WHY BLACK MEN ARE ENVIED AND HATED AT THE SAME TIME....

"Black men loving Black men is a call to action, an acknowledgment of responsibility." So said Joseph Beam more than a dozen years ago in a passage that was resurrected for the introduction of the 1991 classic book Brother to Brother.

In 2002, writer Ellis Cose begins his new book by quoting Toni Morrison's novel Sula. "Nothing in the world loves a black man more than another black man," she writes. "It looks to me like you the envy of the world."

Why Black Men Are Envied & Despised

Cose's new book, The Envy of the World: On Being a Black Man In America, explores America's love-hate relationship with black men. "We evoke, in not quite equal measure, inescapable feelings of envy and loathing," he writes. But most of the envy is based on stereotypical notions of black masculinity, physical prowess and sexuality.


"White kids in the suburbs want to talk like us, want to walk like us, want to dress like us," Cose writes. "Yet, as much as they want to be like us, they have no desire to be us." They too know the challenges of being a black man in America.

In eloquent, articulate, and often passionate prose, Cose insightfully examines the duality of a socially-constructed "black masculinity" that reduces black men to stereotypes and simultaneously rewards and penalizes us for living up to those same stereotypes. For example, "our physical prowess and aggressiveness, so admired in sport, becomes something altogether different in noncelebrity mortals," Cose writes, and then contrasts the image of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods with "the dread and suspicion that greeted Rodney King ? whom the police, in defending their violently aggressive tactics, portrayed as some kind of quasi-mythical beast, imbued with herculean strength."

Although envied for our alleged physical prowess, we can quickly find ourselves despised and vilified for the same reason. With nearly a million black men in prisons and jails ? a population greater than the city of Washington or San Francisco ? Cose laments what he calls this "grand metropolis of wasted black potential."

Despite his useful and necessary critique of the larger society, Cose is at his best in his suggestions for what black men must do for ourselves. "There is something very wrong with the way many of us are defining our place in the world," he says. He challenges the thug mentality now popular in black communities that circumscribes black manhood based on negative and limiting stereotypes.

Rap stars, professional athletes and even some black professionals contribute to the problem by emulating the very stereotypes imposed by the larger white society. "We wallow in the stereotypes and call the practice 'keeping it real," he says, "without realizing that much of the so-called reality we cling to . . . is nothing but a tragic myth rooted in a time when white Americans, in order to feel good about themselves, needed to believe that we were something vile."

Speaking directly to black men, Cose writes: "Your best chance at life lies in rejecting what they ? what much of America ? tells you that you are, perhaps rejecting, in the process, ideas you have harbored for most of your existence of what it means to be black and male." Believe it or not, this entire discussion above comes from the introduction of the book.

Black Men In School


The book's first chapter, "A Song of Celebration," profiles several successful African American men in a range of different fields. In subsequent chapters, Cose explains how black men come to identify education with white or feminine traits. Some of the smartest guys in the ghetto are "lured to the idea of being a player, hustler," according to Alden Loury.


The drug dealers want the smart, ambitious young men to work for them and do a better job at recruiting than teachers often do, Cose suggests. He interviews one young man who said he felt "a lot of peer pressure to sell dope . . . but none to go to school." Cose writes, "Teachers have a responsibility (whether they seek it or not) to show how education can be a bridge to a new world."

Citing statistics that blacks are more likely than whites to think that black men are "born with less ability," Cose reminds us that we have to unload the baggage that we've picked up about ourselves. "It's not so important that we shout it, but that, deep down, we believe it," he writes.

After teaching political science for two years at American University in Washington, I never once had a black male student in any of my classes. Black women, on the other hand, were far more present. If education becomes an option primarily for black women, we virtually condemn a whole gender of our race to substandard lives and continue to frustrate successful black females seeking equally successful black male partners.

Black Men In Prison

With nearly a million black men in prison or jail and 14 million black and Latino males who will spend some part of their lives "locked down," Cose's discussion of prison culture should be read by every federal and state legislator. He goes back to the 1960s to show how the early "tough on crime" policies developed, tracing their history to an article by criminologist Robert Martinson that "nothing works" in terms of prison reform.


In 1973, New York's draconian Rockefeller drug laws were passed. As Republican presidents from Nixon to Bush campaigned against "soft on crime" Democrats, a prison industry developed, prison sentences grew longer, parole diminished, rehabilitation disappeared, prison life became more harsh, and vengeance became an acceptable basis for incarceration.

But the solutions were short-sighted, according to Cose. With 600,000 inmates a year released into predominantly poor, nonwhite communities, most of them are "less employable, angrier, and very much at risk of returning to the same associations and same practices that landed them in the penitentiary in the first place." Unless we're prepared for the huge costs of locking them all up and throwing away the keys, we need to plan how to rehabilitate and re-integrate ex-convicts back into society.

But who is creating alternatives? Even black churches are "more concerned with building bigger churches than building schools for kids," one commentator says. For all our propensity for conspiracy theories, black folk aren't doing a lot about it. And that's not terribly surprising, considering that black folk can be just as conservative and short-sighted as whites sometimes.

12 Things We Need to Know


In the end, we cannot ignore the effects of racism, but nor can we allow racism to limit or define us. "To be born a black male in America is to be put into shackles and then challenged to escape," Cose writes. But he says it would be a "mistake on our part to see racism as an all-powerful force over which we simply don't stand a chance."

Cose ends his book by offering 12 "hard truths" for black men's survival. Most of the 12 rules are repeated from earlier in the book, but it's a useful, if not gimmicky, tool to consolidate the threads of the book. Only 163 pages in length, the book is still repetitive and long-winded at times, and the author's interviews with various black men didn't do much to inform or inspire me.

In the end, what's good about this book far outweighs what little bad there may be. It should be read by everyone, but at the very least, all black men should read this book. If I had the money, I would buy the book for every black man I know. The Envy of the World is a well-written, well-documented, and well-argued case for black men to change ourselves, and in so doing to change our families, our communities, and our society.