Better, Not Bitter

by Yusef Salaam

  The hard reality is that in the process of trying to liberate ourselves, some of us will lose our lives. The same as those who died on the Middle Passage during uprisings or on plantations during rebellions or behind the billy club of a policeman during marches. But if we truly believe in justice and equality, what other choice is there?

  I have power. We have power. But that power works better as a collective. It works best in unity.

  Justice isn’t hard to fathom, but for some, it feels like a pipe dream. We read in our history books about the founding fathers and their great dream for democracy. But we also know deep down that our oppressors across generations were saying, “Man, I got away with it all. I lived the good life on the backs on these people. I stole their land and money. I chopped up babies and fed them to alligators.” We are disgusted and justice feels like a fruitless endeavor. But we forget that none of it is about truth and righteous living. It’s only about telling the best story.

  It’s a spiritual wickedness in high and low places, as the elders say. Justice calls out to us to imagine an unseen reality. Yes, it’s hard to fight air when the only evidence you have of its existence is the movement of the trees. It’s hard to fight injustice when all we can see is the awful manifestations of it. But we must.

  Together.

  We’ve seen the destruction created by division. The Willie Lynch letter, a document believed to be a hoax that outlined the way slave masters would divide the enslaved by color in order to quell rebellion, still rings true based on what we see happening in our communities. The “divide and conquer” methodology, as old as time, is effective but not definitive. It’s time to harness our power.

  We know the destruction of oppression but have not yet been able to move out of its grasp. Our oppressors have mastered planning. Their moves have benefited multiple generations, which is why mass incarceration—slavery by another name—continues to exist. In order to defeat these generations-long plans of white supremacy, we must plan far ahead. The system depends on limited thinking from us, because they embedded it as a way of life. There was a time when we couldn’t plan past the next day. To plan for a future when our children could be taken away from us next week, or when our significant others could be snatched away and sent down the Natchez River to Mississippi or into Alabama, felt senseless. The idea of building generational wealth feels unattainable when it’s difficult to earn enough to serve your basic needs. So, yes, some of us will treat ourselves with Jordans or immerse ourselves in seemingly trivial things like the latest release by our favorite singer or rapper. Because we are human and not afforded much pleasure. And rightfully, that pleasure feels good to us in the midst of darkness. Thinking further out when everything around you says you might not live to see the fruits of your labor is the challenge. In Islam, we believe in justice. Not the kind of justice reflected in this country’s systems. We believe in true justice wielded by God to heal us all. Maybe you call it “karma” or “reaping what you sow.” No matter what, it’s the concept we must embrace for our liberation. It’s the African ethos of understanding that our ancestors have prepared a space for us in this world and the next. Our ability to unite and reframe the narrative can be the force that drives away the fear many of us hold, fear of the impossible.

  Fear is dispelled when you realize that everyone is finite. Everyone wants to live a million years, but we know we cannot. So, part of the collective lack of intergenerational planning is rooted in this myth that “if I do that, they will kill me.” And given history, on the one hand, it’s a reasonable perspective. We know what happened to the Black people living on Black Wall Street in the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, one of the wealthiest Black neighborhoods in America. In 1921, those homes and businesses were burned to the ground by white people who couldn’t stand that these formerly enslaved men and women were now thriving in a town of their own creation, with businesses, schools, and hospitals all run by Black people. Their success was an affront to that town’s notions of supremacy. They killed those people as a way of blocking any attempt at “planning ahead.”

  I wrote in a poem once, “Everybody dies, but not everybody lives. My God, I had my soul to give.” There will, without a doubt, be a sacrifice. But we must play the long game. While I sat in my jail cell, I had to focus on the minute, the hour, and the day in order to survive. But after I was released, I had to slowly unravel from that framework. I had to think beyond that, to think about my family, the one I had, and the one I would have eventually. The journey of freedom for Black people is clearly a marathon, but it is also a relay. In our deaths, we pass the baton. Packaged in that DNA baton is the love, joy, pain, and trauma we pass on to the next generation, and the nourishment our children need is already planted inside them.

  I know that many of us are just waiting for heaven. We are waiting for another plane of existence where oppression doesn’t exist. We’ve been told that heaven is out there, above the sky Islamically; there’s a belief in that. In one form or another, most belief systems ascribe to this. But it’s hard to hold that fully when we look around us and see others seemingly enjoying their heaven here on earth. When I’d walk around Harlem and see the changes wrought by gentrification, it was hard to not wonder why the cleaner streets and renovated buildings couldn’t have come earlier. But even as we fight to right the wrongs done to us, we must also release ourselves from what we’ve been taught has value. We must release the definitions given to us and stand firmly in who we know ourselves to truly be. That’s where our “heaven on earth” lies. We can have the fly homes and cars. We can build up our neighborhoods and watch over our children. We can also be healthy, healed, and whole, despite the journey it takes to get there.

