I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (30 page)

I am not under the delusion that education is going to make a comeback in this country. Far from it. Children don’t vote, so they can’t exert political pressure directly. I can see problems. I can offer solutions. But at the end of the day, I face the world the way it
is
and not the way I
want
it to be. I was very fortunate to have this reality-based perspective beaten into me at a very young age. I had what so many American children lack in this day and age: a father.

Our next-door neighbor growing up was a pedophile named Mr. Moke. He was a big, fat dude with a big, fat wife. I can’t be sure
she knew what was going on in her house, but everyone else in the neighborhood sure did. Mr. Moke would pay kids to come over. A while after they entered, I’d watch them come out. They’d look kind of fucked up, but now they would have money.

My father told my siblings and me that we could never even so much as
look
over there. If a ball landed in Mr. Moke’s yard, it was lost to us forever. We just had to let that ball go as if we had never had it to begin with. There was never to be any contact with Mr. Moke,
ever
.

One night when I was about twelve years old, there was a really bad earthquake. The next morning, my brother Kevin and I were in the backyard picking greens for my mother. Big, fat Mr. Moke waddled over to the fence and leaned over it. “I heard all that moving around,” he told us. “I thought you and your brother had got at each other.” In case that vernacular is too “urban,” let me make it really clear: What he meant is that he thought Kevin and I were
fucking
each other.

At the time I didn’t really understand what the hell he was talking about—but my father did. That motherfucker heard every word Mr. Moke said through the kitchen window. He put down his breakfast, walked out through the screen door to our backyard, hopped the fence into Mr. Moke’s backyard, and proceeded to beat the fuck out of that man. Then my father hopped the fence back and finished his scrambled eggs and Polish sausage.

Mr. Moke was just some random pervert, and I had a father to protect me. In this regard, I was very fortunate. But many children didn’t have such luck, and the consequences to them were horrible. In this country, we have to have our heroes. We have institutions that we’re taught to trust implicitly and not even question. For many women, it’s churches. For men, it’s the cathedral of athleticism.

It’s no coincidence that those very institutions were the exact ones behind systematic child abuse. When I rail against hypocrisy, it’s not just because I have a difference of opinion with someone or because I simply find it of comedic interest. I rail against it because hypocrisy in
thought
leads to harm in
action
. Despite all the smiles on television, America is a predatory country. It has
always
been based on predation and exploitation, whether of slaves or immigrants or whomever we can squeeze at any given time. I don’t just mean corporations. It really pervades all aspects of our culture.

Coach Jerry Sandusky had a charity for underprivileged kids. And very often, those kids that Coach Sandusky came into contact with didn’t have fathers in their lives. He didn’t have to go online and lure them to a park with promises of candy bars and toys. Their very own mothers sent them to the slaughter. Even when those boys told their moms what was going on—and I’m sure
some
of them did—they just couldn’t believe it. That kind of thing happened in this country all the time, and only now are we finding out about it.

When I was growing up, we were told that if we wanted to stay out of trouble, then we should go to church and play sports. Those “wholesome” institutions supposedly exist for the betterment and protection of the people. Yet between Catholic priests, Bishop Eddie Long, and Penn State, I’d rather be on the streets. My odds are
better
with the dope boys and the pimps. When
they
try to fuck me, it’s just for money.

We
despise
poor and underprivileged people in this country. We see them as prey, and we fuck them at every turn—be that literally or figuratively. There’s this American idea that we’re a meritocracy, that people reach the top through the virtues of hard work and perseverance. But the flipside to that thinking is that the poor and underprivileged must be flawed, lazy, stupid, or whatever
other terrible adjective you would like to use. They didn’t work hard enough in some kind of way but had every opportunity. Newt Gingrich explicitly says this all the time, and virtually no one blinks. He has claimed that poor kids have bad work habits because they don’t see anybody go to work unless it’s doing something illegal. Is there any doubt which “poor” kids he was referring to? Let me make perfectly clear what no one else will: “Poor” in this scenario usually means
black
.

Gingrich knows he’s full of it, and so do the people who think like him. He’s not a stupid man. All it takes is five seconds of thought to imagine being a child in these types of households. I have four female cousins. Between the four of them, they have fifty children.
Fifty
. These are all never-married single mothers, who have these kids and get county checks. No one doubts what the children will inevitably grow up to be. But is it really the children’s
fault
? Can anyone doubt that their lives would be better if there was a stable male influence in the home? Nothing good ever comes of the nuclear family being destroyed. The black community used to be just that: a community. Money used to circulate in the black community twenty times. You used to go to a black barber to get your hair done, then go to a black doctor for a check-up, and then buy your groceries at the black supermarket. Then we decided that we should be integrated, which of course we should have the right to do. But now money circulates just once. Is that still a community?

