Black Men Are Not an Endangered Species — Stop Eulogizing the Living

Let me tell you what happens when you eulogize a man who is still breathing. He begins to believe that he is already dead. He begins to move through the world as though his story has already been written, as though the final chapter was composed before he opened his eyes on the first morning of his life, and all that remains is the slow, inevitable confirmation of what everyone already knew. He is endangered. He is at risk. He is a statistic walking toward its own fulfillment. And the cruelest part of this particular cruelty is that the people who wrote his eulogy believe they did it out of love.

The phrase “endangered Black male” entered the American vocabulary in the late 1980s, during the crack epidemic, when Black men were dying in American cities at rates that made the metaphor feel almost literal. Jewelle Taylor Gibbs published Young, Black, and Male in America: An Endangered Species in 1988, and the framing took hold with the grip of gospel. It was repeated in academic conferences, social work curricula, congressional testimony, church sermons, and eventually in the mouths of Black mothers telling their sons to be careful out there — not because the world contained ordinary dangers, but because the world had been specifically designed to destroy them. The intention was protective. The effect has been catastrophic.

Because here is what the research tells us about what happens when you define a group by its worst outcomes: the group begins to perform toward those outcomes. This is not speculation. This is one of the most robustly documented phenomena in social psychology, and it has a name. Robert K. Merton coined the term self-fulfilling prophecy in 1948, defining it as “a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true.” When you tell a population of young men that they are endangered — that the system is designed to destroy them, that their chances are slim, that survival itself is an achievement — you are not describing reality. You are creating it.

Claude Steele’s landmark research at Stanford University extended this principle directly to identity and performance. In a series of experiments beginning in 1995 and published formally in 1997, Steele and Joshua Aronson demonstrated that when Black students were reminded of their racial identity before taking a test — when the stereotype of intellectual inferiority was made salient — their performance dropped measurably. Not because they were less capable. Not because the test was harder. But because the psychological burden of a negative group narrative consumed cognitive resources that would otherwise have been devoted to the task itself. Steele called it stereotype threat, and in the decades since, it has been replicated in over three hundred studies across multiple countries and demographics.

Now extend this from a laboratory to an entire culture. When the dominant narrative about Black men — in media, in academia, in the well-meaning programs designed to “save” them — is that they are endangered, at risk, targeted, doomed, what is the cumulative stereotype threat of an entire lifetime? What happens to a boy who hears, from the age of five, that the world is designed to kill him? He either lives in terror or he decides that if he is going to die anyway, the rules do not apply. Neither response produces the outcomes that the people who love him actually want.

The Numbers They Never Show You

Here is the reality that the endangered-species narrative requires you to ignore. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, approximately 86 percent of Black men in America have never been incarcerated. Not “haven’t been incarcerated yet.” Never. The overwhelming, documented, statistical majority of Black men in this country have never seen the inside of a prison cell.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 73 percent of Black men aged 20 and older are employed. They go to work. They earn paychecks. They pay taxes. They contribute to their households and their communities and the American economy. They do this every day, without cameras, without profiles, without anyone writing an article about how remarkable it is that they managed to hold a job while being Black.

Black male college enrollment has increased by approximately 30 percent since 2000. The number of Black men earning bachelor’s degrees has risen steadily over two decades. The number of Black men in graduate programs, in medical schools, in law schools, in engineering programs, has grown to levels that would have been unimaginable to the generation that marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

But you would not know any of this from the way Black men are discussed in America. Because the 14 percent who have been incarcerated have become the image of the 100 percent. The minority that confirms the narrative has been elevated to represent the majority that contradicts it. And this is not an accident of media coverage. It is the function of the endangered-species framing. When you define a group as endangered, you are selecting for evidence of endangerment. You are building a confirmation bias so powerful that the 86 percent who disprove the thesis become invisible, and the 14 percent who confirm it become the only story anyone tells.

