By and large I count myself among those who believe
that what is generally promoted as a race discussion usually ends
up a waste of time. Now that we’re past Black History Month, during
which columnist Clarence Page suggested that his PBS NewsHour
viewers might look to the 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin for racial
guidance, maybe we can also get past sepia-toned reminiscences of
slavery and eulogies for Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King to the
real grainy Technicolor ways folk live today, or try to. It’s an understatement
that the ravishment of the Gulf Coast, destruction of a major American
city and dispossession of its majority-black residents have set conditions
for more than talk. But that ongoing catastrophe also demands that
when we do speak, we better tell it like it is.
Whenever people say things like Hurricane Katrina “ripped the veil
off racism and poverty” I am reminded of a line from a song in Craig
Brewer’s film Hustle and Flow: “It might be new to you but
it’s been like this for years.” In fact, the film pricked my race/class
sensibilities more than anything else in the midst of the latest round
of race talk.
Shot in the working-class neighborhoods of Brewer’s hometown, Memphis,
Tennessee, Hustle and Flow is the story of DJay (played by
Oscar nominee Terrence Howard), a pimp having a “midlife crisis.”
He’s 35, the same age as his father when he died, and he fears his
life will soon be over unless he changes course.
The film’s look, feel and sound are all intimately familiar. From
the dirt on the walls of a shotgun house to the hot, wet, sticky red
clay-tinted heat of a Southern summer and the ever-present, almost
useless dirty portable fan. From the train track separating the haves
from the have-nots to the get-by job that gets you to the weekend
to the juke joint where anything happens. From the sound of the blues
– even in rap music - right down to the neighborhood, language and
attitudes, Brewer puts a face on the people that those such as Bill
Cosby wish to be invisible. Some of them are even white.
Brewer’s people could be among the 35 percent of blacks currently
living below the poverty line in the United States or the poorest
20 percent or so of Louisiana residents. Hustle and Flow reveals
what Katrina revealed: those who’ve been left to fend for themselves.
In New Orleans almost 40 percent of households, nearly all of them
black, earned less than $20,000 a year.
I have lived in either a predominately black or all-black neighborhood
for most of my forty-nine years. It is not an endorsement of segregation;
it’s just the way it is. Yet, there are a couple of things to appreciate
about longstanding southern black neighborhoods. For one thing, different
economic classes still live amongst one another. They intermix and
interact. This social interaction is represented in the film by DJay’s
relationship with Key, played by Anthony Anderson. Key, an old school
friend, has become a middle-class audio technician. In addition, many
of us move up and down – on and off the economic ladder throughout
our lives. And most demographic data not only bear out that class
intermix but also the precariousness of paycheck-to-paycheck living.
Moreover, the typical black family doesn’t conform to the 2 parents,
2 kids model. Single women head 62% of black families and 67% of black
children are born out of wedlock. Moreover, blacks more readily accept
whites into those communities than vice versa, even poor whites, even
gentrifying white “pioneers.”
Although there has been racial progress in the United States, for
many African Americans life is like ice-skating up hill. According
to the most recent American Housing Survey only 49 percent of blacks
are homeowners as compared with 76 percent of whites. Even with comparable
credit, blacks are 210 percent more likely than whites to be rejected
for a mortgage. When black borrowers are fortunate enough to get a
non-government home loan, a little less than a third of them will
have to bear high-interest sub-prime financing, which usually doesn’t
mesh well with a sub-prime car loan and/or the interest on a payday
loan. No surprise, the national foreclosure rate for blacks sits right
at 50 percent, and half of all African Americans live in unaffordable,
inadequate or crowded housing. Among people living on the street or
in their cars, 40 percent are black.
Wealth, equity, control over property – these markers of the “American
dream” are largely white privileges. At the onset of the last recession,
between 1999 and 2001, the net worth of Hispanic and black households
fell by 27 percent. As of 2002, the Pew Hispanic Center reports, the
median Hispanic household had a net worth of $7,932 and the median
black family had $5,998, while the median white family had $88,651.
And, almost a third of black households and more than a quarter of
Hispanic ones had zero or negative net worth.
The meaning of the numbers is obvious: a sizable number of households
and the individuals in them are barely getting by. And those in the
middle class are seldom permanently middle class. That is not to say
there are no recognizable class lines. Lots of black families lead
economically stable lives and have decent credit.
Yet the majority of blacks live under conditions where any little
bind affects their whole life. They are the people who lose their
sub-prime loan homes, choose between car repair or insurance, gas
or taxes, food or medicine, and frequently need an extension on the
electric or phone bill. They rent the cheapest place they can find
and try to hold on in traditional neighborhoods in the face of just
about everything – from economic redlining to strict property code
enforcement to urban pioneering to population disbursement or marginalization.
