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My Brother Moochie: Regaining Dignity in the Face of Crime, Poverty, and Racism in the American South - Hardcover

Bailey, Issac J.

 
9781590518601: My Brother Moochie: Regaining Dignity in the Face of Crime, Poverty, and Racism in the American South
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1590518608 ISBN 13: 9781590518601
Verlag: Other Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

A rare first-person account that combines a journalist’s skilled reporting with the raw emotion of a younger brother’s heartfelt testimony of what his family endured after his eldest brother killed a man and was sentenced to life in prison.
 
At the age of nine, Issac J. Bailey saw his hero, his eldest brother, taken away in handcuffs, not to return from prison for thirty-two years. Bailey tells the story of their relationship and of his experience living in a family suffering from guilt and shame. Drawing on sociological research as well as his expertise as a journalist, he seeks to answer the crucial question of why Moochie and many other young black men—including half of the ten boys in his own family—end up in the criminal justice system. What role do poverty, race, and faith play? What effect does living in the South, in the Bible Belt, have? And why is their experience understood as an acceptable trope for black men, while white people who commit crimes are never seen in this generalized way?
 
My Brother Moochie provides a wide-ranging yet intensely intimate view of crime and incarceration in the United States, and the devastating effects on the incarcerated, their loved ones, their victims, and society as a whole. It also offers hope for families caught in the incarceration trap: though the Bailey family’s lows have included prison and bearing the responsibility for multiple deaths, their highs have included Harvard University, the White House, and a renewed sense of pride and understanding that presents a path forward.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Issac J. Bailey is an award-winning journalist and the James K. Batten Professor of Public Policy at Davidson College. He has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Charlotte Observer, Politico Magazine, Time, and many more, and has appeared on NPR, CNN, and MSNBC. Bailey was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has taught journalism and applied ethics at Coastal Carolina University. He currently lives in Myrtle Beach with his wife and two children.

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MONSTERS

I held my thirteen-year-old son’s chin between the index finger and thumb of my right hand, squeezing and lifting it ever so slightly to make sure our eyes locked. Our faces were so close I’m sure he could smell my breath, feel the spittle from my mouth.
“I can’t tell you how angry I am,” I told him in a barely audible voice. If I yelled, I knew I’d lose control.
He was nearly my height and athletic, a nationally ranked high jumper and middle-distance sprinter. I was still built like the football player I had been a couple of decades earlier. I wanted him to feel that physical difference like he never had.
“I can’t tell you how angry I am right now,” I repeated.
  
