Why So Sensitive? Black Male Fragility Examined

“Why are you trying to hide your emotion? If you feel a way about what I said address it. Explore it. Why are you feeling sensitive?”

“That desire to hide your feelings from others is the epitome of sensitivity.” Dr. Griffin

The following are quotes I’ve heard in my life, the former coming from a former flame and the latter from my therapist whom I sought after dating her. “Why so sensitive” is a phrase I and other males have heard in some form or fashion over the course of their lifetime. It was called being soft when I was a kid, but now it’s adapted to more fashionable and buzz-worthy phrases such as fragility. Untreated fragility evolves into an even more insidious condition known as hyper-masculinity. If you haven’t seen by now we have terms for days. One of my former flames just called it being sensi. Either way, it is a general term used to describe the feeling people get when confronted with a situation that challenges their prescribed views of life. For black men, in particular, anything that did not reaffirm our societal constructs of strength, dominance, and virility was avoided and associated with the idea of being soft. Responding to any emotional stimuli was the major culprit and most times led to the trauma we now suffer from on a major level. In my novel, Fuck Boy, for instance, I examine how men attempt to establish…