August 6, 2000

Two people I know, Kate and John, have million dollar bails because they're being targeted as organizers of the civil disobedience in Philly. Bails this high have NEVER been given for civil disobedience before in this country. It's really scary. I think this is a pretty scary moment in history when these sick intimidation tactics are used against non-violent protesters. I'm contributing to the legal support both personally and institutionally. The memo and websites below describe the situation in greater detail.

URGENT APPEAL FOR LEGAL FUNDS

Activists who came out to the Philly streets to make their voices heard, to demand a response to the issues of police brutality, the criminal injustice system, and the brutal effects of corporate globalization are being met with inhumane and torturous conditions in Philly jails and prisons. Our first priority is to get people out of these conditions-- and that means an urgent push to raise bail funds and legal fees. The Philly IMC webpage has received 1 million hits. What if every one of those people made a $5 donation? We are asking people to make donations, to organize benefits, to ask everyone you know to give to this fund. This is a way you can contribute whether or not you live in Philly: by helping us get people out of jail. For more information on the conditions prisoners in the Philly jails are facing right now, see below or check out www.phillyimc.org, or www.thepartsover.org.

To make a donation:

Please make out your tax-deductible check to ISMCH (the Institute of Social Medicine and Community Health, our fiscal sponsor) and write "legal fund" in the memo line. Send checks to PDAG/ PO Box 40683/ Philly, PA 19107

Philly imprisonment conditions:

Prosecuters have set unreasonably high bail for demonstrators: from $15,000 to $30,000 for most. Two individuals have bail of $1 million dollars, an amount typically reserved for serial killers, never before applied in a civil disobedience case. "I consider this a civil rights catastrophe of the first order," R2K legal counsel Ron McGuire stated.

Demonstrators continue to demand medical treatment, access to lawyers, access to phones, and timely release as constitutional violations persist in Philadelphia jails. Many of the prisoners are on hunger strike, and a water strike has been started. Guards, police, and administrators continue to attack protestors in jail, seeking to demoralize and divide. There has been one sexual assault, by a female officer who pulled and twisted a prisoner's penis. There are reports of genitals and nipples being pulled and twisted, as well as attempts to break protestors toes by stomping on them. One released activist reports men have been dragged face down through a 'trash trough' containing refuse, spittle, and urine. Arrestees have been verbally abused, punched, kicked, thrown against walls, bloodied, dragged naked across floors. Diabetics, epileptics, and asthmatics continue to be denied medication. Trauma and Psychological stress are evident. Released prisoners consistently report beatings during arrest and beatings in jail, with highest charges pressed on those most damaged.

Monday, August 7, 2000

July 6, 2000
RALEIGH, NC. 4am.
Gita called me a little after midnight and started reading me her quotes.
It’s a nightmare.
In a few hours, my picture will appear on the cover of the New York Times as part of a super-long profile of race in hip-hop.
The story is so wack. It’s embarrassing.
I would like to say it’s embarrassing because the reporter revealed all these deep things about me that are causing me to reflect on myself and challenge myself.
I wish that was the problem. There’s nothing I love like insightful criticism or penetrating observation of my or other people’s shortcomings.
No. That wasn’t it.
It was embarrassing because the reporter is a moron.
He didn’t capture the story.
He didn’t really get what was going on.
Lord have MERCY!
All I can do is laugh.
When he first called me, he sounded strange. He had been writing for the New York Times for a couple of decades. And this was his first story ever about race or hip-hop. How can you go 20 years as a reporter without ever writing about race or hip-hop, then be given a plum assignment to write about those things as part of the biggest series in the history of the paper?
Strange.
But I was open-minded. He seemed open-minded and very nice. So I figured the reason he had been assigned the story was because he was an especially good reporter who could sensitively cover any subject matter, even something completely outside his cultural grasp.
I invited him into my life. I let him follow me everywhere and gave him full access to my every anti-social thought. I tried to give him as many opportunities to pick me apart as possible and to use me as an example of a flawed white person, trusting that he would understand those disclosures in context. And that it would all be for the good of getting people to talk more candidly about race.
Instead I just sound like a moron.
He threw out the baby and wrote about the piss that the baby left in the bath water.
I wish the story even raised some profound issues that I could address.
But it’s just bad writing, bad storytelling, lack of context, and totally misframed quotes, with a few key factual errors thrown in.
He made me sound confused, pathetic, and deeply fucked up. He made it sound like Gita and I don’t have a good relationship. He said that this guy I don’t even know, Dog, cut my hair. He said that Trife is a drug dealer.
I feel like calling him, but I feel like what can I say to him that he will understand? If he followed me around all that time, read both my books, let me bare my soul to him, and then writes an article like that, what more can I say to make him understand?
Oh well, at least it got me to write in my diary.
Otherwise, everything is peachy keen.
DJ and I are trying to figure out what to do with this web page.
If you think I should keep writing this web diary, email me and let me know what you get out of it or I’m gonna kill it until we decide what our plan is.

