The New Jim Crow

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Decent people trying to live with crumbling schools,
high crime, drug dealer rules,
jobless men in their prime,
depressed, enraged, ghettoized,
chastised, despised;
occupied by city police forces, militarized.

You used to need them for picking cotton, and for sex,
then you needed them in mines, mills, factories making cars.
Now you just need them behind bars
to fatten the czars of the prison industrial complex.
Inner cities losing votes,
congressional representation,
hospitals, schools, fire stations.

Pushed into drugs, despite the risk…
Watch it, a cop – gonna stop and frisk.
Pull up your pants, they’re saggin’.
Turn your back, their scanning for black faces.

War on drugs is the new paddy wagon-
Think it might be racist?
Cops in the hood, checkin’ out crack houses –
not military bases or frat houses.
White kid in college? No need to watch your ass,
they ain’t lookin for your grass,
You can get pissed
Chugging down beers,
Snorting cocaine gets you a slap on the wrist,
While smoking crack gets you five years.
Yeah, it’s well understood:
More drug money flows into the banks than into the hood.
Police stations get their share,
More kids they ensnare,
the less they have to fudge it,
money from the fed goes into their budget.
There are winners, there are losers:
Cops bypass the king pins, and just bust the users.
No way they’re gonna bother those with bulging bank vaults,
Police get paid for drug busts, not for assaults.
Seriously now, who are the abusers?

What to do with them? Ship ‘em upstate
where privatization’s been enshrined.
Need to raise the incarceration rate.
Prisons got to watch the bottom line.
So cops get out there, bang some heads
‘cause the system needs more bodies in the beds.

Young men still under the whip,
under the whim of weapons and nervous shooters,
cops and judges and prosecutors.

The history here is pretty intense:
Cocaine comes to the inner city
right after The Drug War starts,
Drug busts and convictions go off the charts.
Coincidence?
How did crack get into the ghetto?
CIA playing Gepetto
with blacks from kids to Viet Nam vets
playing the marionettes?
A million men, strung out, doing hard time
because of a disease – not a crime!

No white shoe law firm’s
gonna help this black kid as he squirms,
his eyes growin’ large as
a young legal aid, says cop a plea, or the DA, you see,
can load up the charges.
His mother in tears; too many fears to list ‘em,
thinking to herself: I shouldn’t have dissed him
when he left last night, I should have kissed him…
Too late now. He’s in the system.

Where is incarceration highest?
Guess…
A quarter of the world’s prisoners are in the U.S
US courts racially biased?
Whether it’s smack or smoking crack or hemp,
look up McCleskey versus Kemp,
and that’s just a taste
of how the Supreme Court took away the basis
of any case being called racist.

Served his term, now out of his cage,
ashamed, enraged, he’s just getting to the next stage.
Bussed from his prison factory town,
whose economy runs on keeping him down,
back to the inner city
his liberty ship runs aground:
no parades, precious little pity,
now he’s got to scrounge like a jackel,
to survive; bound now by a shadow shackle,
you’re still doing time,
ephemeral bars, invisible locks.
Every application asks: convicted of a crime?
Gotta check the box.
The system still got you, never seems to forgive.
How you supposed to find a job? A place to live?
Afford a phone, stay afloat,
stifle the fury? Get a loan, serve on a jury?…
Will you ever be able to vote?
You’re still on your own, in the combat zone,
in quicksand with no stepping stones…
something about your skin tone?

Shame and rage no balm can assuage,
just a kid coming of age,
drugs abound, felons for friends,
break parole and you’re back in the pen…
And so the cycle starts again.

Forget about “darkies” eating watermelons,
Forget about “inferior black folk”,
Now we call them “felons”.
It’s a fact. The more it changes, the more it’s the same.
“Criminal”’s another name for what we used to call black.

We gotta eliminate mass incarceration
from the root; shatter this pattern of discrimination;
from slavery’s exploitation,
through Jim Crow’s segregation and subordination,
to incarceration’s marginalization.
Same cruel hand of control
from prison through probation and parole,
like the old plantations,
like the Indian reservations,
and all those other camps of concentration.
Criminalization, demonization,
two hundred billion dollars a year for warehousing a population.

Nobody’s color blind.
The eye sees nuance of every kind.
Everybody’s got the sight
to see who is and isn’t white.

So the Old Civil War lords saved their ass
getting poor whites to buy into race instead of class.
Affirmative action would get more traction if it were revised
To be open to everyone who’s disenfranchised.
To shake off the chains, to remove each prison bar,
We gotta learn to love people, whoever they are -
love, not demean.
DuBois told us where the burden belongs:
“and the hands of none of us are clean
If we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs”.

The New Jim Crow

New Poems

From By Heart

Some Earlier Poems

Audio Recordings