Narrative Project Tells ​“These Truths”

There is a ​“gravitational pull” dragging down Black men in America. ​“There’s no respect in our community for each other as brothers.” ​“There are not enough men who are positive role models.” ​“What can we do as a society to lift Black men up, because y’all did a hell of a job tearing them down?”

These and many other hard truths came to light Wednesday night in the screening of and panel discussion about the short film These Truths: A Documentary on the State of the Black Community, hosted online by The Narrative Project and drawing an audience of about 100.

The Film

The documentary involved discussions between a group of Black men, and a group of Black women, speaking with uncommon candor about the issues they face as Black parents, siblings, friends, and community members, using as a focal point the life of Erik Clemons, who came from public housing in Norwalk to become president and CEO of ConnCAT and a major community leader. The question Clemons asked: Why had he seen success when so many Black men ​“didn’t make it?”

The discussions among the men in the film felt raw and vulnerable, as they talked about how they were given definitions of success that involved getting out of the community they were raised in. ​“You have to step on someone else to be successful,” said one. They talked about the absence they felt of Black men to look up to in their lives when they were children. ​“The men before us failed. Who’s going to show us the ropes?” said one participant. But then he turned the lens on himself. ​“We talk about kids coming underprepared to school. Households being underprepared. What is it that is keeping us behind? I would say, it’s because I failed.”

“We have to take the narrative back,” said another. ​“We got to get rid of the baby fathers and start being husbands.”

For their part, the Black women in the film described themselves as ​“our brothers’ keepers.” ​“I struggle with trying to teach them lessons that keep them safe and alive without making them scared of the world,” said one. ​“We have to do it all.” It wasn’t in the interest of people in power to make change. ​“We have to come up with solution.”

In an interview in the film, Clemons recalled a sense of support growing up that, in the context of the conversation that preceded it, felt like a contrast. He was ​“accountable to my peers and the elders, always thinking about the wisdom they gave me,” he said. ​“Our young black men do not have that. If they do, it is very few and far between.”

But that family upbringing did not stop Clemons’s brother from being shot and killed at 18, when Clemons was 22. ​“When I found him in the parking lot, and put him the back of the car, and drove him to the hospital,” Clemons said, he felt guilty. ​“He was gifted and didn’t exercise his gift, and I knew he was gifted and didn’t tell him.”

That guilt, Clemons added, was part of the driving force that led him to his community work. ​“I want to make sure I do for others what I didn’t do for him,” Clemons said, helping younger people identify ​“who they could be.”

Once they know, he added, ​“they walk with a sense of agency.” That led him to a deep comparison between Black and White families. ​“I think White people teach their kids lessons for success, while we were taught lessons for survival,” he said in the film.

The Discussion

The discussion reconvened a small group of people who had been involved in the documentary, which was filmed two years ago. Clemons was joined by Cerella Craig, a candidate for a masters in public health at Southern Connecticut State University; community member Che Dawson; Kevin Walton, co-founder of WiseDog Strategic Solutions, LLC & Storytellers New Haven; and Cynthia Farrar, who co-produced These Truths with Clemons. Babz Rawls Ivy of Inner City News and WNHH moderated the discussion.

“I was quite moved, because oftentimes we don’t see these kinds of conversations taking place with Black men,” Rawls Ivy said. ​“There is no place for Black men to have these conversations” today, she continued. They used to happen in barber shops, clubs, fraternities, and churches. And even when they happened, ​“White folks were never privy” to them. How much pain were the participants in that conversation still holding onto, two years later?

“The pain is always there,” Clemons said. ​“But the pain used to be suffering. There is always a sense of survivor’s guilt as it relates to my brother. And success guilt as it relates to where I come from.” Revisiting that meant ​“going back to a place that was very special for me,” he continued. ​“It was therapeutic” and ​“I felt incredibly blessed.” He reiterated that the guilt was ​“an impetus for me to do the best that I can. The reward has been the success, but that was never the reason.”

Dawson — who had voiced his sense of having failed in the documentary, talked about the need for ​“the willingness to say that we failed, that we haven’t done enough.” Too often, he said, people’s willingness to give to their neighbors was ​“correlated with our success,” and not with the ​“need in the community…. nothing changes until we’re willing to have that sacrifice.”

Walton echoed Clemons’s story, saying that he lost 20 friends to violence growing up on Staten Island. ​“I deal with the guilt every day of not being back in Staten Island with my family, doing some of the work I do here,” he said.

