One of the cyber communities published an interview with a mother of a biracial child and I felt obliged to add my opinion to the discourse subsequent to that interview. The interview was interesting in that the participants expressed their dismay at the negative attitude society has. They both agreed that the child would face a hostile world but they did not get to the causative reason for that burden. In this brief treatise, initially meant as a private correspondence with the mother, I attempted to identify the cause of this phenomenon.


The interview in which you discussed the issue of a parent raising a child for whom the other parent hails from a different ethnic group was interesting in not only what was directly alluded to but from what both the interviewer and interviewee --- if that is the correct term --- avoided; the malignant nature of black men as portrayed by the media and perceived by the general population at large.

For starters, the majority of the public displays of black men involve images of the worst that the black community has to offer. The mainstream media are quick to show jail photos of a disheveled young black man wearing drooping pants, walking with a strutting gaiety while foolishly grinning and exposing a golden tooth or two, the very allegory of a care-free and non-contrite lout that is quite abhorrent. This is the typical and lasting image most people have of young black men. The main stream media are guilty not only for showing such images of black hoodlums but for not showing images of the well-groomed, church-going, God-loving, productive and erudite black men who constitute an inordinate number of the population viz-a-viz the hoodlum population.

Even the media that you would be inclined to believe to be more sympathetic towards the decent black majority lend impetus to that very damaging stereotype. I am talking about programmes seen on black media or television programs targeted towards blacks. The recently sold BET is one good example. Almost all the time is devoted to music videos in which the lyrics are littered with incredible profanity. What is even more astounding is the tolerance of epithets that are generally very denigrating such as niggers, whores, people who commit incest with their mothers. To top it of, there are scantly dressed women dancing suggestively while sandwiched by two or more ruggamuffins groping their groins, as if they have anything worth groping anyway. Programs like these feed raw sewage to the young black men while striking horror into the hearts of the mainstream.

We have to understand the genesis of the drooping pants and how it correlates to the images of fearsome thugs conjured in the minds of people such as your father. Drooping pants and unlaced shoes originated in prisons and I will briefly enumerate the variegated reasons for the prison dress code. Firstly, criminals were given loosely fitting cloths because fashion aesthetics and convicts do not go along at all: Why give good cloths to people who would be breaking rocks in quarries in chain gangs? Secondly, no one had the time nor was there any need to spend time and money making prison cloths that would fit each prisoner. The third and quite significant reason for the loose clothes was that they acted as a deterrent in case prisoners wanted to flee. Fleeing prisoners would have to hold onto their pants while they ran. To run effectively, leg motion has to be co-ordinated with a concomitant hand motion and, with unlaced shoes, fleeing was almost impossible. Finally, providing laces and belts was against the grain because these could be used to commit suicide or jail-house murder by strangulation.

Now, there came that inauspicious time when the fashion industry realized they could introduce the prison fashion culture as acceptable. In came rap singers, some of whom had a history of being jailbirds, bleating profanity and strutting all over the place while praising absentee fatherhood. Properly marketed as it was, that image caught fire in the hearts of the young and impressionable who had very little understanding of the origins of that demeaning and abhorrent fashion code. As is the norm with the common spirits, everyone, even the innocent, latched onto this.

To people such as your father, when they see these rappers or the sorry copycats in your neighbourhood, they are reminded of the chain gangs. No parent wants his or her child searing kids with a hoodlum. Unfortunately, there are hoodlums out there and most caring parents would rather err on the side of caution. These few rotten apples spoil the rest, metaphorically speaking.

The saddest part of all this pertains to the plight of the silent majority, the good black men. Like I alluded to earlier in this treatise, there are a lot of very good young black men there who nobody wants to talk about. These are the real victims of both the black hoodlums and grossly misinformed people such as your father. I find absolutely no reason why your child cannot grow up to be one of these good black men provided you instill good values in him. As long as you make him understand that a decent education is pivotal to success even if he is gifted in other aspects of life, he will always excel. Teach your child good values and the last thing he will ever do is break your heart by abrogating your motherly admonitions.

It would have been more enlightening if you had dwelt on such things during the interview. I would have commented on why some black women have a visceral hatred towards white women dating or marrying black men but this is an issue I would rather delve into on another day and in another column.





Click here to see some of the responses to this essay.

This article may not be used or redistributed without the written approval of the author.