‘If you’re taught that opening up will subject you to shame, why would you?’

Three years ago, when I was 13, I started school-provided therapy sessions. What I’d learnt about therapy had been formed by mediocre teen dramas; their only goal was to entertain, even at the expense of accuracy.

I wasn’t a mentally ill patient, teetering along the steep edges of consciousness, strapped into a straitjacket for my safety. There wasn’t a doctor in front of me scribbling nonsensical words onto a page, pushing his glasses further up the bridge of his nose.

Instead, an eccentric, expressive woman sat before me, abstract paintings placed haphazardly around the room’s walls. She listened and nodded as I laid out my truths, which all sprawled messily across the floor.

Throughout Mondays, I attempted to sort through the chaos.

Some sessions helped me sort through the piles just enough to see the pictures on the wall again. I felt in control. Finally.

Thousands of people gathered in June 2020 at Bristol’s Black Lives Matter march, following the death of George Floyd at the hands of a US police officer. Photo by Ellie Pipe

Black bodies are discarded at the side of a policeman’s foot, screens shoved in to capture eight minutes and 46 seconds of trauma again and again. Despite the challenges, it feels to me that almost no black men seek therapy.

The reasoning behind it is simple: black men do not ‘do’ therapy. It’s an issue that exposes a problem that has long affected the black community. Research by the charity Mind found that black men are more likely to be diagnosed with severe mental health problems, and to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. However, black boys don’t show poorer mental health than others until they reach the age of 11.

A significant amount of what we do is performative. We each live in social ecosystems that can only be maintained through the strict following of the roles that each person performs.

For example, sexist men deliver locker-room TED Talks on how feminism is an anti-men movement. They feed off their peers’ puffs of privilege. It’s all to keep the ecosystem of the male ego in order.

Black mens’ roles in these ‘ecosystems’ differ. Historically, we have had our roles changed to suit those who remain on the top of the food chain. Whether it’s a hooded figure warring eye-to-eye with the security guard in a store or a ‘difficult’ kid in class, we are the way we are because of whose dominance it protects: white men.

For the longest time, the progressive expression of black men meant that white men couldn’t cage us into subordination.

Black men were continually emasculated throughout history, even being sexually exploited. When slave revolts were becoming more prominent during the Colonial era, slave owners would publicly rape black men, as a caution to the black and suppressed masses.

Additionally, with the black men they saw as being genetically superior, white men would create sex farms, particularly in South America. The goal was to impregnate a woman, sometimes even a relative, so they would have more slaves for the future.

The statue of notorious slaver Edward Colston was toppled and rolled into Bristol Harbour during the Black Lives Matter march. Photo by Martin Booth

And so, black men, time and time again, would learn two lessons that have greatly shaped our identities, and, therefore, the very structure of the community. Black men learned, firstly, that vulnerability is associated with emasculation. And secondly, the patriarchal ecosystem will earn you a place at the table, but your blackness will mean you’re left to pick apart the crumbs at the sides of people’s plates.

If you’re taught that to open up will subject you to shame, why would you choose to do so?

If, from a young age, you see your father, uncles and cousins embracing the toxicity, why would you question it?

Today’s black men navigate spaces, proudly packaging the most vulnerable, human aspects of themselves on an abandoned shelf, never to be seen. It’s a crisis.

Black men feel pulled to the streets, magnets to the screech of police sirens that reach their mothers waiting for their arrival at the dinner table.

Black men’s inability to open up has gradually destroyed parts of our community. The message is seen through black children growing up without the stabilising hand of their fathers as they learn to ride a bike. It’s echoed through black men in the UK being three times more likely to be arrested than white men.

Bristol’s black mens’ stories are etched into the worn bricks containing block graffiti, in the booths of Felix Road Adventure Playground in Easton. Their expression tells stories of suppression.

Throughout therapy, it became clear that I was a product of my environment, as we all are. I understood how the culture that had mothered me was unhealthy, breastfeeding me historic views on healthy expressions for black men. With that realisation, I was able to question the greater systems at play – to question why everything is the way it is.

My whole life I’d been watching black boys grow from innocence to a voice through the phone of a hollow prison cell. If all black men have access to therapy and further emotional support, we’d be in a different position.

I’m in Year 11 now, still among the truths that lounge messily across the floor in the therapy sessions. I feel that I’ve shed the originally-sewn black shame that my 13-year-old self had.

We need to break out of a vicious cycle. Classrooms and playgrounds are home to another generation of black men, their faces, like their fathers’, set; forever unchanged. Another generation caught in the familiar spin of a vicious cycle. Therapy could equip us with the resources to break out of it. It’s imperative.

Bristol-based charity Nilaari offers specialist mental health support to BAME people. Young people can get support from Off The Record’s Project Zazi by visiting www.otrbristol.org.uk/what-we-do/zazi

Shaheim Minzie is a fifteen-year-old aspiring journalist, currently splitting his time between his studies and journalism.

Main image by James Eades via Unsplash

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