Category: Free the Jackson Five

If you were watching the news August 11, you probably saw Rev. Jerry McAfee hijack Mayor R.T. Rybak’s press conference on fighting crime. Rybak and Council Member Don Samuels were standing on West Broadway Avenue when, the cameras showed, McAfee got into Rybak’s face. The next images were of Rybak scurrying to his waiting car.

This was another skirmish in the ongoing battle for the hearts and minds of North Minneapolis residents between Rybak-ally Samuels and activists such as McAfee, pastor of the New Salem Baptist Church. This tension between those African-Americans “workin’ with The Man” and those down in the trenches “struggling against The Man” has deep roots, going back to the “house Negroes”-versus-“field hands” days.

Since both McAfee and Samuels want (in McAfee’s words) to have the police “target those that need to be targeted,” why can’t they “just get along” and focus on getting things done? Because each man has a different view of how to interact with the majority culture and establish political legitimacy. McAfee, who calls Samuels “Rybak’s house Negro,” claims that Samuels has let scarce city resources, such as video-surveillance cameras, go to more affluent parts of the city. Samuels counters by saying that McAfee is a “wannabe power broker and professional hell-raiser,” who “makes a living off the suffering in North Minneapolis” while he retreats nightly to the relative safety of Brooklyn Park.

McAfee, whose two-thousand-member church is one of the largest black congregations in the city, boasted to me about how his organization is working. “We have a crack-fighting team, a mentoring team, and a team that works with people in prison. We are on the streets daily. We respect the members of our community and we demand respect from people outside our community.”

Were his actions that day motivated by his fears of racial profiling, along with pique at not being invited to participate in the press conference? “Absolutely not,” McAfee said. “The mayor came up here with an attitude. Me getting in the mayor’s face only happened after he repeatedly ignored my questions about why it took him so long to focus on crime in North Minneapolis. I wanted to know—why did South Minneapolis get surveillance cameras before we did, even though twenty-six of the forty-one murders so far this year have been in this community?”

Samuels denies that Rybak disrespected McAfee. “It is Lord of the Flies time up here, and McAfee is crying about getting ‘respect.’ Well, the grown-ups are coming and we are prepared to face the thugs and guns that McAfee, who does not live in this community, apparently cannot deal with. What happened at the press conference tells these immature, morally deprived kids that it is OK to be violent and stay stupid.”

The major difference between McAfee and Samuels revolves around their relationships with Rybak. McAfee dislikes Rybak and sees him as someone who only comes to North Minneapolis to record sound bites. Samuels makes no apologies for his relationship with Rybak. “The mayor is advocating a targeted precision strike for a limited period of time by forty cops. This is a good thing! My relationship with the mayor is an asset for this community. McAfee’s attempt to publicly humiliate and excoriate me because I can work with him is wrong.”

The harsh political reality is that North Minneapolis desperately needs the juice that both men bring to the table. Samuels is North Minneapolis’ voice on the council. Suggesting that he is an Uncle Tom for creating a political alliance with the mayor only makes it less likely that Northsiders will get city resources. Nevertheless, Rybak and Samuels have got to forge a working relationship with people like McAfee. He has credibility with factions of the community that distrust Rybak—and by association, any politician who is at his side whenever he comes to the hood. Neither man can claim political legitimacy without maintaining an effective bond with the other. And both should realize that claims of political legitimacy do not mean much in comparison with the twenty-six people who have been blown away in less than eight months.

After winning the DFL endorsement at the Fifth Congressional District Convention in May, Keith Ellison has come closer than any black person (or Native American, Latino, Hmong, or Somali, for that matter), to representing Minnesota in Congress. If he wins the September 12 primary in the overwhelmingly Democratic Minneapolis, about the only thing that could keep him from taking Martin Sabo’s seat come January 2007 would be, in the words of the old saw, getting caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl. The primary is his to lose—and opponents Mike Erlandson (current Congressman Martin Sabo’s chief of staff), former State Senator Ember Reichgott Junge, and Minneapolis City Councilmember Paul Ostrow all know that.

And yet, that is not such a far-fetched possibility. His past ties to Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, the unpaid parking tickets, and the public hand slaps for failing to follow campaign financial-disclosure rules have certainly given his detractors something to work with.

