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The right of Alford A. Young, Jr. to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2018 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2205-7

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2206-4(pb)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Young, Alford A., author.

Title: Are black men doomed? / Alford A. Young, Jr.

Description: Cambridge : Polity Press, 2017. | Series: Debating race | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subjects: LCSH: African American men. | Stereotypes (Social psychology) | Identity (Psychology) | United States–Social conditions. | United States–Race relations.

Classification: LCC E185.86 (ebook) | LCC E185.86 .Y66 2017 (print) | DDC 907.2/02–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025319

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Preface

The crisis of African American men and masculinity seems to have been around forever. It surely has been a point of concern in the United States for the past 30 years. It was three decades ago when these individuals began to garner extreme attention in the media and in policy discussions. Indeed, the precarious status of Black males became a high point of concern in the US conversation about the state and fate of African Americans in the post-civil rights era.

The problems that Black men face seemingly cover vast terrain. They exist in employment, education, physical and mental health and well-being, fatherhood and family relations, incarceration, surveillance, and detention at the hands of legal authorities, and in the myriad challenges and threats to their ability to construct a positive social identity and self-concept. Irrespective of how the general problem of African American men and masculinity is construed, however, the greatest dimension of their problem is that much of the public attention on them calls for what they must do to change themselves. Consequently, even those professing to be empathetic to Black men often emphasize the material resources that they must acquire from more privileged others in order to enact such changes. This condition masks the deeper problem for African American men: the inability of others in US society to realize that an improved situation for African American men is contingent upon those others being willing to change, themselves. For the past 30 years, then, Black males have been framed as a problem in the US. The resolution of their plight, however, requires more thorough attention to the ways in which the US is a problem for them.

Transforming the situation of Black males requires more their changing themselves. The outcome of a more positive public identity and life situation for Black males cannot be achieved without some change in the public that has consistently framed them so problematically. Undoubtedly, there is no shortage of African American males who must change. Yet, a great deal must change around them in order for them to improve their life prospects and personal well-being. Essentially, what must change if Black men are to prevail in the modern world is the public perception of them. That is, others must learn to understand and accept that many of the standard portraits of these men and boys are incomplete if not inaccurate. Black men are framed as menacing and incorrigible. They are too often seen as uncompromisingly committed to themselves and to social destruction. Consequently, they are regarded as necessarily requiring social control and containment. As is well understood, the latter is achieved via incarceration or the kinds of surveillance provided by penal, policing, and other state institutions.

The following pages argue that a new conception of these men is in order. They make a case that a more thorough sense of who they are and what their capacities as citizens of the modern world happen to be are prematurely and severely handicapped by the contemporary misreading of them. All this is to say that Black men are doomed in US society, but they should not have to be. Indeed, they can prevail. However, they cannot do so without wholesale changes in the prevailing societal notions about them.

* * * * *

The situation of Black males in the US has been on my mind for quite some time. It has been for much of the same three decades in which the public has acknowledged a crisis. Unlike many Americans, however, they have been on my mind not because I am bothered by or fearful of them. Instead, I have been intrigued by them, but more importantly, I have been intrigued by the broader public response to them. The latter includes a measure of frustration with the public reading of these males. Yet I come to this constituency – which is one in which I hold membership – with a perspective rooted in hope and possibility as much as in recognizing the dire straits such men are in, and the role they sometimes play in putting themselves there. From a personal as well as an intellectual perspective, I find much to appreciate about Black males and much to consider about why others feel about them as they do. In fact, I have spent the past 20 years as a sociologist immersed in deep thought about whether the US can ever come to terms with Black men.

I am an African American male who was born and raised in the East Harlem section of New York City. Although mostly comprised of Hispanics, that community brought me into contact with a plethora of low-income African American males. My experiences there ultimately cemented my research focus and agenda. My late father was a college graduate and a Certified Public Accountant. My late mother worked as a legal secretary for much of my childhood. Although I lived in a highly impoverished urban neighborhood, I was not in any way as resource-challenged as most of my peers. Indeed, I was among the first children that I knew of from my neighborhood to leave it in order to attend (and actually help integrate) a Catholic elementary school in the considerably more elite mid-town section of Manhattan. Thereafter I attended Fordham Preparatory High School, a highly competitive Catholic school in the Bronx.

I first began to think seriously about how Black males in my community thought about their life situations and future prospects while a teenager. By my high-school years I noticed that most of the young men in my community were on a different, and much less promising trajectory. The recession of the late 1970s, the economic turbulence of the 1980s, and the crack epidemic that was occurring near the end of that decade appeared to be highly relevant to the stalled fortunes of these men, yet as an adolescent I did not possess the language and mindset that I now do to figure out what was going on. It simply appeared to me that over those decades more and more young men had become strung out and were without jobs.

