Handicapping our Sons

There are certain things one needs in life in order to grow up emotionally healthy.  Because our culture has this deep seated hatred for Black men and, at the same time, an irrational worship of Black masculinity, we, meaning Black society, raise our little boys in ways that dishonor their proper maturation process.  We set the stage for them to be horrible fathers and husbands in childhood with practices and patterns that are nothing more than diseased remnants of slave teachings.  Because, however, these practices are accepted as standard, and touted as healthy, we, in essence, manufacture, disabled Black men.  All of our patterns and behaviors begin in childhood.  We go through our entire lives mirroring the “truths” we learn before we are 10 years old.  So to get to the origins of some of the pervasive and debilitating issues surrounding Black men, which are many of the issued Black men possess in staggering numbers, let’s take an in depth look at the life of a typical Black little boy, let’s call him Damon. 

Damon is a beautiful, brown little boy with all the potential in the world.  He, like almost every black child, is being parented by his single mother.  He was the “byproduct” of a four month fling in which his mother, a very pretty, light-skinned women got pregnant and her “boyfriend” did a Maury Povich and said, “It ain’t mine.”  Turns out he was and the father has to pay court ordered child support and has scheduled visitation.  Damon’s grandparents are “high yellow” and they often criticize their daughter for getting pregnant by such a “Black” man, right in front of Damon.  His mother wasn’t emotionally prepared to have a child, because she, like most Black women, hadn’t dealt with her own issues.  Oh, she is excellent at repeating clichés like, “I’m a strong black woman, I don’t need a man, and, I can be the mother and the father.”  But those are just empty and irrational sayings that have no meaning because any mature adult knows that a child is best reared by two parents in a loving environment and it’s not even emotionally possible for a mother to teach her son how to be a man because she has no clue what it means to be a man.  She might be capable of raising him to be a good person, IF she had cleaned up the mess of her own emotional life first, but she didn’t and she beats the crap out of her son for every minor, perceived, or imagined infraction, every chance she can get, saying that she’s teaching him discipline when all she’s really doing is reinforcing violence and hatred. 

In order to be a trusting adult, you need to have reliable, dependable people in your life, you need stability.  Damon is 8 years old and he’s lived in four apartments already.  He and his mother move frequently to avoid getting evicted for failure to pay the rent.  His mom works a steady job but she spends her money carelessly, opting to buy clothes and shoes, and getting her hair done in order to be attractive to men rather than budget her money and provide a stable home for her child.  She thinks that Damon is the reason she can’t get a man, an although, to her credit, she doesn’t come out and say it, she shows it in her behavior, quick to leave him at various “auntie’s” houses any and every chance she can get to go out on a date.  Damon’s absentee father breaks promises all the time in order to get out of his parenting responsibilities so he can run the streets with all his women.  Poor Damon.  He learns very early that father’s are never present and that women put men first.  The only thing that is constant in his life, the only thing that he can truly trust, is that there is going to be change and disappointments.  He has to make new friends every time they move and he never really feels a sense of permanence or feels like he has a home because he knows at any moment, his mother could say, “Start packing, it’s time to go.”  Damon grows up and he doesn’t let people get close to him because believes relationships are temporary and he’s never had anyone provide stability, consistency, security, or even a sense of being loved in his life.

Little Damon learned early on that he wasn’t good enough, that there was something inherently wrong with him.  His mother would come home from work, frustrated and angry from the job and yell and scream at him.  It was usually her chance to get out all her frustration with the world.  “Damon, you stupid little nigga, you are just like your father, that no good son of a bitch.  I hate him.  You are an evil, hateful child.”  Sweet innocent Damon hears that and learns that he was born no good, that he isn’t good enough as is, so he has to become something else, someone else.  He wears the mask that grins and lies.  Adult Damon adapts his behavior to what he learns as a child by being untrustworthy, never really being his authentic self with anyone, shaping and morphing his personality to fit people’s needs, and ultimately, he can’t keep up the façade and lets them down when the game gets too demanding.  It becomes too tiresome to keep up the image of being something and someone he really isn’t, of pretending to be someone he’s not, so he doesn’t keep his promises, he doesn’t follow through, he doesn’t live up to his word.  But the real authentic Damon, the one inside is looking for validation.  He’s never gotten it, he’s not even sure it exists, so all he knows is to keep lying, keep pretending to be something he’s not to prove to the world that he is worthy.  When he let’s the people around him down, his subconscious mind validates his mother’s words, that he really is no good.