But ​“we’re familiar with being under attack. We come out swinging. That’s what makes us a great people,” said Craig.

A question arose about Farrar’s involvement, as a White woman, in the creation of a film about deep issues within the Black community. ​“What’s a White producer doing here anyway?” Farrar recalled asking herself. But as she worked with Clemons, she came to understand that ​“we are part of the conversation, whether we are actually speaking, or simply present…. The underlying premise is that these conversations have to happen in each other’s presence.” The film, she added, was ​“meant to open up a different kind of conversation…. It was key to have someone who didn’t understand what went on among Black men and Black women.”

That allowed Rawls Ivy to voice a concern. ​“I’m always concerned when White folks talk about accountability,” she said, as if ​“what has happened to us is our fault…. How much accountability can we secure within ourselves in these intimate spaces, and how much can we look to history” — from the Middle Passage to Jim Crow to ​“out-and-out racism?”

“I wanted White producers and filmmakers to work with me,” Clemons said. ​“White people believe Black people talk in this monolithic way.” The film was about unveiling the ​“texture” of Black life — and for White people, ​“to be uncomfortable with what was said…. I wanted some discomfort as Black men and women were talking to each other.” The film had been sitting on the shelf for two years, he added; he wanted to screen it now because ​“the same conversations are happening now that were happening two years ago.” It was ​“timely and needed and relevant.”

“As we are fighting for justice,” he continued, ​“we have work to do on our own and with each other. There are systems we need to dismantle,” and ​“we need help to dismantle them.” But at the same time, ​“we must hold ourselves accountable and not rely on our allies. I wanted that discourse … because I want us to think deeply about what our expectations are for ourselves, for each other … and for those younger than us, and most important, those who have yet to be born.”

Rawls Ivy then asked about the comment made in the film about Black women being their brothers’ keepers. How did it feel to hear what women said? What about Black men not showing up?

“A lot pf us come from single parent homes,” Walton said, ​“raised by women. We didn’t have a lot of role models for what a father was, or what marriage was like.” But, he added, ​“we hear you, Black women. We know that you have been holding this baton for centuries” — not only at home, but in marches, and by becoming elected officials.

“There are men that are out here to support you,” he continued. ​“We are trying … we have lots of work to do … we struggle, too, Black men, with our place in this world.”

But for Walton it was also about ​“changing the narrative.” Too often the definitions of success involved becoming entertainers and athletes. ​“How do we change the narrative to highlight the Erik Clemonses and the Che Dawsons?” he asked. ​“We are striving to do better and we think we can do this work together.”

Dawson picked up those thoughts. ​“Black women have played a significant leadership role in our communities and in our families,” he said. ​“They have been patient and passionate beyond belief in understanding the condition of our community.” He considered the men in his community — sons, students, neighbors, boyfriends. ​“What standards are we holding then to?… What is our expectation of ourselves and each other?”

“The most powerful piece that every child is born with is their mind,” he added. Young people could be held accountable to achieve, and given the tools to do so. ​“Can we begin to leverage each other and our strengths? It may be a generational plan. It be for my son, or grandson, or great-grandson. We must provide the shoulders for them to stand on.” And, he said, ​“women are instrumental in helping us do that.”

“The fear that some of the women spoke about — it was so raw and so real,” said Craig, who has two daughters. ​“We have to support these women who are having conversations with their sons about how to stay alive,” especially in that so often the advice for survival was about ​“not being yourself.” She heard the pain, and the strength beneath that pain: ​“A lot of the mothers of young black boys have still managed to do as well as they have, despite those challenges,” she said.

“We easily can point out celebrity and athletic prowess,” Rawls Ivy said. ​“We are not celebrating enough the folks who run barber shops and after-school programs, and the brothers who stay I the park later than usual” to make sure kids are safe.

“The role models are celebrities and those we don’t have access to,” Clemons agreed. Also, he added, ​“there is acute focus on brothers who are incarcerated or coming back into society.” And then there were ​“brothers who do what they’re supposed to do, for their families and the neighbors and their extended families.” He recalled, as a teenager, coming across ​“friends slinging drugs and doing what they do, and I remember them distinctly telling me, ​‘you need to get out of here, because this can’t be you.’” That’s ​“everyday heroism,” he added. “‘I’m going to surrender my life so you can move forward.’ I want to underscore those stories…. I want people to be curious about the people who are in that film, who may seen ordinary but are extraordinary.” In that way, ​“the texture of black humanity” could ​“come to the front.”

