- Just ahead on "Black Issues Forum", Black men find themselves navigating a landscape of systemic challenges and invisible struggles with devastating impacts on their mental health, sometimes manifesting into suicide far too often.

But what lies beneath the surface of this invisibility?

We'll find out right after this, stay with us.

- [Narrator] Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[upbeat music] ♪ - Welcome to "Black Issues Forum".

I'm your host, Kenia Thompson.

From slavery to mass incarceration, Black men have endured generations of trauma that have been largely ignored or dismissed by society.

The stereotypes and expectations placed on Black men from the strong Black man narrative to the hypersexualization and criminalization of in media further perpetuate their invisibility and erode their sense of self-worth.

Today we dig deep into how we begin to see our Black men for who they really are and provide a safe space for healing that's long overdue.

To begin the conversation, I want to introduce our guests here on set with me.

First, I'd like to welcome Dr. Terrance Ruth, assistant professor at North Carolina State University, and Nathaniel Brown, who is a speaker, coach, and mentor.

Welcome to the show, gentlemen.

- Thank you.

- It's so great, I mean, we were talking a little bit before, this is a tough topic, but it's a very necessary topic for us to dig into.

In preparing for this show and doing research, I'm a Black woman, obviously I have Black men around me, but I'm not a Black man.

So I had to do some research.

And in doing that research I kept seeing and hearing the recurring themes of feeling unseen, of having no outlet.

And I wanna share a clip before you guys give me your perspective on that thought about really where the source of that comes from.

So let's take a look at this clip.

- When you look at the history of colonialism, you look at the history of slavery, the whole concept was how can we make Black men in particular as unnecessary as possible?

During slavery, like we talked about last time, protect and provide.

Men couldn't do any of those things.

So ideally, or not ideally, but essentially men didn't exist for 400 years.

Black men did not exist for 400 years.

Now because of that, we are hypersensitive to feeling obsolete.

And our women have also been socialized to reinforce the idea that we're obsolete.

- Now, that was from the "We Need To Talk" podcast.

And they talk a lot about relationships, but a lot of that stems from why there's discourse, right, between Black men and Black women.

But going back to that clip, the obsolete feeling that Black men have, is that something that you've seen rung true in your time, Dr. Ruth?

- Yeah, for me, I call it the default negative.

Most of our story is around this perception that at first the perception of me as a Black man is the negative.

And I have to prove that I'm the anti-narrative or whatever that default negative conversation is about Black men.

To hold that for so many years, not only does it move from white centric audience talking about Black men, but it moves into the Black culture.

And that's when you start talking about, in that clip where you were saying 400 years, we couldn't just do the basic, so now that becomes the brand of the Black man.

And so for me, I have seen this default negative, where as a Black man, by default, you must prove that you're not these negative expectations.

- Mm hmm.

- Yeah, I second that.

I can remember it's almost like technology is built in obsolescence, right?

Slavery has done a really good job in building in obsolescence in the minds of society as it pertains to what value Black men bring to the table.

I remember when my son was born in the hospital and I never will forget this, how overlooked I felt.

- Mm.

- Having all of the attention, and I understand the mother is doing the work, she's doing the labor, but to feel like I wasn't there, it's almost like there was an expectation of an absentee father.

And like that right there makes me, it's very emotionally triggering, but it calls me to arms.

Like, I will not be that narrative.

- Well that kind of goes into my next thought.

Research shows that there's a lack of father figures in Black households.

64%, 64% Forbes has reported.

We've seen that shift, right, to Black men, Black fathers in their children's lives.

But how did we get there and how significant is that lack of presence?

Start with you.

- Just, for me, there's some work to do in terms of understanding the history of the Black family.

And I had the opportunity to study history.

When you study history and you study slave history, you began to understand how difficult it was to keep your family together when either you were on different plantations or you had to have cousins.

That's why we use the word cousins all the time 'cause if we were moved to a different location, your cousins was gonna take care of you.

So to figure out how to hold that together was tremendous.

So research has pivot on the Black family and the Black father.

When slavery ended, Black men were going to look for his children and his wife.

So there was still a connection, there was a location.

If there was no connection, then what would you be looking for if slavery was over?

So there was a bond and there was a resilience even during slavery.

So there was a strength there to say, "I want to go and protect and be a part of."