Ellison was born in Detroit in 1963. The middle child in a family of five boys, he was raised in what he calls a “very Catholic family” by parents who expected their sons to achieve. Ellison’s mother, Clida Cora Martinez Ellison, who was born and raised in Jim Crow Louisiana, was a social worker who encouraged her boys to also be politically active. After graduating from Wayne State University, where he converted to Islam, Ellison went to the University of Minnesota Law School. He candidly admits he took pleasure there in “shaking people out of their zone of comfort” and sometimes said and did things for their “shock value,” such as writing what some considered racially inflammatory columns for the Minnesota Daily under the pseudonym of “Keith Hakim.”

Ellison has a number of things going for him, starting with the most obvious—he is the endorsed candidate in a primary election. He sits very comfortably at the same spot on the political spectrum as most of the DFL party faithful who are most likely to turn out and vote in a primary. And, by virtually all accounts, he was a conscientious state legislator. Beyond that, he is the only non-white candidate facing three other Democrats who are political and demographic clones of one another. In essence, they are fighting over the same pool of chardonnay-and-Brie white liberals. This is a state that loves “firsts” and “onlys”—therefore, the chance to send Minnesota’s first African-American to Congress, where he will be the only Muslim, is something to die for in this recognition-starved state. Face it—since Paul Wellstone’s death, has any Minnesota politician really made a national splash for anything other than bad-mouthing Kofi Annan or shutting down his office in reaction to an anthrax scare?

And yet, if I were Ellison, I would be a tad concerned about the underwhelming response from the African-American political community. I spoke with a number of well-connected black politicians who said that Ellison has to do some fence mending “right quick” to ensure a strong black turnout. Former Fifth Ward City Council Member Natalie Johnson-Lee had this to say about Ellison. “Keith is a smart, driven, very ambitious, bordering-on-arrogant kind of guy. Many in the African-American community who actually turn up to vote will likely vote for him. But—and this is key—how hard those same individuals are willing to campaign for him and how deep they are willing to dig into their pockets to support him financially … that’s another question. I wish him the best.”

Between now and primary day, Ellison must do these three things: convince the Lake of the Isles-Lake Calhoun-Linden Hills crowd that he is a person of integrity who does not see himself above the law; re-energize black people about his candidacy; and make sure that the delegates who showed him the love in May do not get a case of buyer’s remorse in September. If he does, he should win by a comfortable margin. However, those three factors will not mean squat if there are any more credible allegations about Ellison. Should any more bad news about Ellison surface—particularly if it comes from anybody but Ellison himself—then stick a fork in him, because he will be done, and rightfully so.

Clinton Collins, Jr. is a Minneapolis lawyer and ABC Radio commentator. You can reach him at ccollins at collinslawfirm dot com.

A few weeks ago, Joseph C. Phillips, one of my childhood “ace boon coons” (black Southern speak for best friends), rolled through the Twin Cities. He’s mainly an actor (The Cosby Show, General Hospital, and the upcoming Vanished), but on this trip he was promoting his book, He Talk Like A White Boy—Reflections on Faith, Family, Politics and Authenticity. In it, Joseph proudly riffs on why he is so “old school,” which he defines as embracing traditional values: love of God, devotion to family, patriotism, and Smokey Robinson crooning about love and marriage. In other words, he is what our label-happy culture calls a conservative. For him, affirmative action is demeaning, hip-hop music is nihilistic and same-sex marriage an abomination.

While in Minneapolis, he appeared at Raking Through Books, this magazine’s monthly showcase for authors. After his reading, Joseph and I volleyed on the state of racial politics in America, and on affirmative action and reparations, each saying the things that you would expect people with our political viewpoints to say. We have had this conversation so many times and are both so hammy that for us eating pork is akin to cannibalism; the audience loved it.

However, the warm fuzzies floating around the room grew frosty after an earnest young African-American law student asked Phillips if he agreed that diversity fostered by affirmative action enhanced the value of education for all students. Phillips responded with a passionate denunciation of Gratz v. Bollinger, the 2003 Supreme Court decision that upheld the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program but rejected the school’s policy of giving undergraduate minority candidates an automatic extra twenty points on their admissions scores.

Phillips’ voice lost the relaxed cadence of our friendly banter. Pointing to the corner of the room where most of the African-Americans were sitting, he shouted, “I reject the notion that African-Americans need extra points to get into an elite school! We have just as much brain power as anyone else!” A few minutes later, the same law student, not so subtly referring to George W. Bush, asked how Phillips felt about people who secured spots at fancy schools like Harvard and Yale due to their money, family name, and connections. Is it OK, he asked, to give these “legacies” a leg up in college admissions but not to do so for members of historically oppressed minority groups? Joseph never really did answer the young man’s question.

