Will the Selfi-stick Generation ever feel Empathy again?

Soulja Boy danced his way into internet stardom by reaching a critical mass of clicks in days with catchy hooks and addictive sing-alongs. His song superman even had the wheel-chair bound moving like their accident never happened. With him we saw the first of many who’s number of views would rocket them into the mainstream. View-count also tells a story. It narrates from start to finish what Malcolm Gladwell calls in his book The Tipping Point, “the stickiness factor”. This is a phenomena that happens when a fashion statement, word, or place is so easily digested by the public and so enticing, that it becomes a paralyzing trend to pop-culture. What I’ll share with you in the next few paragraphs took me a week to summarize into words. As with most epiphanies these days, I had it while watching a ratchet fight on WorldstarHipHop, a website famous for putting societies lowest moments on full display.

            From what I could count on camera it was easily 6 to 8 teenage girls. However, I don’t believe they even thought the video they featured in would be played over 100,000 times, an ode to Soulja Boy himself. It was March 9, 2015 and New Yorkers were enjoying unexpected jacket weather in a city known for it’s hawkish winter endings. To be exact they were in Flatbush, a rugged section in Brooklyn with as many Mcdonald’s as there is stars in the sky. However, the golden arched kingdom on Flatbush Avenue played host to two of the most heinous actions I’ve ever seen play out, a girl getting severely jumped by cowards, and the imbeciles filming them.

            Usually I skip through any ghetto fights on my feed, but the constant comments on my Facebook timeline consisting of “why did they do her like that” and “these kids are straight outta control” pulled my finger magnetically to the press play button. At any other time I’m disgusted, nose turned to the sky, enraged at footage that continues the narrative of black self-destruction. While whomever decided the best option was to capture a grainy video that afternoon, a teenage girl was consumed by the kicks and punches of her cohort for 120 grueling seconds. A ton can happen in 2 minutes, especially if your in a fight with 6 people.

            She stood up prideful, attempting to square one opposer off amidst a sea of overly pubescent girls, bravely swung with all her might one or two times, and was eventually overwhelmed by ugg boots and french manicured fists. The mob cheered on in elation as every blow sent her spiraling to the ground. She hid under a thin table for refuge. In seconds she was ripped away from the little safety the table provided, and continued to receive stomps  to the temple. More phones popped up out of the congregation as she now began to have her hair extensions torn out of her head. Before I knew it an entire group of onlookers seemed less concerned with the health of the young girl being attacked, as they were inspired by the brutality.

           Since that fateful day I witnessed the aforementioned video, at least five girls committing the attack have been arrested for charges ranging from robbery to felony gang assault. I can’t say that I’m even slightly bothered by them reaping those consequences. But what about the people who turned McDonald’s into a cockfight? Should they be held accountable? Is there a immorality charge listed in the court of law? To think that this tradition might carry on into the new millennium is deafening. Crisis, near-death, and mob beatings are all worthy of shoddy camera work by veggie brained zombies praying for their big break with a worldstar submission.

          Our beloved internet is a labyrinth full of content that can either raise your sense of togetherness or sink it lower than the titanic. I may stand alone, but I think it’s awkward that we have people such as an unnamed woman in New York, who saw a man teetering on the Brooklyn Bridge prepared to say his last good-bye’s to a cruel world, stop him for a selfie. Or in October 13, 2013 when Bahsid Mclean, severed his mothers head and then took a quick pic to commemorate the occasion. I could go on and on, but the mere mentioning of their names and stories seems like it would be exactly what they want.

         Truth be told, the selfie is a “me” thing, and since we still live in a sick world that needs monsoons of holy water, it turns the “me” into “I”. Hey, my phone is about “me” right? So, “I” have to get this footage. No way “I” am letting this slip by without shooting a video. “I” could go viral when “I” post this clip “I” took! And the seconds roll on our video recorders, with every red blink on the screen screaming validation, because this just might be it. Today I may upload the internet breaking cinema of the week, the bloodier the better. Twenty years ago we wouldn’t have had a context for all the content we consume. Today our content needs compassion.

         Every minute, youtube users upload 48 hours worth of content. 100,000 tweets are sent, Instagram users post 3,600 photos, Facebook personalities share 684,000 pieces of content, and 204,000,000 emails are distributed back and forth. And while the batons of savage beatings, blood thinning mob violence and death clips are passed, someone at the other end of the camera may just be wishing that we didn’t pull out our phones when these things are happening, but instead, pulled out our humanity.

