American Culture Is Inflicting Pain on Our Boys

Twelve days after my brown-skinned boy turned 21 in this country to which we immigrated, another brown-skinned young son of immigrant parents, from a country that borders mine in South Asia, shot 49 people dead in Orlando, most of them also brown-skinned males from immigrant families. And before any right-winger swoops down to make a ridiculous statement about how this is a “brown” or immigrant problem, I will declare—as a social scientist and as a mother—that this is a struggle for all of us raising boys in America. Our boys are hurting and we are asking them to “man up.”

 We are pushing our president to use tough talk (“say ‘Radical Islamism’ now!”), we are measuring our presidential candidates by their small hands and big walls, we are “straight-washing” the attack in Orlando on the LGBT community, we are serving our rapists the briefest jail sentences so they may quickly return to their true calling of being athletes and champions, and we are doing nothing to change a gun culture that’s led to so many tragic murders.

I will especially say this as an immigrant mother—it is not easy to raise a young man in America’s culture of masculine dominance....
http://www.alternet.org/gender/hyper-masculine-hubris-hurting-us-all