June is Men’s Mental Health Awareness Month, and we’re not letting it pass in silence. Across sports, entertainment and everyday life, men from all backgrounds are finally starting to speak up about their mental health struggles. But too many are still suffering alone. This month, we’re telling real stories and reminding men that asking for help isn’t weakness. It’s survival. It’s power.
Black men know death.
We know literal death. We grow up rehearsing it, anticipating it, surviving it.
I often speak of coming of age in Newark, New Jersey, during the crack era, when “Black Men: Endangered Species” T-shirts were not ironic fashion statements but demographic observations. Young Black men disappeared from neighborhoods with astonishing regularity—murdered, incarcerated, or otherwise swallowed by systems that seemed designed to extinguish them.
The statistics have changed over the decades, but the socialization remains. Black boys are taught early that their lives are fragile, contingent, and disposable.
Death is not an abstraction. It is a possibility that accompanies us to school, to the corner store, during a traffic stop, or while walking home at night. But Black literal death is only half the story. The more pressing crisis facing Black men today is our failure to understand what the sociologist Orlando Patterson called social death.
The vestiges of slavery
Patterson developed the concept to describe the condition of enslavement itself: the severing of family ties, cultural inheritance, legal personhood, and civic recognition. The enslaved person was not simply physically dominated; he or she was rendered socially nonexistent—a being excluded from the realm of the human. For many contemporary Black scholars, that condition did not end with emancipation.
Afropessimist thinkers such as Frank Wilderson, III argue that there is a direct line connecting slavery to the present. They contend that Black existence in the modern world remains structured by anti-Black violence and the logic of social death. The distinctions that liberal societies obsess over—male and female, rich and poor, citizen and immigrant—matter less than the distinction between those who are recognized as fully human and those whose humanity remains perpetually conditional – for Wilderson, the distinction between the living and the dead.
I am not certain that I am an Afropessimist. But I understand better every day why the theory exists. Because when I watch the headlines unfold—the Black father who murders his family, the young men who rob and kill one of their own, the endless cycles of intimate partner violence—I no longer think only about criminality or mental illness. I think about social death.
This is not an excuse.
Nothing can excuse the murder or abuse of a wife, a child, a brother, or a stranger. Accountability is non-negotiable. But explanation and exoneration are not the same thing. A society that refuses to understand the historical and psychic conditions that produce violence will never interrupt its cycle.
Too often, Black men respond to their own vulnerability by embracing the very ideologies that have dehumanized us. Patriarchy, misogyny, domination, and violence become compensatory performances of power. If society denies your humanity, the temptation is to prove your power over someone else. Usually, that someone else is another Black person.
Most often, it is a Black woman.
Understanding power
The data surrounding intimate partner violence, domestic abuse, and community violence should force us to confront an uncomfortable truth: many Black men have internalized the grammar of domination that white supremacy itself produced. We have inherited a script that teaches us that power is exercised through control, possession, and violence. The tragedy is that we often deploy that script against those closest to us.
This is why Black men need a new kind of literacy.
We spend enormous amounts of time teaching financial literacy, media literacy, and political literacy. But where are the conversations about social death? Where are the spaces where young Black men learn that the rage, alienation, humiliation, and despair they experience may not simply be personal failures but historical inheritances?
Imagine if our schools, churches, fraternities, barbershops, and community organizations engaged Black boys with the writings of Orlando Patterson, Saidiya Hartman, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, and James Baldwin. Imagine if we gave them language for the psychic wounds they carry before those wounds harden into violence.
Because some of the headlines about Black men murdering their partners and/or their children are not just destructive/diabolical instances of literal death and murder. These crimes are also devastating embodiments of social death—a surrender to a world that had already taught them that Black life possesses little value. The same can be said whenever a Black man annihilates his own family. In that terrible moment, he has accepted the logic that neither his life nor the lives of those he loves possess inherent worth. Again, this is not absolution. It is diagnosis. And diagnoses matter because they determine treatment.
One of the great failures of our public discourse is the tendency to individualize what are often structural and historical problems. Every time a Black man commits an unspeakable act, we immediately ask whether he suffered from mental illness. Mental health is real and important, but sometimes that conversation becomes a distraction from a deeper affliction. The deeper affliction is the condition of living in a society where Black existence has historically been marked as disposable.
Social death is not simply a theory about slavery. It is a theory about what it means to inhabit a world that continually denies your humanity. The answer cannot be for Black men to cling even tighter to patriarchy, misogyny, or domination. Those are not antidotes to social death. They are symptoms of it.
Black women have been telling us this for generations. They have challenged Black men to reject the ideologies of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism that promise power through domination while delivering only deeper alienation. Perhaps we have not listened because we lacked the language to understand our own condition.
Literal death has always haunted Black men. We have built songs, rituals, humor, and survival strategies around that fact. Now we need to become equally literate about social death. Because unless we understand the historical and psychic structures that shape our lives, we will continue to mistake inherited wounds for individual destiny. We will continue to direct our rage inward, against our families, our communities, and ourselves.
The point of understanding social death is not to surrender to it. It is to recognize it well enough to refuse its logic. The struggle for Black liberation has always been a struggle to insist that Black life is fully human. Perhaps the next stage of that struggle begins when Black men learn to see the social death that has always shadowed us—and decide, together, to live and love in spite of it.
