Michael Eric Dyson (12 page)

It is also ironic that Cosby seems to justify the shooting by police of a black man who steals a piece of pound cake. Most black folk surely don’t approve of stealing and certainly want criminals removed from the community, especially violent ones who menace neighborhoods. Yet, too many of us understand the nexus between poor schooling, severely limited life options and the subsequent self-destructive choices made by desperate young men. Moreover, despite a strong desire to see criminals arrested, black folk are justifiably wary of police who often seem incapable of distinguishing legitimate criminals from law-abiding citizens who call the police for protection—not for harassment or brutality. Years ago, Cosby understood the complex social arrangements that provided the backdrop for explaining certain forms of criminal behavior. He also understood how disparities in money offered differing brands of justice.

Cosby’s blistering, brilliant analysis captures the harsh, excessive and unjust penalties imposed on poor blacks. It also situates in its historical and racial context the criminal justice system, and clarifies the link between class and justice. Of course, Cosby’s powerful critique of the two-tiered justice system, one for the wealthy, the other for the poor, offers another jarring contrast between his past thought and his present practice. For instance, while condemning the black pound cake stealer, Cosby stood by Martha Stewart’s side, and showed up in court to support her, even though she fit Cosby’s description of a person with huge resources who buys justice and whose crime, perhaps, has a more harmful effect
than the man robbing a candy store or stealing a piece of pound cake.

The disparity in the distribution of justice is painfully apparent in the case of black males. From 1974 to 2001, the percentage of black males who had been in state or federal prison increased from 8.7 percent to 16.6 percent, while the percentage for white males went from 1.4 percent to 2.6 percent during the same period. The percentage of black women who had been in state or federal prison rose from 0.6 percent to 1.7 percent, even as the rate for white women increased from 0.1 percent to 0.3 percent.
⁶⁹
Blacks are six times as likely as whites to have gone to prison at some time in their lives. If the trends hold up, one out of three black males born in 2001 will be imprisoned at some point in his lifetime. In 1974, that number was one out of eleven. Only 5.9 percent of white males born in 2001 have a chance of imprisonment in their lifetimes. For black females, the number is 5.6 percent and for white females, a paltry 0.9 percent.
⁷⁰

And when one considers the relation between education and incarceration, things look even bleaker for black men. According to the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) report “Cellblocks or Classrooms? The Funding of Higher Education and Corrections and Its Impact on African American Men,” we have a lethal public policy of prizing prisons over education.
⁷¹
There is a swelling prison industry that is sweeping ever larger numbers of blacks into local penitentiaries. The more black bodies fill the jails, the more cells are built and the more revenue is generated, particularly in the rural white
communities where many prisons are located. The prison-industrial complex literally provides white economic opportunity across the class strata, from the lower- or working-class maintenance worker, the moderately middle-class guard and the solidly middle-class prison executive to the wealthy merchants of incarceration capital who manufacture and produce prison life. In 1995 alone, 150 new prisons were constructed and filled, while 171 more were expanded.
⁷²

Big money is at stake when it comes to making a crucial choice: to support blacks in the state university or the state penitentiary. As the report makes clear, we have chosen the latter. During the 1980s and 1990s, state spending on corrections grew at six times the rate of state spending on higher education. By the end of the last century, there were nearly a third more black men in prison and jail than in colleges and universities. The number of black men in jail or prison has increased fivefold in the last twenty years. In 1980, at the dawn of the prison construction boom, black men were three times more likely to be enrolled in college than incarcerated. In 1980, there were 143,000 black men in jail or prison and 463,700 enrolled in higher educational institutions. In 2000, there were 791,600 black men in jail or prison, while only 603,032 were enrolled in colleges or universities. It’s not a matter of whether “Junior” stole the pound cake; it’s a matter of whether he can get into a school that will train him to cook rather than incarcerate him because he stole when he was hungry.

None of this is meant to dismiss black crime or serve as an apologia for destructive behavior, but it is necessary to underline
the social and personal forces that drive criminal activity, even as we fight against an unjust criminal justice system that targets black men with vicious regularity. I speak as one who has been a victim of crime. As it is with most victims, I can remember the most recent event, though more than twenty-five years ago, with chilling accuracy.

“Give me yo’ money, nigga,” a voice icily demanded of me as I walked with a female companion on a hot summer night in Detroit in 1977.

