Worrying about My Black Boy’s Future in America, by Allison R. Brown, of America’s Wire Writers Group

My husband and I fuss and fret over our black boy.

Like other parents, we worry about a lot. We want him to use his smarts for good. Do we coddle him too much? We want him to be tough and kind, but assertive and gentle, and not mean. His boundaries of independent exploration are radiating outward, concentric circles growing farther and farther from us.

We wring our hands and pretend to look away in acknowledgment that he’s ready to claim his freedom, even as we cast furtive glances his way. We’re beginners in the worry department. He’s only 9 years old.

Our angst certainly isn’t unique among parents of black boys. What’s unique for us and for other such parents is that when we peek inside the matrix, we panic. Agents out there are bearing down on our son — bloodthirsty for his dignity, his humanity — as if he were the one. We feel outnumbered, but we hunker down for battle.

This is not a paranoid conspiracy rant. Recent data from the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education reveals that black boys are the most likely group of students to be suspended or expelled from school. Black men and boys are more likely than any demographic group to be targeted — hunted, really — and arrested by police.

Meanwhile, the number of black males taking advanced courses in elementary, middle and high schools and entering college remains disproportionately low. Suicide among black boys is increasing. Media imagery and indifference have locked black boys in their sights. Prisons have become corporate behemoths with insatiable appetites for black and brown boys and men.

My husband and I rightfully agonize about our boy. We agonize alongside many who are working to help, including the federal government. I know firsthand the work that the federal government has done and is doing to improve circumstances for black boys. This includes internal memos and meetings, interagency planning sessions, public conferences, community meetings and listening sessions, and now a White House initiative.

I also know that the federal government is accountable to numerous constituencies that sometimes have conflicting needs. Federal government workers must walk a fine line among varying public interests, which occasionally has meant unintended consequences for black boys.

For instance, in 1994, the federal priority of “zero tolerance” for anyone bringing a weapon to school was signed into law as the Gun-Free Schools Act.That priority reached fever pitch after the Columbine school massacre in 1999 and subsequent copycat slayings and attempts to kill. Federal requirements were overshadowed by local authorities and school administrators who stretched the parameters of “zero tolerance” in schools beyond logical measure to include, for instance, spoons as weapons and Tylenol as an illegal drug, and to suspend and expel students as a result.

“Zero tolerance” has entered the realm of the ridiculous. Many schools have removed teacher and administrator discretion and meted out harsh punishment for school uniform violations, schoolyard fights without injury and various undefined and indefinable categories of offense such as “defiance” and “disrespect.”

Students are suspended, expelled and even arrested for such conduct without investigation or inquiry. There is no evidence to support use of exclusionary discipline practices as tools for prevention, and they have no educational benefit. The brunt of this insanity has fallen on black boys.

Recent federal priorities have targeted harassment and bullying in school to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students from peer-on-peer discrimination dismissed by, and in many cases encouraged by, school administration. Again, understandable.

The goal is praiseworthy — to protect, finally, a population of students and segment of society that has long been a whipping post for every political party, ignored in political discussions except to condemn. While my husband and I have ardently supported federal protections for LGBT students, practically speaking, we continue to lose sleep over our blackboy.

Another peek inside the matrix tells me that the fever pitch around this latest federal agenda item will mean a significant cost to black boys when new categories of offense are created, new ways to characterize them as criminals unworthy of participating in mainstream education or society.

It’s one thing for educators to guide student conduct and educate students about how to care for and respect one another, which is a primary focus of the federal move against harassment and bullying. It’s quite another to change mindsets of adults who run the system, too many of whom believe and speak negatively about black boys and what they cannot accomplish or should not do.

To speak and think affirmatively, to affirm behavior and black boys as people, is to relish the silly jokes they tell within their context, to compliment them on their haircuts or groomed and styled dreadlocks and cornrows, to adopt lingo they create and add it to classroom repertoire, and to invite their fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, cousins to participate in the educational experience.

To support black boys is to celebrate their physical playfulness and the unique ways in which they may support and affirm one another. As with any other children, we must teach black boys through instruction and by example how to read and write, and how to conduct themselves without erasing their identity and attempting to substitute another. We must hone their instincts, whims and knowledge base so they can be empowered to exhibit all the good in themselves. We must be willing to show them our human frailties so they know how to get up and carry on after falling down. Yes, these things can benefit all children, but many children receive them by default. Black boys do not.

