 I've done a doctorate. I've sat through classes at every level. I've seen how, and I've taught women and girls how to interpret and engage what happens to them, how to articulate and respond to it. I was trained as a feminist in school because there was nothing for males. We were taught in fact that feminism was for us as well as for our gender. And so if we just learned black feminism, we would know enough and we'd be good. There have been ideas about black boys and men that have become very popular, especially after slavery, right? Ideas that made black boys and men into monsters in the minds of people, right? Unfortunately, those ideas never went away. They've only snowballed in the last century. So black male studies attempts to study, analyze, and explain where these ideas came from, what problems they cause, and how they damage to this day, how black males are seen, even to the point where black males themselves have assumed some of these things, because that's all they've known, and damage ourselves even further. They're in a time period of receiving these ideas because they're not only getting them from popular culture, they're also getting them from family. And this is kind of part of the problem with the black family in and of itself. We have ideas that have really been transferred from generation to generation to generation. This is where the pathologizing of males really starts to pick up. In elementary school, it's a little more subtle, especially before elementary school, very subtle, right? You know, there's data to show us that teachers start to see boys as not so cute, not so innocent, even as young as four and five years old. Now, if you wanna push that up to eighth grade through high school, now you're in an environment where you have teachers that see you as an outright threat, not only in mainstream society and media, but even in your schools and even in your families. I had a conversation with my mother about a week ago, and she was mad at me because I remember telling her years ago, I said there was a clear cut difference in how my sister, who's three years younger than me, and myself, how we were treated in schools. So we went to the same high school. At that time, 17-year-old, 16-year-old Muslim, you know, I was pretty political, kind of militant, but not in any kind of organized ways. I just read, I read a lot, you know? So I had this kind of, I was learning about racism, I was starting to really kind of see how this works. This is early 90s, so this was popular at that time, and it was more accessible. So I knew people for a good few years, teachers, administrators, students, and yet and still I had teachers that would not sit in the same room with me alone. I couldn't go to after school meetings. They had to meet with me in hallways. This went all the way on through graduate school. I had, you know, professors that would only meet with me in public spaces. Like, I'm gonna get to grad school and rob you, which makes no sense. But that was the kind of perspective that I remember dealing with. Those same teachers helped my sister with computers. They got her computers. They had, they helped her figure out how to navigate community college to graduate early. I had never even imagined you could graduate high school. Or do you know how much earlier if I had known you could do that? You know, I didn't even know it was an option. They had friends that went to a major university that she later got into that helped her navigate that. These were the same teachers that would not speak to me. Right? So when you have a black boy with some degree of talent, you know, outside of sports, who's willing to support him? Who's willing to invest in him? First teacher I ever had that invested anything in me was like my senior year of college. Was a black male professor who came and started the Africana Studies program. I think he came like in the middle of my junior year. So we got close in my senior year and that was the first teacher I ever had that had that saw potential in me. And so he asked me, so what are you gonna do when you finish here? I said, well, I gotta hook up. I'm gonna go work at UPS. And he just kind of looked at me and he was like, no, no, you need to do something else. And he picked up the phone. He made a call to Temple University. A few months later, I'm standing in Philadelphia with two suitcases trying to find a dorm room. I had no plans to go to graduate school. Technically, I couldn't even tell you what graduate school was. I mean, I could say a master's was something you got after a bachelor's, but I wouldn't be able to define it anymore than that. He was the only reason I went to grad school, never crossed my mind to go, had no interest in it. Well, that's not true. To say I had no interest in it would mean I knew what it was. Because I didn't know what it was, I can't say I didn't have any interest. I just, it just wasn't on my radar. It took him to make that kind of investment. What happens when black boys, especially who have the capability, even though it may not have been appreciated, what happens when they don't get that support? Because there only is elementary school. And I'm not saying black girls get that across the board. I am saying black girls, I think, sooner get that than boys in an environment that is run primarily as a female