Why Do Black Men Struggle To Say What They Need?
Short answer: Because most Black men were never trained to name a need — they were trained to meet everybody else’s. Add a real fear that saying “I’m not okay” gets answered with “what do you have to be unhappy about,” and the need never makes it out loud. It shows up later as anger, exhaustion, or silence.
The four-word question that stopped the room
One of the fellas opened this episode with a story from his therapy session. He was running the list — doctoral classes, special education teacher, single dad — meeting everybody else’s needs at what he called a generational-talent level. His therapist stopped him mid-sentence and asked four words: What do you need?
Silence. Then tears. Not because the question was cruel, but because he had no answer ready. A grown man, deep into a doctorate, and nobody had ever asked him that in a way that required a real response — including himself.
It isn’t that he wouldn’t answer. He couldn’t.
That distinction is the whole episode. The crew pushed on it: can you tell the person who has your back — your wife, your best friend — “I need to be validated right now,” or “I’m in a spot where I can’t carry this”? Most of the men listening already know the answer. The words aren’t there because the muscle was never built. You get decades of practice describing what everybody else needs and zero reps describing your own.
The fear underneath is rejection, not weakness
The panel named the thing that keeps the mouth closed: an instinctive fear that nobody will accept it. Say you’re struggling and the response comes back how could anything be wrong with you? What do you have to be unhappy about? People will tell a man how he’s feeling in spite of what he just said out of his own mouth. Get that a few times and you stop offering. Silence starts to look like the safer play.
Where the silence gets installed
Then the episode went somewhere most shows won’t. One of the hosts finally told the story behind his obsession with fragrance and being clean. He came up as an African immigrant kid, one of a handful in a majority-Black classroom, hearing every day that he was different — that he stunk, that his food stunk. In fifth grade it stopped being the kids. His first Black teacher called him to the front of the class and handed him a stick of deodorant while the room laughed. She laughed too.
He didn’t want to step foot in school for most of that year. He couldn’t explain it to his parents, because newly-immigrated parents figuring out a new country had one instruction: go to school, get your education, don’t worry about anything else. Thirty-plus years later he is a man who counts compliments about how he smells. That is not a quirk. That is a child still answering a fifth-grade classroom.
The “compliment kink” is a clue, not a joke
The episode opens funny — a woman tells him his fragrance smells “seductive,” and the room runs with it. But the joke is sitting on top of something real. When a man has no language for what he needs, he takes validation in whatever form is socially safe. A compliment from a stranger is safe. “I need you to tell me I’m doing okay” is not. Same hunger, different door. It is the same instinct we watched a man hide a health problem behind in what it costs to hide ED medication from your wife.
Fences, and the monster nobody meant to become
The crew pulled up Fences to land it — Troy reciting what he provides as if provision settles the question of love. You don’t realize the monster you’re becoming, and the forces pushing you there are largely outside of you. From the outside it is easy to ask why don’t you just do X?, as if behavior happens in open space. It doesn’t. That is the same cycle we broke down in Black parenting, corporal punishment and the cycle we ignore — harm gets handed down by people who were handed it first.
The episode carries that conditioning out to scale, too. The same propaganda that teaches Black people to see each other as less than is what fuels the diaspora wars, and it is a cousin of the thinking we unpacked in do Black people want to be white — or do they want to be free. Different room, same conditioning.
What actually helps
Nobody on the panel pretended one therapy session fixes forty years. What they landed on is smaller and more useful: build the answer before somebody asks. Pick one need. Say it out loud to one person who has already proven they will catch it. And when a brother finally does say something, don’t correct his feelings — that response is exactly what taught him to stop talking.
Keep it in the black
Watch the full conversation below, then pull up on us — the conversation keeps going with the family. Become Family for early drops, extended cuts, and the room where we go deeper.
Informed. Intelligent. In The Black.
-
Condensed and lightly edited for readability. Watch the full 43-minute episode above for the complete conversation.
The compliment — “I went in, and a lady stopped me. She wasn’t my typical clientele, she was about our age. She said, ‘I love that fragrance you’re wearing. You smell very seductive.’ Those were her words. And I was like, okay — that’s the type of party I want.”