If education started to go south in the late ’70s, things started falling apart for
my
community with the advent of the War on Poverty. America hasn’t won a war in so long that we have to stop pretending like we know how to fight one. We got some good licks in, but we
haven’t been successful in anything we’ve called a war in the last sixty years. Right around the Korean War is when the best we could hope for was a draw. Whether it’s the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, or the War on Terror, we always know how to start but we never know how to finish. We’ve got a plan on getting in; we never have one on getting out. Look at the Gulf War, the only major success of that entire period. America had gotten so soft that we had to bring in an
old lady
to win it for us. Margaret Thatcher had to bitchslap President Bush,
a former war hero
, and tell him, “This is no time to go wobbly!” That’s British for “Nigga, get it together!”

I think the War on Poverty was a good idea
in theory
. The idea was: We’re going to give you money if you don’t have a man around. If you took government assistance at that time, you couldn’t have a man in the house. But when the government is the father, he’s a jealous father. As a consequence, black men left their households. They were allowed or even
encouraged
to abdicate. Many black men got to say that they didn’t have to be around—and if you trace the rise of drug use and teen pregnancy in the black community, it started around that time.

Before the late ’60s, black men had large families and worked menial jobs—but they were stable and there was nowhere else to go. They were ostracized if they didn’t take care of their family. A man would do anything he had to. Mothers stayed with the kids. They didn’t have housekeepers.

I remember when I was growing up, people used to tease you if you didn’t have a father. Now they tease you if you
do
. The majority of black children are raised in single-parent homes. We’re a community of
men
being raised by
women
. Not only do these boys not know what a man is like, their
children
don’t know. My mother used to make all of us—me, my father, my siblings—leave our shoes
outside because they smelled so bad. But when I woke up from a nightmare and smelled my father’s feet, I wasn’t afraid. He made me feel safe, even the mere scent of him. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a little kid and to have to be the man of the house. It must be
terrifying
—and I’ve already discussed what road that kid will probably end up on.

All my childhood sports heroes had fathers: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali. They’d talk about their coaches as if they were their fathers—even if they
did
have actual fathers. Michael Jordan had a great father, and he
still
talks about his coach in that way. Now look at LeBron James and Allen Iverson. They’re guessing at being a man. LeBron James left Cleveland because he tried to win the championship and he couldn’t do it. But he should have stuck it out in miserable Cleveland until he got that championship. My father would have said that you have to play it out until you win. LeBron’s coach was a puppet who deferred to him, and he lost his star player because that’s
not
what a coach should be about. Fathers and coaches are really the same thing: They both tell you to sit down and shut the fuck up.

I learned lessons from my dad every day, and they’re not the same kinds of lessons a mom would teach. He once told me that you don’t want to be a thoroughbred; you want to be a mule. “Thoroughbreds don’t last. Everyone is always going to need a mule. You can be tough or smart or strong—but if you can outwork everyone, you’re set.” Is
any
mom going to say that? Or is she going to tell you that you’re the best and that everybody loves you? People grow up genuinely believing that everyone loves them. In other words,
they grow up completely delusional
. And with our culture edifying whatever you already believe, people will never have to question their delusions. How the fuck is that going to
help
this country, let alone
save
it?

I can tell the difference between how I was raised and some of these children today. I can see it in Obama. He thinks everyone is going to like him and is disappointed when they don’t. He is baffled when people don’t like him. He honestly feels in his heart of hearts that if you just got to know him, you’d like him.

Now look at the Jacksons and their dad. They wanted to be stars, so their dad told them that they were going to have to practice. “You want me to buy a guitar? You want me to spend this money? You’d better work to be a goddamn star.” Whereas a typical mom will be like, “He’s tired! He’s trying! Let that boy rest.” Michael Jackson became a freak when he
stopped
listening to Joe Jackson.

You can always tell the difference with a man who was raised by his father, whether he liked him or not. He didn’t even have to be a particularly good father, either. He just had to be there.

The question becomes: Can the nuclear family be rebuilt? Men are getting married less and less—and though this is a huge social problem, I really can’t blame them. Our women have forgotten how to land a man and how to keep him. So, ladies, let me take a page out of Steve Harvey’s book. Let D.L. teach you what you have to do.