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 Step One: Articulation
The first step was our determination as parents to indelibly mark our sons'
passage from childhood to young manhood. Charles and I forced ourselves to sit down and
begin the arduous process of articulating precisely what we expected of our sons. Our
sons, Charles and Damon, fraternal twins, were young, but rapidly maturing
African-American males, and we wanted our expectations to be as clear as possible. Our
hope was that our expectations would help them shape their own.
Part of the rationale for this critical first step was the desire to circumvent what
we term the vortex of assumption. All too often a consensus of goals, if achieved within
the family or community, is not articulated to children moving to adulthood. The existence
of such a consensus of goals is not articulated, in fact the existence of goals, simple
and complex is neither expressed nor implied. Without an expressed or implied articulation
of positive goals, a negative space is created. Within this vacuum non-productive and
unhealthy beliefs and behaviors evolve and foster.
We wanted to assure ourselves that we clearly had begun the process of life
sustaining goal articulation for our sons. "Begun" is emphasized as the
development and certainly the attainment of goals is an ongoing, highly personal process
to be engaged in fully by our sons.
Our job, essentially, is to create an environment conducive to their
growth and development in that process. As we began this first step, we were forced to
confront both the individual and societal assumptions of what it means to be a
"man." First, there is the general, societal assumption of the need/desire to
dominate abusively other individuals and Nature herself.
Our
goals for our sons included their focus on the perfect union of the spiritual,
intellectual, and physical components of the self. This primary goal formed the foundation
for our approach to the rite of passage...
We articulated, first to one another and then to our sons, what our hopes,
expectations, and goals were for them words, yes, we want them to graduate from high
school and college. A graduate degree would be nice as well. We want them to find
meaningful work at a living wage, and, of course, we want them to marry spiritually and
intellectually enlightened African or African-American women. However, we also want them
to have a clear and conscious sense of commitment and responsibility to God, their community, and people of the African
Diaspora, wherever they may dwell in the global
village. We knew the first set of goals would be repeated and supported by us and others
involved in Charles' and Damon's lives. We wanted to articulate for ourselves, for our
sons, and for our community that we value the other goals as well.
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