Kyle Phoenix Books 2018

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Showing posts with label African-American. Show all posts
Showing posts with label African-American. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Kyle Phoenix Answers: Why do Black people suffer injustice?





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Saturday, November 3, 2012

Education: Women, Limited To Motherhood By Poverty, Part 1 by Kyle Phoenix

 Awhile back, while pursuing my first degree, I moved in with a female roommate.  At first I thought she was around the same age as me as she was also a student according to the real estate agent.  Turns out she was well into her fifties, Dominican and very religious.  Like, no, no, I'll pray for you, you don't have to worry about your relationship with God, I'll handle it---yeah, she actually said that to me.  My silent staring wasn't a signal to her about what I thought of her or the comment but I kept it moving.  I really didn't think much about, or, of her, in the sense that I was so intensely focused on my academic work and internships and work that other than the envelope for bills and hearing her in her end of the apartment or a hi and bye in passing, I didn't give her much thought.

But one day, as one is want to do, during school breaks, I replayed my mental clips of her and really gave her some thought.  At first I thought we went to the same university, a conversation or two nixed that idea and I realized that when I assumed when she said she was studying religion, she meant a degree in theology.  In fact I think she sort of meant a lot of church services and some typings for whatever positional honors occur in churches.  Then she started babysitting a little girl, which I didn't really care about because by then I was back into my routine.  Other than hi and bye, she really didn't register until I started doing projects and essentially clinical work around poverty and race.  Suddenly my "academic lenses" were dropped in front of my eyes in a social situation.  This has happened to me once before in the past few years---I was with a friend visiting his family for Christmas.  And we went to The Projects.  No, the real New York Projects.  And I realized two things:

  1. All Black people, particularly me, didn't grow up the same way.  (I knew this of course but it really, really hit me how different I was as an educated man of color in a mixed race neighborhood.)
  2. There were books, articles and studies on poverty that my friend's family fit into to the point where I was sitting in a chair admiring how Ruby Payne, a noted educational expert on poverty was right about the lack of pictures on the walls and why.

This pushed me to consider that roommate and how her babysitting eventually turned into her explaining to me that she was helping out her daughter.  At first I thought the little girl was her daughter then I realized that no, it was her granddaughter.  But wait---she couldn't be that old, could she?  Then I was staring at her closer, paying attention to the hair dyes and the attempts at modern woman blouses, skirts and jackets.  I realized she either had 20 years on me or scarily, maybe she only had 10 years on me.  Then I thought about my friends' family visit, there were only women present in The Projects.   In most of his family stories, single mothers raising children, and I started thinking (and writing/teaching) about women and their relationship to education and poverty.

I then really started to think about the difference between generational and situational poverty.

Generational poverty is an unbroken cycle where the family, grandparents to parents to grandchildren, barring severe positive intervention will remain in financial, social, educational poverty---marked by Welfare, low wage jobs, never higher than a high school level degree in the family.

Situational poverty occurs when one is in school/college, or unemployed temporarily or when a child is born and then one of the parents stays home for a couple of years before returning to work.

I couldn't help but to reference the women in my family---my grandmother, Dorothy born in 1910, graduate of high school in 1928 and then a young woman on her own who moved from Providence, Rhode Island to Washington, D.C. to work for an aunt before years later making her way to New York.  My grandmother was a very patrician woman, extremely refined.  She would tell us of her father's surprise gift to her of a grand piano when she was 16; she came around the corner with her best friend Shirley Bolden and they saw a group of men raising a piano through the window into her family's brownstone third floor window.  She bathed every day and wore simple house coats over a dress and fine slips through the day and her outside finery of a fur coat and pearls to see the doctor once a month.  One had dinner on Sundays and supper the other days.  The table was always basically set with silverware, flatware and a table cloth.

She had 5 children with my grandfather, the first, Jeannette, dying of sudden crib death,  My grandmother would tell me the story of how she dreamt the night before that Jeannette would die but with her stiff iron lip, she soldiered on to bear and raise 4 more, my mother, her last surprise child, 10 years after she thought her childbearing years were done.  My grandmother was a voracious reader---about 5 to 6 books a week and after her heart surgery I would come back from movies and tell them to her, scene by scene. (We only saw two movies in a theater together, we accidentally got locked out while she was visiting and had to wait for my mother at a movie theater.)  She would share March of The Wooden Soldiers with me every Christmas and then books, hundreds of books from when she thought I was ready for my first adult book when I was 10, a thriller named Entangled, until she died when I was 15.

It wasn't until I studied education for a Masters that I thought seriously about these different kinds of women.  My grandmother was stymied by her time, when she was born, even to some degree by marrying in her early twenties before she got a chance to explore who and what her rapacious intelligence could've taken her to be.  A sharp discordant point: my grandmother wasn't Black, she looked it but was White, Narragansett Indian and only a 1/16 Black.  She was raised in an upper middle class Protestant family, her father full Narragansett and her mother   1/8 Black from her mother, whose mother was half Black.  Marrying my extremely dark skinned West Indian grandfather is what racialized her to Black in New York's Harlem.  The tangled web of ludicrous sub-divisional racial designation and miscegenation at the roots of my family tree.

Just being able to discern how she was different suddenly explained why she was different.  She didn't particularly care for soul food, spoke proper English always, had the manners of someone used to a high class level, and would make fun of the first time she heard a Black woman order pork chops in a butcher "Gimme sum of dem dere po' chops!" she would imitate.  It never occurred to me until later, that my grandmother wasn't completely racially nor socially (nor socioeconomically) Black like the women surrounding her in Harlem.  Her hair had been straight and waist length until in her fifties her eldest daughter cut it for her because it was so heavy and ungainly.  But the time had regulated her to being a mother, a housewife for forty years until she tired of my grandfather's abusive temper and threw him out, a year later he died, and the next year I was born.  She was the inverse of Nella Larsen's Passing.

