At the Corner of Progress and Peril

It doesn't always start as a catastrophe.

Growing up in New York City and San Jose, Rahsaan Ferguson, 27, remembers his father's mantra: "You are a black boy. That's two things you will always have against you."

Now, Ferguson understands that his father, an employee of the Santa Clara County transit system, was merely trying to prepare him for a harsh world. But in his young mind, his father's message was confusing -- and a little disabling. "It kind of brings you down," he says. "I know it is supposed to make you strive harder. But when you hear that over and over, it makes you believe you are not supposed to succeed."

After being left back in third grade, Ferguson says, he lost confidence. As he continued to struggle in school, he worried about failing, as he had been taught so many black men do. Ultimately, he stopped trying, dropped out of school, fathered a son, now 7, and fell into crime. First, it was a few stolen cars. After a while, he sold crack cocaine, eventually serving a four-month jail term after authorities confiscated more than three grams of the drug from an apartment he shared with his girlfriend. Now, Ferguson is struggling to find stability, earning $10 an hour working for a sign company in one of the nation's most expensive areas.

"I can't help but think about the white kids I know. They were raised to think they are going to succeed and be better than everyone," Ferguson says.

The Rev. Elwood Gray, chaplain at the Patuxent Institute in Jessup and president of the National Coalition of Prison Ministries, has been working with inmates and ex-offenders for nearly 30 years. Many of those black men feel left behind and stigmatized by their behavior, he says, and as a result are sometimes difficult to reach when they leave prison. It's almost like they are in "an intensive-care unit," Gray says. "The approach must be holistic because they need employment, food, shelter and mental health care."

The plight of poor, young black men has fueled some attitudes and practices that affect all black men. In a 2001 article defending racial profiling as a rational police tactic, journalist John Derbyshire wrote in the National Review Online: "A policeman who concentrates a disproportionate amount of his limited time and resources on young black men is going to uncover far more crimes -- and therefore be far more successful in his career than one who biases his attention to, say, middle-aged Asian women."

These images not only shape how others see black men but also can affect how black men see themselves. Warren Simmons, 55, executive director of Brown University's Annenberg Institute for School Reform, recalls waiting in his car at a stoplight in downtown Washington and locking his doors when he spotted a black man approaching. Incredulous, the man began yelling at Simmons.

"For a moment, I found myself caught in a cultural quandary," Simmons says. "I'm a black man, and I know what it is like to have people respond to me with fear. Yet I did this. He assumed my response was to him as an individual, but it was directed to him as part of a larger group."

If these images distort the rich complexity of the lives of black men, they also have been embraced by some of the nation's most prominent icons of popular culture. A long, lucrative stream of music videos and movies extol the "thug life" fantasy of fast money, fast women and fast living.

Rapper 50 Cent has built his chart-busting, multimedia career on his being shot nine times and left for dead during his days as a drug dealer in Queens. Similarly, rapper, actor and pitchman Snoop Dogg has ridden music referring to his gang-life past, and his playful public persona as a would-be pimp, to fame.

In some ways, black men have always stood on the leading of edge of popular culture, often through the very imagery that offstage or off-screen inspires fear and contempt. Minstrel shows, widely regarded as the nation's first form of mass entertainment, burst on the scene in the decades after the American Revolution. The shows most often featured white performers in blackface mocking aspects of black life.