Thanks for caring. Thanks for giving a shit.
It makes me appreciate people who get it and care that much more.
I feel pretty discouraged at the moment about talking publicly about things I care about. I put a lot of faith into this guy.
billy

May 29, 2000
(AIRPLANE) NEW YORK TO PHOENIX –This book The Tipping Point is fucking with me. It’s the first book I’ve read in more than a year that really made me sit up and pay attention. It’s raising a lot of big questions for me.
For example:
Why hasn’t No More Prisons hit its tipping point? I mean it has sold more than 10,000 copies in six months which is almost twice as fast as Bomb the Suburbs started out –from that perspective I should be happy. I’m swamped with phone calls and emails and volunteers -more than I can handle. I hear people are talking about Self-Education and the Cool Rich Kids Movement, and the Prison Industry and Meaningful Graffiti Sidewalks, and Hip-hop Leadership and Creative Philanthropy. It’s an underground smash, no question. And it does have natural limits. Mainstream America for the most part is not going to like this book. They just won’t. It’s too contrary. It’s too crazy-seeming. It’s too multi-dimensional. It’s not simple enough. Too much cursing to be widely used in schools. I’m aware of the limits. But I also know that if it gets the right combination of little pushes, it could very easily “tip” and become 10-20 times more popular. And raise 10-20 times as much $ for Active Element. And lay 10-20 times as much groundwork for people to get involved and build movements.
Same for the No More Prisons album. It is such an amazing and unique album. But only 2,000 people have actually bought it.
And the truth is, I know what I would have to do to push it over the edge. Go crazy with the street promotions. Double and triple my tour stops. Raise the money to hire someone to help me. Make up a stunt. Do a lot more self-promotion. Call up stores and distributors. Tell everyone I meet the importance of buying 10-100 copies and giving/selling them to everyone they know. Redesign the damn thing. Get Eminem to write me a foreword. I know what to do. It’s just a lot of time and energy to put into promoting a product and it’s not really what I want to do with my time.
I’m a born marketer but I don’t actually enjoy it enough to do what it takes.
And –this is the deep part- why do I always make everything more complicated than it needs to be? Why do I feel on some deep level like a loser and sabotage my own success –personally and otherwise?
One of the characters in this book is a financial whiz from LA who is always positive and optimistic all the time. He is so convinced of his own rightness that he manipulates people effortlessly and joyfully without experiencing moral conflict. One of the biggest barriers to success that I think myself and most other morally-attuned people face is that we have a deep suspicion of manipulating people. I bite my tongue constantly or act against my own self-interest constantly because I am afraid to exercise my power over others.
In part this instinct is profoundly good. But mostly, I think it holds back good people from doing the most good. This Malcolm Gladwell guy is fascinating. He is also profoundly uncritical of the status quo. And he’s not trying to do much of anything about the stuff he’s talking about other than write about it. So the job I’ve given myself is three times as hard. I want to be as influential, but I also want to buck the power structure and I also want to build institutions that effectively carry out those goals. Sometimes I just have to remind myself how much I have bitten off so that I can forgive myself for not chewing my food better.
I’m happy because I am taking time to read and be intellectually stimulated. I’m jealous because this is the kind of book I would like to write if I wasn’t scrambling to save the world. I am angry at the author for being so brilliant yet so uncritical of the power structure -talk about blindspots, hello! And I’m frustrated because I need to become much more effective and step my game up several notches and I feel like I’m within striking range but I have psychological blocks to succeeding. And dealing with those blocks could mean major life changes for me which would be hard for everyone in my life who I care about.
One thing I know is that I need to write in my diary more, and since time is scarce, I’m going to have to decide if I’m going to write in this diary on-line, or if I’m going to do a more personal diary just for me. The drawback of writing online is I can’t be as free as I want to. The advantage is that I love my readers and I want to share my growth with you if it matters to you that I “bring you along with me”. So my question to you is whether you are actually getting something out of this and if so what? Because if not, I need to either kill the diary, change it drastically, or do a massive publicity campaign so that it attracts a lot more people.
So if this matters a lot to you, please email me and let me know why. Otherwise I will kill it.

