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.

Loving disability



Walking to work this morning, I saw a young man with an older woman, running across the street hand in hand. There was a sense of urgency in crossing a busy, major road and a sense of joy too at their bodies, joined together to accomplish the task of getting from one place to another safely. It was one of those the biggest pleasures in life are contained in the small things or in this case, the little dangers safely traversed.

They walked in front of me. I watched them, the young man, his feet splayed as he walked unawaredly inelegantly enfolded  into the older woman: his mother, aunt, or caregiver perhaps. They were completely focused on each other, tender, present, joyful, and easy in their intimacy, easy in the closeness and the small (or large if a good life is a sequence of enough little pleasures) talk of the morning. It was beautiful to witness, the give and take, the mutual and reciprocal pleasure. It looked like a dance of intimacy and care so well-practiced that the steps are less important than the pleasures of dancing together.

So, why would I notice this, you may well ask. I was surprised by the mutuality, the reciprocity, not the intimacy in the encounter. I was surprised by how present the older woman was, her palpable pleasure in the young man. You may be raising your eyebrows here or should be. I've left out a salient point, the young man looked to be developmentally disabled; child-like in a body of a twenty-something year old.

I've been reading a fair amount of disability literature and the models of disability rarely mention this. The pleasure that is received by the caregivers. The focus, or at least the literature I have been reading, is usually focused on models of care, models of righting ruinous and stigmatising perception, models of integration, models that provide support and education for the families of the disabled. If parents write to capture the reality of parenting a disabled child, it is usually in fighting terms, no matter how dry or tender the discourse: my child is worth loving, why does society not see. If disabled people write their reality, there is this showing normalcy within abnormal conditions too. When parents or caregivers talk anecdotaly about someone who is disabled, they usually make explicit that the person is loving, as if this were in doubt. Something profound slips in these accounts.



The capacity to love, the what is received from the person who is deemed incapacitated. The need to defend or disavow what is already and unconsciously accorded to those we consider able-bodied. A similar kind of operation pertains for identity politics on race, gender, class. The imaginary where somehow reciprocity and mutuality become contained in stereotype, stigma and prejudice. The reduction of those intangible things that make life worth living, love flourish and bring all parties in intersubjective exchanges to a fullness of the human condition.



Undoubtedly there are stresses in caring for someone who is subjected to structural violences, requires more care in a world that splits our attentions and demands commodified responses, where value is accorded on unequal scales according to who is most human. In a world or societies rather that discipline us into regimes of value, what I witnessed this morning might have been a moment of mutual tender and intangible exchange that is not always constant for a  life enfolded by capitalism brings with it multiple pressures, and varying emotional, structural and psychological resources at any given time.



Pic sourced at http://www.idrs.org.au/



However, it made me pause and wonder, in which ways those who do not traverse life in ordinary, unmarked ways enable new capacities of caring, different modalities of attention, alternate requirements of engaing with the world. The older woman was fully present, and there was something joyous about it, something immediate about her attention and focus on the young man that made them both appear full. I wonder if this was a result of his 'disability', that its conditions generate presence and full engagement, a celebration of little victories like crossing a road successfully that might be all too fleeting, an acceptance of what is and a letting go of expectation, a mode of attention that is open and engaged, a tenderness and joy in the now.

I have heard people remark that their disabled child was a gift, and wondered at it, the need to say it. In a romantic view all children are gifts, that is if society were equal. Usually theses parents will say s/he is loving. I wonder now after this encounter if it is less about the child's very human capacity to love (although we know this is not always channelled well or reciprocated) or whether it is the disabled child teaching adults how to love in an unmediated way, beyond expectation, pausing after a harrowing day to bring their full attention home, bringing their capacity to care to the fore, opening them up to the moment; for there is no protection from the disabled child's need, no good reason to warrant the withdrawal of love, no good reason for distracted attention and probably bad interactional consequences too. In other words, does loving the disabled child give the adult a gift of the self, as most good loves do that, bring our highest self or most whole self into the world whereas anaemic loves tend to bring a defensive and thus fragmented self to the fore. I wonder how difficult it is to sustain or whether like toxic or resentful parental care it becomes a habit? I wonder why it's possible for some people or in some moments, like this morning and not others?

I have many, many questions and much food for thought. I'm just grateful to have witnessed this encounter today. Social scientists like to talk about the importance of contingency, this contingent moment's synchronicty is uncanny and necessary.

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.