institution. I do think it's something that, I think their humanity in some respects is at least regarded before the boys, but obviously compared to like white girls. There's no comparison. I'm not arguing that. I think the boys just kind of get written off a lot. And the only ones that tend to make it through are either boys that can code switch and make white women in particular feel comfortable. That was my particular talent. Yeah, it's easy to understand. We had the same. Part of the problem I think with that age group is, men are being vetted at that point for relationships, possibly marriage. So they're being seen through the lens of coupling. And whether or not this person is a good candidate or he's trifling. Black male studies in that respect, I think can be digested in a far more mature way during that age range. Because now you're able to engage this academically, intellectually, philosophically, ideologically, you're able to understand how these arguments play out, how these historical periods that we've, that you probably even studied in other fields, but not necessarily through the vantage point of black males. I mean, even looking at the college my son's about to go to, they actually structure in the feminist coursework in his first semester before he's going into marine sciences. This has nothing to do, but it's worked into his indoctrination into, you don't see that when it comes to studying black males. The idea is there's really nothing to study. If you go back even to the 1800s, when it came to the black family, the option toward reading and education to the degree that we were allowed to access that legally often went to girls. You know what I mean? In terms of being able to negotiate deals, interact with whites, in the business, in town as it were, black males were not seen as those that needed to be directed toward those interests, right? So you have that on one level. And part of this is really understandable, especially if you look at Jim Sedanius' work. Black women have a different relationship with white men than black men have with white men. He's willing to entertain her in a certain kind of way. He's not willing to entertain you. So that's part of the early dynamic. When you get into education post-1950s, even in black schools, part of the issue is how the curriculum is set up, how things are done in the classroom. Up through elementary school, you have over 90% female teachers, most of whom are white. What they begin to do is kind of colonize the classroom in a manner that's very gendered, but it's not talked about as gendered. So boys are considered a problem. And on the surface level, it's just because they're acting up. But really when you look at it, is they're not acting like girls. What you have a woman that's running the space, and then you have a female administrator and another one over her. The space that's being cultivated in many schools is one that's conducive to how girls learn, how girls communicate, how girls act. Any deviation from that is seen as a problem. And as much as we live in this era where we wanna make everything, everything, and we wanna suggest that there really are no behavior patterns that are endemic to boys and girls, have a child. You know, have a boy. You know what I mean? There are things that boys do. We are very tactile learners. We're very up out. We gotta feel things. We gotta talk about things. We gotta fight. We gotta yell. You know, there's a different kind of engagement, but that's all being criminalized. And this is why, you know, works like Konjufu who's been talking about this for years as far as black boys in the classroom. You know, and I'm an advocate for actually having boy schools with male teachers. There needs to be space for an expression that doesn't reflect how one demographic tends to learn and process information and interact. By the time you get to the end of high school, you have this machine that's spitting out two different products. And the boys for the most part, I mean, if you look at the stats of where these boys are going, if you look at the poverty rates, if you look at the unemployment rates, it's night and day. You know, who's being spent, is what put in the special ed to a greater degree. How much of that is because of behavior versus academic performance? And who's interpreting that behavior, right? We've seen studies on that, which really reflect on the teacher more than the student, but yet and still the boys end up punished, especially black boys. So you get to about sixth grade, or really fourth in some respects, but some of these boys begin to check out. And the interpretation of that is somehow a failing of them rather than, you know, a response to something that they don't know how to describe, but nobody's listening to them anyway. Then you throw in an Andrew Tate, a Kevin Samuels, and it's like, well, they're at least talking to us, not talking at us, but they're talking to us. And they're even explaining things that we're going through now in middle school. Well, you know, who are they gonna listen to? The teacher that's basically been making them feel like they don't even belong here, or the guy who's telling them not only what you're going through now, but what you're about to go through and those things start to happen. Girls are treating you this way, teachers are treating