It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (18 page)

Let us carry with us Amnesty’s internationally recognized definition of a political prisoner in our minds as I spray-paint a picture of
the right here, right now, and illustrate the idea, expressed by young people throughout the country at the Jena rallies, that a great majority of the 1.5 million African-Americans in prison today are political prisoners. “Free ’em all, free ’em all,” were the chants that cascaded through the crowds.

As a
teenager in Philadelphia, whenever I traveled—whether to the store, a party, or just wandered aimlessly—it was always with all of my friends… all at once. Ten of us, sometimes more, mahoganycolored saplings, hiking across concrete, exploring the gritty labyrinth of the city.

“All a y’all not go’n make it,” a woman who resembled my grandmother, all of our grandmothers, once told us as we congregated at a bus stop on Market Street in West Philadelphia. Tight coils of muted silver peeked out from beneath her brightly colored head wrap as she warned us, both with her squinting purple-black eyes and soothing singsong soprano, about our futures.

“Y’all be careful, now. They lookin’ for y’all: young Black boys. Y’all gotta know that. Avoid the traps,” she grimaced, knowing what we were up against. Roughly a decade later, at twenty-five, with most of my team of ten depleted (jailed, killed, et cetera), I find myself on similar streets, echoing sister elder, trying to find the words, if there are words, that might prevent today’s youth from becoming part of the third (or even two-thirds in some northern cities) of African-American men in their twenties that are in jail, on parole, or on probation.

The prison industrial complex, as it has come to be known, is the frigid, mechanical name for the ferocious combination of government institutions, private corporations, national policies, and cultural attitudes that have created what scholar Manning Marable dubs the “new leviathan of racial inequality that has been constructed across our country.” “New” because unlike the old leviathans of chattel slavery
and Jim Crow, this new one, as Marable observes, “presents itself to the world as a system that is truly color-blind.”

Consider Marable’s observation with what H. R. Haldeman, White House chief of staff under President Richard Nixon, wrote in his diary about his former boss’s approach to law and order:

Haldeman’s recollection of Nixon’s agenda is immensely important if we wish to understand the challenges that the post-hip-hop generation must confront. For it is Nixon’s rabidly racist “system” that is at the foothills of today’s mountain of racial injustice.

The African-American experience, since we were enslaved for longer than free, could easily be categorized as one of resistance and rebellion. The late sixties were no different. African-Americans, fed up with the decimation and exploitation of their communities, took to the streets in national protests that were often given the misnomer of “riots” by the mainstream press. The front-page images of Black rage, of course, terrified a white America for whom fear has been among its core characteristics, then and now. Harris polls conducted in the sixties reveal that 81 percent of white Americans believed that “Negroes who start riots” were to blame for the perceived collapse of law and order in the cities of America. Politicians like Barry Goldwater, an influential senator from Arizona, used this fear in his 1964 presidential run. “Law and order has broken down, mob violence has engulfed great American cities, and our wives feel unsafe in the streets.”

If politicians failed to react to the growing sense of fear they would lose their white voters, some of whom were arming themselves. During
the 1967 uprisings in Newark, for example, a group of whites led by future New Jersey assemblyman Anthony Imperiale armed themselves and patrolled Black neighborhoods in what they called “jungle cruisers.” When asked about the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Imperiale declared that “when the [Black] Panther comes, the white hunter will be ready.” As would Nixon, who had an idea of how to capitalize on white fear while simultaneously eliminating what he dubbed as “the Black problem.” Nixon’s logic: “Crime meant urban, urban meant Black, and the war on crime meant a bulwark built against the increasingly political and vocal racial other by the predominately white state,” as Christian Parenti writes in
Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis
. Additionally, the administration “linked street crime to the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement.”

James Reston, in his 1968
New York Times
op-ed, “Political Pollution,” foresaw that Nixon, during his campaign, “undoubtedly will emphasize order in the cities, for that is his best issue… he thinks he can tame the ghettos and then reconstruct them, and he may very well make reconciliation with the Negro community impossible in the process.”

Reston’s analysis was correct. To Nixon and his cronies, running a successful campaign meant appeasing white fear by promising to enforce law and order by any means, thus creating the illusion of security. As journalist and political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal writes, “promise death, and the election is yours. A vote for Hell in the Land of Liberty, with its over one million prisoners, is the ticket to victory.”

Nixon—who once told Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, “Henry, leave the niggers to Bill and we’ll take care of the rest of the world,” and complained to Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman that Great Society programs were a waste “because blacks
were genetically inferior to whites”—would take office in January 1969, immediately setting in motion a vicious system responsible for much of what we see today.