I looked at my roommate, a woman, a mother, a grandmother before fifty, the same as my grandmother but not my mother, and then back into the cycle of caring for a child all day with a few hours of church at night.  I began to think about her clothing all being polyester  the effort of a woman from poverty trying on a meager budget to look as sharp as the university professionals swirling around the neighborhood.  The way she often mentioned she was going to school or class but never asked me what I was studying.  (Social Note: Educated people ask what you're studying and when  I mention I'm a teacher the next question is, what do you teach?)  She never asked what I was studying nor what I taught.  I thought it was just polite distance but in fact the thousand of books I had spilling from my bedroom into the living room, probably seemed alien.

I then started thinking about what it must be like to be a woman of a certain age in a world that had based on ethnicity, education, socioeconomic status and gender, assigned her an iron cast role: mother.  And when she had raised her daughter to adulthood she was cast back into that role.  She would continue babysitting her granddaughter even as the younger went off to school and the cycle of mother beget daughter to only a minimal level of education would continue.  I used to watch my roommate and the little girl watch TV for eight hours, stopping only for the bathroom and canned, clock work meals.  No books, no trips out, just sitting and being without advancement, looking at women on television who had made familiar negative choices on daytime talk shows or vastly amazing positive strides that are beyond recognition.  I often wonder what people who are so far away from worlds---lifetime mothers see when they see a Kathryn Bigelow get an Oscar or a PBS special on Madame Curie or Robin Roberts interview a President.

I thought about my grandmother who carved out her intellectual cavern but never rode on an airplane.  I thought about my friends' female relatives who were literally textbook examples of women in poverty. I thought about my old roommate who was literally a generational cycle of mental and social poverty because a misogynistic culture got to her in the Dominican Republic before she could stop breeding and blossom into........into.......someone's cheaply fancy clothes that weren't an effort to appear more than costumes on her.

Conversely my mother, named Patrica, by her patrician mother, Dorothy and one of my mentors Carlene Hatcher Polite, exampled to me women who perhaps didn't try to equal themselves to men but lived as freely as any.  Yes, they had children but they traveled the world; educated themselves; taught at universities and started businesses.  In Polite's case, she was the first Black woman nominated for a Pulitzer for Fiction   When I looked at these other women, even my grandmother I couldn't help but see how women, mainly women of color were limited by poverty in ways that made it generational.  I often think about the little girl,  my former roommate's grandchild who is in a repeated cycle that I expect won't end in high school graduation, as neither her mother nor grandmother graduated.  And she'll have children and find herself cast aside, perhaps caught by a church for a time until she's called back on deck to be a mother figure again.

But I wonder, as brown women stand at stoves across a planet where it is more normal for them to be in poverty than not, stirring the same meals on Wednesday as they did a year ago on a Tuesday, for a child only slightly bigger, what are they thinking?  What do they want?  Are they thinking this is good enough?  How did I get here?  How do I get out of here?

Or, if the child is male, are they thinking that they were but a conduit for one man to come into, another to come out of and then a third to be begat from him---but why do the males get to be free?  Why are the boys going to leave, to roam, to become and she, whose literally given her life, will just go from standing to huddled as she gets older.

Coming Soon: Part Two: How Women Can Get Out/Why Women Are The Vanguards of Socioeconomic Change In Families

Thank you,
Kyle Phoenix
Email: kylephoenixshow@aol.com
Website: http://kylephoenixsite.com/
Blog: http://kylephoenixshow.blogspot.com/2012
Thanks and enjoy! You can Like Us on FaceBook or Follow Us on Twitter! Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show on Channel 56 (Time Warner), 83 (RCN), 34 (Verizon) and the Thursday/Friday 12am/midnight simulcast on http://kylephoenixsite.com/
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Saturday, October 27, 2012

Race: Things Fatherless Black & Latino Men Beget

Race: Things Fatherless Black & Latino Men Beget

What I want to do is compare overall statistics to some of the remedies/enhancements boys to men can get from fathers and male mentors.  Unfortunately poverty has become matriarchal  more to the point Black & Latino families expect to be single parent headed, mainly by women.  While we revere the women for doing this we never connect what their lack of abilities in key areas creates as an outcome.

We're going to assume that fathers referenced below in the abstract are good, healthy men even if maybe they divorce the mother of their children.  They still stay intensely devoted and supportive to their children.

  1. If 30 to 40% of Blacks and Latinos in America are in poverty and 70% of their households are women headed, what does that create?
  2. If only 35% of men of color are college educated, what does that bode for their families/children?
  3. If for 20 years the CDC has been tracking that men of color are increasing in HIV and other STI infection through MSM, why is that?  That men below 30 are potentially as high as 45% infected amongst Black and Latino communtieis, , what does that say for the ones infecting them?  Who are they?  And if they're the same race as the ones they infect, why would a Black or Latino man infect another Black or Latino man?
  4. Why is it so difficult for you to find a Good Man?
  5. WHat's going on?  What's really going on?


Lack of Education

As a teacher, I'm biased to education.  In fact I often tease my students that like a criminal profiler I can identify educational levels by quick observation of people in public or in fast social contact.  But I also can see in my Black and Latino students what a lack of fathers has done to them.  Grown men are what boys want to emulate.  Boys want to be men, particularly the men in their immediate range.  If the man is educated, he wants his sons to be educated, to be able to navigate the world, to understand what he does and even progress further than he has. What I learned personally from my father was that there was no whining, there was no simpering, there was no mewling when it was time to go to school because he'd grown up in a segregated South where education was not a guarantee to brown children and I sure as hell wasn't going to take education for granted.  (He'd worked his way from Louisiana to New York to a bachelors and then a Masters degree, no education wasn't even a remote possibility.)
Why?
Because I wanted to live basically. lol


 Lack of Motivation

My father and stepfathers kept me attentive to moving along in my life, doing the right things, staying out of trouble and focused on becoming a man.  Women can't teach you how to surmount a psychological passage into manhood because they've never done it.  In fact women can observe when a boy is male and male is a man but they don't know nor have the skill set to transition a boy to manhood.  Simply can't be done.  Men are needed for that.  Now throw in our statistic of 70% of Black and Latino males growing up without fathers and you're surprised you have saggy pants as a fashion trend?  Do you what kind of natural hell walking around, purposefully having my ass hanging out would have garnered from my fathers.

