“Man,” I said, “I don’t know who it was.”
“Motherfucker, you know, dammit.”
Obviously I knew who it was. “Man, I don’t know who they are, man. I was just coming through school and I saw them.”
He wasn’t going to let it go. “Tell me who it is. Motherfucker, if you don’t tell me who it is, I’m gonna cut you.”
Here’s what people who didn’t grow up like I did need to understand: I never even considered ratting out the dudes that did it. I was a kid, being held in places by dudes I didn’t know, with a butcher knife being waved in my face and a hysterical broad screaming in the background. The tension and adrenaline could not possibly have been higher. It wasn’t like I considered telling him the names but decided against it. I didn’t consider it any more than I considered growing wings and flying away. It was something that was completely out of the realm of possible behavior for me. That’s what the tribal mentality is like. It’s not about choosing your people over another group of people. The mentality makes the decision for you, and your thought process doesn’t even acknowledge that you have a choice. If anything, I shouldn’t have been helping this broad from another neighborhood to begin with! If it had been a dude getting beaten up or even killed, for example, I definitely wouldn’t have helped or even thought to help.
So I just closed my eyes and told the brother, “You’re gonna have to cut me because I don’t know who it is.” He let me go. No one thanked me or anything like that. In fact, a couple of people punched me as I left. Months later I saw the brother at the liquor store. He got to his burgundy Impala and he said, “Thanks, man.” Then he drove away.
I’m older now, and I see the world a lot clearer than I did when I was a kid. But the effects of my upbringing haven’t gone away. I went to Gardena High for a stretch, but Gardena was also a rival neighborhood. When I was asked to appear at the Gardena Jazz Festival a couple of years ago, part of me felt wrong about doing it. It was just this subconscious, visceral reaction. I’m a grown dude with three kids, and I still have the hang-up. As recently as 2009, I made friends with dudes from Gardena. I play golf with them and hang out, normal stuff. Yet my brother-in-law wouldn’t do it. If those Gardena guys were there, he wouldn’t be around. “I don’t trust those niggas, man.”
When I played a gig in Hermosa Beach in 2011, a lot of people in the audience were from a rival neighborhood. As adults, we can’t believe that it was like that and that we were ever that way. But the young folks are still just like that. The same circumstances that were there when I was a kid are there now, so of course this cycle of hate continues.
When Tookie, the founder of the Crips, was going to get the death penalty in 2005, plenty of people I grew up with were ecstatic. It was more as if we Bloods had won the World Series than that a man was being put to death. But if that was the way you operated growing up and you had never been anywhere else, you’d probably feel the same way. You wouldn’t have anything to compare it to.
So now we have black kids who don’t think of the future, who are discouraged from being educated, and who see the world as beginning and ending with their neighborhood. They may be ignorant and they may be oriented entirely on the present, but that won’t be enough to make them a criminal. Mentally handicapped people are ignorant and oriented on the present; they’re the opposite of hardened.
So how would you make these kids into criminals? It’s kind of like a battered wife. If you tell a woman over decades that she’s worthless, stupid, and ugly, she will come to genuinely believe that she is worthless, stupid, and ugly. Conversely, if you tell someone that he’s a great singer, he’ll act like a great singer. He might not be a great singer, but he’ll go on that American Idol audition and make a fool of himself.
Making a kid into a criminal requires the same approach. Treat him like a thug, and he’ll start acting like one. When it comes to thug life, there isn’t much sunlight between being one and acting like one. Here’s a question that doesn’t require much of an education to answer: What group treats young black men like thugs?
A lot has been written about Rodney King and police brutality. But what is less often discussed is the effect an occupying police force has on impressionable young minds. To claim that the police are a factor in encouraging crime sounds ridiculous to most people. It’s counterintuitive; after all, the cops are there because the crime was there first. But that doesn’t mean that the cops didn’t increase what was there already. It sounds crazy, I know. It would have also sounded crazy if I had said that banning the sale of alcohol would lead to a huge increase in alcoholism.
Then Prohibition happened.
The police-brutality cases when people get killed are horrible and huge tragedies. Those stories make the news and they are terrible; no one argues with that. But it’s the day-to-day things that have consequences—especially when you’re an ignorant kid. Let me explain a little bit of what that kind of life was like.
In the mid-1970s, Smitty’s Liquor Store on Avalon Boulevard was a very special place. It was located dead center in between two neighborhoods. On one side you had us, and on the other side was where another sect of Bloods lived. Because we all had to go to that same liquor store, it ended up being like a safe zone. Smitty’s was South Central’s version of the UN. We may have had beef with each other, but we never did no dirt to anybody when we were at Smitty’s.
One of the kids in my crew was a big strong dude named Curtis. Even though Curtis was only fifteen or sixteen years old, he already had a beard. He was basically like a huge freak of nature. Curtis was Tyson before Tyson was Tyson. Curtis was always in and out of California Youth Authority, which is basically jail for kids. The cops constantly picked on Curtis. He was tough, but at the same time he couldn’t really mess with the police. That made them feel like they were tougher than him because he couldn’t fight back from their provocations.
