Letters to an Incarcerated Brother: Encouragement, Hope, and Healing for Inmates and Their Loved Ones

by Hill Harper

  I guess I should admit now that it’s the one thing that makes me deeply suspicious of your cellie Sammie. On the one hand, he’s cautioning you not to put your full trust in anybody. Then he turns around and—after knowing you for how long, four days?—starts trying to convince you to become part of his ethnic gang and to undergo an initiation into it by shanking somebody he feels dissed him at the canteen. Yes, I know you’re afraid he’ll turn against you if you decline and that could put you in danger since, so far, he represents all the support you have in that joint. But know this, Brother: The danger you’re putting yourself in by refusing him is minuscule compared to the mess that can come from gang involvements. Beyond everything you’ve told me about this place and how it’s freaking you out, it’s this false offer of protection that’s worrying me the most. You’ve got to find a way to bow out of it gracefully.

  A SURVIVAL CHART

  In the meantime, mind doing something for me? I’m as interested as you are in understanding how to survive prison while holding on to as much of your personal integrity as possible. So why don’t you start a “survival chart” and then send it to me to add to? We can send it back and forth that way.

  Take a sheet of paper and divide it down the middle by drawing a line. Label the column on the left “Survival.” Label the column on the right “Unnecessary Compromises.” In the left column, write down every rule you think you need to observe to keep alive and make your stay in that joint go as smoothly as possible. In the right column, list every rule you’re being told to follow that you think is a useless, demeaning compromise, a bunch of bullshit based on featherbrained ideas about hypermasculinity. For example, in the left column, you might list “Keep my mouth shut in most situations,” and in the right column, you might list “Talk shit about a guy to try to make another guy protect me against him.”

  SURVIVAL CHART

  SURVIVAL

  UNNECESSARY COMPROMISES

  Meanwhile, I’ll keep reading about your world, and I’ll take the challenge of adding more items to both columns. When either of us thinks the other person has put an item in the wrong column, he’ll draw an arrow pointing it toward the opposite column. As it grows, we’ll discuss these items when we can start talking on the phone again.

  Listen, I got to run, but I’m going to write again tomorrow night about the same subject we’ve been discussing.

  Until then, take care,

  Hill

  P.S. Below is a letter from my man Lupe Fiasco, a rapper, record producer, and entrepreneur who has something to say about gangs.

  Dear Brother,

  Everybody within six feet of me has been to prison, whether it is my assistant or my brother, or my cousin who is just now getting sentenced for drug charges. So I have a fully formed relationship with the Black incarcerated mind and the institutionalized mentality. There’s no push to learn who the fuck you are and why the fuck you’re doing what you’re doing and how you can stop, but you can stop yourself from participating in it. That’s also when society and community come into play. Because if a Brother comes home from prison and he has no place to sleep, that is a failure of the community, a failure of us.

  If a Brother comes home from prison and he has no place to sleep, that is a failure of the community, a failure of us.

  From the beginning of time—from the hammer to the wheel to the iPod—humans have had a drive to get things, to have things we weren’t born with. The biggest promoter of things we don’t need, or things we want, is not music. It’s the philosophy that governs the advertising, marketing, and branding industries, that gets people thinking, “I need this,” and “Yeah, I need that.” And on the surface we can say that a lot of people are in prison because they wanted things—money, or the things it can buy.

  But I feel that the real reason so many Brothers are in prison is a lack of understanding of their history and their place in society as Black men. The Black man started as creator of the world, but now we’re on the bottom rung of the ladder, especially in America. We’ve been barred from being fully immersed in the American culture. What is the cause of that? There has been a complete destruction of any type of educational consistency.

  A Brother in Harlem who is running for a city council position recently said, “What Brothers need is less entertainment and more focus on real, solid things. Things that they can actually use.” Because now entertainment has become commercial. Hip-hop can be used as inspiration, or it can be used to sell things. On the other hand, pure education is not commercial. The history, philosophy, and teachings of the world are not commercial; they are solid and concentrated. That’s why your focus on education has to be 100 percent. You control how much information goes into your mind and how much of the past you allow yourself to be privy to. Even in prison you can get a thorough, consistent education, especially because you don’t have the usual distractions.

  You have to become as smart as Socrates, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Immanuel Kant. You have to be smarter than the people who put into play these philosophies that run the world. As you can see, they were meant to keep you at the bottom of the ladder. But if you don’t understand what those philosophies are, you’ll never know how they affect you. You are the end product of it, which is “I’m in prison.” And you’ll probably come back to prison after you leave it if you don’t fully understand how the world works. So educating yourself is the way to stay out of prison, once you are released.

  I was writing a lyric yesterday about the fact that Chicago has always been a gang city, since the days of the robber barons. This is no-holds-barred because that’s how I talk to niggas; I keep it straight, keep it free:

  Why do you think all these gang chiefs are deified?

  Maybe you realize that gangs were just the reaction after Martin Luther King died.

  I wrote those lyrics because a lot of young people in prison have a gang affiliation—but they don’t even know the history of how gangs came to be. Some of these gangs originated as community protection when the KKK and white supremacy groups were burning everything down and targeting Blacks. These bands of Brothers would gang together to patrol and protect their community. And with some groups there was a criminal element, so they would take things too. And after that experience you felt a certain commonality because you didn’t have shit. If you had kids and were on public assistance, you couldn’t be in the house with your kids because that was part of the terms of public aid. And you had to have a job, which you couldn’t get in 1965, because niggas couldn’t get jobs ’cause they were real niggas.

  But these young gang members today do not even know their gang history. If you’re going to be a criminal, at least understand the history of your criminality and the reason why you’re a criminal! You were supposed to be protecting the community after Martin Luther King was killed, and people got together to keep others from burning down their stores. Do you understand that, young gang member in prison? That is where your gang came from.

  When that Brother comes home from prison and he has no place to go—not even a place on the kitchen floor—then the philosophy of “It takes a village” has become obsolete. It’s a catchphrase, but we don’t really live it anymore. The sad part is, the phrase comes all the way from Africa across the Middle Passage to today. We still say it, but if that village isn’t willing to take on the responsibility, then it doesn’t matter what the Brother learned in prison. If he doesn’t have a world that accepts him and gives him a cushion against the forces working against him, then he’s at a loss. So we need to work as a community to support that Brother when he gets released.

  Yours,

  Lupe Fiasco, Grammy-winning hip-hop artist

  I AM MY OWN MAN

  LETTER 16

  What Makes a Man?

  The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort
and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

  —Martin Luther King Jr.

  Above all things let us never forget that mankind constitutes one great brotherhood; all born to encounter suffering and sorrow, and therefore bound to sympathize with each other.

  —Albert Pike

  Hey, man,

  You didn’t tell me the joint you’re in is part of the 20 percent of prisons that are privately run, for-profit places—and that it’s owned by one of the biggest of those businesses, the Corrections Corporation of America. Maybe you just didn’t know it yet. I found out about it by looking it up online.

  I can’t say that makes me jump for joy. In general, those private-prison corporations win when you lose. “Business” means getting the highest profit from the smallest outlay of cash. Their profit motive incentivizes them to provide the least amount of services to as many inhabitants as possible. So do me a favor and send me information about the place as you discover it. Stuff like how the food is, what kind of a medical clinic it has, showers, recreation facilities, what job they assign you and its hourly rate. Just anything you happen to notice. Know what I mean? I do have some friends in Washington, so who knows. . . . Oh, okay, I better not say another word. I know every letter or package you get is examined.

  Maybe what bugs me most of all about prison gangs is their distortion of the meaning of manhood. I haven’t mentioned it to you yet, but after doing that research on gangs online, I started thinking about a novel I finally read a few years ago after a couple of friends kept raving about it: The Name of the Rose by the Italian writer Umberto Eco.1 There’s a movie based on the book, starring Sean Connery, that just replayed on the TCM channel.

  The book is kind of like an unconventional whodunit. In the year 1327, a series of mysterious deaths is taking place in a monastery. A visiting friar (the character played by Connery in the movie) is asked to investigate them, as it’s clear that some are obviously the result of murder.

  It wasn’t so much the unraveling of the murder mystery that fascinated me as much as the key symbol of the novel: the rose. The phrase “the name of the rose” refers partly to the beauty and meaning of the past that has long disappeared, leaving behind only its name. One interpretation of what the book is saying is that most of us go through life bandying about empty terms that are all but drained of their significance. And it turns out at the end of The Name of the Rose that the murderer is trying to keep the other monks from finding out about a book that explains the lost meaning of another word. I’ll stop there, to avoid a plot “spoiler,” in case you want to read it someday.

  You probably want to know how my remembering the plot of that book could have anything to do with what I was saying about gangs in my last letter. Well, check this out. Gang values have perverted the meanings of a lot of words: loyalty, brotherhood, family—but also the word manhood. They promote swagger, so-called brotherhood, and machismo. I’m sure you know what machismo means. The dictionary defines it as “strong or aggressive masculine pride,” or hypermasculinity. Masculinity is a vital component to manhood. Hypermasculinity, however, is overcompensation for male insecurity. Most men are insecure. Why do you think we wear our hats so low they cover our eyes and our clothes so big they cover our lives? The unnecessary need to cuss and demonstrate a blatant disrespect for people falls under the category of hypermasculinity. We swear radically to express emotions we’re too insecure to express logically, and we disrespect others to gain a sense of dominance and control. Ironically, this act of disrespect categorizes one as being out of control.

  The philosopher Eric Hoffer says, “Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.” The whole flawed code of machismo is central to the male bonding that holds gangs together. But what if we went back to the origins of machismo just to find out whether the original intent has survived? Machismo finds its source in the attitudes of the Latino male. Scholars of Latin American history have been able to trace the concept back all the way to the late medieval period. Machismo was born from a concept known as caballerismo, a Spanish word referring to the late medieval culture of horsemanship. The term is derived from the word caballero, Spanish for “gentleman.” Caballerismo referred to a gentleman of high station who valued honor, dignity, and wisdom above all else.

