Race is difficult to talk about. And that’s exactly why we keep talking about it. Here are some of our best posts on the subject.
—
RSVP for #StopRacism Weekly Calls
We’ve heard it said: “You can’t even have a conversation about race in this country without being called racist.”
Damned if that will stop us from trying.
We’re obviously not afraid to tackle the tough subjects of issues relevant to men. We had an in-depth, sometimes ‘vehement’ discussion of pornography going on for weeks. We like to come at topics of importance from multiple angles—not to moralize, not to tell you what’s good – but to help figure it out together, as our community shares insights through comments, reactions posts, across social media and throughout the web universe.
So we’ve asked several people to give us their views on men and race. We don’t think you’ll find them racist. We think you’ll find them fascinating.
♦◊♦
We would like nothing better than to have all of you join in the conversation and give this topic the importance it deserves.
♦◊♦
Black Boy in a White Land
‘Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race’
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism
Black Boy. White Girl. Talk Race.
Land of the Fear, Home of the Afraid
Race Ya
Eating While Black
Facing Mecca
I Fit the Description
The Most Racist Thing That Ever Happened
Race is Always a Parenting Issue
Poetry In Motion: A Story of Hardship and Hope in Crow Country, Montana
Stereotypes And Hate Speak Are Killing People
How Travel Made Me Confront White Privilege
I Prefer My Racism Straight Up, Thank You.
I Ain’t No Whiteboy: A Reflection on Hip-Hop, Misogyny, and Racial Identity
Why We Need to Talk About Race
Why Are Some (Perhaps Too Many) Men Unwilling To Cross The Racial Divide? Is it Fear, Suspicion, Racism?
How Basketball Helped Me Realize I’m Not White
I Talk About Race Because I Don’t Know How Not To
Internalized Racism
How The Rules of Racism Are Different for Asian Americans
Black Women, White Men, Black Men – The Politics of Sex, Race, and Humanity
The Proper Way to Be Black
I Will Not Raise A Child Blind to Race
Why Does Tonto Have That Bird on His Head? Racism in the New ‘Lone Ranger’
The Luxury of Invisible Privilege
No, We Are Not “Making It About Race”: An Interview With Samuel James
♦◊♦
RSVP for #StopRacism Weekly Calls
What Next? Talk with others. Take action.
We are proud of our SOCIAL INTEREST GROUPS—WEEKLY PHONE CALLS to discuss and help solve some of the most difficult challenges the world has today. Calls are for Members Only (although you can join the first call for free). Not yet a member of The Good Men Project? Join now!
Join The Good Men Project Community
The $50 Platinum Level is an ALL-ACCESS PASS—join as many groups and classes as you want for the entire year. The $25 Gold Level gives you access to any ONE Social Interest Group and ONE Class–and other benefits listed below the form. Or…for $12, join as a Bronze Member and support our mission.
Register New Account
Please note: If you are already a writer/contributor at The Good Men Project, log in here before registering. (Request new password if needed).
◊♦◊
ANNUAL PLATINUM membership ($50 per year) includes:
1. AN ALL ACCESS PASS — Join ANY and ALL of our weekly calls, Social Interest Groups, classes, workshops and private Facebook groups. We have at least one group phone call or online class every day of the week.
2. See the website with no ads when logged in!
3. PLATINUM MEMBER commenting badge and listing on our “Friends of The Good Men Project” page.
***
ANNUAL GOLD membership ($25 per year) includes all the benefits above — but only ONE Weekly Social Interest Group and ONE class.
***
ANNUAL BRONZE membership ($12 per year) is great if you are not ready to join the full conversation but want to support our mission anyway. You’ll still get a BRONZE commenting badge, a listing on our Friends page, and you can pop into any of our weekly Friday Calls with the Publisher when you have time. This is for people who believe—like we do—that this conversation about men and changing roles and goodness in the 21st century is one of the most important conversations you can have today.
We have pioneered the largest worldwide conversation about what it means to be a good man in the 21st century. Your support of our work is inspiring and invaluable.
***
“Here’s the thing about The Good Men Project. We are trying to create big, sweeping, societal changes—–overturn stereotypes, eliminate racism, sexism, homophobia, be a positive force for good for things like education reform and the environment. And we’re also giving individuals the tools they need to make individual change—-with their own relationships, with the way they parent, with their ability to be more conscious, more mindful, and more insightful. For some people, that could get overwhelming. But for those of us here at The Good Men Project, it is not overwhelming. It is simply something we do—–every day. We do it with teamwork, with compassion, with an understanding of systems and how they work, and with shared insights from a diversity of viewpoints.” —– Lisa Hickey, Publisher of The Good Men Project and CEO of Good Men Media Inc.
Excellent list of articles! GMP has published some very provocative articles on race.