After the event, Joseph and I reconnected with old classmates from George Washington High School in Denver over dinner. He was frustrated that so much of the discussion had centered on affirmative action. “Our country needs to get back focusing on our shared values—the things that unite us as Americans,” he said. Meanwhile, I thought about those long-ago days in Denver, when we both knew that being African-American enhanced our chance of getting into an elite school. We did not doubt for a minute that we had just as much “brain power” as anyone else. However, affirmative action was not about who had the bigger cranium. We saw it as deferred compensation for the brutally dashed dreams of our forefathers and mothers. From that perspective, we felt no remorse for being “affirmative-action babies.”

There is a scene in the movie Ragtime in which a black man named Coalhouse Walker Jr. barricades himself in an art museum after being disrespected by some white firemen. Booker T. Washington tries to convince him to give himself up, and makes a moving speech encouraging Walker to trust the system. Walker replies that Washington “spoke like an angel,” but that he and the people he cared about most lived “on earth,” with its cold and bitter realities.

As we finished our meal, I remembered that scene. It so neatly captured why Joseph and I, despite growing up with the same political signs on our lawns, competing on the same high school speech team, and enduring the same racial pressures in our white middle-class Denver neighborhood, have differing views on certain issues.

Like Booker T., Joseph still trusts that “the system” can work without enforcement tools like affirmative action. I am more like Coalhouse. I want to believe in the lofty rhetoric Joseph espouses in his book. However, just when I am about to take that leap of faith and believe I am truly part of the “we,” something happens to me or my family, like getting stopped for driving at night in the wrong neighborhood, which brings me back to reality of living in a still-unequal America.

Therefore, I am not ready to give up affirmative action and other institutional safeguards that help to protect “us,” until my country gives me consistent and sustained reasons to believe that the “we” are prepared to actually do—and not just talk about doing—the right thing for all Americans.

When Kate Parry became the Star Tribune’s “reader’s representative” in December 2004, she told readers she was their “advocate in the room. My job … is to take [your] concerns and make sure the newsroom understands them … It’s a good thing when someone wants to call, even if they’re angry. It’s a good connection.” Unless the reader in question is a very frequent complainer like Dan Cohen, and the issue is making Star Tribune staffers pay for something that they used to get for free—their own newspaper. Then you may find that the “good connection” gets disconnected.

Cohen, who successfully took the Star Tribune all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court for outing him as an anonymous source, takes great glee in continuing to torment the paper. After Parry got her gig, Cohen, according to Parry, began emailing her almost daily. Cohen, who admits as much, says that he was simply exercising his rights as a reader to complain. Parry, however, counters that she did not sign up to be a “punching bag” for Cohen’s “abusive emails.”

So, when the newspaper got egg on its face for first requiring its staffers to pay for newspapers and then threatening to hunt down the ones who stiffed the company newspaper rack (former Twin Citian David Carr wrote a hilarious New York Times story about it), Cohen got really busy. He wrote several emails chiding the paper for failing to respond to the Times story, while at the same time taunting Parry with her own promise to provide “a window … on how the newspaper makes decisions.”

On April 24, Cohen received the following email from Managing Editor Scott Gillespie. “I don’t want you communicating with Kate Parry again. That means writing her messages directly or copying her on messages.” Then Gillespie went one step further and said, “you should message me directly: not Kate, not Anders [Gyllenhaal, Star Tribune editor in chief] … if you’ve got a legitimate question about the content of the paper … send it my way.”

Cohen gave me the emails regarding the paying-for-papers brouhaha. (Kate Parry would not give me the copies of his other emails and Cohen said he would only “if pushed.”) The emails I did see simply questioned why the paper failed to report on a story covered in the New York Times, Politics in Minnesota, and even City Pages. The paper’s responses that I saw sidestepped this question and did not make any comments about Cohen harassing Parry or being abusive.

Even Stevie Wonder can see that Cohen has a thinly veiled agenda of wreaking havoc with the paper whenever possible; still I think he correctly calls out the Star Tribune on its own hypocrisy here. Having gone a round or two with the paper myself—I used to write a column for them and we parted on less-than-pleasant terms—I personally know that this paper does not always practice what is preaches. Complaining to the Star Tribune is OK—if it is the right complaint, on the right issue and one does not complain too often.

