Audubann’s Weblog

I recently had a conversation with a few associates who were Caucasian. Some lived in the southern United States and some lived in the northern U.S. They said that African-Americans in urban areas complain a lot, but don’t vote. Also, that they were too lazy and ignorant to inform themselves of the issues so that they could vote correctly if they did go the voting polls. In vain, I tried to explain to them that many minorities in urban areas are impoverished and with poverty often comes substandard educations. They either did not understand the issue or just did not care. However, citizens need to understand and care. If I could have informed it to them in writing, I would have done so as follows.

It was a sweltering August night and the buzzing street lights seemed to add to the heat. As I came around the corner with my aunt and cousin I could see a large crowd of people in the street. There looked to be well over 100 people. My cousin was a little curious about the scene and my aunt did not seem to care at all. When we were close enough, my cousin and I stopped to watch.

A young lady was scampering in an erratic course. She was wearing shoes, white khaki shorts and a ripped t-shirt. The sweat was drinking off of her in rivulets. It was easy to see that she was very frightened and fatigued.

My cousin asked, “What going on to a nearby kid who looked to be about 14 or 15 years-old who answered, “That’s her brother.”

I was relieved that her brother had shown up. He was wearing Nike shoes and long jean shorts. He was sweating profusely and looked angry. His sister was afraid and tired and he was going to help her. “That’s a good thing,” I said aloud. My cousin looked at me like I was retarded. He often times treated me that way went I came to visit him and my aunt. I soon realized why he had looked at me that way.

The girl’s brother was skinny. He looked to be maybe a year older than myself and much smaller in size than his sister. When he reached her, his fist clenched and he hit her in the face. She stumbled a bit and struck back at him. Even though she hit him, he landed another blow on her that cause her to tremble and wobble backwards. The crowd whooped and hollered at the spectacle.

“Rip her shirt off!” someone yelled. “Yeah, rip that bitch’s shirt off!” another guy yelled. To my surprise, even the women in the crowd laughed and verbally urged on the spectacle. The boy’s sister must have heard the crowd. He punched in the face again and she cried out loud. I was surprised that she had not been crying the entire time. The two siblings reminded me of trained boxers. As the girl was gasping for air, her brother hit her again and she hunched over a bit. Quickly, the boy grabbed her shirt and pulled it hard. As he pulled with one hand, he punched her with the other. The girl started crying so loudly that she could be heard over the crowd’s cheering. She no longer cared about dodging and returning punches. She only cared about keeping her shirt on. Within a few seconds, she lost both fights. As her right breast spilled out, the crowd cheered. The girl who could not have been more than 15 years-old had breast that were well into the size of a woman’s and the sight was a shock to my thirteen year-old eyes.

The girl ran off pushing her way through the crowd. The people she ran into shouted threats and insults at her. She ran between two buildings and into an ally way. My cousin was laughing and my aunt looked annoyed at us having stopped for even less than two minutes. I looked at the kid who had answered my cousin’s question. “Why was he doing that to his sister?” I asked him. The kid looked annoyed and almost like he was going to hit me. I was thankful when he looked at my cousin first who was tall for his age. My cousin gave a slightly derisive look my way to diffuse the tension. The kid decided that I wasn’t worth trying to beat-up. “She stole five dollars from him.”

“Really,” I asked without thinking.

“That’s what I heard,” the kid responded. Another person chimed in as well.

“Yeah, that bitch always be stealing from him. He told her that he was going to beat her ass if she did it again,” said an older girl who overheard us.

All of this happened in the U.S. in the summer of 1994. It took only 2 minutes and looked to be something that went on routinely. The Chicago intersection near where we got off the bus was 77^th and Halsted Street. A current Google Maps street view of the intersection shows it to be in the same condition, except for this time, there seems to be a small parking lot with parked police cruisers. It did not occur to me at the time, but now I know that it is significant not only that a brother and sister in the streets for minutes on end over five dollars, but that the police never came. No lights flashed through the neighborhood, trying to sort out what happened.

Even in Lansing, 10 years later, the problem of apathy and ignorance plagues us. In July of 2004, I saw a man knock down another man. The man doing the knocking down towered in stature over the other. The smaller one got up and lurched at the taller one, only to be knocked down again, but this time he was bleeding heavily and did not move to get up. I called the police and described the two African-American men and was horrified at what the operator told me.

“Well sir, are they fighting now?”

