Why We Like Our Man-Caves
African American males are the most marginalized group in this country. We have lower employment levels than any other group. A study from the Brookings Institute reports that Black men have the lowest employment rates of any race or gender in this nation. Many Black men who have jobs find that they make low wages and may not be employed full-time. The Brookings report points out that many Black men are missing from the data that reports employment statistics. So, the picture of employment as it relates to Black men may be even bleaker than anyone knows.[i]
We have the highest rate of incarceration as a group. Some of you may be familiar with the term “mass incarceration.” This term refers to the explosion in the prison population that occurred over a twenty-five-year period beginning in the early 1980s. During that period, the prison population nearly quadrupled. Black men bore the brunt of this explosion. African Americans and Hispanics have been disproportionately impacted by mass incarceration. The national incarceration rate for Whites is 412 per 100,000 residents, compared to 2,290 per 100,000 residents for African Americans, and 742 for Hispanics. Approximately 12%-13% of the American population is African American. Less than half of that number are men, but they make up approximately 40% of the prison population. That is a vast overrepresentation.
While one-in-thirty men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for Black males in that age group the figure is one-in-nine. Black women in their thirties, by the way, have hit the 1/100 mark in that one in one hundred Black women in that age range are now behind bars. There are now more African American men in prison, on parole or probation than there were in slavery in 1850.[ii]
Black men in this country have the highest mortality rate of any race or sex in this country. The life expectancy at birth for White men in this country is 83 years. For Black men it is only 72. The top five causes of Black men’s death in 2014 were: heart disease at 24.8%, (2) cancer at 23.0%, (3) unintentional injuries at 5.8%, (4) stroke at 5.1%, and (5) homicide at 4.3%.[iii] The life expectancy for Black men declined from 2000 – 2014. We are more at-risk of just about every negative outcome there is. And I’m convinced that all of this is by design, because keeping Black men marginalized serves to keep the entire race down.
So, we have developed survival strategies just to be able to make it from day to day. As a minister, I’ve found that even those Black men who appear to be doing alright are feeling tremendous pressure from society, from the community and sometimes, even from their own family. They have been so beaten down by life, they feel so oppressed, so powerless that they have learned to hide out in their cave.
One of the things I did for almost 10 years to keep body and soul together was selling houses. One thing I learned when I had a married couple who was looking to buy a house was to focus on the basement and the garage for the husband. All the rest of the house could be beautiful, but the thing that is of most interest to the man is the basement. While the wife imagines how she will make the rest to the house beautiful, the man wants to know about his prospective man cave. For this reason, I paid particular attention to the basement when I rehabbed the houses because that is where the man will spend a lot of his time in the house. After he has been out in the world scratching out a living for his family, perhaps dealing with all kinds of slights and disrespect, he wants to go into his cave to lick his wounds. Prepare to fight another day.
[i] Why are Employment Rates So Low Among Black Men https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-are-employment-rates-so-low-among-black-men/
[ii] Criminal Justice Facts (https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/), The Sentencing Project, 2019
[iii] Mortality Among Black Men in the USA