In this orientation talk, Coach K introduces the “Community of the Four Crosses,” a metaphorical map that frames gender (Female Street, Male Street) and race (Caucasian Street, African American Street) intersections to explore systemic advantages and disadvantages. He outlines his personal background—born a white straight male, educated in social work, and with extensive experience working with African‑American men through collaborations with Elijah Cummings, the Alternatives to Violence Project, correctional work, and the National Fatherhood Initiative—to establish credibility for discussing Black men’s issues. Coach K then critiques the common assumption that being male confers an advantage for African‑American men, pointing to comparable or worse outcomes for Black men versus Black women in incarceration and suicide rates. He proposes a “double whammy” hypothesis: Black men may face both racism and a distinct gender‑related disadvantage, challenging the notion of male privilege in this context. The talk concludes with an invitation to follow a series of tours and exhibits that will further investigate these intersections, encouraging viewers to subscribe and stay engaged.
Chapters
¡Hey there! I'm Coach K, and today I hope to be your tour guide. Our comeback is planning a series of interesting tours and exhibits in a very dynamic neighborhood full of problems and promise. We'll set up the projector now and get started with the orientation right after this. So thanks for attending our orientation on our tour of the Community of the Four Crosses. This is a community that, like a lot of communities, gets its name from the streets that surround it. You could see it outlined here in orange. The whole area is called the Community of the Four Crosses, but the crux of it is that area in orange. And this is a close-up, and here are the street names. On the west, Female Street. On the right, Male Street. On the north, Caucasian Street, and on the south, African American Street. So we have gender divisions on the east and west and racial divisions on the north and south. Now, of course, not everyone in the community belongs to one of the four groups, but we're gonna try to keep things simple and just focus on those four. Now, anytime you go to an art museum, an exhibit, or a tour, or any work of art— and the tour really is sort of a work of art— it depends a lot on what the artist, and in this case, the tour guide, believes and thinks about the subject matter and wants to say. And so it's a very subjective thing. It's an art form, and it gives you good reason to want to know, well, who is this tour guide and why should I go on a tour with, with him? What's he know about the subject matter? What's he know about the community of the Four Crosses? So I'm going to start by telling you what I know about each of the four main communities in the community of the Four Crosses, the four main groups. I was born a Caucasian male, and that's what I am today, and so that's the corner that I know best. I spent my life as a white male and a white straight male. Um, I didn't get married until I was 60 years old, so I had a lot of opportunities to have a lot of interactions with Caucasian females. Some of those interactions were good, some of them not so good, but I know Caucasian females pretty well, pretty well. The next corner is African American females at the corner of African American Street and Female Street. Now, this is the corner that I know the least. It's diagonally opposite of where I hung out most of the time, so I can't say I know African American females greatly, but I did attend a school of social work in Baltimore. There were a lot of African American women in that school of social work. Not only did I get time to spend a lot of time with African American females and getting to understand how they thought and who they were and what they wanted and what they didn't want. The subject matter was specifically, for the most part, about social issues, which is very much what the subject of our comeback and this tour is about. Now, this is the corner that is most interesting to me. I didn't come down here a lot to the corner of African American Street and Mail Street until I was an adult when I had developed a strong interest in what was really going on on Mail Street. So, as I started becoming more familiar with what was going on at the intersection of African American Street and Mail Street, I became more and more interested and more and more fascinated. So, let me give you some detail about what I know about this corner, because it really is the crux of the message of this talk.— in this series of tours. I worked in 1985 and 1986 with Elijah Cummings, who at the time was a Maryland state delegate from Baltimore. And he was interested in what was really going on with men and boys, particularly black men and boys. And I worked with him in '85 and '86 in Annapolis, the state capital of Maryland, to try to get the state to establish a commission or a task force on men and boys. Now, we got— we took a lot of heat for this. People thought it was a silly idea, but we put on really good hearings, and a lot of the people who made fun of us at first really came around and said that was good work. They didn't vote for it. They couldn't vote for it politically, but they congratulated Elijah for having the courage to step out and talk about this issue. And of course, I learned a lot helping him put on the hearings. Then I became a certified facilitator for a program in the prisons around the world. Prisons around the world will run this program. It's called Alternatives to Violence Project. And I was consistently blown away when I would conduct these weekend workshops with inmates in prisons, with the depth of the heart and the soul of these men, and I only did it with men, it's also done with women, but I only did it with men. I was blown away with how deep the emotions and feelings were that these men expressed in these alternatives to violence. Project sessions. And these sessions just would