Mentoring Black Men: It's More Complicated Than I Thought

I spent my late 20s and early 30s wishing I had a mentor. In one sense my father's death when I was 29 sent my personal life into a tailspin. He'd been my dominant male archetype--the person who, by virtue of his mere existence, kept me in line. He was your typical southern gentlemen. Quiet and reserved. Went about the business of providing for his family like a tactician. His departure left me hungry for an older and wiser black man to take an interest in me as a younger black man. In another sense, I needed serious career direction. I wanted to make my career as an author but I didn't know any black men who'd ever done that. What I had was this fantasy that once I published my first book a more experienced black male author would seek me out and put me under his wing. In my mind it made sense. If anybody knew how hard it was for me to a) get published and b) keep publishing then it was a black man. When that first book was published I waited eagerly, and naively, for an email. When it didn't come, I took it upon myself to write a handful of  black male authors asking for a cup of coffee or a little advice. When that didn't work I sent copies of my book with notes expressing my appreciation for their work. I never heard back from any of them. Not one.

At first I took the silence personally. I'd been raised to believe we were supposed to look out for each other, especially in fields where we were a scarce commodity. There weren't many young black writers getting published by major houses so, in my mind, I figured more seasoned black writers would take notice and make themselves available. I thought that was how it worked--each one teach one. It wasn't like I was looking for a hand out and clearly I'd demonstrated enough talent, skill and fortitude to get published in the first place. What I was looking for was a community, a tribe. I'd spent my 20s feeling like an outsider among my childhood and college friends. They'd spent the decade moving into and ahead in their careers; I'd spent mine reading books and teaching myself how to be a writer from scratch. For a while my closest relationships were with authors I'd never met but felt close to because I spent hours with their words. That was the price of the ticket, though. Growing and get better in any craft requires sacrifice. Mine was the years and years of bad writing, literally reams of terrible stories, and stacks upon stacks of books. I figured that other black writers would understand that struggle and embrace me one of the their own.

I remember on one occasion seeing one of my inspirations at a hip-hop show at SOBs. This was a guy whose books and articles I'd devoured in college. He'd wrote for all of the big mainstream magazines and newspapers. He was one of the reasons I'd allowed myself to believe that I could come to New York and be a writer one day. His writing had shown me that I could talk about the black experience as more than the struggle or the struggle to get out of the struggle. I couldn't wait to tell him how much his work meant to me. But even before I could fix my face to say hello he sized me up as a silly fan boy and walked away. I never looked at his work the same way again after that encounter. Eventually I threw out most of his books.

Once it became clear that my first book was going to be a commercial failure and that my publisher had no interest in exercising the option for my second book, I began questioning every choice that I'd made over the previous six years.  I'd spent three years writing that book. Before that I'd spent three years writing another book that had yet to see the light of day. I'd imagined book number one as a beginning to my career not the end. Yet there I was, 31, and without a future that I could see. I became depressed, angry and resentful. There I was out there on my own trying desperately to navigate a white publishing world that had already determined that I was no good. All I wanted was for someone who'd been where I was to reach out a hand. Just let me know I wasn't alone. It never happened.

Once I got past the anger, I started to gain some perspective on the matter. I'd been so focused on what these other authors had accomplished that I just assumed they felt as though they'd made it. It never occurred to me that maybe they didn't agree. After all, if the standard for making it was walking into Barnes and Noble in Union Square and seeing a book you wrote for sale, then I'd made it. Yet, I felt like an abject disgrace because the market had said so. I was so embarrassed and ashamed. I went into virtual hiding (AKA moved to Jersey City) for a couple of years. What good could I do anyone else? How could I guide someone else through a process that I'd clearly failed to master myself? What little energy I still had went into writing my next book. I was determined to prove my doubters wrong and the last thing I had time for was some upstart. That's when something else clicked. We, meaning the handful of black male writers on the market, were rivals.

Without waving too broad a brush across the situation, black male writers are reflexively placed into a brutal competition with one another for a sliver of authorial space that has been assigned to the black intellectual voice by a predominately white owned and operated intellectual marketplace. If we're honest with ourselves, we know that race is the only subject that black writers have been able to carve out a space for themselves in which to speak with any kind of authority. This space includes subcategories such as sports, the justice system, hip hop, education and social inequality. This shouldn't sound controversial since it's fairly obvious to anyone who takes a cursory look at the contemporary landscape of intellectual production by black journalists and authors. The market cares about consumers not citizens and unless something appeals to the broadest consumer base--white America--its value is limited. In the case of black intellectuals, our value on the market is wed to race. Historically, this has translated to a black saturation cap, which, aside from being a term I just made up, is a fairly accurate descriptor of a phenomenon that cuts across industries in so far as it ensures the proper containment of black creative and intellectual production.

