One Day Shy

 

I have planned these blogs for months now. It’s the kind of thing that you always know that you must write someday but now that the day is here, where do you start? I guess the easiest thing would be to explain the title. One day shy refers to my journey really since leaving the Marine Corps. A lot of my friends and associates will be surprised to learn that as of yesterday, January 14, 2014, it will be exactly 10 years since I was released from the Indiana Department of Correction. That, in and of itself, is not all that uncommon. People are released from prison every day. What is extraordinary is the length of time it took for me to get to that release. To begin I have to go back, waaaayy back, to 1984. Specifically October 23, 1984. That was the day I was sentenced to 44 years in prison. The particulars are not that important, many of my friends and a few of my classmates went to prison that same year. Oh, yes, you did read that correctly, 44 years which in Indiana means that a convict serves 50% of his sentence. That’s 22 years for those that are slow counters. Needless to say, that relatively short statement (44 years incarceration) had a profound effect on my life and the man that I became. I was released a few months early for good behavior as well as earning my degree so I was released after 19 years 364 days. In other words, one day shy of 20 years.

Many of my friends always ask me why I know so much about prison/jail related issues as well as criminal justice in general. I just smile and tell them I read a lot. The truth is, I know so much because I lived it. I watch theatrical representations of prison. I watch “reality” shows about prison. I read, listen to podcasts, watch news stories about prison and think to myself, “if only they knew.” A lot of what you see on television is sanitized, it’s a caricature of what incarceration is, and only begins to scratch the surface of what a long term bit is like. When I went in 1984 prison was different than today. Now prison is sectioned off into pods. In the early eighties, prisons were “wide open,” a term that meant that inside of the forty foot wall I was behind, convicts ran everything. Convicts were responsible for everything from race relations to prisoner movement.  Convicts controlled what you ate, when you went to the doctor and even what particular religion you practiced.  If you ask many of my friends, prisons were better then.  I use the word “better” very loosely as prison is never good, its just a matter of being marginally “better” one day than the last.

That being said, I went to prison at 22 years of age.  That is considered young by many prison standards.  Due to the seriousness of my crime I was sent to a maximum security prison in southern Indiana.  The Indiana State Reformatory was designed to hold only prisoners with sentences in excess of 30 years.  It was also where the “young bucks” went as opposed to the Indiana State Prison which incarcerated older, more seasoned convicts.  An ongoing shell game existed in the DOC whereby the administration would transfer prisoners between the two to control their influence and to break up what would become lifetime bits.  You’ll read the term “bit” a lot in this work as it means to serve a sentence.  A sentence is a bit, and doing time is considered “bittin.”  To say I was subject to culture shock doesn’t even begin to do justice to what was to become every waking day of the next almost, one day shy, twenty years of my life.  One of the common misconceptions the uninitiated have about prison is the time worn vision of getting off the bus and walking between two lines of degenerate, homosexual rapists just waiting to prey on the first-time prisoners.  Nope. Didn’t happen, doesn’t happen.  Most people, and I think I’m qualified to say most, who go to prison know someone there.  It can be a friend from the block, a cousin, an uncle and sadly in many, many cases your father.  I’ll touch later on how many fathers and sons I was locked up with. I’ll even tell you about a real good friend of mine who saw his son join him AND his father in prison.  (Before you profile them, this was not a question of a bad family dynamic where there was no guidance, it was a case of really, really, really bad luck.)  Their story was atypical.

I will also mention many people but I’ll change their names, one for their protection/privacy, two due to the disheartening fact that, hell, I just don’t remember.  I also don’t want my writing to make one think that I’m looking for sympathy.  I did what I did, I did my time for it.  I learned more than one can expect from a fucked up situation and I became a better man for it.  My main reason for sharing, and in some cases oversharing, is to enlighten the uneducated.  I’m not special, everything that I’ll describe is happening as we speak to some other ex-convict.  I hope that my writing will help some of you understand what your brother, uncle, cousin, father, son and increasingly, sister, aunt, cousin, mother and daughter is going through trying to reconnect with this crazy world we live in.

I encourage you to share my story.  Comment on my blog, suggest it to others.  Oh, and click on an ad so Google will pay me my measly pittance for using Blogger as opposed to WordPress or one of the other blogging sites.  Also look out for the collected works to be published later on this year.

The N-Word

I have told myself time and time again that I would write something about the argument that is going on within our nation about the term nigger/nigga. I have went back and forth with myself about whether or not it is ever okay to use this word, whether in casual conversation with the fellas or heaven forbid with a white guy.

