; it’s accountability that White people—and Black people—need. We’re all just human beings who always need to change and become better people. Wade said: “The insidiousness of systemic racism is that, like many cultural norms, it doesn’t require our conscious participation—we are always internalizing it and then externalizing it, moving through the world the way we’ve learned is ‘normal.’ What makes racial trauma so reprehensible is that it takes the basic human desire to connect and turns it into a weapon without our consent. This takes many lifetimes to change.”25 Similar to James Henry’s earlier question, I  wonder, “When will change happen for Black men?” My hope is that someday it will. I may not live see it, but I hope it will change in these next generations. JAMES HENRY:

James Henry and Mitchell embrace. James Henry looks at the other cast members with a smile. Mitchell sits down after James Henry and he embrace. James Henry is still standing. The lights dim over the cast. Sly & the Family Stone’s 1968 “Everyday People” begins to play softly as the cast members continue to talk and drink their coffee. The audience applauds.

Notes 1 W. John Morgan and Alex Guilherme, “I and Thou: The Educational Lessons of Martin Buber’s Dialogue with the Conflicts of His Times,” Educational Philosophy and Theory (November 2010): 979–96, 982.

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Wishes by Black Men 2 Matthew Martin and Eric W. Cowen, “Remembering Martin Buber and the I-Thou in Counseling,” Counseling Today, May 8, 2019, n.p., http://ct.counseling.org/2019/05/ remebering-martin-buber-and-the-i-thou-in-counseling/#comment-811387. 3 The names of the cast members are pseudonyms for the Black men I interviewed for this book. The actors who starred in the staged reading debut are: Ym (aka chad browne-springer) playing Elijah; Michael L. Turner, playing James Henry; Jesse White, playing Mitchell; Kevin L. Booker, Jr., playing Edmond; and Patrick “Rico” Williams, playing Storyteller. I also want to acknowledge Te’Asjah Bosh, the stage manager. My special thanks to Godfrey L. Simmons, our director, and to Tony DeJesus, my friend and colleague, without whom the staged reading of Wishes by Black Men would not have debuted in April 2022. 4 Staging: There is a white screen in the back of the stage with yellow and orange lighting blended to create an autumn, morning sun. A long, tall, bar top table and four 30-inch-tall director’s chairs are positioned close to the center of the stage. The director’s chairs are behind the table and positioned to face the audience. In front of each chair on the bar table surface are four black binders with the scripts for the staged reading. The Storyteller also sits in a director’s chair but to the far right of the stage, observing the action and weaving his story throughout as analysis of other men’s talk. He holds his script in his hands and always faces the audience. There are three black pendant lights suspended over the bar table and chairs. Directly behind the cast and closely in front of the white screen are three farmhouse windows, each having four windowpanes. The word “Black” is etched in one of the four windowpanes in the first window; the word “Lives” is etched in one of the four windowpanes in the second window; and finally, the word “Matter” is etched in one of the four windowpanes in the third window. Together the words have uniformity and signify the chant “BLACK LIVES MATTER.” When dialogue occurs, the lighting is on all the speakers equally.   Production Note: The scene names come from the writing prompts given to the four interview participants whose responses comprise the messages of this staged reading. The staged reading background is fictional, but the words and sentiments of the cast are real. The cast members are listed on the left-hand side of the script in order of their appearance; the Storyteller’s entries appear indented to signify that he isn’t part of the circle of four friends but rather is a narrator commenting on their experiences and his own. 5 Michael Quander and Lauryn Froneberger, “Black vs. African American: The Complex Conversation Black Americans Are Having about Identity #ForTheCulture,” WUSA9, May  30, 2019; updated June  17, 2020, www.wusa9.com/article/ news/local/black-history/black-vs-african-american-the-complex-conversationblack-americans-are-having-about-identity-fortheculture/65–80dde243–23be4cfb-9b0f-bf5898bcf069. 6 Ernest H. Johnson, Brothers on the Mend: Understanding and Healing Anger for African American Men and Women (New York: Pocket Books, 1998), 108–9. 7 Mary Francis Winters, Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body, and Spirit (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2020), 53. 8 Alexandria Burris, “Black Homeowner Had a White Friend Stand in for Third Appraisal. Her Home Value Doubled,” IndyStar, May  31, 2021, www.indystar.

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Wishes by Black Men com/story/money/2021/05/13/indianapolis-black-homeowner-home-appraisaldiscrimination-fair-housin-center-central-indiana/4936571001/. 9 Johnson, Brothers on the Mend. 10 Laura Cathcart Robbins, “I Have a White Boyfriend. Does It Make Me Less Black?” Huffpost Personal, August  8, 2020, www.huffpost.com/entry/black-woman-whiteman relationship_n_5f36f082c5b69fa9e2fb733d. 11 Winters, Black Fatigue, 149. 12 Ahmaud Arbery was murdered in a racially motivated hate crime in 2020. 13 Pria Mahadevan, Emilia Brock, and Virginia Prescott, “The Talk Is a Rite of Passage in Black Families. Even When the Parent Is a Police Officer,” GPB News, June  26, 2020, www.gpb.org/news/2020/06/26/the-talk-rite-of-passage-in-blackfamilies-even-when-the-parent-police-officer. 14 Winters, Black Fatigue, 126. 15 Ibid., 129, 149. 16 Ibid., 66. 17 Johnson, Brothers on the Mend, 108. 18 Winters, Black Fatigue, 18. 19 Ibid., 128. 20 Breeshia Wade, Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2021), 95. 21 Winters, Black Fatigue, 60–61. 22 Johnson, Brothers on the Mend, 4. 23 Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2020). 24 Winters, Black Fatigue, 62. 25 Wade, Grieving While Black, 164–65.

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Activity 3

THE AUDIENCE

Thank you for watching today’s staged reading. I  hope you’ve had a good break. After we discuss the staged reading, we’ll take an hour-long break for lunch. There was a lot of dialogue happening between the guys and me in the staged reading. I’m guessing you may be interested in processing what you heard and witnessed between the guys and me. So, I would like to open up this next hour for discussion. As a prompt, please think about these two questions: What is your interpretation of these Black men’s stories? And how do these stories of Black men’s lived experiences affect you? You can decide whether to use these questions as part of your responses. [Stefan pauses for a moment to allow people to think and decide whether they want to share]

STEFAN:

A Black woman raises her hand and stands. STEFAN: Yes? ANTOINETTE: Hello, Dr. Battle. My name is Antoinette.

Hello, Antoinette. Thank you for coming. Everyone, please feel free to call me Stefan. ANTOINETTE: Thank you. STEFAN: You’re welcome. What are your thoughts? ANTOINETTE: Well, first, thank you for writing Wishes by Black Men. Even though I’m also Black, as a woman, I  felt like I  was learning a lot about the excruciating lived experiences you all had to deal with STEFAN:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003304777-4

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regarding racial trauma as Black men. I tend to see racism more from my own perspective as a Black female, so I realize I need to pay more attention to the male side of the issue. STEFAN: Thank you. I appreciate your feedback, Antoinette. I had hoped that this piece would provoke new thinking from the audience. ANTOINETTE: You’re welcome. How did you create such a provocative piece? STEFAN: In the handouts I’m giving you at the end of the workshop, I explain that this is autoethnographic work taken from the lives of five American Black men, counting myself. I wanted to make sure I got the guys’ stories right. They gave me their words and trusted me to tell their stories while accurately portraying their experiences. That was a lot of responsibility. Their trust is a privilege that I needed to honor. The process of arranging their words and my own expressions as a conversation was challenging. Sometimes I would close my eyes as I wrote and imagine being in the café, hearing them talking expressively together. Fitting their individual responses together into a dialogue was like a puzzle. There were so many pieces of their lives available to create this longstanding relationship among the guys. ANTOINETTE: I also was intrigued by how you, as the Storyteller, engaged with your four characters and how you connected their stories to persistent and destructive oppression. That really got me thinking about my own experiences of oppression as a Black woman, Stefan. STEFAN: I used the Storyteller persona to offer a larger picture that would help explain what the characters were experiencing. But I couldn’t help inserting my own outrage at times. I was hoping to get the audience thinking about how oppression plays out in Black men’s lives in ways they might not have considered before. I’m glad it made you think about what we might do to change racial realities as well as your own sense of oppression. Thank you, Antoinette. Antoinette sits down. Stefan points to a White woman whose hand is raised, and she stands. CYNTHIA: Hello. My name is Cynthia.

Hello, Cynthia. Thank you for coming today. What would like to say?

STEFAN:

Cynthia looks over at Antoinette, pointing at her. 62

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Like Antoinette, I  want to thank you for sharing this staged reading. This was very brave of you to write and share with us. STEFAN: Thank you for your kind words. I had a few colleagues review the staged reading to get their impression and any comments that might help the writing be stronger. They each said the same thing as you— that I was being “brave.” I guess any playwright has to be brave to be in this position, especially a novice like me. But I think the four men who shared their lived experiences were the brave ones. But it’s the Black men who live in our culture who are the bravest ones. Thank you for your kind words. CYNTHIA: You’re welcome. [pause] I write for a living, but I write fiction. Well, I  couldn’t write non-fiction about racial needs or change. Thank you, again, Stefan! STEFAN: Cynthia, certainly, our world would benefit from more attempts to share the challenges of lived experiences in a racially divided America. White people’s experiences are valuable, too, as the interview with Beth Hewett that you read before today’s workshop shows. CYNTHIA: Well, that’s a challenge from you to me. [shrugs slightly and smiles] I’ll have to think on this further. CYNTHIA:

Stefan points to another Black woman in the workshop audience. As Cynthia sits down, Carine stands. STEFAN: Yes, ma’am! CARINE: Hello. My name is Carine. STEFAN: Hello. Nice to meet you, Carine! CARINE: Nice to meet you, too! STEFAN: What would you like to share?

I also love your play like the others have expressed. I  found myself nodding at each of the characters, feeling them resonate in me as a Black person with my own life experiences and wishes that seem a lot like theirs. Yet, I’m also in awe with how you brought out the uniqueness and individuality of each Black man’s voice. It’s clear that one of your messages is that we can’t know all Black men by knowing even a few or many Black men. I guess that’s true of all people, isn’t it? STEFAN: I believe so. CARINE: You can’t know all Black women by just knowing me. STEFAN: I agree! CARINE:

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There’s so much more I  would like to say, but I  find myself speechless for now and want to give others a chance to talk while I think. This staged reading is an intriguing work of art. STEFAN: Thank you! And thank you for your kind words. [pause] You’re right that any one person is unique even when they share racial or cultural characteristics with others. But, please, tell us more when you’re ready. CARINE: I will. Thank you. STEFAN: Anyone else? CARINE:

Carine sits down. Stefan spots a hand raised and points to a White man. STEFAN: Yes, sir! You in the blue shirt. MATT: Hello. My name is Matt. STEFAN: Hi, Matt. Thank you for joining us today. MATT: Hi. You’re welcome. STEFAN: What would you like to comment on?

I’d certainly like to join in with others who have spoken and say “thank you” for the opportunity to see your staged reading. It’s an interesting approach to telling the stories of four Black Americans. STEFAN: Thank you, Matt. What did you find interesting? MATT: You’re welcome. I guess that it’s not like a typical play with a typical plot. You’re not telling a single story to us but allowing the men to tell multiple stories with multiple themes. It’s up to us—to me—to listen and see how each man has experienced life as an American Black man. STEFAN: I don’t want to single you out, Matt, but given that you’re a White man, I  appreciate your openness to this discussion. In fact, I  want to thank all of you who have commented so far. I  appreciate your courage. Acknowledging race and racism in conversations like this one isn’t easy. It is difficult to talk about such sensitive and important issues. I know our discussion can be challenging in general. It becomes more challenging especially with people you don’t know—like right now we don’t know each other. That’s why I appreciate your bravery as well. [pauses] I apologize for interrupting you, Matt. I just felt it was important to recognize people who have spoken so far. Would you like to say more? And, again, my apology. MATT: No worries. [pause] No, I don’t have anything more to add right now. I suspect I will later if time permits. MATT:

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The Audience STEFAN: Okay. Thank you, Matt. MATT: Thank you.

Another hand is raised, and the playwright points to another audience participant, a White woman. Matt sits down. STEFAN: Yes! POLLY: Hello. My name is Polly. STEFAN: Yes, Polly. Welcome! POLLY: Thank you. [smiling] STEFAN: You’re welcome. Please feel free to join in with your comments.

What you said is true. It’s hard to talk about racism. As a White person, I  feel a bit awkward even trying to do that here. I  look around and feel, well, I  just feel White and so obvious in this workshop where there are just a few White people. Just like Carine [looks at Carine briefly] said, it was easy to follow the dialogue even though there were times I had to choke back tears in listening to the guys speak.

