‘Boys will be’ what they are taught
Engaging young men of color to encourage openness, less rigid definitions of masculinity
Joel Hernandez struggles to imagine what career he wants to have when he gets older. After spending time in a juvenile detention center at age 10, the East New York native says, “If I go to jail, I go to jail.” He has jumped or been jumped by so many people, he says, that he doesn’t even value his life anymore. He is 13 years old.
I met Joel several months ago as I was engaging young men at a middle school in East New York on the role of masculinity in their lives. Over the course of the past year, I have explored issues around masculinity and how it is evolving through the Social Journalism program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. In my time researching and reporting using new journalistic strategies, methods and approaches, I have found it important to simply help organize a community of young men who are engaging and who want to engage in conversation about their experiences since they are so often discouraged from doing so.
By uniting around what it means to be a man, I will ask young men to be vulnerable with one another and draw from their own experiences so that they might grow their understanding of how men have been socialized, the harms that our current definitions of masculinity present and the power they have to spark social change for the better.

At the start of 2019, the American Psychological Association sounded the alarm when they created explicit Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Men and Boys. The report names something called “traditional masculinity ideology,” as something negatively impacting men’s mental and physical health and that therapists should be aware of when treating men and boys. Being told not to feel a full range of emotions and to distance themselves from experiences of women and girls such as sharing their feelings or being “overly emotional,” can lead to private, internal conflicts for them. As boys and men, they are told to remain strong and in control over their feelings in the face of any conflict. This limits the capacity for emotional, social connection.
“Though men benefit from patriarchy, they are also impinged upon by patriarchy,” says Ronald F. Levant, EdD, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Akron and co-editor of the APA volume “The Psychology of Men and Masculinities.” While it would seem reasonable to think that men benefit from the system of society or government in which men hold the power and women, LGBTQ people and other minorities are largely excluded from it, Levant argues that they are negatively impacted by it. His book surveys a growing body of work on therapeutic and preventive interventions for men, as well as programs aimed at men’s violence, substance use, and lack of self-care. For that reason, it has become a standard reference for researchers and practitioners in this field and an essential part of university courses on men and masculinities.
On top of a collective socialization that indoctrinates boys at an early age, Suicide Attempts Among Black Teens Are Increasing, according to the findings of self-reported data from high schoolers collected by the Centers for Disease Control between 1991 and 2017 that was published in the journal Pediatrics last month. Lead author of the study Michael A. Lindsey, executive director of the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at the NYU Silver School of Social Work, says factors such as racism, higher rates of poverty and higher rates of adverse childhood events could be at play. He suggests that mental health professionals consider race and ethnicity when analyzing suicide attempts and ideation by American teens.
“It’s important to look at trends in suicide behavior expression, because it gives us a sense of whether there are particular risk groups — and then how we can begin to think about the needs of those different groups,” Lindsey said.
This is about hope. This is about letting young men of color know that they are not alone despite being taught to avoid sharing their experiences, complaining or appearing weak. This is about feeling a sense of community, a source of inspiration and accountability.
Through “boys will be,” a video series that features small group discussions with young men of color ages 12–24, I hope to provide a space for young men of color to reimagine what manhood looks like. The group discussions will happen organically with me as the moderator, and they will also be filmed, edited, published on YouTube and shared on social media through Twitter, Instagram and hopefully Snapchat since many of the middle schoolers use Snapchat.

The topics of discussion will include, but are not limited to: the collective socialization of manhood, when young men realize they are a man, what they are taught it means to be a man, how men relate to women and girls, what is hard about being a man, how we see manhood evolving and what we all can do to promote less rigid gender roles.
By generating an online presence centralized on my project landing page, and trackable movement with the hashtag #boyswillbe, I will open up a necessary conversation about masculinity that no one else is having. I have encouraged the sources and participants in my group discussion to use the hashtag to either call out problematic behavior that they see from boys and men or to celebrate examples mindful masculinity and successful boys and men of color thus, creating a vehicle for further discussion. I have been told by members of this community that they would be much more likely to engage with video content than with a written article, book or event in which they do not know the participants (or in this case the facilitator, me).
The name “boys will be,” stems from one of my favorite quotes. Michael Kimmel, an American sociologist and leading researcher and writer on men and masculinity in 2012 asked, “Why don’t we say ‘boys will be boys’ when a man wins the Nobel Peace Prize?” And he is right to ask. The phrase “boys will be boys” is often used to excuse problematic behavior rather than to celebrate the successes of men and boys. Boys need to see examples of what healthy, respectful manhood looks like if they are going to live it out.
That is why my project, “boys will be,” reframes that well-known phrase to be more open-minded and to signal less rigid definitions of manhood for a future generation of boys. In an interview with the Women’s Media Center, he went on to say that using the phrase “boys will be boys” when you are only referring to bad things, is a form of “male bashing.”
Far too many conversations around men and masculinity involve language that demonizes and alienates men for being who they are, so taking a couple steps back to hear them out and brainstorm what healthy, mindful manhood looks like, together — or most likely, to get them to think about their gender in a way they have never thought of before — is the key here.
I went from a very broad goal of wanting to help men feel comfortable in their own skin, which is hard to measure and has many variables involved in achieving success, to a specific goal of modeling a conversation about mindful masculinity with three different age groups of young men of color to be shared and replicated. What that change took was realizing that conversations around the topic of manhood and how men are socialized were the thing itself — that filling this void with voices of young men of color was the information need my journalism would work to meet. I plan to provide a model for conversations that have not been taking place on their own and a diverse range of content for people who are new to the conversation around mindful masculinity to engage with.
The biggest challenge in this work has been coordinating a lot of different people of different ages. I have learned to lean into both the similarities and differences among my sources as they will lead to the most insight and understanding.
There is a wide range of diversity in the stories I will feature on my website and that I foresee coming into the group discussions. Since I am working with 5–8 participants in each group discussion, I know that it will be possible to make sure that everyone has a chance to share and to be heard in a reasonable amount of time.
While testing and refining this project, I have thought of different potential partners who would see the value in this work and could be a source of revenue such as, My Brother’s Keeper or other groups like Mindful Masculinity, A CALL TO MEN, The Alliance for Boys and Men of Color and more, who would be willing to cross-promote material. I could also see an influencer with a large following like Liz Plank or Jumaane Williams to help promote or lend funding ideas for further projects.
After the video series debuts, I would love to take it to the streets in a sense, by commissioning and helping to promote murals, wheatpaste posters, ad campaigns and more inspired by art like Pharrell Williams in GQ’s New Masculinity Issue. Depending on the demand for more in-person, round-table group discussions, I could also see myself having topic-based discussions that people sign up to participate with an opportunity to donate or maybe pay a small fee. With a grassroots movement, anything is possible.
I keep success stories like this one in the front of my mind, and I look to my community for inspiration and answers for how best to meet their needs. I am honored to serve them, and care deeply about them and their success.