One reason it’s so difficult to talk about race is that we’re supposed to be a race-blind society, but in many ways we fail. In other ways, we don’t even try, or acknowledge it. Another reason is that race – meaning nonwhiteness – is a stand-in for so much else. Especially, it’s meant to stand in for class, an even greater taboo in many ways. Still another is that nonwhiteness affects our perceptions of gender and what it is to be a man vs. a woman. The roles society dictates are different for each man/woman of each racial group. It’s… Read more »
What’s difficult for me when talking about race and racism is that I don’t pay much respect to the categories in which people have become so deeply invested. Racial or ethnic pride is based on these fluid, arbitrary, unstable categories that are always much newer than people imagine and which are going to mean something totally different in a generation or two. I also can’t bring myself to ignore sloppy, lazy, illogical thinking. That’s one of the major reasons I despise racism in the first place. Racism takes a bad theory, mixes it with self-serving stereotypes, mythology, and feel-good stories,… Read more »
A similar sort of discussion could be had about all types of social identities, and the ways in which discrimination happens based on these identities, and then the attempts to ‘fix’ that discrimination. For example, homosexuality is a social identity. Some people are born sexually and romantically attracted to people of the same biological sex…but the identity itself is socially constructed. Similarly, ‘African-American’ or ‘Latino’ or ‘white’ are socially constructed. Some people are born with darker (or lighter) skin…or have recent ancestors from one part of the world or another…but the identity itself is socially constructed. So in that sense,… Read more »
Ah also, with regards to the whole having pride thing…it’s also about rejecting the notion that you should be ashamed of belonging to a certain social identity. And what’s the opposite of shame? Pride. 🙂
The Trials and Triumphs of a Joyful Black Man in America “As a man amongst men, I create a world of Love and understanding by loving myself and understanding others. Michael “Powerful Tiger” Taylor Land of My Grandfathers July 2002 Growing up as a young black male in the inner-city projects of Corpus Christi Texas I was acutely aware that being “black” somehow made me different. As I watched television and looked through magazines and books I realized that the people I perceived to have all of the wealth were white people. When I asked my mom the reason for… Read more »
I think this is an important discussion – that is doomed to failure. When we talk about race, we talk from a particular perspective that seems to automatically disquailify our thoughts in someone’s mind. I served for several years on a Human Relations Commission in my city, and we tried to initiate a dialogue between different racial segments of the population. We formed small groups around the city (a city of 1 million +/- people). What happened, in most groups, was that races were talking “at” each other rather than “with” each other, and no one really heard a different… Read more »
I disagree; keep trying until you succeed. I have had many successful discussions about race. I’ve learned a lot about active listening over the years; it’s an important skill for any conversation.
One more comment – though I’m excited to keep reading more articles in the “on race” series, I do hope to read one about racial pride in being White, because that is not and should not inherently be a bad thing. Just like not every Black person is an “African-American” (there are Hatian-Americans, Brazilian-Americans, Jamaican-Americans, and then, you know, those people who are Black who aren’t hyphen-American anything), there are all types of Whites who have complex, important, and even radical racial identities of our own.
I think that there is some confusion about ethnicity, which is related to culture and history and family, and race, which is about social position. I am all for ethnicity and culture. I have to say though, that asking the “other” to tell you about their ethnic life is really problematic. There’s a great essay by James Baldwin that explains that “nobody was white before they came to America.” It was in ESSENCE magazine back in 1984. A link http://www.cwsworkshop.org/pdfs/CARC/Family_Herstories/2_On_Being_White.PDF.
No one was called white in Europe because everyone there is white and people are differentiated on ethnicity (German, English, French, etc.) but in America they are white because they have merged into a single ethnicity.
I think we’re already there. Pride in whiteness is a default. It’s so celebrated that we all think it’s normal. It’s so pervasive that it’s considered standard. Most of the “white” people I know speak pridefully of their family name history, and can tell you most of their ancestor’s origins. They speak dreamily of one day visiting Europe to see where their family originated, or smugly announce that have already been there.
Most Americans assume on meeting me that I’m white, but I’m mixed. I make it a point to take pride in each of my ancestral lines.
Sorry, but pride in whiteness is not near anything like a default. If it were, you could have “white pride” rallies without anyone blinking an eye. American whites going to Europe to “discover their roots” are a small minority, more often the case it’s blacks who would take that trip to Africa in a heartbeat given the chance. What’s more unquestioned in America today is the belief that blacks should have pride when in fact their conduct does not merit their laughably high self-esteem.
If we’re going to judge who is allowed to have racial pride based on the conduct of members of their race, white people probably come dead last in the line for a pride parade. Which I think is kind of the point.
Geneticist Spencer Wells talks about how his Genographic Project will use shared DNA to figure out how we are — in all our diversity — truly connected. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8866568816093486330#docid=-6255223346369443745 Understanding Race: Are We So Different? A new look at RACE through three lenses: History, Human Variation and Lived Experience http://www.understandingrace.org/home.html “Journey of Man” http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8866568816093486330# The Incredible Human Journey : Out Of Africa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQJ54qnBVNg Dr. Joel Freeman: African American History https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mc0hv3MSKqs&feature=related Michael Moore – The Making Of America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGa13QH6rQY “Race/Racism: The Power of an Illusion” (The lies people believed/believe) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8150655206168545333# “Race And Intelligence” (Intelligence comes from how/where you were raised, NOT from… Read more »
Had this same thought (as Matthew & Jason) – Black, White, yes, but also Asian, Hispanic/Latina/o, and those people so close to my own heart, Indians… Who here can write about them? I would love to read that. Thank you!
Cosign on what Matthew said–thanks for starting this conversation, but a conversation about race in American has to go beyond the black/white paradigm. (And to echo what Jackie noted in his accounting of black contributors on the site, how many regular contributors beyond Matthew are Asian American?)
These are good pieces, but it’s disappointing that race seems represented here as only black and white.
Couldn’t agree more. Let’s open this discussion and really start some conversation. We need to figure out there’s ONE race–human–BEFORE THE DAMN ALIENS ARRIVE.
JFB
I think that is not true. Several of the books I mentioned deal with issues of other ethnic groups, Takaki especially deals with immigrants from Asia and the southern Americas. Also, Ignatiev deals specifically with the Irish, who BECAME white over time. And Churchill and Vander Wall talk extensively about the Native American experience.
This is brilliant. Discussions about race – that involved why one wasn’t normal or unhappy or was unhappy – were part of the reason why I came back to Africa. Not that one can fully escape it here either.
Well done, to the author.