The senators and congressmen and -women filed in, followed by their aides, the seats filled in with lobbyists, advocates, and reporters. Then all the awe washed away and I focused on the business at hand. Before I spoke in support of the bill, a Juvenile Court judge named Steve Teske, who was working for alternatives to incarcerating youth, testified, noting, “It’s not just a legal obligation, it is a moral obligation. These are our children.” I echoed this in my testimony, hammering on the idea that youth incarceration was “not just a juvenile problem, this is America’s problem.” Addressing it would help keep communities thriving, bring our families together, and make our country live up to its promise. Only when we take this issue on as part of all our lives will our country get anywhere.
We call them marginalized kids but they’re not actually on the margins at all. That perception is the problem. They are a living, breathing part of society. Their hopelessness, their poverty, their violence, their lack of education lands on all our doorsteps. They are our children, and their choices—or lack of choices—affect us, whether we want them to or not. Our hearts need to be open to them, and their pain needs to be ours.
In front of the panel, as always, I felt obligated to openly share all of my story, regardless of how vulnerable it made me feel. Politicians are motivated when a story moves them, when a face and a voice are attached to an issue, when they can picture their own loved ones in similar predicaments. Otherwise it’s abstract and dead, existing only in briefing papers and statistics. I aimed to be a vessel, a channel, a personification of what passes across their desks.
It seems like I’m not angry when I speak, though of course I am—and that anger is justified. I just know that white America misconstrues anger because it plays into their fears. That anger gives them an excuse, an easy out, not to do right by our children. So I don’t give them that opening. I come at them with logic and humanity and compassion for all children, not just their own.
After my testimony, I was invited to eat lunch in the Senate Dining Room, an imposing and stately room overflowing with members of Congress, lobbyists, congressional aides, and interns. The patrons were nearly exclusively white and mostly male. The food-service workers and custodians were almost uniformly black. It was a troubling division, especially in our nation’s capital. I thought about freshman senator Obama sitting in this same space. Did he notice the janitors and waiters and did it bother him? As a young boy, could he have envisioned that he’d be eating in this room? Could he possibly have imagined that a family that looked like his would occupy the White House, a place built by their ancestors exclusively for men who once owned them as property? The thoughts swirled into a thick fog so that when they brought me my giant bowl of soup, and I caught my reflection in the giant spoon, I felt dizzy.
I know those closest to the problems are closest to its solutions. I try to carry my understanding of each world back over the barrier into the other. Splitting these worlds, I experience what I call the chameleon effect: adapting to the world of suits and stakeholders during some days, and the hood and street corners others. Often it’s the same day. The drop-off—the shift—is disorienting, like a change in altitude. It pains me. How can the world be so separated? How can one be so blind to the other? How can one profit from the other’s failures?
I’ve returned to Washington, DC, several times over the years, to testify and meet with policy makers. I’ve reflected at the lit-up Capitol dome quiet and resplendent, watched our elected representatives debate a bill on the Senate floor, marveled at the stately rotunda and the busy halls of Congress. I visited the Martin Luther King monument, a stone sculpture of the man, arms solemnly folded, a rolled-up speech in one hand. He is emerging out of a mountain three stories high, evoking his famous phrase: “Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.” I lingered over his words carved into the monument, tried to absorb each one with as much dignity and purpose as they had been spoken. Across the water, in the distance, I glimpsed the Jefferson Memorial, and it got me thinking about the man who spoke about freedom and the man who actually helped achieve it. The difference—and the centuries—between those two things.
I thought about others, like Thurgood Marshall and John Lewis, forcing America to make good on its promises, about Senator Ted Kennedy making it easier for families like mine to come to America. I thought about my former congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, whose parents too came from islands in the Caribbean, the first African American woman elected to Congress, the first African American and second woman to seek a major party nomination at a time when that just wasn’t done.
And every time I do, I feel this thing in my body. It’s electric but it also stills me. It’s my past rising up from a buried place; it’s my future leaking in from the blurry margins.
Then something bites at my heels. I sense it, then it grows, and then—with little warning—it’s on me. I think about the struggle to keep my childhood apartment because of the gentrification that’s flooding neighborhoods like mine, pushing us farther away. I’m haunted by the stories—far too many—of kids I work with being murdered before they have the chance to be anything. I think about generations of us growing up learning fear—fear of exposure and fear of experience.
Seven minutes north of the White House, homelessness is rampant; I also spotted it on a walk out to the run-down neighborhoods near Howard University. I notice it on the cab ride home from JFK Airport that takes me through parts of East New York and Brownsville that have never seen the light of a new day. I notice it in front of my apartment building, where young kids are out on the stoop late at night because no one is telling them to come inside. And I notice it in the eyes of my son, scared awake by the pop of gunshots and the whir of sirens.
I remember reading that in order to train an elephant, men would chain it so tight for a period of time that the pain of movement would echo and resurface long after the chains were gone. I refuse to put a chain on my son—but the world has other ideas.