Thursday, July 6, 2000

May 22, 2000
(AIRPLANE) CHICAGO TO NEW YORK –I just read part of this new book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s about how trends happen. And the people who know everyone and play a role in spreading them. My territory all the way. So he has this quiz of 250 names from the phone book and you’re supposed to score yourself for how many people you know with these names.
It’s supposed to be a measure of your social capital.
He gave the survey to college students and found on average they knew people with 21 of the names. Professionals in their 40s tended to know on average 39. His journalist friends knew 41 on average. But some people knew way more than others. Some knew 90 or 100 and a few people knew over 100. The highest number of the 400 people he surveyed was 118.
I knew around 120.
Holy shit. As far as knowing people goes, I’m off the scale. Well it is my job to know everyone. But damn, it feels good to get some confirmation that I’m not crazy.

May 21, 2000
KANSAS CITY, MO- This was organized by the Free Speech Coalition. This woman named Anne Winter who owns a record store called Recycled Sounds on 40th and Main convinced me to do it. If you’re ever in KC, go straight there. Anne’s one of the coolest small business owners in America.
She and Jeremy from Flavorpak and Victoria from the Midwest Underground Media Sysposium and some other people put it together. It was a hip-hop show with discussions on activism, zines, and teenage relationships. And a dozen groups from hip-hop crews to Food Not Bombs had tables side by side. That’s what I’m talking about. I stayed out all night so I’m too tired to write. But something is starting to gel here. 200 people came, which is huge for KC, and they mixed races reasonably well. KC is the headquarters of Hallmark, so anything real that happens here is a big deal.
KC has been the kind of place everyone moves away from. The week before KC had held a rally with 300 people (300 people, this is unheard of!) and the police singled out two young organizers after the rally and arrested them, charging them with bullshit too small for me to even remember that added up to 18 months for one and 24 months for the other. They’ve just moved back to KC from the Bay Area because they knew they were more needed here.
And this kid named Sike had wheat-pasted the hell out of the city Cost and Revs style. I was impressed.

