You inherited a role you never auditioned for.
Before you spoke your first word, expectations were already written into your story. Be strong. Be twice as good. Don’t show fear. Protect everyone. Provide everything. Never crack. This is the rough blueprint — passed down, again and again, through generations, forged in survival, baptized in struggle, unchanged. And it’s kept us alive. But here’s the question we’re sitting with in ICBM: Just because something helped us survive, does that mean it helps us thrive?
The Weight of Legacy:
In our workshops, when we ask brothers (and sisters) to name what they inherited from their fathers, the list comes quick: work ethic, pride, determination, the ability to endure, etc. Then we ask what else they inherited. The room gets quieter. Emotional distance. Unprocessed grief. The belief that your value equals your productivity. The conviction that asking for help is weakness. Trauma dressed up as tradition. One participant put it this way: “My grandfather survived Jim Crow. My father survived the crack epidemic and mass incarceration. And, I survived growing up without either of them really there. At what point do I get to do more than just survive?”
The Historical Context:
Psychology and history aren’t separate — they’re tangled up in each other. The “Strong Black Man” archetype isn’t just cultural — it’s a survival adaptation. When showing emotion could get you killed, when being vulnerable could get you exploited, when the system was designed to break you, toughness became armor. Our ancestors needed that armor. They needed to be superhuman just to be treated as human. But are we still wearing armor to places that no longer require it? Or have we been wearing it so long we’ve forgotten how to take it off and take on different challenges? Are we operating from a threat-detection system calibrated for dangers that have evolved, wearing ourselves out fighting battles that now live inside us?
The Liberation Question:
So here’s the psychological and cultural reckoning: How do you honor the resilience of your lineage without being imprisoned by it? How do you respect the blueprint without being crushed by the burden? Great, more questions. This isn’t about disrespecting what came before. It’s about recognizing that the strategies that helped your grandfather survive in 1950s Mississippi might not be the ones that help you thrive in 2026 and beyond. It’s about acknowledging that being strong and being whole aren’t the same thing.
Defining Yourself:
The ICBM framework asks: What if you could design your own masculinity? Not the one handed to you by trauma. Not the one demanded by a society that fears you. Not the one you perform to prove your worth. But one grounded in your actual values, your real relationships, your authentic self. This means:
- Questioning what you’ve been told “real men” do
- Examining which parts of your blueprint serve you and which arts are just heavy and useless
- Choosing which traditions to honor and which patterns to interrupt and replace
- Building community with other men (and women) doing the same work
The Both/And
Here’s what we practice in our sessions: You can be proud of your father and angry about his absence. You can honor Black masculinity and critique toxic expressions of it. You can be grateful for the strength you inherited and intentional about not passing down the pain. This isn’t about rejecting who you are. It’s about becoming who you choose to be. The blueprint may have gotten us here, but we must be the ones who get to design what comes next
The Invitation
Being a Black man today means standing at a crossroads. Behind you: generations of men who carried unimaginable weight with grit and grace. Ahead of you: the chance to set some of that weight down and pick up something lighter— connection, healing, wholeness, choice. The blueprint helped us survive. Now it’s time to create the vision that helps us live. The one that has yet to exist.
Date posted: December 8, 2025
Author: Fredrick Bush