This is a continuation of the previous post, “Gangs In Baltimore" which examined the history of gangs in Baltimore City. 

Blue Rage, Black Redemption is the memoir of Stanley Tookie Williams, co-founder of the Crips, a Los Angeles street crew that has since spread across the continent to be one of the few truly national gangs.  Structurally the book is divided into two parts, the first of which is “Blue Rage”, which chronicles Tookie’s early life, from his birth into a poor family in New Orleans to his development as a chronically truant, often incarcerated teenager in L.A.  The second section, “Black Redemption”, concerns his imprisonment on four counts of murder (for which he declares his innocence) and spiritual awakening on death row.

Throughout the text we are treated to a first hand account of the culture of Los Angeles in the early to late 1970’s that details an orgy of violence, drugs, and, well, orgies. The biographical nature of the recollections is broken up by Tookie’s interjections on his own failures, as well as those of the education system, the judicial system, the penal system, and the Dagobah System.  To summarize the main theme of Blue Rage, Black Redemption and to quote Strong Bad, “the system is down”.

It’s tough for me to be too critical of the effort by Tookie, seeing as he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize five times for his writings and efforts to educate children on the dangers of gang violence.  Plus, in his prime, the dude’s arms were over twenty inches in diameter. But still, this wouldn’t be the Internet if I didn’t critique something based at least partially on the inadequacy I feel over my inability to create anything similarly successful.

My overall take on the book: it’s not written for me.  I’m not sure exactly who its target audience is (Author’s Note: Probably those who live life with a target on their backs), but it seems as though Williams had difficulties in figuring out which readership he would be addressing.

If his aim was to pen a warning to youth who are following a path as directionless as the one detailed in his memoirs, the use of very complex vocabulary is probably not a good choice.  My experience with such a demographic suggests that contextualization, or even looking up, of certain words is occasionally tolerated, but its frequent necessity runs the risk of further marginalizing their limited educational backgrounds and therefore eliminating their interest based upon either pride or sheer boredom.

Williams disparages academics that use large vocabulary words that he considers “empty” because they are inserted in an attempt to create the illusion of power and intelligence.  I find it strange, therefore, that he seems to utilize the same tactics, when more basic verbiage would be able to do the same job more concisely (i.e., when discussing the use of “cuz” as a staple of Crip language, Williams says, “We avoided using ‘brother’ as a salutation because it was no longer indicative of camaraderie”.  Words that are easy enough for the college educated but would make a young inner-city teenager reach for the dictionary three separate times).

So then, is it possible that this work is meant to be written for the majority of book readers in American, college educated white people (Author’s Note: This sentence was a source of brief discussion for my family, with my sister calling the logic “more of a correlation”, that is, seeing as the majority of Americans are white, they are more likely to do pretty much everything, including read books)?  My answer would have to be a no because, despite my hesitance to appear in accordance with Williams’ depiction of my race, I found the black pride aspects of the book to be overwhelming.

While I understand that there is an entire section called, “dyseducation” which chronicles the myriad of ways in which the education system and the culture in general misrepresent the immense level of pride black people ought to feel at the societal contributions to art, science, literature, etc., there are passages which place racial issues in front of human issues.

For example, at one point Williams says, “My rage was nourished by the hate I saw and felt from mainstream society and White people, a hate based on my black skin and my historical place at the nadir of America’s societal caste”.  While I absolutely understand the level of fear the average white American would display at the sight of a black body builder with a bandana covering his head if they encountered him in the ghetto like conditions of an L.A. street corner, this doesn’t cover all the bases. 

You see, at this point in the memoir we’ve already learned of the author beating numerous people to a bloody pulp, sometimes with little to no provocation at all.  We’ve read about muggings and stabbings and use of PCP that created ultra violent rampages of which he has no actual memory.  The only thing he hasn’t admitted to doing is taking another life, which, coincidently is one of the only crimes without a statute oflimitations.  Basically, the point is that maybe white people don’t give a negative reaction entirely because Williams is black, maybe it’s because he’s a violent sociopath who built an empire of young men willing to fight and die to uphold a moral code that can best be described as Darth Vader-ian.

This first person perspective bias is (as could be expected) present throughout the work, leading to phrases that are nearly comical suchas, “My being black was in part a cop’s justification for harassment; but being a Crip only exacerbated an already volatile matter”.  Yeah… maybe the order of those should be switched because the fact that you heinously and habitually violated the law brought about the “fanatical harassment” you bemoaned. Just a thought from a generally law abiding citizen (Author’s Note: Car running being a glaring exception) who likes the thought of violent criminals behind bars.

All of these complaints being aired, it’s not as though Blue Rage, Black Redemption isn’t worthwhile.  Despite the feeling that you are not always receiving the same fair and balanced reporting that one might find from Fox News (Author’s Note: I can’t even type it with a straight face because it’s hard to keep a straight face while dry-heaving), there is honesty to be found.  Williams admits to many faults that he identifies as defects of character brought about by a lack of understanding of the place for a black man in modern society, a question that still has not found a suitable answer.

Ultimately I believe this book is written for Williams himself.  It missed the mark on several levels, mostly identifying itself with educated black men and women as a sort of plea for understanding that the horrors of a life gone completely off the moral path had to begin with hardships unimaginable to anyone who never lived in the destitution unique to the slums of American cities.  The morality lessons are interwoven with largely entertaining (read: violent) anecdotes and anti-establishment diatribes so tightly that a coherent theme cannot find a way through.  It can, possibly to the interest of young homeboys searching for a history or those simply interested in the subject such as myself, seem as though Williams just wants to get it all down so the arc of his life can be present when society is enlightened enough to receive it.

It could be that that moment is on the perceivable horizon, though not in the way Williams wishes. The subsequent generations of the black rich are developing and spreading, giving certain young black men and women access to the same schools as their white peers.  Because wealth has begun to disperse itself among the elite and skilled rather than the elite, skilled, and white, money will begin to find it’s way to black institutions, black scholarships, and black entrepreneurial opportunities in the way it has with white people for generations.

The problem is that all of this comes at the expense of the inner-city (Author’s Note: Almost everything written about the divide between blacks and whites ought to be categorized in terms of economics because that is the underlying issue, not race). Black people who leave these economically depressed areas due to their success understand the basic lawlessness and drug culture that make for a uniquely terrible place for them to reinvest their wealth.  The rampant criminality bolstered by an enduring credo to “stop snitching” creates an environment where the rule of law doesn’t so much hold sway as it holds on tightly for dear life.  Perhaps the government should intervene but how can they when the tax dollars collected from the impoverished and the homeless barely cover basic expenses, nevertheless social programs to intervene.

One of Tookie’s basic messages is that the world doesn’t function with a “leave no man behind” mantra, so black people need to stop only looking out for themselves and start looking out for each other.  It is the idea that we can rise up from the damaging culture of fear we have created and use the “no one believes in me” card not as a “Get out of morality free” invitation, but as a challenge to use the rage to prove the ubiquitous “them” wrong and make something of a life that promises nothing.

The cloud hanging over a current reading of Blue Rage, Black Redemption is the knowledge that, no matter how sincere and righteous William’s enlightenment might have been, he was executed by lethal injection in December of 2005.  He writes without knowing that this is his fate, though with an acceptance that the path he chose began in darkness and might very well end there, leaving behind multiple books worth of redemptive words that one can only pray will mop up some of the decades of blood his rage left on the streets of America.