To love black boys is to refuse to be an agent of forces clamoring for their souls and instead to be their Morpheus, their god of dreams, to help them believe in their power to save all of us and to train them to step into their greatness. Those agents in the matrix are real. If everyone combines forces and uses common sense, we can declare victory for black boys and eventually all of us.

But without a change in mindset, federal initiatives, no matter their good intentions or the incredible talents that give them life, will continue to leave black boys by the wayside as collateral damage.

My husband and I will continue to fret, knowing the formidable challenges our son faces. We hope that if he has a son, that boy can be just a boy.

Brown is a former trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Educational Opportunities Section. She is president of Allison Brown Consulting, which works with educators, students, families and other key stakeholders to improve the quality of education, especially for black boys. America’s Wire is an independent, nonprofit news service run by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and funded by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Our stories can be republished free of charge by newspapers, websites and other media sources. For more information, visit www.americaswire.org or contact Michael K. Frisby at mike@frisbyassociates.com.

You say violence, rape, murder. I say love, peace and happiness!



Love can offer you a place of safety



There is all this enraged talk about rape, violence and murders in South Africa right now - and rightly so. But we have known for a while that there are just too many people being murdered, too many being raped, and that crime and violence are highly prevalent. We have known this for a long time.

In an earlier post, a colleague stated that: 

"the leaders are either out of ideas how to turn things around, restore meaning to the lives of these young men and women, or they couldn't give a toss for the young black men and women".

I can agree with the possibility of the second bit, but tend to disagree with the first part. It may not be that the leaders have run out of ideas, and instead that the options that might work are the options that they regard as insignificant. The options that might work, like paying attention and changing the small, daily aspects of our lives, that might make the difference are not even given a look-in. Small things like the need for love and the meaning of happiness and what they mean to young men.

So after interviewing a few young black South African males about the importance of love and happiness in ideologies of masculinity, I found that most young men need love. They actually do. Really.

This got me thinking and reading even more about men, love and happiness. Then I had to remind myself that I am a psychologist too, not just a researcher. I am new in this business of being a psychologist, so I forget sometimes.

Psychology, as you might know, is a field that could make significant contributions to the current depressing state South Africa finds itself in, emotionally speaking. The discipline continues to underchieve, but it has such a great potential for this society. Through the discipline psychology we learn the undeniable role of emotions in our lives, and currently, for me, the importance of paying attention to the affective lives of young black men.

Of course, cognitions and behaviour are important, but even though we all would agree that we are "feeling beings", affect tends to be regarded with suspicion by business and political creatures, or otherwise relegated to the private sphere. However, through psychological studies prove again and again that emotions like love, hope, gratitude, shame, and happiness can actually change a person's perceptions and outlook on life. But let me stick to love. As one of the young men I interviewed stated:

"since I met her, she has shown me so much love, and I have become a responsible man, I do not only think of myself, but I have to think of her too. When I buy myself a chocolate, I know I have to buy for baby too..".

So please tell me you don't think love can make a difference in this world. I will wait for your response.

Of course this is not irrefutable proof about the importance of love in young men's lives. But it tells you this young man thinks love has changed him. 

Anyway, all I am saying is that our political leaders and government directors and corporate heads need to forget, for a moment at least, about the traditionalist way of doing things as being the only way that works. Don't buy more guns and bullets for the police to intimidate black young men. Take down the boom gates. Stop building prisons. Ignore that traditionalist leader's voice inside that says love if for "birds". Young men, like young women, need love. Black men, like white men, need to be cared for and to care for others. We need to teach these men that it is okay to love, to be loved. That it's not so bad to laugh, you know. That being happy is just what one needs sometimes, maybe ultimately. That it is okay to cry if you want to. Pat Conroy puts it very well for me when he says

"I thought that at birth men are allowed just as many tears as women, but because they are forbidden to shed them, they die long before women do, with their hearts exploding or their blood pressure rising or their livers eaten away by alcohol, because that lake of grief inside them has no outlet. Men die because their faces were not watered enough".  

