“Men don’t cry,” my mother would often say to me, after she had given me a beating. Most often it was because I had disobeyed her by going to play soccer when she had forbidden me to do so.
“A man does not stay in the kitchen,” my aunts would say to me, when I went to the village, which was hundreds of kilometers from Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, where I lived most of the time. At the same time, I and my male cousins were the little hands they needed to help them with the chores.
“We didn’t ask for your opinion," my sisters and cousins would often throw at me, when I tried to give my opinion on a topic of discussion that one of them had raised. "This is women’s business, not men’s. Go away.”
And then came “real” before “man.”
“A real man is strong," men often repeated at Songo’o, the traditional game that men used to play in Fanta Citron, the shantytown of Mvog-Ada, in Yaoundé, Cameroon, where I grew up. "He bangs his fist on the table to show who is the rooster of the farmyard He must show a woman who is wearing the pants.”
“A real man walks with his head held high and his shoulders square,” my father told me when I first met him. My parents were separated. I had been raised by my mother and her sisters.
“What do you mean you only have one girlfriend? A real man has several girlfriends,” my aunts exclaimed, almost horrified, when I told them about one of my very first loves.
A man, a real man: everyone went about what that meant or represented, but no one asked me how I saw it. Above all, no one saw the discomfort they had all made me feel with each of them defining the man I should be. None of them cared about how I saw myself. Was I man enough? Was I a “real” man?
These questions, which I remember asking myself during my childhood, resurfaced as I was trying to understand the reason why some Black men, especially young Black men, kept saying that they are not heard. As the world of politics has come to realize, this has had a big impact on the current election cycle. According to the polls, there is a huge gender gap in support for Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.
The polls show that a comfortable majority of women plan to vote for Harris, who will become the first female President if she wins on November 5, whereas her support among men, particularly Latino and Black men, a traditional Democratic voting bloc, is lower compared to Biden’s four years ago.
This new reality has caused jitters in the Harris camp. Conversely, this new situation has made the Trump camp optimistic that he can reclaim Georgia and Michigan, two swing states lost in 2020 to Biden, and keep North Carolina, which would simplify his path to the 270 electoral votes needed to become the 47th president of the United States.
I embarked more than two weeks ago on a tour of swing states with a large Black population, to capture the voices of Black male voters, in order to hear what some of them have to say and to understand how they view their place in America today.
I met Jayvon Nougaisse, a MD/PhD student at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University in GA, a South eastern state where Blacks account for over 33% of the 11 million inhabitants as of July 1, 2023, according to the U.S Census Bureau. Nougaisse, 24, grew up around Atlanta. We talked via FaceTime three weeks before Election Day when I was in Atlanta.
From our conversation, it appears that there is a crisis among men in general. This crisis is impacting a lot of young Black men, according to Nougaisse. He made the same protests I heard from my 19-year-old son and his Black friends a few months ago. They feel “disempowered” and “invalidated.” It is in this identity crisis that we must seek, according to Nougaisse, the gender gap between men and women that has never been clearer than during this election.
“There are these changes that have happened over the past couple of decades,” Nougaisse told me. “It’s been kind of slowly progressing issues, where men have increasingly been almost unfavored or put down by society as a whole.”
“I’m not saying that feminism is bad, but the way it’s been going, some people have taken empowering women to mean depowering men. And I think feminism works best when both men and women are empowered.”
Nougaisse is part of Black Men of MCG, an organization whose goal is “to build community and foster relationships between Black males in medicine or interested in medicine.” It’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to him, as I assumed his organization must be in permanent contact with the Gen Z and Alpha generations.
“How bad and deep is the malaise,” I asked.
“It’s just the undervaluing of the male perspective and the male hardships, I guess, that occurs because of this overly focusing on feminism,” Nougaisse told me, adding that phrases like “men are trash” have made a lot of damage among his peers.
“Whenever there is a man who does something bad to a woman. I think of that phrase, that generalization. When men hear that, you know, that’s overly broad. Yes, some men are extremely bad people, I don’t deny that. But making that broad generalization, hearing it multiple times and having society kind of support it, it makes men less likely to share their experiences,” Nougaisse said. “It feels like their voice doesn’t matter as much.”
I pushed back.
“But women,” I said, “have been going through sexism and discrimination for centuries.”