Little Damon learned to lie at an early age.  His mom would always make him responsible for her happiness.  She would call him “her little man” and tell him that he was the only man in her life.  He felt responsible for making his mommy happy.  He hated seeing his mommy mad at him, and she would fly off into a rage when he did something bad, so when she confronted him, he would lie to make his mommy proud of him, to make sure she loved him.  Damon would never get a spanking when he lied, but he would get a beating every time he told the truth.  Mommy, desperate to make Damon the man in her life, never held little Damon accountable when he lied to others.  She coddled him and defended him against anyone who would dare accuse him of anything wrong because she thought any implied imperfections of her son were a reflection on her poor mothering skills.  If his mom sanctioned his lying by telling her own lies then lying couldn’t be all that bad.  Lying got him out of trouble, made people happy, didn’t make people mad at him.  It became first nature for Big Damon to lie, to deny, to deceive, and to lie some more.  Adult Damon lies so much, he doesn’t even realize what the truth is.  He can look a person in the eye and lie without so much as blinking an eye and he has no concept that he’s wrong for it. 

“Little boys don’t cry.”  Little Damon heard it over and over again.  “Be a man, don’t be a sissy, real men don’t cry.”  Okay, so little Damon holds in his tears as best he can.  He wants to be a man, right?  All the men in his life are playboys.  All the men in his life use women for sex.  Every message he gets, from TV to friends to that same absentee dad who blows him off for his dates is that men fuck women to prove their manhood.  When he has sex for the first time, usually at an exceptionally young age, he “feels” this great sensation.  It’s more than physical, it’s a moment of release where he can be himself.  He loves that feeling.  He isn’t able to articulate it because  . . . well because he’s never ever been taught to express his feelings because that’s not something boys do.   He associates sex with feeling good but never with intimacy and connection because those are terms he doesn’t even understand.  Everything in society tells him that his big, black dick makes him a man.  Not once is he told that a being a man means having integrity, keeping your promises, being honest when it means you won’t get what you want.  Big Damon uses women for sex left and right, craving the sensation of closeness, craving the opportunity to let down his guard but completely unaware of how to go about it with a partner.  He knows pornos and women who yell and scream at him for being emotionally unavailable but he doesn’t have a clue as to what they are talking about so he moves on to the next woman to fuck and see if he can’t get that feeling again. 

Damon is every Black man.  His experience isn’t identical to every Black man but in far far too many instances it’s damn close.  Now, the triggers can be different.  I could tell the same story with Damon and he could have lived in the same home all his life, with a dad and a mom who were super rigid and super strict, he could have waited until he was a grown man until he had sex but the messages he learned were the same:  that people are untrustworthy, that there’s something inherently bad about him that needs to be suppressed and that lying makes life easier and that sex soothes his weary soul.  Damon has grown up to be an emotionally immature man who uses women for sex without remorse, who lies constantly, who feels justification for never trusting anyone and who changes his persona to fit every relationship in his life.  The saddest part is that Damon doesn’t see anything wrong with the way he is because it’s been his programming since before he had memories and it’s his natural state of existence.  I’m not saying that the reason black relationships are failing is because of Black men, but I’m saying that until men can break their patterns and as long as society tells them that they are justified in whatever they do, we are fucked as a race. 

If Black men can figure out that the messages they got as children, the bad programming, figure out what happened to give them the blueprint for their life were fucked up, they can start the healing process.  I pray that I can somehow get Black men to see that their blueprint wasn’t designed well but that doesn’t mean that they are bad people and it doesn’t mean that the foundation for their lives is right, we can start heal Black relationships. 

Copyright 2006 Scottie Lowe