It means the sixth-mantype dealer arrested with fifty grams on his person, what amounts to the size of a jumbo meatball, is subject to the same sentence as an all-league dealer caught with five kilos!
Now that we all know the numbers, can we agree they don’t add up? That the math adds up in the worst way.
[Pause.]
Now here’s another billion-dollar question. Which ethnic group is most sentenced to the unsportsmanlike bids?
Answer: The lion’s share don’t look nothing like Commissioner Tip and his team of rah-rah politicians.
[Pause. Eyes.]
Before you accuse me of playing the race card, check out a few more stats
Nationwide, blacks make up eighty-two percent of the cocaine defendants, while whites and Hispanics make up two-thirds of cocaine users!
Nationwide, blacks receive eighty-eight-point-three percent of the mandatory crack sentences!
In Bias’s home state, the stats aren’t any better.
There, blacks make up sixty-eight percent of all people arrested for drugs.
There, blacks now land drug-related prison terms at eighteen times the rate of whites!
I could go on. Believe me, I could.
[Pause. Pause. Eyes.]
It’s safe to say — no, it’s true and right to say — Commissioner Tip and his Dream Team of legislators not only dropped the ball on drug laws, they exacerbated it to the crisis of a forty-four-billion-dollar (take that salary cap!) annual blunder. Commissioner Tip has passed on, so the new question, the question for all the bank, is this: Which politician will have the guts to amend what has become the biggest mistake of twentieth-century American law?
* * *
Even a super-senior such as myself don’t know what to make of this silence.
Haskins stands and tucks the hem of his African-colored ethnic print shirt, the light turning his natural into a gibbous black globe. Polished wing tips, pregnant wallet stuffed in the front pocket of slacks cinched at the waist into specs of a corset. This is what the activist-turned-professor look looks like live in vivid color. He saunters up, and I make my way to the back to a seat. He makes a comment that I don’t hear from eyeing the Filipina chick across the room.
Would anyone like to offer feedback? Haskins says. Or ask a question. I sit up, roll my neck, press my toes to stretch my calves. The pugnacious earthy chick with the tangled hair, who stay shooting me a cryptic eye, shoots up a hand. You make it seem like some big conspiracy, she says. She pulls her knees to her chest, leaves her demolished boots hanging off the lip of her seat. As if America has some goal to put blacks in prison. Like, that’s just so ridic, she says, and waves her hands past her eyes. Like beyond ridic.
I kind of agree, a dude from across the circle says. He don’t raise his hand cause, shit (his T-shirt is two sizes too small and jeans are shrink to snug!), if he did he might bust a seam. Hey, I’m not prejudiced or anything, he says, but it sounds like excuse-making to me. Do you really think Congress has it out for blacks? C’mon, bud, he says. People commit crimes and criminals go to jail. It’s simple. Everything’s not about race.
If this was another year, my freshman or sophomore or junior year, those quarters my brain’s alchemy was tweaked by a legion of black studies courses (you’d be surprised how riled the right reading list can make you), if this was then, those days I spent stalking campus with a militant’s scowl, I’d say something to set dude’s snug-ass jeans aflame. But this ain’t then; it’s now, my last year, and the real is, no matter what I say, white folks won’t ever hate themselves like us.
You’re right, not everything’s about race, I say. But what if this is?
No one else says another word.
Quiet or no quiet, how I feel about most of them most days, especially the rare ones when I’m carrying a package with my books and papers, how I feel those days especially, is these suckers would be ecstatic if they saw me arrested. Oh, the dreams I’ve had, the nightmares of officers raiding my class, clapping me in cuffs, and parading me to a car parked conspicuous as shit in the Park Blocks, horrors of these squares blabbing to some local reporter how they always thought me up to no good, the vision of my suckerfied classroom nemeses running his weak script for all the world: People commit crimes, criminals go to jail. Simple!
Haskins yanks his hella-cinched slacks well above his hip bones. He calls on the next speaker and the next — one speech on recycling, another on organ donors, both of which real talk might’ve been better than mine. Haskins asks at the end of class if I’m keeping my appointment, and I know I should say no, but why, this moment, do I feel as though I can’t. He packs a vintage shoulder bag and we leave while the next class files in. His office is in another building, and I drag a step behind him the whole way there. Haskins offers me a seat on a green tweed couch, retacks the Who Will Survive America poster that’s come loose at one end, shelves a stack of books from his desk.
Your speech, he says. It was strong. You could tell by their response.
But I don’t think they got it, he says.
Sometimes it’s not what they think, but if they think, he says.
Haskins leans back in his seat, clasps his hands behind his head. So what’re your postgrad plans? Grad school, I hope.
Grad school, I say. No plans for that.
Well that’s disappointing, he says. Is this a certainty? You’d do great in political science.
You mean politics? I say.
Yes, politics, he says.
Oh no, I say. Politics aren’t for us.
Wrong, he says. He takes off his specs, rubs the bridge of his nose. Politics are especially for us. Give it some thought before you dismiss it.
Haskins swivels to face his crowded bookcase, plucks a dusty hardcover off a shelf, shoves it at me. These are some of the greatest speeches of the century, he says. Go ahead and take a look. I think you’ll like it.
Will give it a read, sir, I say. But I’m pretty set.
Give some thought, he says. The program is two years. Trust me, time will pass no matter. You might as well do something with it.
Careful not to open my bag too wide (the stench would be tough to explain), I stuff the book inside and quick-fast zip it shut.
When I leave, there’s a cluster of students wearing shirts and ties with buttons pinned to their chests campaigning for the school election. I push past a flyer-bearing future politician (me one of them?) onto Broadway, stopping by the phone booth (it beats a cell for business 24/7) under the sky bridge to call back a lick. My guy says he’s on his way down. He wants a few zips which won’t buy no mansions, but ain’t nothing to scoff at neither.
Every campus has them, self-aggrandizing weed men. Around here it’s the anarchistic muralized white boys who hock the nickel bags, twenty sacks, and eighths of green to the school’s ubiquitous weed hypes. Got to admit they make me jealous too, cause though the money’s less, unless they get greedy or hella-reckless, they can semi-stealth their business sine die, no troubles.
But there ain’t no charitable apathy nor no promo for this illicit shit. Anyone vending what I vend best keep it to themselves. Which I do. You won’t catch me selling to anyone affiliated on any level with this fine, fine institution. But just because I don’t serve the student body, staff, or faculty don’t mean the campus is off-limits for business. Believe you me, there is no safer place for this than here. The Bias Effect. Tough to count the days my backpack’s freighted with more than books, with what’s a sure trigger for a federal charge. Shit, if the Feds emptied my bag today, if they found what’s sealed off in clear plastic, I’d be knee-deep in middle age when I paroled.