you this way, police officers are looking at you this way. Part of the reason the man is fear is so aggressive as far as how women take it is because it's not been welcomed. It's been bottled up. I had a black nationalist brother on YouTube asked me to come on his show. And the subject of the show, because he had done a show on black men and dating and the problems black men bring to black women. So for this one episode he reversed it, he asked the question, what do black women negatively bring to black men in some kind of way, shape or form? So I got on the show, this is probably probably about, I don't know, five, six people on the panel, plenty of people in the comment section. They kept each person for the most part kept turning the conversation back to female victimization. They kept bringing it back to what men do to women. And these were the males and the females on the panel and in the comment section. And I just observed, I said, look, notice that even in a conversation that's supposed to be about the negative things that black women do to black men, we and women cannot hold that frame for very long. We have to bring it back to male aggression, female victimization. What does that tell you about our inability to talk about this? This is why it's so aggressive in certain contexts when you hear men talk about this because there's no active venue in the community for that. But you can't tell men to shut up for decades and then all of a sudden when they finally break through and speak on their own, be offended. Not only at what said, but at the intensity of it. Well, of course it's gonna be intense. Most of these boys were told, they've really been gaslighted for years. They were told nothing they're talking about really exists. So by the time it's confirmed that they're not crazy and the stuff they're going through is the same as the guy in Florida and Newark, New Jersey and Texas and New Orleans. When all these things start to come back and they're like, wait a minute, I'm not crazy? You mean to tell me that boy ain't gonna go back to his family and be like, I mean, even Kevin told a story like that. The first time he went to a Christmas dinner with his family and he finally broke down and explained to them everything that was going on on gender terms, he had his entire family silent. Even to the point where his mother was checked for the first time because this was a part of the conversation that one man didn't want to articulate and two, there's not been any space for, he commanded the space. Even if you get married, you have kids, whatever those issues are that you weren't willing to listen to then, that he didn't learn how to articulate, they're still gonna come out. This is where you hear about husbands who cheated and abuse and all kinds of dynamics that take place in relationships. And I don't mean just men abusing women, men also being on the receiving end of abuse. These are conversations that need to be had. So you can tell a story about being imprisoned and then being by a man. But if you talk to, even as a boy, if you try to say I was violated by a grown woman, there's this cognitive dissonance, especially from women where they just kinda look at you and then move on. I mean, I remember sitting in feminist courses and when I first admitted that I had been violated by a woman, it was like the conversation was going, I said something, the whole class looked at me, went back to the conversation and kept going. There was no frame of reference for a male. The only way you're supposed to participate in this discussion is as an aggressor. If it comes from a woman, then we have to understand what she went through, who violated her, what happened to her. But if you talk about a male rapist, he's a monster, end of discussion. If you talk about a violation across age, where you're talking about underage children, for example, when it comes to a male aggressor, he needs to go to prison. He might need to sit on the electric chair. When it comes to a female aggressor, one, you have a whole population of people that believe that that doesn't exist, let alone in any significant way. I mean, think about a young woman who's been raped underage. What are the kind of psychological things that tend to happen with her? And to adulthood, this stuff doesn't go away. And we've all seen these women who are damaged from the experiences they had as young as five years old. What you're gonna tell me, young males that have these experiences don't have damage? As I had these men in the class start to talk about these things, I noticed the population of black women in the class diminished. White women began to take the class in higher numbers because they were dating the athletes. And they were coming in because they wanted to actually study the men they were dating. They had no frame of reference. The cultural differences. Most of the time, if they weren't out of the hood somewhere else, they were coming up in Fresno off the West side. And then all of a sudden you had these young white girls that wanted to date them and understand them. Now we can talk back and forth about why and how much of that was fetishizing black males. All of that exists. But they would often walk away with the highest grades because they were serious. After that, because I was, the course was being supported by women's