What Kind of Black Are You?

All I’ve ever done, all I’ve known to do, is make a home out of language. I wrote my first book at fourteen years old. That book currently sits in a box in the closet of my old bedroom in my mother’s apartment in the Bronx. The book started across two summers: the summer spent in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with my cousins and the summer spent in Indianapolis with my sister, Tanja. I didn’t know I had a sister until I was ten years old, her being the offspring of my father, who, unbeknownst to my brother and me, had a previous relationship before he met my mother. My cousin Leah gave me a collection of African American essays and poems written between the 1800s and the early 1970s, a foundation for my exploration into Blackness. My summer with my sister, my nephews, and my then brother-in-law Sean offered me three things: a newfound work ethic, the church … and puberty. Sean would have me trail him from salon to salon while he got his and my sister’s business off the ground: a clothing boutique bringing the fashions of New York City to the Midwest. I spent days hauling plastic bags full of Enyce, Karl Kani, and Avirex gear. Think of Tyrese’s character in the film Baby Boy but with a teenage sidekick to drive up the cuteness ratio. Outside of the grueling heat and sense of civic duty required to sell gear to Black women looking to style their kiddos and beaus, I was also doing a lot of reading and a lot of churchgoing. My Indianapolis summers also put me in a recording studio for the first time. Sean wanted to promote their clothing business, so he enlisted me and a couple of the younger church boys to essentially record rap jingles. They wrote theirs, I freestyled mine off the top of my head for the duration of the session. The summer prior to that, in Baton Rouge, had me go to my first party. A fight almost broke out between two rival neighborhoods. The security guard working the event plainly explained to the high-strung teens, “Y’all got all these girls in here and y’all wanna fight?!” Those summers began Bloodlines, my collection of essays, all handwritten, where I began exploring language. It was the first time, outside of the little poems I would write in grade school for homies trying to mack to the girls in our school and the sports column I wrote for our grade school newspaper, that I had started putting pen to paper to speak to the things I was still learning the language for. Every rap, every poem, and every essay since then has been reintroducing myself to myself for the first time. This endeavor is no different I suppose.

I am both greeting and grieving myself. There are endings and beginnings. As a Black father to two Black girls, there is rarely if ever a moment when I am not fully aware of what that means within the context of the world we are living in today. There is almost always something at stake, something to live for and fight for. And isn’t that what manhood is supposed to be? If it is not hard or difficult then it must not be worth it. But I’ve decided for myself, for my girls, for my partner and family and friends and community, I want ease above all else. I want to make and leave room for a different way of being that doesn’t subscribe to the notion that our pain, suffering, and trauma need to play a starring role in the stories of being. The greeting of myself is the reintroduction.

Lauryn Hill talks about having to reintroduce herself to her parents. Because there was a shift, a transformation. And while doing so, there is also a dying. For in the rebirth, there is also a conclusion, a burying of what needs to die to allow something new to live. It feels at times that collectively we are at the intersections of both. I’ve found it most helpful to meet the expansiveness of the moment by expanding right along with it. We are achieving so much and yet, in parallel, are losing so much in the process. This time we’re in feels like a reflection point—an opportunity to sit with what was and has been, and the potential in what could be. In that potential, is love. Blackness is love, to me. To be loved is also very Black. And if we are looking at Blackness through that lens, then that love exists beyond a romantic sense of love and travels deeper into the vortex of humanity as a whole. Because to embody the fullness of Blackness and the spectrums of Black masculinity that exist within that framework, we get to reimagine what Blackness means with a new set of eyes and a new set of rules to play with.

I love being Black. Being Black is a birthright privilege, and a rite of passage, like learning how to parallel park or double Dutch. But just as much as I love being Black, I love being able to say I’m Black. The ability to speak, to use words, to use language, that ability to speak to a truth, to our ancestors—I’m in love with that, too. I am in love with language, with the languid and the lusty. With the length of a page and latitude of a levee breakage. It is this love of words and their use that has moved me to look at Blackness. Being Black is a noun and a verb. I learned this by looking in mirrors, staring at my reflection, standing naked, and seeing Black skin, Black body—my Blackness staring back at me. I saw a thing, being. And leaving my family’s two-bedroom apartment on Creston Avenue in the Bronx, going outside showed me what Black was also doing. Doing Blackness as a person living and breathing—dapping up elders, ducking into bodegas for bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches, reciting rap lyrics I learned from Video Music Box and snippets of the cassette tapes my big brother D would cop near the D train on Fordham Road in the Bronx.

