Racist S#!t

When a PHD and a GED set out to make everyone Big Mad

Preface: (Yeah, I do those now)

I wanted to approach this topic with more than simply what I had to offer. That's why I hit up Torrance for a helping hand. From having read his work, I came to understand that we started out in a similar world. Here was a man who also lived that life and got out. What's even better is how he did it.

Torrance got out the right way. The cliche is that I, being the white kid, would've worked my way out and became a doctor while the black guy learned through prison. Yet we're the opposite of the narratives we're all told.

He saw that life and made himself a better man in spite of it and clawed his way out. I, on the other hand, fully embraced it and survived through sheer luck. That gives us a pair of perspectives our respective races “aren't supposed to have” and I think that's absolutely fantastic for this topic.

The perspectives of a black PHD and a white GED

That said, let's discuss that which shall not be mentioned.

Let's roll dog

Gimme that mic, a honky is about to talk about racism. I've included the following evacuation procedures to assist any readers who believe I can't speak on this topic:

•Safely stop your work. Shut down equipment that could become unstable or present a hazard.....

•Leave the building through the nearest door with an EXIT sign..…

•Go jump in front of a bus…..

I’m going to skip the fact that I spent many years around actual race gangs and save that for another time. For this I'm going to focus on how I grew up in the PJ's. I don't mean a poor neighborhood, I mean them streets. The kind of neighborhoods where you couldn't have a pizza delivered to your house. Where the police didn't patrol because they took random gunfire while at stop lights. Where the corner stores had bullet proof glass for the criminals and steel doors for the cops. The kind of neighborhood where I was one of the few white kids.

So let's start with a hang-up a lot of people seem to have.

The first 30-odd years of my life I used and answered to “Nigga” just like everyone else did where we lived. Be mad, stay mad. People on the outside looking in never understood that word. I'm so tired of hearing uptight bougie talking-heads moaning, “if the N-word is so offensive, then why do they use it in their rap music and say it 50 times in every sentence?”. Because fuck you, that's why. If you can't tell the difference between there, their and they're, then you're in over your head.

Here's where some of you get to take it personally. I got to use it freely and without so much as a sideways glance. Do you know why? Because it's a different word! Learn what tones, inflections and context means. Not that it matters. Even if you did figure it out, you still don't get to use it.

When some closet racist gets mad because it's not fair he can't say his favorite hard R, it's because he wants to use the version that refers to race. The rest of us are talking about the version that refers to living ‘that life’. You're either a part of it or you're not.

When my white ass, standing on a corner where everyone and their Mama is hustlin' says, “Ayo! What up wit that nigga over there reckless eyeballin’ y'all niggas”?”, no one, for one second, thought I was talking about race. Because nobody was. I could've been pointing out a Mexican. Anyone-In-That-Life. Any man, woman or child could tell by the very way you said it if you could use that word or not. You best be hitting hard “C’s” where them G’s go and don't be lingering on that A son.

“Well that's only because you acted like them”, I'm sure someone is mumbling as he looks down at his phone with his double-chin all red from agitation. That's yet another thing you're wrong about and more proof why you can't use it. I didn't sag baggy jeans and wear my hats backwards while flashing gold chains and rocking’ Tim's or whatever nonsense cliche you're picturing. I looked like a standard-issue 90’s grunge gutter rat. What, did you think that life had a uniform? Once again, you either belonged or you didn't.

Which, to justify the purpose of that opening rant, brings me to my real point: people's extreme misunderstanding on simpler things such as that one word is the perfect example of why they've muddied-up what racism means. They don't get it so they ramble incoherently.

I'm aiming at a lot of people here. Half of them claim it's an archaic thing that doesn't exist in modern society and the other side has watered it down so much with nonsense that it's lost its edge with rationally minded people. Everyone pretends it's either not real or absolutely everywhere in everything.

It's absolutely real. It very much still exists. It may not be like it was but y'all sound dumb acting like it just up and vanished. People think that because we fought a civil war that means we solved hate. Do you know one of the reasons why I was running drugs, money and guns when I was a kid? Because I was a white boy! I can't count how many cops I literally walked past unnoticed while carrying a life sentence in my bookbag. But you keep telling yourself profiling ain't a thing. I spoke to a cop with a man's dead body in the bed of a truck barely 20 feet away, (the case I ultimately went to prison for) and he gave me directions. Let that sink in. You don't get to say it isn't real to me.