Why?

Because men see the boys/males under their wings as representations of themselves   A healthy man can't have no busted, flagrant  foolishness under his aegis.  Even as a mentor, I jettison young males who I discuss decorum and decency with who continuously breech that.  Mentoring allows one the space to understand that you can't save everyone and there's always someone new behind the jettisoned one to help.  The jettisoned rarely understand that they've lost out on a lifetime enhancing relationship and all I've just lost is a little time but I am refining my mentoring skill.


Lack of Manhood (Addiction to Masculinity)

 MSM are often raging about wanting masculine men, checking the masculinity level of men, guys being effeminate, not being real men---and then they rush to the gym to pump up their bodies to look as masculine as possible  However in contrast look around you at all shapes and sizes of  men, fathers with their children.  Manhood is generosity and strength and caring and going to work to support and provide for children and spouses and family.  The distortion of lack of men teaching males, even homosexual males, about manhood means that boys/males will grasp at whatever they can.  Whatever they can translate to hyper-sexuality  hyper concern over masculinity, and even the fear of intimacy.

I would stretch so far as to suggest that it's easier for men of color to bareback, to have unprotected sex with other men, to infect them, out of resentment and anger towards lack of father figures. Males who don't have men to love will have trouble learning how to love, and not harm, other men.  When you're talking to men, ask them about their relationships to their father (figures).  Asking how he's learned to be loved by men, will inform you how he loves men.  If you don't  have healthy father figures or none at all, you learn to fear men, especially well rounded men because there's an unknowable quality/training they've gotten from men.  They might seem harder or tougher or less open to your emotional needs because of some of the boundaries they've learned from their fathers.  It answers why homosexual men have both an attraction to and resentment/fear of heterosexual men.  It might even answer why Black and Latino men festishize such hyper-masculine/distant extreme imagery of thugs and criminals and ne'er do wells.

When you have a solid male figure in your early life, you have a solid manhood figure as part of your festishization scope---all that Oedipal and Elektra complex stuff really does apply throughout a lot of our psyche and sexuality.


Lack of Resources (Poverty)

There was a rule in my house growing up.  Everyone worked.  Me, my mother, my father, my stepfathers, even when a cousin stayed with us for a year.  Everyone worked.  My parents made enough money to give me the trinkets I wanted without big stress (comics, action figures, movies, toys, candy money) but they engineered a system for me to learn the prime rule of life.

You have to work for what you want.

At 7, I wanted some more action figures, more comics, just more, dammit!  My parents sat me down and first we worked out a chore list but eventually there was only so much I could do so they were like let's create something you can do to earn the money you want for this other stuff.  My mother wrote up a contract and they loaned me $5 to start a Sunday newspaper delivery business.  Buy for 50 cents, sell for 75, keep the shopping cart in front of you when they open their doors.  In a week I'd made and paid back my investors plus moved on to hiring the babysitter's children to franchise out to other buildings.

At 17, during summer vacation from high school I was jobless and my mother told me that she had the perfect job for me.  The plan was simple: get up at 7am, she'd made me breakfast, be dressed to impress and have my resume and copies on me.  I did.  I was scared (my mother can cook but doesn't so this solicitousness was frightening).  We stepped outside, she locked the door, took my keys and told me to start on the left hand side of Flatbush Avenue at 8am.  Walk up it and at every store stop and ask for work.  She handed me $5 and said at 1pm stop and get some lunch.  Then cross the street and work my way back doing the same thing.  I had 3 jobs by the end of that day.  My father thought this was a great plan.

My father fully supported this.  In fact my father had things about boys (even as young as 10) sleeping too long into the day whether or not it was a weekend.  What are you doing was always his challenge.  FInd something to do.  Do you need me to find you something to do?  At times it was a blessing to be able to wander outdoors away from him but it taught me how to explore the world; how to go find something to do.

Men teach boys that it's safe and expected for them to go explore the world, to take risks and to support themselves.  Boys without fathers are left to their own devices about what to do with their time and energy.  And boys have a lot of energy.  Fathers teach you how to focus that energy.

My father explained to me at the age of 7 that while as my parents they were responsible for the big things (food, roof, school/clothes)---boys who were becoming men didn't take money from women.  Real men didn't.  Women, unfortunately because of disparities in society, can't always earn the same as men or more than enough to support herself and children.  Women left by men overwhelmingly end up in poverty because they haven't had the time to develop and nurture education.careers while also being full time parents.  HEnce why Welfare rolls are inundated with women and children and now, a generation later, men who haven't been socialized by healthy men in how to survive and generate resources.

I often ride the train or wander around neighborhoods throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens and I see Black and Latino men from 15 to 50 just hanging on corners---all times of the day.  The odd thing about focusing so much of my career and education towards teaching and school is that I'm no longer on a strict 9 to 5 schedule so I see more of the world versus when I was in corporate America for 10 to 12 hours a day.  I see an overwhelming amount of males going nowhere at the speed of light. Outside on block now are Latino men who are effectively dead to their futures.  I've had to learn that I can't save everyone, that I have to focus my energy and skills in the areas that I can help individuals or groups at.  Lack of fathers has left them without guides how to transition from boys to men, so they're stuck.  They're males but they'll probably never be men.  They'll never work nor educate beyond boy-level but they will procreate and having no father to teach them how to be fathers, they'll abandon their children.  People never consider that abandoning fathers breed males who learn how to abandon.  Where do you think abandoners learn to abandon?