May 19, 2000
CHICAGO- Wow. The talks went well. The talks went SO well. I did five engagements in three days and I don’t even feel drained. I feel happy. Chicago is a gracious friend. 250 people came to the U Chicago talk with less than aggressive publicity. Around 500 people came to the De Paul talk. And it was raining outside. The energy was lovely.
The morning I got back, I got a call at 8am. from Salim Muwakkil asking me to speak at his class at 11. It was great except students had to leave early. Then I had to spend the day in my dad’s office answering email. When I walked around the University, I felt intimidated. All the students looked so cool and together and smart. They re-did the student center so it’s more human feeling.
I was too scared to talk to people. I felt silly and embarrassed, coming back to talk to U of C students. I hadn’t had time to even call my old friends in Chicago and talk to them. And I felt funny calling people to come to my talk when I haven’t seen them in a long time, like it would be a violation of our relationship for them to see me being treated by other people as a big deal.
I met all these amazing student activists. I’m very impressed. The kid who organized the talk is a man of few words named Vinod. He and some others started an organization on campus called Grassroots Hip-hop, which brought me there.
I invited Rishi (from Raptivism) to speak. And Rishi suggested we invite Deon, Rishi’s friend who is one of the realest hip-hop brothers on the South Side and who currently sells Streetwise on 57th Street. He used to work as a custodian in the Reynold’s Club, where the talk was held and he knows a lot of the students, so we thought he’d be a good person to talk about his experiences with race and class in Hyde Park. I ran into Deon on 57th Street, selling Streetwise (which is an excellent paper by the way. Every city should have a homeless paper this good) and he told me he couldn’t speak with us because he had been banned from the Reynolds Club (without any grounds other than the fact that he’s a tall, dark, black man who some people might be afraid of which if you know him is ridiculous because he’s such a good natured person).
Deon is banned from the Reynold’s Club?
Can’t have it. So I went and talked to the cop by the door and I told him we needed Deon to come in to speak. The cop said okay. Deon said he couldn’t risk it. He’s got one year left of a two year probation and he can’t afford to take the chance. What is he on probation for? Selling oils and newspapers on 53rd Street without a license! He couldn’t pay the $300 fine, of course, what the fuck do you think he’s selling oils for in the first place!?! So he gets slapped with a two year no arrest period, which is near impossible for a young black man in Hyde Park. So he didn’t end up speaking. And I wasn’t even there long enough to try to press his case with the University. That hurts.
But otherwise the event went well. My parents were feeling it. Some shorties came from Chicago hip-hop’s next generation. This 16 year old kid from Whitney Young cut the whole day of school to attend the six hour follow-up session. He told me his parents used to be into hip-hop. His mom is from East St. Louis. She used to pop-lock and his dad used to be a graffiti writer. And then it hits me. This kid was born in 1984, the year I got into hip-hop. An old friend of mine from high school Alison Tobak came. Cool white woman. She co-runs an adult literacy program and she’s ready to get involved in everything. She asked me for my list of people she needs to meet in Chicago. Nothing makes me happier.
The best thing that happened was the networking the next day. Anton, Tamara, and Haydee Nunez from the Chi-Town Low Down came by. They are so fresh. Chi-Town Low Down is a youth political paper that is getting better with every issue and it has gotten really good lately. The last issue was called Stop The Land Grab. It featured activists from around Chicago who were fighting for their neighborhoods. The circulation is up to 20,000. And the back cover, and the whole back section is printed upside down in Spanish. And they’re getting it into classrooms. Oh, it is so fresh.
They give me hope for Chicago. And they’ve been doing all of this without an office, without even a fucking computer. They’ve never gotten a grant before –aside from the $500 award Active Element gave them. And they’re taking on a Youth First campaign similar to the one that won in Oakland and San Francisco which mandates that 2% or some tiny percent of the city budget goes in to youth programs as opposed to the even smaller percent that goes to youth now.
Which also ties up more money that can’t be spent on prisons or other enlightened social programs.
Brilliant brilliant brilliant idea.
So they’re saying all this. And these U of C students are asking them questions. And this guy pipes up and says he has two computers he wants to donate to them. And he’s a photographer and he wants to take pictures and he’s a school teacher and he wants to use it in his class.
Whut?
That’s what Reciprocity is all about.
And I’m like Yo, what is your name? And he says Joel Wanek. And I’m like Joel Wanek?!? He is an old friend of my old best friend Hunter, who lives in St. Louis who I haven’t talked to in almost two years. And the anti-Sweatshop activists want to hook up with the hip-hop community and form a new anti-prison group on campus. That’s what I’m talking about! And Lord, the whole week was like that. So many connections. I feel so connected to Chicago again. Every where I would go I’d see people I know and they’d be more grown up now and have some connection to some new aspect of my life.
The next day I went to “speak” at Kari Lydersen’s class at Pedro Albeso Campos Puerto Rican High School. OH MY GOD is it beautiful. It’s located in the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. And I’ve been hearing about it for years, but damn. It is so warm and family feeling. I sat in on their “unity” session. The students were planning their prom. And they made up a hilarious song about it that they played. And the teachers all gave out their home telephone numbers to the students. And and and another old friend of mine Jesse Mumm works there. And he’s trying to push the white alternative schools to be less white. And Kari is one of my favorite new people in Chicago. She writes for The Washington Post Chicago Bureau and she writes for Streetwise. And she volunteers at Pedro Albeso Campos. She is extra prolific.
And then I hooked up with Alix Gonzales and Michelle Luellen from De Paul who are some of the dopest young college organizers ever. They got me more money and more people to show up than any other school. They had people putting up flyers on the train lines! And they made food. And they’re so humble. They didn’t even want to talk. And they have all these relationships with community organizers around Chicago. And I freestyled the whole thing and it went beautiful. People spoke from their hearts and so many people hooked up and I can feel the movement.