Baltimore is the Real Life Hunger Games

If Maryland was Hunger Games, Baltimore City would be District 11. Any day you can become prey for stick-up boys, diabetes filled corner-store food, or crooked cops. Coming across people from your childhood that got swept up in this tornado is nostalgic. I refuse to see them through CNN’s eyes. Recently, I had to prove that to myself when I met an old friend released from prison. I was standing outside of the Raven’s stadium waiting for my cousin Anthony before we blew the game against the chargers last season. Between the folks selling sweaty polish hot dogs and all the recycled Raven’s gear being pitched at me, I got turned around. After a while, I saw a familiar face. It was my old pop warner football Coach Steve. He’s about 5’8” with skin like tinted windows, a pot belly, deep set eyes and a guttural voice. If you closed your eyes he sounded like a ghetto Darth Vader. I figured he must have been getting harpooned by the steamy bratwurst. I leaned in, snatched him out of his ecstasy, and hugged him. “Tariq what’s going on with you boy? How’s the family?” he asked looking inspired. I shot back, “Coach we been taking it easy you know, working and building”. Coach Steve said “Boy you looking like you taking care of yourself man I’m so proud!” Coach Steve coached in Park Heights, a neighborhood in West Baltimore notorious for dirt bike parades and day-time drive-bys all his life, so seeing a kid he coached fourteen years later was almost biblical. “I know it’s still tough out here regardless but, I’m striving Yahmean?” I retorted.

     Besides catching a stray bullet, prison was a menacing reality that Coaches like Steve lost countless hours of sleep over. In fact, according to the ACLU, 1 and 3 black males in America born can be expected to do hard time. Baltimore’s “tag em and bag em” police culture is no help in quelling the disparity. In 2007 Maryland ranked at a deadly number 7 among states that jailed people for petty marijuana possession. Behind him stood a guy looking all too familiar as well. “Is that you Dip?” I asked, peering over Coach Steve’s shoulder. “Yeah shorty it’s me, whaddup with you?” he said grimacing. I said “cooling man, same ole same ole”. Dip was Coach Steve’s oldest son who played ball with me back in the day. I remember him with the same deep electric eyes like his dad, but now they looked troubled, almost as if they had blown a gasket. A tattoo centered in the middle of his eyebrows like a bull’s-eye and his fudge skin had dusty gray glow to it.  I saw him get cursed out more by his dad than kids who got their outfits dirty on Easter Sunday. Sometimes it was brutal. We’d be having a sleepover the night before a game at Coach Steve’s house, and he would barge in the room screaming, “How the F#%k you gonna be up here playing XBOX when its hundreds of dishes in the sink?! Are you testing me M@r#$cka? Clean the kitchen before I destroy you and that damn XBOX!” And Dip would hang his head, slink out of the room and clean up. We also witnessed him meet the warm embrace of his father and he rarely heard no if he asked for anything.

    Coach Steve was an astute practitioner of tough love, and if you’d thought Dip would make a left turn in life, anybody would’ve disagreed. But again this is Baltimore, and staying out of jail is a minefield. Our conversation delved into that wrong turn and eventually, the systematic harbingers that had him caught in the vortex of the system. “Yo what you been up to Dip?” I asked. “Shorty I aint even gonna lie I was locked up for minute yo. Feds booked me for distribution.” he remarked. I interrogated him in awe, “Distribution of what? Yo you lying”. He looked square into my eyes and said “Yo I swear on everything I got booked for some bud they found in my car and I just came home one month ago” Suddenly I realized his skin and the dark cloud that radiated around him told a more complex story. “But Yo, how you get booked for 4 years off distribution of weed son?” I asked more concerned. He whispered, so as not to have his father hear me, “Man I was in West Virginia with the savage N#%gas, I kept getting violations for holding my own yahmean? So time kept getting tacked on, from the petty weed charge.” I had heard this type of situation before. At times, one prison sentence gets multiplied because of the demands for survival there, don’t always align with the rules. Dip failed to learn this lesson early on.

    Dip was now 25 years old with multiple convictions and an institutionalized mind that would take intensive care to repair. With all that being said, we both grinned optimistically at each other. We both knew that him making it to the outside was triumphant in its own right. I walked a few more yards towards the stadium with him and we exchanged phone numbers. “Yo I work with people who be coming home, just hit my phone” I said after slipping him my card. Dip nodded his head in approval as we shook hands and parted ways. He’s called me once since then, but for good reason I believe, it hasn’t been a lot of follow up on his part. The thought that he was a thug or gangbanger never ran through my mind. These are labels society puts on guys like Dip who make mistakes in dying neighborhoods where the margin for error is slim. No one’s an exception, and I mean that.

