A BLACK MALE IN AMERICA 'NEVER' BREATHES FREELY

“A Black Male in America ‘Never’ Breathes Freely”

    “Mom, I worry about how I’m seen. I feel insecure every time I’m visible, anytime I’m outside, even outside to care for my yard I feel vulnerable. I always feel I’m compromising my sense of safety,” my son Michael sadly related to me.

    That particular evening, my thirty-five-year-old African American son and I had a conversation by telephone the uprising the ‘George Floyd’ murder triggered. Michael mentioned distinct instances, some I recalled that demonstrated the sense of insecurity he’s always experienced because of his ‘Blackness’. Listening to Michael, I felt the pain and regret that overspreads his life, and the lives of other Black males. Throughout his life I’ve worried about that time he’d find himself in that demeaning, frightening position as a Black victim of an officer of the law, when he shouldn’t be. As a law-abiding, upstanding man my son and others like him cannot enjoy a sense of security, or contentment—race automatically violates their right to breathe freely.

    That deep discussion with Michael led me to write about a longstanding unequal justice policy in America.

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    America from its formation onward has been an irreconcilable venture. A powerful Europe grabbed the Natives’ land. Then a force of revolutionary settlers captured the British landlord’s stolen claim. From that takeover a historically devastating victimization ensued…slavery.

    A hostile past accompanies life every day if you don’t use strong will to disengage its grip. Rebuking what was a long period of human captivity of African Americans is possible but total liberation is undeliverable. Slavery’s damning effect is unshakable from the soul of black folks.

      Slavery is the most harsh and cruel treatment for any people to endure. And, so it was for Blacks brought from Africa during the Middle Passage for the profit of White Americans. America made its greatest gains with slavery and ‘cotton.’ But Blacks did far more: cleared the wilderness, built canals, railroads, and even built the White House. Slavery was an atrocity, an assault on humanity. It created broken spirits and desperation. Nevertheless, a legacy was handed down that is so phenomenal we should never look askance at the power of hope and regeneration. Even before it was advanced, and progress was taking hold, early, freedom was being whispered for those in bondage across America.

    Enslavement left Blacks with little knowledge of the American experience. With slavery behind them, Blacks thought they’d overcome struggle, strain and pain. Nonetheless, they possessed only a partial awareness of what living in America promised.

Frederick Douglass was a leader in the Anti-Slavery movement. He was born a slave in 1817 on a plantation in Maryland. He escaped to Massachusetts in 1838, and says about himself, ‘I am a fugitive of slavery, the “dark night.” His book, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is contributing greatly to abolishing slavery in the United States of America. Speaking of which, it’s been said that no one writes as effectively and skillfully about the Black man’s Cause as Frederick Douglass. Another matter to bring up here: Frederick Douglass didn’t go along with the manner of some in the battle against slavery. By that I mean that he opposed the Garrisonian approach: moral persuasion and the North seceding, or the Constitution as the way to accomplish freedom for black slaves. He says about his opposition, that he knew slavery’s brutality and demoralization, and was passionate about its abolishment.

    I long ago realized that Caucasian or Whites naturally exist on a higher level, and the true American experience is not attainable for Blacks and people of color. The total freedom to explore all that the United States of America represents has always been a primarily White ‘aspiration.’ It’s a privilege which can be akin to feelings of invincibility that requires you’ve been afforded the required standards.

    America’s indoctrination is founded on anglicized principles, an agenda that consolidates a fictionalized account of human existence. I say ‘fictionalized’ because the liberal pursuit that it purports cannot be applied to everyone equally. Let me say this, people of color can never experience a broad, open field; no matter how much you want it to be, someone’s else story cannot be ours.

    America has never veered from its original social intent, and has never been a fully assimilated society, an equalized organism, a naturally welcoming community. Every new group to come onto American soil has witnessed resistance of some sort.

   From its formation onward America has been an irreconcilable venture. A powerful Europe grabbed the Natives’ land. Then a force of revolutionary settlers captured the British landlord’s stolen claim. From that takeover a historically devastating victimization ensued…slavery.

   Inch by inch, little by little, Blacks have made their way toward equal status in America. In a landscape cluttered with hostility and opposition and uncertain acceptance, African Americans plowed their way through, and moved ahead. From Slavery, to Jim Crow and discrimination in various forms-some subtle, some overt-reaching the ultimate human goal has been accomplished, almost.

Throughout our Dark Past, our survival depended on the daring men and women who defended the truth of our humanity. From Slavery to now they opposed adversity, dismissed impossibility…they destroyed that thick fog of inhumanity.

Blacks abandoned the south in great numbers. They were romantics, adventurers, dark pilgrims, young, clothed in innocence and immaturity, leaving behind the burden of Slavery for a life in the North that’s better and promises shelter. Northern-bound, the southerners travel with meager belongings, wrapped in hope and an idealistic dream, with the strength of their projections dented by doubt, and their visions ushered by burgeoning loneliness. Traveling in the summer months means days of relentless, burdensome heat with images of solemn countryside and seas of prolific fields burning in the blazing sun, while the nights swell with the sweet aromas of honeysuckle and magnolia, and the pure magic of soundless, smooth darkness along with the long tracts of landscape looming with mystery and intimidation. Autumn and winter travel present cobalt, somber skies, cold rain and vast vigils of stark, lonesome woods. And, there are the sights of lifeless pasture, and fields stretched by stubble and isolation-the empty fields bore gracious manors, or tiny, tarpaper houses shackled to silent, leaden landscapes.

     The system of slavery slaughtered Black humanity, reassembling the pieces that will make them whole again will never be easy.

Growing up in during the 1940’s-50s, and beyond, African Americans, having suffered the loss of their humanity under Slavery, had been resurrected, and reconciled to circumstances of Civil Rights inequity, and injustice.

    The 1950’s put the 1940’s to rest with a stabilizing front…a period of sober hopeful, silent messages; detractors composed of manufactured superficial delights: televised variety and game shows, picturesque golf courses, camper trailers, and ‘rock and roll.’ The gates to promise and fulfillment and accessibility began to open, nonetheless it was a time of solid, stark heavy-laden opposition; Negroes knew well their rejected, hidden place in America. It appears, however, that while the heavy dark shadows of injustice and inequality plagued Blacks, the elite amongst them thrived at this point in time.

    It was a time notable for a quiet form of activity conducted by Negro leaders. Roy Wilkins, Adam Clayton Powell, Thurgood Marshall, and NAACP, Core, and other organizations formed to strangle the prejudice and racism aimed at preventing Blacks from breathing freedom. These people and organizations served as a coverlet intervening for the harsh, bruising rambling injustice concretely and miserably set before Negroes. This quiet activism settled quietly around the middle class structure.

    During the 1950’s upper middle-class and middle-class Negroes solidly positioned themselves more than ever; those within their ranks used influence to elevate directives. 

A hostile past accompanies life every day if you don’t use strong will to disengage its grip. Rebuking what was a long period of human captivity of African Americans is possible, but total liberation is undeliverable. Slavery’s damning effect is unshakable from the soul of black folks.

    The Christian experience freed the spirits of African Americans; it became an association that supplied a sense of protection and hope. Blacks’ depended on religion, Christianity, to a large extent, in accordance with family to solidify their existence.

     With all of that said, I am grateful to be an African-American in a society that embraces the idea of freedom and progress. I believe that all of the following is true: Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, spacious skies, that we are the recipients of God’s Grace. That’s the Good News!

The End