It's Bigger Than Hip Hop: The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation (28 page)

When comedian Chris Rock told
a packed Apollo Theater, “If you Black, you get more respect coming out of jail than school,” they erupted in laughter, just as I did. Those who had the privilege of knowing Langston Hughes often talk about how much he laughed. “He laughed a lot. He liked to laugh and he liked to make people laugh,” remembers Gertrude Jeannette, a friend of his and founder of the H.A.D.L.E.Y. Players theater group in Harlem. Hughes revealed in his 1940 autobiography
The Big Sea
that he was often “Laughing to keep from cryin’.” When we consider the brutal reality that hides itself behind Rock’s raucous routine—that a generation of young, gifted Black men and women have been wiped out as a result of mass
incarceration—we find ourselves, just as Hughes did, “laughing to keep from crying.”

Being Black in America means that you probably know, all too well, what it’s like to have a friend, family member, or loved one
come home
after “serving” a bid in what writer and death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal calls “hi-tech hell.” Sad as it is,
comin’ home
—because of the attack on poor urban Blacks by an unjust “justice” system—has indeed become a tradition, one that gnaws at the flimsy fabric of our already deeply fractured families. It has become, especially for young Black males, a kind of rite of passage into what poet Sonia Sanchez dubs a “makeshift manhood.” Despite all of this, however, nothing beats having a formerly incarcerated loved one come home. Last June, my lil’ cousin’s homecoming was no exception.

The sun blushed across the sky as I waited for the mouth of the prison, made-up of stiff gates, to open wide enough to allow my cocoa-colored cousin to walk out. As I waited, I tried not to think about the fact that he’d be walking out of one prison and into another kind of prison. The correctional officers (COs) that patrolled his cell block were now police officers patrolling his block. The bars, like teeth that kept him confined to his cell, now covered most of the windows on most of the skinny houses in our neighborhood. The jobs available to him were, in scale, as low paying as the twelve cents an hour he earned in jail. The anger and frustration that boiled the blood of optionless inmates now paints the streets of Philadelphia red. One finds the same general sense of entrapment and nihilism inside and out—a double sentence. The late French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his observation of Attica prison in New York, observed that:

The late Tupac Shakur, who grew up in the ghettos of East Harlem and Baltimore and served stints in prison, may have articulated this connection best in “Trapped”:

Contemporary scholars have come to similar conclusions, in many cases viewing the ghetto and prison as two points on the same continuum of oppression. Sociologist Loïc Wacquant, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, sees the prison as a surrogate ghetto. In “The New ‘Peculiar Institution’: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto,” he writes that the ghetto and the prison are mutually reinforcing “institutions of forced confinement”:

Observing this, one can see why the line between prison culture and street culture, among Black youth, is, at best, thin. This is why, for example, one can look at the prisons and determine what the styles and trends are on the streets. The Wayans brothers mock this interconnectedness in their film
Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood
(a spoof on the films
Juice, South Central, Higher Learning, Menace II Society, Poetic Justice, New Jack City, Dead Presidents
, and
Boyz n the Hood)
where Toothpick, a secondary character who has just been released from prison, still behaves as if he’s locked up, using language exclusive to prisons like “phone check, nigga” and “I got top bunk.”

An alarm
sounded as a group of Black men, each clutching a clear plastic bag filled with their belongings, trekked up a semi-steep hill. When my cousin reached the top, I met him with an embrace—a deep, soulful embrace full of fraternity and love.

“I’m out!” he yelled as we drove down the avenue. The avenue in Philly is just like any other avenue in any Black urban city: a consumer mecca lined with pawnshops, check-cashing spots, and sneaker, jewelry, and hair accessory stores; none of which, with very few exceptions, is owned, operated, or managed by Black folks. I tried not to dwell on those dismal facts and focused on the beautiful reality that my cousin was finally HOME!

The ride home was full of updates about friends and family as well as frequent outpourings of
I missed you, I’m out, you’re out
, and so on and so forth. I caught glimpses of him on the outskirts of my eye as we passed store after store after store. He turned to me.

“I ain’t got no gear,” he said, “but what’s on my back—and this is what I was wearing when I got locked up three years ago,” he added.

I understood both what he was saying and what he was asking. One of the visible differences between the inside/out is that you don’t have to wear those dreaded orange or blue jumpsuits that are the standard in most prisons. Throughout history, fashion has been used as a nonverbal communicator of social class, gender, occupation, age group, history, ambition, and reality. As Alison Lurie writes in the
Language of Clothes
, “To choose clothes, either in a store or at home, is to define and describe ourselves.” We see the implications of what we wear in Amiri Baraka’s 1964 one-act play
Dutchman
, a poetic indictment of American racism and capitalism, which centers around an interracial clash on the subway between Lula, a white femme fatale, and Clay, a young Black man. At one point on their train ride, Lula snaps:

I understood my cousin’s need to
change clothes
. Plus, after all he’d been through—in the hellholes of the American injustice system—it was the least I could do.