I believe that we as elder brothers/sisters in the struggle have lost sight of the reality of the situation. Realistically speaking, language is dynamic. A broader conversation could be had about profanity in general but for now let’s just talk about the so-called n-word. First and foremost, we need to stop calling it the “n-word.” When we say that, we may as well say nigga/nigger. When we hear that we don’t think nasty, we don’t think Neptune, we don’t even think narcissistic. We know what is being implied. To me, this gives others license to use the term but be protected by linguistic work around. The argument will be “well I didn’t say nigga/nigger, so see, I’m not a racist. I would much prefer the word not exist but I’m not retarded, I don’t live in a vacuum. I live in the real world.

That being said, there is a primary, undeniable reason today’s generation throws nigga/nigger around with no seeming sense of the word’s power and unfortunate history. It has nothing to do with a lack of grounding in our history. It has very little to do with the constant bombardment of the word through popular media. It is simply the FACT that unless you are at least 35 year old for the most part, you have no personal connection to the word. I, at 50+ years old, still remember “going down south” in the sixties, early seventies. I remember the stern warnings from the Great-Grandmother, Aunts, Uncles and cousins. I remember being told that I was from Gary, Indiana and that was a wholly different world for Blacks than Port Gibson, Mississippi or Chattanooga, Tennessee. There were things that you could get away with up north that would get you hurt in the south. Most of today’s generation didn’t have that experience. They, for the most part, have NEVER been called a nigga/nigger in anger. At least that’s the way they take it. No white person has ever looked at them and with venom dripping from their voice told them “nigger.” So there is no emotional connection to the word.

That’s why they are so comfortable with their friends and even white acquaintances using the word. It has become just another part of the common lexicon like bitch, hoe, ratchet, ghetto, etc. Although these words can be used to describe anyone in our society, they have become part and parcel used more often than not to describe us. Due to this overuse of these phrases we have come to be desensitized by their use. A nigga is my boy, “that’s my nigga.” “Bitch please,” how we argue with our queens. It’s all just culture now, a culture that we can rail against but eventually we have to accept our ineffectiveness and move on. We have to quit trying to go against the tide of cultural Amerikkka. Our battle cannot be fought in blogs; we’re outgunned by videos, YouTube, Facebook, twitter, etc. We are also in pitched battle with other mature “adults” who also use the word cavalierly in normal conversation. I’ll even admit I use it. I try not to, but when in Rome . . . As a casual aside, I actually went over 10 years without using it during my exploration of Black consciousness. Then culture changed and everything was nigga this, nigga that, bitch this, ratchet ass hoe that. Additionally, thousands of times a day on radio, thru Pandora, I-heart-radio etc., we hear the word. Record companies appear to reward our people for how many times they use the most degrading terms, as well as other exhortations to conspicuous consumption. It is exceedingly hard to combat this trend. As distasteful as it may be to us, what I and the conscious brothers/sisters I rotate with call the “lumpenproletariat” (look it up if you’re lacking in your 19th century Karl Marx) don’t see it that way. To make them understand the true nature of the term would require tearing down almost everything they think they know and instilling in them their true nature. Does anyone have time for that? Is that more important than teaching them how to respect their mates, or how to stop killing each other for little or no reason? Is that more important than teaching them how to avoid the pitfalls in life that will either kill them or incarcerate them? I think that we have bigger fish to fry, as the old folks used to say. Call me whatever you’d like but just don’t shoot me.
So the question was asked, is there any such thing as honorary black, or is it ever acceptable for white guys/gals to call you, or me, a nigga? Although it pains my heart to say it, I would say it depends. It depends on the situation. I’ve had young white guys who didn’t know me approach me like “what’s up my nigga?” (Suffice it to say they never did it again) They did it because their contemporaries never checked them. They did it because where they are from its acceptable behavior. They don’t see the world as polarized as we do. Some of them have true love for their ”niggaz.” They grew up in the hood and they know no more than their friends what the word truly means. Honorary blackness is out of the question as they’ll undoubtedly learn as they grow into their parents and are accepted by the society as a whole. I’ll bet money that Eminem probably used the word when he was young and running with D12 but when he became more attuned to the nuances of civilized behavior he realized that everything ain’t for everybody. He realized, like many before and many since, that everybody ain’t your guy and some people will tear your head off for the use of that term. In other words, he grew up. He became more mature. As long as we as a society accept their use of the term, endearment or not, they will use it with impunity. Usually, all it takes is for one brother to threaten, or perpetrate, violence due to their use of the word for them to realize that it is a no-no. What cannot be done is remove the word from the English language as a whole. It’s like Pandora’s Box, once its contents have escaped, they can never be returned to the box.

