boys to men

You MUST read this fascinating post on author G. Neri’s site.  I found the link on another great new blog, Crazy Quilts, which Doret Canton shared with me.  I have to say, as a feminist, I get a little anxious when I hear people talking about the differences between girls and boys.  It’s not that I don’t believe differences exist, it’s just that people are so comfortable with binaries that they often can’t accept that there’s a lot of gray area in between.  Plus gender is constructed, and many people still believe boys (and by extension, men) are “wired” differently.  In other words, it’s in their DNA so they can’t help themselves.  But I digress.  This post is amazing b/c it’s a conversation with half a dozen men about their own relationship to reading, and that’s a great place to start if we’re going to address the problem of many boys not reading enough (or at all).   I did watch Bill Cosby on Meet the Press yesterday morning, and didn’t find that the conversation added anything new to the debate around personal responsibility versus structural oppression.  The moderator played that same old clip of Barack Obama on Father’s Day, calling on all those black fathers who are “AWOL” or “MIA.”  The military terms are problematic enough, but it’s nothing new–for decades we’ve been hearing that call: “Black men!  Stand up!  Step up!  Be better fathers and husbands–save the black family, the black community, the black race!”  That’s a lot to put on any one individual, though I do believe that altering a group’s behavior can change things dramatically.  And we do need to understand why so many men aren’t parenting their kids.  But too often those calls end up underwriting patriarchal masculinity–the idea that men are “naturally” meant to lead; they are the head of the family, the church, the state–they are “the decider,” and protector/provider for dependent women and children.  What I’d like to see are the OTHER models of masculinity, and a conversation around the progress we could all make if black men stopped buying into patriarchy.  You can be a man and STILL love to read.  You can be a man and STILL cook dinner for your kids.  You can be a man and NOT be the primary breadwinner.  You can talk openly about your feelings and NOT be “a punk.”  That’s the kind of masculinity I try to portray in my writing–not fully achieved, but in progress.  It was really important to me in writing Bird that the child turn to the other men in his life and find tenderness and understanding.  I love it when artists show their characters grappling with who they want to be, and who they feel they ought to be.  If boys spend all their free time playing video games and watching rap videos on BET, they won’t know that there are other ways of being cool and earning respect–it’s not about “bling and bitches,” or dominating other men through violence.  But I don’t know how likely we are to lure boys away from the TV and into a book, and since we can’t immediately change the games they’re playing, the TV shows they’re watching, or the films they see in the theater, we have to teach them to consume those texts more critically.  I’m not sure I agree with Jesse Joshua Watson‘s assertion that picking up a book automatically counters consumerism.  It really depends on the book, and how the child is taught to read it.  I was watching C-Span the other day, and they showed a panel of black publishers talking at the 2008 Harlem Book Fair.  I think they were deploring the rise of street lit when one male publisher said he didn’t think kids should be censored b/c he came to reading through “girly magazines.”  I read a speech by Julius Lester in which he, too, advocated less inteference in children’s reading selections since he grew up reading comic books and true crime reports.  Author/illustrator Don Tate admits he’d rather see his 7-year old son reading educational books, but will settle for Sponge Bob if it gets his son hooked on reading.  I don’t have kids, so I’m not sure what I’d do in that position, though I KNOW that if my son wanted a subscription to Playboy, I’d say “Hell, no!”  I haven’t read Chess Rumble yet, but have heard great things and plan to check it out.  As far as getting more boys into reading, I think the key to change is incentives…I don’t support paying kids to get good grades in school, but I do think you need to give an incentive that’s tangible, something more than, “Trust me, this is good for you.”  I just want to make sure that when we try to provide books that appeal to boys, we don’t reinforce stereotypes or otherwise glorify problematic images of the hustler, or thug, or pimp.  I’m not saying books can’t have violence in them, but I would like to see more books that complicate the tired old formula of “how to be a man.”