Fortunately, Gyllenhaal wisely saw the dangers of Gillespie’s attempt to bully Cohen. After hearing from Cohen directly, Gyllenhaal wrote that another frequent Cohen target, Katherine Kersten, was “very much up for the criticism as well as compliments.” Cohen told me he took Gyllenhaal’s response as a “pass” to write as often as he chooses to anyone at the paper without being admonished like a bad little boy. Parry, however, responded that Cohen’s interpretation was all wrong and that he remained no longer “welcome to write to her.”

Gillespie has since told me that Cohen simply needs to take a “time out” and that no one is banned from writing “substantive emails” to the paper “four times a day every day” if he wants to, as long as he does not make “personal attacks on the character of the person [he is] writing to.” Gillespie further concedes that deciding when an obnoxious reader needs a “time out” is currently a subjective “judgment call” and that maybe the paper should “kick around” establishing clear guidelines.

I think Gillespie is starting to understand what this whole ruckus is really all about. If the Star Tribune is going to have a true “reader’s representative,” then she and her newspaper must have the cojones to take on all comers—from the meek and mild to the Dan Cohens—or clearly state that some complainers can wear out their welcome of certain editors and columnists of the Star Tribune.

If you really want to get Minneapolitans edgy about crime, kill some white people. Since the random murders of two middle-class whites in Uptown and downtown, near Block E, both places where affluent people live, work, and spend big entertainment dollars, Minneapolis has dramatically raised its police profile at those locations. Block E, with its proximity to the city’s most populous African-American neighborhoods, has drawn large numbers of black teens and twentysomethings since the $170 million entertainment complex opened in 2002. Even before the March 30 murder of thirty-one-year-old Alan Reitter, black kids frequenting Block E, who often wear hip-hop clothes and enthusiastically embrace the swagger that goes along with it, were sometimes perceived as a menace by white patrons.

On a Friday night in mid-April, I decided to catch a movie at Block E with my sixteen-year-old son Alexander. I wanted to see for myself whether young, African-American males were targeted by security more frequently than other patrons, and, if they were, whether their behavior warranted the extra scrutiny. Beyond that, I wanted to get the African-American males’ perception of how they were regularly treated.

I found that groups of African-American males were scrutinized more closely than groups of white young people by security guards and also were more frequently asked to move along. Admittedly, this was just one evening’s worth of observations, but that was all it took to witness the disparity. Shortly after Alexander and I arrived, we saw a guard order a group of African-American males, who were chatting amiably, to leave the building. Within about twenty feet of them were groups of white teenagers that the guard left alone.

When I asked the guard why he had rousted the black kids, he curtly replied that I was “interfering with his duties.” When I told him that I intended to continue watching his interactions with Block E patrons, he ordered me to leave the building. When I protested, he called the Minneapolis police and asked them to toss me out. After the police arrived, I explained who I was and what I was doing. They told me that I was free to observe whatever I wanted so long as I did not speak to the security guards. A few minutes later, I saw the guard who had tried to expel me engaged in a friendly chat with some white patrons.

I then spoke with the rousted African-American kids, who were dressed in what they called their “hangin’ out with their boys clothes.” One told me that he was tired of security people and cops “mean mugging” him. “The brothas always get singled out down here,” he said. “The cops think we’re up to something and these young white wannabes hit on us for weed.” When I pointed out that some African-American males do hassle white passersby, as attested to by some of my white friends, nineteen-year-old Derrick R., who did not offer his last name, conceded the point. “Yeah, some of the brothas are acting like fools sometimes,” he said, “But hey, we all gotta hang out someplace.” Twenty-year-old Isaiah Thomas added that black guys have to dress more conservatively than whites to get respect. “If a nigga has got a good fit [i.e. nice clothes], and acts like he’s about something, then he ain’t as likely to get hassled.” His friends nodded in agreement, with one adding, “Yeah, that’s true brother, but it ain’t right.”

The following Monday, I spoke with a senior official with Securitas, the company that employs the overly zealous security guard. The official predictably said that Securitas did not train its security guards to profile African-Americans or to hassle anyone engaged in lawful conduct. You know what? I believe him. Securitas is not the problem—it is much deeper and more systemic than that. Ever since the earliest days of slavery, the mere presence of a group of black males has been interpreted as threatening by many whites. That is, unless they are wearing a business suit or a uniform of some kind—say, for a sports team—which signals that they are properly domesticated and under control. One black man can be easily cowed if he gets out of line. A group of black men is more likely to fight back. At some deep subconscious level, white America knows that black men have plenty of valid reasons for wanting to avenge centuries of abuse. And, as we all know, payback is a bitch.

