The type of remedy depends on whether a corporation or the government is involved. If a corporation says, we want to fund literacy programs all over the country and that endears them to the community and they somehow make more money because of it, then it was smart for them and for the community, and God bless us all. I’m hopeful that what I’m doing will inspire other people to do the same. I believe the more you give, the more you get. That’s my spiritual thing. It works out that way in this case. It works out that way in almost every case. A lot of social and political causes that affect our community are the driving force behind my businesses.
I think keeping our community together is about communication. There are successful people who disappear from the community and people who are apathetic and separate from the community, and who don’t realize that they have separation from the people, a separation from God. I think it’s about spirit first, though I hate to say it, because people say, oh, man, you mean that? Spirit first. We are all connected. We breathe; we compromise someone’s air space. And everything we do is political. Something was told to me and I never got it out of my head, ’cause it’s very true: everything we do is political and has social implications. So long as we realize that, we’ll start to support each other in our efforts to become better and happier.
People like Richard Parsons at AOL Time Warner are great. They show people we can make it and all that, and that’s good. But there’s an issue of language. How important is it that those people speak the language of the ’hood? They couldn’t have forgotten their language. Or maybe they did. Maybe they’re different. They do not speak their language. All these cultural levels we communicate naturally on, and we have to communicate more on those levels so that people can really feel connected to those who succeed. There’s a disconnect between the successful, educated, and sophisticated, on the one hand, and the unsophisticated—in some ways unsophisticated, but in other ways much more sophisticated than others. There’s a disconnect between the undereducated and the educated, and that disconnect has everything to do with how people aspire to success in America, with how they define success.
You learn a language when you’re young and you learn language when you get older; but you don’t forget the language you learned when you were young. It’s a very cool language, very expressive. It’s beautiful. But how the fuck we forget it when we get a nickel. Of course, when in Rome, you do the fuck what the Romans do. It’s the marketplace. But you learn that when you go to school and they teach you the King’s English. Then you go back to the ’hood, where you can be comfortable—where you can speak a dialect of this language too. You’ve got to communicate with people, encourage them, and be honest. I’m not knocking Richard Parsons, besides him being a Republican, which is none of my business and which is okay by me too. We need all kinds to reform this world. You need people on all sides. Parsons and Ken Chenault and people like them are huge role models. They work inside institutions; they haven’t built institutions. They have jobs, and they’re great. But Puffy’s a much greater hero, a much greater inspiration. He’s self-made. The same sophistication and education that guys like Parsons and Chenault have can come from some of our kids who will have enough experience to take on businesses that have smaller margins.
It’s great to be able to speak the King’s English, and it’s good to be able to work in a corporate structure. Having relationships or having the ability to communicate in a certain way is important. You learn that when you go to school anyway, you hope. You speak a couple of languages. You speak street, but you also had to pass English tests. So you move around. You’ve got to be able to speak to who you’re speaking to. But being an entrepreneur is outside the building in the beginning.
I don’t think that young kids feel so much like they’re selling out in learning to speak the King’s English. I read something that Puffy said which I thought was brilliant. He said, what about his street credibility? He says street credibility is about hustling, not about being a gangsta rapper. He said he can’t really live up to that image and he’s not trying to. He’s trying to get some money. He said it more simply and much smarter than that, about how they respect you if you’re doing your thing and if you’re building your life and you’re building your career.
I believe that it depends on how you bring it back. A lot of people are so offended by you bettering yourself. I spoke at a seminar in front of three thousand people, with Irv Gotti and Kevin Liles, about entrepreneurship. I see the way young people are so excited about being entrepreneurs, and I believe that’s the climate that will make a difference economically in our community. And the education part of it, they all recognize it’s necessary. Some don’t have an education and want economic success right now. But a lot of them will get an education, and the group that’s coming along now will be more sophisticated.
At Harvard and Howard, rap is what black kids are talking about. They’ll all come out of school and they can read and write. But if not for Cash Money Crew and Master P and the rest of those street kids setting an example, the cultural phenomenon of hip-hop wouldn’t have been able to continue to evolve. All my Syrian partners, a lot of their kids don’t go to college, because by the time you come out of school, you could’ve made millions. Look at so-and-so who made 30 or 40 million bucks and you’re still in school, arsehole. That’s the cultural space they live in, over on Ocean Parkway, the Syrian Jewish community, who are my partners in many businesses, who are my friends and my community in many ways. First of all, they own everything on every block in every ghetto in New York. Jimmy Jazz, S&D’s, Ashley Stewart, the WIZ, Crazy Eddie, Dr. J’s; I can go on. And they own most of the real estate and most of the retail businesses and all the electronic businesses. They all live at one little block at Ocean Parkway. They’re there because the Wasps didn’t want to be there. That’s first. To all those who are going, well, they’re exploiting us, they’re there in space that you didn’t buy, that the Wasps didn’t want. It’s not their fault, except that it’s a cultural phenomenon. They are merchants. They rub off on us when we’re their partners.
