Months ago, the Economist published an article titled Sex and the single black woman: How the mass incarceration of black men hurts black women.  I read the piece and I quickly moved on.

I wanted to avoid the topic. Frankly I am afraid to broach the subject today.  You will wonder why I am so skittish.  You will think that this is irrational.  You might say: “Hey, you write about everything else even tangentially connected to prisons, why not this too?”

Some time ago, I wrote of feeling queasy about hip hop culture’s not-so-subtle admonition that young women of color stand by their incarcerated partners no matter what.  I received some of the most passionate e-mails based on that post that I have ever gotten.  I had hit a real nerve.  I also wrote briefly about that.

The gist of the Economist article is this; the marriage market for single black women is abysmal and:

[J]ail is a big part of the problem, argue Kerwin Kofi Charles, now at the University of Chicago, and Ming Ching Luoh of National Taiwan University. They divided America up into geographical and racial “marriage markets”, to take account of the fact that most people marry someone of the same race who lives relatively close to them. Then, after crunching the census numbers, they found that a one percentage point increase in the male incarceration rate was associated with a 2.4-point reduction in the proportion of women who ever marry. Could it be, however, that mass incarceration is a symptom of increasing social dysfunction, and that it was this social dysfunction that caused marriage to wither? Probably not. For similar crimes, America imposes much harsher penalties than other rich countries. Mr Charles and Mr Luoh controlled for crime rates, as a proxy for social dysfunction, and found that it made no difference to their results. They concluded that “higher male imprisonment has lowered the likelihood that women marry…and caused a shift in the gains from marriage away from women and towards men.”

If you are a black woman reading this, you know what our conversations are when no one is listening.  We talk about the lack of “good” brothers.  Each of us has our own definition of the term “good.”  We lament the state of affairs that sometimes pushes us to have children on our own rather than waiting for Mr. Right.  Something else is palpable in our conversations though; it’s the sadness.  I imagine that outsiders might think that black women would be angrily discussing these issues amongst  ourselves.  Yet, in my experience, that has never been the case.  My disappointment, in fact,  is that we too often keep the conversation at the level of individual solidarity rather than moving towards social justice.  Because after all, the mass incarceration of black men has more than personal implications for our lives, it is also a social justice issue for our communities. But I digress…

I am reminded of a poem by one of my favorite writers Carolyn M. Rodgers.  It is called “Poem for Some Black Women.”  The poem includes these verses:

we live with fear.

we are lonely.

we are talented, dedicated, well read

BLACK , COMMITTED.

we are lonely.

we understand the world problems

Black women’s problems with Black men

but all

we really understand is

lonely.

These words no doubt resonate strongly with other black women.  They speak to what so many of us experience.  The words evoke the symbolic violence that mass incarceration has wrought in our communities, in our lives.  I am apprehensive about writing these words.   I feel that they should be whispered.  I have no idea why this is the case.  It is so much easier for me to write about things from an analytical perspective.  I live in my head.  It feels safer.

I know that the question of the impact of mass incarceration on black women cannot be reduced to a conversation about dating and marriage.  Increasingly more and more black women find themselves locked up too.  But today, I am concerned with the collateral costs for black women of  having hundreds of thousands of black men caged in jails and prisons across the U.S.

My black girlfriends with sons live with the daily fear that they will be harassed by the cops; that our sons will end up, even if we do our very best by them, locked up too.  We keep those fears quiet.  We dare not speak the words.  With one out of three black boys born in 2001 likely to spend some of their lives in prison, we know that the bogeyman is not a fantasy but rather that he is close by, too close for comfort.  My black girlfriends with heterosexual daughters wonder if they will ever find love and companionship or if they will be consigned to living single for life (not by choice).  The worries are there.  Always.  It feels like I shouldn’t be writing this down.  Perhaps these words are best whispered.

Most of the time this blog is about the macro issues that relate to the prison industrial complex.  I focus on the micro when sharing individual experiences of the incarcerated.  Today, I feel like I am writing for a confessional.   I worry about the reception because I know about the reach of racism in America.  Black lives are so cheap in this culture.  Being vulnerable does not serve us well.  Yet we need to talk about the emotional, mental and spiritual costs of mass incarceration.  We need to acknowledge how the prison industrial complex touches our individual lives.  We need to move from abstraction to the concrete to the real.  It is about lived experiences after all.   Isn’t it? I don’t know…

Then I remember being in a room with a group of teenage girls of color five years ago.  We were reading some essays by Pearl Cleage as preparation for a documentary film that they were producing.  As we were discussing one of the essays, a young woman sighed out loud: “I am just looking for a good brother; Is that too much to ask?”  That young black woman was 14 years old.   Her wish led to the writing of a collective poem called “Looking for a Good Brother” that I will share here.  The poem wasn’t specifically about the mass incarceration of black men and yet that young woman’s wish seems somehow connected to the topic. I wanted to tell this young woman that many, many ‘good brothers’ are locked up.  That the system has conspired to deprive her of her wish.  And I wanted to tell her that it isn’t too much to ask for a healthy and abiding love.  I wanted to tell her…

I hope that you will find the young women’s words as poignant and moving as I did.

Looking for a Good Brother – Inspired by Pearl Cleage (collective poem by the Rogers Park YWAT)

It’s time!

Brothers, it’s time to step up

We are waiting

Let’s be clear

We are looking for some good brothers

We are looking for the real deal

A brother who can listen

A brother who can change

A brother who is not afraid of women

We are looking for a real brother

One who loves his people

A brother who doesn’t hit, slap, yell, punch, rape, kill women and children

A brother who doesn’t call us bitch or ho

We are looking for a brother who says I’ll be with you till we get there

Till we get to the place where violence ends

We are looking for a brother who says

“That’s not cool” when his friends down women

We are looking for a REAL brother

A brother who uses his hands to build, not to break

A brother who understands the word “solidarity”

We are looking for a brother

One who gets it

A brother who doesn’t pass the buck

A brother who takes responsibility for male violence

A brother who speaks truth to power

Will you stand with us?

Brother, will you stand strong with us?

Will you be a soldier in an army of peace with us?

It’s time

It’s time to step up

Brothers, we need you

We are waiting.