The Men You Are Trained Not to See

There are more than 65,000 Black male physicians practicing medicine in the United States. There are over 48,000 Black male engineers. There are more than 2.6 million Black-owned businesses in America, a significant portion of them founded and operated by Black men. There are Black men running school districts, managing hospitals, building houses, designing software, driving trucks, welding steel, repairing aircraft, arguing cases before federal judges, and coaching little league on Saturday mornings.

These men are not exceptions. They are not anomalies. They are not the lucky ones who escaped the fate that the narrative assigned to them. They are the majority. They are the statistical norm. And the fact that calling them the norm feels surprising — the fact that reading these numbers feels like discovering a secret — is itself the evidence of how thoroughly the endangered-species framing has distorted our perception of Black manhood in America.

Consider Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett, whose work on mRNA technology contributed to the development of the COVID-19 vaccine. Consider the Black men who serve as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies — a number that, while still too small, has grown from zero to its current level within a single generation. Consider the Black male teachers in urban schools who show up every day to classrooms that the media describes only in terms of failure, and who produce students who go on to college, to careers, to lives of quiet, undocumented dignity. Consider the Black fathers — and despite what the statistics on marital status suggest, the CDC’s 2013 report on father involvement found that Black fathers who live with their children are more involved in daily caregiving activities than white or Hispanic fathers across every measured category.

Read that again. The CDC — not an advocacy organization, not a think tank with an agenda, but the federal government’s own health research apparatus — documented that Black fathers who are present are more involved than their counterparts of any other race. They bathe their children more often, they read to them more often, they eat meals with them more often, they help with homework more often. And yet the dominant narrative about Black fatherhood is one of absence, because the endangered-species framing requires absence to function.

The Language That Builds — and the Language That Buries

Words are not neutral. The psychological research on framing effects demonstrates that the language used to describe a problem determines the solutions people can imagine. Margaret Beale Spencer’s Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST), developed in the late 1990s, documented specifically how identity framing affects adolescent development in Black youth. When Black boys are framed as “at-risk” — when the vocabulary of their existence is the vocabulary of danger, pathology, and potential failure — they internalize a reactive identity. They see themselves as objects being acted upon by forces beyond their control. When they are framed as “high-potential” — when the vocabulary shifts to asset, capability, and expectation — they develop what Spencer calls a proactive identity, one that positions them as agents of their own outcomes.

This is not semantics. This is documented developmental science. The difference between calling a child “at-risk” and calling a child “high-potential” is the difference between two entirely different trajectories, because the label does not merely describe the child — it instructs every adult who encounters the child on what to expect, and those expectations become the ceiling or the floor of what the child is permitted to become.

Carol Dweck’s research at Stanford on growth mindset versus fixed mindset provides the complementary evidence. Students who are taught that their abilities are fixed — that their intelligence, their talent, their capacity is a predetermined quantity — perform worse and give up faster when confronted with difficulty. Students who are taught that their abilities are malleable, that effort produces growth, that struggle is not evidence of inadequacy but the mechanism of development, perform measurably better on every academic and behavioral outcome studied.

Now ask yourself: what is the “endangered Black male” narrative if not the ultimate fixed mindset? It tells Black boys that their destiny is encoded in their demographics. It tells them that the system is a machine designed to process them into prisons or graves, and that resistance is noble but futile. It is the psychological equivalent of telling a child, before his first day of school, that the test has already been graded and he has already failed.

What Happens When You Expect Greatness Instead

Morehouse College — the only all-male historically Black college in America — has been producing evidence against the endangered-species thesis for 157 years. Its alumni include Martin Luther King Jr., Julian Bond, Spike Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, and Maynard Jackson, the first Black mayor of a major Southern city. But beyond the famous names, Morehouse has a documented graduation rate of 52 percent for Black men — nearly double the national average for Black male students at four-year institutions. The school does not frame its students as endangered. It frames them as expected to lead.

The 100 Black Men of America organization, founded in 1963, operates mentoring programs in over fifty cities across the country. Their documented outcomes include mentored youth who graduate high school at rates exceeding 97 percent and college enrollment rates above 80 percent — in the same zip codes, from the same demographics, living with the same structural disadvantages that the endangered-species narrative says make success nearly impossible. The difference is not resources. The programs are not extravagantly funded. The difference is framing. The mentors do not approach their mentees as victims to be saved. They approach them as young men to be developed.

