Los Angeles – Socio-political analyst Cleo Manago stands his ground with Sean Hannity, on Fox News’ “Hannity” tonight, Friday, July 19 at 9:00 p.m. ET in a discussion about race relations in America in general and also as it pertains to the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case.

Manago appears alongside Compton’s own, Pastor Michael J.T. Fisher of the Greater Zion Church Family. Fisher is leading the 13th Annual “March 4 a Cause” Peace March in Compton, on Saturday, July 20, in conjunction with Rev. Al Sharpton’s call for a “Justice for Trayvon” National Day of Action. One hundred vigils in cities across the country are scheduled to take place at noon as a call to action pushing for the Department of Justice to file federal charges against George Zimmerman. The vigils will lead up to the Saturday, August 24, 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Justice led by Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III,.

As the board chair for BMADD: Black Males Against our Defamation and Demise, Cleo Manago has been an outspoken advocate for the human rights, well-being, dignity, self-respect and protection of Black men and Black people for over two decades. The Trayvon Martin travesty brings home issues he has been mandating for years. “The racial profiling, stalking and killing of an unarmed innocent teen should be protested, and yet, Trayvon Martin was the victim of a larger problem stemming from America’s wholesale dehumanization of Black men. Now that there is public resistance to legally sanctioned executions, can Black males stop being America’s favorite prey – that is the larger question?” Manago deliberates.

Watch Cleo Manago on “Hannity”, Friday night, July 19 at 9:00 p.m. ET, then join the discussion with him on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/Cleo.Manago.

By Cleo Manago, CEO and founder of the Black Men’s Xchange (BMX)

According to United States Attorney General, Mr. Eric Holder, “…in things racial [Americans] have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” “Endgame: AIDS in Black America,” an edition of the PBS network’s “Frontline” that aired recently, personifies the timidity Holder references in that the documentary only went but just so far, and not far enough. The special feature barely touched the surface of AIDS in Black America, an over 30 year ride on a vehicle never allowed to move. In reality, AIDS in Black America has been stuck in first gear by racism – both internalized by African Americans – and institutionalized by America’s tendency to treat Black male life as marginal, disposable and more valuable, if compromised, controlled, diseased or disloyal to the African American community.

In more than three decades, the United States never produced a supportive campaign targeting Black males at HIV risk. That diverse HIV negative and positive Black males were closed out of HIV prevention access by gay-identity politics; and how HIV went from having a White face, to no face, to a Black female face, was not remotely engaged in “Endgame.” These are all directly connected to why HIV/AIDS still disproportionately ravages the lives of Black men and Black women, however, keeping both at-risk.

Featured in “Endgame” are so-called homophobic attitudes in Black communities, drug use and a lack of education. Yet, these don’t actually explain the epidemic because the anti-homosexual movement in this country is led by White men, Pat Robertson, Scott Lively, and previously the late Jerry Falwell. African Americans, especially highly impacted groups – Black homosexual and bisexual men – are no less educated on HIV than White men. People among Whites have poverty, men who get incarcerated and have sex with men in prison and excessive substance abuse too, but neither suffers from an HIV epidemic. Also neither suffers directly from the reverberations of racism, or from being people of African descent in America. African Americans do.

Worse of all, “Endgame” never mentions the HIV interventions designed by and for Black people now being researched by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention because of their promise. ‘Endgame’ provided no examples of promising solutions to AIDS in Black America. This possibly racist under or misrepresentation of the facts illustrates the cowardice Mr. Holder spoke of. What Americans saw in ‘Endgame’ was whatever and whoever the documentary writer and PBS – who are not Black – decided to include. The National Black Programming Consortium (I think purposely) was listed to give the impression that “End Game” had Black architects. It did not.

To date, every highly profiled film on Blacks and AIDS in America has been written and produced by someone White. This gap in representation is not because of a lack of gifted Black documentarians and journalists in America. As a matter of fact, in 2009, the late Claudia Pryor (who used to produce “20/20” for ABC) produced and directed a Black AIDS documentary called “Why Us? Left Behind and Dying.”

Pryor’s riveting film was considered for an Oscar. While the documentary has an unfortunately dismal title, uniquely, it featured “inner city” Black youth as the narrators. Being that HIV/AIDS could impact their future in particular, this was a compelling and brilliant HIV educational angle by Pryor. Because Pryor was Black and had lived insights into the nuances of Black life and culture, her film is richer and more engaging than “Endgame.” But, it apparently was not acceptable to “mainstream” sources. So, despite its value it has been unacknowledged. Here is a link to Claudia Pryor’s film – http://www.diversityfilms.org/

The Black HIV/AIDS game has not ended and has yet to be fairly played. The actual healing and effective HIV prevention work being done (and it is being done) for Black people, and particularly for Black men in America, apparently won’t be televised, because of racism and related agendas in American media.

