As a mom elevating a Black boy, I’m starting to know one thing I wasn’t at all times taught to prioritize: the facility of Black male mentorship. The type that reveals up not simply as self-discipline, however as presence. Endurance. Steering. Vulnerability. There’s an actual hole in how we help our sons and a deeper one in how we help the boys they develop into.
I’m grateful for the numerous Black males doing the work of filling that hole. Phil Agnew is a kind of males. He’s a longtime group organizer and co-founder of the nationwide collective,
. Based in 2020, the
is rooted in therapeutic areas, political schooling and survival packages. Via that work, Agnew helps reshape what it means to be a Black man on this nation, not simply politically, however emotionally, relationally and spiritually.
Photograph courtesy of Phil Agnew.
Phil’s sense of group runs deep. “I grew up, I’m the son of preachers and lecturers,” he informed me. “My college was proper down the road from my home. My mom labored at my college. My grandmother labored at my college. All my lecturers, my mother knew them for like 20 years.” His whole world — college, church, even his first girlfriend — was rooted in relationships, household and familiarity. “I don’t know something however group,” he shares. “I don’t know how you can survive and thrive with out having that.”
Nonetheless, mentorship past household ties was one thing he craved. “I didn’t actually have [it] till I went to FAMU and I joined a fraternity and I had different individuals round me,” he says. “Different individuals would inform me after I’m erring and never on my sq., or I’m working in a aircraft that’s beneath me. There are function fashions and there are inspirations, however mentorship is a bit of bit extra intentional.”
That intentionality is one thing Black Males Construct is working to scale. Their males’s circles supply collective mentorship; areas the place brothers share experiences, classes and accountability. However the want runs deeper, particularly for the subsequent era. “I at all times yearned for it,” Phil stated. “It’s not automated.”
We talked in regards to the loneliness epidemic amongst males, the sobering suicide price for Black boys, and the way social media compounds all of it. “The web is exacerbating the alienation, the isolation, the individualism, the consumerism, the [comparisons] to a different individual.” But it surely’s not new, he stated. “For the final 400 years, we now have confronted this identical disaster of capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy. That could be a dehumanizing tradition to dwell in.”
So what do Black boys want? “We’d like revolution,” he informed me. “Cliché, proper? However what Black boys want, and what I want I had, was a plethora, a range, a cornucopia, a range, a litany of various pictures of what it means to be a grown or older individual like them.”
However none of this occurs in a vacuum. Phil doesn’t simply need boys to be informed they’ll cry. “We don’t say this sufficient, however you also needs to have the ability to chuckle,” he says. “I grew up in a group the place when you chuckle an excessive amount of, [people] can be like, ‘You goofy.’”
That freedom, emotional, non secular, and cultural, can’t occur with out security. “You sort of gotta ask, low-key,” he stated of mentorship. “I feel for there to be an actual mentorship relationship, there ought to be a degree of like, ‘Hey brother, I see one thing in you that I feel I would really like extra of to mannequin in myself. Are you able to assist me alongside that path?’”
Phil isn’t simply interested by techniques; he’s doing the internal work, too. “I needed to face myself in a manner that I had by no means needed to do earlier than. Why do you concern or hate being alone a lot? Why do you search for a lot validation exterior of your self?”
As our dialog concluded, Phil hardped on how vulnerability can’t be anticipated except it’s made protected and modeled by a trusted supply. “We are attempting to do [that],” he stated, “Present that there’s not one technique to be a person.”