  The kind of machismo promoted by the street or the culture of gangs is actually an expression of being “down”—enslaved—by a greater power.

  The original roots of machismo had very little to do with the arrogant bravado of gangstas and hip-hop we see today. Some scholars think that it was the importing of caballerismo into South America during the colonial period that tainted it with suggestions of violence, recklessness, and contempt for and control of women. These negative connotations crept in when the original people of South America were being put under the domination of the Spanish. But if machismo functioned according to the true meanings of its roots, it would be symbolic of responsibility, emotional openness, and a respect for family.

  Gangs exploit all the negative connotations of machismo and masculinity, draining the word machismo of all its valuable historical worth. The kind of machismo promoted by the street or the culture of gangs is actually an expression of being “down”—enslaved—by a greater power. It’s a reaction to the ghetto oppression of minorities. Just as South American machismo was a combination of the old values of caballerismo and anger at the Spanish colonial masters who had brought it to that continent along with their exploitation and oppression, today’s machismo is a so-called manliness based on rage at “the Man,” centuries of prejudice that have driven entire ethnicities into ghettos and poverty. When a member of a minority—and that includes anyone who’s incarcerated—behaves toward a member of his community with negative machismo, he’s merely replaying the oppressive behavior that he has suffered all his life.

  If you look at urban communities, in many ways, gangs are causing an urban holocaust. Last year twice as many young men were annihilated in the name of gangs and drugs on the streets of Chicago as were killed during the same time in the Iraq War. Kanye West highlighted this sad reality on the Watch the Throne album, pointing out that 314 soldiers died in Iraq and 509 young Black men died in Chicago. Where is the true war then? And who is really responsible for Brotha killing Brotha?

  Be the man you want your son to be and the gentleman you’d want your daughter to date. My hope for you is that you’ll be able to discover the true meaning of manhood, which involves a lot more than testosterone or offing somebody on a switch because the prison drug lord who happens to share your ethnicity has commanded you to. In fact, that’s the second thing about gangs that turns my stomach: The violence they promote is just an example of social conformity. The “sheeple” (a little term I like to use that combines sheep with people to denote mindless followers) who followed the dictates of Adolf Hitler in the name of patriotism and German pride were exhibiting a contemptible form of conformity with disastrously negative consequences. In fact, Hitler reportedly once said, “What luck for rulers, that men do not think.”

  JUST FOLLOWING ORDERS

  What makes people into such dangerously unthinking followers? In 1963, a Yale University psychologist named Stanley Milgram tried to answer that question with an experiment.2 The purpose of the experiment was to measure how willing a person was to obey an authority figure even if the figure ordered him to perform an act that was against his sense of right and wrong. The results of the experiment were so unexpected and so disturbing that it changed some of our basic assumptions about the human brain.

  People who took part in the experiment were divided into teams of three. Two of these three were researchers who were acting. One pretended to be the “experimenter” and spoke with an authoritative voice. The second person was pretending to be the “learner,” someone who had volunteered for a little money to take part in a scientific experiment on how people learn best. The only per
son who didn’t know what was really going on was a real volunteer who’d responded to an ad offering to be paid for taking part in the experiment, and that person was assigned the role of “teacher.”

  The teacher and learner were put in separate rooms where they could communicate over speakers but couldn’t see each other. Before going into his room, the learner had been instructed to casually mention that he had a heart condition. At the instructions of the experimenter, the teacher began by reading a list of word pairs to the learner. Then the teacher would go through the list again, mentioning only one of the words that formed a word pair. It was supposedly up to the learner to remember what word it had been paired with.

  Each time the learner made a mistake, the teacher was told to administer a shock to him. The strength of the shock increased by fifteen volts for each wrong answer. The teacher was the only one of the three who did not know that there was no real shock being administered. The purpose of the real experiment had nothing to do with learning and punishment. It was to see how far the teacher would go in administering the shock just because the experimenter, an authority figure, insisted that he do so.

  Meanwhile, as the shocks grew in intensity, the teacher could hear what he thought was the learner screaming with more and more pain. Finally, the sound of the learner banging desperately on the wall could be heard; then, silence, as if the learner had died or passed out from the shocks. Whenever the unsuspecting teacher expressed a desire to stop the shocks and leave, the fake experimenter would forbid it with statements such as, “You have no other choice, you must go on.”

  In the first set of experiments, 65 percent of the volunteer teachers were willing to go all the way to the supposedly most powerful and painful shock, even after it seemed that the learner may have passed out or even died, merely because the experimenter—an authority figure who they thought was a genuine scientist—was telling them to. In discussing the study, Milgram suggested that these results might help explain what the millions of people who carried out unimaginably inhumane orders from Nazi commanders meant when they said they were “just following orders.” What they meant is that what they did conflicted with their moral code, but the power of an authority figure giving them orders was strong enough to suppress that moral code.