Solutions to the dilemma of AIDS in Black America and gaps in story-telling on the issue include:
Being mindful of Attorney General Holder’s sentiments about race;
Being more courageous and realistic about reducing the impact of racism as it effects African Americans; Consider ceasing with racist and oppressive attitudes, choices and practices; Stop avoiding the fundamental issue of internalized oppression and the part it plays in creating barriers to Black well-being, self-love and constructive or HIV protective behavior; African Americans need to face and collectively work to resolve the high probability of suffering from some level of internalized oppression (or racism); Highlight promising solutions or interventions to AIDS in Black America that do exist (like the Critical Thinking and Cultural Affirmation [CTCA] strategy) and not just deficiently explained crisis and dysfunction (That’s racist); Stop selecting so-called Black leadership on the AIDS issue that does not engage or represent most Black people; and
Media (and other institutions including government) needs to acknowledge the limitations and blind spots that can occur when culturally embedded Black people (and not just a Black face) are not at the helm of Black storytelling or relevant decision-making.
The link to the “End Game” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/endgame-aids-in-black-america.

Cleo Manago is founder and CEO of the Black Men’s Xchange (BMX) (http://www.bmxnational.org/), the nation’s oldest and largest community-based movement devoted to promoting healthy self-concept and behavior among same gender loving (SGL), gay-identifying and bisexual African-descended males.

By Cleo Manago, CEO and founder of the Black Men’s Xchange (BMX)
African-American hip-hop artist Frank Ocean recently shared in a post on his Tumblr page that he had fallen in love with a man before. At the speed of sound, all available media space has been consumed with ill-informed presumptions about Mr. Ocean’s identity and conception of his sexuality.

In less than 24 hours everyone, particularly lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) identified individuals, had defined his sexuality for him even though he has said nothing at all publicly on this issue to date.

What we’ve witnessed is a profound chauvinism on the part of gay-identified individuals who cannot conceive of any identity outside of the limiting gay/straight binary. And in the process, they continue to obscure the rarely acknowledged reality that many Black men who love men are not comfortable with the LGBT or gay identity.

Frank Ocean wrote that he fell in love with a man. It was a beautiful story about love lost, about the unique challenges of being a black man who loves another black man in a society that does not value the lives of black men. Mr. Ocean never articulates it in those terms, but as a man who has worked for more than three decades with black men who love men, I recognized the signs.

And, importantly, he never used the words “gay” or “bisexual.” He did however use the word “love.” Five times, in fact.

That’s the beautiful honesty obscured here, and obscured every time the predominantly White gay movement and other gay-identified individuals label Black homosexuals and bisexuals without their consent. As quiet as it is kept, our society has more complexity than the predominately White-controlled media allows space to understand. People, especially African Americans, need to understand that many African Americans do not consider LGBT or gay to be inclusive nor culturally affirming. And this is not always because they are in denial of their sexuality or that they wish they were heterosexual, contrary to what you might hear in the mainstream media.

The reality is that there are many African American men that prefer being in spaces that affirm their Blackness, rather than associating with an often racist “LGBT” community. Africans Americans are not the architects of the LGBT movement. They are, if anything, just used in advertisements to create the impression of inclusion that is not always there.

Recently, Queen Latifah headlined the 29th Annual Long Beach Lesbian & Gay Pride Festival. Following her appearance, like with Mr. Ocean, an avalanche of LGBT-identity associations was made about Latifah. She soon corrected everyone explaining that she was not “coming out” as a “lesbian” but was just being supportive.

Latifah and Ocean are the products of deeply African-American art forms and cultures. Latifah is a highly respected figure from hip-hop’s golden age and Frank Ocean is a member of the hip-hop collective, Odd Future. They are not highly assimilated individuals, culturally speaking. Both are still quite “Black” in how they “represent.” It is entirely possible that, as a result, they are unwilling to adopt the LGBT identity because it holds no cultural capital for them. And there is nothing wrong with their decision to do so. In fact, it’s a sign of radical self-determination that is all too rare in our so-called “post-racial” America.

Often Black men identify as gay because it’s the only identity that they think is available to them. They believe they have no other choice; that there is only gay, bi, and “straight.” And that can seem better than being an abomination in the eyes of a so-called Christian God and demonized by people in a church.

