MEN in AMERICA

ongoing photo essay

This photographic journey, kicked off by a two-month motorcycle trip across America, aims to create a visual tapestry of men in America today.

“When I was in my world of black lung, every day that I come down that driveway… I have to put on a whole different face in order to face these coal-miners, in order to be accepted. Thinking about that now: that’s an oppression, because I couldn’t be who I wanted to be. I had to be someone that I thought the miners wanted me to be or I would never have accomplished what I did over those 30 years. So it was a form of oppression. We see that a lot in a lot of African-Americans in this area. It’s so easy to just divorce yourself from society than to be out there dealing with it.”

“I have some people come say, “Look at Beyonce! Look at Jay-Z! Look at Puff Daddy! All the Black billionaires out there.” Yeah, from an economical standpoint, they have money. They don’t have no power. You put them in a room with 40 Black people, they are Black people. Bottom line, they are driving down the highway in a car, get profiled, they are Black people. Once you stop them and find out who they are. You may want to give them a load of clout or something because of who they are and what they’ve done, but in general, they are Black people. We have people say, “Poor people the same way.” Yeah, poor people are discriminated but you can pick a poor person and put them in a Brooks Brothers suit and he’s white, and you put me in a Brooks Brothers suit and I’m Black. There’s a difference there, I can’t take this off.”

“I feel that a black person cannot be racist. We can be prejudiced. “I don’t like you because you’re wearing a white shirt” or “I don’t like you because you are slim and built and I’m fat. I don’t like you.” That’s prejudiced. But in order to be a racist, my definition is you have to have power. Power is: I can’t stop you from getting into UT but UT can stop me from getting in. Or I can’t stop you from getting a mortgage or bank loan but the white president or the board of mostly whites around here, they can stop you. It’s that systemic racism. So, therefore, I feel that racism is power. It’s all of the biases and then it’s how it plays out that becomes racism.”

“I grew up in a household of immigrants. I’m first-generation American. My mom’s from Cuba, my dad’s from Belgium. I’m half Latin, but I’m white, so a lot of my childhood and youth up until college was me trying to stake a claim on my Latinness: “hey, I’m Cuban, you have to respect that.” And over time I’ve just been okay with: “hey, however you see me is fine, but I know who I am.”

“I always played sports and I was always surrounded by other boys, other young men, and I struggled a lot with accepting what masculinity should look like. My dad is not a Donald Trump style masculine man. He has a very fair amount of what people might say are feminine qualities: He’s a great listener. He never raised his voice at me, was just a very calm, kind, gentle man.”

“I’d start playing for a team and be surrounded by locker room behavior or a way of being as boys or men that I thought: this is bullshit. I don’t want to act like that. I don’t want to talk like this. So I would just leave.”

“My father is a gentle man. He never seeks conflict. He is a conciliator. I do not have all of those qualities. In politics, no different than father-son relationships or men, sometimes you need statesmen, and sometimes you need gladiators. But, to have a great nation you need both. You can’t have all one or the other. My dad was a gentle statesman. I’m a gladiator.

“I am so fortunate because my son has both of those qualities. He can be a gladiator and he can be a conciliator. He can be a statesman. He’s learned them both and he can turn them on or off. Building a son, growing a son... I learned this from my dad, is like painting. I don’t mean a painting like an art form. I mean painting with a building or a piece of machinery. But, your job is to put on 10,000 very thin coats. That’s how you build a boy. That’s how you build a man, 10,000 very thin coats, one time, one lesson at a time, one example at a time. It takes 10,000 strokes of a brush. I learned that from my dad.”