The My Brother’s Keeper initiative, launched by President Obama in 2014, adopted asset-based framing as a core principle. Early evaluation data from the initiative’s milestone programs showed measurable improvements in school attendance, course completion, and suspension rates among Black and Latino boys in participating communities. The programs that produced the strongest results shared a common characteristic: they did not describe their participants as at-risk youth being rescued from anticipated failure. They described them as future leaders receiving the preparation they deserved.

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” — Steve Biko

Biko was talking about apartheid South Africa, but the principle is universal. When the oppressor’s narrative becomes your self-concept, the oppressor no longer needs to be present. The work is done. And this is precisely what the endangered-species framing accomplishes: it takes the external reality of systemic racism and transplants it into the internal psychology of Black boys, so that even in the absence of an oppressor, the boy carries the oppression inside himself. He has been taught to see himself as the system sees him, and in doing so, he has become his own prison.

The Media Machine and the Invisible Majority

The media’s role in this distortion is not subtle and it is not accidental. George Gerbner’s cultivation theory, developed through decades of research at the Annenberg School for Communication, demonstrated that heavy consumers of television develop perceptions of reality that mirror the content they consume, regardless of whether that content reflects actual statistical reality. When television overrepresents Black men as criminals — and it does, consistently, in every content analysis conducted over the past forty years — viewers come to believe that Black men are more criminal than the data supports. This is true of white viewers. And it is true of Black viewers, including Black boys watching stories about themselves.

A 2015 study from the Sentencing Project found that news media overrepresent Black people as perpetrators of crime by approximately 20 percentage points relative to actual arrest statistics. Black people constituted 51 percent of people depicted as perpetrators in news stories about crime while representing 28 percent of those actually arrested. The inverse distortion applied to victims: Black crime victims were underrepresented in news coverage by a similar margin. The message is unmistakable: Black men are the ones who commit violence, not the ones who suffer it. The endangered-species narrative absorbs this distortion and metabolizes it into prophecy.

And the remedy is not to deny that Black men face real and documented dangers. They do. Police violence is real and documented. Sentencing disparities are real and documented. Employment discrimination is real and documented. The remedy is to insist that these dangers are obstacles, not destiny — that they are problems to be solved by capable men, not prophecies to be fulfilled by doomed ones.

The Intervention

James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time that the details of one’s life are “a mask — a mask behind which we both hide and through which we both seek to communicate.” The endangered-species label has become such a mask. It allows well-meaning people to hide their low expectations behind the language of compassion. It allows institutions to hide their failure to educate, employ, and serve Black men behind the language of systemic inevitability. And it allows Black men themselves to hide from the terrifying freedom of being responsible for their own outcomes behind the comforting identity of the victim who was never given a chance.

I am not asking anyone to pretend that racism does not exist. I am asking you to stop giving racism the final word on what Black men can become. I am asking you to look at the 86 percent and let them be as loud as the 14 percent. I am asking you to look at the engineers and the doctors and the teachers and the fathers and the welders and the truck drivers and the business owners and the pastors and the coaches and the artists and the scientists and to say: this is what Black manhood looks like. Not the prison yard. Not the chalk outline. Not the statistic. This.

Every boy who enters a classroom should be met with an expectation, not an excuse. Every young man who walks into a mentoring program should be told what he is capable of, not what the system plans to do to him. Every son should hear from his mother, from his father, from his uncle, from his coach, from his pastor, from every adult who claims to love him: you are not endangered. You are not a statistic. You are not a species being catalogued for extinction. You are a man, and you are expected to become a great one, and here are the tools.

The research supports this. The data supports this. The outcomes of every program that has bet on Black male potential instead of Black male pathology supports this. The question is not whether the evidence exists. The question is whether we have the courage to follow it — to retire the eulogy, to silence the mourners, and to say to every Black boy in America, with the full weight of documented truth behind us: we are not burying you. We are building you. Get up.