  I recently saw an interview with a man from Bosnia. His children were translating for him. He knew the language that they were speaking—I believe it was German—but he essentially said he refused to speak the language of the colonizer. He was going to speak only in the language of his identity, Arabic. The tongue that would best express what he knew about himself and his experience. And this extends beyond linguistics. To his point, when we speak the cultural language of our oppressors, we will find ourselves thinking in the cultural language of our oppressors. When we can speak freely in our own tongue, we can think freely. While there’s something to be said about leaving your words up to someone else’s translation, what was also powerful to me was that this man didn’t care.

  I imagine that’s what it looks like to retain ownership of self. To be exactly who you are, and let other people expend the labor to translate. Black people defining themselves for themselves and letting white people catch up is absolutely a power move. We are putting the onus back where it belongs. You do the labor, justice system, of undoing the horrors you’ve enacted. You do the work of dismantling this thing you’ve created, and I will reclaim and retain myself.

  There is a huge deficit in our Black and Brown communities that has been intentionally exploited by a culture and its systems determined to deny our humanity. As a result, some of us deal with a plague on our psyches. When who we are is too indelibly linked to how they see us, we are in trouble. I’d submit that we can trace all of it to a kind of love famine. We don’t know how to love each other because we don’t know how to love ourselves. We’ve lived so long in a place of survival that the idea of thriving in love and joy feels unattainable at best. Seeds of self-hate sowed by a country bent on denying you basic human rights can create a hate harvest that is sadly plentiful in Black and Brown communities. It’s not about crime. People aren’t robbing and shooting and dealing drugs because it’s fun. Not even because it’s cool. It’s because their options are limited and their vision of themselves as whole and healed—as self-actualized—is cloudy. It’s about a lack of self-love and identity.

  To echo Malcolm X, the white man is the greatest criminal in the world, the greatest thief. The privileged have looted both natural and human resources globally. Even though Black people are r
esilient, though we are people equipped to survive, loving and being loved well is a stolen treasure. Too many of us can be prisoners of limited thinking, faithful students of our captors, who teach us to hate everything about ourselves and love and crave everything attached to them.

  It’s frustrating that this conversation falls on deaf ears, but there are moments of light. Moments that give humanity a little hope. Recent movement in the fight for Black lives in light of police brutality has been one of those hopeful moments. My only wish is that it can be sustained. That we can use what we learned from our ancestors, from our grandmothers and grandfathers, and leverage that wisdom to build a better world. Black and Brown folks are asking for equality. That’s a reasonable request, especially considering the levels of inhumane treatment inflicted on our communities. But even more than that, we demand that the dominant culture own its documented history of injustices and work diligently to replace it with systems that intend good for all. The calls for reform and defunding the police are not without warrant. Danielle Sered, in Until We Reckon, speaks about the immediate need to address these injustices, and everything about my experience concurs. “It means not only shrinking systems but developing solutions that stand to displace them,” she writes. “And it means building political power to protect those changes from backsliding and backlash. The people whose lives are at stake will need to have the durable collective power to choose, implement, and sustain solutions.”

  In short, the ruse is up. The curtains have been pulled back. We see the props on your stage, and we’ve got a copy of your script. We are no longer deceived by the lines you recite saying that the problems are “not that bad” or that we are the source of our own oppression. We’re reading your script and can clearly see the stage notes that claim whiteness as the standard and everything else inferior. We see you. It’s time you fix the problem and stop trying to apply Band-Aid reforms. They’re not solutions; they’re coverings. They don’t allow for healing. They don’t allow for our stories to breathe.

  If my experience doesn’t prove that America is sick, I don’t know what does. If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone. My mission is to make sure it never happens again. To anyone. It’s easy to feel trapped in a cycle of despair. It’s easy to believe that you don’t have tools to fight the good fight. But that’s not true. Knowing yourself and identifying your power for yourself is the winning strategy for navigating the uneasiness of the rage we feel as Black or Brown people in America. It hurts to think that some people in our community took the forty-fifth president seriously during his 2016 campaign when he asked us, “What do you have to lose?”

  At Harlem Valley.

  A lot.

  I know firsthand.

  TWELVE

  Becoming an Alchemist

  And when you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it.

  REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

  THERE HAVE BEEN SO MANY times throughout the writing of this book when I’ve thought about the life I lived before the case. When I’ve really had to sit with the innocence and naivete that was stolen from me. There are small memories, things most people would laugh about at the family reunion or whisper about with close friends, that seem so much bigger, more notable, in the context of my life.

  There’s the time when David Nocenti, my Big Brother, bought me a skateboard. Skateboards were very expensive in the late ’80s. The financial realities of most of the people in my neighborhood meant that parents weren’t just running out buying top-of-the-line skateboards for their kids. If asked, a mama would likely say, “No. Make your own skateboard.” And before David’s gift, I’d done exactly that. Wheels were easy to find, so I added them to a little piece of metal piping along the bottom of a flat block of plywood to support my weight. As soon as my friends and I were riding down what we called “the Ramp” in Schomburg Plaza, we realized I could do some of the same tricks that kids on the expensive boards could do.