And so that's the narrative we're starting at.

And so we have been living through what does it mean to go get our.

- Family.

- Yeah.

- To, and to piggyback on that, getting our family is, that's the job.

That's the, that's the work.

I remember reading through some narratives, and there was some newspaper clips where the slaves who had, well the former African slaves who were set free by the Emancipation Proclamation were putting ads in the newspapers to, with the names of their children, the potential ages of these children saying, "Hey, if you see this person, they will be this age.

I'm looking for them.

That's my daughter.

That's my son."

So that need for significance, and to be, to be needed again, I think is very important.

Black men are that we have a need to be needed.

It's real.

We want to be seen as not just a protect and provide, but sustain, give, nurture.

You know, those kinds of things.

And I think conversations around that need to be, they need to be had.

And this conversation is like, it's long overdue.

- Much, yeah.

Very much.

When I was talking to the men in my life, and doing research, the consistent recurring theme was, there's not a safe space.

You know, and I don't want to get emotional, but I have a young black boy, and I always tell him, "This is a safe space for you to share what you're feeling."

Talk about the mental, traumatic mental health impacts that, that trauma has.

And how has that trickled down to today's society?

- Go ahead, Dr. Ruth.

- So I want to start first with, if you look at the child welfare social support system, you have to think of when is the first message that you're not desired?

Like when is that, when does society, at what age do they say you're not desired?

So we zoom into the school system.

That's almost the first social structure they meet outside the church.

- Mm-hmm.

- The highest suspension is black male.

If you go to child welfare and adoption, the most unadopted human being on American earth is the black male.

If you go to who adopts, the most, the black man's less likely to go and get... Like you're talking about absence all the way through in each system.

If society at some point, either directly or indirectly, is telling you that you're not desired, then it's very difficult to find a safe place.

It's only when I lost my father that I began to understand my father.

But when he was here, he, there wasn't a conversation of, "You know what?

I'm not feeling the 100% today."

- [Woman] Yeah.

- Or, "Son, I'm not..." So we had to learn how to engage in these conversations.

- 'Cause there's no vulnerability.

- That's right.

That's right.

We had to, we had to learn those.

But society everywhere is telling you you're not desired.

If you're pulled over, you're not desired.

If you are in a corporate situation, you're not desired.

I mean, literally people will clutch their purse in a elevator with you.

- Yeah.

- And never been in a fight in my life.

But, but I at by default am undesired in that space.

So there's spaces that screaming to you that you're undesired.

And so that's what makes it difficult to find a desired space to feel vulnerable and connected.

- Yeah.

- Right.

100%, vulnerability is punitive, especially on plantation life.

A black man couldn't show weakness.

I was listening to a podcast with Busta Rhymes, and he was saying, you know, a black man can't even show that he's weak in society because of the stigma that's there.

We were, we as black men were used as the muscle of the plantation.

You, your only job was to move things, and make sure it got done right.

And if you showed weakness, you were cast aside.

- Yes.

- You were discarded.

So it's hard to find a place that's safe enough to handle your vulnerability, while at the same time highlighting what you're strong at.

And I think that kind of, it's dualistic, but it's necessary.

It's a necessary dualism to say you're vulnerable, and that, that show of weakness is what's making you strong.

And, and if we can have that kind of conversation with our black boys, it's okay to be emotional, just don't stay there too long where it starts to deplete your strength.

That's where the conversation starts to build the community back up again.

And people get to see, oh, this is a black man who is stepping into his power with his chest out and his shoulders back.

His head is up, and he's looking forward towards a brighter future.

- You know what's amazing is when I, it's only in retrospect that I go, "Man, maybe my father was depressed right here."

- [Woman] Yes.

- It's only in retrospect.

And I'm like, "Man, maybe my grandfather was trying to cope with."

- Yes.

- You know, and it's only in retrospect.

Yeah.

But in real time, it just wasn't a conversation.

ACEs, the Adverse Childhood Experiences, they linked trauma to biological change.

So they said, not only is trauma devastating to, you know, your hope, your dreams, but actually it hurts your biological health.

And so my father died of cancer.

His body began to break down.

- Mm.

- What's the link between that biological response and the trauma that he experienced?

He grew up in rural North Carolina.

And so for us, we spent so much time looking at the body, your body has to be healthy 'cause you gotta go to work.

