#MakeBlackMenConfidentAgain

By:  H.T., Website:  Rogue Black Nerd

I did not vote for Donald Trump nor do I like him.  I grew to hate the man because I grew up aware of his op-ed on the Central Park 5 that possibly could have gotten them lynched or convicted of a crime they did not commit.  Combine this with the fact that he is a man that due to his ego both sunk the USFL and started the bs birther movement against President Obama and I look at the man with a great deal of loathing.  But for all intents and purposes, I look not only at his persona and his rise to power as President of the United States and I realize why he was able to take office.  I live in Michigan, a state that Trump won that also had many black voters for him.  To understand why black people here would vote for Trump over Hillary Clinton, I think you have to look past the argument that people would rather vote for a white man than a white woman and see the deeper issues that black people here had with the idea of Clinton as President.  For many black voters, socially this seemed like a nightmare.  See, what people don’t understand about a lot of black people is that for as much as people were happy we got a black President, many of us didn’t like the literal left turn culture took in America while he was President.  It was great that the trans community was getting its shine and that gay marriage was legalized, but one thing that couldn’t be ignored was that in all this there was one group that was visibly getting socialized in a way that was clearly not helping:  black men.

Cisgendered heterosexual black men for the last few years have slowly but surely been getting socialized in a way that one can’t help but notice isn’t actually fixing the issues of the world around us.  Instead what it does is simply teach men that they, not by any actual action but by the fact that they exist in a world that on an omnipresent level isn’t as hard on them (“privilege”) that they are the cause of black women’s suffering and oppression in society and the best option is to basically live life through a calvinist paradigm of repentance for the sins of other men and to be constant evangelicals for the ideals of every which feminist we come across.  Which in the end is how you get men like this:

The problem with men like this is that within the black community alone, men this neutered can’t actually do us any good.  If anything, they are a clear and present danger on the fact that for as much as men are told to resocialize other men from behaviors that could harm black women, these kinds of men are neutered almost purposely in that the belief is that if we remind men that to deal with men who are a danger to women, there will always be a chance violence will be a possibility.  But instead, we not only socialize men to not even try to teach women how to protect themselves, but we’re demonized for simply wanting to physically protect them ourselves.  The claim being that if we would stop men from being trash in the first place, they would have to commit “benevolent sexism”.  The problem with this logic is that even women in power know that it’s usually clutch to have a man who’s willing to protect them from physical threats, even if said man is doing it simply for a paycheck.  Let me remind you all that Beyonce’s main bodyguard is a man who has a FIRM that specializes in security.  It’s clearly been doing well as it has offices in New York, London and even Abu Dhabi and has existed for over a decade.

But for men of today, black men especially, it feels like we’re told multiple messages at once and we don’t know which way is up.  To quote a meme I saw once, we’re deeply frustrated by a society that constantly seems to be emasculating and undermining us while delegitimizing any complaints we have because of “privileges” that do nothing to reduce the frustration of living in a isolating, sedentary and self-destructive culture increasingly devoid of age-old sources of happiness like community, religion, national identity and family.

For as much as I look at guys like Elliot Rodgers and shake my head in disgust, it can’t be denied that men like him only exist because on the whole we have created a culture where men aren’t even tasked with fixing the issues of our gender, just to get on social media and verbally flagellate ourselves to prove how woke we are but changes nothing in the big picture.  The reason we have violent incels like Rodgers is because many men today, due to being from a generation that overly congratulated and under disciplined us, many men have grown up in a society that loves to tell women that they’re living gods but tell men that we are the causes of the world’s ills, mocks the complaints with the label #MaleTears, and then shames any real offered solution to men on how to feel good about themselves either as male entitlement or ego stroking men by saying that they don’t need to have a six pack or be tall to feel attractive while ignoring the very reason men wish to feel attractive:  women and their affections.

