Black community, and Black men among themselves, can create “by the sense of belonging provided by other Black men and the activities, institutions, traditions, and practices of the brotherhood of Black men that typify the uniqueness of being an African American man” (Franklin, 2014, p. 16). According to Franklin (2004), the keys to surviving invisibility and nurturing a sense of personal power are (1) recognition—the power of feeling you are being acknowledged by others; (2) satisfaction—the satisfaction of feeling rewarded for what you do; (3) legitimacy—the feeling that you belong; (4) validation—the power of feeling that others share your views and values; (5) respect—the power of feeling that you are being treated as a person of value and worth; (6) dignity—the power of feeling that you are a person of value and worth, and; (7) identify—the power of feeling comfortable with the way you are and with who you are. Franklin and Boyd-Franklin (2000) explain that Black males engage in microaggression repair and achieve visibility through many different methods. To heal from the multigenerational impacts of anti-Black racism, Leary (2005) suggests that Black people know themselves and/or restore their historical memory, identifying and building on their strengths. Daniel (2000) argues that it is erroneous to refer to the distress suffered by people of African descent using the term “post-traumatic” because racism has proven to be ongoing, not a specific, time-limited event. The following are several important factors that may be used to address the challenges of racism and White supremacy and to enhance the well-being of men and boys of African descent.
Knowing and Defining Self
During slavery, Black people who escaped were considered to have engaged in a theft of self because their escape represented loss of power and privilege, a financial loss, and a loss of knowledge and skill ←45 | 46→to their captors (Landers, 1990). This reveals that Black self-determination was and is fundamentally tied to a loss of power and privilege to those who benefit from their subordination. Moreover, one of the first aspects of Black self-determination is self-definition, which is an act of opposition. When African people were enslaved, many of the actions of their enslavers were guided by the effort to dislocate African people’s sense of self by separating them from their ethnic groups, their families, and their cultures and traditions. Knowledge of self may help diminish the ability of White supremacy to reward Black men for undermining collective Black well-being. The first step in challenging racial oppression is self-definition based on one’s own social-cultural perspective (White & Cones, 1999). This is a necessary step for a Black man to achieve his potential (White & Cones, 1999). Akbar (1991) explains Malcolm X’s emphasis on the importance of self-definition:
He was vehemently determined to define himself. He said (in words), “It is better to be called ‘X’ than to be named Williams or Smith or any other name they gave you on the plantation. It’s better to be an unknown quantity than to be walking around with your slavemaster’s name. Eventually, you’ll discover and take on some name that came from your own land, but in the meantime just be ‘X’. The idea is absolutely critical for you to define yourself.” Not only that, but he went on to redefine everything about himself. What should be eaten, when it should be eaten, how it should be eaten. He was the first one to teach us that the Black man was the original man. Everybody is talking about this subject now, but he was the only one who made it popular. The middle-class scholars looked at him in disbelief. They didn’t even believe what their own White historians had told them in passing. They didn’t believe that they were the original people of the earth. It was that message that became critical in changing the self-definition of the people who studied with him. He was defiant in defining himself. If you are going to be a man, you’ve got to be willing to take your own name, your own place, your own definition of reality and accept nobody else’s unless it is compatible and synchronized with your own. (p. 70)
For Black men, gaining knowledge of self is not just to boost morale, but to prepare them for the quest for empowerment and collective self-determination.
Racial Identity Development
Positive racial-gender identity is an important protecting factor that Black men must possess to lead them to stronger self-acceptance and to neutralize the effects of anti-Black male racism (Franklin, 2004). One African proverb found in different languages across the African continent is I am because we are, and because we are, therefore I am. This proverb is an excellent point of departure for discussing the importance of Black racial identity and consciousness. Black ethnic/racial identity is the sense of attachment, knowledge, and connectedness to one’s ethnic/racial group. The combination of circumstances that shape Black males’ self and their identity challenges are unique compared to African American females, or any other ethnic group (Belgrave & Brevard, 2015). Many scholars assert that Black men experience a greater share of negative myths, images, and stereotypes compared to any other subpopulation in America (Johnson & Cuyjet, 2009; White & Cones, 1999). These images include uncivilized creatures, brutes, buffoons—unintelligent and unemotional. These images, of course, are based on Eurocentric understandings of what Black males are and should be (Johnson & Cuyjet, 2009). In fact, society’s expectations of what behaviors, personalities, and ways of life Black men should possess are largely based on a body of Eurocentric ideas (Johnson & Cuyjet, 2009). True to a history of racism, many Whites and other non-Blacks continue to impose their performance expectations on Blacks (Young, 2007). Therefore, Black males must reconcile with the extent that they hold any negative self-images and then remove those false understandings.
How does the development of racial identity work for Black males? The Nigresence Model is a framework characterized by movement through a series of stages in which a person develops a psychological alignment with Black racial/ethnic consciousness (White & Cones, 1999). Nigrescence is a resocialization process of discovery and transformation through which a non-aligned person develops a ←46 | 47→new ethnic consciousness. The stages consist of pre-encounter, encounter, immersion-emersion, internalization, internalization-commitment. Black men at the pre-encounter state are likely to have little awareness of what it means to be a Black man in America. A person at this stage could be of any class and any profession, who believes that he or she is judged solely based on his or her intelligence and work ethic. According to White and Cones (1999), “Malcolm X’s pre-encounter view of the world, for example, was formed by the assassination of his father in Lansing, Michigan by local Whites, by the breakup of his family after his mother was committed to a mental hospital, and by the racist advice from a White teacher that Black boys should not aspire to become lawyers” (p. 122).
The encounter stage consists of the experience of an event or series of events that call(s) into question a person’s pre-encounter beliefs. For example, a person may deal with instances of racism at work, school, or in public. Sometimes high-profile national events can impact racial consciousness, such as the assassination of Martin Luther King, the Black Power movement, the Million Man March, high-profile police killings of Black people, or Black resistance movements. These events spark a great deal of emotion (and sometimes anger) that prompt Black men to reject their pre-encounter beliefs and recognize the importance of struggling on behalf of Black people. Malcolm X’s arrest was his encounter experience, causing him to examine the roles of racism, power, and economics and how they shaped the lives of Black people. “He was convinced that he received a longer sentence than usual because two members of his burglary gang were White females” (White & Cones, 1999, p. 123).
In the immersion stage, the transition of consciousness takes place. At this stage, a person moves away from their pre-encounter beliefs and embraces new ones that haven’t been fully formed. They may join groups about Black people’s advancement, embrace Black-oriented reading preferences, African American and African styles of clothing and adornment, and attend Black cultural, social, and political events (White & Cones, 1999). A person may attempt to cast off pre-encounter beliefs by adopting a thought process of “everything Black is good and everything White is bad.”
As a person enters the emersion stage, they begin to become less intense, and more calm and reflective. White and Cones (1999) explain that when Malcolm X entered the emersion stage “he examined seriously the Black Nationalist philosophy to which