“Let’s get you some gear, then,” I suggested.

“Really? You got me?” he checked respectfully.

“Of course man. I got you,” I assured him, as I eased into a parking
spot in front of a wide storefront boasting
URBAN FLAVA—LATEST IN URBAN WEAR
.

Regardless of their name or location—Dr. Jays in New York, Up Against the Wall in L.A. and D.C., City Blue and Net in Philadelphia—all of these “urban wear” shops are the same: they’re all located in Black shopping districts, they cater to a young Black consumer demographic, and they are never Black-owned. Jerseys. Crisp white XXXL T-shirts. Firm, fitted hats. Colorful Nikes. A warehouse of overpriced items that both 50 Cent and my father agree to call “instant gratification.”

My cousin hit the racks hard, flipping through hangers of starched cotton like an avid reader might fly through the pages of a good novel. He scanned:
EvisuTimberlandPolo 5iveJungleAdidasAkade-miksAvirexCOOGI DickiesDKNYJeansEckoEnyceFreshJiveG-UnitGir-baudLacosteNikePhatFarmReebokRocawearSean JohnTheNorthFace
, until—

“Yeah,” he said as he admired a blue shirt that reminded me of the type of shirt he just took off—prison blue.

“What you think?” he asked, as he held the shirt up against his sturdy frame.

“That’s nice,” a voice, laced with an accent I couldn’t place, chimed in before I could. I turned around to find a shopgirl pulling a pair of pants off the rack.

“We’ve also got the pants to go with it,” she added, as she offered the pants to my cousin. As she did, I noticed the tag on the pants.

“State Property?” I blurted out.

“Yeah, it’s good,” the shopgirl said.

“No, the fuck it ain’t,” my cousin said, his face wrinkled with scorn.

“Well, it’s very, real popular. State Prop,” she said.

“Where you from?” I asked, annoyed.

“Lebanon,” she stated seriously.

“Do you know what this means, ‘State Prop’?”

She pursed her lips and shrugged her shoulders, indicating she wasn’t sure.

“It means us, Blacks, in prison. In jail. Modern-day slavery,” I said, animating my words with my hands to which she simply smirked. As my cousin and I walked out of the store, I noticed that State Property, which I knew to be a term employed by the state to exercise governmental authority to possess property (us), had an entire section in the store. Thoughts of crushing glass, shaking gasoline out of a crimson canister, dousing the store, and striking a match crisscrossed my mind. But it wasn’t the store’s fault. They didn’t manufacture the line.

The tragic irony is that Beanie Sigel, the front man for the clothing line, has fought valiantly to stay out of prison and even raps about the conditions that more than two million Black men find themselves in. In “What Ya Life Like,” which is perhaps the best song, in any genre, ever written about the prison experience, Sigel addresses the painful reality of incarceration:

“You know how you put your gun in your waistline and you gotta worry about it slipping? With these [State Property] clothes, you don’t got to worry about that,” Beans once explained. “You don’t worry about having to run from the police neither, because State Property can withstand the search.”

Or can they?

Just a few months after these comments, Beans ran from the cops, tossing aside a handgun during the chase through South Philly. He was later charged with attempted murder, and months later, despite testimony from Jay-Z, was sent to prison: becoming true
state property!

“Why would he do that?” my cousin asked of Beans on our way home.

“The Panopticon,” I replied.

“The what?” my cousin asked.

I told my cousin about the Panopticon, a type of prison building designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century. The architecture of the Panopticon places a tower—
the tower of power
—central to a circular building that is divided into cells encircling the Panopticon’s perimeter. The prisoners are isolated from each other by thick walls and their cells are backlit, making them open for inspection by anyone in the central tower who remains unseen. The basic idea of the design is to allow the prison guards to observe the prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether or not they are being observed, thus conveying a “sentiment of an invisible omniscience.” Bentham saw his prison as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind” where prisoners would behave like prisoners even in the absence of authority. The Panopticon was intended to be cheaper than the prisons of Bentham’s time, as it required fewer staff. “Allow me to construct a prison on this model,” Bentham told a Committee for the Reform of Criminal Law, “I will be the gaoler [jailer]. You will see… that the gaoler will have no salary—will cost nothing to the nation.” As the watchmen cannot be seen, they need not be on duty at all times, effectively leaving the watching to the watched. According to Bentham’s design, the prisoners would also be used as menial labor, walking on wheels to spin
looms or run a water wheel. This would decrease the cost of the prison and give a possible source of income.