The irony is that I was one of “them” while not looking like one of them and that allowed me to do and get away with things they couldn't. This wasn't during Jim Crow, this is from my own childhood.

So, while we're on that point, lose the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps'' mantra. Trust me, working isn't the problem. The grind is hard. I'm a conservative guy but that ideology is a complete denial of the reality on the ground.

Don't get me wrong, 100% of the people who got out did it with hard work but that doesn't mean that everyone who worked hard got out.

It's more than that.

You really think that if people in those neighborhoods want a better life all they have to do is “try harder”. It's that easy, huh? If money was the only prerequisite to escape don't you think the criminals would commute? There were piles of money changing hands. You're dumbing down the hardships they face to “you just have to visualize success maaaan”. Which means you're assuming anyone still there must just want that life. That's a demeaning view.

Yes, people get out, however it's a lot more than just trying harder. They have to first have that goal, something where they have very few, if any, examples to pull from. Next, they then need the means and some kind of outside assistance to even have a chance. I learned about how the rest of society lived while in prison from speaking to guys from your neighborhoods. The whining “it wasn't my fault”, “she drove me to this”, “I'm innocent” middle-class punks.

But what about the other side of this equation? People who cry wolf so much they've made it legitimately harder for those who live through real racism. You invent slights and attacks where there are none so you can cash in on some of that sweet-sweet victimhood. That's trifling and you're foul.

Real people are suffering real hardships and you cry racism because the live action Little Mermaid flopped? Because you're being held to the same standard the people in your community and job, the ones you chose to live and work in, hold each other to. You don't live where people look at a mother with open surprise whenever her kid's share a dad, but you want to act like you're a victim because a Starbucks employee misspelled your name on a cup.

You're in a Starbucks! Quit frontin’.

Half of the people crying about this topic dismiss black accounts of racism because they think they're all lying and the rest dismiss whites because they think crackers can't understand. These two extremes are making things worse. I may just be a squirrelly-ass white boy but my life gave me a vantage point few of you have and I'm telling you what I see.

But where do I get off barking about a problem and at least not offering my take on what might help address what has y'all hating everyone in that life? (Lets be real, no one hates Thomas Sowell, y'all hate niggas) With the exception of a vanishingly small number of AB’s, closet racists actually hate the culture more than the color. Y'all just don't know how to separate things in your own head.

The solution is simpler, yet harder, than just telling people to act right. Especially in a world where I was raised from birth to view the things y'all do as being weak, fake and shadier than anything we were doing to each other. At least we were up front about being dirty. It's going to take men who understand that life to be there and strike the balance in what's lacking.

We all saw you as doormats and punks. How else could someone live in the cookie cutter world y'all inhabit? The hood needs men who can hold their ground against thugs while showing the grind in the citizens' world can be more than just that 9-5 desk jockey bullshit.

There was no one to show us you can be a cold, pipe hittin' mother fucker and a protector, provider and contributor all at the same time. There was no one to show us we could be all of it. That we didn't have to choose.

That we could be more than that life without acting like we're better than that life.

As with most things, real men can solve the problem. In that sense, real men can fix even racist shit by addressing the things that people are actually being racist about. Y'all just gotta stick your chest out.

From reading Coleman, any real cat knows that he ain’t frontin’. We can conclude, through his experiences, that he has been what we call in the South in the field, and has had his feet in the mud. I can vouch for him although I am from Tennessee and he, I suspect Ohio. He has what we call in Memphis clout. We are two peas out of the same mutha fuckin pod that just happened to go into two different frozen boxes. Just because he was hemmed up makes him no different. I have been arrested but never hemmed up and Coleman knows what I mean. Neither defines your character.

I do not see Coleman as a honkey, but rather as a man who has real life experience from the field – what he calls the streets or corner. He is a modern age Vietnam reporter calling balls and strikes using words like a lens and aperture to relay honest observation. His views on racism are accurate. Folk like him are real, they respond to nigga because in this world of gerunds, they see him as one and such is easily internalized when one is treated as such. He may not have used the word in the presence of other black men frequently (or may have), but best believe they saw him as such and recognized their life experiences as being similar to his. I see it just through our off-line conversations. Him from Ohio (OH-10) and me from Tennessee (Tenn-a-Ki). We just overlap like plastic coverings on your grandparent’s sofa.

Another thing he is correct on is the usage of the word nigga. Growing up in Memphis and remembering being in the basement of my boys Devin (RIP) fathers church stacking “I am a Man” signs the night before Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, I know first hand the word was never used in our home. We were taught to never use the word, but use the word I did.