Trayvon Martin The Aftermath Part Two: The Blackout

Blackout

As I’m quite sure many of us have done over the last few days, I have sat down and thought about what I think would be an adequate response to the TM verdict handed down in Florida. I won’t go into a long description about what happened, as unless you’ve been in a coma or otherwise off planet we all have heard from multiple sources who did what and how. The only unifying theme is still no one knows exactly what happened, and that’s not an issue. We believe we’ve been wronged and that’s enough.

We as Africans in this country have volumes of evidence that support that belief but that is not the thrust of this article. I am not here to describe what anyone with a third grade capacity to read can go to the library and research. I’m here to talk about what we do next if we are really dissatisfied with how we are treated in this country. I hope my readers will excuse me but I have a thing for preambles. I’m a big believer in the setup.

Our problem with a noteworthy response is two-fold. One, the response must be big enough to make our intended audience take note and two it must not in any way lead to us harming others or being harmed by others in ignorance/fear.

Let me first explain what won’t work. Pictures, however artfully done, won’t solve the problem. Facebook posts with Jesus’ (Jesus’s?) arm around TM are useless as they migrate slowly off the page, replaced by pics in Ghetto or Ghetto Fabulous or Vine or some other momentary pastime. Long, passionate blog posts, articles or YouTube rants, (with the exception of mine of course) aren’t effective as the only ones of us with a readership/viewership large enough are long on descriptions of the problem and short on solutions.

The true problem with forming and executing an effective, meaningful response is our respective level of dissatisfaction. I’ll admit I heard this from a late brother of mine Mahdi Nu’man who described us as Africans in America in a khutbah at Jum’mah services some years ago. See my friends/loved ones/haters as well, any response to what Africans in America now claim to be the latest “last straw” or the “I’m fed up and I ain’t gon take it no mo” moment in our history in the country is largely dependent on to what degree one participates. (Damn, I guess I’m the king of the run on sentence as well) There are some of us who are 10 percent dissatisfied and there are those of us who are 100 percent dissatisfied. The biggest difference between now and the civil rights era was that back then, they were 100% dissatisfied. Things couldn’t get any worse than they already were without going back to slavery. We have made great strides since then and now there are many of us who have something to lose. We identify/sympathize/empathize with what happens to us around the country but only to a point. Not to the point where we will jeopardize what we have worked for to get where we are.

Before you begin the requisite howling, raising of pitchforks and lighting of torches, let me explain that I’m not in the hood envious of those who are more fortunate than I. I live in a upscale gated community in a suburb north of Dallas. I don’t live here because I’m scared of or any way ashamed of my people. I’m here because they have the best schools in the area. Unfortunately, where we are forced to live for economic reasons, for the most part, have horrible school systems. (I’ll talk about tax based school systems in another article) But I digress. I have African friends who are PhDs, and who possess MBAs. I myself am simply lazy, I am maybe two or three classes away from my MA, having already graduated with a BS. I also have close friends that are a bit less . . . what’s the word, uhhh, safe. I have close friends that I wouldn’t want to be caught in a dark alley with. (Their lower self may get the better or them) I love them both as they are both reflections of the same person. The point is that my more erudite, accomplished friends may not be 100% dissatisfied with what it may take for this culture to respect us. My niggas from the hood though, down for whatever.

THE FINAL SOLUTION

Believe it or not, my plan won’t take much beyond a bit of sacrifice; it will though take us ALL, each and every last one of us. My plan will involve everyone from our illustrious President to that brother doing life, or its equivalent, in all of the jails and prisons in America. Whether you are a teacher, a judge, a policeman, criminal, inmate, or a fireman, I’m talking about you. Whether you host a nationally televised talk show, a weblog, or stand on a box in the middle of a vacant lot like Lawrence Fishburne in Boyz N Da Hood. My plan doesn’t involve boycotting any business as that has shown to be somewhat limited in scope. I read a rumor that the Koch brothers financed GZ’s defense so we should boycott Charmin or Bounty or something. Any plan must be bigger than that due to the fact that many of us (most) use the store brand of paper products anyway. I don’t want us to march on the statehouse in any state or city hall in any city; we’ve been marching so long our feet should fall off. We are not going to esign a petition to any lawmaker or write a letter to our congressman. All of these solutions have been tried and they have all failed.

