Masculinity in Detroit is complicated.
“Fake it with me, is that too much of the black woman to ask of the black man”
Nikki Giovanni
GROUNDING
I think I speak for alot of GenZ when I say that I was radicalized at an age where I wasn’t necessarily old enough to manage those emotions. For me, I remember understanding racism as early as 3rd grade. Events such as the 2008 election, Casey Anthony, and Micheal Vick were well-known news events where I had to wrestle with race and its allowances. In the years following elementary, I’d come to learn about police brutality, fascism, and the increasing power of corporations over our political system.
I live in Michigan, a state where right wing actors such as Governor John Engler, Betsy DeVos and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy waged a 40+ year onslaught on black and brown communities. We have watched as Michigan has transformed from a labor movement vanguard to a testing ground for corporate-centered policy. These trends mirror the devolution of the United States into a country where the people with the least amount of power are crushed under the immense, unchecked power of corporations.
Our Democratic Party is now a right-center party focused primarily on witholding power and stalling progressive policies whereas the Republican Party is even further infected with authoritarian politics aimed at snatching safety nets from working class people. These circumstances are by no means unique consequences of capitalism; they are however increasingly more consequential upon the lives of young people who now witness it all through 6 inch screens.
Because of this, much of what I write and work to build in the world is informed by that political context. We must be protecting the freedoms we currently have while also envisioning new freedoms.
Ginger Root is a four-part workshop and essay series aimed at answering what Metro-Detroit GenZ and GenY black men need to identify a political home. It’s an opportunity to reflect on dominant narratives, challenges, and limitations of our movement currently.
But also, it’s an opportunity to build black men's muscles in conflict resolution, accountability, and collective action. The workshops will take place over the next few months, with me identifying some checkpoints along the way to publicity share ideas we are building clarity on. I cannot promise that everyone will agree with what is written in this series; but I can guarantee that it will be true to a community being built in the real world.
My personal hope with Ginger Root is to unearth where I think I fit in a broader liberatory context, while also making space for those discoveries for other black men . This will not be a penultimate analysis, moreso a lens into what I observe as a community organizer inviting others into changemaking work here in Detroit.
In the book Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements, Charlene A. Caruthers poses the “5 Questions every organizer must answer.” Those five questions are as follows:
Who am I?
Who are My People?
What do we Want/Desire?
What are we Building?
Are we Ready to Win?
These four essays serve as my answer to those questions, as best as I can answer them in this current moment. Like many things, these answers will change over time. However, my hope is that I am able to return to these essays and observe change in both my politics but also my role in the movement.
So first, who am I?
Who Am I: The Evangelization of Choices
In the most general sense, I am a Native Son of Detroit’s eastside, who grew up right off East Warren. I take pride in my eastside heritage, despite cultural division between Detroit’s east and west side–more on that in later essays. My family on both my maternal and paternal side were economic refugees who traversed this region from the antebellum south for auto-industry jobs. I can trace my ancestry to the Carolinas, Mississippi, New Orleans, and Arkansas.
My childhood was incredibly active, clinging to arts, culture, reading, and study. For me, I was consistently engaged in political topics from an early age, often taking place right at family dinner each night. My parents both worked entry and mid-level positions and my elder brother and I both graduated from high school. Kimathi, my brother, suffers from both autism and scizo-affective disorder, which have both been major challenges to both his life and my own.
As for my schooling, I attended public school, but more prominently charter school from kindergarten to the eighth grade. I spent equal time at the top of my class as I did in the principal's office for disrupting class. In school, I was hyper-active and under stimulated but found liberation in my bedroom, getting lost in hobby after hobby. My parents fed these curiosities, often choosing to prioritize high-art instead of material objects. This included interests such as: ballet, opera, chess, and political lectures.
I experienced a dichotomy of never having the right clothes or possessions to visually fit in while having so much lore and versatility that I could survive all spaces. I felt at home with black kids of varied experiences because I understood that they had things to offer. For me, my best survival skill was wit, being able to make a class laugh regardless of our backgrounds. But also, friends involved in gang activity served as protectors to me whenever I talked myself into a conflict. These are strengths I would push to their absolute limits in my high schooling
University of Detroit Jesuit is a private, Catholic all-boys school on Detroit’s westside for young men ages 12-18. The school is self-proclaimed as the only school in the Catholic High School League to stay in Detroit following the 1967 uprising, something that was frequently discussed in just my first semester of Mr. Rowe’s Religion class. The school centers a college preparatory curriculum while instilling the Jesuit traditions of service, faith and the promotion of justice. This pedagogy is encompassed in the school’s mantra of “Men for Others”
My parents had immense pride that I was not only accepted into the school, but also able to go without paying a dime for my education. I can still remember heading to my first day of high school and Mary Mary’s “Go Get Your Blessing” playing on the radio, which my mother affirmed–go get your blessing. It was a bit on the nose, but it speaks to the ways that we often evangelize opportunities like mine.