They routinely face racial profiling and aggressive, if not brutal,
law enforcement, jail and unemployability. A majority is in the South,
where 54 percent of blacks still live. Others are concentrated in
the ghettos although many cities have driven poor people out of the
core of metropolitan areas all across the country. And then there
are those holdouts who occupied the waterfront – be it the bayous,
the barrier islands, along a lake or river, because that’s where their
ancestors fled to – only to have that land taken by developers, or
a storm, because it is waterfront.
That’s why Hustle and Flow is such a notable picture. It
is not just the story of a pimp in Memphis who needs to make music.
It is the story of another city on the Mississippi delta. New Orleans
was built on race dating back to the day when the first Africans fled
out to the bayous to be free just as a runaway Jim in Huck Finn
was attempting to do. It’s that superficial sense of freedom
and abandon that still draws tourists to a battered New Orleans, although
the benefits of an economy based on the arts and nightlife never will
trickle down to everyone. That is, unless you consider the four-man
stand-up band that used to live in the Ninth Ward and is now playing
and dancing in the street on a weekend night in The French Quarters
for the money out-of-towners throw in the collection box as trickle
down economics.
The film’s climax has the police at DJay’s doorstep after his encounter
with rap mogul Skinny Black, played by rapper Ludacris. And, at the
story’s end DJay is behind bars. Neither situation is unfamiliar.
DJay is from that big neighborhood where, according to the U.S. Justice
Department, the 12 percent of African-American men ages 20 to 34 who
are in jail or prison live before and after their release; where lifespans
on average are six years shorter than those of whites; where having
the police at the door, going to court every now and then or having
a family member in jail is not so uncommon.
My father’s dad was married a number of times, legally and not. My
pop had three brothers and a sister by his mom; one brother died young,
and the other two served time on the chain gang, both for murder.
One killed a woman, the other a man, both of them black. My father’s
sisters had four sons and four daughters. Three of the males and two
of the females served time for offenses ranging from the ridiculous
to the serious. My three brothers went to jail in their youth for
non-violent offenses, and I have a few relatives in jail now. Maybe
it’s just the odds, because it almost went wrong for me many times,
but I have never been in jail overnight, although I have been handcuffed
more than a few times and in leg irons once. But I have visited more
chain gangs and work camps, jails, prisons and courtrooms than I care
to remember. Whenever I see the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke it
conjures memories of family visits to take cigars or a carton of cigarettes
to one of my uncles in the camp, or spotting someone familiar on a
road crew, or having a Sunday family picnic lunch under the pine trees
while my incarcerated eldest brother had a conjugal visit with his
girl.
This is not to cop to some inherent criminality in my family in particular
or black people in general or to offer apologies, regrets, excuses
or blame. Sometimes getting caught up with the law is as simple as
making a bad choice. Others times bad programming gets the best of
a person. Or, when folk are raised in and around violence it should
be no surprise when they commit or accept acts of violence. He or
she might be at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people
and just gets caught up in it. And there are those times when an offense
is an act of rebellion against it all, a straight-out scream because
regardless of how racists view blacks or how defeatists view themselves,
all the negative indices of black life are too huge to be coincidental.
After Katrina, rapper Kanye West famously quipped, “George Bush doesn’t
care about black people.” Most black folk believed it, and Princeton’s
professor Cornel West affirmed it, adding, “...you have to distinguish
between a racist intent and the racist consequences of his policies.”
But labeling Bush and placing the problem solely at his feet is far
too simple. Poor people of all hues are disregarded in both good and
bad weather. Though it was class more than race that determined who
got left behind in New Orleans, African Americans also take it as
a matter of fact that the class structure of this country is built
on race. Under the “racist consequences” standard, Louisiana Governor
Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat who gave the “shoot to kill” order to
a police department with a violent history, and Ray Nagin, the black
Democratic mayor who before Katrina had not factored poor people into
any of his political calculations, would also make the list of failed
leaders.
So would former president Bill Clinton, who typically polls in the
high 80 percent approval ratings with blacks. Clinton’s policies and
attitude on due process, equal protection and equal treatment – otherwise
known as civil rights – were horrible. One initiative required citizens,
mostly black, in public housing to surrender their Fourth Amendment
or privacy rights. Another was the “one strike and you’re out” policy
under which public housing residents convicted of a crime, along with
anyone who lives with them, are now evicted without consideration
of their due process rights.
Black incarceration rates during the Clinton years surpassed Ronald
Reagan’s eight years. He stumped for “three strikes and you’re out”
in the federal crime bill, for restrictions on the right of habeas
corpus and expansion of the federal death penalty, and he got them.