completely blow away everything you thought you knew about offenders, prisoners, inmates in prisons. It was really quite an amazing and beautiful experience to participate in Alternatives to Violence Project, mostly with African American males. After that, after I got out of social work school, I thought maybe I should learn a little bit about the correctional system from the inside, not as an outside facilitator, but from the inside. And I got a job in the infamous Baltimore City Detention Center as a CO. That's my lieutenant there giving me a little certificate for being a a good doobie one month. He liked the way I did business. After being a CO at the jail for a year, I spent a year as a parole and probation agent in Central Baltimore, and my clients were very, very largely African-American males. I learned a lot about what their struggles were. And, um, well, we'll talk more about it in other sessions. Uh, after that, for a year, I worked for the National Fatherhood Initiative, and I was a trainer and a consultant to a lot of, um, state correctional programs around the country, various departments of corrections in Missouri, Virginia, Indiana. Did some work for a social services organization in Connecticut, teaching them how to run this National Fatherhood Initiative program called Inside Out Dad, which was a program for helping incarcerated fathers stay in touch with their kids. And what I learned there was that if you really want to touch the heart of a man, or touch the heart of a father. You can touch it through appealing to him about what's good for his kids. And then I did an article for the website blackmeninamerica.com. I didn't know it at the time, but this article at the intersection of black and male was really the beginning of this tour that I am proposing to run for you, this tour about what's going on at these various intersections, these various cross streets. So that's the sum and substance of my cred, I guess, for talking about African American men. And I hope you agree it's fairly substantial. What's, I think, fair to say is pretty unique about me is that Not only do I have a fair understanding of African American men as a Caucasian man, but also I have a very deep interest in what's going on with men in general. Okay, enough said there. Okay, so let's talk about what happens along these streets, Female Street, Male Street, Caucasian Caucasian Street and African American Street. So I don't think any right-thinking person would deny that there are some very significant advantages for the people who live on Caucasian Street. Those advantages are signified by the green checkmarks. Advantages for people on Caucasian Street by Verge— by virtue of being Caucasian. At the same time, and by the same token, there are some very significant disadvantages for people who live on African American Street by virtue of racism. Don't think there's any doubt about that. Now, what's happening on the other streets, on the cross streets? Well, we have heard a lot about sexism disadvantages that befall women by virtue of their sex. Those red X's, difficulties for women by virtue of being female. So the people who live along Female Street have trouble with sexism. The people who live at the corner of African American Street and Female Street sort of suffer a double whammy there. Racism and sexism, or racism and the effects of patriarchy. What's happening on Wall Street? Well, what we're told is that there's nothing but advantages on Wall Street, that living on Wall Street is nothing but a positive experience. However, One of the points of this tour is to look at what's going on at the corner of African American Street and Male Street. And you can see the disadvantages of racism, and supposedly there are a lot of advantages, uh, by virtue of being male. But I really have to ask myself when I look at these two corners and I think about what I know about African American women generally, um, and what I know about a lot of African American men, I have to wonder if African American men are really doing that much better than African American women. A couple of the major indicators would be incarceration and suicide. I just don't see African American men doing that much better than African American women on measures like that. I wonder if living on the corner of African American Street and Male Street really is an example or a situation where you suffer disadvantages by virtue of being Black, but you suffer advantage, or you enjoy advantages by virtue of being male. Doesn't seem, doesn't seem that that's correct to me. If there were advantages to being male, Black men would be doing better than Black women, and I for one don't see it. So, I question that whole thing, and I propose a different way of looking at things. Again, no doubt that there is racism, advantages to whites along Caucasian Street and disadvantages to Blacks along African American Street, but I want to propose something slightly different. Again, there is still sexism against women,. But instead of nothing but advantages along male street, maybe there's also something negative, some disadvantages happening to men along male street. That would help explain the double whammy of racism and sexism against black men would help explain why African American males are not doing significantly better than African American women. Both suffer a double whammy. The double whammy that Black women face is racism and sexism, or racism and patriarchy. The question would be, what is the other thing besides racism What is the particular form of gender dynamics that is operating against African American males living along Mail Street? And that is the central question of this whole series of tours and exhibits that I am planning and hoping that you will be part of. So please stay in touch. Subscribe to the YouTube channel if you wish, but stay in touch, and, uh, we'll have subsequent tours and exhibits from time to time. If you're interested in this, as I hope you are, please stay in touch and please stay tuned. Thanks, take care.
