Ava Kofman Photo
“What is the blueprint?” Pierre Goubourn passionately asked four panelists.
He wasn’t asking them how to build houses. He was asking them how to build lives.
Goubourn asked that question moderated a panel discussion about black male identity in America at the Connecticut Center for Arts and Technology (ConnCAT), located in New Haven’s Science Park.
The evening discussion, which took place on June 7, was inspired by the contents of Question Bridge: Black Males, a three-hour film depicting intergenerational conversations between black males about stereotypes, truths, struggles and challenges they face.
Gouborn’s choice to use an architectural metaphor was inspired by the moment in the film when a young man asks the older generation: “Why didn’t you leave us a blueprint?”
The film’s inclusion of a plurality of opinions seeks to raise as many questions as it answers. As the Artist’s Statement explains, “Question Bridge strives to make it more difficult to say, “Black Males are ______.”
The roundtable conversation that followed from Goborn’s question Friday was similarly inspired by this lively spirit of inquiry. The panelists, who shared personal anecdotes and advice, were New Haven residents Steve Driffin, 47, Shafiq Abdussabur, 46, Henry Green, 21, and Cody Norris, 32.
Police officer and community mentor Shafiq Abdussabur answered that the blueprint is “aural, but the right kinds of stories are no longer being passed on.” Abdussabur is also the author of “A Black Man’s Guide to Law Enforcement in America,” which he describes as a “straight talk manual.”
Steve Driffin, who works as a writer and director, wondered whether the blueprint could be seen as continuous. “Do we think the blueprint is the same across generations?,” he asked. “No building is the same but the beginning of every building is the same. We lost that foundation. We lost that image.”
Artist Cody Norris sees the blueprint as “having a goal” –– of making a contribution to family, to the community, and to the larger world. “You try so hard to be someone else and you lose what you’re supposed to be.”
Green, the youngest on the panel and a spoken word poet, thought there might be a better choice of words than “blueprint.” “A blueprint is how to build something,” he noted. “It seemed like they should have left us a mission statement.”
He compared the struggle to define black male identity in America today to a “mission completed without a debriefing.” Many men, he explained, are unsure what they are fighting for or why.
Status is the only thing left to fight for when you don’t own anything, Green explained. Violence is often used as a means to the end of self-esteem. “If I own a tiny piece of fear in your heart, then I matter. Even if my property is only fear.”
Green used to be a member of a gang until a near-fatal gunshot wound in 2010. (He now works as the spoken word instructor at ConnCAT.)
Frank Mitchell, curator of the Amistad Center for Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Hartford, partnered with the YMCA to bring the film to play in neighborhoods, rather than museums, across Connecticut. These local spaces lower the barriers for audiences to access the film, increasing its impact. “I’m seeing it as a public health intervention almost,” Mitchell said. No museum, he said, could duplicate community engagement.
At ConnCAT’s talk, all four men concluded that the adolescent struggle for self-definition is compounded in the black community by a dearth of leadership and modeling. All had struggled with some combination of absent fathers, a broken education system, and the under-representation of black role models at large.
Driffin called the absence of his father “a lost image.” Driffin described himself in adolescence as a “magnet.” In his short bio for the panel, he defined himself as a “dedicated father” and “a good man not by the things he has done right, but by the things he has done wrong.”
“I was looking to define myself,” he said of his youth, “and I got all this stuff clicked on me because I didn’t have a strong enough image.”
The talk turned to knowledge — how it could be passed down and how it could come to be known. Goubourn posed the question: “If we could reach back and talk to a 75 year old from 40 years ago, what would we want to know?”
“What makes me a man?” Green answered immediately, as though the question had been on his mind for some time now. He wondered aloud when the “searching for validation of self-esteem” will come to positive ends. Goubourn mentioned how going to jail is often seen as a rite of passage for many young black men.
Goubourn also pressed the panelists not only on what but also on why. “Why are we in the place that we are today?” he asked, referring to the soaring rates of murders, incarceration and disenfranchisement for black men today.
The panelists focused on the absence of strong teachers, both at home and at school. Green also spoke to the internal divisions he sees on urban streets. It can sometimes feel as though there are as many as six different neighborhoods within a city block, he said.
Abdussabur said that parents will often ask him, a police officer and role model, to place his hand on their child “just for five minutes.” The parent’s hope is that just by talking to a child Abdussabur might inspire confidence and stability. After visiting so many of these single-parent homes, Abdussabur repeatedly emphasized the importance “proper modeling” within families and the presence of more father figures. He returned to the theme of image: “They need a visual of us doing something positive.”
Abdussabur runs a mentoring program for 20 boys and tries to impart a sense of love. When he is walking on the streets, he gives his business card out to young men and offers to help them if they need a job reference, telling them to text him “What’s up?”
ConnCAT – – which teaches unemployed people marketable work skills – – also provides another type of personalized blueprint. Students at ConnCAT learn not only to work a job, but also how to keep one. The center focuses intensely on improving the quality of their student’s lives by providing individual support, personalized focus and customized care for each individual each step of the way – – from the intake process until two years out into their job.
Erik Clemons, ConnCAT’s director, picked up on Abdussabur’s mention of love. “Not telling a brother you love him is worse than telling him that you hate him,” he said.
“Love,” Goubourn concluded, “has to be the paper that the blueprint is written on.”