When it comes to literature, back when there were still book stores, black writers had a section. And in that section we had a narrow range of stories we could tell. This wasn't segregation, we were were told. This was smart business strategy. The publishing industry has historically limited print runs, publicity budgets and advances for black authors because white consumers make up the majority of the market and they don't buy black books. Under this logic, segregated marketing and sales strategies for black writers didn't just make sense--it was a blessing. Bunching the black authors together on a few shelves of the store allowed the few of us who were interested to easily find what we were looking for and perhaps stumble onto something new!  It was the industry's version of trickle down economics. A rising tide lifts all boats.

Yet those conditions bred and still breed a sense of competition among the few who "make it". If there is only room on the shelf and the talk show circuit for one black voice to offer THE BLACK PERSPECTIVE in any given industry-- ergo, the Head Negro In Charge-- then those of us who feel like we have something to say have to compete for air time. One only needs to look at the history of intellectual conflict within the race to see my point. The history of black men in America is the history of conflict.  We--meaning our views--are always framed in relation to one another. Du Bois was situated in relation to Washington. Malcolm to Martin. Jesse to Farrakhan. The list goes on and on. Most recently Michael Eric Dyson has gone after Cornel West and West has gone after Tai-Nehisi Coates. The takedown pattern is well-known, well trodden and well-designed to contain the debate and discussion on the margins of the real discussions taking place among those who really run the country. It doesn't matter that the reasoning underpinning the saturation cap--the market can only handle a certain amount of blackness at any given time--is circular, specious, unscientific and flat out racist. We absorb the dogma that there is only enough room at the top for a couple of us. We come to believe in it, live and die by it. And the market reinforces it. In my case, it wasn't that black writers were purposefully ignoring or rejecting me. By virtue of our conditional and limited power to publish, publicize and distribute, I was a threat to their existence, and if I had any sense whatsoever I'd know that they were a threat to mine. Since race was the only subject matter we were invited to participate in the public discourse concerning, every book deal for of one of us meant one fewer on the market for the rest of us.

I didn't come to this conclusion easily. I fought it for years. I saw it as a cop out, a comforting excuse for my failures. I didn't want to become (or worse be seen as) one of "those angry black people who blame everything on race." But I'm also not a fool. I've spent a lot of time in bookstores and thinking about who gets to be identified as a public intellectual in general. I know what gets published, why and for whom. I know what we're expected to produce and what the marketplace is willing to promote and consume. I'm not particularly mad at it anymore either. These days I'm more concerned with the corrosive effect this has on the writer as he matures. What happens when you're stuffed into a box? When you're not allowed to grow outside of that box? When you find yourself spinning the same yarn again and again for years because that's what pays the bills? When you know you have more to contribute but aren't offered the space to say it? Where does all of that excess energy go? How does one reconcile being a one-trick pony when it appears others are allowed to continuously reinvent themselves?

So, what does any of this have to do with my search for a mentor?

I've learned through experience that it's really hard to invest in others when we don't feel others have invested us. I also learned that's even harder to encourage someone else to achieve when we don't feel we've been able to achieve our own dreams. I can look on my bookshelf and name a dozen black male writers in the past 20 years who've never gotten their due and probably never will, who've been ignored not only by the mainstream but black readers as well. I know firsthand what that does to a person's sense of self. Left unaddressed or unresolved, the anguish calcifies into bitterness and cynicism.

My experience has been with and between black male writers, but I'm certain the same issues show up in every other profession because the same social dynamics are at play. So many black men I've known and spoken to feel cheated or shortchanged, as though things would be a lot different if they weren't black. They'd be farther along in their careers, more successful. Some of our unfulfilled aspirations are partly of our own doing--we can be prideful and cocky, cavalier and aloof. I've been all of these things at one time or another. In my case these were my only defenses against self-loathing and despair, mechanisms I adopted and adapted to cope with feeling less than a man, to deal with my relative powerlessness in a society ruled by an elite descended from those who once owned my people. That shit is deep and it affects each of us in one way or another.

Towards the end of my 30s a couple of things became apparent to me. The first was that I actually hadn't been without mentors. They were just women--and not just black women either--not men. Supervisors. Editors. Whoever it was who took time to either encourage or correct me--it was always women. They always answered my emails and returned my calls. They checked in on me. They opened doors for me. They cared. I felt a twinge of shame once this dawned on me. All of my most honest and thoughtful bosses and editors had been women yet I'd overlooked and undervalued these contributions because they didn't look the part, because the men I was looking to for guidance were too busy chasing their own unfulfilled dreams.

