He was convinced there was some conspiracy against him. "To him, I just didn't understand the situation. "To me, I was returning the positive encouragement he gave me when I needed it," Jivani writes in his book. After their talk, Jivani looked up the Crime Stoppers release, and was shocked to see Lucas described by authorities as "violent" and "dangerous." For Jivani, the bulletin was something of a signpost, indicating how far he himself had once "strayed from mainstream values."īut Lucas kept calling while he was locked up, and in their difficult conversations, Jivani implored him to change his ways. In Jivani's freshman year of university, he received a phone call from prison. It also meant leaving behind most of his friends, including Lucas. He then chose to aspire to greater heights, which meant taking school seriously and thinking about a life beyond the gaudy, empty promises of rap music. Jivani was forced to overcome his anger about his father's withdrawal from, and eventual abandonment of, the family, as well as his anger at being racially profiled by police as a young man. What if he did get his hands on that gun, and police were to catch him with it? Would it not demonstrate exactly why they treat young Black men the way they do? And what would it do to his mother who, Jivani now acknowledges, "was the only good thing in my life?" His friend never came through, though, and Jivani was forced to confront where his life was headed. Jivani was on his way down the same path, and at one point asked another friend to find a gun for him. "Lucas was the coolest guy I knew," Jivani wrote.īut none of those skills could save Lucas from winding up in the statistical pile of lost Black boys he was constantly in trouble, in and out of jail for fights and other minor infractions.
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Lucas dressed like NBA legend Allen Iverson, flirted easily with girls at the mall, and knew how to handle himself in a fight. Jivani became friends with another young man named Lucas, who filled the role of older brother and hood mentor, and who helped him deal with his father's increasing detachment from the family. "I saw guys trying to make money where money was hard to come by, commanding respect in their neighborhoods and playing a small part in a corrupt system conspiring to hold our community down." "The world looked in fear at young men who acted like gangsters, appeared in mug shots on television and added to the crime statistics in newspapers," Jivani writes. He was angry at being racially profiled by police, and fantasized about claiming money and power through selling drugs. In his early teens, Jivani fought in school, listened to rap music that "glorified violence," and carried a knife in his knapsack. In fact, the circumstances of his own life, took him precariously close to being just another one of those nameless and unremarkable young Black men inevitably fed into the machine. For Jivani-born to a Black Kenyan father and raised mostly by his white Canadian mother in the suburbs of Brampton and Mississauga-these boys are not only trapped by the same system he managed to overcome, but failed by counterproductive cultures within their communities. In his book published in April, Why Young Men: Rage, Race and the Crisis of Identity, Canadian author and lawyer Jamil Jivani scrutinizes the socially destructive effects of trauma inflicted on young and marginalized men of colour.
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Often times, falling into one of these traps is a guarantee for young Black men that we will be ensnared by the others, and those who do survive these trials often learn lessons about our masculinity that are less about "living" than they are about finding the narrowly prescribed path to mere survival. And most of all: do not fall in with the wrong crowd.Īs we grow from youth into early manhood, it is impossible to avoid seeing other Black males culled by the system that our parents used their words and instruments to protect us from: Failing, suspended, and expelled by schools, snatched from their families by Children's Aid, consumed by substance addiction, or dragged into the maw of the carceral system.
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Address your elders as "sir," and "ma'am." Study your schoolbooks. We feel this way because our parents begin driving the message into our heads at an early age-and when their words fail to suffice, it is too often driven into our backsides with their belts and sandals, instead. Where we fromįor many young Black men in North America, the world can feel like it's been purpose-built for our destruction.
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But through the crucible of his own experiences-from mental-health troubles and a crisis of sexual identity, to a frayed relationship with his father and becoming a father himself- Andray Domise works to understand how Black masculinity is really made. Youth Illustration by Chiedza Pasipanodya The making of a Black man The world has long told Black boys what they’re allowed to be.