ON ELLIS COSE, REGAL BLACK MEN & "THE ENVY OF THE WORLD"

{2010 – Truth is stranger than fiction. Racist black suicidal fools, who worship Hobama only because his deadbeat dad is black, call me racist because I refuse to do the same. Racist black men who hate themselves, just as they hate their mothers and all black women, call me a racist because I dare to check them on their glaring white supremacy. Those who actually know me, like those who have heard my radio shows, know that I despise racists. Those who truly share my intimate life know that I adore many people who are biracial or live within conscious interracial couples. Ellis Cose is a brilliant black man married to a brilliant Latina. I love them both...This review is dedicated to Ellis Cose, a regal brother I adore. It is also dedicated to every one of his fellow global African Kings. It is NOT dedicated to any black court jesters because NONE of you are in our tribes!!!...}

1993

I always find it comically amusing when foolish gaybashers assume that I hate men because I am a lesbian who is brave enough to tell or pen uncensored truths about men. They have no idea how much I love and admire many men in my family. They are ignorant about the droves of dear and intimate male mentors and friends, heterosexual and homosexual, black and white, who make me laugh and feel alive. They know nothing about the brothers I adore like: Charles Green, Duane Cramer, Mark Starr, Labi Siffre, Bryan Cambrice, Steven Ivory, Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, Rawjah, Rippa, Jamaa Fanaka, Ras Abudah, Phillipe, Fyah Wyah, Dr. Asa Hilliard, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Tim Anthony, Willie Davis, Rod McCullom and countless others who share/shared my life…

These are the men who are kindred spirits and dear friends. The men who inspire me, believe in me, and encourage me. They comfort, console, and cheer me when sistas break my heart. These great men network for me, temper me, and ground me.

All of the men that I love collectively hold up half the sky....they ease my burdens in a world that hates and wounds. It often seems as if the sky is falling down upon me and my sistas. The collective spirits of all the men I love heal my own spirit, when it is bruised and nearly broken by the incessant and increasingly hard and low blows of racism, sexism, and homohatred.

I revere and adore so many other brothers from a distance, men who make me proud to be an African-American. They are rebels, artists, authors, and scholars. They are men like: Malcolm X, Denzel Washington, Donnell Jones, James Baldwin, Billy Strayhorn, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Cleage, Bayard Rustin, Thurgood Marshall, Quincy Jones, Blair Underwood, Langston Hughes, Will Smith, Deion Sanders, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Geronimo Pratt, Tavis Smiley, Marcus Garvey, Bill Cosby, Harry Belafonte, Steve Harvey, Dr. Cornel West, Blair Underwood, Bill Withers, Huey Newton, Tupac Shakur, Quincy Jones II, Quincy Jones III, and droves more...

My mother, Laura Delores Strong-Banks, loves libraries. She taught me to do the same at a very young age. I have been a voracious reader since I was a small child. I have read at least five books a week for decades. Without exception, “The Envy of the World: On Being a Black Man in America” penned by my gifted, fellow native Chicagoan, author Ellis Cose, is the most comprehensive examination of the best and worst of Black manhood that I have ever read.

Cose has penned several classic works. I will now add this one to the top of his list. This book is a masterfully crafted survival tool for our race. It is spiritual medicine for the increasingly toxic and infectious illnesses of criminality and sexism that cripple droves of African-American males today. In his typically coherent and cerebral style, Cose has penned powerful poetry, inspirational intelligence, and salvational sanity.

Expertly and admirably, Cose shares the collective visions of an entire race, with clarity and empathy across all boundaries of gender and class. Frequent references are made to James Baldwin, a literary idol who I am certain would be very proud of this book. Like Baldwin, Cose expertly and eloquently masters describing the entire scope of African-American interpersonal, interracial, intraracial, intercultural, and intergender dilemmas.

Cose superbly indicts enemies of the world and of the self. He intricately details the perils that black men endure while calling them to task on the perils that they create. He has penned a consummate and balanced portrait of real black men, equally highlighting their perfections and flaws. Surprisingly, Cose even takes the reader into the hearts and eyes of black women to reveal our collective perceptions of black men.

By revealing so many truths so deeply, Cose has fashioned a primer for multi-faceted liberation. He debunks myths and thoroughly examines racist stereotypes and internalized madness that have dually poisoned the spirits and murdered the psyches of so many lost black men. This book is a celebration of exceptional achievement, revolutionary defiance, and infinite potential. It is a soulful manifesto for sole survivors, and a poetic lament for the soulless.

Read this book today! Rush a copy to any black man you love. Urge every brother you know to do the same! Its pages are full of racial and sexual candor, reality, wisdom, prophecy, honesty, and African-American history. This book documents proof of conspiracies and sabotage as it simultaneously analyzes institutional genocide and cultural suicide.

The following excerpts from "The Envy of the World: On Being a Black Man in America" capture the magic of Cose’s literary prose and the depth of his wise vision:

“...the vague entity called society ...had created colonies, labeled ghettos, where young boys like myself learned every conceivable lesson in being cool, but were kept ignorant of the way the larger world worked and of the skills we would need to survive in it...

Virtually every bright kid who bumps up against the typical ghetto school system is bound to be bruised by the encounter...many of us equate acting a fool with ‘acting black’....you are lost without a decent education......there is a breakdown of intergenerational empathy - and a diminished parental ability to educate.

The joke, of course, is on us. For while the white hipsters of the fifties, and the wiggers of the present can shed their “Black” identity whenever they tire of the charade, many of us have taken this hopped-up thuggish character to be the essence of who and what we are.

..we desperately need to promote archetypes other than rappers, thugs, and ballplayers, of what it is possible and desirable for us to be.

The very fact that a so-called revolutionary group [The Black Panther Party] could embrace a man [Eldridge Cleaver] who ‘practiced' rape on black women says volumes about the misogyny that has long existed in our midst.

..somewhere between coddling wrongdoers and destroying their spirit, lies a better way...Obviously, in many eyes, the lives of ordinary blacks are not quite as precious as those of ordinary whites...we will create more of the very monsters that we most fear, by condemning more and more souls that could have been saved to prisons, where their only choice is to mold themselves in the image of those who are truly beyond redemption.

Pimping is easier (psychologically at least) than proving ourselves - than winning acceptance - in arenas such as the classroom, where we have been told that we do not belong.

More and more black women are deciding to go it alone, or look beyond the black community for suitable mates, or to see men principally as providers of sperm, as so many see themselves.

...what is often characterized as behavior directed at black women is just the way some black men treat all women...when it comes to women and children, we as a group are guilty of just about everything of which we stand accused. And we damn well know it.

Many [black men] have developed an arrogance when it comes to the opposite sex, and consequently behave in ways that make women feel extremely angry and insecure...only a fool - or someone totally ignorant of American history - could blame black women for being hurt or upset when their men go off with women of other races...There are still many of us who are somewhat color struck.

Those who love us...are our salvation...”

Ellis Cose is a gifted author. See more of his expertise in the following works:

The Rage of a Privileged Class

The Press

A Nation of Strangers

A Man’s World

Color-Blind

The Best Defense