I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up

by D. L. Hughley

  If you start walking on this road when you’re a kid, how the hell are you supposed to go to college or make something of yourself? When you’re old enough to get it, it’s already too late. So what’s the answer? Lock them all up? Crime is a symptom of a community in crisis. If everyone in a town developed cancer, the people would get chemo—but they’d also desperately try to figure out why they’re getting sick. I’ve done my best to address the causes. Now let me address the solutions.

  THE mechanism through which children are changed from dumb-asses into contributing members of society is education. It’s a public good, meaning that it benefits everyone. Everyone wins by getting educated, and everyone wins by being in an educated community. But the assault on public education has been going on for decades. I would peg the tipping point to a specific year: 1978. That’s when a man named Howard Jarvis changed California forever.

  At the time, wealthy Californians were pissed. The court had ruled that tax money should be apportioned for educational purposes on a fair, equitable basis. It wasn’t right that kids in rich neighborhoods should have great educations while poor kids were sucked into a system that was educational in name only. So property-tax dollars were taken from rich communities and used to subsidize schools in poor communities.

  That was why Howard Jarvis and men like him put Proposition 13 on the ballot in 1978. Proposition 13 tied property taxes to a onetime assessment of a person’s home. It strictly limited how much those taxes could increase annually, even if the value of a property doubled or tripled. If property-tax dollars could no longer be used on behalf of rich children, then they weren’t going to be used on behalf of anybody. Proposition 13 passed—and budget cuts came with it, virtually overnight.

  As a schoolboy at the time, I didn’t know a lot about politics. But I immediately learned how Proposition 13 affected my life. I couldn’t go to school in the district that we were technically in because my house was in an unincorporated area of Los Angeles, like we were Palestinians or something. The high school I ended up being sent to, Gardena High, was seven miles away. It wasn’t a big deal for me and the other kids who lived by me. We had buses; we had bus passes; we could get on the bus; we could get to school.

  Then Proposition 13 kicked in.

  I remember perfectly that it was January, and my mother told me that I had to find a way to get to school. I didn’t have a car. None of us did—and none of us were going to be walking for miles, literally, every day to school. It was an hour-and-a-half walk up and an hour-and-a-half walk back, and that walk back was in the dark. I had to go through Crip neighborhoods, from the Pay Back to the Shot Gun through to the Fives, to my neighborhood. It was just like The Warriors. Everybody in every neighborhood knew which way I had to walk. Sure enough, one night some cats I was into it with beat me unconscious on Rosecrans and Vermont. After a while, fuck that.

  It was so hard to get to school that I used every reason I could to avoid going. Of course it’s an excuse and of course it’s something that I wouldn’t do now. But if I knew what the fuck I was doing then, then I wouldn’t have needed to be going to school to begin with. Kids are uninformed by definition.

  At the same time that they took our bus passes away, they took the after-school programs away too. Avalon Gardens Elementary was much closer to my house, and it used to stay open. They had games for people to play, and they had job-fair programs. I would think Howard Jarvis would have rather had kids occupied with wholesome activities than growing up on the streets. Isn’t it better for these young black children to hang out and play Yahtzee at school than be on the corner chilling out with the Bloods? But that’s a long-term kind of thinking, and our nation is really very selfish and very short-sighted. So what happened right after that? Reagan came into office, and there was a huge rash of drive-by shootings. What did they expect would happen? If it’s true that black people have poor habits, it’s because white people stopped investing in what we need to develop good ones.

  This kind of thinking is what I see behind the charter school movement. The charter schools are explicitly based on the idea of putting budgets before education. The biggest argument charter school advocates make is that they are cheaper. They also claim their schools are just as good as public schools—but that’s like an afterthought to them. Public education is a function of government. The government is fine with a present-day loss so long as the long-term payoff is there. It’s why President Obama and so many others refer to education as an “investment.” The payoff is not immediately there. But a charter school turns education into a commodity. All they want is to get their cash now, and the way they get their cash is to make sure the kids do well on a certain test. Teaching children to take a test is not the same as educating them. It’s preparing them for a year-end exam. What happens to the kids in twenty years is not the charter school’s problem. Their responsibility is done—and the government is stuck with the bill should the kids have problems as adults.

  The most successful American company is Walmart. Do we really want our kids raised on the Walmart model? The private sector cares very little about results. Walmart stocks aisle after aisle of cheap, unhealthy food. They don’t pressure the food companies to develop cheap, healthy food for the benefit of their customers. All they care about is their money, which is (arguably) fine enough in that context—but is calamitous when it comes to educating our kids.

  I am not saying the public school system is doing great. It’s doing horribly. So let me compare the public school system with another government program that seemed hopeless: the Iraq war. In 2007, everyone except for the completely delusional neocons knew that the war in Iraq was a complete shit show with very little hope of improving. President Bush, John McCain, and all those types got together and started analyzing the situation with one simple premise: Failure was not an option. At the same time, they didn’t want to admit that success was not a possibility. But the way things were going, that shit couldn’t stand. It was embarrassing for America, it was humiliating, and it made all the time, effort, and lives expended up to that point seem not only wasted but downright counterproductive.