I will candidly admit that some groups of African-Americans males do, to borrow Derrick R.’s phrase, “act a fool sometimes” and exploit this historic white fear. However, as a society we have got to come to grips with the legacy of this fear if we are to peacefully co-exist, as individuals and groups, at places like Block E.

Ratting out someone, even a creep who really deserves the exposure, is not usually done before an adoring throng, but furtively, behind closed doors—because people generally despise snitches. When Vanity Fair magazine revealed former FBI agent Mark Felt as “Deep Throat” last fall, old passions flared anew. Virtually everyone, even those who defended Richard Nixon to the bitter end, conceded that Felt did the country a service by helping expose serious lawbreaking at the highest levels of government. Yet many of the same people cannot bring themselves to call Felt a hero, because he snitched.

Our collective aversion to snitching explains why Minneapolitans reacted with palpable resentment to “photo cops”—cameras placed at intersections notorious for red-light running—and cheered when Hennepin County District Court Judge Mark Wernick, in City of Minneapolis v. Daniel Kuhlman, said that Minneapolis failed to use them legally. Kuhlman, who received a photo cop ticket for running a red light, hired attorney Howard Bass to fight it because, according to Kuhlman, he was not driving his car at the time.

When photo cops were installed last summer, many of us railed against them as another Big Brother encroachment on our right to ride anonymously along life’s freeways. No one seriously disputes that the photo cops have significantly reduced red-light running—according to some reports, by close to twenty percent—at the dozen or so intersections where they were installed. And, in these dire, budget-crunched times, the photo cops helped generate close to a million dollars in revenue for cash-strapped Minneapolis. But what mattered, and what ticked off so many people, was that the photo cops never blinked. They were invariably right, and just like a true snitch, they hid behind the protective cloak of anonymity.

While the technology behind the photo cop is state of the art, the concept was simple and logical. Cars running lights were photographed; the driver was identified by license plate number and received a ticket in the mail along with “the evidence”—a series of photographs showing the car in its compromising position. The ticketee was presumed guilty and typically fined $164 for the violation, unless he could prove (1) he no longer owned the car; (2) the car was stolen at the time of the violation; or (3) he was not driving the car at the time of the violation—in which case he must “nominate” (i.e. rat out) the actual driver.

According to Judge Wernick, the problem with the Minneapolis ordinance was that it took the presumption of innocence that girds our criminal justice system and turned it on its head. Instead of the government having to prove that someone actually committed the alleged crime, it was up to the person accused to prove that he did not do it. Minnesotans accused of running a red light anywhere else in the state—even in Minneapolis, in cases where a photo cop did not do the ticketing—did not start their cases against the government in such a deep procedural hole.

Did Daniel Kuhlman run a red light on August 17, 2005? The answer to that question turns out to be irrelevant. What is really at stake in the City of Minneapolis v. Daniel Kuhlman is reaffirming who has the burden of proving the answer to that question beyond a reasonable doubt. Judge Wernick got it absolutely right: Minneapolis cannot dump that responsibility on the accused. At the same time, Wernick was careful not to unilaterally condemn this sort of law enforcement tool. Photo cops can and do work effectively and legally in places like Oregon and Delaware. Drivers snapped in those states are not charged with crimes. Instead, they pay civil fines, which usually do not place their drivers’ licenses at risk, nor leave them with the consequences of a criminal conviction—like the potential loss of one’s license and higher insurance rates.

No one likes to get caught doing things he knows are wrong. And very few people like snitches, be they human or electronic, even when they save us from our own stupidity. However, we are far less likely to resent—and may even come to grudgingly accept—electronic surveillance like photo cops if the government, in its zeal to encourage us to do the right thing, does not do it by gutting our constitutional right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Close your eyes for a minute and picture a typical academically challenged, underperforming student. If you are really honest with yourself, you probably see one of the “boyz from the hood”—in other words, a black, brown, or Latino male raised in bad circumstances and going nowhere fast.

For many years, the desire to avoid students like the “boyz” fueled what came to be known as “white flight.” Here in Minnesota, whites ran to the suburbs with just as much enthusiasm as their fellow citizens in other parts of the country. Why? Because for many whites, the unspoken assumption was that the phrases “great schools” and “high minority student population” could not co-exist in the same sentence.