May 15, 2000
(AIRPLANE) RALEIGH TO CHICAGO –This is so confusing. Tomorrow night I am speaking at the University of Chicago and it is fucking with my head. I am writing this as a form of therapy and to figure out what I’m going to say. My head is swimming. There is so much so much so much I feel and want to say. I don’t even know what all I’m feeling and I’m scared to find out and I have less than 24 hours to figure it out and put it in a form that will be considered a good speech and I have a feeling that’s a lot of the problem. I feel like I have to be this great person. Here I am one of Hyde Park’s cultural exports, a living symbol of honesty and blazing your own trails, and now I have to come home and live up to being this person who I am myself only trying to become.
Or not. The publicity for this event has been weak. For all I know, it may only be 40 or 50 people. I usually do better when it’s 400-500. I feed off the energy and it comes roaring out of me. I want to come home on fire. I don’t want to be a disappointment. I wish I could find a campus organizer to orchestrate a massive turnout. Because what I want to do tomorrow night is nothing less than a massive community revival.
My parents are gonna be there. My parents friends colleagues. So there is major embarrassment potential. Folks from the hip-hop community. So I have the chance to either ignite them or disappoint them. Kids from my high school who look up to me and see me as a hometown legend. Student-activists who are fighting sweatshops –this spring at the U of C has been the most active anyone can remember in at least a decade, if not two or three. Regular students who I want to shake up. Probably some well read conservative nit-wits who will want to tear me apart and embarrass my parents. And God knows who else could be there!!! My ten year high school reunion (of Lab School, my private school) is in two weeks so I’m feeling insecure about what I have done with my life. I bet at least half of my classmates are professionals making at least $60,000 a year. I bet at least a forth are making 100 plus. And I’m this broke rich kid, CRAZY, incredibly moralistic and judgmental and scary author who gives all his money away and can’t afford new shoes or health insurance. And I don’t even know when Kenwood (my public school) reunion is. It is so heartbreaking to me to be so superficially involved in a place that used to be my world. The word community doesn’t mean a whole lot to me in relation to where I grew up. It wasn’t a community. There were slivers of community, fleeting moments, and a few strong threads, but no overall sense of it.
I feel so disconnected and out of touch with myself and my people and my neighborhood. Who are my people anyway? I haven’t talked to my parents in a long time. My contact with the Chicago hip-hop community is irregular. My knowledge of Chicago happenings are abysmal. My knowledge of current events is non-existant. I haven’t spoke to any of my old best friends in over a year, some two years.
So many memories and emotions! All the love and anger and ugliness and isolation and evil and imaginative brilliance I have ever felt was birthed in Hyde Park. I used to walk home from my high school at 10pm after a long night in journalism with Mr. Brasler and read some mind-blowing book by the street lights, picking up bottles to recycle, back when recycling was still considered new. I would go skinny-dipping at the point at 6am. Sleep out on the back porch and sneak around the city with friends. Common Sense doesn’t live here anymore. I feel a strange connection to him now going global and feeling alienated from the South Side. Of course my South Side is different from his and I ask myself: Am I the enemy? Are my white Hyde Park hypocritical liberals the enemy? Someone is responsible for under-developing the south side of Chicago. Someone kicked the poor people out, the blacks and the bohemians. Someone closed the jazz clubs and the family-owned businesses. Someone