In a piece previous to this, I discussed Doom Narratives of Detroit and how they are closely tied to the perceptions we adopt about ourselves. When we are taught a scarcity narrative about Detroit, we learn to cling to power out of fear of losing it. Things such as: schooling, social clubs, and extracurricular activities become closely tied to our perception of ourselves. We learn to cling to these markers of status regardless of acknowledging how fickle they might be. After all, the impermanence of class status has been a consistent subject of political discourse for the better part of this century, post 2008 financial crisis especially. As a matter of fact, we are always discussing the “death of the middle class” as a barometer for how much this country has fallen into disrepair.
As someone who would be seen as such, I don’t really endorse the existence of a “middle class.” The term is far too nebulous and all-encompassing to make any concrete conclusions about our material needs. I strongly believe that if “middle class” was a precise term referring to a specific constituency of people, it would not be a talking point of both the Republican and Democratic party. As changemakers, we must be intentional about the words we use to classify our values. Our country has a wide, nuanced spectrum of class status, but I don’t think an all-encompassing word such as “middle class” pushes people to be critical enough about their position and power.
What I generally categorize folk like me as is the Choice Class, folk who are allowed choices of how they would like capital and labor extracted from them. We are able to seek out “schools of choice”, shop at nicer markets, and take up mid-level management positions where we carry out the supervision of entry-level staff. Offering these choices to a values-aligned minority of people helps preserve the broader structure of capitalism by ensuring that folk feel consistent division. When you are black or any other marginalized identity for that matter, this status is often necessary for mere survival. A school like UofD Jesuit appeals directly to the Black Choices Class.
Sharing space with students whose families made 3-5 times more than my parents did, thrusted me even further into that implied class status. While there were clear markers of class differences, all men attending the school were seen as one status–UofD Men. It did not matter if your family strained to purchase $400 in semester books because by default, you were a UofD man. I would have choices such as extracurricular activities, a wide scope of romantic partners, and more universities offering financial aid to my family. I’d also be able to navigate a white world far easier than my classmates from middle school. But also, the pillars of private-parochial school appealed to conventional aspects of black gender politics that are prodigious in a city like Detroit.
An evangelical all-boys school is something that does not challenge the canonized traditions of Black Detroiters. Keith Famie’s Emmy award winning documentary Detroit: The City of Churches (2022) discussed a city with the most churches in the country where worship centers play a big hand in shaping the city. In Detroit, churches are not just places of worship; they are cultural centers and political breeding grounds. Some examples are: city council opening meetings with Christian prayer, pastors being prominent actors in the voluntary/philanthropic sector, and a heteronormative baseline that limits queerness to “special occasions” only. In both the ideological and the material sense, Christianity sets the baseline for how Detroiters navigate their communities. UofD is no less a conduit of this than any other religious institution in the city.
I don’t intend to deconstruct Christianity, as I think it's a faith with far too many people and nuances to generalize. But I will affirm that when christianity is inseparable from government, we run the risk of developing communities that cause serious harm to people on the margins of society.
For example, UofD solicits young men with charitable values that offer personal penance but no impact upon broader systems. The school invites its student body to become “men for others” a concept that is obscured by the countless ways the school promotes self-importance. I learned that I need to build my muscle for rigor so that I might be in a position to be charitable to others. I however did not learn to zoom out to why particular people need charity in the first place. I’ll offer up an example from my time there that absolutely tickles me.
Every year, the student body participated in a day of service called “Pledge Detroit.” Publicly, the day served as a major fundraising day where the school would solicit its donor base to reach a particular amount agreed upon by the school’s leadership. I can still remember the emotional ride we went on hoping that our school would meet its goal, which they always did.
As part of the proceedings, we were bused out to arbitrary sites in Detroit to remove weeds, plant seedlings, and help elders move chairs from downstairs to upstairs. Some frequent locations were Fort Wayne and Belle Isle–two public assets under the management of the city of Detroit at the time. Amidst most of these experiences, we did not interact with the people of Detroit at all. We learned to engage with the city as more of an idea than a city of many people. And there’s frankly nothing more irresponsible than inviting kids who have learned the worst narratives about the city to tend to sites with no residents, under the guise of “helping the city.”
Who Are My People: Taking Action
I recall being an incoming freshman at Wayne State University and reading in the Michigan Chronicle that 11% of black men graduate from the university. That stat felt like a death sentence, even for me. I wondered just how bad things were to foster a stat far lower than the national average. What I experienced, would radicalize me further.
Wayne State University is a largely commuter research university in the middle of Detroit. It’s known for its pre-professional paths towards both medicine, law, and business. For years, it was seen as an undesirable university where students may take longer to graduate undergrad, but as Detroit has experienced a boom of investment from the private class, the school has now become a hot destination for students looking to cut cost. Demographically, Wayne is a predominantly-white-institution (PWI). But additionally it has a large Arab population, given its proximity to nearby cities such as Hamtramck, Dearborn, Ypsilanti, and Sterling Heights.
My early experiences at Wayne felt overly programmatic, but lacking in depth. There were several opposing initiatives for black students that were configured in ways that added more complexity than clarity to the college experience. Programs like Apex Scholars called for underperforming students to complete two years of their undergrad education before declaring a major, which conflicted with course cycles, often resulting in students paying for 2-3 more years at the university. The Office of Multicultural Student Engagement (OMSE) was a promising new invention but had to over-solicit students to get them to visit their tucked away office on the 7th floor of the Student Center. And lastly, gender-based programs such as the Network and Rise, were top-down pedantic spaces that talked at black students.
It became clear very early that many black faculty had taken up paid research opportunities using these programs as testing labs for those personal gains. If you asked too many questions, you were condescended to. If a student fell behind, faculty would express sympathy in public but then pass moral judgements on to them in private. I realized that a whole economy had been built around the preservation of inequality. If problems were solved, research opportunities would fade. And many of these people knew it.
And that’s when my friends and brothers Cedric Mutebi and Damarius Brown aka “DB” propositioned me. Ced posed the question of starting our own organization dedicated to the retention of black men at Wayne State. For me, I had plenty of interest but I was a bit cautious. In some sense, I could see the desperate need for an organization of the sort but I was also terribly cautious about fostering yet another top-down space. Ced and DB were however more interested in my expertise and what it offered to a group of folk with differing skills. Something that I bought was a political and cultural lens that was desperately needed if we were to organize a space attentive enough to meet the needs of black men at Wayne State. I was well-read, but also had an interest in breaking down complex concepts for people in ways they can understand. But also I craved deep friendship and camaraderie with people before building projects. That pacing would be vital to us organizing together.
And so we did.
Very quickly, I drafted the first mockup of our constitution, and talked to each guy we were interested in to see what E-board positions we needed. For the time being we went with the good ol fashioned structure UofD’s student governments had : president, vice president, sergeant-at-arms, treasurer, secretary. All of these roles had defined roles that we honored verbatim our first year.
Much of our first year was incredibly DIY, funding each program with just our work-study income but somehow we always found a way. I can still remember us all chipping in for an absurd amount of ice cream bars just so we could pass them out to students and spark conversation on one of the hottest days on campus. We spent that day skipping class and just greeting anyone who would speak to us. “We’re the brotherhood, our focus is making sure that black men graduate.” We’d stage several similar engagements in the coming months often finding any excuse to talk to people. Valentine's Day? Let’s set up a card table. Mothers Day? Come write a note to your mom. This also included attending other student programs, hanging together, and then ideating our own events based on what we learned from events we witnessed.
Gradually as we continued this pop-up form of student engagement, administration started to leave their offices, taking photos of us for their own program newsletters. We allowed it. They expressed being so proud of us, yet they were still withholding capital. We would continue pushing.
During this time, we were collecting data. Understanding what programs and activities students felt pulled to. Along the way, we even picked up students willing to volunteer with set-up, planning, and even adopted 4 committees by 2nd semester. These included: communications, events, outreach, and finance. It was great progress. We were capturing the head—the logical action necessary to solve the problem. And also the hands--the action to take based on what we know. What we needed was the heart. What were folk craving? In what ways were folk scared or hopeful? This is where I needed to assert myself.