POLLY:

Stefan looks at Polly with empathy. STEFAN: I hear you about feeling White and obvious in this group. That’s

how I feel every day of my life as a Black man in the vast sea of White America! [chuckles] Polly, can you share what your tears are about? What made you sad? POLLY: All these guys were highly educated and able to articulate their life experiences so clearly. So, I really heard them and felt them. I mean, who would think that professors would have so much trouble as Black men? Stefan interrupts Polly for a moment by holding up his hand in a “stop” gesture. He smiles kindly at Polly and then looks at the audience. STEFAN: I get what Polly is saying about the guys being “highly educated”;

in fact, the four men I chose for the study are particularly well educated and solidly employed either in higher education or journalism. So I know Polly’s comment probably was intended differently from how it sounds. I think she really wanted to get across the idea that these men’s stories are powerfully stated. Is that right, Polly? POLLY: Yes, that’s what I  mean about being choked up. I  really felt for them. I hope I didn’t offend you. 65

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Not at all. Thank you for checking with me. I appreciate your vulnerability through this dialogue we’re having. But since we’re talking frankly about race today, I  need to say that statements about [uses air quotes] “highly educated Black men” have become a coded phrase or message that is insulting to Black men. Some people treat Black boys and young men as if they can’t put together a declarative sentence and, if they do speak or write well, that they’ve somehow cheated. Mary-Frances Winters refers to such statements as a “microinsult.” What she means is that, intentionally or not, these kinds of statements insult Black people’s capabilities. Winters puts a strike through the prefix micro [makes an animated strike through in the air to show the audience what he means] to demonstrate that a so-called microinsult is simply an insult with nothing small about it.1 [pauses] Again, I’m not saying that Polly is using these words with negative intentions. But it’s important, if we really want to talk together, to understand such coded phrases and to stop using them. We all need to call out people (appropriately) in uses of language or phrases that downplays Black men. Polly, I’m sorry for interrupting you. And I hope you understand why I needed to say something about these Black men as being [again uses air quotes] “highly educated.” I also hope I didn’t embarrass you. POLLY: Oh, no worries. Not at all. I’m here to learn. STEFAN: Thank you. Please. Go on. POLLY: The actors were able to etch in our heads what these highly educated guys . . . STEFAN:

Stefan smiles gently and shrugs his shoulders slightly as Polly again uses the “highly educated” phase despite his having just instructed everyone about it. . . . had and mostly are still going through because of their skin color. The actors articulate beautifully their unfortunate lived experiences, and at times I  found myself witnessing their stories as if I was witnessing their racial attacks right then and right there. That is what I meant and felt about holding back my tears. STEFAN: Wow! That is a lot, Polly. POLLY: Sorry to be so emotional. STEFAN: No! No! Not at all! You’re fine, Polly. You’re fine. [sounds emotional himself] POLLY:

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A workshop participant repeats what the playwright just said to Polly about being fine, echoing saying the same words to support her. I get it! You’re fine, you’re fine. Thank you for being strong to share with us.

UNNAMED PARTICIPANT:

Stefan signals to Antoinette again, and she stands up. STEFAN: Yes, Antoinette.

My perspective is informed by my own life experiences as a Black American woman, college-educated at a reputable, predominately White institution in the late 1970s and early 1980s. So, I have first-hand knowledge of oppression, powerlessness, and picking battles. But I’ve also had relationships with Black men, including my father, brother, sons, other family, friends, colleagues, and so on. I also have my experience as a professional in higher education over the course of 30 years. So, I feel pretty well informed and closely connected to these characters. STEFAN: It sounds like you could have helped to write the dialogue, Antoinette! [smiles] ANTOINETTE: Well, maybe, maybe not. But anyway, their stories resonate deeply with me because they are true. They are absolutely true. These stories validate me even though I  am not a Black man. Their stories of injustice strike very close to home for me. I’ve experienced so much of it, too, and I’m weary of it. I want other people, especially White people, to understand. One other thing, Stefan. I must admit that when you speak of these existential topics and their profound effects on the well-being of Black people, especially Black men, I wonder why you’re talking only about Black men. I say this because while a difference in gender impacts the way in which a Black person experiences America’s special brand of racist oppression, the essence of the damage affects us all. STEFAN: Thank you, again, Antoinette. That’s a good point. I  concentrated on Black men because I know the story of our racially charged and traumatized lives all too well as a Black man myself. ANTOINETTE: I get it. But, please, in your next play, remember Black women and our plight and struggle with race and racism. It’s just as real as Black men’s challenges. STEFAN: Oh, I know, and I will. I’m already working on a staged reading that will similarly honor Black women’s experiences and voices. ANTOINETTE:

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me to write about something you know, something that feels familiar. Then, you can speak the truth. Stories like these men are telling too often are shrouded in secrecy and, as several note, silenced due to fear of rejection. Autoethnography, which is the process of telling these stories that I used, helps to take these stories and expose them in the light of day. This staged reading was constructed both to protect these men and encourage their personal power. When you leave today, I’ll provide you with a handout that clearly explains this autoethnographic process and suggests some readings to learn more.2 Maybe it will help people like Cynthia try a new type of writing. [smiles at Cynthia] Stefan points to Polly again, who stands. STEFAN: Yes, Polly.

I agree with Antoinette and want to piggyback on what she just said if I’m understanding her correctly. STEFAN: Yes. Please, go ahead. POLLY: Their stories of injustice and resulting pain, every one of which was completely believable, made me feel sad and also angry. As I already said and as you can see, I’m not Black. [shrugs self-consciously] But you don’t need to have the same color skin as someone else to feel with them when they’re experiencing pain. While each character told his own story, and the stories were woven together through conversation, I could see how their individual lived experiences related to one another. They all and understood each other’s pain and rage. That layering created a richer, deeper understanding for me of the Black male experience living and growing up in a White dominant society. POLLY:

Polly finishes and sits down again. To encourage more talk, Stefan decides not to comment. He points to a different audience member, another White woman who stands. STEFAN: Hello. NINA: Hi. My name is Nina. STEFAN: Nina, thank you for joining the conversation. NINA: I’ve been listening and waiting to jump into the discussion. STEFAN: Please do!

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ries. I was distressed and angry, sometimes full of rage, as I watched the play about these four highly educated Black men. We can’t ignore the toll of their experiences. STEFAN: Thank you, Nina. I appreciate your thoughts. I’m also finding it interesting that the education level of the four Black men seems remarkable to the audience. If anyone has any ideas why, I’d love to hear about it. Matt stands again. MATT: To respond to your question, Stefan, maybe that’s because the ste-

reotype is that only poor, uneducated Black men have a hard time in life or experience racism? That’s one thing that makes your staged reading so unusual—you’re dealing with a demographic that people might think would have an easier time in life. That these men haven’t had such an easy go of it teaches something about the breadth of Black male pain in America. STEFAN: That’s an interesting point, Matt. It’s also a profound comment. Some people would rather perpetuate the stereotypical lies about Black men, including seeing us all as impoverished in education as well as in finances, rather than truly want to get to know us individually. That’s why I wrote this performance text. Matt sits down. Another audience participant, this time a Black man, stands and speaks abruptly. SYDNEY: Hello. My name is Sydney. STEFAN: Okay. Go ’head, Sydney, and welcome!

Thank you. [pauses] Well . . . [pauses again] . . . I wanted to be a part of the conversation. But I wasn’t sure whether I should say what I’m thinking. STEFAN: Why not? What’s going on? SYDNEY: Because I didn’t want to be seen here as just another angry Black man. That’s a label often tied to Black men when we express our feelings and thoughts about race and racism. But the truth is that I am angry! STEFAN: Well. [pauses] I thank you for speaking your truth. Please share whatever you want or feel the need to say. SYDNEY: I have reached a point in my life and career where I am sick and tired of trying to prove myself to White people because in my state, SYDNEY:

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they are in charge in so many aspects of my professional life. I  am just sick of it. I  guess I  am sick of them. I  think of the character Elijah when I  consider the reality in my own career and the fact that I would have to relocate to see more Black professionals serving in leadership roles in the field of education. That is sad to me. Like Edmond, I, too, have had a White person tell me—more than once—that I  look like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., or some other famous Black American in history just because I’m Black, educated, and well-dressed. [pauses] STEFAN: I suppose that takes us back to the question of educated Black men experiencing racism in ways we’ve come to recognize as Matt indicated a moment ago. SYDNEY: Dr. Battle—Stefan—as I watched your play, I continually thought of the content of my doctoral dissertation as well as an article I wrote earlier this year and had published with The Great Schools Partnership, Inc. Both contain many personal experiences of race and racism, both personally and professionally. [turns and looks at Matt] Matt could be right that people stereotypically think of Black men as poor and uneducated. But all Black men can have the problems your staged reading showed. White people especially need to start paying attention! [turns away from Matt and speaks angrily] STEFAN: That’s an important point, Sydney. I appreciate you acknowledging Matt’s comment earlier. It’s noteworthy in our conversation this afternoon. Tell us more and help us understand your perspective. SYDNEY: Sure. I cannot begin to tell you the number of heads that turn and eyebrows raise when I am in a public place like a car dealership or a doctor’s office, and my name is called out as “Dr.”! Even in the 21st century, too many White people are still so shocked and surprised that a Negro male can be a medical doctor or doctor of philosophy. To that, I say, “We shall overcome!” I can identify so well with each of the four characters in the play, as well as the storyteller. As a Black man in America today, I have grown both wary and weary of White people especially. I have become very selective of my interactions with White people and try my best to avoid any prolonged public contact in everyday, necessary places like department stores, the post office, grocery stores, and so many others. I saw the film Harriet about Harriet Tubman, the slave freedom fighter, with a White female friend. After that and then following 70

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George Floyd’s death, I honestly did not want one White person to say a single word to me. Sydney breathes deeply as Carine intently looks at him, prepared to reply. Both Sydney and Carine are standing. Sydney eventually sits down while Carine continues to stand and speak. CARINE: Thank you, Sydney! [pauses] Ten years ago, if you were to ask me

about the impact this performance would have on me, I would probably bring up the ongoing issues with race and what needs to happen to “fix it.” But now, I’m a proud Black mother raising three sons, a nine-, four-, and two-year-old. The mere thought of what these three boys may go through in life just for being born Black males brings me to tears. I find myself in the position of the mother and sister the Storyteller describes in the play. I am constantly telling my sons “Don’t be sloppy.” “Hold your head up.” “Your handshakes should be as strong as thunder.” “Always look people in the eyes when you are speaking to them.” [emotionally expressive] These mannerisms go against my Haitian culture, which is based on submitting to elders and those in higher position. However, they are skills that are necessary in America because if my boys act as Haitians, they might encourage people who see them as inferior to treat them badly. My boys are not inferior! But I’m afraid that respectful and strong behaviors may not be enough to keep them from being stopped by law enforcement, charged, and booked with no apologies— just like Elijah and countless Black men and women who’ve had to experience oppression and even death . . . [pauses and breathes in deeply] Well, am I helping or hindering my sons by constantly amplifying their need to become strong Black men in America? Here, they are Black before they are just boys. STEFAN: I’m familiar with the talk you give your boys. My mother’s words were simpler but offered a message with a broader context. She would say to me, “Remember, you’re Black first.” Her message was as clear to me as your messages to your boys are clear for them. CARINE: Throughout the play, I found myself petrified while holding my breath at times, hoping that none of the characters would end up dead from a violent hate crime—especially Mitchell, who was absent from the first scene. Four educated men—here I go, calling out their education levels—reminiscing about their experiences, trauma, 71

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oppression, and disappointments. But I just said, “four men” without mentioning their race. The truth is, if this was a staged reading about four White men, one could assume that these men were war veterans because of the levels of trauma they’re experiencing—war veterans who had to deal with violence, death, or even being put in a position where they had to decide whether another human being lives or dies and then having to live with that for the rest of their lives. No! This is a performance about four Black men, who were not speaking of their war scars from fighting with other nations but from a war they were drafted into from the time they were born Black. Stefan quietly allows Carine to speak. Nina then begins to speak—too quickly to allow him to speak. Carine sits again. I felt like Carine said she felt about Mitchell. I was very anxious, almost from the beginning, when Mitchell didn’t arrive. I  think I  shared anxiety with his friends. Though his initial delay was explained with his phone call about work responsibilities, as time passed, I couldn’t suppress visions of some terrible incident. I can only imagine the fear that Black families experience frequently, like Carine with having Black sons. What a relief when Mitchell appears! Then, when James Henry later leaves on an errand, it triggers similar concerns. STEFAN: What made you have these fears? NINA: I felt emotionally involved! As an older White woman, I can only imagine the fear of “driving while Black,” the hateful response of women and fierce dogs, or the frequent and false accusations against young Black men. I am deeply upset and ashamed to live in a country that has imposed, and continues to racially impose, a lifetime of living with emotions of fear and dread. And I wonder, what have I done to Black people without knowing it or understanding my part in racism? NINA:

Nina sits down. There’s silence among the audience members. STEFAN: Nina, that question is precisely the kind of response I had hoped

this staged reading might evoke. I don’t know the answer, but I do suggest some self-reflection on all our parts. Marching together in protest, like with the BLACK LIVES MATTER movement, is a start, 72