One day at Smitty’s, this five-star sheriff started fucking with him and Curtis just shook his head. “Motherfucker,” he told the cop, “if you didn’t have that badge and that stick I’d beat the shit out of you.” This cop was a big dude, too. It wasn’t like Curtis was a lock to win. But after a while, enough becomes enough.
The two of them went to the alley behind Smitty’s. That cop took off his badge and his belt while his partner kept a lookout. We all stood there and watched as Curtis proceeded to beat all five stars out of that fucking sheriff. We were all very excited to see a cop getting his ass whupped like that. Eventually the sheriff’s partner had to pull out his gun and start shooting in the air to break the fight apart. That’s how badly Curtis fucked that dude up.
Two weeks later, Curtis was dead. The police had found his body after he had been shot to death. There wasn’t any doubt in our minds as to who had done it, either. If it was another Blood or a Crip, word would have definitely gotten out. Hell, they would have been bragging about it. But no one had any beef with Curtis like the police did.
Curtis’s fate was a story that was beaten into all of us, often literally, day in and day out. There’s no bravery in shooting a minor. There’s no justice in punishing an unarmed ass-kicker, with deadly force, in secret. Of course there was never any investigation. Curtis’s life didn’t matter. None of our lives did, in the eyes of the police.
Things like that happened constantly when I was growing up. One summer when I was ten, I was walking down the street with my friend. A police car pulled up and called us over. I don’t remember what they wanted to know, but neither of us were much help. We were still only in elementary school, and pulling a girl’s hair hadn’t been declared a felony yet.
The cop made me and my friend put our hands on the hood of the car. I can still feel how hot that metal felt in the California sun. “If you move your hands,” the cop told me, “I will blow your head off.” As the two of us stood there, scared to death, the cop’s partner sat in the driver’s seat revving the engine. I don’t know if that made the hood any hotter, but it s
ure wasn’t helping. We didn’t have the information what he wanted or else we would have told him immediately. I would have confessed to sinking the Titanic to get my hands off that hood.
Most white ten-year-old boys are taught that the cops are their friends. “If you have a problem, ask your local neighborhood police officer for help!” Well, our local neighborhood police officer was our problem. A white kid would never have been treated the way I had been by the police. As soon as a white kid’s parents found out, that cop would’ve been fired and almost certainly would’ve had charges pressed against him. But with me, there was no doubt that the cop would have absolutely no repercussions for his behavior. If anything, his partner would claim that I supposedly pulled an imaginary gun on them.
So in our community, the lesson was obviously a different one. Very early on, my mother taught me and my siblings to answer the cops with “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” The fact that we had to be taught this so young meant that interacting with the police was an inevitability—whereas most white people go their entire childhoods without speaking to a policeman even once. The fact that we had to address them as “sir” wasn’t a sign of respect. It was a symbol of fearful deference. We were reverting to talking like black people in old movies. Whenever I saw a cop, I instantly turned into Kingfish.
We had to be deferential because the cops were always looking for an excuse to harass us. You don’t have to have grown up in South Central to know that if you give the police attitude, things can get really ugly really quick. It’s like they were daring us to do something so that they could escalate the aggression. I played the game for as long as I could. I wasn’t worried about ending up like Curtis, but I wasn’t interested in going to jail, either.
As an adult, I would still often get pulled over for DWB—Driving While Black. I even knew what neighborhoods to avoid. If you went through Torrance, you were being pulled over as sure as night follows day. To this day, every black person I know will make a detour to avoid going through Torrance. I don’t know if it’s still like that, but old habits are fucking hard to break. It takes some sort of pressure to change old ways. In my case, what happened was that I became a dad.
One time I took Kyle out for a ride when he was a toddler. Soon enough, the sirens came on and I was pulled over. I stopped the car and got my son out of the car seat. I knew that a search of the vehicle was coming next. It was standard operating procedure, like going through baggage check at an airport. You get pulled over; your skin color gets checked; “black man detected”; your car gets searched. What also was standard operating procedure is that black men were commanded to sit on the curb. It was completely emasculating and it was entirely humiliating. Everyone could see you sitting there on the sidewalk like a dog waiting for his master to be done at the grocery store.
Right on cue, the cop gave me my orders. “I’m going to check your car,” he said. “You and your son sit on the curb.”
“No,” I said, holding my boy.
“Sit on the curb,” he repeated.
“No, man.” (Not “sir.”) “I’m not going to have my son remember that his father was sitting on the curb.”
“I can put you on the curb!”
“Then he’ll remember that somebody put me on the curb. He won’t remember that I did it willingly.”
The lovely officer stared at me with anger, but I stared back with calm. “Just go stand over there,” he mumbled under his breath. He searched my car and sent me on my way, and that was the end of it that day.