The slightest tear began welling up in the corner of Kyle’s right eye. I let his chin go and left him alone in his bedroom, though, sadly, not because of what I had almost done, but because I wanted to do something more to cause real tears, because I wanted to ignore that my wife, Tracy, told me hitting him would be wrong, and ineffective, because I wanted to literally shake maturity right into him—because I so desperately wanted to save him from . . . I’m not even quite sure what. All I had caught him doing was being a teenager, being less than honest with me one too many times, letting his grades slip a little, arming himself with a more defiant attitude as if to announce his newly discovered manhood to the world. Still, he’s well on his way to becoming a better man than I’ll ever be. And yet, my instinct was to crush his soul to save his black body from some undetermined future harm that may never materialize.
He was born in 2001, the year researchers said we crossed a Rubicon, when fully a third of young black men Kyle’s age were projected to end up behind bars if we didn’t make significant changes in the way we treat them, and how they treat themselves. It wasn’t that statistic that scared me, though. It was what I had long known, and why when Tracy and I decided to have kids, I initially wanted a girl.
I was afraid of black boys. The image of them was everything I didn’t want to be.
The shameful truth is that a not insignificant part of my mind had so thoroughly absorbed the ugly myths about black boys, I seriously wondered if violent behavior was the result of an immutable genetic reality unique to those born black and male like me.
I was a black boy who grew up with eight black brothers, and a nephew raised like a brother, along with two black sisters. While researchers might turn out to be right, and a full third of young black men might end up in jail or prison at some point in their lives, it’s already been worse for us. Half of the black boys in my immediate family ended up behind bars. I spent much of my early parenting years trying to deny that the shame of that reality had any effect on my treatment of my only son. I was lying to myself.
I knew it almost instantly when I walked out of Kyle’s room and downstairs and remembered the years-long debate within my family about why some of us went astray. Half of my family seems convinced our disparate outcomes resulted from my mother’s decision to not beat the youngest, those who got into the most trouble, the way she had beaten the rest of us. That belief is rooted in how black people were treated as slaves in the American South and the Bible most black people—nearly 80 percent of black Americans self-identify as Christian, more than any other group in a nation in which religious identity is undergoing a transformation—read and swear by. I can’t count the number of times I heard the words “black people!” in exasperation at the sight of another black boy who dropped out of school or a black man milling around at the park with a tall can of Schlitz Malt Liquor in a brown paper bag. They weren’t individuals who had made wrecks of their lives or succumbed to overwhelming challenges; they were representations of the black race. That’s the way
many of us spoke about struggling black men. Even in the black churches I attended, Father’s Day was used more often as a scolding for deadbeat dads than a celebration of fathers working twelve-hour shifts in a nearby factory to keep the lights on.
I never said such things out loud. But it doesn’t mean I didn’t grow up believing them, too. Deep into adulthood, I thought I was one of the progressive ones—until I almost beat my son for no good reason. About a week after the encounter with Kyle, a cop in a South Carolina high school made national news for assaulting a black teenage girl who had refused to put away her cell phone. He threw her around as though tossing trash in a Dumpster. I was horrified and outraged and argued with anyone who tried to deflect attention from what that officer did.
“No, she was not the problem, it was the adults,” I said loudly. “She did what teenagers since the Stone Age have done, get under the skin of adults.”
What I didn’t say is that too many black parents treat their kids the way that cop treated that teenage girl, with a kind of desperate hatred born of a warped sense of love. I’m not just referring to extreme corporal punishment, the kind on display during the Baltimore riots when a black mom was deemed heroic for being caught on TV wailing on her wayward son. It’s also because despite our loud protestations, many of us don’t think we’ve been fully accepted in this still largely white-dominated society. Unruly, nappy-headed kids in our midst make us think we never will. That’s why so many of us are more comfortable when our kids fit, rather than reinvent, the mold.
We are willing to beat our children to near death if that’s what it takes to get to a successful adulthood. When they step out of line, we first wonder if we spared the rod too much, not if we didn’t give enough hugs. We are willing to call them the ugliest names, label them as thugs, see them as monsters, likely out of an effort to prove to others that, yes, we, too, believe in personal responsibility; we, too, can do right and be right and worthy of their respect. Before that awful day with my son, here’s what I had done to prove I was one of the proverbial good black people: I married Tracy Swinton. We took precautions to not have kids before we were ready. We bought a house, then planned to bring kids into our world. We decided we wouldn’t be working full-time jobs simultaneously because we wanted a lead parent home with our children. That decision caused us financial stress—it got so bad we had to dig out coins from between the couch cushions to buy gasoline—but we thought it was the right thing to do. We worked hard to advance in our careers, me as a journalist, Tracy as an educator and consultant who earned a doctorate in education and founded a nonprofit literacy program to help at-risk kids. We joined a church, did community work, kept our kids in the presence of good influences. We volunteered in the schools and showed up for performances and parent-teacher conferences. We monitored their homework and responded every time a teacher had a report, good or bad. We cheered at their sporting events, provided incentives to keep them inspired, implemented various forms of discipline—took away privileges, instituted earlier bedtimes, unleashed a plastic ruler on an open palm—and hugged them and told them we loved them, that we expected great things from them because they could accomplish just about anything they wanted. And despite all of that, I was standing in my son’s room believing hurting him was the way to save him from dangers that had yet to manifest.
I...

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Verlag
Other Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1590518608
ISBN 13 
9781590518601
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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