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too. But if White people are marching from a position of not having done the work of self-reflection and inner change, their participation is meaningless and maybe even harmful. So, I say to White people: Become active in Black causes, but do it from a position of genuine respect for and knowledge about Black people and people of other races and colors. Everyone, I’m seeing a lot of emotion from people who have spoken and from others who haven’t. I see from some of your body language that this conversation might be hard to have. [pauses] Am I on target? Some audience members partially nod their heads. A few utter sounds like, “uh huh,” “um hum,” and “yeah.” Matt speaks and stands again. So far, I’ve been the only White man to speak, so I want to reply to your prompts, Stefan. I see these four Black men’s stories as an expression of their perceptions, feelings, and experiences as Black men living in America in the post-Civil Rights era. I accept their stories as they are, as they are presented, without any interpretation on my part. These are their lived experiences. For me to interpret them in any way would be dismissive. STEFAN: Well, I appreciate your sensitivity to that concern, Matt. But did their stories have any particular meaning for you or have their stories affected you in any way? MATT: Sure. While I can’t interpret their stories, I can reflect on whether any of my assumptions or core beliefs were challenged. For the most part, I found the stories to be typical of those my Black friends and colleagues have told me during the past 35–40 years of my work life. You see, I’ve worked with many Black men and women, first in the military and then in work that involves both military and civilians. I believe I work well with people of any race because our work is to get the job done together, not to judge each other based on skin color or culture. STEFAN: Matt, I appreciate your position. But—and I want to be sure I convey this respectfully—I worry about your statement that you’ve heard these stories before and found them to be typical of ones your Black friends and colleagues have told you over the years. I get that. Yet, I want to challenge your thinking, too. One of my goals is to offer the contexts, the histories of these Black men to help the audience see MATT:

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where they’re coming from and how they’re unique men with unique responses to the racial experiences they individually and collectively have had. In that sense, can you see that I hope you find the distinctness in their lives as well? Matt nods, tipping his head as if thinking. Well, certainly the performance provides many opportunities for me and others to challenge our outlook and to start discussions about how life experiences affect our outlook—where similarities and parallels do and don’t exist and the effect of those differences. I realize that when we understand the different individual and racial contexts between us, maybe we can reduce division among us. STEFAN: Yes, Antoinette? MATT:

She stands again. Matt is still standing. Matt seems to think that simply seeing coworkers as equal can create less traumatic work lives for Black men. I wish that was so. But if we look at the characters’ stories in the staged reading, it’s evident that they’ve shared similar harmful experiences that have affected them. In other words, they can relate to each other’s experiences because of their own lives. They’re not expressing that equal workspace that Matt sees or has seen. Is it possible that Matt has missed some clues in how his Black coworkers really experienced their work with him and other White people? Is it possible that they are masking what they think and Matt has missed it? So, Matt, [looking at him] I’m not saying you’re lying or even just unaware, but the stories these men tell are familiar in my life and that of others. That is true. I’ve heard these stories from my father and brothers, as I said before; but it’s not me that needs to hear them. It’s White people who need to take a long, hard look at the shame, discouragement, and degradation that I witnessed my Black father, brother, sons, and now my grandson endure. As the staged reading points out, there’s a fatigue that comes from always making room for White people—suppressing your authenticity. I’ve done that work. It really is exhausting.

ANTOINETTE:

Matt responds to Antoinette’s comment. I imagine you are tired, Antoinette. The staged reading made me want to sit down and talk with the four characters. I want to hear

MATT:

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more about what their lives have been like. I’m really interested. But I also want to explore their experiences by considering generational prejudices about race. My parents’ generation likely had a different view of race because they were adults during the Civil Rights era. Were Mitchell, Edmund, and the others interacting with a lot of adults who would have had different views or prejudices about race than many White people now? ANTOINETTE: Matt, I’m not sure that their age matters. If the men had these experiences, they’re affected by them no matter who was responsible MATT: But, Antoinette, in terms of how their lives are now and how they can have improved experiences in this country, it does matter whether the generation was more or less conditioned to prejudiced behavior. Sydney stands again and joins conversation. SYDNEY: I really must challenge you, Matt. Your ideas may be well intentioned, but they’re also naïve. How can generation be at issue when it’s common these days for Black men to be accosted by the police who are our age or even younger? Like Elijah, many of us worry about “driving while Black,” and the thought of a traffic stop is terrifying, causing us to wonder whether to quit driving like Elijah did. Driving is a privilege that all citizens regardless of skin color should be able to do without fearing how a stop by police might end in prison, the hospital, or death. MATT: I hear what you’re saying, Sydney, and I really want to understand more about their heightened anxieties associated with common occurrences such as traffic stops. But I also want them to know I get a fist in my stomach when I’m stopped, too. I believe you that my anxiety is of a somewhat different origin from what you and the characters are expressing in the staged reading, but I  think most people have a sick, sinking feeling at being stopped. Can we begin talking from that small commonality? If many people of different colors experience some things similarly, is the difference we need to discuss the degree of anxiety or the potential for danger? Or both? Or something else? STEFAN: Matt, I really appreciate you speaking so clearly about the need for more talk and listening between people of the Black and White races—and other races or cultures, too. Talks like the one we’re 75

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having now are good models for others to have regarding difficult conversations about race and racism. My interview with Beth Hewett that I gave you to read before the workshop is another model. Do you have anything else you want to add? MATT: I guess I also would also like to talk with these men about how we all make stereotypical assumptions about each other. How can we avoid making those assumptions? In the workplace, all of us— regardless of skin color—have had negative experiences. Which ones have been driven by racism and which simply involve poor managerial skills? How do we differentiate when race and skin color are involved? I’m not sure how to answer that question myself. But I’ve also worked under some nasty, unfit managers who wanted me to do their work and then they took the credit. Skin color wasn’t a part of the issue there—just rank or time in the job. I’ve had some dysfunctional managers and coworkers that were like Teflon®; nothing stuck to them no matter how awful they were and how little work they did, but they got the credit anyway. Again, it wasn’t race in my experience. If Elijah or Edmond have a similar situation, I’d like to ask them to consider whether their problem might not have been so much a racial issue as experiencing bad managers. Please know that I don’t want to dismiss anyone’s experience, but are White and Black people sometimes experiencing the same issues but seeing it through different lenses? If so, I want to talk about how we all can stop lumping people together by groups, reducing members to perceived global images derived from inflating the negative traits of the few. STEFAN: You’re right, Matt. We need to stop lumping people together. I totally agree with you. It’s not fair. It devalues a person’s self-worth. [pauses] Is there anything else you want to add here, Matt? MATT: Thank you all for hearing what I’m trying to convey. My last thought is that I want to have the “I see no color” discussion—what that means to James Henry, what that means to me. Of course, we do see color; it’s one of the first things we notice about someone. But it’s what we do with that noticing that’s important to me. For example, do I mentally think, “this person is a Black professor or architect or contractor,” or do I think, “this person is a professor or architect or contractor who happens to be Black”? That small difference in wording belies a great difference in attitude. I  want to talk about how we can shift to the more positive and respectful attitude. 76

The Audience STEFAN: Matt, you sound like my husband who often says, “Why can’t we

treat each other like human beings instead of as others?” [pause] If I may be frank here, I appreciate you as a White person knowing the importance in seeing color. You don’t sound like many White people I’ve encountered who say they don’t see race. Of course, they do. How can they not! I went to a social work conference years ago and the keynote speaker was a Black man. He said it is an insult when White people say they don’t see color. I  agreed with him because what some White people are doing—perhaps inadvertently—by making this statement is shaming me as a Black man because they’re not acknowledging my identity. You’re not saying that Matt. You seem to see me as Black but not as a stereotype. I really hope you’ll continue to explore these questions with other White people, though, because we need many such discussions for changes to occur. [sighs and pauses] Does anyone else want to share? No one else stands. Thank you all for your courage to speak your different truths and to share your thoughts in this public venue. I know doing that is risking being vulnerable with people you’ve never met before today. [pause] I’m getting a signal from our organizer that our drinks and boxed lunches have arrived and are available at the back of this room. We’ll take an hour and then we’ll round out today’s workshop experience with my talk. Let’s keep the conversation going during our lunch break. See you soon!

Notes 1 Mary Francis Winters, Black Fatigue: How Racism Erodes the Mind, Body, and Spirit (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2020), 126. 2 See Activity 5, “Author’s Notes.”

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Activity 4

WHAT I WISH PEOPLE KNEW

Stefan returns to the center of the room, walking past the white screen and holding a wireless presentation clicker in his right hand. He’ll use the clicker for a few slides. STEFAN: Thank you. I hope everyone had an enjoyable lunch. My talk this

afternoon is entitled “What I Wish People Knew.” I’ve used versions of this talk in my classroom as a talk with undergraduate and graduate students, and I’m offering it in today’s workshop as a way to further personify the Black man—in this case, me. My talk will focus on how my Blackness has evolved from a young to an older Black man with specific incidents involving my emotional family trauma to the acknowledgement of my sexual identity. The mention of race and racism will explicitly overlap in my talk. How could it not? When you look at me without knowing anything else about me, you see a middle-aged Black man. As a Black man, I’ve dealt with racism more than I care to remember. This afternoon, I’ll talk not only about the racial victimization many Black American men experience but also about my own. Some of these traumatizing experiences seem to circle back to the explicit, yet at times hidden and undisclosed, weaponizing of Whiteness and the manners in which people may use their privilege to wound Black men, whether they do it consciously or unconsciously. As a scholar who teaches and writes about the experiences of racism, it’s generally important for me to be impartial. However, as a human being 78

DOI: 10.4324/9781003304777-5

What I Wish People Knew

talking to other human beings, today I’m allowing myself to take off some of that objectivity and simply express my outrage of how unashamed some White people are in being explicitly racist. With all that said, I hope you’ll find this talk moving as I peel away layers of myself, becoming nakedly vulnerable and inviting you to look with me in the mirror to view my Blackness as a man. *** A wish is a strong feeling or a desire for something one desperately wants but may not get. You might remember being a child wishing for a particular gift on your birthday, Christmas, or whatever holiday you may celebrate. Sometimes your wish might be granted while other times it may not. For Black men, a wish is often a plea to escape unscrupulous racist persecution against us. The Black man’s sensitive attunement to people’s negative racial attitudes doesn’t preclude us from sometimes sighing deeply and muttering, “What I  wish people knew ______.” These words are not unfamiliar to Black men, yet it feels shameful to have to ask for what should be a basic human right. We share with all people the need to be accepted regardless of race and gender. Some people perpetuate lies and stereotype Black men in harsh, even inconceivable ways; they create unfathomable rumors and false narratives about us. They’ve become wedded to the lies they spread about who and what Black men are. They may even spread what they think or know to be falsehoods about us. Did you know Black men’s mental health in the United States is in jeopardy? Yes, it is! The instances of racial challenges for us seem to have increased since the twenty-first century rang in on January 1, 2000. How do I know this? Well, I am a Black man. George Floyd’s death—his murder!—was a major event for Black Americans, signaling to us that we’re in danger daily and reiterating the horrors of being on our side of the racist divide. According to Fowers and Wan, “The rate of Black Americans showing clinically significant signs of anxiety or depressive disorders jumped 36 percent to 42 percent in the week after the video of Floyd’s death became public. That [percentage of increased mental distress] represents roughly 1.4 million more people.”1 You don’t need to be a mathematician to know this is significant. 79

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Interestingly, the media contribute to our pain by documenting and then repeatedly commenting on our racial challenges as epitomized by George Floyd’s murder and other brutal deaths of Black men in the twenty-first century and earlier. We have two issues here that I  want to note today. The first is the number of recent Black male deaths and the second is how the media traumatize and retraumatize us through endless pictorial and video retellings of the incidents, which I’ll get to in a moment. On the screen in front of us are names of some of the Black men subjected to racially based killings. I will let you read silently to yourself for a moment. On Screen: On the screen is a slide with the following names: Amadou Diallo (02/04/1999), Eric Garner (07/17/2014), John Crawford (08/05/2014), Michael Brown (08/09/2014), Kajieme Powell (08/19/2014), Akai Gurley (11/20/2014), Tim Rice (11/22/2014), Freddie Gray (04/12/2015), Alton Sterling (07/05/2016), Philando Castile (07/06/2016), Stephon Clark (03/18/2018), Elijah McClain (08/24/2019), Botham Jean (09/06/2018), Ahmaud Arbery (02/23/2020), George Floyd (05/25/2020), Jacob Blake (08/23/2020), Daunte Wright (04/11/2021). Did you notice I said, “some Black men”? There are countless others who represent the unnamed soldiers, so to speak—those who have died or been wounded in senseless violence against Black men. So, if you haven’t heard of the horrific slaughter of Black men in our country today, then you aren’t staying connected to current events. I don’t mean to be condescending or sarcastic. But come on! Dead Black men are the headliners of the evening news multiple times each year. Once is enough! Two or three times are way too many. Let’s return now to the issue of how media portray Black male death and its consequences. For me, this uptick of brutal attacks in the United States against Black men suggests a modern-day version of lynching that some people may see—perhaps unconsciously—as normal or even as entertainment. Now, I  might be stretching this lynching analogy, but please indulge me for a moment. The act of lynching was a form of entertainment for many White people in centuries past. Often, mobs of thousands of people, including women and children, flocked to the site of a lynching, which most often took the form of a hanging outside of due process and legal executions.

