I can’t find a good Black man if you threw one directly in my path. Only seven percent of Black women marry outside their race. This is our pool, and nowhere else. So do the subtraction with me. Start with a hundred Black men in your age range. Take out the roughly 2.5% who are incarcerated right now, today, not over a lifetime. Take out another 5% who are gay, using the same national average that applies to every other group. What is left is still standing, still straight, still walking around free. And a real share of what is left is carrying something you cannot see on a profile picture. Eh. Slim pickins…
What kind of man are we left with? Mr. Angry At All White People, who treats everyone like crap because he’s carrying a grudge that never got resolved. Mr. Hotep, who’s got a Queen this and a Queen that, but some real interesting ideologies on women’s rights, sex, and a pitiful execution of his own moral stance. Maybe he’s Mr. Women Ain’t Shit, who really hates women and wants you to prove him right, so he pushes your buttons as a general practice and turns you into Ms. Try, Try Again. Or Mr. Loverboy- never met a coochie he didn’t want to have, and actively sought out the ones he shouldn’t. Sometimes you meet Mr. Narcissist- my personal favorite- so messed up in the head he could have a PhD in manipulation, gaslighting, and stealing your money. Then there’s Mr. Druggie (or druggie adjacent), who always smells like weed and never smells like he has a job.
There are other versions of Black men who have earned a negative reputation, but just meeting these few, you start to understand why I can’t find a good Black man.
Black men have been done wrong, government removal from the home, whether prison or the system, and left to carry mental illness nobody ever helped them treat. The elusive good Black man is proving impossible to find, and it did not happen by accident.
Start with the 1980s. A drug ring with direct ties to the CIA-backed Contras in Nicaragua sold tons of cocaine into South Central LA to fund a war overseas, and crack tore through Black neighborhoods at home on schedule. The CIA’s own internal watchdog later admitted the agency had relationships with those traffickers and never told Congress the truth about it. Call it intentional, because it lines up too well with what Nixon’s people already told us they wanted, criminalize Black people, associate them with drugs, use that to raid their homes and break up their communities. That was the plan on paper in 1971. Not speculation. Documented, in writing, by the people who ran it. A decade later, the drug epidemic in the Black community showed up right on cue. In 1982, Nancy Reagan stood in front of a camera and turned a public health crisis her own husband’s government helped create into a criminal one, and called it “Just Say No” like the crisis started with the users instead of the U.S. supply chain of drugs.
Prison was only one leak. Black men went to prison for marijuana, the same plant white millennials are now growing and selling legally, making billions. Same crime. Until even today, Black men stay in prison for it and white boys get a new mansion. Before that plant even got legal for somebody else, welfare caseworkers were already raiding Black women’s homes at midnight, checking closets for a second toothbrush, any sign a man lived there. Found one, the check stopped. Didn’t matter if he worked. His presence made the family undeserving. That is not laziness. That is the machinery that built today’s wealth gap, the one that has us working two jobs and still needing government assistance to close the gap it created. The Black family, purposefully dismantled.
More than sixty percent of Black Americans report experiences of racial discrimination. There is a clinical term for what that does to a person now, race based traumatic stress, and it mirrors PTSD almost symptom for symptom. Hypervigilance. Avoidance. Emotional numbing. Trouble trusting. A nervous system that never fully stands down because it learned early that it could not afford to. A Black man who grew up watching his uncles get pulled over, or who has been pistol whipped, seen someone get killed, been incarcerated on a false charge, gets nothing. He gets told to “man up,” and he mostly does, right up until he is standing in your kitchen and cannot explain why he shut down over something small.
He is not going to a therapist about it either, not unless a judge orders him to or he has a full mental break, requiring a mandatory psych hold. That is not weakness. That is what happens when an entire community learns that asking for help from the same institutions that built the trap rarely goes well for you.
So, no. It is not that good Black men do not exist. That’s not the premise of my post. It is that the ones who made it through intact, present, un-incarcerated, unashamed of who they love, and unbroken by everything this country asked them to carry alone, are fewer than they should be. I did not do that math for fun. I did it because I got tired of hearing that the problem is us. Black women aren’t the cause of the problem. Let’s put the blame where it belongs.
I do not have a clean way to end this one, or give you a clean solution. I wish I did.
What are you struggling with in your relationship journey? Tell me about it in the comments.