When Clinton went into office one in four black men were involved
in the criminal justice system in some way; when he left it was one
in three. DJay represents the one in three.
So what does all this mean? Once again art provides a clue. Hustle
and Flow depicts a society without leaders and how people cope.
Brewer likens the lead character DJay to Rocky Balboa. But I see DJay
as more like Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
Joad returns to his Oklahoma home after a stint in prison to find
that his family is leaving to escape not only the drought but also,
a state and class system that is crushing them. As the 1940 movie
adaptation of the novel begins, Henry Fonda stops in front of a country
store named for its location, “Crossroads.” DJay is at that same place,
as is his woman Shug (played by Taraji Henson), pregnant by Lord knows
who, tormented by dreams of giving birth to “dead dogs” and “nursing
a big old catfish,” worrying that her unborn child is doomed and sensing
for the first time her own creative power.
Standing at the crossroads is the obvious metaphor for where America
is today. There is a feeling across the country that we are headed
in the wrong direction and need to choose a better path.
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson said the passing
of Coretta Scott King marked the “end of a ‘black leadership’ era.”
I would mark its demise some thirty-odd years earlier. But often the
good thing about the end of one thing is the start of something new.
The idea that African Americans and the poor must have someone who
speaks for them is at the least annoying and at worst racist. Who
speaks of white leaders? And the problem with most contenders for
the role of national black leader – regardless of who they are - is
that they don’t necessarily rail against what exists. They usually
speak from a privileged perspective and often wrangle over symbolism
or shout over not having a bigger piece of the pie. But effective
social change happens when people from the bottom, speak for themselves,
put pressure on the middle and the top, promotes a set of values and
enforces them. Rosa Parks’ legacy isn’t a solitary act. Parks, trained
in non-violent activism at the Highlander School in Tennessee, is
part of a peoples’ movement that included folk like Claudette Colvin,
who at 15 was arrested for refusing to take her place on a Montgomery
bus nine months before Parks. And it wasn’t just Martin Luther King
Jr. dreaming out loud. The kids who filled the jails, the “Freedom
Riders” and the grassroots voter registrars were leaders.
African American opposition to the Iraq war today is black leadership.
All those families and individuals discouraging their kin from joining
up to fight have resulted in a decrease in black recruitment and a
crisis for the system. And it didn’t take a leader (other than George
Bush) to set them on course.
The issue of race in America is hard to face, but it is inseparable
from class, which might be why so many African Americans support the
concept of reparations. But though black communities are hit the hardest,
amid staggering wealth disparities and social insecurity rampant in
the land, they are not alone in need of repairing. W.E.B. Dubois in
a 1960 speech at the University of Wisconsin, when presented with
the question “What then is the next step?” called for ”the stopping
of a government of wealth for wealth, and by wealth, and a returning
of governmental power to the individual voter, with all the freedom
of action which can be preserved, along with an industry carefully
organized for the good of the masses of people and not for the manufacture
of millionaires.” Seven years later King, pushed by black discontent
in the cities and mass dissent from the war, called for “a restructuring
of the whole of society.” That was his Crossroads.
Some complained he was taking a radical path, but it was the only
realistic one for society, as is plain today. The path for government
now should be made clear: make the unwhole whole, not just Katrina
victims in Louisiana and Mississippi but also the victims of life-changing
storms over the past four years from Florida to North Carolina and
the millions of structurally poor Americans of whatever race for whatever
reason. Now is the time to demand serious public investment, full
employment, debt forgiveness and a national housing policy in which
homesteading is a significant part the plan.
Of course, grassroots advocacy for a new plan begins with Gulf Coast
victims. For the renters and homeowners who lost everything the demand
is simple: Homes. That is not to suggest that those who were well
below sea level for reasons of history should be encouraged to rebuild
in an unsafe area. New Orleans has the opportunity to rebuild an economically
and racially integrated city if America has the will. That is, rebuild
it in a new, more equitable way. As for the Gulf Coast rebuilding
effort, citizens should insist that federal, state and local officials
take the profit out of public works and put the money in the pockets
of those who need it most instead of making rebuilding efforts into
another welfare program for millionaires.
Finally, while promoting Hustle and Flow on the The Late
Show with David Letterman last year, Terrence Howard commented
that the Hurricane Katrina victims in that city were “waiting on someone
to give them something, instead of doing for themselves.” If he was
referring to those trapped on roofs, in attics and at overcrowded
shelters, he was way off base. If he was referring to the need for
poor people to organize, make a demand and speak and represent themselves,
he’s right.
Kevin Alexander Gray is president
of the South Carolina ACLU and contributing editor to Black
News in Columbia, SC.. Contact him at [email protected].