When emotional literacy arrives in your 60s, Black women are left carrying decades of fallout. It’s time men hold themselves accountable.
By Shelby Stewart
Essence
https://www.essence.com/
Clifton Powell is 69 years old and just now learning how to love.
That confession hit hard during the “Black Men Trust Black Women Roundtable,” convened by SisterSong Executive Director Monica Simpson to bring Black men into deeper accountability within the Reproductive Justice movement.
But honesty is not the same thing as repair. And repair is long overdue.
Black women are nearly three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, reproductive access has narrowed most aggressively across Southern states where Black women disproportionately live. Reproductive justice, a framework coined by Black women activists in 1994 — has always meant more than abortion. It’s the right to have children, not have children and to raise them in safe, sustainable communities. Safety is the baseline.
When Black men say they want to “do the work,” it is not an exercise. It is a question of whether Black women live longer, safer lives.
The roundtable brought together Kendrick Sampson, Powell, Luke James, Joseph Irvin and others across generations. At one point, Sampson posed a question that cut through the theory: Where does safety live in your own relationships with Black women?
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Powell traced the issues back centuries — to enslavement, displacement, and generational trauma. He is not wrong. Research on intergenerational trauma shows how prolonged exposure to racial terror shapes attachment styles, emotional regulation and family systems. History leaves residue. But an explanation is not an exemption.
Too often, history becomes a hiding place. Slavery. Jim Crow. Mass incarceration. All real. All devastating. However, when trauma is used to rationalize harm, it starts to sound like a cover up.
The conversation pivoted, as it often does, toward culture: monogamy not being our tradition, polygamy in Africa invoked as ancestral precedent. It is a familiar move: when accountability tightens, redirect to anthropology.
But patriarchy is not tradition.
Then came the question that should have ended the debate.
When asked directly when he became monogamous, Powell replied: “Today.”
Today.
At 69.
Announced unashamed, without the humility of reckoning, but lighthearted, funny — as though this were a charming twist in a character arc instead of a lifetime of women absorbing the consequences.
And Powell is not alone. It’s striking — and a little scary — to watch men in their later years arrive at revelations that feel decades overdue. Nick Cannon has openly said trauma contributed to fathering 10+ children with multiple women. Cam Newton spends hours on his podcast debating his struggles with relationships, his many children, and the concept of “play-tonic” partnerships. Mike Epps recently told Club ShayShay that at 55, he finally understands why his second marriage worked.
These confessions are not heroic. They are evidence of a pattern: accountability, emotional intelligence, and growth often arrive too late. Black women are left navigating the fallout, carrying emotional labor that men are only belatedly learning to reckon with.
And while Powell, Cannon, Newton, and Epps are high-profile examples, the truth is that this is not confined to celebrity life. Every day, Black women witness the same patterns in our families, workplaces, and communities.
Our brothers, cousins, neighbors, coworkers, and friends, men who may never touch a podcast mic or be interviewed in a magazine, are often navigating the same late-arrival revelations. They are learning lessons about respect, emotional intelligence, and accountability decades into adulthood, sometimes leaving women to carry the emotional labor in the meantime. The work begins on a grassroots level. In living rooms, barbershops, and kitchen tables, in unfiltered conversations between men themselves about how Black women are treated, how trust is built or broken, and what it means to show up consistently.
Let’s be clear: growth is possible at any age. But accountability that arrives at 69 is not a breakthrough — it is an indictment of how long it took. Because while he was discovering himself, Black women were living with the fallout.
There is something audacious about declaring monogamy on a Tuesday and expecting applause. As if discipline is a personality trait you stumble into. As if the women who endured instability were stepping stones toward your self-actualization.
And still, we are expected to clap.
This is the larger issue simmering beneath the roundtable: the arrested development of older generations who are so set in their ways that correction feels like an attack. Growth becomes adversarial. Accountability feels like disrespect. And ego fights for survival. Accountability late in life is not revolutionary. It is a reminder of how long Black women have been waiting.
Powell did not soften. He sparred. He doubled down. His ego was not dying, it was fighting for its life. And that fight is precisely the work many older men mistake for growth.
Irvin represented that generational shift clearly. He spoke truth to ignorance. At some point, he suggested, you choose who you want to be. That is the tension: trauma may shape you, but it does not absolve you.
At some point, ignorance stops being inheritance and becomes a decision. And what we are witnessing, particularly among Gen Z is a refusal to inherit dysfunction without interrogation. Younger Black men and women are becoming increasingly fluent in boundaries and emotional literacy. They are challenging what previous generations normalized.
It is not perfect. But it is movement. The danger is when older men confuse being close to breakthrough with having crossed it.
Powell raised another dynamic, one Black women know all too well. The expectation that we would help facilitate male healing. That we would soothe, translate, and rescue. But healing that depends on women’s unpaid labor is not healing.
Sociologists have long documented how women perform disproportionate emotional labor in relationships: managing feelings, smoothing conflict, and holding space. For Black women, that labor is compounded. We become therapists and mothers unprovoked, guiding partners, friends and family toward better versions of themselves in the hope that love will be reciprocated with growth. Too often, it is not.
The roundtable made something plain: Black women cannot want healing for Black men more than Black men want it for themselves. It is not our job to midwife someone else’s ego death.
If healing depends only on women pointing out the harm or guiding men toward growth, it will never be sustainable. Black men must hold these conversations with one another, discussing generational behaviors and patterns, acknowledging privilege and power, and practicing accountability before we are asked to carry it all. The reckoning cannot wait for Instagram apologies, roundtable moments, or viral confessions.
This critique is not aimed at every Black man. Many are actively unlearning, healing, and choosing differently. They exist and they are present. The question is whether that leadership extends beyond their own households. Because these shifts do not happen in isolation. They happen when men challenge men.
Supporting Black women demands more than protection that’s rhetorical or familial. It calls for behavioral change. Safety is a practice everywhere. In bedrooms. In conversations. In the small daily decisions that either build trust or erode it. A roundtable is a start.
But growth announced at 69 should not be celebrated as revolutionary. It should prompt a harder question:
Why did it take this long? Until that question is answered — not with history, not with culture, and not with excuses, but with sustained change — Black women will continue carrying work that was never ours to hold alone.
