The Shero in my TEDx Talk
I gave a TEDx talk at Lynbrook High School in the Spring of 2017. The talk was titled #PoweringPotential for #Impact. In the talk I used a story about a young woman who took martial arts classes to belong to a community and to increase her self-esteem. At the end of the story our shero began to believe in herself and was able to turn a so-called weakness to a strength. This story is one of my favorites. However, when I was told this story years ago the teenage girl, the main character, was a teenage boy and the martial arts teacher wasn’t a woman like I mentioned in the talk but a male. I changed the gender of the main characters before I took the TED stage and this is why.
First of all, I am a Haitian/African American male, who is heterosexual and identify with “he, his and him” pronouns. My gender expression or the way I express my gender is masculine. I ascribe to a number of gender norms and there are others I reject. As a male in a patriarchal society I am awarded privileges that I did not earn. This is called male privilege.
My purpose for writing this piece isn’t to speak for women. I am writing as male who wants to dismantle patriarchy. Now, I don’t do this very well every day. I have made sexist comments, addressed men before women in social settings, and much more. But before I totally discredit myself, I think men have a place in dismantling patriarchy even if it’s us clumsily stumbling in the process of liberating our society from an oppressive system. I’m not saying that we, men, should do bad work, which would make things worse. What I am saying is that we can do less and less harm if we work on ourselves. Hence, below I share my own self work and process and my reasons for changing the genders in my talk.
I wasn’t aware of any marginalization of women until my freshmen year in college. I didn’t start my own work in addressing my male privilege until my last semester of my senior year. Since then I’ve learned that a lot of our stories are based around male characters. It is the norm. When I was told the story I shared during my talk, I imagined a white teenage male. In my mind, the only woman character in that story was the teenager’s mother.
As I practiced and told this story at different speaking engagements I asked myself, “Colber, why are most of the characters males?” Then I asked myself, “Would it be hard to imagine if the main characters were women or in fact women of color?” I had a brain fart! I then had to force my imagination to work outside or against the status quo by picturing all the main characters as females. This included the parents. After that I asked myself, “What is my role in a society that is oversaturated with male centered narratives?” And I told myself, “Since it was so hard for me imagine female characters, I will then share the story this way. Hopefully, this will push the imagination of others.” But this process didn’t happen in one sitting, but over several months. And I think the “happening” was more important than the time it took.
There are several iterations of this story and some of them have the main character as a young woman. A number of people may believe that the story itself is more important than changing the genders of the characters. But in my book No Entry: Examining the Powers that Undermine our Full Potential, I conveyed that dominant groups use their power to maintain a system that silence and overlook the people who belong to subordinate groups (Prosper, 2017). As men we shouldn’t continue to say only male centered stories that leave women invisible or playing stereotypical roles. Women are much more than what we have them to be in our male centered imaginations.
bell hooks is one of my favorite writers. In her book We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, she shared that black men have a history of pushing gender equality with black women. She challenges black men to redefine masculinity to include the fight for gender equality and to end “plantation patriarchy” (hooks, 2004, p. 1). I thank bell hooks and other women for keeping men accountable of our male privilege. Therefore, I encourage all men to change the status quo by doing their own work around their privilege. Let’s create a “revolutionary manhood” that partners with women for a society based on love, justice and liberation (hooks, 2004, p. 14).
Work Cited
hooks, b. (2004). We Real Cool Black Men and Masculinity. New York, NY: Routledge.
