Who's Gonna Take the Weight?: Manhood, Race, and Power in America

The Breakdown

And we are programmed to self-destruct, to fragment.
--Jayne Cortez, "There It Is"

A few short years ago, I wanted to end my life. Suicide, yeah. You see, there is nothing worse nor more humiliating than to move to a metropolis like New York, become a writer both prolific and known during your very hip twenties, then lose it all--your cushy magazine job, your phat apartment, your instant access to money--by the age of thirty. I suffered through this period privately, telling a small knot of comrades of my predicament, while feigning sanity to others. That I am able to write this essay is testament to how far I have come since falling so low. I am not remotely confident where to start other than to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald who said famously, "All life is a process of breaking down."

Like Fitzgerald's roaring 1920s, the naughty '90s were my time to live and play irresponsibly. Upon moving to upper Manhattan--Harlem--from Jersey City, New Jersey, my hometown, in August 1990, I wrote in my diary, somewhat egotistically and in spite of my few years of toiling in obscurity as a freelance news reporter, that I wanted to be remembered as one of the best, and best-known, writers of my generation. As the elders say, be careful what you ask for.

Two years after my unheralded arrival on Manhattan's shores, I would be drafted to costar on MTV's hugely popular docu-soap The Real World, and soon thereafter I found myself writing the cover story for a new magazine founded by Quincy Jones named Vibe. I had become a staff writer with a national byline and face recognition at twenty-six. I wore this freshly minted notoriety akin to how a homeboy wears his straight-outta-the-box Timberland boots. I admired it in the mirror. I scrubbed that notoriety regularly. I deemed my self-generated franchise better than anyone else's. And I got caught up in the hype of the entertainment industry: the fluffy parties, the air kisses, the synthetic let's-do-lunch rhetoric, the rubbing of slippery elbows with icons like Spike Lee, Tommy Hilfiger, General Colin Powell, and many, many others. At Vibe, the demand to produce articles like a well-oiled machine wore on me. I binged on liquor to keep the motor going; I drank more liquor to make it stop. I did not take a legitimate vacation during my four-year association with the glossy. I felt guilty for thinking of one, and I found myself becoming an insomniac who slept by inhaling loads of liquor or alcohol-laced NyQuil.

Then, in May 1996, I was fired.

In the nature of these things, my firing was the twin two-edged sword to my hiring. When I started at Vibe it was a magazine that promised to boldly, beautifully showcase the journalistic element of the culture I lived and breathed, which I'll roughly define by that elusive term of art: hip-hop. But almost from the start it betrayed the source of its power. Many of us people of color at this ostensibly urban, people-of-color magazine were miffed that management could never seem to find "qualified" Black editors. Moreover, it bothered us that while the col- ored folks--chiefly the mostly female cadre of editorial assistants--carried workloads comparable to those of the White men at the monthly, the salaries and perks were hardly in the spirit of egalitarianism. Among ourselves, at the water cooler, outside the office during lunch breaks, or even within earshot of some of our White coworkers and superiors, we began mocking the Vibe headquarters as "da plantation," because, as coarse as it sounds, we felt like the latest in history's line of slaves, picking the cotton only to watch the masters reaping the profits from our labor.