Written for keynote presentation at the Juneteenth screening of the film “Where Do Black Men Live?”, directed by Corinne Spencer, event hosted by The Black Response held at the Brattle Theater.
“This film is a labor of love and fulfillment of a promise made during the participatory action research (PAR) process launched by The Black Response following the 2020 uprisings. That process asked our community to image alternative to policing. As part of that process, we explored the deep links between public safety and housing justice."
…
Where do Black Men Live? Is a fictionalized dramatization based on these true stories. The script uses the men’s actual words, anonymized and performed by actors in the tradition of verbatim theater.” - Stephanie Guirand, The Black Response
www.TheBlackResponseCambrige.com
(Presentation begins at 2:25, 14min long)
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Where do Black men live?
Where do Black men live?
Where do Black men get to breathe?
Where do Black men live?
Black men live on the streets, rooming houses, couches, prison cells, jails, institutions, at the brutal intersection of economic, medical, housing, educational, cultural and colonial oppression
In the planned capitalist wage slavery of unemployment, of underemployment, in the ghosting by the GI Bill and the fleeting wisp nearness, unfathomable distance of the possibilities of intergenerational wealth, the possibilities of home, safety, security, embodied ownership yet on stolen Indigenous land
Where do Black men live?
in a perceived and coerced criminality, coded not only into our whip and bullet flayed skin, but into our own concoctions of who we often think we are
In a capitalist European settler colonial state….of a distorted sense of self
In the violence of poverty, the relegation into 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th class status
In the blood red, white violence, black and blue descendancy of the plagiarized constitution that said yet still affirms we are but three fifths of a man.
Where do Black men live?
In the sacred warrior, protector, lover, nurturer of the African woman’s womb, of the Black woman’s womb, in Black woman’s worry, in the complex liminal and hard spaces of Black women’s boundaries, in the tears of her eyes, in joy and in despair and in joy, the fire of her soul, salvation in the cornrow genius of her hair, in her arms as she released us together over the gunnels of the enslavers’ ships, yet into the growing Ancestral population home, the Ancestral Atlantic ocean womb of so many Africans, so many Africans, too many Africans
In the space behind the guns and cultural weaponry of Yaa Asantewa and her Ghana sisters, aunties, nieces and mothers against the British
In the forces led by Queen Nzingha in Angola against the Portuguese,who had been one of the first nations to send spies, agents, interlopers, contractors and soldiers onto the shores of our African home, where Black men lived, where Black men live
Where do Black men live?
In the indifference and neglect of beaten men who contributed sperm, but not love and commitment and in the lives of men, in the dedication, power and love of those who did give all to family and community, in the communities of men who took on extended family fatherhood’s many facets without officially filling out the application, so many of us still, continuously captured, enslaved, violently coerced into incarceration in numbers so high, in communal pain and loss so deep that we had to write libraries of books and song and poems about it, in the statistics of the USAmerican Settler Colony holding the largest population of incarcerated humans in the world, in the painful numbers that mark Black men as more than 25% of all those incarcerated.
Where do Black men live?
In the Black Liberation Army that liberated Kuwasi Balagoon….AND Assata Shakur…whose legacy would help liberate the spirit, creativity and cultural power of Tupac
Where do Black men live?
In our struggles against the patriarchy already in our cultures, but made rabid by the brutality of off-planet male deity christian European colonial misogyny and then the construct of misogynoir (thank you, Dr. Moya Bailey), in the blood sweat and tears of the intersectional battleground of the Combahee River Collective, thank you Demita Frazier and crew, and the geniuses of Kimberly Crenshaw and the sisterhood of struggle to clarify the mirror we all see ourselves in,
Systemic oppression gave us a brutal distortion funhouse mirror in which to see and be ourselves, confusion in confusion out, violence in violence out
In our struggles with the patriarchy that rots us from the inside and deconstructs our relationships with all those around us, turning us into the danger we warn our daughters about and often fail to tell our sons not to be, clearly, directly, authoritatively
Where do Black men Live?
In the sweat of applications for housing, for apartments for rooms for space, the freedom of being held by house, home, the support of the Spirit of our Mother Earth, Tenbalu, in the dotted i’s and crossed t’s, in the asking, in the proving of oneself, in the submission of our names that spark rejection at the thought of the ragged stories of prejudice of us…and our families….or no families, in the justification of eligibility, the financial risk, the emotional risk, the loss, the rejection,in the wins, in the successes, in the abuse of withholding by power of something that should be a right for all, like air, or water or community or love
Where do Black men live?
In the police legacy of enslaved African catchers kidnappers, in convict leasing, in vagrancy laws….LAWS…injustice is often legal, in the enslavement exception clause of the 13th amendment, in the racist injustice system, foster care, in the school to prison pipeline, in the iron sights and crosshairs, yet unwielded batons of modern day racist policing, in the memory of George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, Freddie Grey, Medgar Evers, Malcolm Little’s father, Breonna Taylor, Rekiah Boyd, Michael Brown
Where do Black men live?