When not focused on the plight of the people in my neighborhood, my father's professional networks enabled me to meet politicians, business executives, and other high-profile people that were in his social circles. Accordingly, as a young man I had constant and intimate exposure to people in poverty and in privilege. That resulted in vivid exposure to stratification, inequality, and social difference throughout my life. I interacted with many people at each end of and all along the socio-economic class continuum. I noticed that those at each end would rarely engage each other. I also noticed and was fascinated by the differences and similarities in their social outlooks and worldviews.

I came of age in the 1980s. That was the decade of my adolescence and early adulthood. It was when I decided to commit to the study of African American men as a life pursuit. It also was the period of the rise and sedimentation of the so-called underclass in the minds of the general public about the most disadvantaged residents of urban America. During that time it seemed like attitudes and opinions about Black men proliferated faster than did public interest in personal computers. Young Black males in urban communities were regarded in the media as a social menace. For many, the peak of public panic in that decade occurred near its end.

Media accounts reported that on the evening of April 19, 1989, close to 30 Black and Hispanic young men accosted, threatened, robbed, or assaulted people in the vicinity of the northeast corner of New York City's Central Park (the portion of the park adjacent to East Harlem) (Burns 2011). In a wooded area in that section of the park the horrifically abused body of a female jogger was found, apparently left for dead. The report of that discovery created a moment of panic about the consequences of urban living in the US (Burns 2011).

Four Black and one Hispanic adolescent males were convicted of assault, robbery, riot, rape, sexual abuse, and attempted murder in association with the discovery. They were crucified in the media and in public conversation (Burns 2011). Edward I. Koch, the mayor of the City of New York, Mario Cuomo, the Governor of the State of New York, and various civic leaders and politicians called for the condemnation of these boys. Ultimately, they were convicted and spent between six and 13 years in prison.

The convictions were vacated in 2002 due to the confession of Matias Reyes, a man who was not associated with those originally convicted. A re-investigation of the crime resulted in the uncovering of police misconduct, including the collection of questionable evidence used against these boys to convict them. That discovery was publicized far too late to counter-balance the intensity by which urban-based Black males in 1989 were deemed a threat to the public well-being.

Apparently, a lot of bad behavior went on during the night of April 19, 1989. However, what also went on that night was the vilification of innocent boys. Alongside this vilification was the validation of the extreme indictment of Black males in urban America. The concept of wilding – a description of the presumed uncontrollable and extreme conduct of males of color in the streets of urban America – was introduced in the media to define the seeming lawlessness of these individuals (Burns 2011).

Also unfolding in the 1980s was the New York City Police Department's introduction of neighborhood sweeps to counter the crack epidemic. The efforts resembled military operations designed to capture fugitives. Except, in this case, people occupying street corners that were deemed to be drug distribution sites were picked up en masse by the police in night-time sweeps. The result was that by the 1990s low-income, urban-based Black men were firmly constituted in the public eye as being in trouble, riddled with personal problems, and troublesome for nearly everybody else.

In the following pages I affirm that Black men have been doomed. Accordingly, any effort for recovery necessarily involves constituencies external to them. Their capacity to prevail involves as much action on our part as on theirs. A part of our societal challenge, then, is to re-educate ourselves about Black males. That being said, the argument here is to confront and challenge the idea that pathology is foundational to who Black men are and what Black masculinity is, especially when focused on low-income men.

The proposed project of understanding and identification is two-fold. It includes both rethinking the collective sentiment about these men as well as taking more thorough account of how these men think and feel about themselves. The following pages are intended to encourage both efforts. I make this case by drawing from research on these men, what I have observed about how others respond to and portray them, and what I have experienced as one of them.

I wish to thank Emma Longstaff, who initially invited me to consider submitting a book for the Debating Race series at Polity Press. I am not clear what she saw in me that compelled her to ask me to do something very different from the kind of writing I've been doing as a sociologist, but I am glad that she did. Shortly after informing her that I was willing to take a stab at doing so, Jonathan Skerrett assumed the position of editor. He guided me from early drafts to a finished product. Jonathan served as my distant audience – the very kind of person at whom this book is targeted. He was conscientious and sensitive about the topic, but was removed enough from it that he would raise questions that encouraged me to offer more substantive explanations and more precise clarifications. The Polity Press team, including Clare Ansell and Ian Tuttle, were vital for allowing this book to come into fruition.