So why are whites leaving the well-regarded public schools in Cupertino, California, home to Apple Computer and Silicon Valley’s ground zero? According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the proportion of whites at Monta Vista High School, which boasts some of the highest test scores in California, has dropped to twenty-five percent of the student body—in a town that is nearly half white. No one disputes the quality at Monta Vista or at Lynbrook High, a school with a similar percentage of whites in nearby San Jose. Both routinely send students on to Stanford and the Ivies. They also have a burgeoning population of Asian students, and, as the article attested, it’s the fear of having their children out-performed by these students that is leading many white parents to abandon these schools.

In Silicon Valley, the kids at the back of the bus, academically speaking, are very often white males. The Cupertino superintendent pointed out the racial composition on two different floors at one of his schools. White faces dominated the first floor, which housed the math class for slow learners; among the kids on the second floor, who were primarily advanced-placement students, whites were an underwhelming presence.

This stark reality was not lost on the students. Many of them, both white and Asian, simply assumed the Asian kids were smarter, especially in science and math—an assumption that of course aligns neatly with stereotypes about Asians. Even Cupertino’s superintendent said there is a “white boy syndrome” which he characterizes as a kid who feels that he is part of “a distinct minority against a majority culture.”

In both Cupertino and Minnesota, groups of kids are battling stereotypically based perceptions that they are either human computers or “underperforming” losers. In California, the whizzes are Asian and the “unteachable ones” are white, mostly male, and largely affluent. Here in Minnesota, the academically competent are white and the academically challenged are primarily children of color, male and poor.

One key difference, and it is a big one, is that white parents in Silicon Valley have the resources to place their kids in environments where the parents perceive their kids are valued and not as academically and culturally threatened. In a word, they are increasingly choosing to segregate them.

I do not for a minute think that is the answer—either for those affluent kids in California or, assuming we had the resources, for poor minority students here in Minnesota. Some African-American parents have eagerly jumped on the “Afro-centric” school bandwagon. They believe that an ethnically homogenous environment is most likely to lead to academic success for African-American students, and they point to the huge success of historically black colleges, which still produce a majority of this country’s black doctors, lawyers, and engineers, as proof.

I believe that this approach takes our country’s educational system off the hook for failing to adequately educate all of our students. Beyond that, ethnically segregated schools deprive students of the opportunity to learn from—and learn to get along with—people from different backgrounds.

Stereotyping usually springs from bigoted assumptions and fear—which makes it a stupid and damaging basis for making decisions about our educating our students. Moreover, it is just as damaging for the haves as for the have-nots. That’s because, for better and for worse—as kids in both Cupertino and Minneapolis can personally attest—perceptions and expectations often do become reality.

Before I understood what “wild oats” were, my parents—especially my mother—warned me to stay away from white women. Both came of age in the pre-Emmett Till South, where black men got lynched for so much as flirting with white girls. For my mother and father, however, avoiding “playing in the snow” was more about racial pride than physical safety. I can still hear my mother telling me that there was no need to “cross the fence” because we had every shade of color imaginable on our side, from “dark as midnight” to “high yaller.” “Have some pride,” she said. “If you and your friends don’t stay within the race, girls like your sisters will not have decent men to marry.” She meant that the male portion of W.E.B. Du Bois’ “talented tenth” had a duty—which they failed to meet because of slavery and its aftermath—to protect black women and take their rightful place as head of the family. To marry “out of the fold” was to once again abandon black women.

I did not openly question this obligation, but I did surreptitiously date white girls. In college, when I dated a white girl, my father believed it was simply a misguided attempt to dis my parents’ values. Meanwhile, my mother prayed for my black soul. I called my parents hypocrites for marching for freedom in the 1960s while castigating me for embracing freedom in my choice of romantic partners. I saw myself as carrying out Dr. King’s dream—that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

Before and between marriages, I dated women with light, dark, and red hair, but relatively few with dark skin; I’m now married to a woman with blond hair and blue eyes. I used to rationalize my choices as a search for smart women, skin color be damned. And when I did admit, to close male friends, that I found blonds and redheads especially appealing, I was always quick to point out black women who also tripped my trigger, such as Halle Berry and Vanessa Williams. Interestingly, they were in many ways the “high yaller” version of what I found attractive in white women. Did I truly have a preference but lack the guts to admit it? Was it just physical—I gravitated toward whites over blacks the way other men go for model-thin waifs over their more zaftig sisters? Or was it something deeper? I have to wonder if years of living in white neighborhoods and attending an Establishment bastion like Harvard created confusion about my racial identity—and maybe that confusion led me to what could be taken as a symbolic abandonment of black women.

