 Every semester that my students had to go find a black man over 40 and Basically chronicle his life And we put it up on that blog for people to see they had to get a picture and they had to do this interview And they basically had to transcribe the interview and post it up One they find it hard to find black men over 40 that they can interview that was one of the biggest problems To the other problem. I had none. I didn't see coming. It was complaints from women online That this man not that he was interviewed but that he wasn't That the interview wasn't structured in a way to denigrate him X wives X girlfriends, you know old friends people we work with You know that negative. He shouldn't be written about he ain't this he ain't that and really the assignment is just an interview about his life Where's he from? What did he experience? How does he feel the fact that he wasn't being engaged? Just on humane terms and the interview wasn't structured and reliant on his denigration Was offensive to a lot of the women that were writing in Eventually We kept doing that and then a heavy D passed away the rapper. I Grew up listening to heavy D. I grew up with him. He's only a few years older than me His masculinity was always a little different in hip-hop. It wasn't overly You know my cheese mode. He was always he just seemed like the kind of brother you would want to hang out with Real cool and down to earth. I've heard that's the case. I've never met him But when he passed away it did hit me because I had so much respect for him So I wrote my first blog piece about him And that became that began an evolutionary process for me to really kind of work on this unspoken thing That I didn't know how to articulate about black men and it's still going to this day But it evolved into the YouTube channel and into my upcoming book with Rutledge coming out in August I took my son to his first college orientation at this California school 75% of the incoming students for next year were female I Took a picture that you know, they have a table you pick up your tags I took a picture of it and I put on Facebook The only tags left on the table after everybody was sitting in the auditorium were tags for males Tags for Spanish speakers And then there was a whole list of tags for those who were non-binary What that meant was the majority of people sitting in the room were primarily female Right, those were the majority of the tags. There were no female tags left on the table and when I walked in the auditorium 75% of the students in there if not 80 female. I saw three black males including my son and even when I looked for males across race, it was like Needle in the haystack, right? I'm not saying every school is like that, but I Did a show on Howard not too long ago. It is like that in a lot of places Howard included an accusation Can be damaging but we're also in the era of Johnny Depp. We're also in the era of Jonathan majors We're also in the era of Was Carly's last name We're in the era where the argument listen to all women believe all women is Not you know, there's finally a public kind of acknowledgement that that might be a little irrational Listen to women. Yes, but we still have to have evidence We still have to have some this notion of believing all women and that's the end of the discussion When you got black men that have been in their graves for decades that are now being reframed as sexual aggressors And they're not even here to defend themselves But what happens when you have an 18 year old boy going into a space that's predominantly female Any accusation can end his academic career and it doesn't even have to go off campus to the police It doesn't even have to require evidence and my mentor taught me back in the early 90s Said every 17 year old girl that walks across this campus has your career in her hands If you have a meeting with a student and close your door and she says he said this Especially if you didn't what leg do you have to stand on? So I'm just saying in this environment and that doesn't work the other way I can't call it. You know and say well this 17 year old girl said X Y Z to me in my office Even the university to look at you like, okay Whether I'm lying or telling the truth, it's a one-way dynamic I can talk to you about brothers that have dealt with every race woman But especially black women that have gone through something very similar I got an I got a professor brother of mine who can no longer teach in his field Because of a false accusation and a frustrated ex-girlfriend who called his job and told everybody at his job that he did X That he didn't do it required no evidence. They fired him on the spot. He can never teach in his field again After working through a doctorate all because she was upset. So we look at Jonathan majors She accuses him at the behest in many ways as they say have a police officer Who's interviewing her and suggesting to her that he must have done these things to you and she seems to go along with that And then we find video evidence that there's no way possible That he could have committed those crimes that she shows up in the club a couple hours later Doing fine feeling fine, right? But it took those video clips for people to step back and say, okay Well, maybe he's innocent in the meantime. He's lost so much momentum on his career. Nobody cares I don't know how many of the the deals he had set up if called him back and apologized How they they didn't do it to Johnny Depp for the longest I don't know if they're gonna do it for majors But to the extent that majors is emblematic of black men or men in general You know the question is what kinds of protections are there especially in environments that are already hostile to young black men The problem is a lot of people don't tend to believe that black males and females have a different quality of life They have a different set of options made available to them. They have a different road in society The idea is if we're all black we grew up in the same house what I experienced is what you experience The only time I see this really break and I think I said this to you before is when I see mothers of sons Mothers of sons will be the first ones to say oh shit There's something or you'll find mothers who have a daughter and a son and she'll be like, okay These are very different experiences But she's grown up in a family with brothers and sisters it never dawned on her until she had a son You know what I mean? And that's kind of where you see this slow acknowledgement that the fact that we're all black is not an is not clarifying enough We've talked about how gender adversely affects women and girls We assume that that's the only group gender adversely affects We have no vocabulary for how gender adversely affects men and boys So when boys interject it they're they're dismissed because their gender experience doesn't reflect women's gender experience So it must not be happening It's not until usually you see a mother of a son Who's watched this boy grow up from birth and start to go through things that she hasn't had to That other girls your her son's age hasn't had to Then she starts to say something's going on here I showed a film. I think it's still on youtube. I showed that in class My young men went nuts They went nuts because this was the first thing they saw outside of like anthuan fisher And most of them were too young for anthuan fisher unless I was showing it in class But outside of that was the first film they saw that spoke to them Again, this is precursor to kevin samuels. You know so on so far So there they went nuts and I remember there was a particular exchange that took place in one class one of my young women Brilliant very intelligent and though and one of my young men who was considered Nobody ever said this out loud, but he was considered not to be anywhere near as bright Right. This was the attitude. I think people had So the film ends and she immediately raises her hand. She says I've never seen anything like this in real life I don't know any woman like this. I this is bullshit And she just went off right and then you just see behind her this hand just go And I was like, yes, and he was like this is my sister And then another man sitting next to him was like, yo This is my cousin another one was like that's my auntie and and and you saw A number of these men and they weren't yelling. They weren't screaming. They were just like nah That's my mother, you know what I mean? And they started to tell stories about divorce and Court family court and not being able to see their fathers and sisters getting into fights with them and Girlfriends calling the police on them just because they could and And you saw this in this moment the young women that were in the class were looking around like What the hell is going on? And it was almost like this is the other side of the scale that I couldn't get three or four years ago I'm well familiar with the feminist complaints. I've been hearing them for four decades. What I'd never heard was this So as the men started to talk Then we started to actually have conversations about okay What is it you're actually going through at home at school and in intimate relationships? And the more they started to talk what we noticed Is the feminist vocabulary we had was not Flexible enough it didn't have enough nuance to engage men And so then it became clear that we needed a new vocabulary So around this time this is when I meet Tommy Curry And he and I are very much in alignment about this need and we're coming at it from different experiences, but You know, we're very much in alignment in terms of this need