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FinalCall.com News
National News
Saving Black men
By Clinque L. Muhammad
Updated Apr 14, 2003 - 9:15:00 PM
Expo for Black women panel focuses on other gender
CHICAGO (FinalCall.com)--At a three-day weekend expo that focused on Black women, a town hall meeting, titled "The Assault on Black Men," was the highlight of the day April 5.
The event brought together Congressman Danny K. Davis (D-Ill.), psychologist Dr. Alvin Poussaint, Newark, N.J. Deputy Mayor Ras Baraka, Rainbow/PUSH president Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr., and Rev. Albert Sampson of Fernwood United Methodist Church in a panel to openly discuss the perils facing Black males.
Black men still suffer from the psychological effects of slavery, said Dr. Poussaint, speaking at the 11th annual Expo for Today’s Black Woman. Through lynching and castrations, Black men were made less than men, he said.
"There was a plan in place to keep Black men humiliated and subservient to make sure they understood that they were at the bottom and inferior," he said.
Black male anger, according to Dr. Poussaint, comes from the mistreatment of the Black man in the home and in the community. Black male children continue to be more likely to be victims of severe corporal punishment than girls, he said. Eighty to 90 percent of Black male violent offenders have been victims of child abuse and neglect, he said.
"In slavery, Black parents tried to keep their sons in line by beating them so they wouldn’t talk back to the White man and get lynched. It was a control factor, and a lot of it was done with physical force," he said.
The return to society from incarceration is a difficult process for many Black men. In Illinois, Black men are six percent of the population, but make up 60 percent of prison inmates, and there are over 50 job titles that convicts cannot hold.
"It’s against the law for you to get a license to cut hair or be a beautician. You can’t be a butcher, work in a hospital, around a school, wash dishes in a nursing home. So these individuals end up back in the penitentiary," Rep. Davis told the audience, adding that 57 percent of convicts are re-arrested in a three-year period and about 50 percent of them return to prison.
Rep. Davis has submitted legislation, called the Ex-offender Self-Sufficiency Act, to help people in these situations. "We have to re-integrate successfully these individuals back into normal life. We’ve got to bring them back home," he said.
Rev. Jackson said Blacks act out survival schemes because of a lack of life options available. He explained that Blacks pay what’s called a "skin tax," saying Blacks pay more for the same cars, mortgage loans, insurance premiums as Whites. When living under these types of practices, he said, Blacks internalize these assaults to survive.
In 2003, one million Black men are incarcerated in America, a huge increase from the 1980 figure of 150,000. Rev. Jackson pointed out that the corrections system is a major problem, saying that in every state there are more Black men in jail than in college.
"Half of all public housing built in the last 10 years have been jail cells. No Black college in America has the budget of Cook County jail," he said.
Rev. Jackson also alerted the audience that the media is leading the assault on Blacks, saying that the media "projects us as less intelligent than we are, less hardworking than we work, less universal than we are, more violent than we are, and less patriotic than we are."
New Jersey deputy mayor and high school principal Ras Baraka said the low quality of available education is failing Black children and that there is big business in prison. He said schools in the Black community, many of them filled with White administrators and teachers, aren’t necessarily geared toward preparing students for college, nor do they know how to deal with Black children, leading to a widespread displacement of Black boys to correctional facilities.
"Every day they walk out of school in handcuffs, going to the precinct, and if they got a charge, they’re going to stay. It gets to a point where they feel like they’d rather be in jail than in school. They feel like they’d get more respect and attention in jail," he said.
Mr. Baraka also said, "The reason (Black youth) gravitate toward gangsterism is that they believe that we have no power. Your kids are naming themselves after the Italian mobsters. I tell them, ‘You won’t find one Italian person calling himself ‘Malik’ or ‘Pookie,’ " he said.
Mr. Baraka suggested that, in order to better understand Black children, parents should listen to the music that they listen to and have conversations with them about it. He told parents that they should tell young Black men about life, give them direction, and create a bond that would be stronger than the attraction of the streets.
Rev. Al Sampson likened the assault on Black males to the biblical story of King Herod’s drive to kill all male children in his attempt to find and eliminate the Christ child. Claiming that we have lost the "moral authority" over our communities, he suggested that Blacks have failed to be active in their own salvation.
Alluding to the Million Family March, he said that when Blacks stand up for themselves they would effect change.
"There will be no peace until we get back to the church, the mosque and the temple, and raise Black men, then get back into the community," he said.