Our turning point actually came by absolute accident. It was our biweekly meeting and I was responsible for the agenda that week. Needless to say, sophomore year of university was a rather difficult one for me (more on that another time), so I didn't have time to craft an agenda. Naturally, the day we were underprepared was the day we greeted 40+ black men all looking for the exciting program that they had been catching on to. Demarius looked to me to lead us off. I had no agenda, no plan. I take a deep breath. I think of the Miles Davis quote:
”If you hit a wrong note, it’s what you play next that determines if its good or bad”
I then introduce myself and propose the room to reflect with me for the entirety of the meeting. I then ask…
“What's the hip-hop album that saved your life?”
Mind you, I’m a hip-hop fan but not a fanatic. For me, I was a backpacker and nerd that loved any hip-hop where I could see myself. I knew my album. It was “Food & Liquor” by Lupe Fiasco. Whenever I listen to “Kick Push” I can still see the loading screen of NBA Live 2007 on PlayStation 2. I can still see the cover with Tracy McGrady.
For me, that record affirmed by identity—understanding disparate urban experiences and the structural systems that foster them. I led us off sharing about the album and my connection to it. Guys in the room snapped, we moved to the next person.
We sat in the HIlberry B room for something like 3 hours, hearing albums from men of all shapes and sizes. Everything from MF Doom and G Herbo to Nicki Minaj and Nas. Somehow, I created an easy entry point for any guy to share a bit of themselves. I can still remember that feeling of breakthrough, all from me just “winging it.”
I dug deeper. That’s where we took up cultural programs that invited all of campus to have a free space to share their full selves. Everything from “Let’s Rap” a rowdy open-mic night to Dap Seminar, a full length program teaching folks the history of dap handshakes as an intimate practice exchanged between black men. We even took up silly game nights were folk competed fiercely for a random trophy we thrifted the morning of. What we started to build in that first year was the relationships needed to actually, truly contest for power.
Our second year, we hit the ground running. By this point we had secured a partnership with the Office of Multicultural Student Engagement (OMSE) where they would fully fund our programs while allowing us full autonomy over how we wanted to engage students. The Network stepped back from being the primary program for black men, to being a more broad resource supporting student-led programs. This required a meeting with these stakeholders where we presented our findings, our membership, and why we needed to be in the drivers seat of black male retention at the university.
These partnerships added more formal legitimacy to our program and met our demands of the university's resources. This is where we would start shaping Dinners for Winners, a hallmark program and baby of Cedric. Together we fundraised $30,000 in university dollars across departments for a month-long student program dedicated to connecting students with career opportunities, externships, and the necessary training to seize those opportunities. I guess it makes sense to talk a bit about Cedric here.
Cedric was a fellow classmate of mine at Uofd Jesuit who I graduated with. We weren’t super close in high school, only really interacting when I spent a short stint managing the junior varsity basketball team. That’s a story for another day. But he was recognizable to anyone in our graduating class for being tall, Ugandan, handsome and the top of his class. For Wayne State, he was the perfect mascot for diversity and the opportunities waiting for black students there. He was the counter-narrative to the statistics that had forsaken the university for many years. Because of this, he was in a perfect position to contend for capital at the university. So much of our ability to fundraise was a direct result of Cedric’s position at the university.
Our first year of programs, he was less available, often tied up with pre-med obligations. This would change Junior Year, as he would join in on the culturally rich nucleus we had built. In doing so, he would call upon some of our committee members to join the E-Board so that they can learn on the job with us. We called upon Miles Reuben, a film student with an innate knack for both community and creativity. Miles often traveled with a legion of black students all engaged in unbridled joy. Additionally Damon Creighton, a social work student from Wyandotte who was deeply thoughtful and willing to plug in any gaps. Duminie Allen, a fashion major who spoke seldom, but always identified a hole we needed to fill when we did. And lastly, Kamali Clora, a public health student that drew very similar to Ced in status but also donned a softside for trumpet.
By the time we graduated in 2020, the graduation rate for black men had climbed to 34%. We were in the peak of the pandemic, and I was turning to any bit of community I could to stay sane. I often say that I kinda just fell into organizing because there weren’t a ton of other work opportunities. Because of it, I think that I started organizing before I even got to think about who I am. I hadn’t answered that first question.
In many ways, my own identity as a black man had taken the backseat to issue campaigns where our possibilities were endless–so much so that it became almost disembodying to organize in an intersectional, multiracial lens. I work in climate work where often the most frontline people are often black women and elders. And while I will continue to organize those parties, I actually need to be organizing Black Men who are wrestling with their leadership. I began to wrestle with movement ecology which pushes us to organize the people who we feel accountable to. To organize people who share identities, values. I had to organize Black Men.
