Black Men: You Are the Blueprint

The secret sauce that has made the Black Love community what it is, turned out to be something so simple, but still so necessary. Black Love created space for couples to share the raw blueprints to their marriages. From how they overcame challenges to how they sustained their success, it was the telling of their stories that laid the groundwork for the millions of viewers who turned to them for guidance and inspiration. Similarly, the second season of Men’s Round Table available now on the Black Love+ app promises to do the very same.

One of the most challenging aspects of navigating as a Black man is acknowledging how our learning is often done in silence. Rather than call back on what we’ve seen, we piece together examples from what’s available to us. Rather than simply ask the question, we first realize we don’t know who would even have the answer. Across six seasons of “Black Love,” more than 80 couples have helped men become better fathers, brothers, and partners by simply sharing the hard-learned lessons they’ve experienced along the way. And yet, this is usually foreign to us.

On any given day, the pull of survivalism that comes with the Black male experience can be lonely if we can’t get beyond surface conversations. So when we need support or guidance in how to navigate a world that works us or kills us before loving us, we decide to go it alone. In Men’s Round Table, Glen “Beleaf” Henry guides a group of men into areas of our experience that we rarely tap into with one another. As the men dig deeper into their own experiences, they open a door to the audience that allows us to explore these together, and maybe for the first time. Healer, educator, and artist, Karega Bailey, captures the illustration perfectly. 

“It was at a photoshoot, [my father] drove my mom there,” Karega shared. “Me and my mom are taking all these affectionate pictures, all these hugging and kissing pictures. Then the photographer is taking pictures of me and my father…and I lean over and kiss him on his forehead,” he pauses. “The liberation I felt in that was, I didn’t want the first time I kissed my father to be at his funeral.”

The dynamic of this lived experience is that for many men, that moment might not be significant. That moment might be so commonplace and normal that they’ve never known a world without that intimacy, but for many Black men, that is the breaking of one of the countless unspoken rules that govern how we show up. The power behind these episodes of Men’s Round Table, is the space it creates for us to examine those unspoken rules and if they’re serving us. If the weight that we carry that prevents us from building community more authentically and organically is helping us to become better fathers and partners. Or could we do it differently?

“Sometimes your wife, your partner…will sometimes know you better than you have the courage to know yourself,” Alimi Ballard says in episode 4 titled “Manhood and Partnership.” He says, “When they’re really grounded they give you great counsel that can save you time, money, aggravation, sometimes even heartbreak. I’m the beneficiary of someone who is thoughtful and that has made all the difference for me.”

Sometimes we can look around and feel as if we never got the cheat code. We never got the blueprint that so many other people seem to have helping them navigate a world so indifferent to our existence. And without those resources, we carry the weight of the world in our minds, not knowing that the answer lies within community. That we are our own blueprints, our own skeleton keys to understanding what it means to show up as a father while being bombarded with images of state-sanctioned murders by police. We’re our own guides to understanding what’s on the other side of the taboo that is emotional vulnerability. This season of Men’s Round Table, once again does the work of showing us the shortcut.

Season 2 of Men’s Round Table is now available on the Black Love+ app and new episodes stream weekly on YouTube.