Black Boy Poems

by Tyson Amir

  Those of us who recognize it all are able to see that we are in the depths of a hellish battle. Some of us don't even know we're in the middle of a war. Some of us drop out of the war, we attempt to conscientiously object to the fighting through distractions like gangs, drugs, liquor, sex, and other addictive behaviors. Some of us are shell-shocked and PTSD'd, so we can't fight any longer. You can see it all in the eyes of the rank and file. We are a people who did not choose war, but war is at our front door every day. We have our heroes, heroines, martyrs, and prisoners of war whose only crime was fighting for their people. We have our Nat Turners, Harriet Tubmans, David Walkers, Ida B.Wells, Kings, Malcolms, Medgar Evers, Marcus Garveys, Newtons, Fannie Lou Hamers, and Shirley Chisholms. They are our honored fallen who await us on the other side. As Prodigy from Mobb Deep once said, "There's a war going on outside no man is safe from. You can run but you can't hide forever." None of us are safe, and if you are black, you cannot hide. Every man and woman upon the Earth is destined to die; therefore, how will you live?

  “The concept of revolutionary suicide is not defeatist or fatalistic. On the contrary, it conveys an awareness of reality in combination with the possibility of hope—reality because the revolutionary must always be prepared to face death, and hope because it symbolizes a resolute determination to bring about change. Above all, it demands that the revolutionary see his death and his life as one piece. Chairman Mao says that death comes to all of us, but it varies in its significance: to die for the reactionary is lighter than a feather; to die for the revolution is heavier than Mount Tai.” - Huey P. Newton

  My pants sag when I walk to show ain't nothing you can tell me

  every social institution you created has failed me

  all they do is kill and jail me to wipe out my chromosomes

  so every block I walk filled with cops

  is a war zone,

  a war zone.

  The Rose (2015)

  I’ll attempt to collect my thoughts to show you all what I’ve been thinking through

  A humble depiction of the conditions

  some of these men and women I know on the brink have been through

  Word to the wise: don’t hold your breath waiting for this society to save you

  because if you do, then you’ll soon be blinking blue.

  In the eyes of many, we belong to

  a disease infested, decrepit stinking few.

  Stranded in gentrified neighborhoods where it’s hard to survive

  levees breaking got us sinking too

  call it (Katrina Redux)

  Meanwhile constantly seeping through cracks

  are noxious toxic chemicals

  asthma and cancer are perennial visitors

  to where we sleeping through

  Now can y'all see me move,

  what I speak can take you in and out of these streets

  quicker than them policemen do.

  That last line wasn’t a swipe at the boys in blue,

  what I’m speaking is deeper than that

  This is defining everything outside in our environment set to poison you

  I heard from one of our elders by the name of Langston Hughes

  A question of the deferred dream

  It’s sad when we even have to consider such an absurd thing

  That for some boys and girls

  that word means

  something less tangible

  That it’s harder for them to grab a handful

  So their hands stay closed

  Just as schools close and homes foreclose

  Yet it still seems so close.

  Just like when you standing on the corner of Jones and Post

  you can see the wealth of Union Square vivid and up close,

  but it’s oh so far

  That Financial District might as well be another geographic jurisdiction

  The jurist in my district

  don’t understand that the blocks we from force conscription

  Men and women are drafted from the womb

  to be at war with the system

  There are a few ways to make it out,

  but everyday it gets harder to pick them

  Our war is of attrition,

  the fatigue bleeds deep into our bones

  The fatigues we wear look like

  white tees, jeans, air ones, fitted cap over the dome

  But we soldiers of misfortune

  who don’t even know what we’re fighting for

  Is it for the hood or for the block,

  is it for the good or for the guap,

  for the dead homies

  who just waiting for the next dead homie to drop.

  We so confused,

  we so traumatized and so abused.

  But still in this midst of all this did y'all hear what Pac said,

  Did you hear about the rose that grew?

  From a crack in the concrete.

  Yeah, we got crack up and down our concrete

  but even through that trap the rose grew.

  That rose is you.

  Through underfunded schools,

  the war on poverty,

  the war on drugs,

  the war on terror

  the war on our young,

  prison industrial complex,

  bracero programs,

  united farm workers,

  civil rights,

  jim crow,

  forced migration to reservations,

  Ellis and Angel island,

  sharecropping and slavery,

  we’ve survived it all.

