I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (29 page)

Many people in the black community rail against the death penalty. They are pissed off that the only people that the justice system
sees as fit to execute are poor, brown, and retarded. But it’s unjust in the opposite sense too: How many people have been given the death penalty for
killing
black people? The deck is stacked on both ends.

I have to disagree with my fellow progressives on this issue. The death penalty
is
a deterrent in one very specific sense. I don’t believe that any criminal thinks, “I’m gonna get the death penalty if I do this,” and thereby refrains from committing a crime. That’s a long-time-preference approach. But the motherfucker who gets the death penalty?
He’ll
never do it again. Death is the ultimate deterrent. The death penalty is really about
vengeance
, and sometimes vengeance
is
necessary for the most heinous of crimes.

Yet our community’s focus on the injustice of the death penalty misses the point. There were forty-six people executed in the United States in 2010. That year there were also 6,043 white murder victims as well as 6,470
black
murder victims. Over 90 percent of
those
were murdered by other black people. You ain’t gotta go to Detroit. You don’t see hordes of white people hacking hordes of other white people to death in Rwanda or the Sudan.
Black people kill black people all over the world
. It’s like Tupac said: “The same crime element that white people are scared of, black people are scared of. While they waiting for legislation to pass, we next door to the killer. All them killers they let out, they’re in that building. Just because we black, we get along with the killers? What is that?” And those words weren’t just true; in his case, they were tragically prophetic.

People get more angry about a cop killing someone instead of when another black kid does it. If we stopped killing ourselves, eventually people would get the message. “You know what? They value their lives, so we better stop fucking around.” Blacks killing each other is not even shocking. It’s the norm—but it’s swept under
the rug. If you know, you have to
do
something about it. If you know, there’s an
expectation
. But if you
don’t
, then it doesn’t matter—and we live in a world right now where you can tailor-make your reality. You can live on the Internet and have a pseudo-life there. Because of technology, you can hear only what you want to hear and see what you want to see. If I want to hear this kind of news, I watch one channel; if I want to hear another kind of news, I watch another channel. If I don’t want to listen to the news at all, I can listen to music on my iPod. Uncomfortable truths become ignorable trivia.

I can’t
completely
explain the phenomenon of why black people place such a small value on the lives of other black people. I can certainly talk about the
result
of that mentality. It’s men being hacked to death by other men with machetes. It’s men fathering children with women and never seeing those kids. It’s men being as abusive as they can be, or selling dope to somebody who looks like them, or shooting in a neighborhood where people are going to school and kids are outside playing. Judges, cops, and prosecutors might put us in jail. But the thugs and killers of
our
community are putting us in the ground.

That’s how young, poor children are turned into killers before they’re fully grown: They are taught that they have no future, and see no life beyond their neighborhood. They are treated like criminals and branded as such. They see violence as the means of solving disputes and arm themselves to be safe. They’re trained to appear tough so no one would ever guess that they are suffering. They have no regard for their own lives, so obviously the lives of others are meaningless as well.

If you start walking on this road when you’re a kid, how the hell are you supposed to go to college or make something of yourself? When you’re old enough to get it, it’s already too late. So what’s the
answer? Lock them all up? Crime is a symptom of a community in crisis. If everyone in a town developed cancer, the people would get chemo—but they’d also desperately try to figure out
why
they’re getting sick. I’ve done my best to address the
causes
. Now let me address the
solutions
.

T
HE
mechanism through which children are changed from dumb-asses into contributing members of society is
education
. It’s a public good, meaning that it benefits everyone. Everyone wins by getting educated, and everyone wins by being in an educated community. But the assault on public education has been going on for decades. I would peg the tipping point to a specific year: 1978.
That’s when a man named Howard Jarvis changed California forever.

At the time, wealthy Californians were pissed. The court had ruled that tax money should be apportioned for educational purposes on a fair, equitable basis. It wasn’t right that kids in rich neighborhoods should have great educations while poor kids were sucked into a system that was educational in name only. So property-tax dollars were taken from rich communities and used to subsidize schools in poor communities.

That was why Howard Jarvis and men like him put Proposition 13 on the ballot in 1978. Proposition 13 tied property taxes to a onetime assessment of a person’s home. It strictly limited how much those taxes could increase annually, even if the value of a property doubled or tripled. If property-tax dollars could no longer be used on behalf of rich children, then they weren’t going to be used on behalf of
anybody
. Proposition 13 passed—and budget cuts came with it, virtually overnight.

As a schoolboy at the time, I didn’t know a lot about politics. But I immediately learned how Proposition 13 affected my life. I couldn’t go to school in the district that we were technically in because my house was in an unincorporated area of Los Angeles, like we were Palestinians or something. The high school I ended up being sent to, Gardena High, was seven miles away. It wasn’t a big deal for me and the other kids who lived by me. We had buses; we had bus passes; we could get on the bus; we could get to school.

Then Proposition 13 kicked in.