Remedies:

How do we change this?  How do we encourage and develop men of color to be active involved parents to one or a dozen children?  More importantly, why should we consider this an emergency?  Black and Latino males will become the permanent underclass.  Sure there will always be a small percentage of men of color, regardless of their sexuality and family origin who survive, thrive and find male mentors who teach them the manhood transitioning skills that their single mothers can't.  But let's conservatively flip that 70% boys of color in mother headed households to 70% of Black and Latino men won't progress to manhood.

1. No viable mates for women and/or other men.  Can't find a Good Man?  It might have to do with the fact that two thirds are trying to find and mate with the good one third.

2. Men make money.  But if there is no economic power (which translates to political/social power) within communities of color to launch into power positions around the district, counties, towns, cities, states and eventually the nation.  Imagine a country where right now people of color are over 30% of the population but by 2050 being reversed and being over 60% of the population. But the financial, political and educational capital rest with the minority 30% to 40% who are still Caucasian because that other 60%?  70% of their males are useless in the capitalistic system.  Where do you think the next Barack Obama's will come from if there are no father's to raise a new generation?  Our hopes and futures can't be lottery ticket built on hoping for the 1 in a million.  When people talk to you about 1 in a million people.  Remind them there are 999,999 who it didn't work out for----it reduces the cheering from just one in a million.

3. Men move families and communities along to higher education because fathers have money, time and resources (motivational, mental and spiritual) to move their families to the next level.  If you don't have men who are responsible back to their communities and children then they aren't advancing the communities nor the individuals.  Hence the cycle will beget itself again.

Remedies include:
1. Getting men of color off of Welfare and HASA.  Teaching men that they have value and training them in skills to improve themselves starts a stop gap.  Welfare, HASA and Social Security Disability have to be safety nets,not norms for men of color.  If you don't buy the self esteem argument then consider this---anytime someone gives you support they can change it.  I once challenged a group of men/women who were on Welfare with the question of what would they do if the very next month Welfare lowered the money/Food Stamps they gave them by $5.  Would they walk away in protest?  No.  They all agreed they'd be upset but adjust.  I then asked them what if the following month it was lowered by $20.  And then another $5 the third month?  We played the game until we got to if your benefits were cut in half, then you'd rise in some form of protest but what if the Welfare office just shrugged back at you and said you can take half or go away. with none, what would you do?  Only slaves and whores keep knuckling under to such financial undercutting, men/manhood says oh, hell no and pushes back healthily, assertively but if you haven't been taught how to have healthy assertive power, you can't stop being made into a slave.

Welfare/HASA is not helping anyone, in fact it's destroying them.  Destroying someone's natural capabilities to work and progress means that they develop the habits of complacency and helplessness.  Not of power, not of empowerment. Manhood though is built on one's sense of power and integrity and value.  If you don't have those as a constant in your identity and goal, what are you?  Safety nets should assist, help and develop not incubate weakness.

2. Getting skills and education.  You're on the Internet---you should know how to use all Microsoft Office programs because the lessons are free on YouTube.  In fact the equivalent of a doctoral education is available on the internet.  Find a college, get some syllabi and between the library and internet fill in the holes in your education.

3. Give back to boys.  As uncomfortable as it may make you, because you didn't have the experience go volunteer with some boys or teens.  If you can't play basketball you can still referee   If you can't walk, you can still teach a boy how to read, how to find a job, how to tie a tie.  In order to save your people, you must as much as possible take the place of absent fathers.  Teach a boy how to use a checking account, how you use a credit card, how to fill out a job application, how to drive a car.  You have valuable skills and most importantly that mentorship will teach you how to patiently parent boys, how to care for them, how to nurture and enhance them and that will help to heal your own loss and wounds.

Thank you!
Kyle Phoenix
Email your comments and thoughts to: kylephoenixshow@aol.com
Sign up for the E Newsletter at: http://kylephoenixsite.com/
Thanks and enjoy! You can Like Us/Share this post on FaceBook, LinkedIn, Google+ or Follow Us on Twitter! Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show on Channel 56 (Time Warner), 83 (RCN), 34 (Verizon) and the Thursday/Friday 12am/midnight simulcast on http://kylephoenixsite.com/
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Sunday, September 23, 2012

MSM and the Equation of Ideology + Liberation = Power

What do you believe?  What do you believe in?  Why do you believe that?  Our belief system is ideology---our personal ideology could include religion, capitalism, sexuality even education.  Think of yourself as a container---or a storage cabinet where we store our ideas.  Our ideas conceive our selves and from our selves we move through life/reality.

Liberation on the other hand is actualization of an ideology.  Say I tell you I believe in capitalism, entrepreneurship could be an extension of that ideology, therefore a level of liberation.  Or say I tell you I believe in the inherent rights of races to being treated with legal equality (ideology) and then I go and get an education and teach Race Theory or Race Psychology or I become a Civil Rights Attorney, actualization to Liberation.

But how does this go from thought/belief to action and then manifest as Power?  The concept of Power---ability to move, influence, control, exert force upon, whether that be a concrete or abstract, is as normal as oxygen on Earth.  It is natural for humans, particularly men, to seek ways to have Power.  (Women too.)  In fact one could argue that it is how men define themselves.  But what happens when one is racially subjugated into semi-submission psychologically and that's combined with a sexuality that isn't wholly or at all, heterosexual and brings about a social subjugation through closeting, DL-ness, inequalities, lack of manhood expectations (marriage, children, etc..)?  What does a man become?  How does one become a man?

First we would have to consider where one could get Ideology from and use it for.  As a Teacher---I've taught everything from elementary school children up to advanced college graduate courses---and to some degree I am teaching Ideology.  When I teach about Toussaint L'Overture and the Haitian Revolution, I am teaching about people believing so much in their inherent right to have agency over their own bodies, in spite of the laws advocating slavery, that they were willing to wage first an uprising and then full out protracted revolution against the French and Spanish colonists and eventually to some degree their home countries; I am teaching the ideology of self-rule.  Pretty much in all teaching a transference of some sort of ideological framework occurs.  It's often the areas of wrestling with not simply what to teach but how to teach it.  I could teach that Toussaint was completely wrong in leading a revolution; I could frame the discussion and lessons to the side of the French.  I don't but I could.

