Someone got really angry at me last week. She asked me to “defend” Chief Keef and I said no. I declined to engage with her not because Chief Keef isn’t “worth” defending but rather because he is a proxy & therefore irrelevant. What this woman really wanted me to do was to condemn Keef. I won’t do it. [Full disclosure: I’ve been asked to appear in the media to talk about Keef & have declined too.]

Many people cringe when they watch Chief Keef’s video for his song “I Don’t Like.” Some people find their fears of young black men confirmed by the images that they see. Others rage against him for embodying the worst stereotypes attributed to black boys. Are we to believe, however, that the negative ideas that people have about young black men originate with Keef and his videos? Come on. Those stereotypes and ideas predate Keef by several generations. The cultural work of racism that set the stage for dehumanizing black people has its roots in the 19th century. Keef really didn’t make this world; he’s inherited it and we are all culpable for this.

If you are taking to the media or the pulpit to skewer Keef, you are wasting your time. It is easy to rant and much more difficult to propose constructive solutions for the social problems that give birth to the destructive realities that Keef raps about and that he lives.

Kevin Coval gets at this in the preface of his new chapbook More Shit Chief Keef Don’t Like:

Every institution in Chicago fails Black youth. Segregated and systematically inequitable, Chicago is a town where white kids exist in an increasingly idyllic new urban utopia, and Black and Latino kids weave and dodge through a war zone. The largest specter in the spectacle and circus that surrounds the city, Chief Keef has become its poster boy and scapegoat. He is a young man who looks and sounds like thousands of young people in Chicago—reared in a culture of nihilism, death, and capitalism. He is a young man who sings the demented measures and results of white supremacy, the legacy and maintenance of grand inequity. Chief Keef sings a tortured and tormented Chicago song. It is a song we need to listen to carefully.

Like some other young black men in Chicago his age, Keef has already been in trouble with the law. He’s been arrested and spent time in jail. He is also unapologetic about these things. Keef is a symptom and product of Chicago’s devastated and blighted inner city communities. This past July, Daniel Shea wrote a profile titled “Chief Keef: Lost Boys,” it’s worth reading.

Keef is just 17 years old and he is basically a commodity at this point. He performs and probably makes much more money for corporations than he does for himself. I don’t know the young man personally but I would bet that he is no different than the other 17 year old black boys that I meet and interact with daily. He is no doubt holding a lot of anger, he is probably funny & mercurial, he might be sullen & sweet, he does a lot of weed and it’s clear that he is brilliant. In other words, Keef is as Kevin points out like “thousands of young people in Chicago.”

And the truth is that thousands of young people in Chicago are being failed on a minute by minute basis. So I won’t waste my time moralizing against Keef. I will instead continue to condemn and to hold accountable the systems and institutions that are supposed to ensure the health and well-being of the thousands of youth like him.

Inspired by the story of an amazing three word letter that former Attorney General of Alabama Bill Baxley wrote to a Klan member in 1976, I wanted to share one of my favorite letters.

I am a great admirer of W.E.B. DuBois though I have rarely written about him on this blog. DuBois wrote a letter on June 26, 1957 with instructions that it be opened after his death which occurred August 27, 1963.

Last Message to the World

It is much more difficult in theory than actually to say the last good-bye to one’s loved ones and friends and to all the familiar things of this life.

I am going to take a long, deep and endless sleep. This is not punishment but a privilege to which I have looked forward for years.

I have loved my work. I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life; that what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished, perhaps better than I could have done.

And that peace will be my applause.

One thing alone I charge you. As you live, believe in life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life.

The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the great end comes slowly, because time is long.

Good-bye.

W.E.B. DuBois

Freedom [3]
by Langston Hughes

Some folks think
By burning churches
They burn
Freedom.
Some folks think
By imprisoning me
They imprison
Freedom.
Some folks think
By killing a man
They kill
Freedom.
But Freedom
Stands up and laughs
In their faces
And says,
No —
Not so!
No!

As an added bonus here’s a short clip of the great Nina Simone discussing the meaning of freedom to her (h/t Son of Baldwin)

Illinois Residents, We need your HELP!

Just a couple of days ago, Governor Pat Quinn’s vetoes of funding for several correctional facilities in Illinois were overridden in the Illinois Senate.