One of my best friends, who resembles a slightly wizened, middle-aged Kunta Kinte, has followed a similar path; his spouse is a statuesque blond with blue eyes whose family hails from Northern Europe. He is proud of his blackness and rails with gusto against the injustices that whites have inflicted upon African-Americans. He says the only criteria for his partner is that she be “pretty, nice, and let me be the man.” The ethnic identities of his paramours over the years suggest he does not believe African-American women fit the bill. He told me that, living in Minnesota, his choices were strictly a result of “supply and demand,” but I wasn’t really convinced. Truth be told, I have always felt that we two were playing a little game of hypocrisy in energetically proclaiming our love for black people but not sharing our love with black women.

Now my teenage sons are introducing me to their girlfriends, and it appears the apple has fallen close to the tree. Until recently, I said nothing. After all, I taught them to look past color. Yet I also taught them never to forget their racial heritage. I still very much believe what Dr. King preached, but I worry that, through my choices, I have unwittingly told my sons they should look primarily to non-African-American women for romance.

Ironically, my mother has come to terms with “crossing the fence.” And I have become more empathetic to her underlying fear, that my dating and marrying women who did not look like her was somehow a rejection of her and her values. Since women have historically been the ones to pass on cultural traditions from one generation to the next, my stepping outside the racial box meant that my children might not be as connected to our African-American roots as I had been. This is a scary prospect for a proud African-American like my mother. And I owe it to my sons to make sure they consider that possibility as they make their romantic choices.

I had begun writing on an entirely different subject for this month’s column—plea bargaining—but then a friend called to tell me that Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III had died. I put all thoughts about plea bargains aside, went down to my basement, and dug out an old Pryor album. Staring at it, I was overwhelmed by how sad I felt, and overwhelmed that I was so overwhelmed. Why should the death of a foul-mouthed drug addict, who blew through six marriages and self-immolated while freebasing cocaine, matter to me? The answer came before I finished asking the question: For thirty years, going back to the first time I heard a Pryor routine, his comedy soothed my soul and gave me perspective. Not to mention that he was bust-a-gut funny.

I first saw Richard Pryor in the 1972 Billie Holiday biopic Lady Sings the Blues. He plays “Piano Man,” Holiday’s main musical sideman, who dies of a drug overdose. I was thirteen then, and to me, Pryor was just another actor. About a year later, however, one of my friends relayed a riff from a Pryor album in which he theorizes about why Patty Hearst ditched her rich family and joined her captors in robbing banks (if you haven’t heard the routine, it had something to do with race and genital size). I was astounded that someone would make a joke like that on a record. I had to hear it for myself. So I bought the album and, early one morning when everyone was asleep, I crept down to the basement. I turned on the stereo with the volume low and traveled to another, more scandalous world. The next day, I bought two more albums.

In the months that followed, whenever my sister and I felt like living dangerously, we would mix a batch of “special ice tea” (tea and cheap wine), sneak down to the basement, and listen to Richard Pryor albums. Pryor, born and raised in his grandmother’s brothel in Peoria, Illinois, transported us from our middle-class, good-Negro world to one where people called each other niggas, liberally used the f-word, and put white people in their places. Listening to his brutally funny stories made us feel rebellious, cool, and authentically black.

Some of Pryor’s routines became permanently etched into our memories. His musings became an underground language for us “brothas” in the “soul patrol,” code for cool in what, for us, was often a very uncool world. When we wanted to navigate a delicate social situation—talk our way into a hot date, or out of a big mess—we would use one of Pryor’s skits for inspiration. What we did not fully appreciate at the time was that he had more to offer than dirty talk and vulgarity, though I admit that was a strong part of the initial attraction. Pryor was also a master storyteller who, with impeccable inflection and timing, commented on the daily struggles of life from an unvarnished African-American male point of view. Unlike Bill Cosby, who sanitized his routines to make them palatable to the mainstream (i.e., a white audience), Pryor was raw and real. When talking about his drug addiction, he commented that he must have “snorted up Peru.” He spoke vividly of the emotional pain in having your woman walk out on you and the physical pain in becoming a human torch while freebasing cocaine.