STEFAN:

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But the lynching could have taken the form of burning, dismembering, or other torturous murder. Even after public executions stopped being legal ways of creating a sense of community justice, lynchings appealed to many, even church-attending Christians for whom lynching was a way to affirm “the prevailing doctrine of white supremacy.”2 White people, including young children, would meet at the center of town to be entertained in watching a Black body swing from a tree as the life dissipated from him—well, usually it was a male, and often it was a male accused of being inappropriate with a White woman or somehow disobedient to a White person. The great Black jazz singer Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit,” a song originating from the 1937 poem by Abel Meeropol. The lyrics spoke about the lynching of Black people and how their bodies swung in the breeze like fruit on a tree. Let’s listen to this audio recording of Holiday singing. I invite you to hear her pain, sadness, and anguish as she vocalizes this terrible story of Black people, Black men, “Black bodies swinging” from poplar trees in the breeze. Listen especially for how the image of the trees’ bloody leaves and bloody roots are juxtaposed against the cloying scent of magnolia. Imagine the crows eating the bloody fruit of evil as human remains rot and hit the ground. On Screen: “Strange Fruit” lyrics appear on screen while the audio plays in the background. I can see from your expressions that some of you are moved and even saddened by this song. I urge you to revisit “Strange Fruit” at home, listening to Holiday again while reading the lyrics. Originally, lynchings often involved extended torture before hanging or even being burned alive with people taking photographs and cutting away body parts as souvenirs. Photographs became postcards celebrating that very act of violence.3 To be clear, most lynchings involved White violence on Black people, but some involved violence against Mexican, Native American, and Chinese or other Asian people. Women and children sometimes were lynched, too.4 What seemed to matter most was racial difference from those who did the lynching themselves. Is this country finished with such lynchings? No. Decidedly not. This “strange and bitter crop,” the fruit of the old South, has gone national in recent years with lynchings that have taken on 81

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new forms. What was Brandon McClelland’s 2008 death by being dragged more than 70 feet behind and under a vehicle if not a modern-day lynching?5 What was the 2012 vigilante killing of Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, who followed and harassed this young Black man because Martin seemed to fit Zimmerman’s image of a Black man who might cause trouble? Is this not a modern-day lynching?6 How about Ahmaud Arbery being chased like a runaway slave before being lynched by gun? But in Ahmaud’s case, he was simply out jogging when three White men went after him in two separate vehicles like big game hunters. Two of the men, Gregory and Travis McMichael, were father and son. The other, a neighbor, William “Roddie” Bryan filmed the chase and Travis attacking Arbery before the younger McMichael shot Arbery dead. And then we have Georg Floyd. George Floyd’s 2020 death by suffocation with nine minutes, 29 seconds underneath police officer Derek Chauvin’s knee in full public view—with video cameras recording everything. What could that murder be called but a modern-day public lynching? It wasn’t uncommon in the days of Jim Crow for law enforcement officers to take part in lynchings. Modern-day lynching of Black men remains as we can see from factual evidence of their lives taken from them. These lives, gone in an instant or, in George Floyd’s case, slowly. What can I say but their lives—and their deaths—matter! Today, our network news, including cable channels and social network media, visually serve up the killings of Black men in exploitative ways that usually are not used with White people’s deaths. Such repeated viewings of violence can either desensitize people or retraumatize them. I  suspect many White viewers may become desensitized, while many Black viewers are retraumatized. The more some White people subconsciously get caught up in the sensationalism of Black men being killed, the more they become like their ancestors. I recognize I’ve been pointing the finger a lot the last few minutes on White people and news sensationalism. To be honest, we all get caught up in the sensationalism—regardless of gender or race. I  remember sitting in the living room of my home on a Saturday afternoon glued to the television, watching multiple demonstrations concerning George Floyd’s death. I was captivated because 82

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not only were the demonstrations happening in the United States but also in other parts of the world. But seeing demonstrations isn’t the same as repeatedly seeing the moment of a fellow Black man’s death. In 2020, Harper said: “For many Black men, viral videos featuring the killings of other Black men can weigh heavily. Watching the disturbing footage [repeatedly] can impact the health of African American men.”7 If you’re feeling a bit uncomfortable right now, that’s a good thing. I  think the uncomfortable feeling is subconsciously signaling something for any of us, but especially for White people who may have previously unconsidered emotions and inner turmoil regarding racism. In the past, some White students and workshop participants have said they had “uncomfortable feelings” and want to leave during my talks. I think the desire to leave may be a decoy to divert them from that “uncomfortable feeling” they are experiencing. For those people, such feelings can be scary. They recognize something is brewing and resonating inside their subconscious. But what is it? The experience of not having an answer is part of the fear; the recognition that they may be complicit is another part. This is my hypothesis stemming from years of experience in being around White people. So, if you—or even people of color—are feeling uncomfortable right now, please don’t resist those emotions. Allow yourself to feel and be uncomfortable! It’s okay. Discomfort can help you change and heal. Let me talk to you for a moment about trauma. When people experience terror, ongoing trauma, or even singular traumatic events, these conditions can lead to what is known in the mental health field as Post-Traumatic Stress or PTS. People can heal from PTS both from their own resilience or with mental health support. But when they live daily re-experiencing that trauma or never being able to get away from it, as might happen for some Black people in a racist America, they may be caught up in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. PTSD takes some serious work with mental health experts to process and heal. It also requires getting out of the conditions that created the PTSD to begin with. Unfortunately, Black Americans may experience frequent episodes of PTS or sometimes PTSD when confronted by racist encounters. Post-traumatic stress can be difficult for Black Americans, especially Black males. Okay. 83

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So, with that said, what is racial trauma? Rowe defined racial trauma for us as we can see on the screen. I will read aloud. On Screen: “Racial trauma is real. Every day in the United States and across the world women, men, and children of color experience racism and witness lives and livelihoods devalued or lost as if they do not matter. The result is that people of color are carrying unhealed racial trauma.”8 Black people can have PTSD from racial trauma, as I  implied earlier; however, it’s also possible to have what DeGruy identified as “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.” DeGruy believes this is “a condition that exists when a population has experienced multigenerational trauma resulting from centuries of slavery and continues to experience oppression and institutionalized racism today.”9 Her thinking seems significant in understanding how Black people—and Black men particularly—may experience racism as a generational link from the institution of American slavery through today. If some Black people really do suffer from Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, then it feels like little has changed for Black men particularly. Let me repoint that comment for a moment. Not much has changed for us regarding institutional racism. Think about the many ways that Black people, particularly Black men, are physically and psychologically wounded by racist acts, just like the men whose names appeared on the screen a few minutes ago. It is plausible for history to repeat itself and it seems that retraumatization occurs for Black men over and over and over again. As an academic, I  give back to my students through telling my lived experiences as a member of a racially defined, vulnerable, and marginalized population: Black men. To give back is a virtue my family modeled for me. I was born into a family of helping professionals. To be specific, my three siblings and I all completed graduate degrees in schools of social work. I believe we chose the profession because of how our parents, particularly our mother, raised us. My own dedication to giving back is evident in offering content to my students concerning race and racism. I hope my use of self in this talk today will be evocative. So, having given you some context about Black men and our plight as racist targets, I  believe it is time for some more personal sharing.

STEFAN:

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I’m a middle-aged, married, gay Black man who is a full professor and experienced social worker. I’m the current chair of the undergraduate social work program at my college and the first Black man to have the corner office and seat for this position. I was born in 1963 and primarily grew up in the 1970s. I grew up essentially an only child because of the age differences between my siblings and me. Unfortunately, in 1998, my much older sister passed away in her early 50s from complications of breast cancer. She and I were 20 years apart in age, and she played the role of a second mother. My identical twin brothers and I are 12 years apart in age. When it came time for me to go to college, my mind was set to leave home and branch out on my own. My choice wasn’t due to the college profiles I had read, but more to get away from my alcoholic Black father. I needed to get away from the excruciating, daily emotional torture of living in a house of endless pain and grief. Do any of you know what it is like to have an alcoholic parent? I see some heads nodding right now. In such a home, there’s always a level of uncertainty that hovers over you, a feeling of: “What will today be like? Will my father drink or not today?” When I lived in my parents’ house, I watched the front door when I knew my father would be coming home from work. David, his ride to and from work, would drop him off. I would wait to hear whether Daddy staggered up the front steps or stepped lightly and naturally. The sound of his feet told me whether he was drunk or not before he reached for the doorknob and opened the door. My father was paid on Thursdays. At times, he would cash his check and spend it on drinks for himself or others in the local bar where he hung out. Buying drinks after work would include rounds for David, too. My mother, though, would be waiting for my father to get his weekly paycheck and give it to her. Most of the time, he would bring his paycheck home, handing it over to her. But there were those other times when he drank most to nearly all that money at the bar. Of course, his friends loved it when Daddy bought them drinks all around. Who wouldn’t? When my parents fought, it was mostly about money and Daddy’s drinking. As a young child, I would run and hide underneath my sister’s bed or in her bedroom closet, afraid of their fighting. I could hear the volume of their voices escalate from time-to-time. 85

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But I  couldn’t make out their words. I  didn’t care what they were saying. I just wanted them to stop. Hiding under my sister’s bed or in her closet helped to muffle the sound. Eventually, my sister would find me. She knew my hiding places. They had become familiar to her. I knew my sister would protect me and understand my hiding. As I said, she was my second mother. Before I go any further, I want to tell you about my mother. She was a dignified, southern Black woman. Mother—that’s what I called her—had a big heart, and she would do anything for anyone. She was generous and self-effacing in her spiritual and religious self and especially in her role as a Black mother. She enacted this role with sincerity, humility, dedication, and pride. In my eyes, she was the mother of all mothers. When I was a child, Mother would periodically say to me, “Remember, you’re Black first.” I eventually realized that Mother’s assertion was a reflection of my parents’ Jim Crow-era upbringing in the South. Mother’s warning was her way of sharing with me the haunting, echoing, historical plights of racism that she and my father lived with as children. In many Black families, the mother is the foundation. Mothers keep the rough tides in the family calm as possible. Often, their calming is needed because of Black fathers’ absence or lack of availability. My parents were both born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They grew up together as kids. My mother said that my father was always over at their house hanging out when she grew up. Her mother, my grandmother, said she loved my father like a son. When he died in 2002, my mother said to me, “I’ve known your father all my life.” I felt her emptiness. They had been married over 60 years when he died. When I was in high school, on one Thursday during one Christmas week, my father did not come home at his usual time of 5:00 PM. His workday ran from 8:00 AM until 4:00 PM Monday through Friday. The time for him to come home had elapsed, and it was getting late. Christmas was on a Saturday that year, which would make Christmas Eve on Friday, the next day. My mother was pacing and visibly upset. She was expecting his paycheck to go grocery shopping on Christmas Eve, and she wanted to buy a few gifts to put under the Christmas tree. We always had a particular spot for our Christmas tree in my parents’ living room. My sister was home at the time, 86

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watching each scene of this drama play out as Mother got more and more anxious. Finally, my sister said to Mother that she and I  would go and look for Daddy, giving my mother some comfort and hope, but not much. We left out of the front door of our parents’ house and walked down the front stairs to my sister’s car. She drove around the neighborhood looking for Daddy. I don’t remember if there was any conversation between us. Eventually, she drove to the neighborhood bar where Daddy usually went to hang out. The bar was just two blocks away, within walking distance from our parents’ home. My sister parked the car, turned toward me in the passenger’s seat, and said, “You need to go in and see if Daddy is there.” I froze while looking at her expression of humiliation and sadness for me. She knew what she was asking me to do. No Black son should be out looking for his Black father to bring him home to his wife so he could meet his responsibility as a man. In 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama gave a speech at a large Black church in Chicago about Black fathers. He spoke about the absence of his own father and how crucial it is for Black fathers to step up to the plate as responsible male figures in the Black family. He urged Black fathers to stop being and acting like pubescent boys because their behavior hurts the Black family unit, making everyone in it suffer.10 No Black son should be expected to make sure his father brings home the sole income for the family, ensuring its financial wellbeing. It wasn’t my job or my responsibility to be the adult male figure of my Black family. It was my father’s. But the male roles shifted that day. When I got out of the car, I remember seeing a simultaneous look of encouragement and apology from my sister. I walked into the darkened bar, a place that looked old and dingy. It smelled like stale alcohol and filthy smoke. Disgusting. As I walked in the bar, I heard someone say: “Hey George! Your youngest is here to get you.”11 I just wanted to crawl into a hole. I felt naked and exposed. Some people stared at me as I  stood near the entrance of the bar. I am amazed no one stopped me from coming in given that I was clearly underage. My father was sitting on a bar stool when I walked in. I slowly walked up to his side as he looked down at his drink. He made no eye contact with me, just looking down at the drink in front of him. I knew he knew I was there. I was 87

