Guggenheim

Guggenheim.  What does that mean?  I have no idea.  I know it’s the name of an art museum in New York.  I also know it’s a person’s name.  But what does it mean and if I call myself “Guggenheim” does is suddenly change who I am?

There is a very troubling effort underway, primarily in the mass of young, black inmates, to recruit these men into “the knowledge”.  As I’ve written in past blogs, both the five percenters and NOI (Nation of Islam) are growing sects in prison.  Coming on the heels of the Trayvon Martin shooting you can feel the palpable rise in racial tensions in this environment.  It’s driven by ignorance, self-loathing and envy. 

Shortly after the Trayvon Martin shooting, Fox News contributor and author Juan Williams – a black man – wrote an Op Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal.  In it, he decried the race-baiters (Spike Lee, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson) who flocked to Sanford, Florida to decry the “racially-motivated” murder of the 17 year old Martin.  Black celebrities and athletes – even a U.S. Congressman – donned “hoodies” and denounced the “open-warfare on young, black males.”  Williams asked a simple question.  If 90% of the murders of young, black males are at the hands of other young, black males, where is the outrage in the black community?

I found Williams’ argument very moving and insightful.  But Williams was not alone.  USA Today Contributor Dewayne Wickham penned virtually the same column.  Bill Cosby announced the Martin shooting was about guns, not race.  As I customarily do, I engaged a few of the guys in here in that “observation”.  What, I asked, did they think of the Williams and Wickham and Cosby theory?

“Sankofa” answered for the group of perhaps fifteen guys.  “They’re all house negroes, sucking up to the white man”.  Who is “Sankofa”, the forty-year old man making this statement?  He’s a friend of mine, Jay, a rather bright forty year old from Baltimore in the middle of a second degree murder sentence.  Six months ago Jay legally changed his “white name” to Sankofa an African-dialect word meaning “freedom”.  He has become a leader of the post-African movement.  Everything about Africa is wonderful; everything Western is vile.  Ironically, the books, the “history”, the “knowledge”, trace its roots to Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.  It is built on revisionist history and completely devoid of fact or logic.  Simply put, I know more accurate African history and current events than any peddled by Farrakhan or the revisionists who peddle their distortions in prison.  Much like the white supremacists in here with their toxic views on Judaism and their holocaust denials, it is lie and misconception . . . and ignorance to the “nth” degree.

I recently read a book by Stanford University professor Richard Ford titled “Rights Gone Wrong”.  Ford, a black scholar, offered a detailed explanation of what he called, “The Balkanization” of the Black community.  He argued that much of the civil law created to stop discrimination and the criminal law created to end drug dealing and gun violence in the inner-cities was racially neutral and well-intended.  However, its application and abuse by parties on both ends of the political spectrum brought us to our current climate of racial toxicity.

The Black community, he argues, is not a monolith.  It is deeply split by those blacks who have reached educational and economic parity with the white middle and upper middle class versus uneducated, poor blacks.  Get an education, get a good paying job, and a middle class black family looks – and behaves – like a similarly situated white family.

As I’ve detailed numerous times in this blog, I struggle to understand what it means to be black in America.  For many of the young men whom I’ve met and befriended I realize their life experiences were so vastly different from the ones I tried to provide my own sons.  And there is no doubt that we are a nation with deep racial wounds and lingering prejudices.  The condition of poor black families in America is deplorable.  That a young black man has a better chance of being incarcerated than being a college graduate is disgusting and should shame every decent American, but the growth of “African” revisionist thought in prison is not the solution.

How dangerous is this ignorance?  Sankofa told me the other day that poor uneducated whites have it better in America than millionaire blacks.  I asked him if he knew who Charles Murray was.  Naturally, he said no.  I explained how Murray is a social scientist who has written throughout his career on the split in America along intellectual and cultural lines.  What Murray found, I argued, was that it’s the poor and ignorant vs. the wealthy and cultured.  It’s the haves versus the have-nots.

Ignorance.  Ignorance leads uneducated men in here to grasp at quick, easy to understand apologist theories for their incarceration.  Ignorance drives men to refuse to accept responsibility for their actions and to believe their criminal conduct is really a political reaction to a racist society.

Ignorance is a cancer.  It is destroying young black men in prison.  No program the government has prepared challenges this ignorance.  Only one thing can fight ignorance:  EDUCATION.

America is a divided nation.  The simple explanation is race.  But simple isn’t always right.  When a white person clutches their bag when seeing a young black man, or utters some asinine comment like “Obama hates white people” – they are as wrong – and as ignorant – as my young black friends in here.

America is a Balkanized country but it’s not Balkanized by race, but by lack of education.  Ignorance is rampant in prison.  Then again, it’s pretty prevalent in the “free world” as well. 

So I told Sankofa, and the Dominator, and Sincere and I God and Divine, to call me “Guggenheim”.   “Why?” they asked.  “Felt like I needed a new name to represent the new me”, I said.  “That’s stupid”, they told me.  Precisely my point.