This is why I say that black men on the whole need to come together and build ourselves up as frankly the world around us refuses to do so and even actively tells men that we should feel shitty about ourselves.  Black men have gone so long with having our image in modern pop culture be so emasculated and sanitized that it clearly looks as though the fight against “toxic masculinity” and #MasculinitySoFragile seems to always be a movement that makes black men more feminine.  The problem isn’t that black men are “being turned gay” as such a thing can’t happen, either you are gay or you aren’t.  The problem is that straight black men are being henpecked into the idea that they really are for getting rid of the social norms that oppress black women & they should be willing to be men that look a little less than masculine as many of the masculine ideals within our community are why women get harmed.  I understand that repressing feelings and not wanting to defer any level of authority to a woman plays a part in why some men abuse women, but I can’t for the life of me understand how we are making men better by creating a generation of men where the main fashions for us tend to look like a cross between 2004 high schoolers and Christopher Street on a Friday.  Again, the issue is that it’s unclear what this accomplishes in relation to how black men treat black women.

I say #MakeBlackMenConfidentAgain because clearly what’s going on here is a clear as day shakedown of black men with the threat of the shame of being labeled a misogynist (or “ashy” or being “canceled”) along with the potential threat of ones sex life being in jeopardy.  People will say that I’m only militant on this because I have a problem with black women.  But that’s not the case.

The problem I have here is that I don’t like when people decide that the path to solving the problem of their cause, however noble, is to basically tell one group to kneel rather than to make them solve the problem they may have played a part in causing.  Yes, there are ways black men can fix the problems that misogyny and patriarchy have caused many women.  But at this point, men aren’t being pushed to actually solve said issue in ways that could bring about real change.  Instead, this is why you see more “male feminists” who either only exist to make a buck or to get laid along with a silent majority of them who simply are men who seek a place in the world.  I should know as I was one of these men.

The reason I bring up Trump is because the reason such a high number of black men voted for Trump is because for all that we loved about Obama, in a ways during the time of his Presidency, we as a culture stopped demanding that black men get up and be leaders let alone be of means.  Between Black Lives Matter and #OscarsSoWhite resulting in what I can only classify as a well shot indie movie with a plot I’ve seen at least a dozen times winning best picture, I think many black people didn’t want more of what we got with Obama, let alone the same with a President that would gladly give more social currency to such behaviors with zero skin in the game should any of it go south.

The problem is not feminists, nor black women, but rather the idea that the best way to fix the discourse between black women and men is to convince black men that the answer is them not being men, not because we’re not fucking everything that moves, but because we’re told to deal with shitty men but shamed for violence.  We’re told to open up on our feelings but shamed if said feelings are “problematic”.  Hell, we’re shamed for liking any specific type of woman as not liking any and all that we see is some sort of aversion.  Which ironically means that many of the same feminists that bemoan white feminists share the views of a few, in this case Helen Rosner on her views on deprogramming men’s views on the optimal state of feminine beauty, right down to the belief that even what they desire matters, which again is why I created this hashtag.  People complain about black men being entitled, but I feel like at this point we do need to demand more in our culture as we can get dozens of parts of our culture that tells women that they’re the greatest things since sliced bread, yet they wonder why so many men go to the more toxic circles and content of our culture to feel empowered.  It’s because for men today, too much of black male culture is on some level built towards pleasing black women, which wouldn’t be a problem if not for the stark dichotomy between the two types of content.  Either it’s men being told to grovel at the feet of black women or it’s us being told to basically kick them in the face.  I argue that we can teach black men to be better black men that believe in themselves without the feeling that they need to be misogynist but also that they don’t need to shame themselves to solve said problem.

Honestly, it’s why I look at guys like Derrick Jaxn with such loathing as it’s frustrating that this is a man that is exasperating a problem by claiming to be here to fix it, but straight up ignoring how to fix it.  Honestly, for as much as people give Gil shit, the guy does offer solutions to tangible problems that people face individually in the black community, but yet and still I watch him and men like him get shat on while the biggest names in independent black media nowadays are men who could easily be a less “problematic” alternative but choose to put their weight behind women selling LITERAL BOXES OF IDEOLOGICALLY BIASED RHETORIC FOR $100 A MONTH.  

Seriously, #MakeBlackMenConfidentAgain.