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close enough to reach out and touch him, but I didn’t. He must have been so ashamed. I was. “Mother is wondering when you are coming home,” I said. He didn’t respond to my words or acknowledge my presence in any way. I walked out as fast as I could and back into my sister’s car. “He’s in there,” I muttered. I remember seeing the silhouette of her face from the corner of my left eye as she looked at me. I didn’t look at her. I kept looking straight out the front window of the car, absorbed by shame and anger for the position my father had put me in. What I  remember most about that Christmas was the somber mood as we attempted to celebrate mostly in silence. There wasn’t much to be jolly about, just a lot of sadness and disappointment etched on my mother’s face. My mother, father, sister and I did our own thing throughout the day. My sister lived in Connecticut, but she came to our parents’ home often. My brothers also had left the family home and were beginning families of their own. There wasn’t a lot of communication between us even at Christmas dinner. Coming back to today, my husband and I  have a five-year-old nephew named Dean. He’s a handsome little Black boy, and his two mothers, one of whom is my niece, take very good care of him. I’m afraid he might grow to be quite the heartthrob for someone someday. I know I’m biased. My husband and I spoil him throughout the year and particularly at Christmas. We may ship one or two boxes of gifts for him at the Christmas holiday. We get a kick out of buying for him, and I just love it. Given the story I just told you, I want to make sure there’s always something under the Christmas tree for Dean. Of course, I know very well that his two mothers give him the best of everything, especially lots of love. Our spoiling him is really for me. It gives me assurance there’s always something under the Christmas tree from his uncles. I didn’t always have negative memories of my father. But I have felt sorry for him and mourned for him because of how much he missed out on his children’s growing up when he submitted to his addiction. I remember when I was a baby, maybe a toddler, and he would soothe me to sleep by carrying me in his arms as he walked me throughout the house. Up and down the stairs, in and out of various rooms, he walked repeatedly until I fell asleep with my head on his shoulder. Other times, I  remember my father sitting on the front 88

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steps and watching me ride my bike up and down the street. I had to keep within a certain range, so he could always see me. If I had gone too far or he couldn’t see me riding further down the street, Daddy would stand on the sidewalk to see where I was. As I approached him closer to where he was standing, I could see the look of concern on his face. I didn’t want him to worry, so I tried not to ride too far away or be gone too long when he was watching. I don’t harbor any resentment now although I  blamed him for many years. By now, I’ve forgiven him for the nightmarish hell he put his family through. I think he wanted to be different. At times, he could stay sober for a few days and be a responsible Black husband and father. But those times were too few and too far between. By the time I reached college age, I was ready to leave home. I was accepted to all the colleges where I applied, one being Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts. Truthfully, while I left home to get away from the chaos of an alcoholic house, I was also excited by the attraction of college in a metropolitan city. My mother would tell her church friends that I was her “city child” because she knew I loved the city. Yet I don’t think my parents thought I was serious about leaving home to go to college. My siblings had all attended the same college near home. Mother occasionally asked me, “Did you apply to the college your sister and brothers went to?” I’d answer with a yes because I had. But she knew Boston University was my first choice. The city of Boston is historically known for the racial riots stemming from the public schools busing desegregation crisis in the 1970s and 1980s. My parents were afraid I  would encounter racism there. When there were desegregation protests, Daddy would watch the evening news, feeling that Boston was a dangerous place for me to be going. The day I left for college, I was waiting for my sister and mother near the car in front of my parents’ house. As I looked through the front door screen, I could see a silhouette of Daddy standing in the kitchen. He was crying. He didn’t know I saw him crying because his back was turned away from me, but I could tell by the jerking of his body that he was emotionally distressed. Remember, I was the only one of his four children who left home to attend college and I was his youngest. Even so, I’ve always wondered whether his tears were about a child leaving home, about his fear of me encountering racial hatred, or both. 89

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My mother and sister got me settled in my dorm room. They visited for a while, and I eventually escorted them to the car where we said our goodbyes. The next day, I  called home and my sister answered the phone. She started off our conversation by informing me that Mother cried all the way home after they dropped me off. But I didn’t feel any guilt. Now I was away from the pain and stress of living in an alcoholic household. A few days after moving to the campus, I met with new and returning students. I remember many of them telling me to not go to South Boston, or Southie as it was called. Southie was known for having a strong Irish American heritage. The school busing desegregation I’ve mentioned affected many of the working-class neighborhoods of Boston like Southie, which were known for their racial divides. When school desegregation occurred in 1974, many of the neighborhood residents like those of Southie were hostile to students of color, especially Black students, attending their neighborhood schools with their White children. The effects of Boston’s school busing desegregation were slowly becoming reality for many of the city residents. Black students were there to stay. But were the White residents ready for this reality? One fall evening around the time people were coming home from work, a White female classmate and I arranged to meet at her apartment to go out to dinner. She lived on Commonwealth Avenue, which is beyond the Kenmore Square area. When I  was a student, the Kenmore Square area reminded me of Times Square in New York City—just a smaller version. The area seemed to be one of the central hubs of Boston where people congregate. Not too far from the Kenmore Square area is the Boston Fenway Baseball field, the oldest baseball field in Major League Baseball. The square is also central for the Boston Marathon racers who run through the area each April. How many of you know the area I  am talking about? Oh! I  see no hands raised. Well, if you ever go to Boston, take a stroll or drive through Kenmore Square. You’ll get the idea of the hustle and bustle I am referring to. There’s a subway station stop called “Kenmore Square,” which is part of the Green Line. So, getting to Kenmore Square is easy. Well, I  was walking rapidly to get to my classmate’s apartment because I was a bit late. I walked toward the entrance of the Kenmore 90

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Square subway station on the same side of the street as my classmate’s apartment but, again, several blocks away. From a distance, I  could see people exiting the station as they reached the street and walking in different directions. As I  approached the entrance to the station, I came across a White woman walking slowly up the stairs from the station to the street. I passed her on her right side. Together, from the corner of our eyes, we noticed each other. Once that happened, she began to run. And I don’t mean run! She hauled ass (sorry) down Commonwealth Avenue. Seriously, she was gone. Some of you might remember the Breck® Shampoo commercials in 1970s. As the woman in the commercial’s hair was swaying side-toside, easily moving in the breeze, so was this woman’s brunette hair flying in the wind and bouncing from side-to-side as she ran away from me. In disbelief, I instantly stopped walking; she looked back at me with her hair blowing away from her face like in the shampoo commercial. I was puzzled and for a few seconds didn’t know what happened. Have you ever been startled by an action of some kind and didn’t know what to do or say? Well, this was that moment. Within mere seconds, which seemed like minutes, I  froze as the White woman looked back and stopped running when she saw that I had stopped walking. We stared at one another from a distance. She seemed to recognize the puzzlement and disbelief on my face, and her face shifted into what appeared to be shame. I  could have sworn she uttered a quiet apology before she walked away. I don’t remember if others who were walking the street with us noticed what happened. I don’t even remember seeing other people. It felt as if she and I were the only two people on Commonwealth Avenue at that moment. Of course, her racist behavior gave ammunition to my father’s concern about me living in Boston. My racial naiveté had a significant lesson that day. Until that point, I’d had some painful racial incidents with White teachers in high school. But those were nothing like having someone run away from me because of the possible danger my skin color and gender represented. Unfortunately, stories about Black men and White women are historically familiar. Blow said: “I am enraged by [W]hite women weaponizing racial anxiety, using their [W]hite femininity to activate systems of [W]hite terror against Black men. This has long been a power [W] 91

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hite women realized they had and that they exerted.”12 As we’ve discussed here today, Black men have been lynched and otherwise brutally killed by White men for allegedly inappropriate interaction with White women. One story you all should know is that of Emmett Till. How many of you have heard this horrific and terrorizing story of a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago, Illinois, who, while visiting family in Money, Mississippi, was accused of flirting with a White woman? Please don’t forget, folks, that knowing Black history is vital for people of all colors—despite what Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is doing in his state in what seems to be erasing Black people’s racial trauma as irrelevant historical content. If we don’t know the facts, we can’t do the necessary self-reflection to heal racial trauma. Anyway, the White woman’s husband and brother savagely brutalized and shot Emmett to death, disfiguring him to the point his own mother couldn’t recognize him. Then, they threw his Black body into the river like it was trash. Just like trash. Can you imagine? Here is a photo of Emmet Till laying in his casket. The photo can be hard to look at and very disturbing, but please look carefully before giving in to the urge to turn away. On Screen: Insert photo of the disfigured, unrecognizable Emmett Till laying in his casket. Oh, well. What could Black people have done then? Black people really had no civil liberties even though we were then and are now citizens of this country. Because of that, there was no trial for Till. What an abominable act of racial injustice! The boy’s mother insisted on an open casket to reveal to the world what had been done to him, and his murder became a rallying point for the Civil Rights movement. On March 29, 2022, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act was signed into federal law, making lynching a hate crime. I suspect none of this would ease his mother’s grief. *** My sharing wouldn’t be complete without talking a little about my sexuality as a Black man. My brothers present themselves with confidence; they have the “cool pose” mystique as two Black heterosexual and masculine males. The cool pose is a self-preservative coping mechanism in which a Black man’s mask-like facial and body 92

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expressions both protect and defend him; he performs within this pose almost as if he’s in a play. I explain more about this in the handout I’ll give you at the end of our day together. At any rate, I couldn’t have asked for two better Black male roles models than my twin brothers. As the younger brother, I didn’t want to disappoint them. I didn’t want to disappoint any of my siblings, which is why coming out as a gay man was difficult. My brothers both played college football and watched a lot of sports. I always saw them as the epitome of Black masculinity with an Afrocentric perspective of their own. Of course, I was the opposite as I prefer the intimacy of another man. I  wasn’t interested in sports except the occasional tennis matches I would play or watch. I consider myself to be a masculine gay Black man with a toss of androgynous expressions here and there. I didn’t realize I  was gay until my early twenties. I  was petrified both by this realization and the knowledge that I was deathly afraid of coming out to my brothers for fear that they would despise me for who I am and who I must be. I tried dating teenage girls in high school. I was never sexual with them. I haven’t ever been sexual with a woman. I had no physical attraction to the opposite sex. I remember Mother saying to my brothers, “Stefan’s different.” I think hearing that alarmed them yet confirmed their fears that I was gay. Recently, my husband and I watched Uncle Frank (2020). In the film, “Uncle Frank” is a college professor and gay man. I wouldn’t say he was closeted because he was out to his friends. But he wasn’t out to his family, or so he thought. He came from a deep-South, backwards-thinking family. One day, as a teen, his father caught him in bed with a young boy his own age. After that day, his father and he barely spoke to one another. Watching the film, one can feel his father despising Frank. When the father died, there was a reading of his will, and Frank accompanies his niece Beth back home. Frank’s father bequeaths his wife and other children, Frank’s brother and sister, their inheritance. When it comes time for the lawyer to acknowledge Frank, he proceeds to read what Frank’s father instructed. The words ridiculed and shamed Frank in front of his family. Okay. I  see some of you are shocked. Any indifference the family might have had about Frank’s life as a gay man was quickly overshadowed by the hatred Frank’s father had for him—all because he was attracted to other men. Wow! For my husband and 93

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me, watching this scene made us feel gut punched. Who hurts their own flesh and blood like that? Fast forward. Frank runs out of the house, embarrassed and extremely hurt by his father’s stunt. Eventually, he returns and is greeted by his sister and brother on the front porch of his parents’ home. They share deep love and appreciation for him. They don’t care about his sexuality. They love him unconditionally. His mother also is waiting for Frank to return. She can hear voices from the inside of the house and calls for Frank while sitting in her rocking chair. He enters the living room like a little boy who is in trouble. Stefan pauses to wipe away tears from his cheeks. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to cry, but what transpires between the two of them makes me think of Mother. Frank sits down in a chair across from his mother, hanging his head. In her loving, mothering voice, she says that he is her son and she doesn’t care about anything else. He nearly crawls to her, crying uncontrollably, dissolving into her lap. She lifts his face up to hers and says, “I knew.” Frank says, “You knew?” She looks at him and says, “A mother knows.” I guess I’m not the only person moved by this scene as I hear a few sniffles right now. I share this film’s plot within my story because I  imagine my mother would do the same with me. She would love me no matter what because I am her son, and I believe that’s why she quietly told my brothers that I am different. Even though my brothers disagree with me, I feel strongly that my mother knew I was gay. I feel bad not ever telling her. I didn’t have the guts to do it. But I believe she somehow knew about me and that gives me comfort. So, talking about being gay, coming out, and telling family .  .  . I  remember when I  revealed to one of my brothers that I  am gay. I  knew this day would come; however, I  just didn’t expect it so quickly. I was in my twenties and living with him and his wife in a suburban neighborhood outside of Boston. They had moved from the mid-west because of a faculty position offered at the same university where I was a college student. At the time, he was a college professor although he has since retired. They invited me to live with them to save money with on-campus food and housing costs. 94