A great number of my partners are from the Syrian Jewish community, and they are very good partners. People used to say that a black dollar wasn’t worth as much to white people as a white dollar. People still say a black dollar is worth ninety-four cents to a white person. But it’s worth ninety-nine cents or a dollar to people in the Jewish community, who have suffered so much and who understand our plight. All my partners in the bags and belts and leather and shoes and underwear are all separate companies; they’re all separate families. Some are Orthodox. Some are Hollywood Jews, not really the practicing sort. My partner Lyor Cohen is a CEO of Island/Def Jam. We’ve been partners for twenty years. We’re going to be old together; we’ve been partners forever. Jimmy Jazz is a Syrian businessman. He did $100,000 of our sneakers last year, and he’s already done $2 million this year. One set of stores. Jimmy Jazz in Brooklyn and Harlem. They have stores all over the city. They’ve done $2 million already, with just one sneaker. That line is just developing, and we donate the profits for reparations work. Certainly I’ve learned a lot from my Syrian business partners.
The street kids who developed hip-hop are inspiring other people, who have become more sophisticated and more educated. Our next generation of entrepreneurs will be a lot more sophisticated and will have a cultural base in being entrepreneurs. I had a number of runners and drug dealers, and now they will have legitimate businesses run by people they respect, that inspire them, that will make their lives different in terms of their possibilities, or make their belief in their possibilities different.
That’s why I support people like Jesse Junior. One of the things that Jesse Junior talks about is equal high-quality education. A very important concept. That’s the key. When I was campaigning for Mark Shriver, his dad, Sargent Shriver, said that the war on poverty and ignorance is the only war we can’t win, because it’s underfunded. When you come out of a really difficult env
ironment and you walk into a beautiful school where you can eat and be treated a certain way, where you’ve got books and you’ve got computers and you can learn, it’s exciting to go. You go to a school that looks like your house and you live in a ’hood, it’s not good. It’s obvious that we need to educate.
Do we think that blacks have found themselves where they are today because they’re stupid? They’re slave victims. They’ve had issues since slavery, but first they’re slave victims and then they’re other victims, and that’s how they found themselves in their current situation, not because they’re stupider than everyone else. This is a commonsense issue. If everybody in America had the same lack of opportunity, then everybody in America would be all mixed up. Under the circumstances, we’ve been very spiritual people. We have a lot of issues and there are a lot of problems, but they stem from a lack of opportunity and a lack of education and a lack of knowledge of our higher self, God, whatever you want to call it. Individual responsibility has everything to do with your heart and your leading, with having a connection to yourself and your truth. We are born love and born God and born good, and we get made something else.
Black kids ain’t identifying success with being white so much as they used to. Their image of themselves is ten times better than it was, and it’s getting better every day. I think that people even in our great institutions of learning have that rebel thing they learned from hip-hop and that is supporting their new energy, their new ideas of what they can be. Hip-hop is a new extension of poetry. Brand-new, and hitting the mainstream now. It has to keep evolving, like anything else. But rap is here to stay as long as it’s got new energy and creative people to fuel it.
The thing about hip-hop culture that’s so good is that it has a lot of honesty and integrity. It’s not fabricated in any way. That honesty comes from the heart. It’s a voice for people who have been voiceless. Its integrity allows them to transcend the environments and ideas they’re accustomed to. These are big environments with big problems and big possibilities. But the poetry of hiphop, and its description of the environment it comes from, is so honest that people who knew nothing about these kids are learning about them. They want to listen, because the articulation is true.
MAURICE ASHLEY
Chess Master
Before Maurice Ashley became the first—and still the only—African American to achieve the rank of International Grand Master of chess, he coached junior high school students in Harlem to the National Chess Championship in just two years. “We were a strong people coming out of Africa. We need to revisit what we had,” he told me. “Chess is a mechanism for turning pawns into the power establishment. Chess transposes the imagination of inner-city black kids so they can see themselves in the back row where all the power pieces are.”
Chess—the real thing—is what I’d call a reflection of life, because there are so many similarities between chess strategy and life strategy. The most important concept in chess is the center. Not just in terms of the physical space, the board itself, but in terms of you, because you have to be centered, same as the sun is the center of the solar system. You always want to control the center of the board: d4, e4, d5, and e5.
People point to these squares because geometrically they form the center of the board, but centrality is more a concept than a reality. It’s about directing emotions this way as opposed to that way or out on the side. Sure, you know you’ll make a move like e4, which occupies one of the four central squares and controls the squares f5 and d5. But it’s not so much the move itself, although that’s important. It’s the idea that you’re coming forward through your middle, through your center, and staying centered, and your pieces want to harmonize with that drift.