I despise that I did and the way it is glamorized today, especially in general conversation and music. Sadly, it is used as a term of endearment which Coleman has earned. He did not ask for such, it was just bestowed upon him by his peers, for we know it has nothing to do with race or skin color as a descriptor. What he has written is not timely, but rather timeless. Namely because what he is articulating is prescient and rooted in personal experience. Regardless of his past, he is expressing truth in the form of accuracy. Most conversations on race and racism are topical. They present what is understood via observation more so than detailed human interaction.

I admit, I have never been to prison, but as I stated, I have been arrested. But where I was raised, it may get you street cred but it did not really count. Many of my folk were never arrested but are no longer here, dead before finishing high school, college and well before the age of 30 (RIP D-George, D-Rell, Motlow, Don, Milk Dud, Terry, Sammy Slick, Tombstone, Danny, Godfrey, Roulac, Maple Syrup, Hookhead and dozens more). But they were true to the game and died as a consequence of living life how we did. People often say the game is meant to be played, I would disagree, the game is to be won and we stood on that. Women used to ask me where my tattoos were, or ask why I do not have any tattoos - I just showed them my knife wounds, ice pick/screw-drive holes and box-cutter scars and they shut up. I was just lucky to sneak away. We lived during racism, but compared to then, I rarely see such today.

I was raised in Castalia Heights and lived my first 17 years of life in the area of Castalia and South Parkway – the deadliest area in Memphis. I had been shot at, and cut/stabbed 7 times before I left the city. I was in a social club called a gang by the police which started as a response to Chicago gangs coming in town to run the city. If you know any dude from Memphis, we take no shorts so Castalia folk (CTO-Castalia Taking over) and dudes from Lemoyne Garden (LMG) began to defend the city in our eyes. It was our city and we took no grief from outsiders. Many from the South Parkway and Castalia area eventually became Travelers if you know what I mean.

I do disagree with his perspective on pulling oneself up by their bootstraps, because my small involvement with black market activities as a teen (maybe during college) and what I see in most drug dealers is just that. Albeit not healthy, such is goal-directed behavior grounded in the concept of “pulling oneself up by their bootstraps.”

Nowadays, folk scream racism for everything from global warming to syrup packaging. I do not see it, but then again, I was born during segregation and remember seeing black section signs in the greyhound bus station.

Laugh at Coleman all you want but the joke will be on you. As for me, don’t let the Ph.D. fool you, everyone does dirt in some form of fashion and we all have dirt behind our ears. Coleman knows one thing, you may laugh at us because we are different and propagate racism with more racism, and we laugh at you all because you are all the same because we know humanity is greater than race.

As far as solutions, I side with Morgan Freeman: stop making and talking about all things in terms of race. The Memphis sanitation march was about men, being men, not being black men. Until we realize this, it will never change. Sure, I have some low-life habits, or what I call tactics learned on South Parkway in my blood and I always will. But it will never interrupt my humanity. Words are words, use them or not, it remains my choice to get upset or not when you use them. There is a risk inherent in all things. And like I said, some of those things are gerunds - nonfinite verb forms used as nouns. True, voracious reading habits, books and guns may have made me, but loving God and others define me. Giving life a chance is all I know. I aspire to believe and think this is true for all good God-fearing folk.

My turn again;

Alright, let me slap a bow on this since I like wrapping things up.

I hope y'all gathered that black and white ain't so black and white. I hope you see that a kid who should have had all of the privileges got eaten by the gutter while a man who could've played victim fought and climbed his way out. I hope you can see that things don't have to be extreme and that nothing will ever change if everyone sticks to their side while leaving the middle empty.

I hope you see that even he and I don't agree on everything within this very article and that I have views you'd think he'd have and he boasts ones you'd think would be coming from me. Because stereotypes are dumb.

It's not just a matter of being able to speak on it, but it's about doing it in mixed company where being aggressive doesn't mean being unreasonable. Ain't nothing ever going to change if we keep playing “the other guy is the problem” game.

White people weren't born wrong but y'all gonna accept that neither were they. Half of you don't know what you don't know and the other half are lying like you're dying. If no one is willing to be honest then there's no point in even pretending.

Bullshit does more harm than hate.

In closing, if you don't like anything either of us said you're free to use your caps lock because anyone who can't grasp this ain't gonna do nothing but keyboard-cardio anyway.

Run tell dat.