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One evening, they had gone out and I  was home alone. When they returned, my sister-in-law walked past me in the living room toward the bedroom. She just said hello and kept walking. I sensed something was up but wasn’t sure what it was. My brother followed behind her and then walked up to me as I was standing in the living room. He asked, “Are you gay?” I froze for a moment. I didn’t know at all what to say to him. I think there was a moment when I thought of not saying anything at all, but suddenly and without any hesitation I simply said, “Yes.” Once I answered, I felt this comforting warmth throughout my body. I wasn’t scared any longer. I wasn’t fearful of what he might say. I was revealed! My secret was out. But I was afraid that as a Black man, I was disappointing him because I didn’t exemplify the Black masculinity that he and my other brother did. Despite my being afraid of what he might be thinking, my brother was wonderful. He didn’t reject me or banish me from his home. Unfortunately, there are many stories of gay people coming out to their families and not being accepted for who they are. Well, that didn’t happen to me. My brother was curious, and he did ask a lot of questions as we sat and talked. I don’t remember the particulars of our conversations, but I remember the expression of care and concern in them. He did make some occasional odd comments that suggested he really was grappling with my sexuality. One comment was that I  wouldn’t be continuing our family last name with any possible male off-spring. At the time I  thought, well what the fuck! To be honest, it was a bit funny then and even more so now as I tell you about it. I  wish some of you could see your faces right now. The looks on your faces are priceless and must have been like mine when my brother made that comment. I think it came from a place of love. He became the Black father I needed through a difficult time in finding my way as a gay Black man. I will forever be grateful to him. My other brother and I haven’t ever spoken about me being gay, and at this point I don’t think there is any reason to do so. It’s a moot point since I’m married to a man. The front end of this story about me coming out as a gay man provides context for talking about my interracial relationship in this country. When I  hear White people say, “I  don’t see race,” or “I don’t see color,” well, I’m sorry, but they’re lying even if they don’t 95

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know they are. My husband is White. How can anyone not see the difference in color between him and me? I think some people have so much guilt from their ancestors who spouted racial hatred toward Black people that they need to overcompensate or apologize by saying they don’t see me as Black to make amends.13 To see a person’s skin color is not the problem. The problem is how people may react when they’re uncomfortable with a person’s skin color that’s different from their own. That the social quandary. Okay. In wrapping up my talk, I want to leave you with some final thoughts and words. The Black poet and author Maya Angelou said many wise things. One of those is on the screen for you now. On Screen. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Maya Angelou “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” What I learned from these words and putting them in proper context is that with some White people who have been unkind to me, I should have believed them the first time because they truly were showing me who they were. But I have hoped, wished, and prayed that those White people would accept me for myself as a Black man. And I’ve wished they would stop persecuting me because of my skin color and gender. Well, that hasn’t happened, but I will not give up hope. I really can’t get upset with those White people I’ve had bad relationships with because they couldn’t or wouldn’t give me what I needed from them as friend or even colleague. They seem firmly entrenched in their Whiteness and privilege of historical and generational beliefs toward Black people and Black men in general. To be fair, even within the Black community, there is racism and prejudice with the differences in skin color related to how much “White blood” one has. It’s a form of anti-Blackness. Some people favor those with darker skin as being more purely African, while others favor those with lighter skin, the “high yellow” skin that might “pass” for White. Have you ever heard of the Brown Paper Bag Test?14 Well, listen up. I think you’ll find this interesting, if shocking and appalling. In the early 1900s, this test determined one’s place within a Black caste system by examining skin tone. It was a Black-on-Black racial bias tool

I’LL READ IT FOR YOU:

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for segregating and discriminating against their own race. The term you should know for this type of bias is colorism because color-based racial discrimination affects people of color from many racial backgrounds. Remember, the lighter the Black person’s skin color, the more acceptable one would be regarding light skin’s association with Whiteness and the privilege that goes along with it. Here is how the Brown Paper Bag Test was done. Take a bag like the one you might have used to carry your lunch into school as a kid. Here’s a bag for a demonstration. Place the brown paper bag against your skin. I will place the bag next to my right arm. If the color of my skin and the brown paper bag match or if my skin color is lighter in color than the bag, I would be accepted to some Black people’s social circles of bougie clubs, social events, and other gatherings. Clearly this would not be the case for me because my skin color is darker than the brown paper bag. I would be excluded from the gatherings of Black people who thought they were better than I am because of their lighter skin tone. How devaluing! The sad truth is that Black folk’s skin tone affects them not only from the perspective of what White people think but also from Black folk’s biases, causing us to hurt each other. Let me clarify the bougie comment. This is a term that some Black people use for lighter-skinned Black people who, again, might think they’re better than darker people. Well, you see how it goes. Now, with such biases acknowledged within the Black and other BIPOC communities, I’m still not giving White people a “get out of jail free” card because that would wrongfully suggest they have no accountability for their own racist behaviors. I’m also not accepting their racist behaviors because then I would relinquish my self-respect and condone foul treatment toward me as a Black man. No. I’m relying on hope along with Angelou’s guidance to navigate me through my Blackness in learning how some people’s failure to see me as a human being feeds their racial hatred. Undoubtedly, Angelou’s words give me comfort as a Black man in a primarily White America. As my mother often would say about some White people, “They don’t know any better.” While I wish they would learn, I’ll acknowledge them as they are. The pre-workshop interview, today’s staged reading, our audience discussion session, and this talk are all about figuring out how 97

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to know each other better and how, especially for White people, to put our best selves forward when talking with people of other races and cultures. How do we learn? How do we leave our prejudices and biases in the past and begin to reckon with who we are and our accountability with racism—White, Black, and other races and cultures alike? I’ve focused most heavily on White people’s transgressions because they have most harmed me and the four men whose stories comprised the staged reading. But there’s hope, of course. Otherwise, why would I  tell you our stories? Frankly, we all could use some self-reflection, honesty, and openness to the vulnerability of racial reckoning. The reason I asked you to read the interview between me and my friend Beth before this workshop was so that we could circle back to it as we end the day. I asked Beth to engage in an unmediated interaction with me. In this interview, Beth examined some racially charged experiences from both sides of her extended family and her own life. My sense is that offering herself up to my questioning wasn’t easy for her. There’s a potential for repercussions from her family in the public nature of her sharing. But our conversation was honest. I listened to her speak frankly and even heard her shame without judgement. She bared her faults as if in a confessional, trusting me enough to let me hear an imperfect tale of racial blundering and distancing, as she called her accountability. We left the conversation stronger friends with greater respect for each other. That’s the kind of conversation that Americans of all races need to have within their families and among their friends, neighbors, and coworkers. When we listen to each other, we learn that we are each a Thou, not an It. We have genuine relation, as Martin Buber said. We can enter a new era of race relations in America. It may sound impossible to achieve, but it isn’t. The ability to change always begins with one small step. I hope today’s workshop has encouraged you to walk this journey with me. Thank you for coming today. The workshop audience applauds as Stefan acknowledges them with a smile and a hand wave. At the entrance of the meeting room, Stefan greets and thanks people for attending the workshop. He hands out the promised additional materials, pausing to speak privately with those who have questions. 98

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Notes 1 Alyssa Fowers and William Wan, “Depression and Anxiety Spiked among Black Americans after George Floyd’s Death,” The Washington Post, June  12, 2020 (para. 4.). 2 Amy Kate Bailey and Karen A. Snedker, “Practicing What They Preach? Lynching and Religion in the American South, 1890–1929,” AJS 117, no. 3 (November  2011): 884–87, doi:10.1086/661985.16. See  also James Lartey and Sam Morris, “Pain and Terror: America’s History of Racism. How White America Used Lynchings to Terrorize and Control Black People,” The Guardian, April  26, 2018, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/26/lynchings-memo rial-us-south-montgomery-alabama. Also see NAACP, “History of Lynching in America,” NAACP, 2022, https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/ history-lynching-america#:~:text=Lynchings%20were%20often%20public%20 spectacles%20attended%20by%20the,on%20the%20leaves%20and%20blood%20 at%20the%20root. 3 James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 9, 120. Also see Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2009). 4 According to “Lynching” under the subhead “Lynching in the United States,” “From 1883 to 1941 there were 4,467 victims of lynching. Of these, 4,027 were male, and 99 female. 341 were of unknown gender but are assumed to be likely male. In terms of ethnicity; 3,265 were black, 1,082 were white, 71 were Mexican or of Mexican descent, 38 were American Indian, ten were Chinese, and one was Japanese,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching. 5 Equal Justice Initiative, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, 3rd ed. (2017), 37, https://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america/. 6 Monnica T. Williams, “Social Media and Black Bodies as Entertainment,” Psychology Today, May  31, 2020, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culturally-speaking/ 202005/social-media-and-black-bodies-entertainment. 7 Averi Harper, “How Viral Videos of Killings of Black Men Take a Toll on Black Male Mental Health,” ABC News, May 27, 2020, para. 1, https://abcnews.go.com/ Health/viral-videos-killings-black-men-takes-toll-black/story?id=70909409. 8 Sheila Wise Rowe, Healing Racial Trauma: The Road to Resilience (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2020), 10. 9 Joy DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (Baltimore, MD: Joy DeGruy Publications Inc., 2017), 105. 10 Julie Bosman, “Obama Sharply Assails Absent Black Fathers,” New York Times, June 16, 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/us/politics/15cnd-obama.html. 11 “George” is a pseudonym in respect for my father. 12 Charles M. Blow, “How White Women Use Themselves as Instrumentals of Terror,” The New York Times, May 27, 2020, 1. 13 Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (New York: Harper Perennial). 14 “Brown Paper Bag Test,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Paper_Bag_Test.

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Activity 5

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In A Performative Autoethnography of Five Black American Men, I take readers through an inclusive workshop where people of all colors interact, using the staged reading Wishes by Black Men as the central pillar for this daylong training. I wanted to produce a book that both moves beyond any overgeneralized chronicle of Black men’s personal lives that may result in an “Ah yes, that again” lackadaisical dismissal of Black men’s stories as all being the same. My primary aim is to help readers understand the complexities and reality of five Black men’s stories (which include my own story) even while risking that many readers may think they’ve heard it all before. Black men’s traumatic experiences with racism and its pain are not the same. These traumatic experiences differ in detail like that of the complexities of a snowflake. No two snowflakes are alike. Black men neither look nor sound precisely alike, which is a message that some people may need to hear repeatedly. Black life—even among Black people—is a general construct of race, but it also is a specific, contextualized vision of reality. The four Black men’s stories in the performative staged reading and my own experiences are compelling. Despite our similarities, each of us has his own background and life narratives. The stories differ given our ages, families, educational backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses, and experiential contexts, among many other contextualizing factors. In other words, each Black man is a person in his own right. Many people, including some White people, still have not learned that basic fact. 100

DOI: 10.4324/9781003304777-6

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Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher who survived World War II as a German exile, theorized an interpersonal and attitudinal relationship between two people as the I and Thou dialogue. He expressed that the pairing of three words I-Thou and I-It described how people do and do not relate with each other.1 According to Martin and Cowan: Buber saw the meeting between I and Thou as the most important aspect of human experience because it is in relationship that we become fully human. When one meets another as Thou, the uniqueness and separateness of the other is acknowledged without obscuring the relatedness or common humanness that is shared. The world of I-It . . . lacks the essential elements of human connection and wholeness that characterize the I-Thou encounter. The I-Thou attitude is increasingly depersonalizing and alienating as it becomes structuralized in human institutions.2

In my experience, Black men often are objectified as an “It” in interpersonal relationships with White and other people of color rather than seen inherently as a “Thou,” a “you” who also is human and desiring of connection with others. That objectification creates a scenario where it becomes all too easy for me and other Black men to, in turn, objectify White people and all those who fail to see us as individuals. Instead, I use this book to invite readers of all colors into an I-Thou relationship with Black men, allowing Black men the freedom to move similarly toward such readers. People who are willing to witness Black men’s explicit lived experiences of racial pain (we could say grief)—not ignoring but recognizing, acknowledging, and accepting these men as a “Thou” rather than an “It”—can help to heal racial traumas and promote healthier, happier Black men’s lives. To this end, I explored Black theater and how autoethnographic performative writing leads to a theater of unique experience. The result is an interpersonal series of exchanges with potential power to move readers into and through the experiences of a few Black American men’s lives.

