Colorlines, a daily news site that puts race at the forefront of its conversations, has developed a new documentary series to discuss the plight of the Black man in America. “Life Cycles of Inequity: A Series on Black Men” is a project broadly covering the inequities that plague the Black male experience.
The project was largely borne out of writer Kai Wright‘s thoughts following the Trayvon Martin case. He felt that in order to fully understand the death of Martin and others like him, it would be best to explore the “context of their lives.”
“Each month, we will publish a package of content focused on a life stage or event that for black men in the United States is uniquely confined by broad, societal inequities. We begin with high school boys—Trayvon’s peers—and we will conclude with the early mortality that takes too many of our fathers, uncles and partners in their middle ages. We’ll explore issues ranging from school discipline to fatherhood, from job markets to health care access…The series is deliberately broad, but we certainly won’t cover the breadth of the black male experience. We won’t even exhaust the range of inequities that impact our lives. Rather, we’ve focused our efforts primarily on places where existing data shows a profound relationship between poor outcomes and being a black man.”
The first video of the series is a discussion between eight teens from Oakland. The segment, directed by André Lee, features the boys talking about some of the discrimination they face in the classroom and how they feel society limits them based on their identities as Black males.
Colorlines encourages those who watch the series to join in on the discussion via Facebook and Twitter to broaden the conversation. Watch the segment below: