Their perspective is understandable. When these judges see kids who look like their own children—or themselves at a young age—they’ll feel empathy. They’ll think this is a kid making stupid-kid choices. But when they see a young black male—and they see a lot of them—they’re going to see the boogeyman. How can anyone distinguish in such a short interaction between a kid who needs to be put back on the right track and a criminal dead set on doing harm? The rules of the street demand that you seem tough and fearless, displaying no weakness. In a court setting, that comes across as angry defiance. The consequences are inevitable, and they are tragic.
I felt a taste of that, and that was enough for me. In 2004, I starred in an independent film called Shackles. Part of the movie was filmed inside a penitentiary where two dudes from my neighborhood had gotten killed, which made it eerie. As we were shooting one scene, the phone kept ringing and ruining the take.
“Shit,” I said. “We gotta do this over.”
“Why, what’s wrong?” said the director.
“That fucking phone keeps ringing!”
“D.L., there ain’t no phone. The offices have been closed for two months.”
I rolled my eyes. “Sound got it. I heard the phone. Come on now, quit playing.”
But sound didn’t get it. I listened to the playback and there was no extra noise whatsoever. “They say that happens all the time,” the director told me. “People hearing noises or what have you.” I’m not saying it’s haunted, but I didn’t know what the fuck was going on.
Prisons don’t convert to movie sets all that easy. Because we were so far out from the city, we had to use the cells for wardrobe. The particular cell we were using as my dressing room had previously been used to keep prisoners under psychiatric observation. It was small and cramped, very minimal, and it only had one tiny window way up high.
When I was in there changing, the fucking door to the cell closed all of a sudden. It’s not like it was windy or drafty in there. Even if it was, how much of a draft could one tiny window have on a heavy steel door? Whatever, so the door closed. We’d get the prop master to open it and everything would be okay.
But they couldn’t find the prop master.
I knew there was no possibility, zero, of me staying locked in that cell for hours, let alone days. I knew that the crew would not give up until I got out. I could see the people through the door, and they were talking to me and keeping me company. In addition, I am not claustrophobic in any way. It’s just not a thing with me.
Despite all this, I literally almost went insane. I almost lost my fucking mind. I’m not trying to be dramatic or over the top, but when I say “literally” here, I mean literally. I was in there total for only about an hour, knowing the whole time that people were frantically trying to get me out. They could see that I was starting to freak despite my efforts to keep my composure.
This happened when I was a successful grown man in my forties. After I got out, all I could think about was, how could a child who is fifteen, sixteen, or even twenty stay in that cell and not go insane? There would be no one trying to get him out of that cell. Rather, an entire system was set up to make sure he stayed in there. That kid would know that this is what the rest of his life was going to be like.
Prison is like thug boot camp. After you’ve gone through it, you know you can survive it and handle it. You’ve got experience living it. Threatening to send you back becomes less and less of a deterrent, if it ever was one to begin with. I know guys that had been going to jail since we were in junior high school. I saw them in junior high, then I saw them again at the end of high school. I saw them a couple of years later, when I was in my twenties. Then I never saw them again. They had three strikes, and they were out. Because they fucked up in junior high, their lives were ruined. They never got to see anything, and they never got to go anywhere. They never got to eat at a cool restaurant or see one tourist spot. It’s just sad.
But if you were one of these people, how could you value a life? If life, to you, only meant what you saw in front of you, then why would it be valued? What the fuck is it worth? You’re regarded as so worthless that people will just as soon lock you up and throw away the key. You’re an unwanted dog in a kennel. How are you expected to look at life as something to be guarded and respected, if that’s all you know? If you’re looking at life through a keyhole, how are you going to have a balanced view that takes all sides into consideration? You’re not even seeing things from one side, but a tiny piece of one side.
In captivity, any animal only grows to the size of its environment. If you keep a fish in a small tank, it’s not going to become the monster you’d find in the Amazon. It’s the same way with people. If you have small-minded people in a small community enclosed with a very real border—shit, it’s on the map!—to create a small environment, those people will never be able to break through those walls to grow to their full potential.
Because of the focus on the present, because of the disdain for education, because of the lack of perspective and the ignorance that comes from being young, the kids who can escape captivity are few and far between. My manager, who is white, desperately wanted to adopt kids. He went to the adoption agency to find out what his options were. To adopt a white child, the list can take up to five years. A mixed-race child takes three years. But my manager didn’t care about the kid’s race; he just wanted a child now. “How long would it take for a black child?” he asked the lady.
“How long can you wait in this office?” She was joking—but only a little bit. The joke was based on the truth that adopting a black kid could happen a lot faster. Animal charities generate sympathy by showing puppies in their ads. “Won’t you please help …?” Now try doing that with young black kids who aren’t adopted. They wouldn’t even run the commercials. Just look at how comical it is:
I made that comment to a friend once and he wrinkled his nose at me. “Are you saying we should be dogs?”
“No,” I told him. “If we were, we’d be treated better.”
