2. Masculinity / Femininity as Governance
How were masculinity and femininity enforced where you’re from?
What behaviors were rewarded, punished, or mocked?
When did you first realize you were being read through a binary that did not hold your full interior life?

3. Inheritance of Manhood
Who were the men who shaped you?
What did they model about tenderness, anger, protection, fear, or love?
What did they never say out loud?

4. The Word “Hood”
When you hear “hood,” do you hear danger, belonging, stigma, memory, pride?
Who gets to use that word with affection, and who uses it as indictment?
How has that label traveled with your body?

5. Civilization and Control
What does “civilized” mean in your lived experience?
Who defines it?
When have you felt required to perform civility at the expense of your authenticity?

6. Vulnerability and Containment
What does vulnerability look like for you as a Black boy or man?
Where have you been allowed to express grief, softness, confusion, or desire?
Where have you had to swallow it?

It was traumatic to make a transition from Fred Hampton to this...

But this highlights everything Williams Jones is talking about in his book “Is God a White Racist.” Especially in the section where he deconstruct the Serving Servant complex black people have. Where summary he say, black people believe they are on a define mission for God to teach their oppressor how to be fully Human by freeing themselves from their racist ideology. When all have been liberated from their racist belief to become fully human then their divine mission is over, and they will return to |

Therefore, their countenance, mannerisms and self awareness is different. Race modifies the experiences of Black men because our society chops down every black man that dares to be on equal footing. Its like an invisible mist or cloud that blurs.

Simply stripping the Black male body naked was sexual violence; & therefore the auction block played a similar role. The Black male phallus remained under constant surveillance & this is why lynching was accompanied with massive crowds; each attendee could take part in ownership.

All of them but Delectable and the Marriott book deal best with both the structural and psychoanalytic implications of the consumption literal, figurative, philosophically, of Black males...of Black penises...the homoerotic nature of this...

And I personally use "the dying Black male" as the interface through which people perceive us. It's not enough to be just dead...there has been excessive need in actively seeing us lose vitality...which is why we have SEEN Walter Scott, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, George Floyd, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, lynching victims with 30K plus viewers...we've SEEN them die. We heard Trayvon's conversation...and then the gunshots.

I think it's Calvin Warren who talks about Black people representing "nothing" so that white people can punish and do away with the terror "nothing" through our bodies.

Maybe the brutalization of the Black man, in particular, is the process of converting Black people into "nothing". And I say this because genocide studies has shown that the violence heaped onto battle aged males/men is directly proportional to the violence experienced by the group as a whole.

James Baldwin