          Baltimore’s filled to the rim with these stories. Our judicial system casts such a wide net on the ghetto that anybody could get find themselves getting hauled along the shores of the prison industrial complex. What’s more baffling is that it so far it hasn’t had any positive impact on the community as far as I can see. Which is why I was saddened by the decision to pump 30 million more dollars into a brand spanking new Youth Correctional Facility. Don’t they know guys come home with the clothes on their back, plump with trauma so deep in their psyche it takes weeks just to get them relaxed in social settings? Neighborhood’s become ticking time bombs for ex-cons. Essentially they become ghostly opportunist, who have few legit opportunities. So, is the best method of increasing the safety of our neighborhoods to distribute 30 million dollars into locking another round of unsuspecting low income blacks in Baltimore? Seems like a lucrative band-aid to me. A band-aid that will eventually continue the spin cycle our communities already in. O'Malley got tough on crime in the early 2000s and that kidnapped entire families. Now either there’s a criminal gene being oozed through DNA of black folks, or we have a parasitic prison system ready to feed on anything black, brown or poor moving.
 

          This legislation speaks volumes given all the unrest lately. It says we are in well invested of the business of rotating broken men and women in and out of the system. It says that the schools who were denied Eleven million of that thirty million have no choice but to be the prep school for the youth prison. And we can consider the youth prison the D-league. So for brothers like Dip who yearn for a new lease on life they’re going to have to pull off a miracle just to stay outside those walls. And everyday that they continue to meet the adversity that comes with the label of a prisoner, the more difficult it is to be optimistic about flying straight. What’s more a concern is that  Baltimore’s similarities to Hunger Games are excruciatingly painful to see playing out. Only in this reality that’s appearing in theaters new you the Katniss Everdeens get shot, broken, spines or prison sentences for selling the same pot that students in Towson pass around in their deep dialogues about fighting climate change. May the odds be ever in our favor…

Swimming in Two Lanes: Bridging the Gap between Black Muslims and the rest of Muslims in America

I will write to you fulfilling a vow to myself to not convey my story as a scholarly treatise littered with the steel wool of statistics and intellectual vomit. I have written all my life, but this type of soul bearing has it’s strangenesses. Yet I know that there is no better time than now to write about my life. Being born Muslim in America’s race inferno is a far too complex medicine to not be taken in spoonfuls. And so, I have no choice but to give you bits and pieces of me and my life. I’ll start by taking you back into my childhood and speak of one incident that shaped much of my understandings of the issue of race within the American Muslim community.

Screen Shot 2015-05-20 at 10.50.50 AMIt was the late 1990s, and jumping off of the second floor balcony into the pool trickled through my mind. I also knew had I done it, it would have been damning to my family’s respectability. I also ran the risk of city kids, or our group in particular, the Muslim boy scouts, never being allowed to swim at Dr. Ahmad’s house again. It was clear that this was a special privilege and an act of “generosity” as we were told over and over again by Dr. Ahmad.

The most of what I can remember about him was that he practiced internal medicine. He had an unassuming stature, and what little hair he salvaged, was sprinkled strategically along the sides of his balding head. Eyeglasses sat up on the bridge of his nose with confidence. Oh, and he wore khakis too high on his waist. His face seemed to maneuver through looks the entire night. In one instance his wrinkling vanilla skin was appropriate, and under different light it told a story of No-Doz, and back breaking years of being on-call. Dr. Ahmad mistakingly substituted all his W’s for V’s due to his colorful Pakistani accent. We snickered at it but found it intriguing as well. Without question he bore the features of a long line of a once royal sand toned people who had their fare share of western dominance in South Asia throughout history. What he possessed materially payed tribute to his expertise nonetheless.

Dr. Ahmad owned a home that belonged on an HGTV special. Six plus bedrooms was a mansion in my eyes. My room at home could have fit just in his office four times over. The kitchen suggested that no one but a chef could cook there.

By the looks of the rusted gold chandeliers and winding staircases, I knew from the door that we were in another realm of social class. It was clearer after just setting out from my 2 ½ bedroom, one bath row house in West Baltimore’s Hilton-Irvington neighborhood that housed at least six people at a time, depending on who was home from college. Our house went through several cycles of repair yearly, by neighborhood handymen that always broke more than they fixed. Throughout the years it wore the expression of a ton of “I can cut you a deal on the labor, them big contractors are going to rip you off” type of negotiations. What it lacked in aesthetics we made up for in the culture my mother brought to the table through her life transformations. She had African sculptures, framed photos of Hajj, and books on anything spilling from everywhere. Despite a homicide rate that always ran in the top ten cities in the country throughout my teens, we enjoyed a level of intellectual incubation.