— “I hate that I showed up here on time this morning, early even, and the first thing I hear is you sharing a story about a woman telling you how you smell.” — “Still, I’m happy I got my compliment. Everybody likes to be complimented. Let’s not act like that’s strange. There are levels to it.”
— “Maybe one day I’ll share the story of why I am the way I am with fragrances.” — “You could have started with the trauma instead of starting with the kink. We would have been okay with the trauma first.”
The therapy question — “Hold on, before this turns into an episode of The Corner, let’s pause there, because you named something specific. In my therapy session this week I was venting to my therapist about how I’m being pulled and stretched in all these different directions — doctoral classes, special education teacher, single dad. I’m meeting everybody else’s needs at a superstar level. Generational-talent type level.”
— “And she paused in the middle of that and said: What do you need?” — “And you couldn’t answer the question.” — “Literal silence. Literal silence, followed by sobs and tears. Because that is a question the overwhelming majority of men — and I’m going to narrow it down specifically to Black men — cannot answer. We struggle to articulate what we need.”
— “Can you articulate what you need? And I’m talking about to the two people you know have your back. Can you tell your wife, ‘Yo, I need to be validated. I am sincerely in a spot in my life right now where I can’t do this’?”
The fear underneath — “I have a feeling I know where part of that comes from. I’ve seen it in my other brothers. There’s an almost instinctive fear of a complete lack of acceptance. And that lack of acceptance shows up as, why? How could anything be wrong with you? What do you have to be unhappy about?”
— “People will tell a man how he’s feeling in spite of the fact that he said it out of his own mouth. There’s a fear that no one will accept it.”
Fences — “I’m not even just talking about Denzel’s character, or James Earl Jones’s character. I’m talking about the son. I’m talking about Viola Davis’s role. When you see Denzel talking to his son — ‘I give you clothes, I give you this’ — you don’t realize the monster you’re becoming. But the reason you’re becoming that monster is because of cyclical forces outside of you putting you in that position. It’s very hard to parse the two.”
— “From the outside looking in, folks say, ‘Why don’t you do X, Y and Z?’ And I can ask you the same question — why don’t you do X, Y and Z to help change my behavior? It’s not just something that happens in space.”
Fifth grade — “If you’re a Black kid, majority Black for that matter — all you’re hearing every day as one African kid in a class of twenty-plus is: you’re different. You’re that African booty scratcher. You guys stink. You eat stinky food.”
— “And then I got to fifth grade. Miss Jarvis. My first Black teacher, a Black woman — and she openly bullied me in school. She would intentionally call me out, tell the class that I stunk. While kids were making fun of me, she would egg them on. She would incite it. She would cultivate and bolster that behavior, to the point where I didn’t want to go to school. Literally, I did not want to step foot in school.”
— “And I couldn’t explain it to my parents at the time, because all my parents knew as newly immigrated people to this country, figuring things out, was: go to school, do what you need to do, get your education, don’t worry about anything else.”
— “One of the things she used to always do was talk about how I smelled, how African people smelled. To the point where she called me up — I will never forget the day — she called me up in front of the class and handed me a stick of deodorant. As kids were laughing, she was laughing.” — “Damn, bro.” — “That is beef forever. Even as a forty-plus-year-old man now.”
— “I went through this for an entire school year, with the exception of the last two months of my fifth grade year. Every day, going to school and being bullied.”
Diaspora wars and the same monster — “We have this idea that our brethren and sisters on the continent are less than — and ‘less than’ is being nice. We don’t talk enough about how that conditioning plays a role. It doesn’t excuse the bullying. It doesn’t excuse the harm. But like we always try to do, we have to have the full context in order to apply any kind of solution. And the solution is: call it out when we see it, and actually learn the historical narratives of our people.”
— “It’s the same pattern with immigration. People say, ‘We don’t get the resources we need, and these folks who just got here are dipping into the pot.’ So they’re mad at the immigrants. They’re not mad at the politicians handing out those resources. They’re not mad at the politicians who brought people over in the first place. They’re not mad at the politicians who allowed the exploitation that forced people into that position. The real problem is up top, not at the bottom. We’re all fighting the same capitalistic political monster.” — “Same monster.”
Informed. Intelligent. In The Black.