In our futures, in our children, those we fathered, those we left behind, those we were unknowing models for, in our expansiveness, in our pushback, our push forward
In the portals we open, in the pain we relieve, in the pain we create and sustain, in the pain we endure, in the pleasure we give and receive,
In our missteps, mistakes, missed opportunities
Where do Black men live?
In our surviving, in our thriving,
In our Nile, Zambezi, Mississippi river of tears,
In Namib, Sahara heat of anger, hell hot, a hell not of our own creation because Africa never created hell, at least not one it felt compelled to force upon others in abusive manipulation of exploitation, the destruction of the beauty and resilience of Blackness, of Africanity
Where do Black men live?
In bondage, in boxes, in prisons, in the holds, the fetid, festering bellies of ships bound for lands many of our forebears had yet seen, in the Door of No Return, in a castle called Elmina and an enslaver ship named….jesus
In the lives of other men, in the eyes of other men, the arms of other men
In the restrictions and rules and patriarchal taboo of other men
in the hearts of other men, in the boxes men make for other men, so many inherited from colonial, racist patriarchal power to magnify the strength of the prison inside our own minds, if a mind is self-limiting, self-policing, the oppressor can leave their prison door unlocked as we will constantly and consistently build and rebuild new prisons with our own hands
Where do Black men live?
In beautiful bodies, in beautiful and disabled bodies, in beaten, broken and betrayed bodies, in powerful bodies, in medically fragile bodies, in medically victimized bodies, in straight bodies, in fabulous bodies, queer bodies, trans bodies, in Marsha P. Johnson brick bodies in beautiful bodies, in celebrated and stereotyped and prejudged and powerful and tender bodies
In the whispers over everything we’ve ever said, everything we’ve ever wondered, everything we’ve ever dreamed was impossible….or wildly, necessarily, remotely possible
Where do Black men live?
On the tip of the Samburu spear, in the hard military steel of the Zulu assegai, in the insistent fight back forward ever of the toitoi in occupied Azania, in the mantra chant song of African liberation, Izwe lethu i Afrika and the no equivocation of the we will overcome TODAY rally cry of the Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania - One Settler One Bullet, in the story and the creation of Pan-Africa, in the manifestation of a United States of Africa
In El Hajj Malik el Shabazz’s voice, “Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality.” In the rending of our very bodies and souls from the Earth Mother land of our birth, our identities, of our deep baobab dark soil root of timeless connectedness. In the creations of new foundations created and constantly recreated out of poverty and oppression
Where do Black men live?
Everywhere….yet still nowhere without some level of struggle and bloodletting
Where do Black men live?
In the fire ash bone dust of Rosewood, of Tulsa, of Slocum, New Orleans, Detroit, East Saint Louis, Memphis, Chicago founded by Jean Baptiste Point duSable, in Philadelphia 1985
In the battles in the swamps of the Seminole, in the Maroon held forests of Jamaica and Ayiti
Where do Black men live?
In the eyes of our Ancestors, in the hearts of our Ancestors, in the blood of our Ancestors, in the wildest dreams of our Ancestors, in the work, forced AND free, of our Ancestors, in the deaths of our Ancestors, in the lives, the breath, the pulsating sounds scientific conservation of energy of our Ancestors transitions and spiritual alchemy
In history, more bright and bold and beautiful than most of us can even imagine
In our presence, our embodiments, our bodies, our movements, our dance, our utterances, our songs of magnificence, from nyabinghi to Nas, in our cries for sustenance, support, healing, holding and relief
Where do Black men live?
In our future, in our futureS, in our dreams, in our plans, in our goals, in our organizing, in our organizations, in our united fronts in our nations, in our freedoms, in our knowing and projections into freedom, even when we have just been notified in official manner that our level of freedom has already been upgraded, though still with restriction, but the level of torture, violence and degradation had been so deep so long, so bloody, so incomprehensible that the Juneteenth energetic release was like nothing we had ever known, a welcome stranger of our extended family we would still yet have to get to know, to integrate into our consciousness, our beleaguered hearts and bludgeoned bodies, beaten but still bold spirits
Where do Black men live?
In the multiplicity of formations and contexts and frameworks, interdimensional, geographical manifestations of freedom and liberation, NOT ONE of them thrust upon us, but every single one created out the concretized prison terrorism of racist, patriarchal colonial forces and people, people that would rather see us asleep in the Matrix movie pods as victim powered batteries, servers in name and in function rather than free and unfettered humans alive in our own communal and cultural body autonomy
Where do Black men live?
In Ubuntu, too simply put as “I am because you are, because WE are”, in the voice of the djembe whose name means “come together”, in uhuru, in umoja, in the Nguzo Saba, in the songs of Shango and Olodumare, in the Dagara ritual dance, in the ring shouts, in the music and dance and martial art of the jota, from Angola to Recife
Where do Black men live?
We live here, we live - here - tonight, in Cambridge and far beyond, we live in the best and brightest hopes and dreams of people who show up to acknowledge our lives, our living, the harshness of it, the difficulty of it, the struggle of it, the beauty of it, we live in the bloodstream of history, now and forever.
Where do Black men live?
Black men live NOW.
Black men, welcome home.
© 2025 Ukumbwa Sauti
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