I spent my childhood watching my brother get arrested. Once, when I was 12 we were just walking down the street, Monte and I, and a cop we saw regularly came up to us.
Are you Monte Cullors? he barked.
Yes, my brother responded.
And that was it. In front of me he handcuffed Monte and took him away. I had no idea what for. To this day I have no idea what for. All I know is that this was a common occurrence. And not just with Monte. It’s hard for me to think of a boy in my neighborhood who didn’t spend time in juvenile hall, or wasn’t arrested at least once.
It is interesting to me now to think that at the time this was happening, a time when my mother worked multiple jobs that still barely amounted to a livable wage, a time when Alton had been closed out of the industry he’d given his life to and no replacement had been offered or created, and a time when Gabriel was given prison rather than treatment, Americans, Black and white, were deeply involved in the final push to end apartheid in South Africa. At his trial at Rivonia, Nelson Mandela would say the following in his famous “I Am Prepared to Die” speech:
Our fight is against real, and not imaginary, hardships . . . poverty and lack of human dignity. . . . The lack of human dignity experienced by Africans is the direct result of the policy of white supremacy. White supremacy implies black inferiority. Legislation designed to preserve white supremacy entrenches this notion. . . .
They do not look upon them as people with families of their own; they do not realize that they have emotions—that they fall in love like white people do; that they want to be with their wives and children like white people want to be with theirs; that they want to earn enough money to support their families properly, to feed and clothe them and send them to school.
He continued,
Poverty and the breakdown of family life have secondary effects. Children wander about the streets of the townships because they have no schools to go to, or no money to enable them to go to school, or no parents at home to see that they go to school, because both parents (if there be two) have to work to keep the family alive. This leads to . . . a growing violence which erupts not only politically, but everywhere. Life in the townships is dangerous. . . .
Africans want to be paid a living wage. Africans want to perform work which they are capable of doing. . . . Africans want to be allowed to own land in places where they work, and not to be obliged to live in rented houses which they can never call their own. Africans want to be part of the general population, and not confined to living in their own ghettoes. Africans want a just share in the whole of South Africa; they want security and a stake in society. . . .
Above all, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent.
In almost every way, Mandela speaking in 1964 at the trial at Rivonia could have been one of our leaders speaking for Los Angeles in 1992, the year of the uprising. Monies were being spent unequally for schools. Our programs were cut. Our parents had the most meager of jobs. Our families were torn asunder. I begin to realize this when I am provided a basis for comparison. Like the one I get when I am still in middle school at Millikan.
There, I am close friends with Tiffany, a white girl who goes there. She, like the other children, lives in Sherman Oaks and there comes a day when she invites me home with her for dinner. I go. And as the sun begins to set, we, the whole family plus me, gather in a fully separate dining room and the sweet, round man who is her father asks us about our day, what we learned, what we cared about and dreamed of for ourselves. Have you thought about what you want to be when you grow up, Patrisse?
It is incredible. Who asks children such things and over a well-set table where all the family has gathered to eat, converse? I’ve only seen that in movies, on the TV shows I love, 90210. But this is real life and here I am.
Have I ever known such a moment in my own home? My mother is gone before 6:00 in the morning each day and home after 10:00 at night. This is our life. This has always been our life. And while we live and we love and we laugh, there is also an unmitigated and unmitigating arc of pain that is there, has always been there, just below the surface. We suspect that things are not supposed to be this way but we aren’t sure what the other way is.
But in any case I am having dinner at my friend’s home, at her table, with her parents and I will tell you now that the sweet, round man, the father who asked his daughter—and me!—about our day and our dreams, I will tell you that over a few visits and discussions about life and where I lived we, he and I, come to realize that we know each other, the father and I. Or, at least he knows my mother.
He is, this father, this gentle inquisitor of my days and my dreams, to put it frankly, our family’s slum lord. He owns many buildings there in our Van Nuys hood, our poor hood. Our colored hood. Our building is one of the ones he owns. He is the very same man who allowed my family to subsist without a working refrigerator for the better part of a year. The coincidence is so shocking to me. I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing. I think if I say something, someone would think I was making it up, eating a big meal with a friend whose sweet father doesn’t care that my family has no way to do the same. I could understand someone thinking I was lying, embellishing, at the least, for dramatic effect.
But I wouldn’t have been. And I’m not now.
It is as true as the fact that our Van Nuys neighborhood, bordering as it did the wealthy white neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, was ground zero for the war on drugs and the war on gangs. There could be no spillover of us, the others, the dark others. We, our poverty and our music and our different foods and our reminders that they, the residents of our pretty adjacent neighborhood, were wealthy only at our expense, could not seep into the neat white world of Sherman Oaks. Of course that’s not what they said, that they didn’t want to be reminded of what it took to keep themselves rich.
It was the 1990s and what was mostly said—in carefully chosen language—was that being born Black or Mexican was enough to label you a gang member, a dangerous drug-involved criminal. And there were few leaders, save for perhaps Maxine Waters, saying that it was all bullshit. A group of kids hanging out in the street—because there were no parks and rec, no programming, nothing except sidewalks and alleyways to hang out in—became a gang. And it was mostly boys rounded up in those years. Boys, the initial wide swath of collateral damage in the war on gangs, the war on drugs, both of these names code for round up all the niggers you can.
There was no education plan for us—school budgets had been decimated and a decade before Reagan had declared ketchup was a vegetable so that’s what we were fed, we who counted on school breakfast and lunch to get through the day. With no education plan for us or thought about us becoming arbiters of our own destiny or self-determining contributors to an economy designed to reward only a few, the only plan left for us was prison or death.
If we did not die, we could go to prison, where we could work for the State of California and corporate brands we could not afford to buy. And the apprenticeship for this kind of work, the work that gets done in prisons, it started young. It started when Monte and his friends were way little. Little boys were cycled in and out of detention centers, places where they were trained and tracked, readied for longer stretches in prisons far away. They were often beaten and abused, regularly humiliated by having to strip, piss and shit publicly, left to discover their sexuality in the presence of people who hated them, and then they were sent back out to tell people they were hard, they were strong and they were a human testimony to other little boys: This is your future. Get ready. Man the fuck up.
And although I don’t agree with this approach to public safety, I suppose it could be argued forcefully that the removal of one difficult person, the local thief or bully, perhaps, makes a community more safe.
But for us, for Black people, the mass incarceration of first our fathers and later our mothers made our lives entirely unsafe. There were almost no adults who were there, present to love and nurture