America fell in love with Barbaro the racehorse. They kept him alive after he broke his leg, and he had the whole country crying. He was insured for $20 million. They don’t have that kind of insurance on Kobe Bryant! Of course I’d rather be Barbaro than a negro.
California had a referendum that said that animals had to be confined in a humane way. Chickens got bigger cages; veal calves were set free from their pens. But you could still do almost anything to young black men. If you damage the California Tiger Salamander’s habitat, the punishment is a $50,000 fine and a year in the federal penitentiary. But you could gun down a young black kid and nothing would happen. There are more black men in prison than in college. More black people are in prison than ever were slaves—but no one’s uncomfortable with it. Nobody ever feels sorry for black men—including other black men. By any standard, we are the worst off in America. We need the most help. Whether it comes to life span, economic mobility and average income, or education level, we are at the bottom. Our lives are worth less.
The left regards black criminality as a function of “socioeconomic factors”—but never really wonders what those factors are or how to change them. The right sees it as the outcome of feral animals out of control. But if we can turn a wolf into a poodle, can’t we turn a black man into an attorney? It wasn’t that long ago that the stereotype of the black male was deferential, studious, and dependable. I’m not saying we should go back to being servants, but maybe being valued, productive employees would be a great place to land.
Back during the slave era, teaching a slave to read or write was a crime with huge repercussions. The consequent illiteracy that caused was then used as evidence to demonstrate black inferiority. There’s a similar situation at work today. You can’t deny people fair access to the law, and then blame them for their subsequent lawlessness.
There was a very famous political philosopher who addressed this very point. Despite defending dictatorship, Thomas
Hobbes is regarded as the first liberal. That’s because he tried to address why people should obey their monarch in terms of both logic and their rights, rather than the prior “because God says you should.” His famous conclusion was that without a government, life is so “nasty, brutish and short” that any ruler is preferable.
Hobbes was right. Human beings need a system of justice. When fair use of the formal legal system is denied to them, as it is in the ghetto, they have no choice but to develop their own informal system of justice. People start looking out for one another themselves. Without some sort of peaceful arbitration process, the only response to wrongdoing is making sure that motherfucker thinks twice the next time. Just like in the Wild West, if you can’t sue the person or call the cops on him, you’ve got no choice but to turn to violence. It happened all the time. People from a young age enforced the law of the streets upon one another.
When I was about eight years old, I was playing in the street with a couple of friends of mine. This dude who was in his early twenties came out of a nearby house. He went up to me, and I don’t know whether he was drunk or high. All I knew was that he was messed up. “I want you to touch my dick,” he told me.
I didn’t even know what that meant. “What? Boys don’t do that!”
“C’mon, touch my dick.”
I had no idea what the hell he was talking about, but I knew that it was weird. I ran away until I bumped into my pal Jerome, who was the same age as the drunk guy. I’d always do errands for him, going to get candy or passing his messages on to other people. “Hey, it’s my little homeboy!” Jerome said. “Slow down, man. Why you running?”
Only then did I feel safe. “Some guy just told me to touch his dick.”
“He said what?”
I told him the whole story of what just had happened. “I didn’t know what to do so I ran away.”
“Come with me.” Jerome brought me to a couple of his friends. “Tell them what you just told me.”
Now a whole posse made me lead them to where the dude was. Then they made me repeat what he had said to me. “That motherfucker’s lying,” the dude said.
“Listen, motherfucker,” Jerome told him. “He don’t even know what that means. How the fuck would he even know how to lie about that shit?”
Right in front of me, they started whupping his ass. The idea that somehow I shouldn’t watch what was going on never even entered their heads. It was like a public trial, and I was the audience. They kept beating him and beating him and beating him. They’re not stopping, I realized. I think they’re going to kill him. By the time all those dudes were done, he was more dead than he was alive.
This kind of thing happened all the time. My sister got pregnant by a guy, and he wouldn’t acknowledge it—so a couple of dudes from my neighborhood beat the fuck out of her boyfriend. Now imagine if your whole community, what you consider your whole world, thinks like that. How many places can there be where we all see eye to eye?
When you witness violence as the norm, you grow to see it as the solution to your problems. When someone does something wrong, you don’t tell. You kick his ass. But maybe the guy whose ass you kicked thought he was right. Then he gets his friend and they kick your ass. Well, you’re not going to let these motherfuckers kick your ass. You get your friends and go after them. Now they’re outnumbered. To even the odds, someone grabs a knife. Where does this escalation lead to? Logically and inevitably, motherfuckers grab their guns—and they never let them go.
I have been around guns my entire life. I will be around guns for the rest of my life. Any attempt to get guns off of the street is an impossibility—and a policy based on the impossible is a failure at best and counterproductive at worst. Guns have been a part of American culture since Washington’s troops brought their own pieces to the fray. Black Americans have been here since the very beginning. We’ve been around guns long before we’ve been living in the ghetto.
When I was fourteen years old, I came home from school to find my cousins sawing a bunch of wood. “What are you guys doing?” I asked them.
They kept sawing and didn’t look up. Hsss, hsss. “Just building a room,” one eventually said.
