Imagine Woodstock for black males.
Imagine close to a 500,000 white “feminists” and black “womanists” in a huge group-hug consciousness-raising.
Then imagine what it would be like if all those women were black men.
Or imagine the Washington Mall full of the mostly white men who fill stadiums at Bill McCartney’s Promise Keepers rallies or beat drums in the woods at Robert Bly’s “Iron John” meetings. Then imagine those men as black men.
If you can imagine that, then you can begin to imagine what it was like to wander through the officially estimated crowd of 400,000 (Although, it looked to me like many more.) black men who gathered on the Mall in front of the Capitol on Monday.
It felt therapeutic. Black men need therapy, too. A lot of us can use a little group-hug, feel-good session once in a while. Since black men, particularly young black males, are the most feared and loathed creatures on urban streets today, we need self-esteem more than most.
Words can hardly convey what it felt like for me and other participants to be able to walk around among hundreds of thousands of black men without nervously avoiding eye contact the way black men do with each other on city streets.
Quite the opposite, black men who never before had met suddenly found themselves slapping “high fives” or embracing like old fraternity brothers.
Even if you believe the official low-ball crowd estimate of 400,000, just imagine 400,000 men, assisted by hundreds of the women who love them, brought together for a whole day without any beer, wine, fighting or injuries.
Imagine, instead, a lot of prayer. Imagine a lot of pride. Imagine a shared sense of purpose you could almost cut with a knife.
Is it possible to support the march without supporting the incendiary star of the show, Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan?
Yes, it is. I denounce Farrakhan’s incendiary remarks about Jews, Christians, homosexuals and others. Yet, once he announced it, I saw this march take on a life of its own, so great is the yearning among responsible black males to do something about the desperate situations suffered by their brethren who have been left behind by the civil rights reforms of the ’50s and ’60s.
A scientific Washington Post poll of 1,047 participants at the site found only 5 percent of them named “Louis Farrakhan” as their main reason for attending.
More than three-fourths named “support for the black family,” “to demonstrate black unity” or “support for black men taking more responsibility for their families and communities.”
Participants with whom I talked offered an additional reason for coming: They were sick and tired of seeing black men stereotyped in the media as criminals, “gangsta rappers,” drug users and welfare parasites.
For them, the Million Man March and its high visibility offered each of them an opportunity to present a “more positive” image of black men to America’s television audience, all for the price of a bus ticket to Washington.
They were a cross-section of black male America–factory workers, government workers, ex-convicts, fraternity brothers, college alumni and church-going deacons and devoted fathers.
Thirty-three percent earned between $30,000 and $50,000 a year, according to the Post survey. Another 28 percent earned between $50,000 and $100,000 a year.
Those who refuse to acknowledge the ability of blacks to support the march without supporting Farrakhan refuse to allow blacks the right to be diverse or the ability to be complicated.
They also refuse to acknowledge the depths of abandonment black Americans feel in the age of “angry white male” politics in which the people in power have defined the races as competing, not cooperating interest groups.
One “brother” at the march asked me what I thought the repercussions from conservative whites would be.
“What can they do to us that they aren’t doing already?” I responded.
Or, I might have added, that we aren’t doing to ourselves?
The big question remaining is, What happens now? It was dismaying that, unlike Dr. King’s 1963 march, this one carried with it no agenda for change. Its goals–atonement and reconciliation–sounded less like an agenda than a cover for a massive promotion and legitimization of Louis Farrakhan among wary, middle-class blacks.
I wish a black leader who was less incendiary than Louis Farrakhan had issued the call for black men to come out to the Million Man March. But they didn’t and he did. He stuck his neck out and it paid off. It was his day. Give it to him. Tomorrow, as Scarlett O’Hara said, is another day.