Now advocates are pressing hard to prevent an override in the House. We would ask that you contact as many House members as you can over the next three business days (11/30, 12/3, 12/4) and ask them to vote NO on an override.

Here is a fact sheet on the facility closures for you to share with legislators. The basic argument is that these facilities are underutilized and empty. For instance, Murphysboro contains no youth, and Tamms only contains 200 inmates. Existing facilities can absorb and manage these populations. Keeping these facilities open will result in the layoff of 530 DCFS employees, while all Department of Corrections and Department of Juvenile Justice employees affected by the closures have been, or will be offered, positions at existing facilities.

Additionally, keeping these facilities open harms vulnerable children by unnecessarily separating them from their families during a period of critical growth and development. We need the money from these facilities to prevent more children from entering into costly State foster care, protect at-risk children from abuse and neglect, and provide adoption assistance necessary to place children in safe and loving homes. Cuts in critical programs at DCFS harm children throughout the entire State.

Ultimately, we cannot afford to keep underutilized, empty facilities open at the expense of vulnerable children. In this time of budgetary crisis, it does not make sense to keep these facilities open when cost-effective alternatives exist.

Please contact your House representative. District telephone numbers can be found here. Make sure to ask them to vote NO on the override of SB 2474. Please email your House representative’s response to Laurie Jo Reynolds at [email protected] each day before the conclusion of business on 11/30, 12/3, and 12/4.

For some inspiration, please watch this fun video which is meant to encourage everyone to call your legislators about this important issue.

One of the most poignant (unexpectedly so I’ll admit) parts of our Black/Inside exhibition is a panel that lists the names of prisoners who died between 1902 and 1904 in Alabama prisons. When we discussed including this in the exhbition, I don’t think that we fully appreciated the power of the statement that we were making. We wanted to make the point that the convict lease system in Alabama and other southern states was brutal and destructive. We wanted to insure that this part of our history was not sanitized. We wanted visitors of the exhibition to understand that real people died in the convict camps and in the mines of Alabama. The fact that I found a document at a library used book sale that listed ACTUAL names of prisoners was serendipitous. The report allowed us to re-embody the prisoners who had previously been anonymous, even forgotten by history.

Below are just a couple of pages from the Fifth Bienniel Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts in Alabama (from September 1, 1902 to August 21, 1904).

I’d like to believe that this can be the beginning of a reclamation project of sorts. One where we can re-insert the names of the people who have been relegated to the dustbins of history simply because they were convicted of crime.

I’ve previously referenced Richard Wright’s brilliant photo essay “12 Million Black Voices” on this blog. The essay includes Depression-era photographs from the Farm Security Administration, selected by Edwin Rosskam. They are haunting, moving and beautiful.

Richard Wright is one of my favorite writers. I admire his gorgeous prose, his ability to distill complicated ideas, and his uncompromising politics. In “12 Million Black Voices,” he does a good job describing how white supremacy plays out in the lives of African Americans. I am currently in the beginning stages of a project about lynching and so I am re-reading some of Wright’s work.

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For information about Robert Williams, click here.

It never gets old. Working with youth produces a never-ending series of unique, poignant, hilarious, and frustrating experiences. Several weeks ago, a young man who I read books with asked me for some suggestions of historical films that depict the roots of American racism. Of course, I suggested THE classic American racist film, D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation.” After he watched the film (and I doubt that he sat through the whole thing), I received the following text: “That’s some bogus shit; it’s just some crazy white people on horses.” I burst into fits of laughter when I read what he wrote.

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The terrific Rebel Diaz have a terrific new video based on their song “Revolution.” You’ll hear them sampling the Black Panther chant in the song.

I was saddened to learn that the great Lawrence Guyot died on Friday. If you don’t recognize his name, it’s a real shame because he had a HUGE impact on securing voting rights and was a critical leader in the Black freedom movement.

I learned about Mr. Guyot in reading about the 1964 Freedom Summer. He was considered one of the “Big Eight” in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi. Others in that group included Bob Moses, James Forman, Lafayette Surney, Willie Peacock, among others. After joining SNCC in 1962, Lawrence Guyot became director of the 1964 Freedom Summer Project in Hattiesburg, Miss. He was also the founding chairman of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

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