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Jivani was on his way down the same path, and at one point asked another friend to find a gun for him. "Lucas was the coolest guy I knew," Jivani wrote.īut none of those skills could save Lucas from winding up in the statistical pile of lost Black boys he was constantly in trouble, in and out of jail for fights and other minor infractions.
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Lucas dressed like NBA legend Allen Iverson, flirted easily with girls at the mall, and knew how to handle himself in a fight. Jivani became friends with another young man named Lucas, who filled the role of older brother and hood mentor, and who helped him deal with his father's increasing detachment from the family. "I saw guys trying to make money where money was hard to come by, commanding respect in their neighborhoods and playing a small part in a corrupt system conspiring to hold our community down." "The world looked in fear at young men who acted like gangsters, appeared in mug shots on television and added to the crime statistics in newspapers," Jivani writes. He was angry at being racially profiled by police, and fantasized about claiming money and power through selling drugs. In his early teens, Jivani fought in school, listened to rap music that "glorified violence," and carried a knife in his knapsack. In fact, the circumstances of his own life, took him precariously close to being just another one of those nameless and unremarkable young Black men inevitably fed into the machine. For Jivani-born to a Black Kenyan father and raised mostly by his white Canadian mother in the suburbs of Brampton and Mississauga-these boys are not only trapped by the same system he managed to overcome, but failed by counterproductive cultures within their communities. In his book published in April, Why Young Men: Rage, Race and the Crisis of Identity, Canadian author and lawyer Jamil Jivani scrutinizes the socially destructive effects of trauma inflicted on young and marginalized men of colour. Often times, falling into one of these traps is a guarantee for young Black men that we will be ensnared by the others, and those who do survive these trials often learn lessons about our masculinity that are less about "living" than they are about finding the narrowly prescribed path to mere survival. And most of all: do not fall in with the wrong crowd.Īs we grow from youth into early manhood, it is impossible to avoid seeing other Black males culled by the system that our parents used their words and instruments to protect us from: Failing, suspended, and expelled by schools, snatched from their families by Children's Aid, consumed by substance addiction, or dragged into the maw of the carceral system. Address your elders as "sir," and "ma'am." Study your schoolbooks.
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We feel this way because our parents begin driving the message into our heads at an early age-and when their words fail to suffice, it is too often driven into our backsides with their belts and sandals, instead. Where we fromįor many young Black men in North America, the world can feel like it's been purpose-built for our destruction. But through the crucible of his own experiences-from mental-health troubles and a crisis of sexual identity, to a frayed relationship with his father and becoming a father himself- Andray Domise works to understand how Black masculinity is really made. And I was.Youth Illustration by Chiedza Pasipanodya The making of a Black man The world has long told Black boys what they’re allowed to be. "I was out of the closet, but not as out as I was down here. "I had never seen that many black gay folks in my life, and I was blown away," said Duncan Teague of his first visit, a two-week vacation from Kansas City in 1985. Each year, the city hosts what organizers say is the biggest black gay festival in the world. Though black Atlantans generally reflect African-Americans nationwide - many are religious, socially conservative and critical of homosexuality - lesbians and gays in town are courted by elected officials and they have access to some of the nation's best HIV-fighting resources geared toward African-Americans. Many make their homes in Atlanta for the same reasons that tens of thousands of other black Americans have relocated to such states as Georgia, Florida and the Carolinas: a moderate cost of living and the familiar culture of the South, where most black Americans have family roots. The region now is home to the biggest concentration of black same-sex couples in the South, with nearly as many as the Chicago area, which has more than four times as many blacks.
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The city and its suburbs have, in recent years, become attractive cities for black gays and lesbians.