I didn't cry when Trayvon Martin was killed. I wrote about his slaying a lot, sure—spent hours chronicling who he was and how he died and why his killer would get away with it. But I never wept. I didn't cry for Eric Garner, or Philando Castile, or Alton Sterling, either, even though I watched footage of their extrajudicial deaths more times than I can count in order to do my job. And honestly, I've never come close to shedding a tear for the people who look like me and are locked up as many as five times more often than whites , nor the roughly two out of five black children who live in poverty .

I've caught myself pushing this shit onto my own nephews, getting at them when they break out into tears and start wailing at the world. Phrases like "men can't cry" and "don't be no punk" have come rolling off my tongue so fast they've felt rehearsed.

I'm not alone. I see it in the guys I run with, brothers I've known since tall tees were in style. To this day, these dudes can be as open as a book when recounting who they've fucked or who they've fought, but when it comes to the way they feel, the depth of their emotional pain, they have nothing to say. Recently, a woman dating one of my close friends complained about the way these kinds of emotional blocks hold back their relationship. She said she never knew what her man was feeling. "He gets mad, because that is acceptable for a man," she told me. "But then I realize he's not actually mad, it's something else that he just can't get out."

Crying feels foreign, even in the face of these horrors, because it's something I just didn't see growing up. Never in my life have I witnessed a man in my family cry—not my grandfathers, not my father, and not my older brothers. I wouldn't say weeping is outright forbidden in my house. But it's certainly looked down upon, especially for boys.

I understand these injustices, and try in my own way to fight against them, but I do my damndest not to feel them.

These informal rites of passage are the building blocks of a gauntlet many men in America face. But for black men, they are especially confounding and made even more grotesque because they're paired with the dehumanizing fact of racism. Shit comes down on us hard. bell hooks may have said it most succinctly in We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity : "Black boys more than other groups of male children in this society, are asked to surrender their childhoods in order to pursue an elusive patriarchal masculinity."

This no-crying routine is part of a pattern of black masculinity in America, one I'm just beginning to recognize, even as I approach 30. As James Baldwin described in his essay "Here Be Dragons," our community's concept of manhood feeds off the same rigid, diametric American ideals that gave birth to the mythology of "cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white." I see it vividly now when I realize that all of the boys in my family are referred to as "little man" before they can even talk. It's there when our barbecues and get-togethers devolve into trials of manliness, where boys are graded on how many yams they pile on their plate, quizzed about how many girlfriends they have at school, or judged by the way they "square up" when they shadowbox with their elders.

I resented when family members pointed out that I talked like her or had thick thighs like her, because I yearned to become a man. Like plenty of American boys of all races, I lived for my mom's cooking—her succulent sweet potatoes, her charred pork ribs, and her thick banana pudding—but I did not respect the work and time that went into it. And even though I saw her put on the same blue Cleveland Police uniform and gold badge as my dad and head out the door to do the same conflicted, dangerous law enforcement work that he did, I saw my dad as the man. She, on the other hand, was the lady who fed me and cleaned my clothes.

Baldwin wrote "there is a man in every woman and a woman in every man." My mother, Gayle Miller-Cooper, is that woman inside of me. She is a woman I've seen cry, out of anger and out of love and out of joy. And she is a woman I've seen fight, for the well-being of her children and for own her self-respect. But as a kid I took everything about her for granted.

This patriarchal machismo is so poisonous, it infects and corrodes our relationships and interactions, especially with women, because, as Bitch contributor Tamara Winfrey Harris wrote earlier this year, it feeds off of a "hatred of what it defines as feminine... For those invested in toxic masculinity, there is nothing worse a black man can be than 'like a woman…'" And I've seen how this ugliness has played out in my own life.

Unfortunately, this macho shit doesn't work out for black men. We're sort of damned if we do and damned if we don't. If we embrace the violent swagger of American icons in the tradition of John Wayne or Charlton Heston, we're not seen as patriotic heroes—we're just thugs. And if we try to resist engaging in these performances, we're emasculated cowards.

This is about more than just being hard. It's an ethos molded in the image of the Antebellum South and reflects that era's rigidly defined gender roles of debutantes and gentlemen, its view of people as property, and its enshrinement of the white man Master at the very top of the pecking order with the power to punish, rape, and kill with impunity. Unfortunately, for some black men, our concept of freedom isn't to defy this patriarchal order; instead, we've learned to envy it. In our avarice, freedom has come to represent the ability to ascend to the position where we, too, might be the Master and dominate others the way we have been dominated.

No doubt, there was stifling patriarchy at play in pre-colonial Africa—like most societies in human history—but what we contend with today is a particularly American problem. As hooks wrote, "The gender politics of slavery and white supremacist domination of free black men was the school where black men from different African tribes, with different languages and value systems, learned in the 'new world,' patriarchal masculinity."