So in my quest to understand how young men experience love and happiness I came across more than I had expected. The look of a young men who is in love and is not ashamed to say that he is, the look on his face when he talks about his loved one and how she has influenced the positive change in his life...just priceless.

I really do believe that love can make a difference. Maybe the rates of murder won't drop by tomorrow, maybe there won't be less cases of rape in the next week, but surely in the long run we will have a society filled with caring, loving, responsible men who are good fathers too and not men who will abuse their families. If men love, in the long run we won't have 12-year-olds who repeatedly rape their 3-year-old sisters. We will not have men who abuse other young men. We shall not have have young men who are frustrated by the fact that they cannot meet the standards of white men or older, wealthier black men. 

We all suffer from the effects of violent crimes in one way or the other. And currently the situation of continuous traumatisation is just causing further and widespread decay in our societies and hearts. We are causing all manner of injury to ourselves, by ignoring our emotions. Violence has become so normalised, so ordinary. Murder is normalised, rape is normalised, abuse is normalised, and all these and more are reported on our televisions and radios eachday and all because, YES, they are happening.

But so is laughter, so are acts of peace: these are happening too. What if we made love, like a normal thing. How about getting strange and weird stories on television and radio about tenderness to each other. What about each of us making it okay for the 5-year-old to see mom kissing dad, granddad embracing uncle, friends enjoying each other. What if we teach the kid to understand that it is good to love and see if there will be a change later on.

I have a good feeling things will change for the better then. Not instantly, but they will. If, that is, we try something different. Like teach love. If we let ourselves change traditions that are not getting us anywhere. Like pay close attention to positive emotions. If we  transform ourselves and this way change our societies. Like hugging a young man today. 

We won’t stop the rapes till we stop the murders in South Africa

Last night CNN flighted the story of the gang-rape of a young South African woman. http://edition.cnn.com/2012/04/18/world/africa/south-africa-rape-video/index.html. It made me feel sick, shamed and nauseous to be a South African man. Angry too.

The story ran several times during different programmes. I am informed that other global news networks also ran with the story. Two of the guests on CCN were the Lulu Xingwana, minister of women, children and people with disabilities and Nomboniso Gasa, former chair of the commission for gender equality. I thought their comments were ok, but nothing new.  They spoke about the enduring legacy of apartheid. They spoke about how unacceptable the levels of violence against women are. Ms Gasa challenged some of the views put forward, and though she was overly gentle, I was glad she didn't let it go without comment.

Then, after recomposing myself, I once again felt that the reportage and comment on rape in South Africa does more than just shame and anger us. It conceals the true picture of what we are facing. It is remiss for news reports and commentators on violence in South Africa not to point out for the country and world that being raped is very bad indeed, but so is being murdered. The rates of death from interpersonal violence for young black men go as high as approximately 500/100 000. That’s a mindboggling number. In comparison, female homicides rates are around 24/100 000 - very high relative to  worldwide figures, but nowhere near the prospects faced by young black males in Nyanga, Thembisa and other low-income urban areas.

Rape is ugly, beastly and can shatter a woman's life, and at rates of approximately 132 per 100 000 for total sexual offences as reported by the SAPS for last year, it might well be true that a young South African woman has more chances of being raped than learn how to read (as CNN said). I doubt it though, and would appreciate it if anyone who knows lets me know where do they get these likelihoods? I don't think it helps us understand any better the violence South Africa is facing to say things like a young black man is more likely to die violently than get a job. That is vulgarly sensationalist. It is enough to state that we are in deep trouble as a society.  

In addressing rape and violence against women, we are where we are still because we refuse to see violence in its different forms in South Africa as affecting women, girls, men, boys. Our response remains piecemeal and our advances against violence slow because the sexual and gender violence against women is inextricably connected to physical violence against and between men. We won’t stop the rapes till we stop the murders. We won’t stop murdering each other with such abandon till we put a stop to the sexual violence.  

Some people say the young will revolt one day. I am afraid the revolution went viral a while back. Offline it's been here for over a decade. Don't just look at the numbers of service delivery protests. Look also at the numbers of rape and homicide; look at the figures for attempted murder, assault GBH and common assault. Look at the suicides and transport-related deaths. Look at the slow death from – where do I start. Hunger, alcoholism, drugs, fat, bad education, hopelessness, they also kill, slowly. Look at AIDS-related deaths. Because we in the middle classes, black and white, do not get the brunt of it, we ignore the direct violence until it gets on CNN, BBC, and Aljazeera. Ignore it till one is directly affected, raped, killed, burgled. The revolt of the young is to shame us, for they long ago ran out of shame.