What we need to do is indicate to the rest of this country just how important we are to its EVERYDAY function. We need for those who claim that we need to quit whining about slavery, and making everything a race issue to see just how integral we are to EVERYTHING that goes on in this country. We need a national BLACKOUT. We need every last one of us to take a week off from work beginning say . . . Trayvon Martin’s birthday. Whatever your industry is, get sick for a week. For those of us with job security, just don’t show up. For those of us with bills to pay and need our little bitty job (most), call in sick with MERS or EBOLA or West Nile Fever. Now when I say BLACKOUT, that’s what I mean. I mean everyone. No nurses, no doctors. No air traffic controllers (are any of them African?). No entertainers. No athletes. No home health aides. No pharmacists, no drug dealers. Whatever you are, whatever you do. If you own a business, close for a week. No haircuts, no tease and flips. No soul food. (It’s fattening anyway) We don’t need leaders either, so the good Revs can stay home and take the week off too. We don’t even need your job to be done. Hopefully President Obama will come home to the Chi and spend some time in the hood where he’s from. (Hmmm, though under my plan his African Secret Service agents will be home too, well we’ll work on that one)

Now that’s part one. Part two is while you’re off for that week; rediscover your family, your community. Talk to your neighbors; make amends with that guy from down the street that you argued with at the last HOA meeting. Talk about how to make our communities safe without arming everyone to the teeth. Talk with those gangbangers who everyone is afraid to make eye contact with. No spending of our dollars. I mean none. No gas station visits. Stay home or walk, we need to walk more. No Wal-Mart, no Target, Dollar General/City/Family, nothing. Keep your money in your pocket. Drop your cable or satellite plan down to local channels for a week. Change your cell phone plan down to the basic plan for one week. Turn your lights off, go by candlelight if possible. Oh, and no church, no tithing, no mosques, no zakat. If the powers that be see we’re not even going to church they’ll know we’re doubly serious. This society needs to see that this country cannot function without us. We are more than just a subset of society that can be overlooked whenever something happens that we don’t agree with. My plan will cost this economy billions in lost revenue, lost profits and lost productivity. That is exactly my goal. The only thing that America respects is that which has the capacity to cost it money.

Of course they’ll be those of other ethnicities that are married to us, have children by us or share children with us. We are not exclusive, if you want to join, be our guest. Just know that this is not about you, it’s about US. No disrespect, love you to death, appreciate your support but this is a black thang. It’s okay for us to have a thang too. Like St. Patrick’s Day or Cinco de Mayo.

Of course they’ll be those of US who disagree with everything I’ve said and that’s fine as well. Of course, there will be pain. There will be those who lose their jobs, but look at it as the impetus for us to build businesses. Put yourself in the shoes of the employer who fired someone for participating in the blackout. They can't fire us all. Who will want to face the backlash of losing all of the black dollars we spend with their company. We’ll see who is 100% dissatisfied and to whom our treatment is a problem but “just not that deep.”

(Next Post: Going back down south)

Togetherness

Recently talked with a friend of mine who lamented on the lack of unity among our people. Truth be told, I have to agree with him. I simply have a different take on the situation. Has anyone noticed that out of all of the different groups there are in America, only us as Afrikans have a totally fragmented existence. Northern Afrikans are distinctly different from Southern Afrikans. Eastern Afrikans are different from Western Afrikans. Afrikans that are 40 years old or older have a completely different mindset than those younger.

There are many reasons for this, but I choose to take it all the way back to our slave heritage. Unlike our Caucasian neighbors, we didn't come here in groups. We came here like luggage, with bags of all different types thrown together. We never had the chance to develop distinct cultural identities. Instead, we learned to coexist with each other and pass along this supposed homogeneity to our offspring. Even a casual glance at the continent of Africa will evidence a hodgepodge of different cultures even physical features. We, on the other hand, all look essentially the same. Sure some of us are lighter, some heavier, etc, but for the most part you can tell an Afrikan from here from an African from there fairly easily.

So why the difference? Its because like the old adage, water only rises to its natural level. Some of us are standing in ankle deep water, while some of us are drowning. We try to lead the blind out of darkness but sometimes darkness is comforting. If I stay in the dark, no one can see just how ignorant I really am. If I maintain this job and pay all my bills, then I'm okay, never once giving thought that the purpose of work is to not have to work eventually. We don't think high enough. We are content to let all other groups be at the forefront. We relegate ourselves to being eternal consumers. We place more value on buying the rims than selling the car. Even if we do make a "come up" by whatever means, we spend it rather than invest it. I know that bills have to be paid, what I'm referring to is disposable income. An extra $2000 instantly makes the average one of us think about flatscreen tv's or maybe dvd player for the backseat of the car, even if we don't have children to sit back there and watch it.

I have become convinced that it is my job to raise the bar. It is my job to pull the blinders off those of my people that want to listen. Of those that don't want to listen, I can only hope that the work that we put it will benefit them in the long run. In Islam it is said that only a small group of people can make a change. Let me be the first one.