We huddled between the entryway and removed our sneakers on plush almond colored carpet. Man sized doors boxed us in to the left and right that seemed like portals to anywhere. Dr. Ahmad dawned a glee filled smile and ushered us in with haste. It was a pretty long walk to the pool, yet I couldn’t help but notice the arabic calligraphy paintings, and artifacts dotted along the hallways. The art was simple and ridiculous to me, only because I thought they took two brush strokes to create. They all were housed in antique glass frames with french names. I tried to count the marble ceiling lights that lit the hallway one after another but soon got dizzy. All of us paced along side him like gladiators walking towards the coliseum.  For any black kid in America, moments where you realize that it happens to be another America, where blades of grass are actually greener, and the street lights embrace your innocence, can make you or break you down to atoms.

At the end of the hallway, we entered in to a large, three story ceiling height room with a pool that belonged in a Colombian villa. I remember feeling bashful as we changed in to our swim clothes. Something felt abnormal in this. That this man, who was Muslim, had a pool in his own home. I remember thinking at that moment that we were from where kids get yelled at for eating the sweet lead filled paint on window sills, or guys earned stripes for surviving a summer in Hickey juvenile detention center. We were miles away from pizza men that get robbed for pamper money and young girls losing their innocence to wide-eyed uncles. Miles away from where the police would stop, frisk, or face plant kids in to the pavement. It was clear that in this neighborhood of Dr. Ahmad the kids mostly got in trouble when they didn’t walk “bucky” the family’s golden retriever, or were handed cold beers at 16 as a right of passage into manhood. Brand new bikes were left on lawns overnight without a worry in the world that somebody would snatch it from outside of your house, never to be seen again. Yet and still, our Muslim boy scout troop from the city avalanched on upon his spacious Baltimore county home without the slightest inhibitions. 

           We tried to hide our insecurities under murmured wisecracks and slang.Dr. Ahmad sat along our scout leader, and in a heavy accent asked him questions about our upcoming activities. After a while we were offered an orange pretzel appetizer, which we figured had to be an acquired taste, and then biryani that we inhaled like vacationers at Golden Corral.On our ride back we all chatted in a frenzy. “Yo that Dr. Ahmad he got mad money don’t he?” Askir shouted from the back of the van. “Absolutely” brother Imran, our scout leader, replied. “That’s how doctors roll.” Other over-generalizations were bartered between us. Our ride home felt longer that night, all conversation bounced back and forth from what we would do with a house that big to how we would become doctors as soon as we got home. Of course our dreams were quickly shattered as each scout was dropped at different parts of the city. Blue light police cameras flickered as if they applauded our return. Heroine addicts nodded and couples fussed their love disputes out on porches. And among all the sighs from an experience that had come to an end too soon, waited Muslim mothers and fathers in doorways, who trusted brother Imran to be the shepherd of life altering experiences.

            We would go back to Dr. Ahmad’s house several times that same year. And gradually through that, I developed great insights into more of this stark contrasting world of the inner city black Muslims and the more well to do immigrant Muslims. The more I got to know Dr. Ahmad then more I did see his humility around us the entire night, which was far different than my later encounters with foreigners. After getting through my own insecurities, I felt unconditionally welcomed.Swimming in wealthy Pakistani’s houses in 1999 is part of my foggy memory of childhood. But, I remember the feeling it brought. It seemed as if through this act of charity Dr. Ahmad had exposed us to his world. A world that many of us only saw on late night TV specials, that is if we owned a TV. He too got to learn more about us. But maybe not so much our world as it was lived and experienced as we had his. Whatever the circumstances were that night, we interfaced with each other, laughed, told stories, and built cross-cultural bonds.

             Since then, as I have aged, I realized that this effort on Dr. Ahmad’s part was just one small step in to our world and building that bridge. The reality and deep patterns of divides between immigrant Muslims and black ones would become even more stark over time.In the years after that through today I realize that American Muslims are in a pivotal position. Many years have passed, which has allowed prejudices to burrow deep roots in our communities. We may stand foot to foot in prayer calling upon the omnipresent, but the mosques in America are much more segregated than anyone would like to admit. They are either immigrant, black, Pakistani, African, Indian, or Turkish. Every five conversations regarding the state of the Ummah my father says something to the tune of, “they don’t want to come down in the city and deal with no negroes boy” and I try my best to think of a counter-argument. Most often though, I can’t find a decent rebuttal. What I should have said was that unfortunately, immigrant communities have internalized media’s representation of blacks. So the time spent apart from each has caused more of a perceptual barrier than a real one. 

            Just as Americans in little towns in Idaho watch Fox news and think that at all times Muslims are plotting to blow up the local Cold Stone, immigrants can have the idea that blacks are lazy criminals that lack morality. Dr. Ahmad’s effort was an important step in bridging our worlds. The only difference was it was us entering in his world, never him visiting ours. If that were to happen, with him, and with all others like him today, our Muslim community could develop deep and really valuable insights in to each other’s conditions. Maybe then, national headlines like “The Baltimore Uprisings” could be better internalized by all.