red-lined blacks and kept them out of opportunities. Someone hired all those cops –the largest private security force in America. Someone built the Robert Taylor Homes and Ida B Wells and someone is tearing them down and kicked the people out. Someone torched Woodlawn and Oakenwald and North Kenwood and Grand Boulevard and Washington Park. And the University of Chicago establishment has always been the major player on the Southeast side. They formed the fake community groups like the Southeast Chicago Commission that don’t represent poor and working class blacks or anyone for that matter who has an imagination.
But I am a stranger here now. Hyde Park is a great place and an awful place. It’s Jekyl and Hyde Park! I am so angry at the University for killing the spirit of the neighborhood. It is such a cold place. Cold buildings. That is not how humans are supposed to live. Yes me and my friends who I don’t hardly know anymore carved out quite a life from the iceberg. But you have to keep the life hot. Come back the next day and it has frozen up again and maybe died.
I am aware that my writing is not as good anymore. It is the worst it has been since high school. The beginning of high school. I haven’t been reading or writing. The muscles grow weak. I want to hide my weakness from these people. I want them to think I am strong, smart, honorable, fascinating. I don’t feel that way. I feel dull, compromised, tired, not in the best of health. I want to hide this from them. Because if I’m not all those wonderful things, if I’m not this great person who I’ve been trying to become, then what’s the point of them paying me this huge speaker’s fee and treating me as this symbol of courage and creativity? I don’t feel very courageous or creative.
I have spent myself down and I can recover, but I need more time. I’m not ready yet to come before them and be an inspiration or a catalyst for their next bold steps. I would even say I feel cynical about the University. About Hyde Park. About Chicago. About America and our ability to revive its spirit. About my ability to live up to my talk. And that’s a role that I feel I am constantly called to play. I’m supposed to be this person who sees the silver linings, and grabs them like solid wire. But what happens when I feel scared? Or weary? Or ready to crack?
And listen to me. I sound so self-important. Like I’m this one man band. What happened to my humility? What about the people who are coming to see me? What can I say to them? I don’t feel able to deliver. I am scared to embarrass my parents. I am scared to burn bridges close to home. The University is such a stifling place. Then again, every big institution feels stifling to me. I feel like my spirit has been stifled and suppressed so much, I can’t even dream great dreams anymore. I am out of touch with God and God says do not fear.
I want to sink my teeth into something. I want to attach myself to a place and go all-out.
I know so much more about how to move mountains now. Perhaps I am ready, I think. I want to move back to Chicago and work some magic here. But it’s not my time yet. I have so much more to learn elsewhere before I return home with Gusto.
This brainstorm is so disjointed. I’m just flapping my wings and losing feathers on the way down. I don’t even know if I should put this on the Internet. But my friend Kiese says be vulnerable. So here I am vulnerable. Come and get me. And I’m gonna come and get you because you are even more afraid of it than I am. You’re probably hurting and cynical even more than I am. You’re probably out of touch with yourself and your community even more than I am.
The building where I am speaking at the U of C in is the place where I saw my first rap concert (RUN-DMC) in 1984. The place where I first got caught writing graffiti in the bathroom (the University police gave me and my friends slaps on the wrist because our parents were professors there and we had to clean off our elaborate pieces, drawn in Scripto magic marker).