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Black Theater Black theater has been, and continues to be, a place where Black playwrights tell stories about Black life to Black men and women and, just as importantly, to White audiences. They use drama to express the entanglement of social, emotional, and racist circumstances for Black people in America. This kind of storytelling about Black people’s lives is far different from the days of minstrel shows. Those were written by White people and enacted in blackface to entertain White people while stereotyping Black people to humiliate and shame them. Gone are the days of Stepin Fetchit, the vaudeville name for Jamaican/Bahamian descendent Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry. In the early-to-mid twentieth century, Fetchit’s characters offered White audiences the stereotyped persona of Black men as lazy, shuffling, and mumbling. The caricature made Fetchit famous for being the first Black actor with a successful film career and the first to earn more than one-million dollars while also stereotyping Black men as uneducated and ignorant to the point of unintelligibility. Unfortunately, before Black audiences of the 1940s to 1950s turned away from this characterization, the damage had been done. To some degree, this depiction is still sometimes used for Black people in movies and theater—for example, in the typecasting of Eddie Murphy’s humor regarding Black buffoonery and Tyler Perry’s Madea character. The fine line between buffoonery and comedy in drama aside, such stereotypical depictions might still be considered reality by some White people. In the latter part of the twentieth century, Black playwrights such as James Baldwin (The Amen Corner, 1954),3 Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun, 1959),4 and August Wilson (Fences, 1985)5 flourished from the creative writing influences of Langston Hughes, helping to change the Stepin Fetchit narrative. Hughes and other Black writers during the Harlem Renaissance period of the early twentieth century pioneered Black theater, preserving and presenting Black people’s history through oral storytelling by dramatizing narratives of racial struggle in Black life for the stage.6 These iconic Afrocentric playwrights told authentic stories of Black lived experience, enabling Black voices to be heard respectfully and without mockery. For example, the New Millennium playwright, Jeremy Harris (Slave Play, 2018),7 is applauded as a Black man who defines Blackness in his own voice and writes for Black theater while maintaining respect for the dignity of the ancestral voices and their racial struggles.8 102

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Today, Black men can represent themselves more authentically, claiming their authority and desire to be understood in an America that still often disvalues their Blackness and sexuality. While assimilating into the Whiteness of White people’s space to belong and to get along, most Black men will not surrender the embodiment of their Blackness but will consciously cling to it for stability as they make other compromises to maintain self-nobility while existing between these two worlds. This self-preservative coping mechanism has been called the “cool pose.” Majors and Billson9 coined the term “cool pose” to describe a Black man’s mask-like facial and body expressions that both protect and defend the inner person while potentially alienating him from other Black and White people.10 The cool pose allows Black men to assert their masculinity and positionality performatively as if they are within a play. Yet they know that some White people will attempt to dismantle their Blackness piece-by-piece through racial assaults and varying degrees of oppression and discrimination. To counteract such assaults, Black men may act as if they are indifferent, using daily scenes and scripts for interaction with White people—all to maintain their personal accountability and dignity while suppressing the fear and pain of racial trauma. In the cool pose, Black men perform, acting as if everything is under control even when they know it is not. The cool pose is used to legitimize the positionality Black men must daily engage to confront racial insults and attacks.

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The Creation of a Staged Reading Several years ago, as this book project began and under the approval of my college’s Institutional Review Board, I recruited four men who expressed willingness to share their racially charged experiences as Black men in America. Three of these men are educators at the college/university level, two of them in the discipline of social work and one in education; the fourth man is a journalist. I chose men who have educational and socioeconomic backgrounds like my own to better understand and then represent well-educated and successful Black men. One thing I  learned is that even so-called “highly educated” Black men share a common experience of being stereotyped. In fact, as the participant discussion in Activity 3 demonstrates, there is a wow factor when some White people meet such men. These four men communicated stories demonstrating that they somehow are still seen as less than among White Americans despite being hard-working, educated, and motivated people. After receiving their informed consent, I collected brief, written narratives from each, using specific writing prompts that had roots in my own lived experiences. We corresponded through email about stories of (1) a time in your life when you felt that oppression affected you as a Black man, (2) a time when you, a Black man, felt powerless in your relationship with a White person, and (3) a time when you were confronted with the need to “pick your battle” in regard to a racial incident. I asked them to provide up to three doubled-spaced typed pages for each prompt, which was my way of encouraging them to write with detail while giving them a sense of potential boundaries. If participants had no lived experiences that they wanted to share based on a writing prompt, I asked them to skip that prompt. Because I  was seeking some sense of spontaneity in their writing such as one might find in speech, I asked participants not to edit their writing except for spelling. In the staged reading Wishes by Black Men, their statements are unmediated except for the added transitional and connective phrases between and among the men as well as any dramatic interventions that explain the movement and or absence of one man or another at different times in the staged reading. To develop a coherent, often verbatim, staged reading performance, I constructed these men’s written responses into dialogic narratives, maintaining their own words to give them co-authorship and authenticity. The interpersonal conflict themes from 104

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the prompts naturally separated the narratives into scenes of oppression, powerlessness, and picking battles. Because I  received these men’s narratives individually, I  needed to weave them together, or co-construct them, as a dialogue. To smooth changeovers among the speakers’ words and give the effect of dialogue, I  created layered transitions that engaged features of dialogue (e.g., “I understand.” “I’m sorry you experienced that.”) Yet, at times, I didn’t want to interrupt important, lengthier statements from individual participants. So, at those times, I spotlighted their words with an extended monologue to emphasize the gravity of a particular occurrence from among the others’ statements of their lived experiences. According to Conquergood, “the aim of dialogical performance is to bring self and other together so that they can question, debate, and challenge one another” and that doing so may engage a layered account.11 Then, I use my own Blackness to tell stories as the “Storyteller” alongside the other men, creating an alternative (auto)ethnographic performance piece as a performative conversational script (see the next section). Thus, the staged reading script itself becomes a layered narrative in which “the researcher is cast as a storyteller, the participants become the characters, and the plot orders the reader’s comprehension of significant events.”12 Any strong performance must be conceived with narrative inquiry/ analysis at its core. In this book, I use narrative analysis as represented by the “Storyteller” to offer clarity to readers who may be unaware of and unfamiliar with the circumstances Black men might experience from race and racism. The intention is to encourage readers (and listeners when the staged reading is performed live or through video) in “thinking about a story . . . [and] to reduce it to content and then analyze that content.”13 I  wanted to move readers beyond merely thinking about a story but rather “to think with a story is to experience it affecting one’s own life and to find in that effect a certain truth of one’s life.”14 Such an experiencing of another’s story is to move that person from the It status in an I-It relationship to one of the I-Thou, as I shared earlier. Once completed, I asked my colleague Tony DeJesus to read my script for feedback. I  didn’t know then that he was interested in having the staged reading performed at his institution, The University of St. Joseph School of Social Work and Equitable Community Practice, where he is program director for the MSW program as well as an associate professor. Tony introduced the idea of having the staged reading debut there, 105

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rallying potential collaborators and partners through his university and outside network. One of his outside collaborators is a local community theater, the HartBeat Ensemble, which produces social justice theatrical works especially from new playwrights like me. From there, the staged reading was edited for live performance by the director and actors. It debuted in April  2022 to a small but enthusiastic audience. That the audience participated in a lively question-and-answer period formed the idea for Activity 3 of this book.

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Autoethnographic Performative Writing Autoethnographic performative writing can be used to evocatively deepen and peel away an understanding of people’s lives through dramatization. As a Black author, I engage such writing to emphasize the preexisting condition of attacks against Blackness as a repeated and vicious historical script.15 Manning and Adams depict autoethnography as a self-examination of one’s inner self, identity, and experiences, “a research method that foregrounds the researcher’s personal experiences (auto) as it is embedded within, and informed by, cultural identities and con/texts (ethno) and as it is expresses through writing, performance, or other creative means (graphy).”16 With this understanding, I specifically turned to evocative autoethnography to steer this performative book. Evocative autoethnography provided me and the four Black men in the staged reading—who became my coauthors of a sort—an opportunity to unravel and better communicate our racially charged lives. As Bochner and Ellis said, to “concentrate on evocative forms of autoethnography [one] must seek to make people feel deep in their guts and in their bones, using various form of literary artfulness and storytelling to place the reader in the action.”17 This type of vulnerable writing can give readers the opportunity to engage and investigate within themselves what they thought they knew about Black men but may not know at all. Such writing may enable them to recognize and discard false allegations and untruths about Black men they had been told and be complicit in telling others. The narratives and dialogues in this book may compel White people and other readers to pause and take notice of their accountability to Black men. Alongside evocative autoethnography, I  have conceived my work as alternative ethnography, a term Bochner used to depict an art form employing ethnography to create different expressive forms of (auto) ethnographic data. Its goal is to illustrate and offer enriching complex stories like my own and those of the other Black men in this book.18 Bochner stated that in qualitative research, alternative ethnography has evolved more as an alteration or transformation than an alternative—a change in form as well as in purpose. Although we may call it “alternative,” what we really intend

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Author’s Notes is “alterative.” In alternative ethnography, the differences become akin to a “counterculture,” which is a meaning that often is attributed to “new” and “alternative” ethnographies.19

Alternative ethnography speaks to me personally. When I  began college in 1982, I was a voice major. With alternative ethnography, I have found a scholarly space to rebirth my love of the performing arts, but this time as a playwright and a solo performer. In this book, I combine the disciplines of social sciences—in particular, my 31 years as a social worker—and my dedication to scholarly writing and theater with my love for dramatization. Combining these disciplines is not a new concept. There have been other stage dramatizations to convey social injustice concerns. Black actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith’s play Fires in the Mirror (1992)20 was a one-person, contemporary, Black solo performance. Black solo performances have given Black people the opportunity to perform various paid solo art genres beginning in the nineteenth century.21 Black theater and performance art continues to be a social justice platform and popular genre for Black entertainers and actors, offering them recognition, respect, and notoriety from White audiences. Smith’s work serves as a model for Wishes by Black Men insofar as she composed and characterized monologues of 26 individuals from the over 100 persons she interviewed who were a part of the August  1991 Crown Heights racial riot in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York. Smith’s ability to capture the accuracy of the 26 individuals’ facial expressions, body movement, characterization, and the clarity of their speaking voice tonality was highly regarded.22 Her Black solo performance was crafted using verbatim text of Black-Americans and Jewish people’s viewpoints of this racially divided community and the aftermath of the riot.23 Co-constructed narrative provided me the opportunity to combine “ethnography, autobiography, and critical pedagogy to shape a methodology that allows [the author] to examine [oneself ] as a qualitative researcher who [lives] in a vulnerable, marginalized community” with others.24 Because I belong naturally to the marginalized American community of Black people and Black men in particular, I can share a narrative of Black men’s racial trauma throughout the book. Researchers can co-construct narratives by “mediating” them through monitoring two relational partners and their conversation; however, researchers also can 108

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become partners in a co-constructed narrative (“unmediated”) by including themselves in a relational partnership.25 In Activity 2, I extended the membership of participants beyond two people to five, including me and four other Black men as we engage an unconventional and creative use of voices. I do the same in Activity 3 as a facilitator with workshop participant attendees for a post-staged reading discussion. My expansion in membership for both activities allowed me to create multivocal texts. Ronai developed the methodology of layered accounts, expressing the benefit of this method within a play script and performance as: “Layers of experiences, [the author’s] and others, are laid down one on top of the other, until an impression of the situation is built up, or etched, into the reader’s durée or consciousness.”26 With this performative strategy in the staged reading, the layering of speech as the Storyteller allowed me to highlight my personal experiences of racism with the other Black men’s dialogue, as well to have a co-performance relationship to validate our experiences and emphasize our authenticity. With a co-performance, the actors are not participant-observers but can be heavily entrenched in the embodiment and engagement of each other’s messaging and attitude, which resonates from their dialogic voice.27 Finally, in my talk of Activity 4 through my solo performance as a Black male educator, I use narrative inquiry/analysis to inform readers— and, in the construct of this book, workshop participants—about my personal concerns with racism. This qualitive method offers the opportunity to cluster stories within a story-telling platform to create a performative showcase of my own race-related lived experiences.

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Author’s Notes

My Wish I’ve absorbed myself into these four Black men’s pain and challenges as Black men living in a White America. I’ve protected their original words and voices as I developed writing prompts to seek their personal, unique narratives and represented them as a staged, read script. By doing so, hopefully I’ve honored the authenticity of their Blackness. And now, like a mother giving birth, today it’s time to deliver them to others to read and hear what I already know and live myself as a Black man. May we come to view each other as Thou and not as It.

Notes 1 W. John Morgan and Alex Guilherme, “I and Thou: The Educational Lessons of Martin Buber’s Dialogue with the Conflicts of His Times,” Educational Philosophy and Theory (November 2010): 979–96, 982. 2 Matthew Martin and Eric W. Cowen, “Remembering Martin Buber and the I-Thou in Counseling,” Counseling Today, May 8, 2019, n.p., http://ct.counseling.org/2019/05/ remebering-martin-buber-and-the-i-thou-in-counseling/#comment-811387. 3 James Baldwin, The Amen Corner (New York, NY: Dial Press, 1954). 4 Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (Random House, 1959). 5 August Wilson, Fences (New York, NY: A Plume Book, 1985). 6 Sandra M. Mayo, “Black Theatre History Plays: Remembering, Recovering, Reenvisioning,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance, eds. Kathy A. Perkins et al. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 29–33, 29. 7 Jeremy O. Harris, Slave Play (New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group, 2018). 8 E. Patrick Johnson, “Many Stories—One Body: Black Sole Performances from Vaudeville to Spoken Word,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance, eds. Kathy A. Perkins et  al. (New York: Routledge, 2018), 317–22, 321. 9 Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (Wilmington, DE: Touchstone, 1993). 10 Ronald E. Hall and Jesenia M. Pizarro, “Cool Pose: Black Male Homicide and the Social Implications of Manhood,” Journal of Social Sciences Research 37 (December 15, 2010): 86–98, https://doi.org/10.1080/01488376.2011.524530. 11 Dwight Conquergood, “Performing as a Moral Art: Ethical Dimensions of the Ethnography of Performance,” Literature in Performance 5, no. 2 (1985): 1–13. 12 Karri A. Holley and Julia Colyar, “Rethinking Texts: Narrative and the Construction of Qualitative Research,” Educational Researcher 38, no. 9 (2009): 680–86, 681, https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X09351979. 13 Arthur W. Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness & Ethics, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 23.