I said that chess is like life. To succeed in either one takes patience, planning, concentration, the willingness to set goals, and an inclination to see deeply into the nature of things. You can’t just go for the first available option; you have to go for the thing beyond. The first option is generally not the best, and it’s often terrible. Chess is about seeing the underlying reality. You have to get a feel for what’s happening on the board.
Usually a strong player won’t give you any holes. You start thinking about what’s in front of you, slowly, rank by rank. You look at a rank and you see it’s well protected because of all those pawns. Pawns are small, yet their importance is in inverse proportion to their size. They have tremendous influence. They’re the peasants, the workhorses, the body. They go slow. But they’re essential for making sure the structure stays together. A knight, a bishop, a rook, a queen—these are the flashy pieces, the fighting forces that do the big damage. But they follow in behind the pawns.
We’re the workers, the peasants, the pawns, in relationship to the white community. Chess is a mechanism for turning pawns into the power establishment. Chess transposes the imagination of inner-city black kids so they can see themselves in the back row where all the power pieces are. The pawns are the people. And just because they have less power doesn’t mean the others can take advantage. The others can’t just go where they like. A bishop or a knight can’t just decide to go right where that wimpy pawn is, ’cause that wimpy pawn is going to decide the game. Weak, so to speak, but deciding the whole future of the game. I can gauge a chess player from the way he plays his pawns. If players are carelessly sacrificing their pawns, they’re not going to make it. They don’t have a clue.
It’s all about long-range thinking. The secret to success lies in the preparation. If you prepare for an eventuality, then your opponent is going to have to outprepare you, and if you keep working hard, they’re going to have to work harder than you. To me, hard work is a challenge. Lots of us were told that in order to succeed we would have to work ten times harder than white people and be ten times smarter. But I’ve worked hard and I’ve prepared, and now they have to be smarter than me.
The forces on a chessboard are equal to start off with. Then you use your intellect to try to outwit the other guy. If you’re prepared, and you bring on all the force of your intellect, you win. For me, chess has always been about achieving at the highest level. I remember hanging out in parks in Brooklyn, playing chess and watching other people play. For some guys, their whole world was playing in the park. It was the be-all and end-all. Then I had friends who were playing tournaments and who wouldn’t try to bring their rating up because they might not win at the higher level. You might win some money staying where you were, but if you went higher in the rankings, you’d have to compete against elite players. But that’s all I ever wanted to do. Some of the guys I knew wanted me to stay in the little pond so that I could be the big fish. I didn’t understand that. I had learned as a child to strive to be the best. And chess can accommodate that because it’s a fair game.
Where I come from in Kingston, Jamaica, to be working class was to be rich. There were few television sets. I learned to play many different games at an early age: card games, checkers, dominoes, all kinds. By the time I was seven or eight, I could beat the other kids and I could compete with all the adults. A friend introduced us to chess, and we all started playing. It was just one of the games we played. My brother is eight years older than I am, and I didn’t know his friends that well. But I hung out with them and we played chess and I learned. I picked up little things from them. I remember even then catching on a little faster than they did. They were surprised that a little kid could play.
I think that being from Jamaica, we had a very strong sense of accomplishment, of trying to succeed despite the odds. There’s a famous Jamaican saying: Wi likkle but wi tallawah. We may be small, but you can’t break us down. We know we have our Bob Marleys and our Marcus Garveys. We’ve made it on the world stage. Even though we’re from a very small island, we’re all about excellence and success.
I was twelve years old when I moved in 1978 from Kingston to East New York, a tough section of Brooklyn close to the Brownsville area that formed good old Mike Tyson. My mother had done what West In
dian parents often do. She had left her three children in the care of her mother and had come to America and worked as a nanny and done odd jobs and made some money. Ten years later, she brought us up to Brooklyn. So we were without a mother in Kingston for ten years. My grandmother had a very strong educational background. She was a teacher, and she made sure we were great students and we kept up with the intellectual side of things. When we came here, we were prepared to study hard and to consider our moving to America as an amazing opportunity to be successful.
When we arrived in America, we had nothing. I slept in a room with my older brother and sister. I remember wearing reject sneakers ’cause my mother said she wasn’t spending money on the fancy $100 kind; she was just going to get us something we could wear to school. But the critical part of our experience was always that you’d strive and you’d strive to be the best you could be. You tried to be great.
My brother is a two-time world champion kick boxer, and my sister is currently a world champion boxer. I beat my brother in chess and then he beat me up. He beat me in the last game we ever played. He refuses to play me in any more games ’cause I got better.
The stereotype that chess is a white game didn’t permeate our community because so few people knew how to play. The other stereotype about chess— that it’s the epitome of intellectuality—didn’t get applied either. I don’t think the other students thought the kids in the chess room were geniuses. I think they thought we were just guys who loved to play the game.
America Behind the Color Line Page 10