  Those military minds and politicians worked up a plan. They threw manpower at the problem and they threw money at the problem. The war was wildly unpopular politically, but they weren’t ready to “cut and run.” They used the very term “cut and run” as a slur against those who thought otherwise. To some extent, things improved. At the very least, they improved enough that President Obama was later comfortable bringing the troops home.

  So if the educational system is failing American youth in general and black American youth in particular, where the fuck is the resolve to do something? Where are the committees meeting to find a way out of this mess? There are none. That’s because they consider it easier to bring democracy to Iraq than a diploma to a nigger. The former scenario is very strenuous, and it will take a lot of financial resources, time, and simple sweat. But the latter option, to them, is an impossibility. They literally believe that it’s not possible for black people to be educated—even though dogs are capable of receiving successful job training. If the slave masters thought of us as subhumans to be owned and sold, is this new perspective supposed to be progress?

  I don’t think it was a coincidence that Howard Jarvis came along when he did. That selfish mentality speaks to a larger problem facing America and how our country had changed. People forget that the 1970s were called the “me decade” because of how the nation turned away from 1960s idealism. It’s easy to get it confused, because Reagan’s ’80s made the ’70s seem like a big, happy time.

  I’m not delusional enough to claim that the public school system cares about results either. But with public schools, it’s a different situation. When a charter school fails, you yank your kid out and to hell with everyone else. But when a public school is in trouble, that’s an opportunity for the community to get involved and to improve things for everyone. The public school system made this country what
it is. It’s the mentality surrounding the importance of education that has changed. The people who had been the shepherds of our system changed. That made the goals change, and that made what we believed to be important change.

  It used to be that people cared about what they would leave their children. Now that’s just what they say so they sound like they give a fuck when they don’t. My kids and everybody else’s kids are just a Tea Party slogan to attack government spending—“We can’t let our children inherit this debt!”—even though they inherited a national debt from their parents. There used to be a time when men made sacrifices so that people could feel better, so that the country could work. There were more people who cared about what their country did. Today our government threatens to shut down more than Microsoft Windows does. I know soul-food restaurants that don’t shut down this much.

  I am not under the delusion that education is going to make a comeback in this country. Far from it. Children don’t vote, so they can’t exert political pressure directly. I can see problems. I can offer solutions. But at the end of the day, I face the world the way it is and not the way I want it to be. I was very fortunate to have this reality-based perspective beaten into me at a very young age. I had what so many American children lack in this day and age: a father.

  Our next-door neighbor growing up was a pedophile named Mr. Moke. He was a big, fat dude with a big, fat wife. I can’t be sure she knew what was going on in her house, but everyone else in the neighborhood sure did. Mr. Moke would pay kids to come over. A while after they entered, I’d watch them come out. They’d look kind of fucked up, but now they would have money.

  My father told my siblings and me that we could never even so much as look over there. If a ball landed in Mr. Moke’s yard, it was lost to us forever. We just had to let that ball go as if we had never had it to begin with. There was never to be any contact with Mr. Moke, ever.

  One night when I was about twelve years old, there was a really bad earthquake. The next morning, my brother Kevin and I were in the backyard picking greens for my mother. Big, fat Mr. Moke waddled over to the fence and leaned over it. “I heard all that moving around,” he told us. “I thought you and your brother had got at each other.” In case that vernacular is too “urban,” let me make it really clear: What he meant is that he thought Kevin and I were fucking each other.

  At the time I didn’t really understand what the hell he was talking about—but my father did. That motherfucker heard every word Mr. Moke said through the kitchen window. He put down his breakfast, walked out through the screen door to our backyard, hopped the fence into Mr. Moke’s backyard, and proceeded to beat the fuck out of that man. Then my father hopped the fence back and finished his scrambled eggs and Polish sausage.

  Mr. Moke was just some random pervert, and I had a father to protect me. In this regard, I was very fortunate. But many children didn’t have such luck, and the consequences to them were horrible. In this country, we have to have our heroes. We have institutions that we’re taught to trust implicitly and not even question. For many women, it’s churches. For men, it’s the cathedral of athleticism.

  It’s no coincidence that those very institutions were the exact ones behind systematic child abuse. When I rail against hypocrisy, it’s not just because I have a difference of opinion with someone or because I simply find it of comedic interest. I rail against it because hypocrisy in thought leads to harm in action. Despite all the smiles on television, America is a predatory country. It has always been based on predation and exploitation, whether of slaves or immigrants or whomever we can squeeze at any given time. I don’t just mean corporations. It really pervades all aspects of our culture.

  Coach Jerry Sandusky had a charity for underprivileged kids. And very often, those kids that Coach Sandusky came into contact with didn’t have fathers in their lives. He didn’t have to go online and lure them to a park with promises of candy bars and toys. Their very own mothers sent them to the slaughter. Even when those boys told their moms what was going on—and I’m sure some of them did—they just couldn’t believe it. That kind of thing happened in this country all the time, and only now are we finding out about it.