I don't because I use Haiti as a historical point because it allows people of color to access history and it happens right after the American Revolution and happens parallel to the French Revolution and then I can link it forty odd years later to the Cuban Revolution against Spain.  Implicit in this is not only the concept of justifiable revolution but more importantly, it allows me to passively teach how people shirked off the bonds of slavery at their own will.  I can go into how Toussaint could read and write, thereby showing the importance of education as well as his confidence to negotiate with both the Crown of France and even Napoleon.  It says something for people of color to hear about a man of color dealing with empires.  Eyes alight, questions become intense, the days I show historical films are well attended.  Why?  Somewhere in the students heads is the spark of Liberation.

This spark then erupts into Power.

People who know they are of the image and blood of Power, act like it.  People who study people who look like themselves see that even if they only suspected it before, they have value, they have agency, they may in fact have more Power than they ever surmised.

So you throw back at me, that maybe this all makes sense.  I've outlined the points well, I've even shown it with a good example but what is the usefulness of this?  I'm a pragmatist so I'm always looking to define, if not, then get to the point of a supposition or at least t's application.


Imagine if men (and women) of color who were raised with education for people of color is valuable and possible for them all?

 I have a student whose mind was blown when we went over maps and outlines of the tribes including the Taino people from the Caribbean throughout South America. His first question to me was---"Is this really true?"
Suddenly, he who could trace back his family to the Caribbean, could trace back his skin hundreds of years.  I make sure I teach about Anacoana, Taíno cacica, sister of Bohechío, chief of Jaragua, and wife of Caonabo (chief of the nearby territory of Maguana) a cacique (nation state on the isle that would become Haiti/Dominican Republic) who first encountered the raiding party of Christopher Columbus and demanded unification from the neighboring caciques to oust them.   She sensed the danger they would come to plague the isle with and opted for a preemptive strike.  It's very hard to simply be a nigger this and a nigger that when you know you are the blood of sovereign royalty on Western shores; that most importantly your people were not an easy kill.

Imagine MSM who learn this about themselves, having teachers who hand them materials---not simply speak it to them---but give them the book to go and read and study and keep and tear apart and digest, themselves.  Why is it so important for the Liberated to be able to take the Ideology they're told is useful to adapt and adopt and dissect it?  Because human beings, like churches or political movements or even terrorist cells, can simply tell you what they need you to believe for you to give them your body, your time, your resources but withhold the totality of an idea.

That is the very definition of a cult.

When a teacher wants someone, even an adult to be liberated, they treat them like an equal and give them unlimited access to the text, the history, the ideology so that there is no possibility of over-identification to the leader.  Narcissism is censored by the dispersal of knowledge and wisdom and evolution.  And we know the history of leaders, white, brown, yellow and red who thought that the people should kneel before them, that their being and sterling intellect and insights was to be recognized as the Power.

Imagine now MSM who have had no racial Ideology nor Liberation taught about themselves or their manhood or sexuality?  They will never achieve Power.  Now look around at the groups and agencies that exist to service MSM of color and you have a new lens to evaluate which ones want men of Power present and which want a head count to get some more CDC money, another donor check, perhaps even your own cash as a membership fee.

Imagine yourself empowered.  Knowing a thousand years, two thousand years of your history, shaping your own personal Ideology.  Maybe even having a genealogical timeline done on your blood.  Then you can decide what to do, how to activate this Liberation and that is when you will truly be Powerful.


Thank you,
Kyle Phoenix
kylephoenixshow@aol.com
http://kylephoenixsite.com/
Thanks and enjoy! Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show on Time Warner Cable, Verizon Fios or Comcast or the Thursday/Friday 12am/midnight simulcast on http://kylephoenixsite.com/
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MSM Insanity # 1: DL And In A Relationship

 It recently came up on the tv show and in a forum, what were some of the things that MSM were constantly doing that didn't work.  Or concepts that they held that simply didn't wash or lead to more trouble than they were worth.  The concept of being DL, not Out and yet wanting to be in a full loving relationship.  Now so we clarify, all interactions with humans are relationships---so I'm not going to dispute the ability to be in one but to be in a loving, satisfying one............ehhhhhh that's where we enter the Twilight Zone of MSM Insanity.

The counter-example I always use is heterosexual relationships.  Now some might argue that the use of hetero to illustrate homo is anti-norming as one is not the same and can't be as the other.  I disagree.  Both relationships are populated by human beings who are the same species.  What differs may be the presence of more or less estrogen and testosterone but to lobby for civil rights, to get marriage equality, to receive health care spouse benefits, we're going to have to "normalize" at some point.  As a side rant, it's easy want to stay "different" when you've grown up different or as a wise facilitator put it to a group I was in, abnormal people when pushed out of the norm, create abnormal communities (i.e. the gay community) who's rules and mores may not make sense when integrated back into the overall human community.

Which brings me sort of full circle to DL relationships---in a homo abnormal community, shame based relationships are the norm.  I can't tell my Mommy about you, you're terrified your boss will see us eating dinner together (because we all know when two men or women are eating together that immediately is a pre-cursor to genital penetration); if I acknowledge you I have to take responsibility for you and all your bills and your crazy family; if my friends knew about you they would----well, explode or at the very least expel me from our little group that is as valuable and impactful as the UN.  Have you noticed where the reasoning and excuse lead---general forms of paranoid delusions.

Life Secret: People ain't thinking about you nearly as much as you would like.  And even when they are, it's still less than they say.