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Author’s Notes 4 Ibid. 1 15 Ronald J. Pelias, “Performative Writing as Scholarship: An Apology, An Argument, An Anecdote,” Cultural Studies—Critical Methodologies 5, no. 4 (2005): 415–24, 419. 16 Jimmie Manning and Tony Adams, “Popular Culture Studies and Autoethnography: An Essay on Method,” The Popular Culture Studies Journal 3, no. 1&2 (2015): 187–222. 17 Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn Ellis, Evocative Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories (New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2016), 63. 18 Arthur P. Bochner, “Criteria Against Ourselves,” Qualitative Injury 6, no. 2 (2000): 266–72. 19 Ibid., 267–68. 20 Anna Deavere Smith, Fires in the Mirror (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1992). 21 Johnson, “Many Stories/One Body,” 320. 22 Ibid. 23 Another social science and humanities dramatic collaboration was Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America (1993), an examination of the AIDS epidemic and gay experience in the 1980s as men were dying from this tragic public health crisis of the decade. 24 Gresilda A. Tilley-Lubbs, “Critical Autoethnography and the Vulnerable Self as Researcher,” in Re-telling Stories Critical Autoethnographic Narratives, eds. Gresilda A. Tilley-Lubbs and Silvia Benard Calva (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2016), 3–15, 3, doi:10.1007/978-94-6300-567-8_1. 25 Carolyn Ellis and Leigh Berger, “Their Story, My Story, Our Story: Including the Research’s Experience in Interview Research,” in Handbook of Interview Research, eds. Jaber F. Gubrium et al. (London: Sage, 2001), 849–75, 859. 26 Carol Rambo Ronai, “Multiple Reflections of Child Sex Abuse: An Argument for a Layered Account,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 23, no. 4 (1995): 395–419, 6, https://doi.org/10.1177/089124195023004001. 27 D. Soyini Madison, Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics, and Performance, 3rd ed. (London: Sage, 2020), 165.

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INDEX

accountability 52, 58, 97 – 8, 103, 107 achievement 22, 25, 46 Adams, Tony 107 addiction see alcoholism African American 22, 27 – 9, 35 – 8, 52, 55 – 6, 83; see also Black Afrocentrism 20, 93, 102 aggression 14, 26; see also microaggression alcoholism 85 – 90 alienation 19, 101, 103 alternative ethnography 107 – 8 American South 11, 35, 81 ancestors 12, 27, 82, 96 Angelou, Maya 96 – 7 Angels in America 111n23 anger 8 – 9, 29, 33 – 5, 41, 44 – 6, 47, 49, 51, 55, 57, 68 – 9, 88 anxiety 57 – 8, 72, 75, 79, 87, 91 apology 8, 57 – 8, 71, 91, 96 Arbery, Ahmaud 34, 80, 82 arrest 44 – 7 articulate 44 athleticism 25 – 6, 93 audience 2, 59n4, 61 – 77, 102, 106, 108 autobiography 2, 108 autoethnography 62, 68, 107; evocative 107; performative 100 – 1 Baldwin, James 102 Bandura, Albert 8 belonging 14, 23, 40

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bias 96 – 8; unconscious 54 Billson, Janet Mancini 103 Black: Americans 8, 70; buffoonery 102; children 12, 30, 43, 53, 81, 84; church 14, 87; community 28, 96; family 87; father 74, 85 – 7, 95; history 92; mother 71, 86; police officers 32; theater 101 – 2, 108; women 22, 25, 29, 61 – 3, 67, 86 blackface 102 Black Lives Matter 59n4, 72 Black man: educated 21, 24, 40, 43 – 5, 65 – 9, 70 – 1, 104; gay 26 – 29, 85, 93, 95; unarmed 32; uneducated 44, 69 – 70, 102; see also anger Blackness 3, 19 – 27, 37, 44 – 6, 58, 78 – 9, 97, 103, 105, 107, 110; anti- 96 Black-on-Black 96 – 7 Blake, Jacob 80 Blame a Black Man Syndrome 45 blood 96 Blow, Charles M. 91 Bochner, Arthur P. 107 Boston 89 – 91, 94 bougie 97 Brown, James 22 Brown, Michael 80 “Brown Paper Bag Test” 96 Bryan, William “Roddie” 82 Buber, Martin 19, 98, 101

Index caste system 96 Castile, Philando 80 change 3, 12 – 16, 22, 38, 52, 62, 98; institutional 55, 58, 84 character 2, 20 Chauvin, Derek 82 Christian 5, 7, 42, 81 civil liberties 92 Civil Rights Era 12, 73, 75, 92; post- 73 Clark, Stephon 80 class 46, 90 colleague 14, 23, 26 – 7, 35 – 8, 41, 52 – 9 college see education, higher colorblindness 6 colorism 97 compassion 16, 36 competence 25, 36, 42 – 6, 55 Connor, Bull 37 Conquergood, Dwight 105 consequence 43, 47, 53, 80 cool pose 92, 103 counterculture 108 COVID 27 Crawford, John 80 criminal 44 critical pedagogy 108 Crown Heights 108 cultural: capital 46 – 7; norms 58 danger 6, 13, 15, 38, 41, 56, 75, 79, 89, 91 death 48 – 9, 54, 71 – 83, 92 degrees 24 – 5, 84 DeGruy, Joy 16, 84 DeJesus, Tony 105 demographics 56, 69 depression 37 desegregation 89 – 90 dialect 43 Diallo, Amadou 80 dialogue 1, 18, 61 – 2, 105; see also Buber, Martin discrimination 3, 25, 29, 96 – 7, 103 dismissal 18, 38, 73, 76, 100 disrespect 35, 50 diversity 23 – 4, 41, 51 – 6 Dunbar, Paul Laurence 28 education: higher 13, 20, 23 – 5, 44, 47, 50 – 6, 63, 65 – 7, 86, 89, 93 – 4, 104; public 53, 56, 89, 91 educator 1, 20, 30 – 1, 36 – 7, 47, 53, 56 – 7, 65, 76, 91, 93 – 4, 104, 109

elders 43, 71 equity 5, 23, 53, 56 ethics 110 ethnic cleansing see genocide ethnicity 6, 10 ethnography 107 execution 80 – 1 Fair Housing Act 25 fair wage see equity fatigue 74 fear 8 – 13, 36 – 7, 47 – 51, 68, 72, 83, 93, 103 Fetchit, Stepin 102 Fires in the Mirror 108 first: Black actor 102; Black coach 13; Black man 85 first-generation college student 24 Floyd, George 32, 71, 79 – 82 forefather see ancestors Foster, Stephen 12 Fowers, Alyssa 79 Garner, Eric 80 gay see Black man Gaye, Marvin 21 gender 21, 67, 79, 82, 91, 96 genocide 8 “good ole days” 26 Gray, Freddie 80 Gurley, Akai 80 Hansberry, Lorraine 102 Harriet see Tubman, Harriet Harris, Jeremy 102 Hartbeat Ensemble 106 hate crime 71, 92; see also lynching Hewett, Beth 1 – 17, 63, 76 Holiday, Billie 81 hope 3, 22, 38, 58, 96 – 8 hopelessness 38 Hughes, Langston 102 humiliation 43, 87, 102 identity 52, 77, 78, 107 immigrant 10 incarceration 45, 47, 75 individuality 22, 38, 63, 74, 101 inequity 56 informed consent 104 integrity 36, 44 – 5 intention 23, 66, 105 interpersonal conflict 2, 104

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Index interracial relationship 95 intimidation 41, 47 intolerance 24 invalidation 26, 38, 45 I-Thou see Buber, Martin Jean, Botham 80 Jewish 9 – 10, 19, 47, 101, 108 Jim Crow 38, 82, 86 Johnson, Ernest H. 25, 51, 55 Ku Klux Klan 7 – 15, 111 ladder of success 50, 54 leadership 14, 30, 36, 38, 70 LGBTQ community 47 listening 1, 75 lived experience 2, 18, 38, 54, 61 – 77, 84, 101 – 5, 109 lynching 8, 38, 80 – 2, 92 Madea 102 Martin, Trayvon 82 masculinity 26 – 8, 93 – 5, 103 masking 27 – 8, 74, 92 – 3, 103 matriarch 22 McClain, Elijah 80 McClelland, Brandon 82 McMichael, Travis and Gregory 82 media 32, 80 – 2 meditation 38 Meeropol, Abel 81 mental health 38, 79, 83 microaggression 26, 44, 53, 66 microinsult see microaggression military 9, 73, 80 minstrel show 102 misconception 45, 52 mission 30 murder 79 – 82, 92 Murphy, Eddie 102 “n—” 7 narrative 1, 29, 102, 108 – 10; dialogic 104; false 79; inquiry/ analysis 105 Native American 11, 81 negro spirituals 12, 22 newspaper 7, 23, 26; see also media non-intellectual 26 non-verbal communication 29 – 30 Obama, Barack 87 objectification 19, 101

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“old boy network” 23 openness 3, 16, 64, 98 oppression 21 – 39, 54, 62, 67, 71 – 2, 84, 103 – 4 ostracization 40 outrage 18, 62, 79 passing 96 peers 13, 26, 53, 55 people of color 5 – 6, 16, 26, 29, 41, 53, 84, 97, 101 Perry, Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew 102 Perry, Tyler 102 persecution 79, 96 perspective 5, 15, 61 – 77, 93, 97 Pizarro, Jesenia M. 110 police 15, 27, 32, 36, 42 – 4, 47, 75, 82 politics 5, 21 post-traumatic slave syndrome 16, 84 Powell, Kajieme 80 power 68, 91 – 2 powerlessness 50 – 3, 104 predominately White 37, 55 prejudice 9 – 10, 75, 96, 98 pride 22, 25, 36, 86 principal see educator prison see incarceration professor see educator promotion 51, 56 protection 29 protest 13, 37, 53, 72, 89 race: relations 98; riot 89, 108 racial: antenna 29; assault 2, 35, 103; blundering 5, 13 – 15, 98; climate 21; consciousness 45; distancing 14 – 15, 98; divide 27, 63, 79, 90, 108; dynamics 42; identification 22; naiveté 91; reckoning 98; struggles 102; trauma 1, 5, 16, 18 – 19, 38 – 9, 43, 47, 52 – 8, 62, 84, 92, 101, 103, 108 racism: explicit 3; externalized 58; implicit 3, 43; internalized 58; systemic 58 research 2, 18, 105, 107 – 8 respect 36, 71, 73, 76, 98, 102 responsibility 13 – 14, 52, 62, 87 restoration 47 Rice, Tim 80 Robbins, Laura Cathcart 29 role model 24, 35 – 6, 48, 93

Index scout 29 self: love 52; nobility 103; preservation 52; reflection 12, 16, 72 – 3, 92, 98; respect 97; worth 76 sensationalism 82 sensitivity training 23 – 4 sexual identity 3, 78 sexuality 92 – 5, 103 shame 6 – 7, 12, 27, 47, 52, 58, 74, 79, 93, 98, 102 shooting 7, 32 skin: color 3, 6, 41, 50, 52, 56, 66, 73, 75 – 6, 91, 96 – 7; tone 96 – 7 slavery 9, 12, 16, 84 Smith, Anna Deavere 108 Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture 29 social injustice 108 social justice 106, 108 social learning theory see Bandura, Albert social work 1 – 4, 20, 77, 84 – 5, 104 – 5 social worker 31, 50, 57, 85, 108 socioeconomic status 100 soldier see military Southie see Boston sports see athleticism stabbing 52 staged reading 2, 18, 20 – 60, 104 – 6, 109 stakes 30 stereotype 26, 36, 38, 77, 79, 102, 104 Sterling, Alton 80 storytelling 102, 107 “Strange Fruit” see Holiday, Billie student union 13 taboo 28 talk, the 12, 43, 71

targeting 48, 84 Till, Emmett 47, 92 tokenism 41, 52 trauma see racial, trauma trust 4, 37, 62, 98 Tubman, Harriet 70 two-parent home 22 Uncle Frank 93 United States 8, 47, 79 – 80, 83, 84 university see education, higher violence 24, 32, 72, 80 – 2 viral videos 83 virtue 84 voice 2, 16, 18, 31, 44, 63, 102, 109 – 10; dialogic 109 vulnerability 15, 54, 66, 77, 79, 84, 98, 107 – 8 Wade, Breeshia 52, 58 Wan, William 79 weaponization 52, 78 Weller, Francis 16 White: counterparts 37, 54; fragility 57; guilt 12; man 29, 31 – 5, 43 – 4, 47, 55, 64, 73; supremacy 81; woman 5, 16, 31 – 7, 43, 46 – 7, 62, 65, 68, 72, 81, 91 – 2 Whiteness 19, 23, 51, 78, 96 – 7, 103 Wilson, August 102 Winters Group 25 Winters, Mary-Frances 8, 44, 66 work: environment 23, 30; performance 55; place 14, 23, 27, 30, 51, 55, 76; space 41, 74 workshop 1 – 3, 18, 109 Wright, Daunte 80 Zimmerman, George 82

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