This treatment we all got wasn’t black paranoia. Nor was it coincidental or an accident. This type of behavior was the plan. Police Chief Daryl Gates’s stated policy was hiring Southern white boys, especially those fresh home from Vietnam. He believed that they knew how to handle these urban niggers. They would have no illusions that they were dealing with anything other than a population of thugs that had to be repressed for the greater good. It wasn’t “to protect and serve.” It was lynch law, imported directly from the source. Any complaints by the black community would be received like a criminal bitching that his handcuffs were too tight: “Maybe you shouldn’t have made us put those handcuffs on you to begin with.” Daryl Gates’s LAPD was even touted as a model for other police forces to follow. They sent him to Israel and to other places so he could show them how it’s done. The fact that what we were living under was presented as an ideal made things even more demoralizing. You can’t change things for the better if things are regarded as exemplary. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Things never would have changed if it wasn’t for Rodney King. The thing is, I get why the Rodney King jury acquitted those police officers. White people have been so conditioned to believe that black people are “just like them” that they assume our experiences are the same too. Well, they’re not. Since our experiences color our perceptions, a black dude and a white dude can watch the same thing happening and come to wildly different explanations for what they’re seeing. Their stories might even contradict each other’s, even if each dude describes only what he thinks is “obvious.” Nowhere are racial attitudes more different than when it comes to the police. It starts from what we see as kids, and that attitude develops as we grow older.
So it’s not that hard to get why the Rodney King cops got acquitted, and frankly it’s not even that surprising. The trial was held in Simi Valley. If South Central is the wrong side of the tracks, Simi Valley is the right side. It’s one of the top five safest cities in the country. Cops live there, alongside sheriffs and firemen. All these types who work in L.A. County live in Simi Valley. In the same way that my perception of police officers is based on my experiences over the years, the same goes for the people who live in Simi Valley. There, the cops aren’t an ominous force out to mess with you at every opportunity. They coach the Little League team. They shop at the same grocery stores. Their wives have you over for dinner.
Because of the jurors’ experiences with the cops—not “prejudices,” actual personal experiences—they couldn’t see what the police officers were doing as malicious. They looked for every reason to justify their long and deeply held beliefs that cops are good. Once you accept the premise that “cops are good,” then by definition those cops couldn’t be doing what they appeared to be doing on that videotape. There was more to the story. There had to be. It’s like finding out your wife is cheating on you or your kid is a drug addict. You will buy any excuse they throw at you because you don’t want to condemn them.
The one good thing to come out of the Rodney King fiasco is that much of what the LAPD formerly did in secrecy was now made public. For the first time, white America saw that there was something to what the black community had been saying for years. So if any white people wonder why we’re so loud, it’s because you never fucking listen to us! The investigators did their work, and the truth came out. It wasn’t that hard to find. The LAPD had been brazen in its abuse of power. They found cops who were robbing ordinary citizens. It was discovered that there was a task force that would follow suspects around and assassinate them.
Things were revealed to be so corrupt on a systemic level that the federal government had to step in with a ten-year mandate to make sure things got better. The first President Bush, a conservative Republican from a blue-blood political family, forced Daryl Gates to resign. Bush wouldn’t take out Saddam Hussein when he had the chance, but this police chief was too much even for him.
Now think about those kids growing up with the kinds of experiences that I had, and think about how they would regard police officers. All those children that are now men, raising their sons and daughters with that kind of distrust. It wasn’t just L.A. that was like that. It was the same situation in New York and in D.C. and in New Orleans. We all experienced things that we knew to be true—only to be told that we were wrong and the cops were right. We were told that we were overreacting or that we had brought matters upon ourselves. It made black people feel that white America knew what the cops wer
e doing and was okay with it.
I’m not going to deny that things are better now. People don’t get pulled over the way they used to in Los Angeles anymore. You’ve got to really be trying. At some point, the cops decided that if we didn’t like the way they were doing it before, let’s see how we’d like it when they did nothing. So, yes, that’s an improvement. But are these examples of heroism, going from abuse to apathy? Let’s be serious.
Virtually every white person will publicly swear up and down that you shouldn’t judge people negatively by the color of their skin. Then why should you judge people positively by the color of their clothing? Don’t get me wrong. I do believe in heroes. But the only motherfucker I know who puts on a blue suit and becomes a superior human being is Superman—and not only is he imaginary, that dude’s not even from this planet.
Police brutality is something that can be addressed. But the antagonistic relationship between the police and inner-city youth is a bigger problem and a current problem. As recently as February 2012, I saw an article that demonstrated that “stop and frisks” are at an all-time high in New York. If the police stopped and frisked you all the time, what possible attitude would you have toward them and society in general, other than hostility and antagonism? It’s humiliating.
The relationship between cops and inner-city crime is a chicken-and-egg scenario in which the presence of one leads to the increase of the other. It’s the same way with parents punishing their kids. If you punish a boy when he takes a cookie out of the cookie jar, he will resent you. But he’ll also understand the lesson. Yet what about a kid who gets punished despite having done nothing wrong? If you incorrectly punish a boy over and over for taking cookies when he hasn’t, eventually that motherfucker is going to start taking all the cookies that he can. If he’s paying the cost, he might as well enjoy the benefit. If he’s doing the time, he might as well do the crime. Punishment to kids doesn’t have to mean putting them up against the wall and frisking them. It could be as simple as the way they’re spoken to and the way they’re watched. It’s being questioned for no real reason. After a while, fuck it. He might as well go down the wrong road. All the cool kids are doing it anyway.
I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up Page 16