Demeaning or at least undervaluing women and burying feelings to live up to some ideal of toughness—these habits have wreaked havoc on the psyche of black men in particular for centuries. Today, their tragic traces lie in everything from the high rates of intimate partner violence committed by black men against black women to the rising rate of suicide among black boys .

It took me years to recognize that her ability to be both a nurturer at home and a cop in the world was an immense display of power in a racist and sexist society. My failure to see my mother for all of her strength and virtue earlier is one of my life's greatest regrets. If I had done it sooner, at the very least, I could have been a better son to a much deserving woman. And I might not be so conflicted with my own identity as a black man today.

Kevin is the love of Chiron's life, though they never had a chance to completely express and explore their feelings for each other as gay men because of their hyper-masculine, homophobic environment. Kevin articulates the stifling world they live in and the way it's hemmed up their lives, saying, "I never did anything I actually wanted to do. Was all I could do to do what other folks thought I should do. I wasn't never myself."

But I'm struck by cracks emerging in this veneer of black cultural life, from the unbridled joy of artists like Chance the Rapper to the gender-bending fashion of Jayden Smith to the emotional availability of Frank Ocean. The breakdown of this façade is an especially integral aspect of Moonlight, the 2016 coming-of-age film that follows a black protagonist named Chiron from the trauma and macho policing he experiences as a youth to the swole, impenetrable trapper he becomes as an adult.

In modern pop culture, I see this ice-cold edge everywhere—from the nihilistic glee of 21 Savage's lyrics to the capitalistic cool of the TV series _Power'_s James "Ghost" St. Patrick. This is art responding to a brutal and greedy society with even more brutality and greed. This reaction is so familiar to me now, it reminds me of an old adage often repeated among my family: "If you're going to be a dog, be a big dog." In a nation built on theft and rape and violence, it's almost patriotic to reflect those macho qualities in yourself. At the very least, it's understandable—be the big dog before the man can dog you.

A big part of that is because the very things that compelled so many generations of black men to embrace aggro masculinity are still with us. White terrorists are still targeting our churches , white supremacists are marching in our streets , and those in power—from the White House to local law enforcement—are giving neo-Nazism at least tacit approval to carry out campaigns of hate. Even if clinging to American machismo hurts us, the steeling of young black males will continue, because the obstacles we face are relentless, brutal, and ensconced in the highest echelons of power.

Chiron and Kevin manage to finally open themselves up and let down their defenses and give into the feelings they've tried to bury. Unfortunately, as in the lives of these characters, such moments of emotional liberation are still few and far between for black men—in popular culture and in everyday life.

Fighting back in the face of racial slurs is not something I regret. But it is incredibly complicated. When I retaliated against words with physical action, in a way, I confirmed the nasty stereotype I was railing against—that I, a black boy, was the short-tempered brute the white folks imagined me to be. Sitting alone in the principal's office instead of learning in class because I had defended my name had a perversely routine feeling to it . In-school suspensions and detentions—preludes to the carceral state that await all black men in America—left me wondering what, exactly, I'd gained with my cavalier displays, and what I'd given up.

The first place I faced some of these obstacles was in the classroom. When race reared its ugly head—from boys calling me a nigger and other epithets to getting crap thrown at me when I got off the school bus—I relied on the lessons the men in my family had taught me about masculinity to assert myself. I didn't cry or whine in the face of hurtful words and actions. Instead, I tried to stand strong. I tried not to show weakness. And I fought back.

Of course, there's also the ugly inhumanity of beating someone down, even someone who is racist. When I went beyond just defending myself and tried to use force to teach people lessons about my own power and strength, I saw in myself the kind of internal brokenness I despised. And while I was bullied and ostracized for being black, I joined in and punished others for being effeminate or slow, hoping that would shield me from or endear me to my tormentors. It never did.

There were also times when my attempts at being the tough guy backfired. I once attacked an overgrown, corn-fed white boy who called me a nigger during indoor recess in elementary school. The future linebacker bested me to the point that I should have thanked the teacher for intervening before I got seriously hurt. In that squabble, I saw the other side of the double-edged sword—that stinging shame of failing to live up to fragile concepts of masculinity. By not being able to redeem my race in proving I was physically stronger, I felt I had failed disastrously.

I resented this stereotype of the hypermasculine black brute, but I also yearned to evoke its fury. Not being able to overpower him made me feel less black and less manly.

Many of my own macho ways come, naturally, from the two men who have shaped me the most. The first is my grandfather, George Cooper. As a black man who lived in Ohio through the Jim Crow–era and fought in the armed forces in World War II, he faced unspeakable horrors and indignities. For him, the key to being a man, above anything else, was earning wages so he could provide for and be the head of his family—the masculine patriarch. Publicly expressing frustration or angst against the system would have jeopardized that in a time when a black man could get lynched or locked up just for talking smart. The key to seeing another day and moving the buck further was to grin and bear society's emasculation, while he earned enough money to create a space for himself and his family. There, he could be the man and run things.