I remember perfectly that it was January, and my mother told me that I had to find a way to get to school. I didn’t have a car. None of us did—and none of us were going to be walking for miles, literally, every day to school. It was an hour-and-a-half walk up and an
hour-and-a-half walk back, and that walk back was in the dark. I had to go through Crip neighborhoods, from the Pay Back to the Shot Gun through to the Fives, to my neighborhood. It was just like
The Warriors
. Everybody in every neighborhood knew which way I had to walk. Sure enough, one night some cats I was into it with beat me unconscious on Rosecrans and Vermont. After a while,
fuck
that.

It was so hard to get to school that I used every reason I could to avoid going.
Of course
it’s an excuse and
of course
it’s something that I wouldn’t do now. But if I knew what the fuck I was doing then, then I wouldn’t have needed to be going to school to begin with. Kids are uninformed by definition.

At the same time that they took our bus passes away, they took the after-school programs away too. Avalon Gardens Elementary was much closer to my house, and it used to stay open. They had games for people to play, and they had job-fair programs. I would think Howard Jarvis would have rather had kids occupied with wholesome activities than growing up on the streets. Isn’t it better for these young black children to hang out and play Yahtzee at school than be on the corner chilling out with the Bloods? But that’s a long-term kind of thinking, and our nation is really very selfish and very short-sighted. So what happened right after that? Reagan came into office, and there was a huge rash of drive-by shootings. What did they
expect
would happen? If it’s true that black people have poor habits, it’s because white people stopped investing in what we need to develop good ones.

This kind of thinking is what I see behind the charter school movement. The charter schools are explicitly based on the idea of putting budgets before education. The biggest argument charter school advocates make is that they are cheaper. They also claim
their schools are just as good as public schools—but that’s like an afterthought to them. Public education is a function of government. The government is fine with a present-day loss so long as the long-term payoff is there. It’s why President Obama and so many others refer to education as an “investment.” The payoff is not immediately there. But a charter school turns education into a
commodity
. All they want is to get their cash
now
, and the way they get their cash is to make sure the kids do well on a certain test.
Teaching children to take a test is not the same as educating them
. It’s preparing them for a year-end exam. What happens to the kids in twenty years is not the charter school’s problem. Their responsibility is done—and the government is stuck with the bill should the kids have problems as adults.

The most successful American company is Walmart. Do we really want our kids raised on the Walmart model? The private sector cares very little about
results
. Walmart stocks aisle after aisle of cheap, unhealthy food. They don’t pressure the food companies to develop cheap,
healthy
food for the benefit of their customers. All they care about is their money, which is (arguably) fine enough in that context—but is calamitous when it comes to educating our kids.

I am not saying the public school system is doing great. It’s doing
horribly
. So let me compare the public school system with another government program that seemed hopeless: the Iraq war. In 2007, everyone except for the completely delusional neocons knew that the war in Iraq was a complete shit show with very little hope of improving. President Bush, John McCain, and all those types got together and started analyzing the situation with one simple premise: Failure was not an option. At the same time, they didn’t want to admit that
success
was not a
possibility
. But the way things were going, that shit
couldn’t stand. It was embarrassing for America, it was humiliating, and it made all the time, effort, and lives expended up to that point seem not only wasted but downright counterproductive.

Those military minds and politicians worked up a plan. They threw manpower at the problem and they threw money at the problem. The war was wildly unpopular politically, but they weren’t ready to “cut and run.” They used the very term “cut and run” as a slur against those who thought otherwise. To some extent, things improved. At the very least, they improved enough that President Obama was later comfortable bringing the troops home.

So if the educational system is failing American youth in general and black American youth in particular, where the fuck is the resolve to do something? Where are the committees meeting to find a way out of this mess? There are none. That’s because
they consider it easier to bring democracy to Iraq than a diploma to a nigger
. The former scenario is very strenuous, and it will take a lot of financial resources, time, and simple sweat. But the latter option, to them, is an
impossibility
. They literally believe that it’s not possible for black people to be educated—even though
dogs
are capable of receiving successful job training. If the slave masters thought of us as subhumans to be owned and sold, is this new perspective supposed to be
progress
?

I don’t think it was a coincidence that Howard Jarvis came along when he did. That selfish mentality speaks to a larger problem facing America and how our country had changed. People forget that the 1970s were called the “me decade” because of how the nation turned away from 1960s idealism. It’s easy to get it confused, because Reagan’s ’80s made the ’70s seem like a big, happy time.

I’m not delusional enough to claim that the public school system cares about results either. But with public schools, it’s a different
situation. When a charter school fails, you yank your kid out and to hell with everyone else. But when a public school is in trouble, that’s an opportunity for the community to get involved and to improve things for
everyone
. The public school system made this country what it is. It’s the mentality surrounding the importance of education that has changed. The people who had been the shepherds of our system changed. That made the goals change, and that made what we believed to be important change.

It used to be that people cared about what they would leave their children. Now that’s just what they say so they
sound
like they give a fuck when they
don’t
. My kids and everybody else’s kids are just a Tea Party slogan to attack government spending—“We can’t let our children inherit this debt!”—even though they inherited a national debt from
their
parents. There used to be a time when men made sacrifices so that people could feel better, so that the country could work. There were more people who cared about what their country did. Today our government threatens to shut down more than Microsoft Windows does. I know soul-food restaurants that don’t shut down this much.