But there have been important same-gender-loving (SGL) Black men who have articulated an identity that is their own, that affirms their Blackness. Great, African American writer and freedom fighter James Baldwin, known as an openly homosexual, never aligned himself with the gay movement. Such a move is not meant to be adversarial, though it is often misconstrued as such because there has been much invested in the [basicallyWhite] “gay” movement.

The point is, we still have too much to learn or acknowledge about African-American homosexual and bisexual people. Our stories have been ignored or told by other people in a way that erases our cultural heritage and specificity. Homosexuals and bisexual people are no more monolithic culturally than heterosexuals are. That richness needs to be acknowledged, respected and “held” so all people, African American people especially, can have unfettered opportunity to love and embrace themselves in culturally affirming ways.

I hope Mr. Ocean too realizes that he can do this and not be seduced by the media avalanche that keeps telling us who and what he is based on someone else’s agenda.

Cleo Manago is founder and CEO of the Black Men’s Xchange (BMX) (http://www.bmxnational.org/), the nation’s oldest and largest community-based movement devoted to promoting healthy self-concept and behavior among same gender loving (SGL), gay-identifying and bisexual African-descended males.

For the last few weeks since President Obama became the first sitting president to endorse same-sex marriage, pundits have been obsessed with what this support will mean for this year’s election. Specifically, will Obama’s rock-solid support in the black community waiver?

Of course, this obsession is predicated on the false belief by nearly everyone in the media that African Americans are somehow more homophobic than other ethnic groups. However, how exactly African Americans feel about homosexuality and why has rarely been investigated.

Yet, when fire and brimstone preachers like Eddie Long or James David Manning surface, they are often treated as poster children for African-American attitudes on homosexuality. Since Long’s “homosexual” scandal, many of us now realize or suspect that the minister was talking out of both sides of his neck. A closer look
will reveal that the very “manly,” and “strong black male” image that Long promoted is really just another example of the conflict between masculinity and homosexuality frequent in African-American communities.

But we must remember that this conflict is not an independent, African-American phenomenon, but the outcome of a history of brutal attacks on African-American males from slavery all the way up to now with what recently happened to young Trayvon Martin in Florida even. Disproportionately, African American males have been under deadly, compromising or stigmatizing siege for centuries. The list of “accidentally” killed, harmless, African-American males is almost endless.

As a result of this constant trauma, African Americans are deeply concerned about the “state of African-American males” and about Black men’s capacity to be “real men” in a society where their lives can be forfeit at any time. There has been a litany of African-American personalities, once including Rev. Al Sharpton, involved in a reactionary “Black male resurrection” campaign to justifiably compensate for what has and does destructively happen to the African American male. Notables like Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (NOI) – in the recent past – have been hard-core proponents of African American males being “strong” and “not homosexual” – though his views have softened somewhat over the past few years.

But, what the pundits don’t seem to understand is that African American’s desire to see Obama win a second term trumps any feelings that African Americans may have about same-sex marriage. And it does so because African Americans, like all Americans, have priorities. Even if some African Americans have concerns about same-sex marriage, we are more concerned about the record unemployment, the high rates of incarceration, and large numbers of Black people without health care in our communities.

We also understand the important symbolic role that President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama play in the lives of African Americans. African Americans (and all Americans) are now living in an era once unimaginable because of America’s history of, and continuing struggles with, racism. But it did happen. The U.S. does have a Black first family, and many African Americans (and others) are not willing to give that up and want to savor and experience this for as long as possible.

One of the rarely articulated benefits to the Black community of the Obamas being in the White House is that they symbolically defy the perception and once believed idea of absolute limitation – in terms of possibility – among African Americans. Obama, in particular, is a daily reminder of Black male greatness that will have enduring impact on Black boys for generations to come. “I can be president” is now a thought that does reverberate within African-American minds. That is incredibly valuable to African Americans even if they object to his support for same-sex marriage.

That Obama is a symbol that assuages and soothes some of that male insecurity that fuels a lot of the anti-homosexual sentiment in the Black community is important. The conversations that were had in the Black community after his announcement are important. But even though this isn’t a deal-breaker for African Americans, we shouldn’t think that the work of dealing with Black male trauma, black manhood insecurity, and anti-homosexual sentiments is over. Obama is an important symbol, but he’s just that, a symbol.

We should remember that not all African Americans are politically naive or stupid. Despite any blunders Obama may have made in his first four years, few of them have been significant enough for most African Americans to let him go. We know that he has more on his agenda that he wants to get done and much of that agenda could benefit us.

And we know what the alternative is. Another white man who wants to destroy everything that has been built during the last century to help African Americans and others move up the economic ladder. African Americans have always been socially conservative and politically progressive. That wouldn’t change now. Certainly not because President Obama endorsed same-sex marriage.