Wednesday, May 24, 2000

May 10, 2000
RALEIGH, NC –Exciting exciting exciting news. I found a house! Not to buy unfortunately. I need to fix my credit and pay my taxes which I’ve been neglecting for more than a year (they’re so damn complicated when you freelance and move around a lot, most tax people don’t know how to handle it). I am splitting the place with Reciprocity. The cost? $600 a month for a four bedroom house!!! Eat your heart out, city slickers. Easter and I found it within a day of hunting. The location is perfect. Right off Hillsborough, which is the major college street, right near NC State University which has a library you can just walk right into. Less than a mile from shopping which is important because I don’t drive and public transit in Raleigh is an abomination. A mile from the Greyhound station. A mile from downtown. And four blocks from the biggest park in Raleigh. Mixed neighborhood. Perfect.
I’m starting to like Raleigh. We drove around in the black community yesterday. A little something going on. Signs of culture. Not bad. Latinos moving in rapidly. I heard that Wake County had the fastest growing Latino population in the country last year.
So here I am in Raleigh. Wow. I practically live here now. This was not in the plans. But I like it. I like it. I can live here. It’s funny. In my self education plans three years ago, I said I would live a year each in NYC, DC, SF, LA and somewhere in the South. Well, I’ve lived in NYC, DC, and I guess this is my somewhere in the South. I don’t feel like I got to know NYC or DC as well as I would have liked though. And I don’t really want to get to know Raleigh too well. This is more my place away from other places, where I have time to read and think without people always coming over to my house or inviting me to things. But it's a conflict. Now that I’m here, I’m curious about the place…

Wednesday, May 10, 2000

May 4, 2000
GREYHOUND NYC to DC- I just got dropped off at the Greyhound by Emily Bernard who is editing a book on interracial friendships. We were supposed to meet for breakfast, but when she arrived at my house aka Gita’s house in Ft. Greene, I had my bags packed and I was running to catch a bus to DC.
This has become the typical experience people now have when they meet me.
Easter is meeting me in DC and she’s going to help me pack my stuff from the LISTEN office and my friend Matt’s house. And then we’re driving down to Raleigh to prepare for The Summer of Getting Our Shit Together.
I just read the concept paper for Emily’s book. It’s called Some of My Best Friends, and it’s the first collection anyone has ever heard of on writings about interracial friendships. It’s a brilliant book idea, and if anybody steals it, we’re going to trace you from hitting this web page through our high tech Pentagon-approved anti-privacy device. She asked me to write something for the book, which I am thrilled and also terrified about.
I can’t see myself writing about interracial friendships without going ALL OUT and trying to write everything no one has ever written and, especially when you are attempting HAVE interracial friendships with real people who have feelings, and to write about them at the same time, it just awakened in my a flood of self-reflection and fear about disconnected I’ve become from my feelings. I think I talked her ear off. She just opened up some floodgates in me just by asking me to write for her.
I just spent a nice couple of days with Gita. What can I say that’s interesting to the public but not too personal? Some of my friends have been reading this on-line diary out of frustration that they can’t reach me and coming up to me like “yeah, I couldn’t get ahold of you to talk to you but I READ ON THE WEB THAT YOU FELT X,Y and Z.” And we’ll be standing around with other people who are like “Oh YEAH, nice to read it on the WEB PAGE.”
Which is part of why I haven’t been writing here lately. I am trying to carve out space to have my own thoughts and friendships without exposing everything to the public eye. It’s a trap for writers who write the truth. Either you have to only be friends with people who don’t mind being written about publicly in the most personal way (which is almost no one I know of) or else you just don’t have any friends. Or else you censor yourself.

