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"So the vast majority of the creative black
minds in America who are males are locked up in prisons during their most
productive years. In the years when most Euro-American males are present
in universities, colleges, and training institutes, gaining the skills
that are necessary to ensure that they can run the world the way that they
have been running the world, our future leaders, future learners, future
advocates, future directoars can be found in the jails of America locked
away, unable to think, under the daily watchful eye of sick minds who would
rather see them dead than learning. Those who show the greatest promise
of thinking, self-direction, understanding, comprehension are the least
likely to ever get paroled. When they get paroled, they are stigmatized
in such a way that they can never get the effectiveness in this society
that they need to utilize what they know. They have been essentially removed,
not by phisical death, but by institutional death."
With dizzying, feverish frequency, African-American youth are being relegated to America’s dungeons, at a rate, and in a proportion, that dwarfs other segments of this society. Long term readers of this column have doubtless read a numbing list of statistics and numbers on this subject, so the writer will not repeat them here. Suffice it to say that this fact is a deep feature of US public policy, one so bred in the bone that no figure, nor set of figures, no matter how startling, can now check or change that policy. Arguments against the injustice of such a policy tend to fall on deaf ears, and the policy, christened by the blessings of what we call ‘political reality’, hardens into unquestioned custom. Until, in common consciousness, the very visage of a black youth, butressed by the negative projections of the majoritarian media, comes to connote an inherant criminality. I thought of such things upon the prosecution and conviction of my son Jamal for weapons charges recently. A young man who’s father has been in prison since he was a boy, Jamal had more than his share of hard and hellish times, making more than his share of foolish mistakes. As a man he grew to become a person who loved his family passionaltely. His weapons possession arrest had to be one that stretches the bounds of coincidence to the point to disbelief. Active since 1995 in his father’s defense, Jamal’s handsome, mustached face appeared on local and national TV and in Newspapers from coast to caost. Yet the cops who stopped him (on an alleged traffic violation) claimed they had no idea who he was. Just a coincidental stop. Just a coincidental search. Just a coincidence that his case would be transferred from a city prosecution to a federal one. One doesn’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that Jamal was shadowed, stopped, busted and convicted because of who his father was, and because of his well-publicized efforts to secure a new trial for him. A bright, articulate, loving father and husband, convicted actually for the unpardonable offense of resistance, he joins too many of his contemporaries in America’s latest concentration camps, yet another casualty in America’s longest war against black life. Column Written 3/25/98
© MAJ
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Another Casualty in the Longest War