Growing up, I learned that being Black is an all-encompassing everything—it is both whirlwind and movement, progress and processed hair; it is fistfights and chicken spots with “Fried Chicken” at the end of each title. It is liquor in barbershops and boyfriends in hair salons; it is long acrylics like Coko from the girl group SWV wore in her falsetto high notes during Showtime at the Apollo. Her stiletto heels set the benchmark for anything vocals-related in R&B videos during my formative 1990s years. These videos and the Blackness in them are what my younger self would watch and stare at, their Blackness and the volume in them staring right back. I’d be looking at all the caramel Black girls with the door knockers on, clutching their earlobes to the ends of the earth, weave tips reaching their waists. I say caramel because it was also here where I learned that light-skinned was preferable; that colorism was a pseudonym for “acceptable.” These are all constructs, binaries meant to be broken and laid out on the living room carpet for us all to bear witness to, a collective sigh of relief that the baggage of titles and labels can be eschewed for a higher sense of being and self we often aren’t afforded the luxury to have. Early on, I learned that masculinity for a Black man is a tapestry of images pulled together from the media portrayals of what you were “supposed” to have—the exotic, light-skinned, curly-haired girl in haute clothes modeling for cameras; the car with the roof missing, money flying out of the windows, gold chains attached to bodies like tattoos. To be Black, to be a Black man in the era I grew up in, was easily everything and nothing at once. And to exist in that, to have that live both in you and on you, like a tattoo that is at once foreign and also embedded in you with the ink forever drying, is a hard thing to grapple with.

The totality of that experience is also hard to put into words. Much of my journey and purpose has been in translating my Blackness and my experiences surrounding Blackness, not for white eyes or the white gaze, but for Black folks who have struggled with having the language to describe how they view the world. The words and ways of expression I lacked then now show up in the prosaic language I use to illustrate those times now. This language is now more visual than anything else, and as I’ve gotten older, the language I have learned to use to express my Blackness has shifted. Blackness has shifted.

It was me walking the streets of New York on sunshine-soaked summer days, me and the ragtag, assembled crew of hood boogers trapezing the block, looking for somebody else’s parked car to perch on. In those days, we’d sit idle and watch our older brothers and friends passing a brown paper bag or a football around while the stories were rehashed—who fucked whom, who shot whom, who got slapped for what. We’d wait to be called in for a game, and some of us would have already had a pass of whatever was in the crinkled container that shielded the rest of the world from its contents. In those days, we did not punctuate words and did not use the right grammar in any of our sentences. In that era of Blackness, we were reckless and carefree enough to pee in the streets, pants hung low, eyes glued to the concrete. In that era, I wanted a gold chain, we all wanted a gold chain because your gold chain was your flex. So was your car. Your light-skinned girlfriend. Your piece. Your J’s. I wanted wanted wanted, but couldn’t afford, so therefore I couldn’t have. All of these things attached to what I thought I was supposed to be as a Black man. That language was forcibly handed to me, a language I was told to own by others who had been told to do the same, without question. We learned this language because we were taught this language: this language of mistrust, of machismo by any means.

I thought I was close to what I believed was the right way to be Black, and had the right kind of language needed to survive. But then I’d watch Martin and see how fucked-up Martin was to Gina and how light she was and how dark Pam was but Pam was the butt of every joke. I’d laugh because they were telling us how to be Black men. No one tells us that our manhood is not about Black women or white supremacy or fire hoses, about lusting after white women or lean or Black & Milds; not about Mike Brown or Jim Brown or James Brown or O.J. running in the airport, or driving in the Bronco during the Knicks vs. Rockets final; not about loosies or “I can’t breathe” or asking for your dead mama for nine minutes with a knee in your neck, or about knowing the math and supreme knowledge.

