Oxygen
If you are Black and claim yourself to be a champion for Black people, and yet the only enemy you can see are Black gay men and Black women in general, you don’t really give a damn about black people.
Hell, let me be even more brazen to suggest that not only do you not care about the general welfare of Black folks, but you, my friend, are nothing more than a willing tool for the very system that oppresses us all.
What I mean is that all weekend, while the mostly Black citizenry of Baltimore protested and burned their city; while the mainstream media, the supposed fourth estate charged with being watchdogs over the other three estates, dined and cracked jokes at the White House-sponsored Correspondents’ Dinner; and while newly elected Attorney General Loretta Lynch finalized her summer tour of law enforcement to help improve “police morale,” a good sum of us were sharing statuses on social media and passing around this essay about how the Black male image is supposedly being destroyed by The Prancing Elite. That’s right, a show about a J-setting group of gay men from Alabama will supposedly be the downfall of the black man.
More specifically, alleged academic and theologian Dr. Rick Wallace writes:
There has been an ongoing debate concerning whether the presentation of effeminate black men on TV has any type of influence on those who watch it. Despite a significant amount of documented and published data that provides pragmatic and empirical evidence that substantiates the fact that any mental stimuli that enters the human subconscious via sight or hearing has the capacity to impact the perceptual mechanisms of the human psyche, subsequently conditioning or brainwashing the thought processes, there is a consistent consensus by blacks that TV programming cannot possibly have an impact on human behavior.
In other words, “Y’all mythological ni**as is comical. My astronomical is coming through like the flu, bombing you ….” Or in layman’s terms, some dumb Keith Murray-inspired psychobabble. Seriously, someone needs to let some folks know that a string of big words doesn’t necessarily make you sound smart. But getting to his point:
It is no coincidence that the black male image is under assault from two different extremes in the media. There is one extreme that is presenting an image that portrays black males as violent thugs, which enforces the perceived image that black men are born with a proclivity to behave violently and to live a life of crime. The other end of the spectrum presents a nonthreatening effeminate black men who lack any threatening characteristics. Although the purpose behind these two different approaches have different secondary motives, the primary motive is the same — to destroy the image of the black man. Although how we are perceived by the masses directly impacts how non-blacks and non-Americans will contextually frame the slaughter and mass incarceration of black men, my primary concern is the lack of positive role models in the media for our young black boys. This would not be such an issue if media programming wasn’t glorified so much by black adults.
If that is not ridiculous enough, he adds:
We shouldn’t be surprised that Oprah is selling a warped image of black men to America. Oprah, 61, was raped at age nine and pregnant by age 14. She repeatedly reminds us that she was sexually abused by men, and even claimed that Bill Cosby tried to rape her.Oprah and the media would like nothing more than to present The Prancing Elites as the perfect role models for young black boys.
Black men are slowly marching towards extinction. The pool of available black men is shrinking. For every 100 black women in America there are only 83 black men — and roughly half of those men are gay or bisexual (down low). The NY Times recently conducted a study that shows 1.5 million black men are missing. The single largest gap of missing black men in America is in Ferguson, MO.
First off, Oprah doesn’t have anything to do with Oxygen. She has a network called the Oprah Winfrey Network, or OWN for short. Secondly, bringing up the fact that Oprah was molested as a child to use it in a half-baked theory about an alleged vendetta she has against all Black men is just plain tackle and offensive (and shows how little one cares about sexual abuse of children to begin with). Not to mention, I have never once heard or read anything about her allegedly accusing Bill Cosby of sexually assaulting her. You would think that someone who proudly claims to have a Ph.D. would be more adept at research and fact-checking.
It would be easy to brush off this essay, with its glaring mistakes and wild conspiracy theories, as just the hare-brained thoughts of someone who likely needs to get his meds adjusted. But the problem is that too many of us, who are supposed to be sane and rational people, buy into it. Too many of us are passing around this essay, or worse, writing similar sentiments of concern about how Black gay men and Black women like Oprah, whose only fault is that she is successful, are hurting the image of black men. And too many of us, who should be worried about real threats to the community, particularly our sons, are taking this snake oil as the gospel, or worse, as legitimate discourse.
And it is all dangerous. First of all, it is victim blaming. These sentiments expressed by Dr. Wallace and others of his ilk give us nothing but false impressions that there is something within us that needs to be corrected in order for whatever aggression, which is happening to us, to cease. If only we would pull up our pants. If only we would embrace our African roots. If only women would return to the kitchen and stop putting weaves in their heads. If only we would stop being Black gay men and become “real men.” If only we would stop rioting and resisting. If only, if only, if only…
Yet all the adherence to social order and the status quo – to the point that we have more college graduates, black professionals, and a thriving black middle class than ever before – has done little to stem the tide of the school-to-prison pipeline, which has not only criminalized our young men, but is now targeting our young women and painting them as aggressive and unfeminine. Nor has our adherence to social order, including gender and sexual roles, acted as a shield against killer cops, who have killed just as many straight fathers and husbands as they have gay ones.
And our meekness has not aided us when dealing with the racist justice system, which can’t seem to convict a corrupt killer cop, even if they are on camera killing our black a**es, but has no problem locking up your cousins and brothers in the millions for crimes as trivial as a few traffic violations. Nor has it helped us receive equal treatment in the medical community, or equal funding for public schools predominated by Black and brown children, or equal pay for Black women, who earn less than just about every other ethnic group in this country. Being a Black straight man has not been the answer to the growing opposition to affirmative action or support for racial profiling. Being Black straight males and Black women who are not Oprah hasn’t done anything to cure the effects of institutional racism. Heck, even in spite of the widespread belief that there is a gay agenda, none of that alleged covert planning has done anything to help our gay, bisexual, and trans men and women who too find themselves routinely harassed by the police at rates much higher than their white counterparts.
Our salvation will only come from unity. The kind of unity that includes people holding each other’s hands while we look our enemy in the eyes and call it a liar. The kind that recognizes that while we fight and divide among ourselves, there are forces out here capitalizing, commercializing, stealing and killing us. The kind that knows that regardless of our gender and sexual orientation or what tribe/ethnic group we originate from (yeah, I’m talking to you xenophobic folks in South Africa), we are all brothers and sisters in the same struggle. And any conversation, which seeks to place the burden and blame on one segment of us, is not only counterproductive, but shows that the person who started that conversation (and those who buy into this divisive hogwash) was emasculated a long time ago.
In short, we’ve got to do better.
