Thanks very much to Blackberry, who made a comment that reminded me of something I’ve seen FAR too often in controversial situations where black men are involved:

“Fighting, tweeting, revenge sex, imm take your man! ….speaking of man…how is possible that public discourse places no blame on him! Kimmoira didn’t leave Kola while she had cancer…..ummmm Djimon did. Kola didn’t wreck Kimmoira’s marriage by sleeping around….ummmm Djimon did.”

She makes a great point. Even in many of the comments, I noted that much of the disgust was with the behavior of the women involved, more so than with the man. If Djimon’s name came up at all. Now, this isn’t to say people didn’t think he was a trifling party in what allegedly went down. I’m sure they did, but most of the focus was on how trifling the women in question are.

Now, let’s say that the following events are true: Your woman (not the one you’re apparently still married to, but the one you consider your main side chick) is sick with brain cancer, and is undergoing surgery. So you are occupying your time cheating on the woman you are cheating on someone else with. Then, you feed this woman’s inner demons by cheating with her on the woman you cheated on her with…while still cheating on someone else. Remove the famous names, and you have a situation that is far too common among black women today: Casting aside dignity and self-respect to fight over a man that really isn’t worth it. It’s a sad thing to see and persons who do it should definitely know better and BE better.

Still, how is it that a man can behave in this sorry manner and the majority of the attention be paid to the two women fighting over him? How can you have a situation where a black girl is blamed for being unwittingly filmed “servicing” a boy she wants to love her and have no role in its being uploaded to the internet? How can you have a high OOW rate where there are people who absolutely accept the idea of a man having no part in the lives of the children he helped create?

This is what I call “The Invisible Black Man Syndrome”. Somehow and for some reason these men, no matter how deviant and/or criminal, are mentally and emotionally removed from the situation. It doesn’t matter if often times they are at the center of it; it’s as if they aren’t there at all. It may turn into a situation where the victim is dragged through the mud for being wrong (even if legally he/she is not and the other person is to blame). It may be a situation where racism is toted as the reason a man is in jail, even if he is a cold-blooded murderer. There is a knee-jerk reaction to look at everything and everyone but the trifling black man or men causing a problem.

This predictably frees such persons to continue with their harmful and dysfunctional behavior, as they are not inclined to stop. I had previously joked that black men are seen as the Keyser Soze’s of fatherhood by many, and maybe there was something to that. The Kevin Spacey character said, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” And so Soze took a page out of the Devil’s book and made himself into a virtual myth. Are black men being allowed to do the same?

It could be another symptom of fatherlessness among a number of black children who’ve grown up and had children of their own, and especially if this is under the same circumstances: The absence of black men in one’s life on a moral and functional level becomes so internalized that there becomes no reason to see them. Really see them. Even if that person is present and wrong, they are mentally and emotionally felt to be so distant, that they cannot even be held accountable for their actions. As a result of such beliefs, people see right through them to the other party or parties in the situation. For them, the black man in question “isn’t there”, because black men are never there for anything really significant for these persons.

Or, maybe these people have been indoctrinated to absolutely NOT place any blame on black men and that doing so is evil. Perhaps because they see black men as already demonized by society and feel it’s anti-black to add anything to that. So they refuse to lay anything at the doorsteps of sorry DBRs who more than deserve it. Maybe there is a fear that if they do hold such men accountable, it enables non-black criticism of black men or there will be some consequences that causes even MORE black men to be lost. And even if those black men are hardly worthy of missing, their being a black man makes them more precious than the dignity that would be maintained by shaming and ostracizing them. Their damaged behavior is ignored and they are protected by being given the equivalent of an invisibility cloak to hide beneath.

Or…maybe there is another explanation altogether. What makes it so hard for black people to see black men in situations where they are at fault or a party to the fault, and then actively ACKNOWLEDGE this?