Frederick Joseph is the New York Times bestselling author of The Black Friend. He is also an award-winning marketing professional and media representation advocate who was recently selected for the Forbes 30 Under 30 List. Joseph talks with rolling out about his upcoming book, Patriarchy Blues: Reflections on Manhood (available for preorder on blackbookstore.com), which examines the culture of masculinity through the lens of a Black man.
What inspired you to write this book?
The book was inspired by a conversation as I was talking to some of my boys at the gym one day. We were just talking about how long it took us to come to terms with certain things in our own misogyny, and our own problematic behaviors. I don’t think that I had the resources to necessarily do that coming up, and there wasn’t a book that I [could] necessarily go to that was immediately available, especially by another man, and someone who is trying to get it right talking about homophobia, misogyny and transphobia.
Why do you feel like this was the right time to write this book?
I think that the past few years have shown us that in spite of a global pandemic, in spite of all the things happening in the political sphere, people are still being deeply problematic, deeply misogynist[ic], so on and so forth. I think the conversations are long overdue. I’m someone who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in my mid-20s, and I don’t know what tomorrow is going to look like for me. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to have the conversation at 45-, 55-, 65-years-old, because those days aren’t guaranteed. So I’m trying to have the conversation as soon as possible, as often as possible. We’re kind of behind the eight ball in reality on having these conversations as a society, honestly.
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