Then everything from our nation’s capital seems like a fever dream, impossible and distant. It still seems inconceivable to me that these two worlds exist, right on top of each other.
The black community is under no illusions that the system was built for us. But each fresh outrage to our people—from Trayvon Martin to Eric Garner to Michael Brown—brings us closer to the unfortunate reality of how low the price of a black life really is. We did not riot when Rodney King was beaten—even the angriest among us recognized that it was the despicable act of four people. The riots came when the system itself was the perpetrator, letting those four men walk free. We can’t prevent every hateful act, but we need to be able to trust the system that is designed to hold people accountable. Once we lose that, we are deprived of our humanity in the eyes of the law.
On December 18, 2014, President Obama signed an executive order creating a task force to study and improve the relationship between the police and these communities. The next month I received a formal invitation from the White House to give testimony before the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
As a young black man with a black son, I saw nothing abstract about this issue. It went far beyond indignation at some recent case of police brutality, or the checkered history of police abuses. It was about my body, my life, and that of the most precious gift God has given me, my son. To know that I could do everything possible to keep him safe and yet a public servant, paid by my tax dollars, might murder him in broad daylight with no consequence? It causes a thick and deep well of pain to collect in my heart. My emotions careen from powerlessness to shame to a feeling of inhumanity and, then, invisibility. Like your country doesn’t even count you as human or know that you exist at all.
I had been to all the protests but it felt like shouting into the void: what were we really accomplishing? But an invitation from the president to share recommendations was something I could buy into. I’m not naive and I know that America doesn’t always keep its promises to us, but I co
uldn’t ignore the hand reaching out. I had to hold up my part of the bargain to protect my son, my community, and every single black and brown child whose parents carry this fear like a giant rock strapped to their backs.
As part of my invitation, I was asked to submit written suggestions for the task force that would be passed on to the president and the Justice Department. I spent weeks on those, wanting to make sure each of my words counted, struck their target, and had maximum potential to effect change. Ms. Oglio helped me put the recommendations together, which included banning the quota system and “stop and frisk,” placing qualified minorities in key positions, and race-theory training that could help extinguish profiling. I also reached out to Edwin, and to my mentor Oliver Pu-Folkes, a high-ranking official with the NYPD, for input.
When I testified, I was respectful of the difficulties that the police face, but open about my own firsthand experience. The fractured relationship between the police and the minority community strikes me as one of the most damaging elements of American society.
One of my heroes, Bryan Stevenson, was on the task force, and we spoke afterward. Stevenson is an activist, advocate, and lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, which provides legal counsel to those who can’t afford it and are condemned to die in prison. He carries himself with such humility and dignity that it would be easy to forget what an enormous force for good he is.
Two months later, after the task force had completed their work, I picked up a copy of the New York Times. There was a front-page article about the task force’s recommendations to President Obama. Next to the article was a large photo of President Obama in the Roosevelt Room, next to Philadelphia police chief Charles Ramsey and across from Attorney General Eric Holder, holding the task force’s recommendations. I know how much work there is still to be done, but I took a moment to revel in the hope and optimism that I felt looking at that photograph.
As the saying goes, politics is the art of compromise. It’s an endurance test, a constant game of push and pull, steps forward and back, and the accompanying frustrations. There’s the snail’s pace of progress and the deboned versions of programs that do make it through. You have to have elephant skin to endure the process. But I have to suppress the anger, or at least not let it ground me in one place. The mountain moves, whether we feel it or not. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” Dr. King said, “but it bends toward justice.”
20
Fences and Billboards
No matter what the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.
—TA-NEHISI COATES14
One weekend last summer I rented a car because I was seeing a girl who lived out in Queens. Returning from her place late one night, I stopped off at the McDonald’s drive-through a block over from the Empire roller rink, the same place where I’d once spent every Friday night, the same street where I once was stomped on the sidewalk. The McDonald’s is near Ebbets Field, where the Brooklyn Dodgers’ stadium used to be. It’s now public housing with a large gang presence.
I was on a long car line at the drive-through, inching forward and blasting rap music. As I pulled up to the delivery window, I felt a loud thump hit the back of the car. I checked my rearview and then turned around, but didn’t see a thing. It felt like something hit my car, but it was dark and I wasn’t sure. A few minutes later a whirling ambulance and police car lit up the night. Two uniformed cops pulled up right next to me and popped out of the car. One of the cops rap-rapped his knuckles on my window, signaling me to roll it down.
“You see what happened?” he asked.
“Uh no, Officer, I didn’t see but—”
“Did you hear anything?” he asked impatiently.
“I felt something bang the back of my car but I didn’t see anything.”
I could now see in the rearview that two paramedics were working behind the trunk of my car, setting up a gurney.
“Well there’s a young man shot on the ground behind you. . . .”
I can’t say I was stunned, though the proximity of it was alarming. The cop was talking into the walkie-talkie pinned to the breast of his shirt. Then he leaned back down to talk to me. “Looks like he was shot a block away—” he pointed toward Ebbets “—kept running and then collapsed on your car.”
