29/03/2024
I wrote this some years back. I wanted to share. Please, leave your thoughts in the comments section.
The Black Man is Not the Bogeyman
Written by maléfi adéyéfa
The Black man is not the bogeyman, yet we're seen as monsters, as threats. Many of our young and old men feed into this stereotype, into this menacing archetype, of sorts.
Historically, our men weren't allowed to be human, much less men. We were property. Our mothers, fearing for our safety taught us to be docile, acquiescent, and friendly to our very real enemies. Anything more could cost us our lives. What's a mother's greatest instinct? It’s to protect her babies. Fathers who dared to stand up, to fight, to take their dignity back were quickly made examples of. They were slain, maimed, brutally beaten, castrated, or sold. What was the lesson? To be on equal footing with your oppressor assured death or some other inhumane consequence.
As our men, and people, made it through enslavement, they still weren't allowed to be men: they were viewed with animus and treated as boys. The nomenclature not only identified gender, but one's arrested development in a society whose majority culture refused to acknowledge the basic humanity and maturation of Black men no matter how many grey hairs protruded from their scalp, or how many seeds had gone forth from their loins. They were boys compared to the white men.
The guilt and fear this must've caused within the collective psyche of white America had to have been immense. The fear of Black messiahs moved white citizens and the white governments that governed them to neutralize any threat that they perceived would usher in a long overdue justice. Smear campaigns, subterfuge, assassinations, and other methods were readily deployed. The original message continued, albeit the methodologies changed: any Black man seeking equal footing with his oppressor would experience death.
The Black man is not a bogeyman. The fear of retribution drives certain people to fantasize about being obliterated by Black fathers, men they've categorized as boys. Their fear of racial annihilation pits them against the one who could sleep with their wives, their daughters, and mothers, producing an entirely different race, rendering them invisible, extinct, powerless.
So you see us as demons, as superhuman monsters. We are not. We are men. Yet, you robbed us of our manhood. You r***d and brutalized our wives, our daughters, sisters, aunts, mothers all while you castrated us, or simply used our pen*ses to perpetuated your wealth, your greed, your agenda.
You vicariously lived through our pen*ses, feeling impotent with your own. Now you do the same, using our artists to forward your agenda of white supremacy. You use our Kerri Washingtons, our Viola Davises as women of power seeking the white's men in their destructive world, while demonizing or emasculating our men, or rendering our men as your boys.
You use our Lil Waynes, our Jay Zs, our Kanye Wests to keep the masses seeking a wealth they'll never really achieve through messages that perpetuate the myth of our evil, our hypers*xuality, objectifying our mothers, our sisters, and our daughters as s*xual tools, all while maintaining our dependence on white power: the values, mores, and culture of our oppressors. We see the guns, the muscle, the s*x, the chains, and in our collective memories, though largely unconscious we remember our place. To those who "rage against the machine" their careers are blackballed (read: lupe fiasco), thus reinforcing that original message: to seek equal footing with the oppressor is death.
The Black man is not a bogeyman. Yet we're killed in the streets like dogs, chocked out without consequence, and forced to listen to moralistic rhetoric by the biggest murderers humanity has ever known. We are not beasts, dogs, or bogeymen. We are men.