That’s because no one taught us feelings. Nobody taught Black boys how to feel things. No one around us knew how. No one told us feeling things mattered just as much as the things you wanted on your neck, in your wallet, in your pants. What I did learn from the culture, what I absorbed growing up, was that white would always be right; that Black women were side characters or nonexistent; that Black men were good for comic relief but not good enough for names in title cards at the beginning of any sitcom; that Black death was a laugh track; that if I just worked as hard as the white people on TV I could be successful on my terms. And maybe I didn’t aspire to that success, but I could see it in my peripheral, knowing it was there. The same way I would watch TV and I’d see the hot white girl, never the hot Black girl. The Black girl was never labeled as “hot” or a catch. Sometimes, the Black girl wasn’t even on-screen. And when she was, she wasn’t the star, she wasn’t painted as desirable. I learned it but didn’t know I was learning it. None of us did. This was the language they gave us. The language we never asked for. I came up with my own. Here are my ten Be a Better Black Man Commandments:

I.

If you’re a good guy, you don’t gotta keep saying you’re a good guy. In fact, just stop saying who and what you are and:A. Let others do that for you and—

B. Just do the things that SHOW who you are. Normally, it’s the dude puffing his chest out in the quest to be the all-mighty alpha who has the least valuable thing to add to the conversation.

Also, just shut the fuck up more often. Period.

II.

If she turns you down, walk away, holmes. Like, really. Do some yoga, contemplate life, jog around the block, call ya moms …Whatever.But, whatever you do, leave her the fuck alone, bruh.III.

Give up ya seat, fam. On the bus, on the train. Like, I get it. You had a hard day, too. You was at ya desk flirting with ya work wife, or you was standing up all day at the construction site working for The Man. I feel you. But, she had to go through shit you can’t even fathom. Plus, just a nice fucking thing to do. It ain’t that serious.You can sit yo’ ass down when you get home. I know you got a couch at the crib, shun.IV.

Be honest. Like, I done had some very fuckboy moments. I’ve lied, I’ve cheated, made promises I ain’t keep, ran from situations with no real explanation as to why.All you got is ya word. Stand by it.Stand behind it. If you are honest FROM THE JUMP, it just saves you a whole lotta trouble. Someone may still get hurt or even hate your existence, but hey, at least you can say you were up front. Intentions are everything. EVERYTHING. Be aware of yours. Be honest with the people in your life. But most importantly, be yourself.V.

Stop trying to police feelings, hair, body parts, clothing …JUST STOP!Yes, we live in a free society, with free will. Deal. People will do and/or say what they want, how they want, and when they wanna do it.Yes, you can have an opinion. But said opinion does not have to be demeaning or offensive. She’s breastfeeding in public? That bothers you? You saying anything gonna make her say, “You know what, lemme stop doing this natural thing with my natural body that ya natural ass mama did for you when you was a little-ass person?”Nah. So stop.She’s twerking? Bet ya moms woulda twerked for MLK if he came down 138th and the Grand Concourse.Check why YOU’RE offended, homie.VI.

Stop catcalling. Just stop. There’s mucho places to get ya holla’ on: the club, library, college campus, class, bar, museum, party, coffee shop, concert, zoo, aquarium, a baseball game, at work, the dentist’s office …Just don’t do it in the street.And if you reeeeeally need to have the convo, don’t grab her arm or pull her, champ. If she got earphones in, let her be.And unless you are also reading The Framework for Dissecting White Male Privilege in the Twenty-First Century, let her be. Smile, and keep it moving.I just made that title up. Cool title, though, huh?VII.

Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics. Do not send unrequested dick pics.DO. NOT.VIII.

Don’t hit her. Don’t rationalize hitting her. Don’t make veiled comments about hitting her. If she’s pregnant don’t threaten her with hitting her. If you ain’t laying hands on her for a massage, a prayer, or some coital action, nah. No excuse …None.She tryna’ put hands on you? Walk away, call the police, jump out a window, I dunno …Just, nah.IX.

Don’t be a creep. Don’t follow her home. Don’t send creepy texts and DMs. Don’t call her a thot or a bitch or a ho or a slut when she curve you. That’s life, man. Dust ya self off. You will live.X.

