by Radio Raheem

G21 Staff Writer

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a cathedral
of words

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OAKLAND, CA, USA - Well, it took a long time for him to cop to it and I'm as outraged by the circumstances as any of y'all, Homies, but our Esteemed Editor has finally come around to admitting something I've asserted in this column for nine years now: It's dangerous in America, "the land of the free", to be Walking While Black.

Two things get to me about his case and his admission:

1. It took him so long to really get the full implications of what I've been sayin', and
2. That passage where he says he's now paranoid just walking down the streets. I felt like askin', "Haven't you always been, Brah?" I have.

I have always gone about my daily life, walking, driving to and from work, hangin' out in the club, knowing that a group of White cops could just charge in at any moment and take me away - simply for being a free Black man. They don't need "probable cause", evidence, witnesses or jack-shit, Bro'. They can make it up as they go along and most juries in America will take their damned word for it that you must be guilty simply because they took you in. You're Black, ain't you? You must have been doin' something wrong.

And that's also why I find our Editor's simply soldiering on with this magazine, going back to his removed style of editorializing, so amazing. If that shit had happened to me the way it happened to him, I'd want to burn something down or see somebody else getting' some kind of payback! I'd make damned sure somebody did if they did me dirt like that.

But I also know how the Rod man thinks. For him the very definition of life is misfortune. So he just takes this latest outrage in stride. But I'm here to give him some reasons why that is not the correct or even the "rational" (one of his favorite words) response in this case.

Firstly, you have to agree that we have a duty to fight every single injustice we can. Injustice, Homes, is like cancer. If we don't beat it back, it just thrives and spreads. That means every single injustice must be met as if it were all the accumulated injustices of the world. It has to be rectified and it has to be cleansed from the body politic. It's that kind of thinking that has made me this magazine's chief and most visible advocate for reparations.

Secondly, though I know that some folks have a problem with anger, anger can be a constructive and dynamic tool for social change. So I say don't take a false arrest, which was obviously racially motivated, in stride. Be angry! Fight back!

I know a guy, a brother, on the Oakland Police force who says that a lot of White cops, particularly those that come in from the suburbs in Walnut Creek and Concord [CA.] just have it in their minds - as far as racial profiling goes - that whenever you see a White person and a brother together socially it just has to be about drugs. That's their mindset, Homes. They can't imagine any other reason for Whites and Blacks to hang together except a crime. Put another way, these kind of twisted cops assume it is a crime for Whites and Blacks to hang together. You see where I'm comin' from here?

The only way to fight this kind of twisted and bigoted thinking is to fight it; to stand tall against the notion that apartheid is the status quo.

My third point is important. One of your chief traits - (Note, the article is for all of y'alls consumption, because I think it contains thangs we all need to talk and think about. But, as I've done in the past, I'm addressing it specifically to Rod, our editor and publisher. Don't worry, he's used to me baggin' on him.) - one of your chief traits is that you go against the perceived status quo in so many ways. One of the ways you do that is that you are a natural born mixer. I think that makes it easy for you to mix it up in so many different countries and cultures. But at the same time, my brother, you gottah understand that that very trait makes you suspect to the kind of Neanderthals that want to become cops. As we used to say, they is unclear on the concept.

The more that kind of person knows about you, in fact, Homes, the more they are gonnah dislike you. I been reading about your latest haps in your "Glass House". Let's put the picture together here for a second:

• You be working with Vietnamese and Arabs,
• You are now sharing a loft with a White woman
• You hang around with drag queens, who throw benefit shows to help you pay off your lawyer.

Get real, my brother! Doesn't that sound like what the knuckle-draggers would quickly label a "social deviant"?

It does to me, anyway.

Let's put it this way: Vietnamese are slowly being accepted into the culture. But there's that stereotype still out there about Black folks and Asians supposedly not getting along that you're up against. But - and worst yet! - Arabs are the lowest rung of the social ladder of hate right now in these United States. Most people immediately think "terrorist" when they see a damned person from the Middle East. You could have made a much better choice of employer, my brother. It goes without sayin' what living with a White woman brings up in the minds of the sick.

My point is, even if I didn't know you published a magazine that was alternative and that certain people might (correctly) call subversive, your very associations would make me put you on a list of unusual people to keep an eye on, Brah. Social deviant.

If you were just hangin' out on a street corner drinkin' a forty with the other unemployed brothers, the cops wouldn't look your way twice. But not you, my man. Never you. You gottah mix it up with a bunch of "undesirables" and "aliens" and such.

So as I see it, and I think I have to the right to bring this up having been your friend this long time, you got one of two choices:

1. Change your lifestyle and start hangin' and working with more socially predictable - and therefor respectable - people, or
2. Go on living that eccentric brand of existence you have been and get used to taking lots of heat.

My man WOLF DEVOON compared you to Oscar Wilde on the "VOX POPULI" page a couple of weeks back. Well, brother, you may remember that Oscar Wilde spent a good deal of his time in the law courts. So you can go that route, but it's gonnah cost you.

Tanya and I were sitting around the kitchen table talkin' about this latest mess you got yourself into the other day, my brother. I had to admit to her that - considering the direction the Republican right, the conservative fundamentalist Christians egging them on, and the corporate interests looking to rape us are pushing this country (backwards) - things were bound to get a lot worse for people like you. I can understand more completely why you were harping for so long on wanting to get the hell outtah this place. I really can.

I know for a fact that you ain't gonnah change and the political and social climate in this country is rapidly changing in opposition to everything you stand for and believe in. That would mean that something has to go. In this case, it might well have to be you. I pray that things down there in New Orleans, as corrupt as everyone knows them to be, ain't so bad that where you have to go is jail because I know you didn't do anything wrong. But I also know, as you are learning, the horrible power of racism. There are lots of brothers behind bars whose only infraction was Walking While Black.

So I think it's important that you don't just accept this, that you do fight it, that you keep a righteous anger about this case alive in your breast. I think it's important that you NEVER forget what happened to you, that you never forget that it could have happened to any Black man on the streets of New Orleans that night simply because he was a Black man. I think it's important and necessary that you hold onto some anger about this and use that anger to help wage the fight for social justice and real human rights for all people, not just White people or rich people or people in power. Let those ten days that you spent in jail for Walking While Black, your weekly drug tests at that courthouse down there in Crackerland and your legal fees and other losses be a down-payment on a struggle for justice. It's important.

COMMENTS? QUESTIONS? Why not e-mail Raheem?