“For us to be living still is an extraordinary feat in this country,” Clemons said.

Rawls Ivy then asked: What about those definitions of success that involved leaving the community, often to never return? What do you tell children what success is?

For Dawson, the definition of success ​“is at the very core of our challenge,” he said. ​“We’ve identified success as the 1 percent. We spend a lot of our lives trying to figure out how to join the 1 percent” by being an athlete or an entertainer. ​“That 1 percent is out of our community.”

Meanwhile, to him, success for kids was really ​“about finding one’s happiness, and their ability to fulfill their potential. When it’s your last days, you don’t want to be the one to say ​‘I really should have.’” He said he told his kids that ​“you define what success is, and there’s a correlation between your success and your potential.”

Growing up, Walton said, ​“my model for success was survival.” He was first told he wouldn’t live to be 16, then 21, then 25. Now, he said, he was successful in a different way. ​“I have a beautiful family and a good job where I can be impactful and serve this community,” he said. He owed that success to his best friend’s father, a seventh-grade teacher, an uncle, and another acquaintance, who showed him what a man could be in the absence of a father. ​“For me, it’s about moedeling. I take this OG status to heart,” he said. ​“It starts with my two sons right in the house.” Though he noted that he and his wife worry about their kids every minute they’re out of the house. ​“Stuff happens in the streets.”

And, he said, part of him still measures success by survival, even as he has moved beyond it. ​“It has allowed me to measure where I was, where I am, and where I can be headed,” he said.

Craig said that ​“somebody like Che is the unsung hero…. He was part of the conspiracy to send me to private high school. He changed my life for the better.” She recalled when her cousin was shot dead on Garden Street and ​“Che was standing there right with us.” Dawson was ​“what I would want my son to look up to and model after.”

“It pains me to hear him say that he feels like he failed,” she added. ​“Nah, you didn’t fail, trust me.”

“We’re starting to see more family-friendly examples of us on TV. You see complete families, black men grocery shopping,” Rawls Ivy said. But, she added, ​“around the world,” people’s first images of Black people in the United States involved ​“violence and gangbanging and drug dealing and laziness.” She addressed the men on the panel: What about these ​“deliberate attempts to malign your character? How do you walk the world with that on your backs?”

That was the ​“very reason why I wanted to share my story and my life trajectory,” Clemons said. ​“I wanted them to see the counter-narrative.” Farrar said that helping Clemons tell his story ​”helped me understand the extent of the vulnerability that Black men are dealing with every day…. Somebody like me has difficulty understanding that — what’s like to feel like your life is on the line with every decision you make.”

But what was to be done about all this? Rawls Ivy asked. She added: ​“Black men are behind and you all need to catch up to Black women in having these conversations. There is more packing to be done and unpacking to be done.” She returned to the metaphor Dawson had invoked earlier, of strengthening one’s own shoulders for younger people to stand on.

“How do we get them to fill their own shoes?” Rawls Ivy asked.

“My shoulders need to be clear enough to stand on,” Dawson said. ​“I need to understand better mental health, I need to deal with that so I don’t pass that trauma on.” It also involved ​“raising our children with purpose — a sense of purposes and accountability to each other,” he added. ​“We have to be very, very careful in how we communicate success, and how we interpret this idea of capitalism” — to ​“put the we over the me.”

But that drove at another question that, as Rawls Ivy put it, involved a ​“dual conversation” with children. On one hand was the need to tell children to ​“get home safe” — meaning both from trouble in the neighborhood and trouble with police — and the desire to have children ​“enjoy the world” and ​“dream all the dreams.”

“Do we ever get comfortable with being Black and maybe freedom-adjacent?” she asked.

“I love being Black,” Clemons said. He returned to Dawson’s shoulder metaphor. ​“It’s even more important to lift them up to get to the shoulders,” he said. ​“They have to be cared for and nurtured in a way that they would think it was even worthwhile being on my shoulders,” that ​“they would love themselves so much because I love them. Being comfortable in their Blackness has to do with a deep and wide love ethic”; he hoped ​“they will strive in life because they want to make the person who loves them proud.”

Walton also worked to impart to his children that ​“I love you for who you are.” He emphasized that they needed ​“their own space” to be themselves and that they could be introduced to ​“the concept of community” and ​“how they can be impactful.”

