Anthony Payton

Granite State News Collaborative

Anthony Payton, joined by his son and co-founder of Black Lives Matter Manchester Tyrell Whitted and Chief Diversity Officer at Franklin Pierce University Pierre Morten, discuss the effects race and masculinity had on them growing up, as well as the progress they’ve made individually and as a community.

This content has been edited for clarity. Watch the full live recording of the Common Ground podcast.

Pierre Morten: As a black male growing up the way that you and I did in the seventies and eighties, that sort of toxic masculinity, how did that color the way that you felt about your son, if at all?

Anthony Payton: Luckily I was in my mid to late thirties when I came across Tyrell so I was cool with it. I'm not where I am now, but there was no need to be abusive. He seemed happy to be doing what he was doing.

Pierre Morten: Were you happy, Tyrell?

Tyrell Whitted: I think around the time that I met Anthony, I was really still learning myself. I did have a lot of male and female friends, I was going to the gym, I would play basketball and stuff like that. Really you could see through my personality that my sexuality was not heteronormal. A lot of people had said they'd seen something in me.

Pierre Morten: How did you learn to accept that and evolve on an even greater level to where you are today?

Anthony Payton: If anyone looks at my website, I'll talk about incarceration a lot. When Terrell came out, I was serving a 10 year sentence for drug distribution. I called home one day and I spoke to his mother and his mother said, Hey, Tyrell is doing him, and after being away from him for about five years, I decided I'm gonna support him however I can when I get out. There's no shying away from it. You got an issue with him, you have an issue with me.

Pierre Morten: I love that you two have the respect to let each other be exactly who you are. Tyrell, talk to us a little bit about what it was like figuring out how to love yourself for who you are.

Tyrell Whitted: Learning to love myself is a process. I believe I'm still in that process, but I believe I'm at a better place now than where I began the process. Self-Love is something that nobody teaches you until you get to college, which is strange because self-love should begin at birth. Of course your parents will instill these values in you, but everybody has different parents and a different structure when they grow up. I learned a lot of my self-love techniques as I was getting my education in psychology, mental health specifically. I learned that the world is not going to give you more love than you could give yourself ever. You have to love yourself more, and you have to love yourself enough to want to continue to be who you are, unapologetically and ferociously if you have to. You just have to be yourself and you have to have that love and respect for yourself that you would hope somebody would give to you. That's very important.

Pierre Morten: That's one of the most powerful things I've heard here lately. In the Black community, oftentimes - we're not a monolith, so it's not every single one of us - but oftentimes having that hyper-sense of masculinity that's forced on you sometimes by your neighborhood and sometimes by the media and how people perceive the black male body is an additional barrier to us actually figuring out how to love ourselves. For you to be working through it at such a young age, I commend you. As a father who grew up in Brooklyn, tell us what that was like.

Anthony Payton: Back in the nineties, we had the highest murder rate in the nation, so life expectancy was really short. I believe that's one of the things that amplifies the masculinity. There were a lot of good times, but there were a lot of ugly times. When it came to the LGBTQ community, there wasn't a lot of representation, at least out in the open. You would have to venture off into the West Village or Chelsea in Manhattan, and then you would get that exposure. But in the local neighborhood, you didn't see it because like I said, for a man it was a sign of weakness if you were gender fluid. I'm just glad that we are where we're at, and I'm glad that it's getting better. 

Pierre Morten: We have a long way to go, but I do agree with you. We have to celebrate the progress that we've made thus far.

Anthony Payton: When you go through war, you kind of love peace. I love peace. That's what I want to see. I want to enrich the lives of everyone around me, as well as being enriched by others. If a person is going through something, then let me be a little bit more open minded or objective because this person actually has something in their heart and they have something to say. That's always been the key with me to open mindedness.