What my little posse in Denver was doing—incorporating Pryor’s routines and jokes into a vocabulary—was being done by kids, especially black males, all over America in the seventies. Pryor’s stories and quips fueled a national dialect for African-American men. When I arrived at Harvard in 1977, I found that referring to a Pryor routine usually brought a knowing nod from other black students, whether they came from Manhattan’s Upper East Side or South Central L.A. When I dated a white girl and the black coeds gave me the cold shoulder, I took solace in Pryor’s biting remark that, “Black women look at you like you killed your mama when you are out with a white woman … they say, ‘Yeah, why should you be happy?’ ”

Obviously, it was not only black men who fully “got” Richard Pryor—he sold too many albums and was too big a box-office draw to suggest that. But there is no question that Pryor fully “got” us because he was one of us. He exposed the challenges of being an African-American man with such wit, and such surgical precision, that he became our collective mouthpiece—the ultimate soul brother. Pryor taught guys like me to use humor as both sword and shield as we make our way through a world riddled with pain. Richard, thank you for being you, because in doing so you helped me, more than you’ll ever know, become comfortable being me. Peace.

—

People are talking about whether Rev. Randolph (Randy) Staten will run for his old seat representing North Minneapolis in the Minnesota House of Representatives. If he did, and won, he would become Minnesota’s version of former Washington mayor and convicted felon Marion Berry: a political player who went through a very public crash-and-burn, followed by a triumphant return to prominence. African-Americans are a forgiving group (just ask Bill Clinton), but would black Minnesotans re-elect a man who so publicly betrayed his community?

Staten was one of the first African-American recruits for the University of Minnesota’s football team in the early 1960s. After a cameo appearance in the National Football League, he returned to the Twin Cities and dabbled in Republican Party politics.

Then he found a home in the DFL and in 1980 became the state’s lone African-American legislator. Staten used his natural eloquence and visibility to push for programs to help his economically challenged district. Along the way, however, he made powerful enemies who were waiting to pounce on any misstep. Staten was soon tripping up all over the place. He faced criminal charges for writing eighty-two hundred dollars’ worth of bad checks to finance a drug habit. Then he was accused of filing late and incomplete campaign expense reports with the Minnesota Ethical Practices Board. After narrowly dodging expulsion, he became the first legislator in state history to be publicly censured. He eventually did jail time.

By the late 1980s, Staten found himself, in a phrase, “busted and disgusted.” He refused to fade off into oblivion, however, and instead took to heart advice from Broadway lyricist Dorothy Fields: “Pick yourself up. Dust yourself off. And start all over again.” Like other disgraced politicians before him, it was religion—more specifically, the black church—that provided a road map to redemption for Staten. He eventually became an ordained Baptist minister.

Since then, Rev. Staten has reconnected with many of the North Siders who once shunned him. He is now chairman of the Coalition of Black Churches and spokesman for the African American Leadership Summit. He led the successful fight to block David Jennings’ permanent appointment as superintendent of Minneapolis Public Schools. (Incidentally, Jennings, a former Republican speaker of the House, was one of Staten’s chief tormentors during his 1980s fall from grace.) The major local dailies regularly look to Staten for quotes, and even his detractors concede that he is extremely articulate and knows how to play a political crowd.

Booker Hodges believes that a run by the sixty-one-year-old Staten for his old House seat would be a huge mistake. “Randy’s time has passed,” said Hodges, who is a columnist for the Minneapolis Spokesman-Recorder and a member of the rising generation of North Minneapolis political leaders (he recently made an unsuccessful run for a seat on the Park Board). “It would open up a lot of old wounds. Many of us have not forgotten the shame he brought on our community. We need to bring up some young people—some new blood.” Hodges then went one step further. “Randy and the Coalition have follow-up problems, particularly on economic issues confronting our community. It’s easy to put up your hands, whoop and holler, and sing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ What has he done to help the brother in the street?”

There is no question that Staten has pulled off a Lazarus-like resurrection. Both Don Samuels and Natalie Johnson Lee courted his support in their battle for the Fifth Ward City Council seat. Certainly, one could understand why a Staten candidacy might appeal to some North Siders, especially those struggling to move past criminal convictions and/or overcome their own personal demons. However, while the number of those folks may be greater in House District 58B than other parts of the Twin Cities, they are still not the norm in that part of town. And, more important, they historically do not turn out in great numbers to vote.

Most of Staten’s past and future constituents are job-holding, tax-paying, drug-free, law-abiding citizens. Hodges is right—for many of these folks, the old wounds run very deep. They might be empathetic to Staten’s midlife religious conversion and be impressed with his political savvy, but still find it difficult to completely forgive him, or to trust him with one of the few reliably African-American seats in the Minnesota Legislature. Getting the solid core of 58B to give him another chance is probably a political miracle that even the resilient and charismatic Rev. Staten would be hard-pressed to pull off.