But we weren't looking at the mind.

We weren't looking at the impact of that on my father's body.

And so I think ACEs said that the highest your score, so you just accumulate how many trauma events you've been through, the more impact it has on your body.

I can't imagine calculating the trauma for slavery.

- I could not.

- Desegregation of schools, the young kids that had to go into these school structures.

Like I can't even imagine the trauma, and then the impact it had on their actually biology.

- Right.

- And so for me, it's just, we haven't even delved into- - Oh, my gosh.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- This next question's a little hard for me, and I think it might be a hard response to hear for women, for black women in particular 'cause we have to put the mirror to our face now.

We play a large role in our black men's lives as wives, as mothers, as sisters.

What have we done to hurt black men?

And what can we do to help black men?

- Wow.

- For me, that's such a powerful question.

First, because if society is telling you that a man should be a certain way, and usually that's a very traditional role where we couldn't show emotion, we had to show strength, and we had to only provide financial, and security through that way, but not emotionally.

So there's a brand of masculinity that leans towards toxic masculinity, and the woman begins to put that expectation on the man, the moment they become vulnerable, the moment they don't show that traditional role, we have seen where men have been torn down by women for showing emotion, for showing compassion, for going through a depression.

Actually, during COVID, there was a couple, black couple, and the husband lost his job during COVID and went through a depression and his wife gave him a very difficult time.

And he was calling for support because he didn't know what depression was, he didn't understand.

He just knew that his value was only in his production of work, not in his ability to rest, not in his ability to enjoy family, not in his ability to love and care and show compassion.

It was only in the production of work.

And sometimes women can value that over other areas that could be helpful.

- 100%, it reminds me of a statement Chris Rock made in his standup.

He said, you know, "Only women, children, and dogs are loved unconditionally.

Men are loved under the condition that they provide something."

And that is a, although it was cloaked, sort of encryption, encryption is just the truth in cloak, that's what comedy is.

But it was cloaked in comedy, but man, that was the most powerful statement you could have ever made from a national stage because it's ideally what black men are facing.

You are as useful as as what you can produce.

And that's it.

And the black woman is the echo of the slave master's expectations.

- [Interviewer] Hmm, wow.

- That's what it has become.

You, don't you show emotion.

Well, that's the same thing that the slave master expected of them.

Don't you show weakness.

That's the same thing that the slave master.

So what we have in the black family, in the black community is a perpetuation of slave narrative that nobody realizes has threaded the entire community together around the same toxic ideologies.

I mean.

- And just to give sort of a zoom out macro view, we are in a region where we used to host the largest men, fatherhood conference.

It was the largest in the country.

That's the only place, I would always speak there, because it was the only place that you could see that many black men in one place, and it was the largest in the country.

Now we're expanding the conversation around gender norms, so even this conversation is becoming a subcategory of a much larger category.

So even in that conversation, it's making room for other conversations around gender norms.

But that conversation is becoming a smaller conversation just by volume of the room growing and the context that now black history has been sort of politicized.

What does it mean to talk about trauma connected to your race has been politicized.

So now I can't even find a safe place to talk about that which we would assume would've been just consciously agreed by the country.

Now there's challenges in that space.

- I wanna put a pause right there 'cause I wanna kind of shift towards suicide, which is a conversation that has really entered into media as of late for black men.

As the invisible struggles of black men continue to go unnoticed, the consequences are dire.

Suicide rates among black men are on the rise, highlighting the urgent need for action and advocacy.

Recently, actress Regina King spoke to Good Morning America about the suicide death of her 26-year-old son.

Here's a clip from that interview.

- I know that it's important to me to honor Ian in the totality of who he is.

Speak about him in the present because he is always with me and the joy and happiness that he gave all of us.

- [Journalist] But behind that joy and happiness, Ian's mental health took a toll.

- When it comes to depression, that people expect it to look a certain way and they expect it to look heavy, and people expect that- - It's okay.

- To have to experience this and not be able to have the time to just sit with Ian's choice, which I respect and understand, you know, that he didn't wanna be here anymore.

And that's a hard thing for other people to a receive because they did not live our experience, did not live Ian's journey.

- So that was hard to watch, hard to listen to.

There was a JAMA study in 2021 that reported suicide rates in black male adolescents have increased by 47% from 2013 to 2019.