studies at the time. So I tended to have a lot of those white female students come in. When women's studies stopped supporting the class I still got a rush of Latina women. All of a sudden that decided to come in and wanted to actually study black males. And if you know anything about Fresno that's not uncommon. Latino, you know, the Latinas, I mean there's, I think we're like 4% here. There's a lot of Latinas. I mean Fresno State is now a Hispanic serving institution. You know what I'm saying? So if you live in Fresno, seeing Latinos and black folk together is fairly common. But that began the new population. So it went from black to white to Latino women coming in to study black men. There are black male scholars that have been dealing with quote unquote intersectionality before Kimberly Curnshaw officially invented it and published on it in 1989. I mean, from Staples to a number of others. This has been talked about that there are different types of experiences, oppressions in terms of race, class, sex, and gender. This is not a new concept. But by the time Kimberly Curnshaw popularizes it becomes, it's interpreted mainly through a black feminist lens. Where the primary subject who's most oppressed are black women. Because if you look at it in terms of race, class, sex, and gender, they take black women and say, well, they're at the bottom in terms of that. They get a negative response on each level. Black men are second to that. Because in terms of race, class, and maybe sex, they get a little negativity, but because they're men, they benefit from white men. And so you still hear this argument with male feminists, or feminists in general, that black men are privileged by their gender. And then when you look at like Athena Mato's work, I think she was one of the first black feminists I saw that actually looked at it. And she looked at her family. She looked at her sons. Again, mother of sons. And she was like, you know what? I don't think gender benefits black men. And she started to look at it empirically. And she started to say, okay, looking at the data, we might be wrong on this argument as black feminists. It may not be as simple as being able to say that we're oppressed by gender and men benefit from it. Because according to the data, they're actually more oppressed because they're male. We don't go to prison the way they do. We don't get kicked out of school the way they do. We don't get treated in public the way they do. She started to list it out. And she started to push for, I think she called it the multi-dimensionality, beyond intersectionality. But she was just basically trying to say as a black feminist who's also a mother to a son, we might be wrong on this one. The push still remains to this day, even in the young black feminists I've noticed to push this narrative of male privilege. And now that's evolved into this idea of black patriarchy and that to be a feminist is to fight against this systemic black patriarchy. But then when you ask them when this magical time period that took place where black men were oppressing black women and I guess smoking cigars with white men in power and enjoying all of us having penises, we can't seem to find this time period. But the more you look at the history, the more you look at the data, you actually find that these men experience more as opposed to less on the basis of being men. But this is a conversation that black male studies is trying to include that for the most part is still very new. In order for me to get my degrees, a lot of this stuff for women was required reading. You're having, we're talking about people that are offended at the very idea that there was a Kevin Samuels that they didn't have to listen to. But I had to read these various particular black feminist scholars, it was required reading. I had professors, women who stood up and said as a point of their lecture, men don't care about family. Men are the 99% of the rape aggressors in the community. And it's like, when you look at the data now, that only is different because the FBI finally changed the definition of rape. Because prior to that, up until like 2013, the definition was somewhere around the lines of carnal knowledge of a woman's body. Who else is gonna be the primary aggressor? If you define it strictly in terms of that, but once they opened, but in order to do that, they ended up having hundreds of thousands of cases that couldn't be classified. And when they finally changed the definition, they found that men were just as likely to be sexually victimized, aggressed and raped as women on a whole set of different terms. But now that means you have to learn about not only how men experienced it differently, but what female aggressors look like. And so black male studies is not consulted in a lot of these discussions. Matter of fact, I just had a graduate student from Chicago point out to me how his program actively pushes black male studies out of the discussion. He told me the minute he introduced the concept of anti-black misandry in his dissertation analysis, he had to change his entire committee because they refused as feminists, male and female, to participate in a dissertation that even acknowledged that there's such a thing as anti-black misandry, meaning the hatred of black men, right? If you never heard of the concept, it's pretty