  But the skateboard that David bought me was no DIY project. It was an exclusive model, black and green, with a fin in the back. Anybody who was into skateboarding—and there was a crew of us in Harlem—wanted a board like mine with the rails underneath that allowed you to do tricks and slides. I did ollies, sharp turns; I was jumping off curbs and flipping the board. I was a real skateboarder, so this gift delighted me and meant so much.

  Some days, I’d ride to school. If it was early enough, I’d enter Central Park at 110th Street and eventually end up on West Drive. That street had the best hills. Steep in parts, smooth in others. Sometimes I’d ride them. Other times I’d walk them. It didn’t matter as long as I kept moving. I never thought about safety. Of course, I heard people talking about how dangerous the park was, especially in the ’80s. But I knew Central Park as intimately as if it were my own backyard. In my youthfulness, I’d move through the park like Matthew Henson surveying the North Pole. In those moments I was an intrepid, fearless adventurer. Sure, I was an explorer on the way to school, but a fearless explorer nonetheless.

  I savored the freedom that came with my skateboard. Riding alongside the cars, and in Central Park, I’d try to race them. Or make them stop for me. Call it a teenage power trip, but I thought it was cool that I could be the reason they would stop moving, and hit the brakes. On those morning rides to LaGuardia, I knew I was invincible. Until I wasn’t.

  It was around 103rd Street, on the west side of the park, when a group of Latino guys with sharpened screwdrivers confronted me.

  “Yo, give us that board!”

  They surrounded me. I was twelve or thirteen years old, and I was terrified. I took a beat to answer. But they didn’t bother waiting for my response. They snatched the board out of my hands.

  This was my first reality check. This was also the first time I remember being totally confused by cops; in my naivete, I believed that, for the most part, being around them meant I was safe. Almost immediately after the guys snatched the board, I turned around and saw two white officers standing right there. Both looked young. Maybe still in their twenties. One was heavier, like the stereotypical donut-eating cop. The other one was slim. I felt assured. I walked up to them. “Hey, these guys just stole my skateboard!”

  Almost in slow motion—at least it felt that way—one of the cops turned to them and asked, “Hey, did you just steal his skateboard?”

  The guys just started laughing. One said, “Man, we were just playing with him. That’s all.”

  “Oh, okay. Good. Well, all right then.”

  And just like that, the cops walked away.

  They’re leaving?

  My false sense of safety began to evaporate quickly. They didn’t even bother to say, “Let me walk with you to get you out of this dangerous situation.”

  Of course they didn’t.

  When I turned back around, my new “friends” weren’t too happy. Their faces were grim. They proceeded to “run my pockets,” patting me down to steal whatever else was on me. I have to admit, I was more hurt that they stole the cassette tapes in my pocket than I was to lose the board. Those tapes represented hours I’d spent customizing hip hop playlists for various occasions. Now they’d be enjoying the fruits of my labor.

  When I told David what happened, he wasn’t angry about it. In his laid-back way, he didn’t even appear worried or upset. He also didn’t say, “Oh, I’m so sorry” or offer any consolation. He just told me, “We’re going to keep on moving forward. No worries.”

  I’m reminded of those moments of riding free in the park. Of dipping and swaying along concrete as trees bowed to me in the distance. I think about Central Park—the symbol of both my freedom and my bondage. How everything turned on me so very suddenly. One minute I was a kid racing cars on my skateboard, pretending to be a superhero in this vast greenery; the next minute my innocence and, soon after, my freedom were stolen. The first time was through neglect—two policemen leaving me to dea
l with danger on my own. The next time was due to a sinister plot to turn my Black body into another number in a prison jumpsuit.

  If I’m honest, writing this book has stretched me in ways I never imagined. It’s forced emotions and memories to the surface that I’d long put away. It was a challenge to sit in those feelings again in order to tell this story. I had to reckon with the impact of a trauma that, despite being thirty-plus years old, can still, in moments, feel fresh. There were many times over the course of these months when I had to relinquish my internal safety mechanism in order to get the words down. Creating distance, seeing that Yusef as different from the Yusef I’ve become, has helped me feel sane. But in order to be true to my experience, to my memories, I’ve had to reach back and grab fifteen-year-old Yusef’s hand; I’ve had to hold his fears, sorrow, and pain, and let him know that everything will be okay—eventually.

  I’ll never forget one man whom I met in prison. He was Muslim as well, but he just approached life differently. He had an esoteric sensibility and would do things like read the Qur’an from the back to the front. He was also a martial artist.

  Everyone called him Buddha. He was a big guy, his belly large and round. But he was also very quick on his feet. If he needed to take hold of somebody because things were about to get out of hand, that person had no hope of getting away.

  One day he said to me, “Hey, I’m going to teach you something.”

  This was not long after I’d had my shoulder yanked out of its socket on the basketball court, and my arm was still in a sling.