Let's talk about why we're seeing such a rise in that number.

I mean, 2013 to 2019, we know the pandemic happened or was on the brink of happening.

Dr. Ruth, why do you think we see that?

- Yeah, research is telling us that there's a generation of young black men, black boys, that will live and die with a device.

The majority of their community is gonna be digital.

They're gonna spend more time in digital space than they will with their actual immediate family.

That community is almost never-never land.

- There's no adults, there's no, and so that community allows for them to be in touch with their emotions, with their lack, with their void, more than what I had when I was little, when I didn't have access to the world.

Without having an adult, someone to hold those vulnerable conversations with, being in an environment where it's almost all young people, almost all narratives of what you should be and what you are not, it leaves young individuals to the point where they believe that there's no point in even moving forward.

I teach on a college campus that had double-digit suicide, and to the point where it crippled the university, we had to have wellness days.

Now, we have wellness days where you can't, there was no such thing prior to that.

Now, we have wellness days where you pause, you can't have an assignment, you can't do anything, but there's a generation that's trying to grapple with being so in-tune with their emotion or lack of, without having a space to sort of zoom out and discuss with a community that loves you, and I think that void is making the assumption that there's few options when there are some options out there.

- We only have a few minutes left, so I want to kind of, I still want to hear your thoughts on that, but I want to hear what do you both, as fathers to Black boys, doing differently with your sons?

We'll start with you.

- I, because of my work, I'm not doing the day-to-day as much, but what I do, I wake him up, I get him to school, and we have conversations on the way to school.

When I go pick him up from school, I take him home, we have conversations, so having those conversations of, "How was your day?"

Right, because I didn't have that with my father.

I didn't have bedtime stories with my father.

So, I read him a story of a Black inventor, a Black influencer, someone in some sort of prominent position from history, and I read him a story about his heritage every night before he goes to bed.

I'm creating this manual, this journal of all of these stories and teaching him about the power of reading and knowing his history, and knowing his heritage, and understanding he has a part in that, and he can bring that resilience into his lifestyle every day.

So, yeah, that's my contribution to him is being that staple, that structure for his emotional intelligence, for his intellectual prowess, and his just overall identity.

- And for me, when me and my wife, when we go to counseling, we bring him with us.

We want to normalize counseling and therapy, so since he was a little one, he was with us in the conversation.

I didn't have that when I was little.

Also, when I'm exploring self-care, he's with me.

So, if I'm gone, and we both got our toes done together, [laughing] you know, so he gets a chance to relax and see the bubbles, but also, I journal, and it's my journal, but it's for him to read when he gets it.

So, I want him to, like, not have to guess about how I was feeling during certain moments, and the very last thing, he is having my undivided attention, sort of what you see here.

When we go to each other's homes, we are out in the yard, where there's animals, there's no digital, so we're, like, exploring family, and connection, and relationship, and it's a healthy exchange between fathers and sons, and I think that that's something that they're not going to see amongst their peers.

- Yeah.

How can society better support Black men?

Last question, Nathaniel, we'll start with you.

- I'd say normalize access to mental health care.

Normalize it, make the conversation echo, make it loud.

Mental health care is for Black men, and then normalize the competency levels of some of the healthcare providers or these providers, sort of therapies and all these other things, because I've noticed that even if you have a therapist, because I have a therapist who is not African American, if they are competent enough to understand history, they understand the goings ons of Black community, they can help with pinpointing what needs to be addressed and help shore up that strength in that Black male.

So, yes, absolutely that needs to happen.

- 30 seconds.

- I just think that we need to be honest about his story.

So, allowing Black men to understand their actual story, what they're connected to in the story of America to now, so that they can understand where they need to go in the future.

- Yes.

Thank you so much, gentlemen.

Dr. Terrance Ruth, Nathaniel Brown, I appreciate you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

And I thank you for watching.

If you want more content like this, we invite you to engage with us on Instagram using the hashtag Black Issues Forum.

You can also find our full episodes on pbsnc.org/blackissuesforum, and on the PBS video app.

I'm Kenia Thompson, I'll see you next time.

[upbeat electronic music] ♪ [upbeat electronic music continues] ♪ [upbeat electronic music continues] ♪ [upbeat electronic music continues] ♪ [upbeat electronic music continues] ♪ - [Narrator] Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.