straightforward. I mean, we've heard about this, we just never called it that. You think about a lynching, right? Many of the lynchings that took place for black men were on the basis of the accusation that they sexually violated often a white woman, right? So this meant that those black men often without due process, right? They would be brought into this kangaroo court and then shortly after by a mob taken out in a home and burned alive, tortured, so on and so forth. All of that took place on the basis of two premises. They were black and they were males, well, three really, and they were heterosexual, or at least their crime was heterosexual, right? So we're talking explicitly about heterosexual black men being murdered on the basis of being heterosexual black men, right? That's what anti-black misandry focuses on, this hatred of black men and boys has been palpable, has been there the entire time, but how much attention we actually give it is a whole another question. So black male studies offers that among a variety of other concepts to say the way we've done history, the way we've done a critical analysis theory, so on and so forth is highly problematic, it's superficial and it often does not include black men on terms beyond how they're framed in feminist contexts, right? So you have white society being the ultimate basis of racism and in the feminist mind, black men double down on that to oppress black women that much more. Black male studies is saying, no, actually that stereotype of black men doubling down and being these aggressive patriarchal oppressors is a myth, it's a myth. And in many respects, and again, shout out to Tommy Curry, he did a lot of the work on this himself. He actually looked at the scholars who published black female scholars who published these ideas and he shows you where they pulled the ideas from, not just where they got the ideas, where they cited the ideas in the book, like Bell Hooks Works and so on, they're citing, well, Bell Hooks is not known for citing, but other black feminist scholars who are actually citing racist white scholarship about black men, that's the basis for a lot of these ideas about black men being oppressive patriarchs that these women are getting in college. And so these colleges are mass manufacturing black women who are coming out with high degrees mixed with a great deal of misandry and the two have become inseparable and the outlook on men gets worse by the time these young women go through college. Even if they haven't interacted with very many black men, I've witnessed that as well. And I get men reaching out to me all the time, but I've also had to sit on multiple dissertation committees because I have graduate students who are being threatened that they will not be able to finish their degree because they've decided to focus on black men, especially from a black male standpoint. But it's basically this idea that you're not on the same level, you're not capable of the same kinds of things. And because of that, you're kind of either a problem or something to be sheltered from the world sometimes. That's one expression where you see a mother kind of shelter her son. By the time he gets out there, he's really unprepared. You see those kinds of dynamics. But in one way or another, black boys are kind of seen as a problem, even within families. And so what the girls are given in many ways is a sort of preparation for leadership and expectation for higher achievement, college degrees, white collar employment, starting businesses. They're kind of being socialized for that kind of dynamic. They don't really know what to do with the boys in many respects. Even when the boys have talent outside of sports. I mean, if it's sports talent, that's pretty straightforward. People know what they're gonna do with that. But if he's intellectually gifted, you'd be surprised how many men report to my channel about being the intellectually gifted one in the family and the women not knowing what to do with him, not investing him in the same kind of ways. And he ends up just kind of going off to the side. These are the kind of things that are happening. And I think it's causing a problem. Part of it is if you go to the boomer generation, right? This was really the last generation of women who at least were raised to be wives, but they didn't want to be. I mean, this is right. You know, I'm talking about sexual liberation era, talking about the era where, you know, the rise of feminism, they wanted to, you know, break apart from the established roles that women were told to play as wives, right? Caretakers, handling the domestic space, so on and so forth. But the weird part is, even though they wanted to break from that, they still wanted men to play the traditional role that we've been assigned. So you're still supposed to be a protector and provider. But in the 70s and 80s, you started to see this transition where women wanted to be able to break the contract and be whatever they wanted. Sexually liberated, have kids, adopt, have abortions, not have kids, whatever, and work full-time, part-time, not at all. You know, they had all of this, they were kind of trying to imagine the family and this new dynamic where women could have the flexibility to do anything, but the men still had to pay for that. So you had to be the floor for whatever she