Human beings have a lot of reality going on, over 90% of their thoughts are about themselves and their immediate concerns, not your crotch and it's shenanigans.  Now if you pose the question of the validity or the actions or reactions of your crotch, humans have an opinion---but even then it's generally only about 50% of them really care enough to comment.  That percentage may be really loud so it seems like it's a lot of people but it really isn't.  This means that half the people aren't think about you at all and the other half aren't thinking about you 90% of the time.  Think about that.  Stroll through your day pointing out people to yourself and observing---there's another person not thinking about me; oooh, look at that one over there not giving a damn; yup, she definitely doesn't know I exist.

Life Secret: Human beings are their own unique universes.

With so much to manage in a personal universe, thinking about the thoughts and actions of others isn't always useful or logical.  This brings us back to the emotional reasoning for delusional paranoia---sometimes it's people who are on the margins wanting attention.  The most pathetic thing a human being can do is tell you how much attention people are casually paying to them---it's either borderline or definitely a resident of narcissism.  People will notice you.  Check you out.  Glance you over.  Wonder where you got those shoes, who did your hair, why your shirt is so bright and then they move on to should they have gravy with the chicken tonight, their left foot hurts, they have to pee, American Idol is coming on soon, they have to call a friend, their kid has a cold and they need to buy some aspirin, bread is more expensive, they're thirsty, the sun sure is bright today, that's a nice car, ooooh, look at that other person.....and so on.  Did you see how quickly they flashed from you to their own universe?  Yeah, I estimate it's even quicker than that in reality.

When one tries to be DL/Not Out and have a relationship two incongruent realities are occurring---that a lot of us on Earth care what you're doing and with whom and that a relationship can survive that constant paranoid delusional smothering.  Smothering?  Yes, imagine walking with your parents and your mother introduced you as some kid from around the neighborhood?  Or your father introduced your mother as a lady who lives in his building?  There would be confusion, hurt feelings and hell to pay.  Human beings thrive on inclusion, in fact it's one of the ways we feel loved and appreciated.  When we exclude people, we kill them a little bit, especially when we bounce back and forth in intimacy.  I loved you down last night but won't stand next to you on the bus.  I told you how much I love you secretly in the back room at my house but introduce you after three years to my mother as my co-worker.  It's a minimization of one's own humanity (and the others' as well.)

Now I understand that everyone is on the spectrum of their own "outness" and transparency and may have legitimate reasons for trying to negotiate inner knowing with public awareness but what I can tell you is it's like a needle prick---people only care for a second or two then they go on about their grocery list.  However when you've grown up feeling self-consciously seen, the words sissy and faggot, casually thrown sticking to you and then internally knowing that people can't see you, like when you go on that prom date with a girl or marry a woman and never tell her about your secret penchant for loving men down...and it continues, you're living a level of cognitive dissonance.  Two incongruent realities within a singular reality.  It never, ever, ever works out----haven't we had 30 to 40 years of TV talk shows point that out to us?  Your spouse finds out, your family always knew, you get outted, your sexuality is so painfully obviously people wonder if you've come full circle you're so out, on and on.

And honestly, isn't it exhausting?  Cover stories, changing pronouns, seeing the hurt look or the cold casualness of calling someone your "friend" or the isolation of your relationship existing, because you're a "homebody" (the new code word for SHHHHHHHHHH!), but ultimately stagnating or exploding as that person finds sustenance elsewhere.

Humans take pride in their mates, part of having a mate is showing what you captured, pretty and handsome in your eyes.  Seeing the admiration in the eyes of others.  The compliments of how nice you look together.  The social help your family and friends can give to keep a marriage/relationship together.  It's no coincidence that marriage is such a hot button issue because when you think about it a community is coming together to bless a union, to sanctify your love your choices, to celebrate it, to confer new legal rights and privileges due to your responsibility.  It's literally one of the ways which humans mature over their lifetimes....exclusion and invisibility being our most childish way of minimizing each other.  Is it no surprise that MSM who practice invisibility and exclusion are neurotic, anxiety riddled, susceptible to diseases, dogged out, used by other men, disenchanted with love, bitter at relationships and terrified of their own shadows.  When we try to oppose natural human expressions and needs, it never, ever, ever----no, really, ever, works out.





Thank you,
Kyle Phoenix
kylephoenixshow@aol.com
http://kylephoenixsite.com/
Thanks and enjoy! You can Like Us on Face Book or Follow Us on Twitter!  Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show on Channel 56 (Time Warner), 83 (RCN), 34 (Verizon) and the Thursday/Friday 12am/midnight simulcast on http://kylephoenixsite.com/
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Saturday, September 22, 2012

Black and Latino Men: Why They Fail And How To Change

I was confronted with the question, what's wrong with Black and Latino men, by one of my email responses to the TV show a while back and while dismayed for sexuality and race to be so negatively entwined, I could understand what they meant.  A friend shared with me in a group that he had concerns about the state of men of color because so many that he met were HIV+, ex-convicts, addicts or in recovery/12 Step programs.  While all of these states have a positive upswing to them if maintained healthily, he was concerned that the state of men of color particularly men of color available for long term relationship or hell, even mid-term relationships was dwindling.  Fast.  I did several shows on race and sexuality at first and then when the question came back up again, I thought how could I address it, answer it.

What IS wrong with Black and Latino men?

As we free fall into the 21st Century we're confronted by competition, global competitors in ways that American society hasn't had to deal with before.  The current American university graduation rate is about 40,000 people with engineering/science degrees; in India it's 400,000 and in China i'ts 1 million.  A year.  No, hold on to that figure, a year.

HIV rates are highest for men of color in America and there are close to 30 million Africans who are infected with HIV II in Africa.  The average lifespan for a HIV individual with HIV now is about 24.5 years and the cost to the state/medical is about $600,000 over that time.