Before Nixon
could “tame the ghetto,” he would first have to prepare the troops. As president, he immediately allocated millions of dollars to local police forces and heightened the federal government’s role in local policing. In addition, police departments across the country drastically changed their training policies. Prior to this period, about half of the states in the United States didn’t have literacy requirements for their officers and, on average, barbers and hairstylists spent triple the amount of time training than cops did. As Daryl Gates, who would be the chief of the LAPD during the Rodney King beating and uprising that followed the trial, noted in a 1968 article, “the police of America have not been overwhelmingly successful in their control of riots,” and he even acknowledged that their initial efforts to “tame the ghettos” were “pretty awful.”

Nixon would respond with a plan to not only control, but to profit, as well. Nixon’s presidential crime commission found that most police departments “were not organized in accordance with well-established principles of modern business management.” Police departments around the country, starting with the LAPD, sent high-ranking officers to study business management at Ford, Rockwell, IBM, and Union Oil. Funded by the LEAA (Law Enforcement Alliance of America), police departments set up management development centers and began to embark on a campaign against the ghettos of America—one that would be gross, robust, and, because it was now in tune with “business management,” highly profitable.

Nixon’s system, in which he was able to target blacks while appearing not to, was the War on Drugs, a phrase he coined to describe his new design to enhance drug prohibition. Nixon characterized the
abuse of illicit substances as “America’s public enemy number one.” However, this war didn’t target whites who statistically used drugs at a much more alarming rate, but rather Blacks in the ghettos. Instead of fighting the causes of crime or drug use, they made sentences abnormally long and mandatory and transformed correctional institutions into punishment warehouses for the poor and Black. This Molotov cocktail of fear, brutality, and power ignited a prison boom unmatched in the history of the world. When the late Tupac Shakur rhymes in “Changes,” “Instead of a war on poverty / They got a war on drugs so the police can bother me,” he is, some twenty-five years later, responding to Nixon who declared, “I say that doubling the conviction rate in this country would do more to cure crime in America than quadrupling the funds for Humphrey’s war on poverty.” And with that brutal logic, the onslaught began.

In 1973, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller would follow Nixon’s lead by introducing the Rockefeller drug laws, which would prescribe a mandatory fifteen-year prison sentence for possessing small amounts of narcotics. To understand the effects of a law like this on the Black community, consider that in New York State between 1817 and 1981, a total of thirty-three prisons were erected. And then from 1982 to 1999, thirty-eight more prisons were constructed. New York’s prison population during the Attica rebellions in 1971 was 12,500. By 1999, there were over 71,000 incarcerated and today that number has almost doubled.

The introduction of crack into Black neighborhoods in the eighties was accompanied by a series of new legislation—The Omnibus
Crime Bill (1984), Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1986), and the Omnibus Anti-Drug Abuse Act (1988)—designed to make existing laws even harsher and more unjust. The racism apparent in these laws, which are still in place, troubles the soul. For instance, although crack and powder cocaine are pharmacologically the same drug, possession of only five grams of crack cocaine yields a five-year mandatory minimum sentence; however, it takes five hundred grams of powder cocaine to prompt the same sentence. Moreover, crack cocaine is the only drug for which the first offense of simple possession can trigger a federal mandatory minimum sentence. Yet simple possession of any quantity of any other substance by a first-time offender—including powder cocaine—is a misdemeanor offense punishable by a maximum of one year in prison. With 90 percent of those convicted in federal court for crack cocaine being Black, these laws were targeted at our communities. As Holly Sklar writes in “Reinforcing Racism with War on Drugs,” “By government count, more than 24 million Americans, mostly White, have used marijuana, cocaine or some other illicit drug in the past year. Imagine if the war on drugs targeted Whites in the suburbs instead of Blacks and Latinos in inner-city neighborhoods. Imagine if undercover cops were routinely sent to predominantly White schools and colleges to sell drugs.”

Even as the national crime rate declined, these racist policies were ratcheted up during the Clinton era and can be seen in legislation like the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, which appropriated $10 billion solely for prison construction. In addition,
mandatory minimums grew harsher. Although politicians argued that the extended prison sentences were set aside for the worst-of-the-worst criminals, the reality is dramatically different. In 1980, there were 40,000 drug offenders in prison. Today that number has ballooned to over 500,000. The vast majority of these offenders, African-Americans and Latinos, are drug users who simply need rehab rather than punishment. Many others, who may have been caught selling drugs, are petty pawns, “not the kingpins of the drug trade,” but rather impoverished “low-level sellers who are incarcerated and rapidly replaced on the streets by others seeking economic gain,” says Mark Mauer of the Sentencing Project, a national organization working for a fair and effective criminal justice by promoting both reforms and alternatives to incarceration.

Although it is often made to appear on the fringes, the observation and analysis of the gross injustices that riddle the current system have maintained a steady presence in the mainstream. In the mid-nineties, a
USA Today
special report on the War on Drugs acknowledged, among a myriad of other injustices, that:

Or, perhaps Nino Brown (played by Wesley Snipes), the leader of the Cash Money Brothers in the 1991 Mario Van Peebles film
New Jack City
, said it best: