I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (26 page)

I’m in a fortunate place where I could keep things from spiraling out of control for my kids. I’m
not
letting them get away with what they did. I have the same deal with both my daughters: I’ll pay for college, but they have to pay me back the tens of thousands of dollars I spent on lawyers to keep them out of trouble. I’m not going to pay for their stupidity.

Kids don’t have the right to be stupid—
but they are
. This idea that kids should have their lives ruined when they make teenage mistakes is completely absurd to me. What most people don’t
realize is that these kids, these
kids
, are treated in the same manner as professional criminals are treated. That’s especially the case when it’s teenage black dudes. The legal professionals genuinely believe that they’re the thin line keeping these animals from dragging us all down into savage anarchy. The presupposition is:
We’ve got to teach these people a lesson
.

The authorities have such
pride
in the fact that they’re doing “the right thing.” But does anyone really
like
a self-righteous person? Are self-righteous people ever really
righteous
? Right-wingers like to make fun of people who shop at Whole Foods (founded by a libertarian!) and listen to NPR, acting as though they’re the anointed ones making the world a better place for the uneducated and unenlightened masses. These officers of the law are the exact same phenomenon. Any attempt to treat black youth as people, in their view, is based on a fallacy and therefore doomed to fail. If the leftists think they’re sophisticated because they follow politics in foreign countries, the agents of the justice system think they’re insightful for a different reason. From
their
perspective, they’re the only ones seeing us savages as we really are. That may be a lot of things, but
just
isn’t one of them.

Their perspective is understandable. When these judges see kids who look like their own children—or themselves at a young age—they’ll feel empathy. They’ll think this is a kid making stupid-kid choices. But when they see a young black male—and they see
a lot
of them—they’re going to see the boogeyman. How can anyone distinguish in such a short interaction between a kid who needs to be put back on the right track and a criminal dead set on doing harm? The rules of the street demand that you seem tough and fearless, displaying no weakness. In a court setting, that comes across as angry defiance. The consequences are inevitable, and they are tragic.

I felt a taste of that, and that was enough for me. In 2004, I starred in an independent film called
Shackles
. Part of the movie was filmed inside a penitentiary where two dudes from my neighborhood had gotten killed, which made it eerie. As we were shooting one scene, the phone kept ringing and ruining the take.

“Shit,” I said. “We gotta do this over.”

“Why, what’s wrong?” said the director.

“That fucking phone keeps ringing!”

“D.L., there ain’t no phone. The offices have been closed for two months.”

I rolled my eyes. “Sound got it. I heard the phone. Come on now, quit playing.”

But sound
didn’t
get it. I listened to the playback and there was no extra noise whatsoever. “They say that happens all the time,” the director told me. “People hearing noises or what have you.” I’m not saying it’s haunted, but I didn’t know what the fuck was going on.

Prisons don’t convert to movie sets all that easy. Because we were so far out from the city, we had to use the cells for wardrobe. The particular cell we were using as my dressing room had previously been used to keep prisoners under psychiatric observation. It was small and cramped, very minimal, and it only had one tiny window way up high.

When I was in there changing, the fucking door to the cell closed all of a sudden. It’s not like it was windy or drafty in there. Even if it was, how much of a draft could one tiny window have on a heavy steel door? Whatever, so the door closed. We’d get the prop master to open it and everything would be okay.

But they couldn’t find the prop master.

I knew there was no possibility,
zero
, of me staying locked in that cell for hours, let alone days. I knew that the crew would not give
up until I got out. I could see the people through the door, and they were talking to me and keeping me company. In addition, I am not claustrophobic in any way. It’s just not a thing with me.

Despite all this, I literally almost went insane. I almost lost my fucking mind. I’m not trying to be dramatic or over the top, but when I say “literally” here, I mean
literally
. I was in there total for only about an hour, knowing the whole time that people were frantically trying to get me out. They could see that I was starting to freak despite my efforts to keep my composure.

This happened when I was a successful grown man in my forties. After I got out, all I could think about was, how could a
child
who is fifteen, sixteen, or even twenty stay in that cell and
not
go insane? There would be
no one
trying to get him out of that cell. Rather, an entire system was set up to make sure he stayed in there. That kid would know that this is what the rest of his life was going to be like.

