By Kevin Powell

I received a very distressing email a few days back, from someone who informed me that a long-time friend and colleague of mine had had a mini-stroke. I was stunned because this friend, a Black man just barely 40 like myself, holds a black belt in the martial arts, works out religiously, and dating back twenty years, when we both were then members of the Nation of Islam, he has always been very conscience of the food he puts into his body. In fact he is a vegetarian. When I called my friend on his cellphone, he was lying in a hospital bed. He sounded terrible, groggy, and, well, very sad.

My friend is an amazing educator, one of the best I’ve encountered, one who worked his way up from being a teacher to an in-demand principal in a very short amount of time. And because there are so few Black male principals in the New York City area—or across America, for that matter—my friend not only carried the burden of overseeing an entire school, but of being a beacon of hope to students, parents, and a community.

“It was stress,” he muttered to me before I could ask him what happened. The stress of his job, the stress of being a father and a grandfather at a very young age, of having been married and separated, of being a Black male in America. Unfortunately, I know of about ten Black males in the past six months alone, ranging in age from 30something to 70something, who’ve all died of completely preventable ailments. One colleague, a producer at a major television network, also suffered a stroke, then a heart attack, and died, in his mid30s. Another, a 60something husband, father, church leader, entrepreneur, homeowner, and all around community man, was told by his doctor, at least a year before he died, that if he stopped drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, and using drugs, he would live. Stubborn to a fault, this man did not stop, could not stop, and his shriveled up body in a casket betrayed the power and strength he once wielded like a plate of armor.

Why, you might wonder, would someone in his position drink, smoke, and use drugs? I think it undeniable that while America is not the country it once was, thanks in great part to the Civil Rights Movement, the harsh reality is that racism still exists, on every level, and it affects us Black males, on every level. I am talking physically, spiritually, and emotionally. I am talking about younger Black males and older Black males; working-class Black males and professional Black males; famous Black males and anonymous Black males; Black males with college degrees and Black males who do not even have a G.E.D.

So what winds up happening is the constant search for an outlet, often a destructive and self-sabotaging one, to ease the pain and hurt of the daily weekly monthly yearly assaults we feel are launched on our psyches, on our souls, on our bodies. Those assaults can take the form of police harassment or brutality. Or not being able to find a job no matter how qualified one is to work. Or being wrongly accused of a crime. Or having paid your debt to society via prison time and no one—no one—being open to employing you for even the most minimal of jobs. Or never quite feeling you’ve made it, no matter how wildly successful your life has been, materially, because there is always the sinking feeling, lurking right there in the shadows, that it can be lost or taken away without a moment’s notice. Or the gaping hole you feel because the women in your life simply do not respect you or your very difficult struggles to be a man, to be a whole human being. And the beat goes on and on—

That is precisely what happened to me, over a decade ago, when I was fired from Vibe magazine. Depressed, filled with anxiety and a smoldering rage, I contemplated suicide (I felt like a miserable failure), I turned to alcohol and it literally became my best friend. It got me through the days I could not look myself in the mirror, and it helped me to go to sleep at night. I do not drink, today, and never will again, but I overstand why Black males in America do what we do. But after years of crisscrossing America doing speeches, workshops, conferences, etc., on Black males; after writing a book (Who’s Gonna Take The Weight? Manhood, Race, and Power in America) about manhood, it has become abundantly clear to me that so many of us Black males simply do not know how to take care of ourselves, holistically, in the face of the multiple challenges we confront every single day.

My suggestion is that we first begin to view our lives from the standpoint of good health versus bad health. Good health means we become active participants in taking care of our physical, mental, and emotional selves. Bad health means we continue to ignore our physical, mental, and emotional selves and continue to engage in behavior (no exercise, terrible diets, violence, alcohol, nicotine, drug, or sex addictions) that ultimately will, over time, damage and destroy our lives.

Here is what I strongly recommend Black males think about in terms of our health, holistically:

I. Taking Care of Your Physical Health

We need to begin with listening and asking the right questions of our family members. Does your family, for example, have a history of diabetes, of high-blood pressure and heart attacks? It is critical that you learn your family health history as soon as possible, especially the history of the Black males in your family.

Next, very important that you make a conscious decision to change your diet. What we put into our bodies has so much to do with our physical health, with how we feel about ourselves over time. One of the questions I routinely ask Black male audiences is this: How many of you are drug addicts? Usually I get uneasy laughter, silence, perplexed stares. But then I take it a step further: If you cannot go ONE DAY without sugar, caffeine (soda or coffee), fast foods, nicotine, marijuana (or some other kind of drug), or sex (yes, if you cannot live without having sex all the time, then you do have a problem, an addiction), then you are, in fact, “a drug addict.” And naturally the hardest thing for any of us to do is to stop or slow down things that we’ve come to like, things that taste good to us, things that make us feel good.