wanted to be. And the problem with that is the dynamic between men and women in the typical, you know, conservative, you know, relationship framework, it's a give and take between both. You're a protector and provider, but you're still depending on her to do her part. She's providing for the house, taking care of the children, so on and so forth, but she's depending on you to do your part. When one redefines their role, the other has to as well. But there really hasn't been a conversation for that outside of what those women said, by the way, not only should you protect and provide, but you should be emotionally present. You should make me feel affirmed. You should do X, Y, and Z. So it became the only changes men were told about were the changes women wanted that suited them, but not necessarily the changes that made it possible for men to actually be human beings and fulfill who they wanted to be. So there was a one change dynamic outside of a couple of recommendations that really didn't and never were about men's humanity. And this is what's been going on for the last 40 years. And I think it's reached ahead that more men are in many ways checking out of the contract, whether it's, you know, going into Monkhood or whether it's passport bros. I'm meeting 14-year-old boys who are monks. And we've heard this, we just don't call it Monkhood. The video games, the one of the kids who check out, there's more to it than them being lazy or them not feeling like working hard. They don't see the reward. They don't see the benefit. Women and girls, not even girls, they see the benefit because again, going back to that boomer grandmother, she taught her daughter, these are the things that, you know, I've done these things to be a mother, but I don't want you to have to do these things. I want you to be independent. I want you to have your degrees. I want you to do so on and so forth. That was the generation that's women. Those are the women I grew up with. That's the generation of women that required six figures back in the 1980s. That was the, you need to be over six feet tall, six figures, own a car, own a house, and then maybe we'll respect you. And because a lot of those women were being brought into white college spaces, they actually talked to you like it was an interview. You know, they were very business minded because that was the space they were being brought into. So they brought that to the relationship. And they measured men along those lines. And then when you get to further generations after Gen X, those ideas only snowballed in many ways in terms of, you know, what roles women wanted to play and what they imagined. That conversation wasn't really happening with men. We didn't have a shared space outside of like the barber shop to really even communicate these ideas. So it took until you had free, cheap social media for men to actually start. And this is where you get Manisphere 1.0 and 2.0. You get men who are on their phones, you know, having conversations. And it's like, well, my wife cheated on me. We have two kids. We got divorced. She got half of everything plus child support. And I'm living in my mother's garage. And then you got another guy in Chicago that says, well, same thing happened to me except she slept with my brother. And then you got another guy, you know, and in Texas it's like, wait, same thing. So you had men comparing notes for the first time and sharing information like, well, wait a minute, this, I mean, I know it's happening, but I kind of thought it was almost an isolated thing, but it's happening to more and more. So now you get more and more men coming in, sharing stories, sharing stories. And it starts to grow and it starts to build. This is not something that was cultivated or supported by any organized corporate governmental, none of these platforms that we've seen women come through, whether it was in pop culture and media, where we had films coming out or whether it was talk shows in the 80s and 90s, men didn't get any of that. Men pretty much just started to, the closest you got from that with that was hip hop and comedy. Eddie Murphy in Raw talking about Johnny Carson's divorce where he's losing half was a pivotal moment. I call it a black masculine, let's turn. It was one of many where you have this moment where men are like, oh, that means, I can relate to that. You had to wait until artists or somebody in the public eye could articulate it for you. By the time you get to the manuscript, now you have men that are contributing and it's not all good. Some of it's gonna be rough as hell. Some of it is gonna be offensive, all of that jazz, even tell the men, but it's a space where you finally have men making their own contributions, sharing their own experiences and trying to measure out how much of this is actually happening beyond me and how much of this, how much of it is me, how much of it is something else. And in this discussion, I don't think it's ever really happened, but we are starting to see states like Texas and Tennessee and Florida starting to change policy in alignment with these conversations that have been going on for this last number of years. No fault divorce is being questioned, right? Being reconsidered. You got questions about DNA testing at birth. You got questions about whether or not there should be permanent alimony anymore