“Since the 1960s and 70s, since those earlier feminist pushes, really what the goal was, gender equality. But now, in more recent times, maybe since the 2010s, it’s kind of going like men are becoming inferior, especially when you look at things like education, specifically how there are more women in higher education, and men are continuously dropping out of the higher education and honestly out of the workforce as a whole.”
In 2022, about 1 million fewer young men were in college compared to 2011, according to a Pew Research study published last December. The drop in young women was approximately 200,000. As a result, men make up 44% of young college students today, down from 47% in 2011.
I told Nougaisse it was not women’s fault, but he pointed out that society is facing two major issues relating to men that might get out of control if they are not addressed: mental health and loneliness.
“There’s a rising loneliness epidemic among men, and I feel that’s contributing to it,” said Nougaisse, who described himself as a “feminist, in the classical version of the word, where it’s supporting gender equality, because there has been a lot that women have faced and still continue to face, from weak men or men who don’t necessarily have the maturity to really be confident in themselves to the point where they have to degrade women in order to feel that power.”
He argued that in the same way that there is a difference between racial equality and equity, we should address feminism as “gender equity,” where both men and women need to be treated fairly and justly while also recognizing the differences between them.
If nothing is done, he feared that a specific version of a man — the strong macho man, which is currently being sold by right-wing influencers and Donald Trump — will prevail.
“Honestly, I haven’t heard either party specifically talking about men, at least in the way that I’m currently speaking about it, where it’s really weak men who are the problem,” Nougaisse told me. “A lot of the time, when I hear Republicans speaking about manliness, it is kind of going in the realm of toxic masculinity, where it seems like in order to be a man, you have to display these characteristics that often involve putting others down and showing you like that alpha or the strong one.”
“There’s a healthy way to display strength and confidence, and then there’s an unhealthy way,” continued Nougaisse, who thinks positive male role models is one of the ways to solve this men’s crisis.
While he described himself as “a Democrat slash Independent,” Nougaisse said politicians of all parties act the same when it comes to the Black community. They all show up every election cycle to court votes, and then they are missing in action until the next election cycle.
“Every election cycle it’s like, okay, we have to win the Black vote. What can we say? What can we do? Which communities can we go to? Which communities can we listen to? And they do a lot of listening, particularly around the election cycle, but then, after the election, and in the in-between years, all of a sudden that just kind of gets lost and there’s no substantive action that I recognize that specifically helps the Black community.”
“How does one fix it?” I asked him.
"More authenticity," he responded, "which starts by prioritizing issues that have a race component.”
A lot of the issues we have are not race specific, but they have an important race component to it,” he said. “For example, improving the economy is good for everyone, but it especially helps Black people because it allows them the ability to sort of get their own ground, you know, open up their own businesses, and really have a better life.”
He used another example.
“Same thing for healthcare. Improving healthcare would be good for everyone, but it’s specifically working for Black people and Black men, because the health disparities and health outcomes are worse as a whole for Black people.”
In the end, the current debate about the lack of support for some Black male voters or young Black men towards Harris is an opportunity, he sees, to finally acknowledge that there are many Black experiences in America, and they are as diverse as one finds with white folks.
“Black people aren’t a homogenous group. We have conservative Black people, with liberal Black people and moderates,” Nougaisse said. “You have those with different perspectives, different backgrounds, and you need to listen and address all of those, because there are things that do apply to all, and others that don’t.”
He said, for example, that young Black men he knows in and around big cities would likely vote for Harris, but those he knows who live in rural areas would likely vote Trump, despite the fact that they are all Black.
Like me in my childhood, many young men, as my conversation with Nougaisse pointed out, seem lost in the face of current societal changes. They are expressing it in different ways, such as lack of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris. Some pundits see it as misogyny.
But from the many discussions I have had with young Black men, including my own son and his friends, I think it is simplistic to call them misogynistic. It’s our way to refuse to look beneath the surface.
These young men feel that their voice does not count. They want equality between men and women, but they feel that it is expressed today at the expense of men. Instead of saying it, because they are afraid of being called retrograde or misogynistic, they use expressions like “we are not heard.” They are afraid of facing something very common in their generation: being canceled.
In doing so, their unhappiness continues to grow and we continue to ignore it.
The problem is that opportunistic illusionists, disguised as strong men, have already rushed in to take advantage. The question is whether we will act too late.
This is one of the urgencies of our time.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Luc Olinga's work on Medium.