  When I was growing up, we were told that if we wanted to stay out of trouble, then we should go to church and play sports. Those “wholesome” institutions supposedly exist for the betterment and protection of the people. Yet between Catholic priests, Bishop Eddie Long, and Penn State, I’d rather be on the streets. My odds are better with the dope boys and the pimps. When they try to fuck me, it’s just for money.

  We despise poor and underprivileged people in this country. We see them as prey, and we fuck them at every turn—be that literally or figuratively. There’s this American idea that we’re a meritocracy, that people reach the top through the virtues of hard work and perseverance. But the flipside to that thinking is that the poor and underprivileged must be flawed, lazy, stupid, or whatever other terrible adjective you would like to use. They didn’t work hard enough in some kind of way but had every opportunity. Newt Gingrich explicitly says this all the time, and virtually no one blinks. He has claimed that poor kids have bad work habits because they don’t see anybody go to work unless it’s doing something illegal. Is there any doubt which “poor” kids he was referring to? Let me make perfectly clear what no one else will: “Poor” in this scenario usually means black.

  Gingrich knows he’s full of it, and so do the people who think like him. He’s not a stupid man. All it takes is five seconds of thought to imagine being a child in these types of households. I have four female cousins. Between the four of them, they have fifty children. Fifty. These are all never-married single mothers, who have these kids and get county checks. No one doubts what the children will inevitably grow up to be. But is it really the children’s fault? Can anyone doubt that their lives would be better if there was a stable male influence in the home? Nothing good ever comes of the nuclear family being destroyed. The black community used to be just that: a community. Money used to circulate in the black community twenty times. You used to go to a black barber to get your hair done, then go to a black doctor for a check-up, and then buy your groceries at the black supermarket. Then we decided that we should be integrated, which of course we should have the right to do. But now money circulates just once. Is that still a community?

  If education started to go south in the late ’70s, things started falling apart for my community with the advent of the War on Poverty. America hasn’t won a war in so long that we have to stop pretending like we know how to fight one. We got some good licks in, but we haven’t been successful in anything we’ve called a war in the last sixty years. Right around the Korean War is when the best we could hope for was a draw. Whether it’s the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, or the War on Terror, we always know how to start but we never know how to finish. We’ve got a plan on getting in; we never have one on getting out. Look at the Gulf War, the only major success of that entire period. America had gotten so soft that we had to bring in an old lady to win it for us. Margaret Thatcher had to bitchslap President Bush, a former war hero, and tell him, “This is no time to go wobbly!” That’s British for “Nigga, get it together!”

  I think the War on Poverty was a good idea in theory. The idea was: We’re going to give you money if you don’t have a man around. If you took government assistance at that time, you couldn’t have a man in the house. But when the government is the father, he’s a jealous father. As a consequence, black men left their households. They were allowed or even encouraged to abdicate. Many black men got to say that they didn’t have to be around—and if you trace the rise of drug use and teen pregnancy in the black community, it started around that time.

  Before the late ’60s, black men had large families and worked menial jobs—but they were stable and there was nowhere else to go. They were ostracized if they didn’t take care of their family. A man would do anything he had to. Mothers stayed with the kids. They didn’t have ho
usekeepers.

  I remember when I was growing up, people used to tease you if you didn’t have a father. Now they tease you if you do. The majority of black children are raised in single-parent homes. We’re a community of men being raised by women. Not only do these boys not know what a man is like, their children don’t know. My mother used to make all of us—me, my father, my siblings—leave our shoes outside because they smelled so bad. But when I woke up from a nightmare and smelled my father’s feet, I wasn’t afraid. He made me feel safe, even the mere scent of him. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a little kid and to have to be the man of the house. It must be terrifying—and I’ve already discussed what road that kid will probably end up on.

  All my childhood sports heroes had fathers: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali. They’d talk about their coaches as if they were their fathers—even if they did have actual fathers. Michael Jordan had a great father, and he still talks about his coach in that way. Now look at LeBron James and Allen Iverson. They’re guessing at being a man. LeBron James left Cleveland because he tried to win the championship and he couldn’t do it. But he should have stuck it out in miserable Cleveland until he got that championship. My father would have said that you have to play it out until you win. LeBron’s coach was a puppet who deferred to him, and he lost his star player because that’s not what a coach should be about. Fathers and coaches are really the same thing: They both tell you to sit down and shut the fuck up.

  I learned lessons from my dad every day, and they’re not the same kinds of lessons a mom would teach. He once told me that you don’t want to be a thoroughbred; you want to be a mule. “Thoroughbreds don’t last. Everyone is always going to need a mule. You can be tough or smart or strong—but if you can outwork everyone, you’re set.” Is any mom going to say that? Or is she going to tell you that you’re the best and that everybody loves you? People grow up genuinely believing that everyone loves them. In other words, they grow up completely delusional. And with our culture edifying whatever you already believe, people will never have to question their delusions. How the fuck is that going to help this country, let alone save it?