And so in 2024, I am returning to organizing Black Men. I organize for We The People MI, a statewide organization dedicated to building multiracial, working-class power. This work often happens through powerbuilding work, largely inspired by the Leadership, Organizing, and Action framework taught by Marshall Ganz at the Harvard Kennedy School. This has been my political home for four years now and I am grateful for all that I have learned.
But with that container comes other challenges. Multi-ethnic organizing, while vital, can sometimes be disembodying when we have an infinite amount of possibilities of who to organize. Additionally the Ganz framework Is merely one framework for changemaking, but not encompassing of all the cultural context we need as black people. It's generalized curriculum must be supplemented with culturally competent practices that form both community and radical governance.
Often issue campaigns such as energy democracy can feel so broad that we feel this urge to organize everyone. We often lose a sense of who we are, because we recognize that so many people are impacted by these issues. We feel a strong push to organize all of them and feel guilty if we don't. This sometimes costs us the chance to develop leaders willing to share the load with us.
When we do this, we hedge making an actual choice of who we need to organize. If we use broad terms like “working class” we might be referring to a broad spectrum of people. If we say “black people” we may do the same, never clarifying who we are actively in position to organize. These imperfections are human and okay in the immediate moment where we’re identifying that we need to take action. But it's then critical to open ourselves up to feedback, critique, and holding contradictions. Multiple things can be true.
I find that when we don't spend enough time discussing nuance, we shield ourselves from real accountability. Our decisions have implications and it is necessary to wrestle with that reality. Ultimately, we cannot please everyone even when we are leaning into the most radical politics we can imagine. Not in the immediate at least. We can however work towards a Northstar where nobody is without their basic needs.
For me, it feels critical to be building leadership teams for multiple subsets of our community. Black Men and Women. Queer comrades. Artists. Policy and legal professionals. Debtors and ratepayers.
Which brings us to Ginger Root….
So Why Ginger Root
I was recently talking to my friend and multidisciplinary artist Francesca Lamarre about the prominence of personal narratives in community work. She posited that people now center personal narratives so much to a degree where they don’t answer comprehensive questions about how they might show up in community. I thought that assessment was astute.
It's vital we make meaning of our journey to inform our why-- our purpose for action. Knowing what is at stake for us helps in our analysis of what we learn along the way. When we are not being challenged, we run the risk of learning the wrong lessons from action. This is why many leave electoral periods feeling more disempowered than empowered.
Our lessons must help us better serve our communities. In practice, I needed to build a container where I apply what I’ve learned along the way to meet the moment we’re in right now.
Black men are under attack. Much responsibility is being proposed to us but so few are taking responsibility for nurturing those traits. America’s liberal apparatus has shifted farther to the right over the past 40 years, yet black men are scapegoats for a nation's dying interest in neoliberal politics. These truths exist in direct tension with the immense community harm that black men are capable of when perpetuating patriarchy. We aim to empower victims and those who have been harmed amidst a paradigm where discardment and incarceration are the only systemized answers presented to us. All that to say, there’s much work to be done. And we have to get our hands dirty. With these realities in mind, I remind myself that I am not a guru. I am not a savior. I am an organizer.
Ginger Root will build a political home for Gen Z and Millennial black men through four workshops that build understanding of the four following competencies.
Self Interest: What’s at stake for us? What dominant narratives are we contending with? What hope exists for black men?
Safety, Harm, & Accountability: Forming shared definitions of safety, harm, and conflict resolution. Building individual Pod Maps to identify our personal networks, resources, and existing power dynamics.
Care, Community: Deeper understanding of our personal networks, their power dynamics, and what practices + systems we need to build abundance for everyone.
Positionality and Localized Strategy: Mapping local actors, forming power analysis, and identifying clear, obtainable steps to take together.
"Over the span of these workshops, participants will learn pod mapping, restorative justice, deep organizing, power mapping. But most of all, we will build obtainable, actionable steps for black men at a localized scale sponsored by We The People MI—a statewide organization dedicated to building multiracial, working-class power. "
I look forward to what this space will bring and will be writing about key takeaways from this workshop series, while witholding some of the reflections deemed sacred in that space. If you would like to attend our next session, you can register by filling out this survey.
And so as usual I want to leave you with a series of critical questions to walk away with. Hopefully they can foster some level of reflection for you.
Black men, in what ways are you not being softer with yourself and your peers?
What experiences have led you away from softness?
What will changing course cost you? What will you have to sacrifice to be softer?
What do you think is possible if you do?
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