I am a social entrepreneur and attorney who co-founded The Brotherhood/Sister Sol – a youth development and community organizing institution nearly 18 years ago.
We are based in Harlem, and as a highly successful and evidence based organization, we have traveled the country, and all corners of New York City, teaching other educators and youth development specialists how to use our model. These travels have inevitably taken me to communities similar to Harlem – communities filled with a rich historical and cultural history, communities filled with hard working people, and also communities facing a plague of violence perpetrated by young men.
Violence is a national scourge in America – last year more people were shot and killed in Chicago than American soldiers were killed in Iraq. The young people I work with think that having young friends who have been killed by gunfire is a normal occurrence. And even those who have avoided the actual violence live in haunted skittish fear of the possibility of violence that pervades their communities. We have raised our children to be afraid for their lives.
This is the America we have wrought.
There has been much written about the need for gun control and for policy efforts to control violence in America. I have written such essays myself. There is no one answer to this scourge: we must respond with education and legislation, gun control and smart policing, pervasive reform of the criminal justice system, and we must also recognize personal responsibility. We must not avoid the responsibility we have as citizens, as Americans, to raise boys to be healthy and strong men who do not see violence as their first form of
communication when they are angry, and enraged and confused.
We must confront our personal and community obsession with violence, the fact that all too often in America we believe that the answer to conflict is found in a gun. We have raised our boys into misguided men, boys who have learned a warped sense of masculinity and manhood. Our boys, in tough communities like Harlem, quickly learn to believe that all they have is their self-respect and in a tragic series of learned and deep seeded responses they adhere to an honor code that is based on defending any perceived slight, any form of disrespect, with
violence.
Over the years of my work I have led workshops in many prisons, talking with men who have been incarcerated due to violent actions. Invariably, when their stories come out, their worn faces acknowledge that the violence they perpetrated was unnecessary, chosen, often done in the haze of alcohol – but still chosen, and
they know now, there were other paths.
I have seen all too many teens, and even young boys, so filled with anger and rage and trauma that they seem ready to combust – and their words become the words of machismo, of violent movie characters, rappers and video games “heroes” they have come to revere. They want to hear a chorus in response to their peacock like displays of rage – “Yes, you are a man.
Yes, you are tough. Yes, you are to be feared.” They have a deep seeded need to be acknowledged, for their power to be recognized, and for their voices to be heard.
Unfortunately, all too many of our young men find their voices and respect through violence. They process the trauma that have experienced, trauma due to poverty and lack of access and the violence that has been perpetrated on them, with violence of their own.
America’s problem with violence, it’s pervasive obsession with physical power, it’s level of homicidal violence that is unequaled by any in the so called “developed” world, is one rooted in the fact that so many of our boys have never been taught alternative standards of manhood, They have adhered to a definition of manhood that is based on power and violence and that so often leads to either bravado laced violence against other men, or the physical abuse of women.
They are raised to be tough soldiers, and so, they act as soldiers act on battlefields, and they speak the language of violence. And then, although they struggle to take off the constricting armor of violence, they are brutal to those they love as well.
This reality has been deconstructed by a legion of scholars in social science, science and by writers and poets -many of them feminists – both women and men. This conversation has happened in pockets of society that are either too small or widely unheard and thus the conversation does not reverberate. We are one of a mere few organizations that have published curricula that speak to these issues – it is one of our salient and most essential values – to teach our young people to analyze and critique ideas of masculinity and femininity that are
destructive to society and themselves.
At The Brotherhood/Sister Sol (BHSS), for 18 years, we have guided boys to define what it means to be men, and leaders and brothers. We have helped them to form these definitions through a 4-6 year rites of passage program that seeks to help them hone ethical and moral codes by which to live. We teach them their history and also the current inequitable realities they face, and we train them in developing the skills they need to overcome these conditions. We empower them to live as they want to live – and reject the degrading and damaging
definitions of masculinity that confront them.
We teach them to be comfortable in different forms of manhood, to work to counter sexism, to analyze and reject the misogyny they are exposed to in the media, in their communities and often in their homes. We teach them as well to reject homophobia, to reject bigotry toward people simply because of whom they love, and to reject the notion of manhood being represented only by heterosexual men.
This work is difficult and it takes years. We must help these young boys to remove hardened layers from their psyches, protective scars of what they have been told they should be, to chip away like stone masons – not to create men, but help them reveal the manhood that lives within themselves – one defined by self, and their own spirits and self love. In these efforts we work to help boys heal from trauma. The teenaged pregnancy rate in Harlem is 15 percent – BHSS members and alumni have a rate less than 2 percent. One out of three black men in America between the ages of 20-29 are under supervision of the prison system – either on probation, parole or incarcerated. After 18 years no members or alumni of our organization is incarcerated and less than 1percent have a prior felony. Our approach works.
Frederick Douglass, a man who, many years before other leaders, saw the interconnected struggle for black freedom and the women’s movement, once wrote: “It is easier to build strong boys than repair broken men.” America’s response to unmatched levels of violence has been to create a massive prison industrial complex, an immoral and unethical, system to cage it’s citizens. That a large percentage of those incarcerated are non-violent drug offenders is deemed immaterial. Those who break the law will be demonized and will pay. A man I know
who served over twenty years in prison says often that he has been inside many of America’s correctional facilities and he has yet to find one that corrects anyone. These are institutions of punishment and profit. It is too expensive to incarcerate millions of young men in coming decades. We know this approach does not work.
In addition, mass incarceration is immoral and unethical. Those who advocate it should be judged for their actions – propagating an unjust and inhumane profiting from the caging of human beings. This too is a form of violence.
However, the work of building strong and free boys, those who reject a destructive predetermined idea of manhood, those who reject a definition of masculinity based on domination and violence, those who will choose other paths instead of guns and destruction, this is profoundly moral and ethical and necessary work. It may be difficult, but the benefit to society, to families, and to our communities is immeasurable. It is time to build strong boys.