This is a leaderless revolution because from Mandela to Zuma, without exception, from Khoza to Motsepe and every political and business leader in between, the leaders either are out of ideas how to turn things around, restore meaning to the lives of these young men and women, or they couldn't give a toss for the young black women and men. Forget apartheid, this democracy is a bitch.

The revolution is not for new rights for the old rights and freedom are just not working for them. They don't care about hurting others because they are hurting. They don’t' care because no one cares about them until they get on telly. Maybe young black men may still get to eat the rich in the future, but for now they are starting with their peers and the poor. Welcome to young black male hell.

Ethiopian feminist Netsanet Gebremichael, then director of Addis Ababa University’s Gender Office, after giving a talk at Traditions 2: Everyday Lives of African Men, Ethiopia 28-30 November 2011

Here is a short video clip of Ethiopian feminist Netsanet Gebremichael, then director of Addis Ababa University’s Gender Office, after giving her talk at Traditions 2: Everyday Lives of African Men, held in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011. She is being interviewed on her impression of the conference and the debates that took place by peace scholar and psychologist Shahnaaz Suffla of the University of South Africa-Medical Research Council's Safety and Peace Promotion Research Unit. Video edited by Mandisa Malinga.  

Retrospective 2: Traditions II: Everyday Lives of African Men

Jimmy Manyi

One of the relatively big stories of 2011 was triggered by the comments made by Mr Jimmy Manyi, President of the Black Management Forum and Head of Government Communication and Information Services. The story went big because of the protagonists, but also for the reason that it was yet another dreadful replay of the effects of the inherited misunderstandings of the racialised past that made us into who we are.

Like other ugly stories of race, Manyi’s words and the exchanges that followed entrapped our imaginations because they played on the masochism and misrecognition that, since apartheid at least, have become an unhappy part of black traditions. I also suspect that the story was a salutary lesson on the unrealised hopes and persisting uncertainties of what it means to be us in this suspended present moment.

Occupying the position of director-general of the Department of Labour at the time, Manyi had expressed the view on KykNet's Robinson Regstreeks show in 2010 that coloured people “must stop this over-concentration situation (in the Western Cape) because they are in over-supply where they are so you must look into the country and see where you can meet the supply”.



Trevor Manuel



One of the political figures who was angered by the comments and publicly responded to Manyi was the minister in the presidency Mr Trevor Manuel. To Manuel, Manyi was “the worst-order” racist, formed “in the mould of HF Verwoerd”.



In turn legal adviser to the minister of defence, Mr Paul Ngobeni, known to have been part of the “brains trust” that helped President Jacob Zuma during his corruption case, came blazing out in support of Manyi. Ngobeni said Manuel a gangster and racist.

The tone of the whole affair was rather unsavoury, from start to end. It is sometimes inevitable that such eruptions will happen, given the continuing trauma inhering in our identities. Still, because of what this regrettable exchange says about us as black people, I found it instructive about how not to think or talk about others.

Yet even though the subject of racial feelings and thoughts is something one does not carelessly broach in polite company, we could still have taken the opportunity to learn, and teach other especially younger people, about how we got here. We could still have fruitfully used the apparent possibilities even while recognising the hurt that Manyi caused in many black or coloured-identified people.

I am also aware, as all the central actors in this story might well be, there are many older people of all hues and creeds who could use some considered lessons about what apartheid racialising and tribalising traditions we employ to identify ourselves continue to do to our language and interior lives.  

The Manyi-Manuel-Ngobeni affair came back to mind at Traditions II, the second travelling pitso held in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011 by the University of South Africa’s Institute Social and Health Sciences. Hosted under the theme of Changing Traditions: Everyday Lives of African Men, the biennial tradition pitso is one of the pillars of the Changing Traditions Project which emerged, among other things, from amongst others the observation that there tends to be an incapacitating conflation of tradition and traditionalism.