I had barely glimpsed in my peripheral vision the approach of his grim, steely figure—young, black and male like me—before he pressed his demand on us, ominously backed by a coal black .357 Magnum. The threat evoked by his sudden appearance choked my vocal cords, and squashed any fantasies I may have had of heroic action under desperate circumstances. I hardly managed a reply, which, by tone and terseness, was calculated to inform him that we had no money (why else would we be walking near midnight in the ghetto neighborhood where the ’67 riots began?) and to cushion the rebuke he would undoubtedly feel with my admission.

“Man, all I got in my pocket is a dollar and thirty-five cents,” I uneasily pleaded, praying that my precision about my indigence would force him to acknowledge that we were poor targets for an armed robbery.

“I don’t believe you,” he angrily protested. “Now give me
all
yo’ money.”

My companion and I grew tenser, fearing that we were about to meet the fate of so many others who failed to have the goods when robbers came calling in Detroit, then known
as the murder capital of the nation. By now, the hand that held our assailant’s gun was visibly trembling, as much, I sensed, out of fear as out of frustration that we had no money. His quaking posture betrayed a vulnerability I desperately sought to exploit, hoping I might forge a bond of racial empathy with him beyond whatever forces drove him to assault us.

“Man, you don’t look like the type of brother that would be doin’ something like this,” I hastily offered.

“I wouldn’t be doin’ this, man,” he exclaimed, seemingly as surprised by his own willingness to explain his actions as by my desperation in provoking his response. “But I got a wife and three kids and we ain’t got nothin’ to eat.”

Then came the cruel twist to his rationale for robbery, the partial cause of so-called black-on-black crime contained in his near-repentant revelation.

“And besides, last week, a brother did the same thing to me that I’m doin’ to you.”

Perhaps the irony lying awake in his own words burdened his conscience. Maybe it nudged him to reevaluate the laws of street survival that turn the victims of crime into its perpetrators. Or perhaps he took pity on our frightened but sympathetic faces. Whatever the case, he allowed us to flee from his potentially harmful grasp. We thanked God and our lucky stars, but only after we were at a safe enough distance to escape should he change his mind.

Too many others, particularly black men, are not as fortunate as I was that night. I know that’s what angers Bill Cosby, in part: the sense that the carnage has become routine, perhaps acceptable. With chilling redundancy, black males are
dying at the hands of other black males. The mutual harming of black males has furnished the themes of too many films to count, and too many rap narratives as well. The situation for black males, especially juvenile and young adult males, has darkened the outermost regions of hopelessness. Terms usually reserved for large-scale social catastrophes—terms like “genocide” and “endangered species”—are now applied to black men with troubling frequency.
⁷³

More foreboding is the common belief that relief appears nowhere in sight. There are over fifteen million black males in America, and despite the success and happiness that some enjoy, many others are snared in unhealthy and unproductive lifestyles. Matched in extremity by the outsize cultural attainments of figures like LeBron James or, for many, Bill Cosby, millions of ordinary, anonymous black males are robbed of social standing and personal dignity by poverty and racial injustice. Often, these men are left to fend for themselves and their families with little more than mother wit and diligent labor that is poorly rewarded. Still others seek more satisfying and immediate material rewards in criminal lifestyles.

The social injuries to black male well-being are indexed in the mind-numbing statistical litany whose mere recitation testifies to the crisis at hand. Black males are more likely than any other group to be spontaneously aborted. Of all babies, black males have the lowest birth weights. Black males have the greatest chance of dying before they reach twenty. Although they are only 6 percent of the U.S. population, blacks make up half the male prisoners in local, state and federal jails. An overwhelming majority of the twenty thousand
Americans killed in crime-related incidents each year are black males. Over 35 percent of all black males in American cities are drug and alcohol abusers. Twenty-five percent of the victims of AIDS are black men. Fifty percent of black men between sixteen and sixty-two are not active in the labor force. Thirty-two percent of black men have incomes below the poverty level.
⁷⁴

The situation is equally perilous for black youth, especially those trapped by the justice system. More than six in ten juvenile offenders in residential placement are minority youth. Minority youth accounted for seven in ten juveniles held in custody for a violent offense. Recently, I visited a detention center and jail for young people. Of course, most of the youth locked up—for petty thievery and, yes, for double murder—were black boys and girls. My wife and I spoke to them, and we were touched, even moved to tears, by their stories. They were young folk eager to make amends for what they had done wrong. But many of them were also hungry for love and affection. As I read Cosby’s words, I thought about these young people often trapped by forces larger than their minds can explain. They wrote to us when we returned home, and every nice thing they said about us would be said about anybody who spent just a little time with them. Here are some of the things they wrote to me after my visit, in their own spelling, their own voices, which speak to the deep need our youth have to be loved, held and redeemed. They are responding to questions posed to them by the wonderful woman who runs the literacy program.