High Price

my people.
    I felt like I wasn’t alone for the first time; the sources of my pain had been named and were shared, after all. Moreover, undeniably brilliant and talented people had felt similarly. Even they were fighting the same demons, both from within and without. They had often themselves literally been hidden from view, like Ella Fitzgerald’s voice appearing to emanate from the mouth of a white woman.
    Gil Scott-Heron was another artist I discovered through Mark. His lyrics were intensely inspiring to me. I bought every album he’d ever put out and listened carefully to each song. When he skewered America’s commercialism and the commodification and co-optation of rebellion in “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” I felt like my world and experience were being expertly dissected and explained for the first time. The inanity of concerns like the soap operas that were always in the background back home was emphasized in lines like “women will not care if Dick finally got down with Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day.” The way television and commercial concerns about the right brand of products anesthetized us was not something I’d ever considered previously. My mind was opening.
    From Scott-Heron I also learned about civil rights leaders like the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, mentioned somewhat disparagingly in another line of that song. And songs like “No Knock” taught me what I really should have already known about how unannounced police searches lead to abuse of power. It referenced the death of Black Panther Fred Hampton. Hampton was becoming prominent as an organizer in the 1960s, initiating free breakfast programs for children, arranging truces between major gangs, and leading unified actions against police brutality.
    The J. Edgar Hoover–led FBI was so threatened by the Black Panthers and his leadership that they assassinated him, firing more than ninety bullets into his apartment while he lay in bed with his pregnant girlfriend. That no-knock raid occurred in 1969. 1 The FBI’s racism and constitutional violations in the killing were so egregious that his family and that of another Panther who was also killed were ultimately awarded nearly $2 million. (The cost to the taxpayer of this and other regularly occurring examples of institutionalized racism is substantial.)
    Listening to Scott-Heron’s music, I felt that Mark and I weren’t the only living black people who found materialism empty and longed for meaningful change. Here was a major recording artist, someone who got mainstream attention, not just some cat talking shit in the hood, who was saying what we all knew to be true. Here was a man who, Mark stressed, had a master’s degree and had written a novel before turning twenty-one. This was not some random guy who just passed along street rumor, but a genuine scholar, someone who was highly educated and really knew history. That inspired me, and pushed me forward at times when I later thought about quitting school. And with brothers who dug Gil Scott-Heron, I felt like I’d finally found my people.
    Back home, however, conditions were getting worse. The no-knock raids of the 1960s became even more prevalent over time: with the war on drugs as their rationale, by 2006, there were more than forty thousand military assaults on homes every year, with SWAT teams typically entering with no warning. Most of them occurred in black neighborhoods. In some of the tragic cases, police raided the wrong address and innocent people were killed. 2
    But, unfortunately, while I was just starting to understand a few things about black history and about who our enemies really were, I was also beginning to fall under the sway of some terribly misinformed ideas about drugs that were being spread for political reasons as a response to the so-called crack epidemic. I’d first become aware of the rise of cocaine during the home leave I took before I’d been sent to Japan.
    I had received almost a hero’s welcome when I returned home after completing basic training and what the air force calls “technical school.”
    My sisters were beaming, as proud of my achievement as I’d hoped they would be. I’d kept up with many of my high school girlfriends with those letters I’d written to keep my status up at mail call. I got to see all of them and hang with my friends. I was on top of the world.
    It was Christmas 1984 and I was both glad to