  We’re made strong by the legacy of those that came before us,

  we triumphantly march into the greatness of our moment.

  But don’t be mistaken,

  see the matrix is quick to shape-shift.

  It’ll try to take that faith you have in yourself

  and make you an atheist

  it'll try to get you to forget what this date is,

  but we will never forget

  on the 18th day of June

  in the year two thousand and fifteen

  a rose grew

  in the face of all things attempting to stifle it,

  it still bloomed

  and its bloom yields all these incredible hues

  strengthened by the struggle

  found in our soil and roots

  It doesn't matter what they do

  Every day this is what we need from you

  Stand tall,

  greet the sun,

  shine bright and bold

  and give your beautiful brilliance to us all

  That's what a rose will do

  and that rose is you.

  __________________________________________________________________________

  Reflections of a Black Boy

  There is a significant degree of power in knowledge but the true power is in the practice an application of that knowledge.

  From a physics standpoint acquiring knowledge is keeping it in a static state. It has value but the true force is felt when that knowledge becomes dynamic. It's put in motion.

  Education of blacks was illegal in most slave holding colonies/states. In Mississippi laws were passed to force free blacks out of the state to prevent them from attempting to educate blacks who were still enslaved.

  Our path to freedom and liberation is only possible through knowledge and a strict revolutionary application of what we will learn.

  __________________________________________________________________________

  For too many of us, the path to true education is found somewhere outside of the "traditional" place of education in the American society. If we only depend on our school experience to provide us with a foundation for our futures, then we are doomed to the same tragic existence, if not worse, that black folks have experienced in America. Malcolm X was born in 1925. He was an incredibly smart student, but eventually was crushed by the ugly face of racism in his middle school years wh
en a teacher told him that a nigger couldn't be a lawyer. It wasn't until Malcolm spent time in prison in his 20s that he began to "educate" himself again. This extracurricular education is what saved him. The same is true for so many others. Dr. Huey P. Newton spoke candidly about his experience in Oakland Public Schools. He said, "Throughout my life all real learning has taken place outside school. I was educated by my family, my friends, and the street. Later, I learned to love books and I read a lot, but that had nothing to do with school. Long before, I was getting educated in unorthodox ways." For both of these men it was their education outside of school that gave them hope and filled them with the courage to dream. Sadly, the experiences of both Malcolm and Huey are not isolated instances confined to the early part of the 20th century. Their experience is replicated millions of times a day all throughout the United States of America in the lives of black and brown students.

  Scholar Carter G. Woodson said, “The chief difficulty with the education of the Negro is that it has been largely imitation, resulting in the enslavement of his mind." The "education" that supposedly has been provided to black people in America has been pitiful. It has not educated in the sense of empowering with relevant information. It has educated by instilling inferiority and making black people easy to control. The Dragon, George Jackson said, "I now know that the most damaging thing a people in a colonial situation can do is to allow their children to attend any educational facility organized by the dominant enemy culture." Fact, the educational system was created by the descendants of those who enslaved us. What type of "education" do you think your former enslavers and current oppressors are going to give to you?

  I am an educator by trade, and I guess you might say by nature. I'm a third-generation educator on my father's side. What being an educator has taught me is that the American educational system is not made to educate and empower black minds. It has also taught me that education, knowledge acquisition and application, and knowledge of self are essential for any attempt at combating this fabricated but oh so real reality for black people in America. Knowledge and application is the key. It has to go further than knowledge/education or assimilating data; that knowledge has to manifest itself and become part of how a person lives.

  I've always had an issue with the clichéd statement that knowledge is power. I disagree. I say knowledge is power when it is put into practice. We do not profit from storing volumes of information. It is great to be informed. It's admirable to be a storehouse of information, but what does it profit you if you cannot use the information to benefit yourself or your people? Knowledge becomes power when it is utilized. We are not attempting to become walking encyclopedias with random facts and figures; it needs to have praxis; it needs to be tangible and find a way into reality.

  I teach incarcerated men and women in a charter high school in San Francisco. The numbers that attempt to explain how people end up incarcerated are very well established and consistent. They tell us most of the men and women are black and brown and are incarcerated due to drugs and other nonviolent offenses. They also tell us that the overwhelming majority of the men and women incarcerated have major deficiencies in their academic careers. Most never completed high school. A 2003 report published by the Bureau of Justice & Statistics titled ‘Education and Correctional Populations’ stated that 68 percent of the state prison population then had not received a high-school diploma."