Delegates at Traditions II: Everyday Lives of African Men 
held in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011



During the discussions, when highly emotional disagreements as well as serious distortions became apparent, I was reminded of one statement by Ngobeni that should have but never got much discussion. Ngobeni said Manuel acted as though he was “the king of coloured people”.

Clearly intended to offend, the sentiment plays on the untruth that those who claim a coloured identity do not have a cultural tradition, specifically not one of kingship.

This unfortunate miseducation about tradition which parses coloureds as cultureless is one which I have encountered also in my interactions with coloured-identified students when I used to teach at the University of the Western Cape. I am afraid it is far more common than that though, widely believed among many old and young people identified as African.

The idea that a people who have roots traceable to at least more than 450 years old in South Africa can be without tradition or culture is plainly incorrect, besides being offensive.

Yet this lie that only some people – specifically those who were once referred by apartheid laws as Bantu – can claim the right to be recognised as a traditional community is the very one freighted by the South African laws on traditional leadership and governance. These laws, to be clear, have the unwitting purpose of primitivising or retribalising ethnicity on the one hand, while also denying the equal fullness of the traditions of coloured-identified people on the other.

What baffles me is how a politically black democratic government fails to realise that the groupings brought under the term traditional communities in post-apartheid South Africa are the very same abhorrent tribes Archie Mafeje showed in the early 1970s to have been the creation of colonial rulers and racist anthropologists.

Let us be clear then that identifying as Zulu or Venda does not necessarily make you a tribesman or tribeswoman, just as being identified coloured or white does not by itself make you a tradition-less post-modern subject. Surely being an indigenous native speaker of isiZulu does not mean you have more traditions than being a native English-language speaker.

Perhaps the argument the dominant discourse on black traditions wants to convince us of is that those who were once Bantu are more strongly tied to their cultural traditions than others. That also is not quite true, for Europeans and North Americans may be said to have stronger traditions precisely because these tend to go unremarked, and often do come under the rubric tradition. It is when a tradition does not call itself a tradition, such as in eating with a fork and knife or calling ourselves by our race names, that it is almost unchallenged in its power over us.

Yet it also needs stating that to be black in the way black South Africans are black is very modern political tradition, but a tradition nonetheless. Furthermore, being black, because it is political identity, does not have ready correspondence with ethnicity. Indeed all racialised identities are first and foremost political identities. 

The fact is while all rituals are part of a tradition, not all practices within a tradition are ritualised. Tradition, that is to say, is not about primitives, pure tribes, traditional communities, kingships or whatever object a person or government wishes to employ to refer to the alienating Otherness we have become used to and use on ourselves.

Tradition is the basic question that all of us try to work from the moment we become cognitively capable of recognising both our individuality within and connectedness to our families, what remains unarticulated in our interactions with each other. Whereas we tend to think of tradition as that practice, rite or custom we do once a year or in a longer while, like being initiated into manhood, celebrating Christmas or Eid, paying mahadi, or burying the dead in a particular way, at its most productive moments tradition is what goes unspoken. Like gravity, tradition is the force that holds down the responses of the insiders to the tradition to the everyday problems of being human.

Though they may be out of sight, traditions are always an underlying dynamic in any practices where one person consciously or otherwise seeks to hand down – this being the principal meaning of the term tradition – the usable parts of a culture, whether that behaviour is what to eat, how to pray, who to love and how, the best way to raise children and how to raise them, and of above all how to be a person in the world of others.

Being at the centre of these traditions lipitso I have become even more aware that there is a great deal of ignorance, confusion and distortions that exists about what traditions mean. It is especially when one tries to square up the very modern, highly improvised, daily lives of black men and women in the Africa of today with how tradition is apprehended that one comprehends the misconceptions, myths, and caricatures that dogs our lives. Black men and women are perhaps the most post-modern subjects of all, and that does not negate that they can and may need to recognise where they have been.

However, it must be said, the paradoxical pull for many to define traditions in barely concealed tribalistic or racialised terms may be due to the uncertainties first provoked by imperialism and colonialism as well as the search for an elusive search for an old wholeness that may or may not have existed before those racist ideologies gutted our cultural life supports.

The Changing Traditions Project was conceived with the aim that, if we want to contribute in building Africa one figurative kgotla at a time, we have to set time aside whenever we can to help each other to more carefully think through what tradition means. We all need to carefully figure out and where necessary rethink what our traditions are, and that done, build on our best. Careless words, lazy thought and insulting each other are not the best way to build one other and our collective black lives.

