Gripping Insights Into the World of Young Black Men

Darrell Dawsey is excited about being a young black male.

Frustrated by incomplete media reports that his generation of black men is headed for what he calls “urban pathology”--jail, drugs or violet death--he set out to gauge for himself what life is like for most of his brethren.

That desire inspired the Detroit native, now 28, to move beyond the statistics and expand an article he was writing about black male violence for the Detroit News four years ago into a look at black males across the country. His new book, “Living to Tell About It: Young Black Men in America Speak Their Piece” (Anchor), is the result of nearly a hundred interviews with men from Long Beach to Mississippi to Washington, D.C.

For more than a year, Dawsey roamed through group homes, corporate offices and Brooklyn parks, listening and capturing snapshots of black males ages 15 to 24. The result is a gripping series of vignettes about lives, though sometimes troubled and off track, that ring of a certain hopefulness about the future.

By examining their stories, Dawsey forces himself to take a closer look at his own.

Some of the characters battle abusive parents, cyclical violence and fatherhood they often are not ready for. There are also reports of young men who triumph in the face of these adversities.

According to Dawsey, the interviews are aimed at taking readers beyond newspaper headlines and into the heads of black males--straight or gay, in jail or on the street.

“I wanted to shed some light on those elements of our character that you don’t see dealt with publicly,” Dawsey said recently over coffee in Los Angeles. “We are usually demonized and vilified. But brothers have our own way of order in our life. We aren’t just out here haphazardly doing things. They may not be masters of the ship, but they ain’t always jumping overboard either. They have plans, ideas and dreams that are never dealt with in the totality of their humanism.”

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Part of what troubles Dawsey, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who’s now a staff writer at the New York Daily News, is an unwillingness on the part of image shapers to explore the reasons behind self-destructive actions or the environments that created them.

“When we talk about gang members in L.A. all they become are these one-dimensional things,” he said. “All they ever were or ever will be is a guy who wore blue or some guy who wore red. People act like they don’t have kids, go to church or come out of some spiritual institution.”

What emerges from the stories in Dawsey’s book is that even as they profess to be treated like outcasts, many of the black males still believe someday they will enjoy a slice of the American pie. One young man in Alabama acknowledges the long-running racism in his small town, yet cherishes the experience as a part of his identity.

This duality haunts even young black men who are achieving professional success. Dawsey himself left jobs in both Los Angeles and Detroit following confrontations with other employees.

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One of the most stirring moments in the book comes as Dawsey argues with his mother over the politics of Malcolm X. After seeing brash black men brutalized in the South as a child, she urges a calmer approach that sanitizes anger. She is fearful her son will jeopardize his life. But as a product of the post-civil rights era and the hard-driving rap music generation, outspoken Dawsey defends the slain leader’s stance as an act of passion.

“America, after all, has little use for ‘angry’ Black men,” writes Dawsey. “Understand, I don’t mean angry in any gangsta sense of the word, wherein outraged is defined in dead-end attacks on our own through drive-bys and drug deals. Neither do I mean angry as in frustrated accommodationism, in which our struggle becomes protest for better wages, senior partnerships or more Black cops in the ‘hood. No, I mean angry the way Malcolm was angry, the way Fred Hampton was angry, the way Mark Essex and Nat Turner and Zayd Shakur were angry. Angry enough to love, live and labor for the whole of Black people. And if need be, angry enough to die for Black people.” He encourages African Americans to strengthen institutions such as the church, the family and black-owned businesses.

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Generational gaps, most glaringly between African American fathers and sons, is tackled personally as Dawsey delves into his own struggles with a father who thought gifts or an occasional visit was enough to make up for his absence.

Popular rapper the Notorious B.I.G. (a.k.a. Chris Wallace), strikes a poignant chord about black fatherhood when he playfully suggests that his absent father pay a thousand dollars for each year that he was not around.

Most important among the nine topics that Dawsey sifts through--including work and wealth, violence, and the struggle for respect--is dealing with the sexism that consumes some of his brothers.

“As black men we are certainly oppressed,” he said. “We also need to understand that in the context of our relationship to our sisters we are also oppressors. And that’s a very difficult thing for us to deal with sometimes.”

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Using a combination of bouncy hip-hop language and straightforward prose, Dawsey avoids the typical pitfall of trying to explain these young men, preferring to let them speak for themselves. He also purposely declines summarizing or trying to find a reason for a host of problems that obviously require multipronged solutions and remedies.

“I consider this a snapshot of a generation in motion,” Dawsey said, flashing a smile. “None of these brothers are complete. Even at the top end of the age range--at 24 years old--you are not a complete man. These are young brothers moving from boyhood to manhood.”

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Dawsey concludes that young black men’s present condition in America must be blamed on a country that promotes excess, yet refuses to deal with the effects on its children.

“Our young people are just as imbued with materialism as any white woman doing her shopping on Rodeo Drive,” he said. “Despite all of her privilege and status, she is a slave to Gucci and Versace too. How can you blame young children who have been deprived of any sense of self-worth institutionally in this country [and expect them] to not be enamored of the same things and feel like that gives them some type of status?”