  The correlation between lack of education and jail and prison is thoroughly documented by more agencies than just the BJS. One of the more popular social/political buzzwords of the day is the school-to-prison pipeline. The American Civil Liberties Union states, "The ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ refers to the policies and practices that push our nation's schoolchildren, especially our most at-risk children, out of classrooms and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. This pipeline reflects the prioritization of incarceration over education."

  How do we arrive at the school to prison pipeline? The ACLU highlights multiple points; we'll look at a few. "For most students, the pipeline begins with inadequate resources in public schools. Overcrowded classrooms, a lack of qualified teachers, and insufficient funding for "extras" such as counselors, special education services, and even textbooks, lock students into second-rate educational environments. This failure to meet educational needs increases disengagement and dropouts, increasing the risk of later court involvement. Even worse, schools may actually encourage dropouts in response to pressures from test-based accountability regimes such as the No Child Left Behind Act, which create incentives to push out low-performing students to boost overall test scores."

  Public schools are not providing the necessary educational resources to allow young people to be "successful." This is a result of choices being made by people who control the system of education to lessen the opportunities and access of young black and brown kids in favor of their white counterparts. Some may feel that is a loaded statement, but it's not. Once again, data clearly shows the bias in which kids receive what funding based solely on the color of their skin. Data scientist David Mosenkis, who was kind enough to allow me to use his research in this text, recently published research on 500 school districts in Pennsylvania. He examined their funding data based on racial composition of school districts, and what he found might be alarming to some but simply confirmation to others who already know the widespread institutional discriminatory practices of public schools. Mosenkis found:

  “If you color code the districts based on their racial composition you see this very stark breakdown. At any given poverty level, districts that have a higher proportion of white students get substantially higher funding than districts that have more minority students.” That means that no matter how rich or poor the district in question, funding gaps existed solely based on the racial composition of the school. Just the increased presence of minority students actually deflated a district’s funding level. “The ones that have a few more students of color get lower funding than the ones that are 100 percent or 95 percent white,” Mosenkis said. Pennsylvania is not an anomaly, much of what Mosenkis reported on schools in Pennsylvania can be found in other states throughout this nation. Most inmates have not obtained their high school degree, and that is not a direct result of bad decisions on the part of that individual. Who successfully completes school and who doesn't is a race-tainted algorithm of misallocation of resources and limited academic opportunities for certain students, while others receive more resources and opportunities. Another reality of this system is once you have been made part of the criminal aspect of it, it becomes extremely difficult to extricate yourself.

  I have my little classroom, and when I look at my students, I see the evidence of the school to prison pipeline. Some might consider me fairly well educated. I am a product of American public schools, but my most important learning experiences did not happen in public schools. My father was a teacher, and he made sure that I would have access to information, whether or not it was taught to me in class. My parents formed what could be termed "black school" for my sister and me. We would take weekly classes at SJSU that were led by community members and learn black history. That was such an important extracurricular learning experience for me. I was fairly gifted as a student and didn't struggle too much with subjects. However, math started to be an obstacle for me around my sixth-grade year. I did well in class, but my father wanted me to master the material so he enrolled my sister and me in the Jose Valdes Math Institute. This was a program offered for free to black and brown students to help improve their math understanding because black and brown students were underrepresented in the higher level math courses. Jose Valdes was a passionate math instructor who took responsibility upon himself to create change for young kids of color because he knew the school district was not going to do it.

  The other nontraditional transformative educational experience for me was hip-hop. I learned black history from my elders, but I can't describe the pride and intellectual stimulation I received when I
saw young black men and women on TV spitting bars about Malcolm X, the Nation of Islam or Africa, or dropping some ill historical facts about black people. The hip-hop of the late ’80s and early ’90s taught me so much. I remember the RZA from Wu-Tang Clan on the album Wu-Tang Forever at the end of the track "Bells of War" saying:

  “That's that Wu, that's that Wisdom

  That's the Wisdom of the Universe

  That's the truth, of Allah, for the Nation of the Gods

  You know what I'm sayin ...

  We got the medicine for your sickness

  Out here, ya know what I mean

  I was telling Shorty like