From high school measurements, 70% of Black and 80% of Latino students don't graduate on time.  Now this number shifts to to 50% & 65% because "on time" is measured as precisely four years.  Most states have continuous systems that allow make up credits in the Senior summer, so graduation is conferred that September--making them  4.4 years, lowering the percentage. (Just being precise here.)  Those others go on to GED programs but only 50% of those numbers actually accomplish GED completion within 10 years so that means a quarter of Black and a third of Latinos don't graduate high school.

There's the popular measurement of 70% of Black and 60% of Latino households being only 1 parent headed (generally female).  This affects males because in spite of the mothers who testify that they were mother and father to their child and the children who capitulate and proclaim success at one parent---a bad or absent parent is not a fair measurement against a household with two present parents.  Also human beings learn by role modelling.  Males teach boys how to be men and women teach girls.  If a boy sees his mother occupying a position of head of household power when he begins to blossom into maturity and needs a male role model, she's not present and he might go haywire (see: education and crime statistics).


Conversely girls who grow up in a female headed household, see a strong female in charge so they learn how to be a strong, independent woman.  By learning how to be a strong independent woman, one becomes one and perhaps honestly perpetuates a cycle by getting a man who hasn't been modeled manhood too.  She becomes the de facto "man"---in earning potential, in household control, in governmental recognition (you can't maintain your family structure of two adults with services like Welfare---the man must go) so she becomes head of household, just like her mother was and then she has a daughter and the cycle continues.  Males of color are useful for breeding and pleasure but they're simply older children---this goes into the whole refrain of "there are no good men".

United States prison contain well over 2,000,000 people, the largest in the world---half of that number are Black and Latino.  A community deprived of it's men cannot move forward as it forces the women to decide between child rearing properly and earning sustenance.  She might do both but she might not be able to do both effectively.

All of the above is the refrain of men of color but it is affecting truths that disrupt identity for men of color.  In fact if you look at this, men of color are dodging landmines of epic potential in competition or destruction.

But we're still alive.  
And we're thriving.

There are healthy, sane, educated men of color who are MSM however they might only occupy a small population.  Say the statistical evidence of 10% of a population being same gender loving.  That means there are approximate 4 million SGL men of color in America.  Let's say you edit based on age, out/transparency about their sexuality, attractiveness, sanity and accessibility---let's say that cuts 50% out of your choosing pile.  Let's say you edit out regions---more in urban cities like NYC, Chicago, LA, etc.---so we'll knock that down to about 1,000,000 and then we'll divide that across the USA.  Using NYC as an example there are about 100,000 eligible MSM here.  10% are nucking futs---just off the top---we thought they were sane but then---well you know how that goes.  Then let's say half of that number, 45,000 are in relationships with each other or women.

That leaves 45,000 men of color who are MSM in NYC who fit the criteria of "Good Men".

If we apply the above numbers of prison, HIV, education, single parent household lack of manhood training that leaves us with about 20,000 who are directly available without suffering from any of the mass ills above.  However the question then becomes, do you suffer from the mass ills above?

If you do, what do you do?

First, therapy.
Any man of color who is MSM who has not every decade of his life pointedly sat down with a trained therapist, needs to in order to get perspective on his survival against the odds, almost like PTSD.  And then he needs help managing life like we all do, but he might need special help balancing race and homosexuality in America's delightful racial and sexuality loving environment.  Depression at all the things that race and sexuality bring about is also a norm for MSM so it's a great way to work those issues of anger, shame, confusion and despondency out.


Second, education.
While we can all agree that basic (K to 12) is good for the world, being an American male of color means that you have to excel in ways that you might be equipped to without education.  It also means that if you don't educate, you can't assist your community fully.  Most people don't consider that the Civil Rights movement occurred because so many minimally high school/blue collar working men were bale to participate.  Educated men of color become even more powerful the more educated they are.  They developed intellectual skills of flexibility as well as strategic capacity to deal with the world.  Less education, more frustration and resentment but also less coping mechanisms and chances at social and economic success.  Race still is a determining factor in social power in America, men of color need every social and intellectual edge they can get.

Third, relationships.
Single men don't live as a long; are more apt to explore addictions; have more health concerns; couples progress further socially and financially.  Why?  Nagging is also a form of love.  Nagging to take care of one's health, nagging to work harder, nagging to relax.  Husbands and wives have cared for and kept partners alive longer than anyone would have expected in many cases because love is not only a feeling, it's a verb.

MSM must date and perhaps even procreate/parent because human beings are legacy based and relationship addicts.  From statues to children to monuments to buildings to businesses, when you live forward, you grow.  Children also have given humans throughout time reasons to stay healthy, to push on, to deal with depression.


Finally, purpose.
What are you alive for?  To do?  Where do you want to go, travel, do?  Start a business?  Write a novel?  Have a threesome in every state in America?  Learn to salsa?  Sing on Broadway?  We all have goals and dreams, most of them we can make come true.  Don't be shy, don't be reticent---if your goal is a husband find the dating nights at your local community centers and go; get online, go to sexuality based outings; maybe even go to a nightclub once a month.  Get out there.  Live!  Adopt some children.  Be a foster parent. Volunteer with older people with children, cleaning parks, serving at soup kitchens.  Men, Good Men are everywhere but you have to get out there and let them know you're out there too---there are at least 20,000 men around you that you have to start chatting up.


Thank you,
Kyle Phoenix
kylephoenixshow@aol.com
http://kylephoenixsite.com/
Thanks and enjoy! You can Like Us on Face Book or Follow Us on Twitter!  Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show on Channel 56 (Time Warner), 83 (RCN), 34 (Verizon) and the Thursday/Friday 12am/midnight simulcast on http://kylephoenixsite.com/






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Sexual Repression and Homosexuality

How is it possible to be repressed and be a homosexual man (or woman)?  When we consider sexuality in our culture, isn't the normal projection that men who have sex with men are constantly having sex?  That unfettered by the female expectation of social restriction, pregnancy and courtship (to some degree) this leaves men to simply fornicate constantly?   What we tend not to consider is the burden of manhood, religion, inability at one's sexuality and social factors when we measure the sexuality of MSM.