How do we raise happy, confident, kind and caring men? Boys in Africa Roundtable at University of South Africa, 25 October 2011

Boys in Africa Roundtable

Date: 25 October, 2011

Time: 10h00 – 16h00

Venue: Library, Seminar Room 1, University of South Africa

How does one parent boys to become good men?

How do we reconnect boys with their fathers?

How do we teach boys and their parents to share the burden of domestic labour?

How does one raise boys to believe in equality?

How do we keep boys at school?

How do we teach boys not to respond to problems with aggression?

How do we keep boys alive?

How do we teach boys self-love?

How do we raise happy, confident, kind and caring men?

African boys and men are pathologised and stereotyped either as hapless victims or as inveterate criminals. While it remains important to keep challenging such representations, it is surprising that relatively little work and discussion has been presented on raising boys to become good men.

Especially given the conditions of poverty, oppression and violence the African continent continues to be subjected to, what does it take to raise a healthy, happy, confident and caring African man?

African boys are not a monolithic group, of course. Their life-chances and development are influenced by a range of factors. Race, class, neighbourhood and the concomitant infrastructural opportunities or lack thereof, their emergent sexualities, their able-bodiedness or otherwise, and very importantly the socioeconomic and historical burdens and triumphs of their parents are all necessary in thinking about how to raise well-adjusted, joyful, secure and kind men. 

It is self-evident to state that the experience of being a white, middle-class boy is very dissimilar to being a poor, black boy or even a middle-class black boy in South Africa. Regardless of other identity markers and the differences between boys, however, to be a boy is not to be a girl; and gender is constitutive of the expectations and socialization of boys.

Raising good African men obviously requires us to look at the boy first. Building positive masculinities that are generative of social well-being, responsive to egalitarianism, desirous of resolving conflict in productive and nurturing ways for whom toughness, violence and bravery are not the ultimate masculine ideals demands a focus on boyhood.

To this end the Roundtable will centre on the series of questions. We hope the question provokes fertile discussions and start a durable generative conversation within and outside the university towards building young positive masculinities and further engender democracy in the public sphere and the home.

Boys in Africa Roundtable is hosted by UNISA’s Psychology Department and the Institute for Social and Health Sciences’ Programme on Traditions and Transformation. The Roundtable is the second of three events of the Changing Traditions Project and will culminate in the biennial travelling pitso in Ethiopia on 28-30 November 2011.

Traditions II: Everyday Lives of African Men

Every two years Changing Traditions, a project of the Programme on Traditions and Transformation of UNISA's Institute for Social and Health Sciences (ISHS), hosts a major pitso. The aim of the pitso is to consider the state of traditions and transformation on the African continent. The event is the culmination of the theme for the year. The pitso brings together a diverse range of individuals from a range of disciplines and worlds, including but not limired to scholars, activists, musician, researchers, writers, journalists, filmmakers, actors, theatre practioners, businesspeopl and anybody else with interest to engage on traditions. If you do something that I have not mentioned and you have an interesting view on traditions you believe deserves to be heard, we would be interested to give you ears.   

If you have been following the blog you will know that traditions is defined from a variety of perspectives. We see traditions as those conscious or unarticulated pasts that shape the way we engage with each other and the world today, influencing every human endeavor from scholarly research to poetry and how we pray, from war to the way we kiss, from politics to sports rules. 

If you have be following the blog, you will know that we have talking a great deal about men and masculinity. That's because men and masculinity is the theme for 2011. And that's what we shall be talking about in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 28-30 November: the everyday lives of African men. More specifically, we hope that men and women interested in the lives of African men, in Africa and the diaspora, will come and talk. If you are interested, please submit a proposal/abstract/summary of what you would like to talk about to us. Talks should fit in the following panels.    

• Money and Work in African Men’s Lives
• Bodies of African Men
• Men at Play
• Masculinity and the African Diaspora
• Men and Politics
• African Masculinity and Belief/Religion
• Men and Love and Marriage
• Sex and Masculinity
• Men’s Friendships
• Representing African Men
• African Men in the Family

However, we would be interested to hear suggestions for other panels. More details will follow. You can also send for more information by contacting Kharnita Mohamed at kharnita.mohamed@mrc.ac.za.