Be aware of your privilege as a man and don’t use it to be a coward or a sucker by saying and doing things to take advantage. Be understanding, LISTEN to others. Just because you hurt doesn’t mean you get to hurt another. I know we as men have been taught that’s soft or whatever, but we gotta invest time for love and healing and compassion and understanding. That’s real strength. You wanna lead with machismo and brute force? Cool. Just know you won’t last very long. The journey we on ain’t for the faint of heart. Leave a stamp on the world that matters. In every interaction, be humble and gentle and sincere. The wind can be gentle and firm. It’s still the wind, though. So, be that.No one teaches you how to talk about being a Black boy. No one gives you that language. You learn that on your own, like I did. I learned it from watching it: from my window, at train stations, at bus stops, and in front of bodegas. Then one day you grow up with your dick in one hand and if you’re lucky enough maybe a diploma in the other, and the world tries to tell you how to be a Black man in America. We think we are connected to what it means to be a man because we are told to do manly things, and so some of us do them and some of us don’t. Some of us do them well and some poorly. This doing and not doing is essentially the undoing of it all, because so much value is placed in the boxes and categories that we have been told are supposed to define manhood. The shoes that fit us at eight will not fit us at eighteen, yet arbitrary rules created largely by an oppressed society that once believed the earth was flat and that Black people weren’t even considered to be human have our views of what it means to be Black and to be a man in a vise grip.

Much of how we view and talk about men and Black men and roles and our identities is wrapped in customary traditions. Traditions that are carried over and never questioned. Because to question them would mean challenging their validity. And challenging that means we would have to then challenge all the other systems that benefit from those traditions and ideas. Men, especially Black men, are seen as providers. There is a distinct need for us to be producers of work, to do work, to make work happen. We are to protect, expected to, and if there is lack in any way where protection does not seem possible, we are considered weak and disposable. There is an unspoken, expected weight we are meant to bear. And we are to carry that weight without sweat, without grimace; without complaint or worry. We are beautiful Black machines, are robots void of feeling. Chivalry is a part of that time-honored tradition—the notion that there are things that must be done in order to prove that we are indeed men and are showing up as men.

And if those things are not being done, without question, what kind of Black man are you? Slave to the patriarchy, to the patterns that live as fabric on us, no? Walk on the right side of the road. Put yourself in danger, in harm’s way. Be the one to be hurt first. Protect at all costs, without the flinching that happens when the heat from the exhaust gets too close for comfort. Walk into the fray. Defend defend defend. Pay for everything. Take charge. Be a leader. I would often say my mother gave me all the language I needed and required to be a better human, to be a better man in whichever ways society had expected of me. But what I lacked were tools: functional, tangible ways to apply these ideas and terms in the real world. In the real world, whining my waist as an Afro-Caribbean man could be seen as effeminate. Having queer-identifying, gay male friends also made you gay and queer. Riding the train home from school, pants cuffed slightly, also opened me up to being called a faggot by grown men. There are traditions we uphold and there are still rules to follow. Walking home in Brooklyn one day, I overheard a young Black boy, no more than nine, sobbing to whom I perceived to be his mother. She lashed out at him, “Stop crying like a little bitch. You acting like a faggot right now.” At that moment, I realized how hot and frustrated, and tired she must have been. Unable to see how masculinity has played out in her own life, perhaps in both past and present. That boy was expected to stand on the right side of the road, too. And be either heralded or chastised for it, either in public or private, for not adhering to and following the precedents laid out before him. As I walked by them, I had a separate conversation in my head, one that would propel me and the young boy into the future: Who would he become? What would he aspire to? Who would he harm? Himself? Others? None of my questions would sit in the space of “if” but “when.” It is expected that someone so young and so available be swayed by what the whims of the world dictate safety looks like and would have those same whims lean into the outward-facing punishment of himself and others that comes from being chastised and punished by the same persons charged with creating parameters for how your safety is measured: your parents and guardians. In that moment of reflection, I also had to ask what would a masculine man do.

We so often say what we would do when the challenges of real-life humanity show up at our door. I often think that a real man would have confronted her, and challenged her use of the language. Would that have been safe for the boy? Would that have been safe for her? Masculinity also doesn’t shy away from ego—it leans in wholeheartedly, chest out and bare. I think about that boy often. About the ways the world will wilt and deflower him to make him into a machine, to turn him into the robot cyborg metal that will be as shiny and as strong as the cars he is to be hit by in order to protect whoever is on the inside of the road. Tradition. How much of what we hold on to is about carrying over the energy of our ancestors? How much of our traditions are boxing us into ideas that no longer hold precedence? What does it look like to hold space for the past while also understanding that not everything in the past needs to play a part in how we think about the present and our collective futures?


Copyright © 2024 by Joél Leon