Prison is like thug boot camp. After you’ve gone through it, you know you can survive it and handle it. You’ve got experience living it. Threatening to send you back becomes less and less of a deterrent, if it ever was one to begin with. I know guys that had been going to jail since we were in junior high school. I saw them in junior high, then I saw them again at the end of high school. I saw them a couple of years later, when I was in my twenties. Then I never saw them again. They had three strikes, and they were out. Because they fucked up in junior high, their lives were ruined. They never got to see anything, and they never got to go anywhere. They never got to eat at a cool restaurant or see one tourist spot. It’s just
sad
.

But if you were one of these people, how
could
you value a life? If life, to you, only meant what you saw in front of you, then why
would it be valued? What the fuck is it worth?
You’re
regarded as so worthless that people will just as soon lock you up and throw away the key. You’re an unwanted dog in a kennel. How are you expected to look at life as something to be guarded and respected, if that’s all you know? If you’re looking at life through a keyhole, how are you going to have a balanced view that takes all sides into consideration? You’re not even seeing things from
one
side, but a tiny
piece
of one side.

In captivity, any animal only grows to the size of its environment. If you keep a fish in a small tank, it’s not going to become the monster you’d find in the Amazon. It’s the same way with people. If you have small-minded people in a small community enclosed with a very real border—shit, it’s on the map!—to create a small environment, those people will never be able to break through those walls to grow to their full potential.

Because of the focus on the present, because of the disdain for education, because of the lack of perspective and the ignorance that comes from being young, the kids who can escape captivity are few and far between. My manager, who is white, desperately wanted to adopt kids. He went to the adoption agency to find out what his options were. To adopt a white child, the list can take up to five years. A mixed-race child takes three years. But my manager didn’t care about the kid’s race; he just wanted a child
now
. “How long would it take for a black child?” he asked the lady.

“How long can you wait in this office?” She was joking—but only a little bit. The joke was based on the truth that adopting a black kid could happen a
lot
faster. Animal charities generate sympathy by showing puppies in their ads. “Won’t you please help …?” Now try doing that with young black kids who aren’t adopted. They wouldn’t even run the commercials. Just look at how comical it is:

I made that comment to a friend once and he wrinkled his nose at me. “Are you saying we should be
dogs
?”

“No,” I told him. “If we were, we’d be treated better.”

America fell in love with Barbaro the racehorse. They kept him alive after he broke his leg, and he had the whole country crying. He was insured for $20 million. They don’t have that kind of insurance on Kobe Bryant! Of course I’d rather be Barbaro than a negro.

California had a referendum that said that animals had to be confined in a humane way. Chickens got bigger cages; veal calves were set free from their pens. But you could still do almost anything to young black men. If you damage the California Tiger Salamander’s habitat, the punishment is a $50,000 fine and a year in the federal penitentiary. But you could gun down a young black kid and nothing would happen. There are more black men in prison than in college. More black people are in prison than ever were slaves—but no one’s uncomfortable with it. Nobody
ever
feels sorry for black men—including other black men. By any standard, we are the worst off in America.
We need the most help
. Whether it comes to
life span, economic mobility and average income, or education level, we are at the bottom. Our lives
are
worth less.

The left regards black criminality as a function of “socioeconomic factors”—but never really wonders what those factors are or how to change them. The right sees it as the outcome of feral animals out of control. But if we can turn a wolf into a poodle, can’t we turn a black man into an attorney? It wasn’t that long ago that the stereotype of the black male was deferential, studious, and dependable. I’m not saying we should go back to being
servants
, but maybe being valued, productive
employees
would be a great place to land.

Back during the slave era, teaching a slave to read or write was a crime with huge repercussions. The consequent illiteracy that caused was then used as evidence to demonstrate black inferiority. There’s a similar situation at work today.
You can’t deny people fair access to the law, and then blame them for their subsequent lawlessness
.

There was a very famous political philosopher who addressed this very point. Despite defending dictatorship, Thomas Hobbes is regarded as the first
liberal
. That’s because he tried to address why people should obey their monarch in terms of both logic and their rights, rather than the prior “because God says you should.” His famous conclusion was that without a government, life is so “nasty, brutish and short” that any ruler is preferable.

Hobbes was right. Human beings
need
a system of justice. When fair use of the formal legal system is denied to them, as it is in the ghetto, they have no choice but to develop their own
informal
system of justice. People start looking out for one another
themselves
. Without some sort of
peaceful
arbitration process, the only response to wrongdoing is making sure that motherfucker thinks twice the next time. Just like in the Wild West, if you can’t sue the person or call the cops on him, you’ve got no choice but to turn to
violence
. It
happened all the time. People from a young age enforced the law of the streets upon one another.