in Florida. That's the reason when that just came up. These are things that 20 years ago, people would have, even 10 years ago, politicians would tell you, you have no chance in hell in pushing any of these. Yeah, I think the difference I perceive, and this is just off the head between the 20 to 30 year old group going into the 40 and up, is really more a matter of moving out of the academic and more into the experiential. I mean, women in that age range you're talking about, we assume have raised children. They might even have older teenage sons and so on and so forth. There's a different thing. It's not quite as analytical and purely academic, although I think that has its place. I think there's still value there, but you're dealing with women who are hands-on. They have a son that they're dealing with. And usually by the time they come into these circles, they're starting to notice that their sons are going through something and they're very curious about what can be done. So they come in very focused on, my son has this problem. And I've worked with men who did a lot of the rights of passage kind of programs. And they've had their primary base where mostly mothers worried about their sons. I remember every boyfriend my mother had from the age I was five years old. And even after their relationships ended, I still maintain contact with several of them, right? Your boys are going to respond whether you know it or not to anything you do, especially as it relates to men. And there may be a lasting impact positive or negative with ex-boyfriends, uncles, coaches, teachers, who are mainly men, black men in particular. There's gonna be an impact, particularly if you're a single mother raising a boy. He's going to resonate in some way, positively or negatively. You can go either way with a male figure. And I think cultivating relationships that take into account these things we're talking about, getting into the nuance of black males and their experiences, especially as it relates to the sons in your care, the nephews, the mentees, even the students that some of these women may have, I think it can only cultivate a more useful and responsive space if you're willing to take these ideas in, cultivate those relationships with men and engage these boys with all of that. So it goes beyond just the theory and the discussion I was talking about earlier with the younger group and actually taking it into action with these boys, which I think becomes imperative. I've noticed an uptick in the last decade of young men who are not dating women reflective of their mother. This has been something I've noticed that mothers have observed and don't, they're trying to, the biggest example I saw that at first, the first time I really noticed it is a woman I work with, don't know her that well, but we became Facebook friends. She's a dark skin sister, has two sons and a daughter, all of whom are dark and have some family. So they took a Christmas photo, the mother single, the daughter single, both of the sons had Latina wives. And, you know, you could tell if you've been raised with black women that they're, you know, is there, you know, but I didn't know her well enough to bring that up. She hasn't said anything publicly about it that I know of, but I'm looking at this photo and then I see another one and then I see another one and then I see one in the mall. And you know what I mean? The family and the mother. So I'm seeing it and when I start really engaging these young men who are the same ones in my classes, they're basically saying the same things I heard individual males say when I was as young as fourth and fifth grade, but I never saw men even in young men communicate that to each other beyond face to face. Now you have the same platform we were talking about for men where even young men are exchanging ideas. And so it's, but it's not, I think it's dismissed in many ways by not only feminists, but by women in a larger sense as a fetish for, you know, light skin, white, whatever. It's dismissed as a sexual fetishized, white supremacist oriented. You just want someone with light skin, long hair kind of thing. And I'm not saying there isn't that, but let's be real. Black women do that shit too. You know, let's just have a conversation and be real about it. The chase for white men is ridiculous. Nobody actually asks these young men why they're doing what they're doing. And when I asked them, the conversations we have are rarely, if ever, about long hair and light skin. More than often it's about, she's nice to me. She talks to me. She doesn't talk at me. She doesn't try to control me or tell me what to do. Because again, that has to do with the socialization of men and women, male and female in the black community. We come out of a dynamic where the head of household is more in the last half century has been female. This is a conversation that we have not been able to have, in my opinion, successfully because it usually devolves into pain, fighting, arguing, blaming. But again, if you have the question about why your sons are doing this, which you're not willing to ask in earnest, and you're willing to only give stereotypes about why you think he's doing it, then we're not having a conversation. That's a monologue. You want to have a conversation. You might need to receive an answer you may not be