 

Everybody needs someone to look out for them, but the social fabric around young white men doesn't need as much repairing

Earlier this month I was asked during a public conversation why white young men do not die at the rates of black young men. Who is protecting them? Or is that what's protecting them?

I am experiencing some kind of Groundhog Day. I feel as if I said this yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. If you have heard, don't stop reading.

As you may know, levels of violent death are never uniformly distributed across the sexes. That's a well-established finding from research. Males die from violence at much higher rates than females. You may also be aware that age is a significant predictor of dying from violence.  

But here are other variables that put an individual at risk of dying from violence: how much money you have, where you live, and race among others. There are studies from the United States and from Europe, and a few from Africa, in support of this. In South Africa you are more likely to die violently, on average, when you are male, in your late teens or early adulthood years, when you are black or coloured as opposed to white and Indian, live in a poor and low-income neighbourhood, live in a metro than in the more rural municipalities, live in Cape Town in comparison to Tshwane. Those are only some of the variables.

However, the question I was asked though is why: why are young white men at a decreased risk from dying prematurely? One of the major reasons is because men who do not achieve socially respected masculinity are likely live in or get into violent situations. Say that again? They are likely to live in or get into violent situations. That is to say, an attempt to achieve culturally valued manhood is interwoven with other reasons. Some of these are structural and others personal.

Studies show that, for instance, Khayelitsha has higher levels of homicide than Constantia. Why is this so? Because young men who live in Constantia are better protected against assaults or murder. It’s not only because of the alarms, spikes, and barbed wires. It’s because of conditions in the two areas. It’s because of their life circumstances, which in the end reduces the choices available to them to make something of themselves, that young men in Khayelitsha, most of whom are unemployed, will put themselves at greater risk of victimisation while trying to get recognition and success as men.

It's a damning situation. You can die slowly and on your feet from poverty, hunger, and distress. Or you can go out, in a world that says risk is good, take your chances and be shot to death.

Of course the risk a stock market trader takes is different from the risk a would-be bank robber takes. They are all trying to get money. But the risks for the latter can be deadly. The one with his qualifications has a lawful space to take risks with other people's monies; the other, whose education has left him standing at the corner with few prospects, has very few opportunities this side of the law and so steps outside of it. 

This is not to condone criminality. It is to explain the difference between young white men and young black men. The difference, which looks like one of race, like it is essentially racial in nature, is actually about historical economic advantages and the legacies of inequality. Social and economic advantages mean life advantages. It contributes towards a longer, safer, and happier life. Historical socio-economic discrimination imply that young black men today will find it harder to enjoy a happy, protected and long life.

But they were born after apartheid, I have heard it said. Their parents were not. Those parents raised them, for better or worse. Those parents may not have jobs today. If they have, those parents are not able to support them to go to university or with connections to get an internship into a good company. And most of those young men who die still live with the abjection that their parents experienced under apartheid.    

In societies that are racially and economically highly unequal the odds to get respect are stacked against young poor black men then. Whereas young middle-class and rich white men live in conditions that offer them protection, young poor black men have decreased safety nets. The conditions that make some young men better protected include things like a having a room of one's own instead of living in a small crowded house. Being able to spend time surfing the net as opposed to standing at the corner also helps. Surfing the net will keep you off the street. Having a job as opposed to standing at the corner will keep you out of trouble for a chunk of the day. Having a car instead of walking past a group of young men standing at the corner will get you past the corner. If that corner is next to a place where people drink, that adds to the risk. If you like to get drunk, it does not help: alcohol tends to make some people more likely to get into fights. If you are a teenager or young adult and your own father and mother are drinkers or even just disengaged from you, that removes a layer of social protection. All these factors multiply the risk as they interact. 