“They’re going to be the elected officials” of the future, he continued. ​“Take control of your community, get involved in your democracy — we have to groom them and prepare them for the next step in life.”

Dawson picked up on that. While Black teenagers’ mistakes could have ​“dire consequences,” he said that ​“we have to be patient” and ​“guide from afar…. Sometimes we want our boys to be men before their time.”

“It’s important that we restore kindness,” Craig said. She said that she imparted to her children that ​“teasing is not going to be tolerated in this house. Be kind. If you lead with that, a lot of things will fall into place. And I see that missing, because we don’t want our kids to be the weak kid on the playground.”

“Love thy neighbor: That’s a value I would like to see back on the table,” she added.

How could a wider net be cast to engage more people in community work? Rawls Ivy asked.

“There are so many people that have ideas but they’re doing them in silos,” Walton said. ​“If we utilize the spaces that we have, the ideas that we have — we all have the same goal to have a better community. We have to find a way to connect. I don’t necessarily want to just volunteer ConnCAT like that,” he said, to laughter.

“How do we create spaces for Black men to sit and talk and be vulnerable and share their dreams?” Clemons said. ​“Here we are as grown men having conversations about who we are and who we want to be.” He wanted that conversation to have started earlier, and to start earlier for younger people now. ​“There is a certain psychic pain when you have an absent father. There is a certain suffering when a boy wonders where his father is, and whether he cares about him.”

What do you need to do to take care of yourself? Rawls Ivy asked. ​“How do you manage the world that is unjust and unkind to you? How do you guard your peace? How do you stay out of jail?”

“It’s OK to have mentors and confidantes, and mentors in different aspects of your life,” Dawson said, ranging from personal relationships to business matters — ​“people who love you and tell you the truth. That’s what I’ve found most rewarding as I’ve gotten older.”

“I believe it’s spending time with family,” Walton said. Spending tome at home during the pandemic, he added, ​“has been very therapeutic … a blessing.” He has drawn strength in ​“surrounding myself with like-minded individuals who talk about bettering themselves and bettering the community.” And, he added, he has started golfing. ​“It helps me relax. For those four hours, we can just be men, vulnerable. Play bad golf and continue to grow.”

“I’ve been through a lot in life, and I live a life of privilege now, but I’ve lived in poverty longer than I’ve lived in privilege,” Clemons said. He was grateful for the knowledge his times in poverty gave him. ​“I understand why people speak from a place of fear and brokennesss,” he said. ​“I’ve been called to do exactly what I‘ve been told to do.” He had ​“faith, my deep belief that I am only a vessel of a greater power, a deep and wide love ethic — I have the capacity to love all people…. Whatever has been given to me, I can give that away to other people so they can pass me. That brings me joy.”

That brought Rawls Ivy to her final question: What did liberation truly look like to the people on the panel?

“The freedom to dream, and do the things that manifest the dreams that one has,” Clemons said. ​“Our people have not been allowed to dream…. Those dreams that have not been realized have turned into rage.” Black people needed ​“the opportunity to dream and believe in the dreams that one has.”

“I’m right there with Erik. I think sometimes we struggle to set goals,” Craig said. ​“Having dreams can feel like burden, but there’s so much power in that…. There’s power in faith and there’s power in hope.”

Dawson drew a distinction between dreaming and fantasizing. ​“Believing that all is possible through our given abilities — that’s where we find true liberation,” he said.

For Walton, liberation was the ​“freedom to chase all that America is supposed to be, without our skin being a hindrance,” he said. ​“I believe our rage will fuel our eventual liberation.”

Clemons said there would be more gatherings like this one. ​“This was a small piece of a larger vision,” he said. He planned to raise funds to create a full documentary and a large project around it. ​“I want to inspire Black men especially to create spaces to talk, to share, to be honest, to be vulnerable,” he said. But his vision involved White people, too. He cited James Baldwin’s observation that every day, there were White people who strategized ways to avoid seeing or confronting Black people. That had to end. More connections had to be made. ​“It think it’s important that people who have power, leverage their power to manifest justice,” he said. And ​“Black people who have justice — leverage justice to manifest power. Justice means nothing without power.”

“Be powerful,” he added. ​“Come together with a foundation of deep and wide love, and deep and wide truth. We can only move together if we can be together in a very real way. We can only know one another if we know ourselves. And we will be keeping this going.”