ready for. And then the conversation switches to colorism and how it impacts them. I'm not saying colorism doesn't have an impact, but trust me, I've taught classes we can do colorism for men and women. I am a dark-skinned male raiser, and trust me, we can have a conversation about colorism. Please. I grew up in the 1980s. It was, ooh, the girls will tell you, nigga, you're too dark. Get away from me. I remember those conversations. I had light-skinned boys that were, and I remember having a conversation with my boys. They would actually tell me, as light-skinned, handsome men who got attention that they didn't even have to dress for. They didn't have to learn game. Do you know how clean I had to be on a regular basis to get girls, I mean, you know, suited, cologne, manicured, these dudes would roll out of bed, we'd go to a party, he'd have six numbers, I'd have two, you know what I mean, but when talking to those men, those were the first ones to tell me that, yeah, I've been fetishized, and really, these women don't like me. They're talking about being objectified on the basis of their color, and we don't talk about colorism in regard to men, and even on a capitalistic level, the impact of someone like Michael Jordan had a huge global impact, huge. This is the transition period from nigga, you're too dark, that I remember going all the way up to the early 90s to something wholly different. A lot of that had to do with the branding around Jordan. I'm not saying it's single-handedly him, but you gotta understand him in the context of this system. Change the dynamic, and then you also had Eddie Murphy, and then you had Wesley Snipes, come on, man. So we can have a conversation about colorism in black males, it goes on a different bent than black women, but it doesn't mean there's not as rich a story there, it's just we don't talk about it. The dismissal of black men who date out as being nothing more than Uncle Tom's, or nothing more than fetishizing light skin or white women, it's really a way of not actually having to listen. And you might hear something you're not ready to hear. Like he's actually good with dating black women, he just wants to be treated a certain way. So even when you talk to these passport bros, people would be surprised how many of them are going to Africa itself, or they're going to places like South America, but they're looking for Afro-Latinas, or whether they're looking for it or not, they come back, those are the relationships they have, then how do you explain that? When he comes back with a woman that's darker than you, when you've always dismissed him as just chasing white women, now you gotta stop and reframe, but if you still don't want to actually have a conversation with him, then we're just at loggerheads. What is it women can do, a black woman in regard to the males in their lives, be aware of how they're being pathologized, be aware of not only how the family is treating them, but how the institutions that he interacts with every day is treating them. Is he seen as a product to be used? Is he seen as something to be discarded? Is he being an invested in, and if so, why? Is it just because he has athletic prowess, or because he can provide some type of sexual service? I've seen that too with teachers and administrators. I've been courted as well to participate in that. So there is that there as well, and that's consistent with the stereotypes about black malehood, right? We're walking fallacies. And unfortunately, sometimes we're perceived as walking fallacies by our own women and our own families. That is a dynamic that plays out as well. Sometimes it's sexual, but the weird part is it doesn't even have to be. And that's a whole other conversations about son husbands and what I call husband sons and all of that. But the reality is, are these things happening to the young men in your family? Are they being protected? Do they know how to navigate it? Do they know how to articulate it? Has anybody engaged them as human beings? And I think this is one of the reasons that black males go into coaching, teaching even, even though that we're not highly represented there. Run different programs that are directly involved with working with young black men. I feel a lot of that is an attempt to prevent them from being just so dehumanized that they don't even see themselves for what they are by the time they come of age to make decisions. I can tell you, I had a very casual and lax view on a lot of this until I had a son. There's not a time when my son leaves my house where I am not terrified. Whether I show that to him is a matter of composure. Whether I say that to him is a matter of composure. Most of the time I don't, but I'm terrified because I know how he's seen out there. I know what they see. They see six foot 10 long locks. And if he's not paying attention to you, potentially, you know, they assume he's angry about something. When really more than likely he's trying to decide which anime he wants to watch next. But the way he's perceived is as a threat. And so the idea is we talk about take on a whole different tone once you bring a life into the world. I really lost faith in the very concept of innocence in people until I had a child. You know, being the first one to hold my son out of, you know, his mother's womb. I saw innocence for the first time.