The process of becoming a man is much like assembling a thousand-piece puzzle. During our formative years, important people in our lives—parents, coaches, teachers, aunts, uncles, mentors, and others—hand us the pieces and help us fit them together. The pieces might include personality characteristics, goals, talents, admonitions, smiles, spiritual proclivities, and other aspects of life that contribute to the making of a human being. Much of college is about rearranging those pieces and developing an identity that will allow for a productive and meaningful life.
The search for identity is universal, but it comes with additional challenges for black men, who live in a society that is often disparaging of black manhood. As a result, many college-age black men are struggling to piece together identities that allow them to be whole.
For these men, attending college is as much about a search for identity as it is about obtaining good grades. While college is primarily an academic pursuit, it is also a time for personal acceptance. For young adults, the college years coincide with the end of physical growth and the maturation of the brain, changes that are often overlooked. All of this happens at a crucial time for the attainment of identity and integration of roles.
As a therapist at a predominantly black, all-male college, my goal is to help young men make the transition into healthy adulthood. This can be accomplished only with a contextual understanding of the problems that bring them to my office. We may see students with depressive symptoms who use drugs and alcohol to self-medicate, and others who are dealing with issues of black masculinity.
Every student who seeks help for a mental illness or emotional problem expresses a unique set of symptoms, which for black men often reflects the influences of family, culture, and oppression. Therapy for young black men must take into account the profound way in which our manhood is defined by our families. Much like the Walter Lee character in Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun, black men often look to their roles within their families to sanction their ascension into manhood. There is a process of expectations and approval that defines what it means to be a man. Black men often come to college with the expectations of their families guiding their decisions. Majors, girlfriends, and extracurriculars are chosen based on family beliefs and hopes. The prospect of not living up to the dreams of family and community can have a devastating impact, even leading to mental-health issues when the gap between the perceived self and ideal self is seen as unmanageable.
This gap can be widened by the expectations that many historically black colleges place on their students: Morehouse College, where I work, tells every new student that there is a crown placed above his head that he must grow to earn. Historically black colleges sometimes not only become surrogate families for these students, but also become the bearers of the right of ascension into manhood.
African-Americans have created a unique culture in America. It is a culture defined by the importance of our African heritage and tempered by callous enslavement, the immorality of the “Jim Crow” era, and the microaggressions that persist in daily life. These realities have evolved into an African-American culture of resilience and spirituality. This culture emphasizes a spiritual understanding of mental and emotional disorders first: It is likely that many of the young black men who seek therapy initially prayed about their problem and/or sought support from their imam, minister, priest, or Babalu (a deity in Santería and other religions). Effective therapy and treatment embrace the importance of culturally based spiritual beliefs and do not ignore it. Ignoring it will very likely lead to the alienation of the young man and a loss of rapport.
Black people in America are united, in part, by a shared experience of oppression. It dominates much of the political, historical, and economic conversation in our community. While there can be strength in this belief, living within a framework of oppression can also exact a great cost. Many black male college students are there as a result of their families’ hopes and dreams and financial sacrifices. They feel an obligation to help improve their families’ lives and society as a whole—a burden that is uniquely expressed within the identified oppression of their culture. For example, some black male students feel a dissonance between their individual identity and their perceived group identity. They may feel positively about themselves, but negatively about the identified group to which they belong. This dissonance requires a severing of one’s identity at a time when identity development is paramount. In treatment, these students often express disdain for black people in America and often attribute their situation to poor, culturally based habits or individual shortcomings. One of the goals in therapy is to reframe this condition and to resolve the dissonance between an individual’s perceived self and his perception of himself as part of the group he identifies with.
In many respects, the traditional model of therapy does not work for black men. Men in general are less likely to acknowledge mental or emotional disorders or to seek counseling. For black men the trend is magnified, in part due to a distrust of authority that is rooted in myriad personal and shared experiences of degradation. When black male students come to us for counseling, we need to discuss confidentiality in greater detail and assure them we will respect their privacy. They need to know that even their presence in therapy is confidential.
By the time they reach college, these men are often struggling to understand and embrace the person they have become. Their work in therapy is to integrate their various roles into one unique identity and to be comfortable with this developed identity. Young black men struggle with multiple identities, and it is the full integration of these identities that often becomes the goal in therapy. Family and cultural identity often provide the most salient influences on identity. However, an understanding of the impact of oppression on daily life is also important, since assumptions about self efficacy can be rooted in one’s perceived ability to effect change.
Oppression-related assumptions often play out within a larger societal context. For some young black men, the shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Mo., is a reminder of the depths of second-class citizenship in an unjust law-enforcement system. Black men are often very reluctant to share personal stories of trauma because of the associated indignation and humiliation. So the trauma often goes untreated or is ignored but continues to disrupt personal and professional life. We have found that discussing a significant news event with students, both in therapy and during campuswide events, can help build rapport and lead to the uncovering of important personal trauma relevant to the therapeutic relationship.
The case of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Florida teenager shot and killed two years ago during an altercation with a man on neighborhood-watch duty, raised similar issues. It was determined that the defendant was justified in using deadly force due to the perceived threat of harm. During the trial the defense used a cement block to mimic the potential harm of the defendant’s body or head hitting the sidewalk. To a young black man, the message was that all physically mature black males are walking threats, armed or not.
While this sentiment in society is not often the focus of therapy with black male students, it underlines and punctuates much of the frustration and anguish that bring them to counseling. National events such as the recent shootings can have a profound impact on identity development and the transition into healthy adulthood. We cannot underestimate their importance.
G. Talib Wright is director of the Counseling Resource Center at Morehouse College.