The second thing I realized was that I'd hit an age where younger men were seeking guidance from me. It was a little unsettling in the beginning. All of a sudden there was this new generation who'd been raised on DMX and Kanye West that didn't see me as their peer but as something else. It took them calling me their mentor for me to understand that a shift had occurred. I was no longer the young guy. I was the guy who, in their view, was making something work for himself. I certainly didn't think of myself that way. Compared to my white counterparts, I was lagging in all of the important categories that society uses to measure our progress. But this younger generation wasn't comparing me to my white counterparts. They were comparing me to so many of the men they'd grown up around.

I made a decision to be present for them in the ways others I wished others had been for me. It felt good to do it. I read their stories and listened to their albums and went to their shows and grabbed dinner or a drink with them when I could just as well go home and get my own work done. I shared   my ups and downs while encouraging them to pursue their dreams with their eyes open. I made thoughtful choices about what I would and would not participate in with them

Mentoring black male millenials in the midst of their own personal and professional journeys has also been more complicated than I thought it would be. Although we may both be operating within a history of social and  economic violence and oppression that has and continues to shape our lives, the all-important difference is that we're in different phases of dealing with that history. Their movement is Black Lives Matter; their call to action is police violence in Ferguson and elsewhere. They are angry with America and rightfully so. But I also sense that they regard my generation (Gen Xers) as sell outs, or at least collaborators with the oppressor.

An encounter I had several months back on a college campus really brought this home for me. A college student I was mentoring at the time called me out for not being more explicit in a discussion I was leading around race and policing. He accused me of soft pedaling for the white students in the room. In his view I was betraying the black students by not validating their pain and by not challenging the white students to own their privilege.

It was a hurtful moment for me. I had watched Rodney King be beaten savagely by LAPD when I was a sophomore in high school. I was in college when Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times by NYPD. I protested against the IMF and WTO in DC back in 2000. I had a cop press his pistol to my neck when I was teenager and got thrown in jail for "resisting arrest" after being beaten with batons by a team of police in my mid 20s. I'd watched close friends go in and out of prison for twenty years. I've lived long enough to understand the opening lines of Allen Ginsberg's Howl--"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness ...."

It took everything I had to restrain myself and remain in that hard place with him. I was certain that I did not need to justify myself to him or anyone else. And, yet, I did. My history wasn't sitting in front of that student. I was. And the "I" in front of him had, in his view, achieved enough stature in the world for his elite university to pay me to be there. I had to own his critique as well as the fact that everything he was experiencing was new to him even if it was old to me. That was hard because, for me, all of that stuff is still so raw and real, still informs how I live my life to this day. It was a learning moment for me to say the least. I came to understand that part of mentoring is restraint and grace under fire. Even when I think I know better or feel the need to defend myself, I sometimes have to just be quiet and present. Who other than me could understand where that student was coming from? Who other than me could that student drop all of that weight on and have it be heard for what it is--trauma? If I could not stand there and take the heat he was giving me for ten, fifteen minutes without lashing out or defending my record of solidarity with the people then how could I expect a police officer to remain calm during a street encounter? Mentoring, in that precise moment, became more than an inspirational talk. More than a white house mandate. More than a foundation initiative. More than a way for me to give back or feel good about myself on a Saturday afternoon (which it happened to be). It became part of my own ongoing work. Work that can't be captured in a handbook or PowerPoint.

Likewise, I've finally started to find some (black male) mentors of my own. Last summer, the Executive Director of an arts nonprofit in Newark invited me to house my startup in his office space. I barely knew him at the time yet he gave me keys and some furniture, never ran my credit, didn't make me a sign a lease, didn't charge me for internet, heat, or phones. All that he asked was that I pay him a nominal rent and take care of his space. After nearly a year I told him we were moving into our own space in September. It was a bittersweet moment. There was a part of me that wanted to remain under the shelter he had provided and a part of him that wanted me to stay--he even said as much. Over the past year we'd had countless five, ten minute conversations about his work and mine. We'd bonded over the headaches that come with running a nonprofit. I'd watched him organize fundraisers and work with board members and staff. When I was going through a really tough patch last winter, he pulled me aside and gave me some advice and encouragement. Whenever donors and foundations visited him, he made sure to introduce me and slip away so that I could work my own magic. And when things started to get better for me, he was the first to offer congratulations. Not once did he ever tell me how to run my affairs or ask for credit or praise, nor did he ever haggle me when the rent was late. In the midst of our reminisce of the past year, I asked him why he had been so generous with me in the first place. Without blinking, he said that he had no choice in the matter. He felt obligated to. When we first met he knew that I had all sorts of challenges that I couldn't foresee awaiting me. He remembered starting out, how hard it was. The least he could do, he said, was help me shoulder that burden for a period. If he couldn't at least do that then what was the point?