There are other factors that put some and not other young black men at increased risk of premature death. These are psychosocial.  They are gendered. Because of their psychosocial vulnerabilities and feelings of not being valued by society, young men may lash out at those nearest to them. The historical gender system denied their fathers their manhood which the sons are trying to regain, the traditionalist cultural system of gender has miseducated them, the education system has warped their sense of social equality, and the economic system excludes them. Men’s violence, then, often enough functions towards deflecting their internal states of vulnerability of being a surplus group. They get violent with women or engage in fights with other men to deal with feelings of hopelessness, anxiety, abandonment or insecurity. Some of this violence will go unremarked or have any visible consequence. Yet this violence is what puts a man at risk of dying violently. In a situation where another man is unwilling to walk away or talk things over, the ensuing argument is likely to result in injury or death of one of the protagonists. As the South African police have said, over 50% of what they call “social fabric-related murders and attempted murders result from arguments which subsequently deteriorate into fights”.

White young men don't die at the same rates as black young men because they have much better protection. They have far more opportunities to achieve culturally successful manhood without resorting to physical violence. And unlike young black men, the socio-economic fabric around young white males does not need as much repairing.       

Fashioning Masculinity

Fashioning masculinity is an interdisciplinary event hosted by the University of South Africa’s Institute for Social and Health Sciences’ (ISHS) Programme on Traditions and Transformation (POTT) Changing Traditions strategic project. This event will be focused on men and the ways in which they are fashioned and fashion themselves.

Men fashion themselves every day, through the clothes they wear, the demeanor they inhabit and/or the bodies they build and groom. Men’s clothes and bodies signify social meanings like status, geographic location, race, ethnicity, affiliations, aspiration and generation. Even the absence of ‘conscious’ self-stylization is gendered. Both a mechanic in grease-covered overalls and a male executive in his uniform, the corporate suit express particular kinds of masculinity. Men’s bodies and clothing act as visual symbols of different types of manhood. Clothing and particular kinds of bodies therefore enable and produce articulations of differing masculinities. However, neither clothing nor the bodies of men exist outside of tradition as they are subject to a system of recognition. We assume a man in a suit is some kind of corporate executive and a man in grease-covered overalls is a mechanic as these are their traditional forms of attire. This event will look at this relationship between fashioning, masculinity and tradition.

Fashioning masculinity aims to enable interesting and inventive ideas to emerge about tradition and the traditions, historical and contemporary of masculine self-fashioning, men’s representation and stylization in the streets, media and fashion industry.

Fashioning Masculinity will launch the Changing Traditions Project 2011 theme - Changing Traditions: Everyday Lives of African Men. It is the first of three events and will culminate in the biennial travelling pitso in Ethiopia in November. Changing Traditions’ is a trans-disciplinary, international and Africa-centered undertaking that focuses on the traditions surrounding the production of wealth, identity, peace, and equality.

You are cordially invited to submit an abstract for Fashioning Masculinity. Please distribute the call for participation widely.

Deadline for abstracts: 25 July 2011

For further information contact:

Kharnita Mohamed kmohamed@mrc.ac.za 021 938-0478

Candice Rule crule@mrc.ac.za 021-938-0535

Impressions of Addis

Here are some images from our trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The trip's mission was to do on-site check of conference venues, hotel accommodation, restaurants (and did we eat and drink coffee!), markets and such like for a pitso we will host come November 2011.

The pitso is an event hosted every two years under the auspices of the project Changing Traditions (http://www.unisa.ac.za/Default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=25441). Changing Traditions is a granted flagship initiative of PoTT, a programme of the Institute for Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa. Changing Traditions revolves around two main drivers, namely, a pitso and an e-kgotla. Building transdisciplinary, international African-centred knowledge traditions is an important impetus for Changing Traditions.

The theme for the second pitso, Traditions 2, is Changing Traditions: Everyday Lives of African Men. The intention is to get to Ethiopia and have men and women (yes, men and women) talk about the hellishly interesting, dynamic relationships African men have with tradition, itself understood to be dynamic. The event is meant for scholars, artists, journalists, film-makers, photographers, and whatever label you use for yourself, so long as you have an interest in what African men do, and do well or could do better, to make Africa work.

This year's gathering will be organized around questions pertaining to not only the exceptional but also quotidian experiences of being a man in or from Africa. These images of the city of Addis are a taster then, aren't they. We hope you will tell others about the event (http://www.unisa.ac.za/Default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=25483). Or why don't you make your way to Ethiopia.

Will Smith on a shop-front in Addis Ababa 



Fruit stall





Building site




Podium for the king and queen of Ethiopia



A woman with a load on her back

Statue of man on a horse