Tyrell Whitted: I believe for me that challenging my internal biases is a process in itself as well because while there's this thing called self love that's really awesome, there's also self hatred and it can be very negative.You'll think of everything in the world that you've possibly done wrong and you can ruminate on it and it can become something that you don't want; it'll be out of control. You'll continue to have these thoughts, or you could look at your shortcomings or your potential to be better and improve upon that. When I look at my internal biases, I try to look at them from an objective third person point of view. I feel this way about myself, but if I ask anybody else, do they feel this way about me? Is this something that I'm making up in my head? Is it something that's valid? Is it something that other people are experiencing like me? You have to really take hard looks at those internal biases because it could be something simple. 

Pierre Morten: For me, it is about staying internally inquisitive and questioning, and externally inquisitive and questioning. If I don't question what I am thinking, especially before I say it, I can't push past or understand what my own internal monologue is saying to me about a certain thing that I'm doing or certain feeling that I'm having. Why am I having this feeling? What does it feel like? Where's it coming from? Where have I felt this? It's about staying internally inquisitive and staying externally inquisitive, wondering why they're feeling what they're feeling. The constant staying open that Tony was speaking about, staying internally inquisitive that Tyrell was talking about, is where it's at. Question everything; it doesn't have to be this way. 

I'll give you an example. I was telling Tony and Tyrell earlier that there was a time in my life when I was a bully. I was 10 years old and I remember in Chicago, Illinois, I was bullying a young person who was about my age. He went and told his older brother that I was bullying him. His older brother was probably 12 or 13. I see his older brother get on this bike and start chasing after me. I'm running down the street, I run into my backyard, and I call my mom and I say, this guy wants to fight me. She opened up the window from upstairs and looked down and said, ‘what are you doing? What's going on down here?’ The other boy said, ‘he was bullying my younger brother.’ My mom looked at me and said, ‘is that true?’ I said no and she looked at him, looked at me, shut the window, went downstairs and locked the kitchen door to the backyard. I began to understand what it was like to be bullied, and I began to question why I was doing that. Why did it make me feel better? Why did it make me feel more powerful to put somebody else down? That is a lesson to stay internally inquisitive, to find out why you're doing what you're doing. Why do you think the way you think?

Anthony Payton: I like to acknowledge progress. Whether it's with the LGBT or the Black community, I like to acknowledge progress even amidst a lot needing to be done still. I'm glad that nowadays, someone like Tyrell can live his truth. I'm glad you're not really hearing about those stories about a kid who just hung himself in the closet because he was struggling with his sexuality and society wouldn’t accept him. Those are the stories that I was used to. Nowadays, you really don't hear too much about it. There's artists left and right coming out of the closet. I don't even know if that's a correct term, but there's artists nowadays being true to themselves. I like the growth and I like the progress.

Tyrell Whitted: For me in my day I feel like it's imperative for me to go to those spaces that don't include people like me because I feel like personally I have to be some sort of trailblazer for those who haven't been in those spaces before. I will go to an exclusive space where there's never been, say black people or people in the LGBTQ community, and I will try to make space for more of us to come through. It's important that we all bridge that gap, and develop connections between each other despite our differences.

Pierre Morten: I grew up during the AIDS epidemic when it was killing my friends, it was killing my lovers, it was killing people that I knew and loved and grew up with. We're talking in the eighties; being gay was not only further stigmatized at that time, but being queer period was looked at as something you could die from just by knowing someone who is. That's what people thought because of the AIDS epidemic. Act Up was an organization who began to fight back, and we began to organize, we began to call each other, we began to go to the hospitals, and it was because of that small group of activists that we are where we are today. We now have HIV medication. You still don't want to get it, but you don't have to die. We now have gay marriage. We have more acceptance of trans people. There has been a lot of progress from the eighties surrounding the idea and the acceptance of folk period. We have come a long way, but we still have somewhere to go.

Anthony Payton is a freelance writer and father living in Manchester. He can be reached at anthony.payton@collaborativenh.org. This story is part of his project, The Common Ground Initiative which aims to highlight the diversity of our communities with stories of people the average Granite Stater might not get to see or meet. The goal is to clarify misconceptions and find the threads that bind us all together as one New Hampshire community.

These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative as part of our race and equity project. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.