I vacillated between pride and anger because I also know I will never see these images on national TV, in the major magazines or gracing mainstream newspapers. Never. Responsible African American males who take care of their children or succeed in corporate America do not translate into good reading as far as the American media are concerned.
But let some Ivy League study portend of black male death, doom and destruction and the story will stand out like neon lights on the front page of the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/national/20blackmen.html). Successful black men can’t get an ounce of ink devoted to them from the nation’s editors. But the moment some black man kills an innocent, pretty white woman, the story mushrooms from a local tragedy into a national scandal with front-page headlines within minutes.
The only other way black men ever get on the front-pages of mainstream newspapers or at the top of the 6 o’clock news is when we score 56 points or run for 100 plus yards.
America seems to derive some sick, almost orgasmic delight in continually illuminating the fact that 1 out of every 4 black men have some affiliation with America’s penal system. But they exemplify no interest whatsoever in highlighting the lives of the other 3 out of 4 black men. They love pointing out the black men who don’t work, who abandon their kids, who live listless lives, who drop out of school, who rob and kill others, who make the front of liquor stores their living rooms. But what about the ones who don’t do any of these things?
Seeing black male success distorts and disturbs America’s mental picture of what a black man is supposed to be and do. It interrupts the existing order of things in America.
Besides, the prison-industrial complex is an extremely profitable enterprise, and they systematically stuff us inside those concrete jungles like cattle and commodities, which is what incarcerated black men are viewed as.
I have the distinct pleasure of speaking with, interviewing or hanging out with scor
es of successful African American males on the regular, some of them extraordinarily and awe-inspiringly successful. America won’t acknowledge your intellectual prowess, your barrier-breaking accomplishments, your earth-altering inventions, so rolling out will continue to do that with the same fervor as we always have.
–terry shropshire