I chose not to get out of the car, not wanting to see the body, the blood, the whole scene laid out six feet away. The officer asked a few questions, and for my ID, and as part of procedure, I couldn’t go anywhere. The back of my car was part of the crime scene. I sat until about four in the morning as they taped off the scene and interviewed the bystanders. I admit I was struck with a sense of relief that it had nothing to do with me. But of course, it had everything to do with me. This is what inescapable means.
Getting out of the hood is an oft-portrayed notion in American culture. It’s a subset of the American dream, one where the picket fence isn’t about money or status, but safety. We all have the natural desire to escape the line of fire, literally and symbolically. We never know when it may find us. As I begin to provide for myself and my son, and that desire propels me forward, an equally powerful force pulls me back. I want to raise my son where he’ll be safe and have access to more resources, but I know my presence here is valuable. If every decent person who gets an education and some means gets out of the hood, then what’s left? Young black men suffer from a dearth of role models, and I feel a duty to stay. I’m intentional about reversing the trend, not just bemoaning it.
Angelina is an incredible person, generous and giving of herself, and she deserves enormous credit in her role as Caleb’s mother. We didn’t stay together but I dove into fatherhood with as much love as I could possibly give. My son’s presence has been a light, but every moment of joy is coupled with a grappling of fears for him. They’re inseparable.
In the evening, around dinnertime, the street penetrates my apartment, the same place I’ve lived in since the day I arrived here. Through my window, a familiar scene plays out: two teenagers pull out guns and start firing in each other’s direction. Bullet holes riddle the cars parked in front, the same spot that Caleb and I pull up to every weekend. At the sounds of the guns, the shouts, and then the sirens, my son lifts his head to the window. I pull him away, already trying to cut the world up into little pieces for him. How do you shut a kid’s eyes to things without blocking out the rest of the world?
Running the streets now are a new generation, kids who were infants when I first stepped onto Crown. Their growth has been accelerated; they’re expecting and desiring for more sooner, able to access what they want, when they want. I fear for them, but I refuse to fear them. It’d be like being afraid of my own shadow. We are the product of the same world, products of the same code.
Friends poke fun at me, saying I overdress, but I know I’m like a walking billboard when I do. Those clothes I wear transmit a message. One morning I got off the train on the way to a meeting at New Lots Avenue in East New York, one of most economically depressed neighborhoods in the city. Walking by a row of apartment buildings, I saw a circle of young men sitting at the fire hydrant, smoking and listening to music. As I passed, one of them turned to me, dramatic. “Damn bro, you fly as shit,” he said.
He smiled and went to give me a pound.
“Good lookin’,” I said, returning it. “I appreciate it.”
“You going to work?”
“Yep, on my way. Have a good one.”
Typically I would stop and engage, go into teaching mode with them. But anything more would’ve killed the message that was implicit in our exchange. We know one another; my walk, talk, and manner tells them we are the same. But they’re thrown off by the suit, or the briefcase, or the book. There’s a disconnect that makes them stop and think. I’m partly distant and partly right there. Inside that gap, that space, is where I see my opening.
I get far too many e-mails or calls about youngsters I know being killed, and each one tears at my heart. Most
recently was Cedric, a seventeen-year-old with whom I worked and had a great relationship. He was shot and killed one night in Brooklyn, an accident, though there’s really no such thing. I have a photograph of him smiling with a towel on his head, opening a Christmas pair of sneakers we gave him, his joy frozen in time.
The toughest part is hugging mothers going through the nightmare of burying their kids. They will never be made whole again, not even close. And for me, each one of these losses is like a piece of flesh cut from my side. All I can do is carry their pain as my own, try to turn it into something valuable. I think of all those families, broken, but carrying on—alive but somehow transparent. I think of Breeze’s mother wandering the streets, unsure where things start and where they end.
The night before my graduation from John Jay I experienced a new level of insomnia, which gnawed at me through the night. I was up at dawn, watching the sun rise above Crown Street’s storefronts and brick buildings, the flight of pigeons dotting the sky.
I had been wandering in lower Manhattan the day before, looking for something to wear under my gown. In a tucked-away clothing store, I convinced an African gentleman to sell me a nice black suit and shirt for a hundred dollars.
That morning I exited my building into the bright sunshine, cap and gown covering my new suit. As Nostrand Avenue veered into President Street and the subway steps, I was caught in the poetry of it: compelled to walk through my past while heading to my future. My story unfurled before me on that sidewalk: where I sold poison to my people, where gunshots flew past me, where I was arrested for things I did and didn’t do, where I was cuffed and slammed on a police cruiser, where my friend’s mother shouted at me that I wouldn’t make it to see my eighteenth birthday, where Ky-Mani left Jigga’s body with bullet holes, where Shawn was gunned down in broad daylight. I had absorbed all of it and I was required to pass through it that day.
A Stone of Hope Page 24