But we should know that consuming large amounts of sugar over time leads to diabetes. We should also know that consuming large amounts of caffeine over time leads to heart problems, among other possible ailments. And having sex with multiple partners, in the age of AIDS and the re-emergence of other sexually transmitted diseases, can be catastrophic to your health (not to mention that every time you have sex with someone you are also having sex with everyone that person has ever been with, and vice versa). We, including me, have all engaged in one or more of these debilitating activities.

But if you can struggle to change your behavior around your diet, to keep your weight at a reasonable level, to avoid the extreme obesity which is at an all-time high in America (I have never seen so many younger and older Black males so far overweight and struggling just to climb flights of stairs or to walk down a street), then the other steps will be that much easier:

• Regular exercise (even if it is just walking 15 minutes a day, or biking, or rollerblading, or doing push-ups, sit-ups, and jumping jacks at home 3-4 times each week)

• Creating a diet for yourself where you actually think about what is in the food you are putting into your body (eating healthier does not mean you have to spend a lot of money on food; it simply means you think more about proteins and vitamins, think more about the kind of food you eat OR change the food you eat); either surround yourself with other folks who are also trying to live better lives, physically, or you become the example for others, to inspire them to also cease with the fast foods, the cigarette smoking, the binge drinking, the irresponsible sexual patterns.

We as Black males need to view ourselves as soldiers in a constant state of war. Either we are going to prepare ourselves physically for battle, and be able to ward off the attacks from various angles. Or we are going to be underdeveloped soldiers who are more likely to be wounded, more likely to be prone to various forms of attack.

II. Moving Toward Mental Wellness

In my work I have come to find that it is very difficult for us males to open up about what hurts us. Think about the film Antwoine Fischer. The title character had survived a childhood of neglect and sexual abuse only to become an adult who could not talk about his lingering emotional injuries, could not fully open up to a woman he had deep affections for. And when he went to counseling, there was that wall of pain built by the childhood him to protect the adult him. By the time the Antwoine Fischer movie ended, I sat in the back of the theater with hoodie on my head ballin’ like a baby.

I remember hearing many brothers saying they were not going to shed tears when they saw that film because they were told that that was what was going to happen. Just to make that sort of proclamation, in advance, about the unwillingness to show real emotions is part of the problem with so many of us. In this society we’ve been taught that males do not cry, do not express raw feelings, do not let others know when we are hurt or in pain, physically or emotionally, or both. That manhood is about cockiness, domination, bravado, “manning up” (perhaps one of the worst terms ever created) and, sadly for many of us, violence.

These are things I have had to grapple with in my own life journey. I was born into a household and a community steeped in physical, emotional, and verbal violence, and that become a part of my being. I got hurt again and again as a child, and I eventually hurt others as an adult. Only through the grace of a higher power and nearly two decades of therapy have I been able to not only think about my past with a relatively clear head, but to take the necessary steps to begin to get past that kind of mental unwellness once and for all.

But the first step is to take ownership of one’s life. Again, racism is a daily constant for the Black male. But in the face of that harsh reality, we need to ask what mental illnesses have we picked up along our life journeys that stunt our emotional growth, our emotional well-being? For some of us, it is violence, against ourselves, against other males, against women and girls. For others, it is constant stress and anxiety. For others it is sparring matches with depression. Still others have low self-esteem and little or no expectations for our lives. And then there are those who consistently think of taking their lives, who think of suicide on a regular. And please be clear that there are two forms of suicide: the quick kind where you end your life with a gun as more than a few Black males I know have done this decade. Then there are those of us who smoke and drink and drug ourselves into what I call “slow suicide.”

Finally, at the end of it all, our health and wellness as Black males takes time and commitment and patience, and acceptance that we are going to make mistakes, that we are going to fall down, that we are going to fall backwards. The critical thing is to never stop striving to do differently, to be differently, to be a new kind of Black male. Think of what Malcolm X was when he went to prison for seven years, and think about what he became when he was released from jail. It did not happen overnight, but Malcolm’s life is testimony that personal growth and transformation is very real and possible. But it takes real work and real self-reflection and brutal honesty. Otherwise, nothing is going to change for us, in my opinion.

Sadly, with so many Black male studies, reports, conferences, think tanks, ad-hoc committees, etc., all across America, none of those efforts are going to matter, from this era to the next, from this generation, to the next, from this century to the next, if we as Black males do not come up with very simple and basic solutions for surviving, living, and winning. Nor will all those activities matter if we do not actually become the real and permanent Black manhood changes, to paraphrase Gandhi, that we need to see in our communities. For these times, for all the brothers who ain’t here, and for all the Black males to come.

Kevin Powell, writer and activist, is a Fair Health Journalist Fellow for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Phelps Stokes Fund Senior Fellow, and editor of the forthcoming book, THE BLACK MALE HANDBOOK: A Blueprint for Surviving, Living, and Winning, which will be published in 2008. He can be reached at kevin@kevinpowell.net.