“No, I the big is walking down the street and the little guy has a friend who I think and hope is taking him to the hospital.”

“Well then sir, call us back if they start fighting again.”

I was livid at this. “What! There were two men fighting right here in downtown. Two blocks away from the capital. One probably has a serious concussion. And you aren’t going to do anything?”

The dispatcher sounded irritated. “Sir, we are too busy with other things going on around the city. You said that they stopped fighting and that the injured one was being taken to the hospital. Now is there anything else?”

How can people be expected to think about voting when they cannot even depend upon their government to be concerned about their safety and health? More importantly, how did things get this way? How is it that a minority group is in such a situation that no one cares about them and they don’t even care about themselves?

I have repeatedly learned that nothing is ever as simple as it seems.

By luck, I found a book at a friend’s home that was in mint condition. The book was a dark red and on the cover was written the name Israel Zangwill and the title “Children of the Ghetto. I looked inside and saw that it had a copyright date of 1892 and was without a reprint date. I was confused. There weren’t that many African-Americans in Chicago, Detroit or New York at the time for there to even be ghettos. And Las Angeles was barely even a city at the time. My friend’s mother would not let me take the book for fear of damage, so I went to a computer lab and did some research. A Google search and book review search on Amazon showed that the book was indeed from 1892 and was about Jews. That it was a journalistic report in novel form of a study of Jews living in England.

This small drop of information empowered me with a healthier and more informed understanding. It is not that African-Americans are more violent and self-abasing than other groups. It is that we are going through what every other ethnic group has gone through already. We are clustered in ghettos and are disenfranchised by means I trust my readers already understand and so I will not go into in this document.

I have come to understand that very few people, if any are evil. Even those who make the worst proclamations about a people are not evil. Often, I do not believe that they view themselves as having any ill intent. They are misinformed and confused. Zangwill was a journalist. He wrote about a people, even if it was a fictional writing, to exposit to the world what he witnessed in his “…Study of a Peculiar People.” Even if everything was not accurate or correct about everything he reported, at least he did it. At least he cared enough to let the world know about the significance of ghettos and social issues stemming from them.

I do not know what it will take to inform others so that they have a healthy understanding of why the world is as it is. People who do not feel safe within their own families and their neighborhoods are not going to see themselves as a valid part of the legal framework for the decision making in community, save for being damned to poverty and as the enemies of the those in authority and those who enforce the will of governmental authorities.

The common response I get when I point out these issues is, “Well that isn’t my problem. I have enough things to worry about.” Much of such a response is narcissism, but to the part of it that is a valid argument, I answer that soon enough, we will be paying for our negligence to one another by way of lowered progress per person and an overall less Gross Domestic Product. People who are less educated, incarcerated and full of angst are not likely to add to the overall equity of our republic. It is my belief that an understanding of the world is easy enough to come by- a person simply needs to be informed. For that I will continue to write. I will continue to inform myself and others around me.

It is coming up on what would be my ten-year high school reunion and it has caused me to spend much time contemplating my life. Technically, I am uneducated African-American from a broken home who has even served jail time and has a brother in prison on a murder conviction and it is important that I point out that I do not have a criminal record. Furthermore, I am probably one of very few students who have ever attended MSU without ever having a high school diploma.

Due to my lack of monies and the efforts of my son’s mother and her family, I have truly learned what it means to represent one’s self in a court of law. I now understand that there are not only strict laws concerning conduct in court, but that half of the battle is in just knowing how to even file a motion correctly. I cannot fully explain what drives some people to hostility and resentment over skin color or economic class. I do not know why my son’s Caucasian grandparents have an inherent disdain for me or why his mother has sided with them. I just know that I have an obligation to raise my son in a healthy fashion and ensure that he is grows up correctly informed about the world he lives in.

To tout my own horn, I can rightfully say that I am awesome. I have battled and won in my fight to be informed. I have been graced with great intelligence and perception. At a young age, I met some men and women who worked hard to repeatedly keep me informed. Two of the names are Orson Scott Card and John Barnes. They are authors who helped me to deal with complicated moral and social issues and I met them via book gifts from teachers and loans from the library.

In the end, I just want to give back. I want for people to not only understand their plight, but to be informed and feel empowered to exercise their inherent rights and abilities. There may be thousands of journalists already in work and more in college, but few of them have seen what I have and understand these issues the way I do. Because of this, I will not stop. I won’t stop no matter how many people have yet to be informed.