Manhood
The construct, particularly the Westernized construct of manhood not only doesn't consider but in fact finds the concept of a man being penetrated by a man synonymous to rape at worst and mental illness at best.  The weight of these projections rest upon MSM as well as heterosexual men.  How to reconcile penetrating a man or even more terrifying, laying on one's back, throwing one's legs to heaven and allowing one's self to be penetrated, willingly.

Once while talking to a female friend in college, she shared that she was a virgin but that her and her boyfriend were fooling around.  And while she found him intensely sexually attractive she was terrified of penetrative sex.  I told her that it was probably the most fundamentally natural feeling to have.  Our biology, outside from eating and elimination, is geared at not allowing anything foreign into it.  To psychologically overcome the biological aversion/fear of being penetrated (perhaps infected with a disease at worse or simply having some form of anal/tearing at best) is natural.  Even if one is the Top, the concept of getting penetrative stimulation from penetrating another men, particularly through an area that has been so erroneous associated with only elimination means that being sexual is a hurdle in simply the mechanics because of manhood.

Religion

America, westernized civilization, whether we know how to handle it is a Christian dominated culture.  The next religions in size Islam and Judaism are not lovingly amenable to homosexuality either.  However what we have to remember is that the major religions were conceived thousands of years ago by people roaming deserts and people who had to socially control millions of people.  Application of religion to society now is often difficult, which is why there are millions of preachers explaining and codifying the same text.

The social weight of growing up in a family that was either not too religious or excessively so, their morality was influenced by the society they were born into.  A boy growing into a physically and sexually mature male would probably not have appropriate, self esteem building role models.  Human beings grow through maturity by having role models, we've only recently in society as a whole, pointedly with the internet, had the availability of multiple perspectives no matter where you're born.

Where are many homosexuals getting an education around their sexuality?  Pornography.  Porn, while physically demonstrative of what to do, where to put it, and even how to react is still an artificial construct.  Imagine learning how sue for child custody by watching Kill Bill.  Yes, it's just as warped and extreme.


Inability At One's Sexuality 

This leads to an inability at what to do, how to do, when to do one's sexuality.  What are the dating rules?  What does non-sexual intimacy look like?  What's the appropriate time to be sexual?  Men and women, who are heterosexual, don't realize the fortune of having a guide of dating, courtship, engagement, marriage to follow.  Simply that structure allows heterosexuals to adhere to it or to not adhere to it.  Imagine that, a road map.  Now imagine not having a road map.  The terror at doing what feels good and natural but there being so few sources to check with. And more insanely who are the role models, other homosexual men who haven't had role models so many men are exhausted at contradictory rules and expectations.  The male ego is most fragile around failure, especially when the outcome is in such an intimate areas: love, sex, acceptance.

 Social Factors

Not all homosexuals grow up in wild, socially expansive cosmopolitan cities like New York or Chicago or Miami or San Francisco.  Without having a Castro Street or a Greenwich Village to migrate to and explore one might be trapped in a small town, with enforced mores around behavior and sexuality.  That might impact finding a boyfriend (or a girlfriend), learning to date, having healthy sexual relationships, etc..  How many homosexuals had desperate crushes or full blown love with someone in high school or college who was rightfully experimenting with their sexuality?  And then that person moved on, homosexuality, and therefore you, not being an acceptable part of their lives?

It is actually normal to experiment with sexuality but if you think you're the only one in the universe in your growing up place, you find another and that relationship changes, it's debilitating.  And when something is so impactful to the ego, the sense of self, people shutdown.  The social weight of not being able to engage in the social game of dating, mating and sexuality---(your friend not having the social right to experiment with their sexuality, yes, you've imposed a rigid sense of binary based sexuality on the other person, too.  Yup, homosexuals can be rigid and bigoted about their expectations about the sexualities of others.  In fact, more so than heterosexuals.)---leaves a man untutored in how to date, to love, to be intimate.  High school is the training ground for mating and dating but if you came from a venue that didn't allow this without abuse, bullying and ridicule then you hid your sexuality.  And if your family, controllers of resources and love in your life, had mores that suggested your sexuality was verboten then you got real comfortable in the closet.

And you might still be living a closeted life.  Why?  Have you considered that it is your inherent human right from the universe---or whatever you believe in---to be free, to be loved, to be accepted?  Even more importantly, that all the people you might not be revealing your sexuality to will die one day and most times, they aren't thinking about you or your sexuality.  In fact possibly not being transparent about yourself is denying them the right to deal with their views on sexuality (and sometimes their own sexuality)?

It is revolutionary to find a man or woman who is able to love intimately their own gender because they've had to climb over their own physical fears, their initial perceptions of God, bad information and maybe everyone up to the moment they're in your arms, on that first date with, asking you out.

Be gentle.  With yourself and others.

If you're not interested, let them down easy but let them know how fantastic you think they are.  Maybe even still try going out on a date with.  Heterosexuals have dates that don't lead to instant love every day.  In fact when polled heterosexuals overwhelmingly say that it took 10 to 20 dates before they felt deeply attracted/in love to their mate.  Think of how quality that information is for how humans build intimacy.  They take their time, they don't allow sexual impulses or lack to be the only reason to mate.

You can't get pregnant so a date isn't a permanent, lifetime connection.  Experiment with it.  Learn to "duty date".  You won't love everyone.  You don't have to be sexual to be liked or feel whole.  You're just practicing moving beyond immediate sex to making your sexuality the norm, for yourself and others.  The worse that can happen is you become a free, fun, attractive date who doesn't come across as neurotic, hung up, heavily closeted, frightened of love.

Thank you,

Kyle Phoenix

kylephoenixshow@aol.com

http://kylephoenixsite.com/

Thanks and enjoy! Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show on Time Warner Cable, Verizon Fios or Comcast or the Thursday/Friday 12am/midnight simulcast on http://kylephoenixsite.com/




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