“A room?”
Hsss, hsss. “Yeah.” Hsss, hsss. “A room.”
“Who’s it for?”
Hsss, hsss. “It’s for you, motherfucker.”
Sure enough, they built this little room for me outside of the main house, and that’s where I had to sleep from then on. Maybe my parents felt I was getting into trouble too much, maybe they were sick of my bullshit, maybe they wanted to ostracize me. I was never told what the plan was. I just knew what the result was, and that was spectacular: I was fourteen and basically had my own studio apartment. They made the space up and it was actually pretty damn cool. It had a carpet, a bed, and electricity. I had a fan for when it was hot, and a heater for when it was cold.
The setup was terrific except for one crucial thing: It didn’t have a bathroom. My parents locked the door at nine o’clock at night, and locked me out of the house in the process. I didn’t really have a choice in the matter if I had to pee. I just went to the peach tree that we had and pissed on that out of necessity. After a while, I started pissing on those peaches just out of spite. I knew exactly which fruit to aim for, too, since the low-hanging peaches at the bottom were the sweetest. Every Sunday my mother would make peach cobbler, and every Sunday I would never eat it because I knew I had pissed on the fruit. I won’t eat peach cobbler to this day.
That sort of solved the bathroom problem. There was a whole other problem that I had to deal with. Sleeping in that room by myself was horrifying. I was out there all alone. It doesn’t matter how tough you are: When you’re fourteen and you’re sleeping in complete isolation every night, it gets pretty creepy pretty quickly. They brought in another bed, and my brother Kevin started sleeping in that room with me. I was glad to have his company.
Unlike the main house, my room didn’t have a lock on it. It did have a sliding glass door, so every night I would put a stick between the door and the frame so no one could slide it open. The door was at the foot of Kevin’s bed. He couldn’t see through it when he was asleep, but from my bed I always had a perfect view of the outdoors.
One night there was a full moon, an especially bright one. I could see everything outside, and that’s how I watched a big, strange man come up to the glass door. To be fair, I don’t know if my imagination made him bigger or if he was just a big man. Whatever the case was, it wasn’t a good thing. The man looked to his right, then he looked to his left, and then he tried to open the door. Nobody could hear Kevin or me if there was any trouble, and this most certainly was trouble. There was no way the man could have seen me or anything else inside my room. I knew how dark it was from the outside. My heart was beating very fast. I didn’t want anything to happen to me or to my brother. Fortunately, I knew exactly what to do.
I grabbed my gun.
In the silent darkness, I chambered a round. Click click. The man heard the sound and he knew exactly what it meant. Everyone knows what that sound means. He turned around and walked off just like nothing had ever happened. After a minute, I took out the stick that was holding the sliding door closed and went outside in my boxers to look for the dude. With my little .25 in hand, I felt safe—and I was safe. I never found the man, and it’s probably a good thing for both of us that I didn’t.
Even though I’m not a hunter, I grew up with guns and I always carry them. There is a tendency to put people in categories, and as a progressive I’m expected to be opposed to guns. But all we are is the sum total of our life experiences. Guns, to me, aren’t a political issue so much as they are a cultural issue. We live in a gun culture, and I grew up in a gun culture.
The first time I ever saw a gun was in fourth grade. This classmate of mine named Vincent had a cute .25 in a little box. He just showed it to us and nothing really came of it. It was a couple of years after that that I became aware of
what that small metal weapon could do. A bunch of us were hanging out at the elementary school that was down the street from my house. It was dark one night, and all the kids were there drinking beer and talking shit.
This cat named Derek—who’s a preacher now—picked up this .357 Magnum and shot it three times in the air. Boom! Boom! Boom! It was the first time I’d ever heard a gun. The force of that sound was also the first time I’d ever felt a gun, because the power of that thing reverberated through the air. The shock waves alone were enough to scare me. I couldn’t get my head around what it would feel like if one of those bullets hit you. I went home right after that, jarred.
But I wouldn’t have to use my imagination about the power of guns for much longer. Up the block from me lived two brothers who used to get drunk all the time. Then they used to get drunk and argue all the time. Eventually, they would get drunk, argue, and shoot guns into the air all the time.
Everyone knows where this story is going.
They were brothers and they loved each other. One day, though, they got too drunk and too argumentative and too trigger-happy. We didn’t see one brother accidentally kill the other brother. We simply saw the effects of him getting shot, and we saw the police and the ambulance come.
Now I had seen guns, I had felt their power, and I had seen their effects when used irresponsibly. It was in seventh grade that I first saw guns being used at their worst. There was a kid named Bradley who was a couple of years older than me. Bradley was this light-skinned dude with a lot of hair, and all the broads loved him. His ambition was to be an Eagle Scout. Bradley would go to scout meetings, and he wore a scout uniform. At the time he was a Life Scout or whatever the level is before you get your Eagle patch. I was obviously never meant to be any kind of scout, so I never really found out. But a ninth grader who is trying to be a scout is obviously on his way to becoming a pretty upstanding citizen.
I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up Page 18