Essence Magazine

I wrote a piece for Essence Magazine focusing on the larger questions involved in Georgetown University's decision to begin a process towards reparations for descendants of people whom the Jesuit founders sold to keep the university afloat.

Excerpt:

"In 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates eloquently laid out one of the most compelling cases for reparations for Black people in this country. Writing for The Atlantic, Coates weaved together centuries of exclusionary U.S. policy and practice, working to bring slavery, redlining, housing discrimination, and Jim Crow segregation into conversation with broader federal policies such as Roosevelt's New Deal. This policy was aimed at increasing the number of U.S. citizens who could participate in this country's so-called democratic process, but had the opposite effect on the lives of Black Americans, who continued to experience rampant discrimination and disenfranchisement. 

Even when it seems that much has changed, the core of this white settler colonial project remains intact. The sustained systemic violence has gradually shape-shifted to camouflage a more sophisticated white supremacy which remains etched into the walls of this nation's most revered institutions, including Georgetown University."

Teen Vogue

I wrote a piece for Teen Vogue about a Gillette commercial which tackled toxic masculinity and how the responses of men illustrated how necessary it was.

Excerpt:

"This implies that based on a certain understanding of what masculinity is, boys and men are taught being sensitive or soft is inherently bad; that taking risks and being outwardly violent or aggressive are the hallmarks of manhood; and that having things, generally money and/or power, makes you a man. Under a system where this is the pervading ideology, men and boys who deviate from these narrow expectations are castigated by other men and boys. The worst things that a man can call another man, or a boy can call another boy, are usually associated with women, i.e., soft. Of course, many negative characteristics of masculinity ideology are also harmful to women, girls, transgender people, non-binary people, and other marginalized identities, because they are often the targets of men who feel those individuals threaten their masculinity.

According to Wizdom Powell, an associate professor of psychiatry at UConn Health, and part of a project called "The Many Faces of Masculinity" from Harry's, a grooming-products company: "There are downstream consequences of not really having a healthy outlet to dispense negative emotions. If you're bottled up all the time, it's like Whack-A-Mole, it will pop up behaviorally in another way." If men cannot change the toxic kinds of masculinities impacting their behavior, they and boys are at risk of experiencing everything from negative emotional consequences to threats to public safety."

Racebaitr

I wrote this piece for Racebaitr, which discussed the changing relationship between myself and my father and how that relates to the idea of masculinity

Excerpt:

"In conversations with my own father, I see this manifest in the absence of affection in my adult life compared to a deeply affectionate playfulness in my childhood memories. The older I became, the less affectionate and playful our interactions. My experiences with my father make me question the effect of masculinity on the willingness to be expressive about your love for your male children. Is it because any expression of love towards any man is related to homoeroticism in the eyes of toxic masculinity? Or is it because expressions of love for boy children is seen as a weakness in the culture of masculinity?

Performative masculinity is a mask that men wear in the place of developing emotional intelligence. It is a poor mask that comes apart at the seams when pressed upon, which makes it a poor choice when one can also choose to be vulnerable. Yet vulnerability is not often chosen because the idea of masculinity is one which has been set in the plaster of our fathers who were taught by their fathers either explicitly or through imitation that hardness or toughness made you a real man.

This particular conceptualization of manhood or masculinity may not be solely the possession of Black men, but it is the prevailing conceptualization of manliness within the borders of Black masculinity. And it is a rigid concept that desperately needs to be challenged. This toxic masculinity does more than imprison our sons in an emotionless state. It endangers women and our daughters in a unique manner, as in the casual violence hidden in "manly" conversations around treating women like animals on safari, wherein we discuss and determine which ones meet our aesthetic approval."

Black Youth Project

I wrote this piece for Black Youth Project after reading James Baldwin's January 1985 essay, which was originally titled Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood centering on how violence makes one American, and this violence is reflected in the abuses of Black fraternities.

Excerpt:

"In becoming American in some aspects, or rather being underneath the thumb of Americanism, or being colonized to aspire to some kind of Americanness, Black people are not immune from becoming socialized to employ these exact same violences in the pursuit of being seen as American. For Black men, such assimilation might help us to be seen as American men worthy of respect and fear.

I believe that this connection is apparent in the relationship between Black and white fraternities. At times, it almost seems as though Black fraternities, though culturally distinct and distant from their white counterparts, partake in the same kinds of acts of violence-both to men seeking to join their ranks and to the women who stand outside of their ranks.

If, as Baldwin presumed, violence is the key to the entire imagining of a thing called being American, then it stands to reason that to become an American is to do violence or to be groomed to do violence to another person, particularly one who is of a less unprotected class.

The white American fraternities have been doing this in spades essentially since the days of the American "founding fathers" who, for lack of higher education institutions, instead engaged in fraternity through the likes of the Freemasons, eventually going on to create a Constitution and systems that refused humanity for Black people and Native Americans. A uniquely pathological kind of violence where all of those white men who were legally and culturally considered human had both the capacity and the power to create violent oppression over the "others"."

Medium

I wrote this piece on Medium after I was a guest on All Real Radio to participate in a roundtable discussion about what masculinity does to men. 

Excerpt:

"I am sad that I have been deprived of the term beautiful by a society that hates me, that hates my skin, that hates Blackness, that hates wide noses and hates Black women and hates to call me and other Black men beautiful unless they fit an exceptional mold. I do not know what it is to be considered beautiful and I do not know what it is to be held by the term beautiful and caressed by the term beautiful, but I know what it is to have the term beautiful applied with extreme discretion, and I want to know what it is like to be beautiful."