May 1, 2000
BROOKLYN- Okay, I want to respond to all these Park Slopians who are writing in to protest my sidewalk graffiti campaign. I am truly saddened and disappointed that some people, including some who I believe are caring and thoughtful people (who I would like to have as allies) have written in to me to tell me they find it an annoying and/or immoral desecration of public space.
So in the spirit of community, I will explain why I believe it is a justified act of civil disobedience, and in doing so expose myself to further criticism, arrest, and prosecution. And yes, I take full responsibility for it. It was my idea. I did a lot of it myself. I do it because I believe it is good and great and wonderful and so do a lot of other people and if you’re one of those who has already decided I’m a terrible person, I’m sorry that you have reached this conclusion before hearing what I have to say. I beg that you attempt to hear me out before making up your mind.
Let me begin by giving some context as to what drove me to do this in the first place. I believe that the prison industry in this country is so out of control, and is at this moment, destroying so many people’s lives and families, and ripping apart our social fabric to such a degree that it constitutes a national emergency. For those of you not familiar with the situation, here are a few brief facts: The US now incarcerates more of our own citizens (both per capita and in gross numbers) than any other country in the world, including totalitarian regimes such as China, Russia, and South Africa under apartheid. Our prison population has been doubling every ten years, a rate of growth which in world history has only been surpassed for a short time by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hilter.
The number of women in prison has grown ten fold since 1980. Seventy percent of people in prison now are non-violent offenders who don’t pose a threat to you or me on the street. It costs us $30,000 a year to lock them up and the money is being taken away, dollar for dollar, from schools, housing, drug rehab, mental health, youth programs, health care and human services. Prisons and police are literally the only big government programs that have grown over the last 20 years (quadrupled and quintupled respectively). Every other social program has been cut. What does that mean? It means we are literally cutting people out of schools, cutting people out of youth programs, out of mental health, out of drug rehab, and pushing them into prison. This is not to say everyone doesn’t have a personal responsibility to behave well, but if you know anything about how the criminal justice system works, you know that the way laws are applied has little to do with any reasonable person’s definition of justice. Last month, a man in Texas got 16 years for stealing a Snicker’s bar. If you know anything about the prison system in America, you know that stories such as this are not at all uncommon.
A Senate subcommittee did a survey of prison wardens and found they believed that on average half of their inmates could be let out without endangering society. The reason we keep building prisons is three fold: 1) A coalition of very powerful industries profits from and lobbies heavily for prison construction. 2) The media sensationalizes crime to such a degree that the American population has a paranoia of crime that exceeds our actual likelyhood of victimization by a factor of five to ten (See Why Americans Fear the Wrong Things, a new book –I can’t remember the author’s name). 3) The climate of fear and profit makes it almost impossible for politicians to do anything other than the most socially, morally and fiscally irrational choice to build more prisons. I believe that we desperately need to change that horrible consensus in the next couple of years or it will lead us down a very dark path of becoming a wicked and self-destructive civilization indeed.
So here I am, a person who feels compelled to do something about this problem. Some friends of mine are putting out a hip-hop album called No More Prisons. It is a brilliant album and they are donating the proceeds to the Prison Moratorium Project, a non-profit organization devoted to organizing Americans to stop prison construction, especially of private for-profit prisons which are the fastest growing and the worst of a bad bunch.
I am an author coming out with a small independent book. All of my profits of are going to a small foundation called Active Element which strategically funds under-funded young people who are working for positive change in their communities. I slap the title No More Prisons on my book to help out my friends at Raptivism and to call attention to the national emergency of our out-of-control prison system.
To be Continued...

Monday, May 8, 2000

Continued...
So guess what happens to small press books in America? Nobody buys them. I am one of the most famous and most critically acclaimed small press authors in America. Yet, the mainstream media completely ignores my books. I sent out 600 press copies of my book. Guess how many reviews I got in daily newspapers across the country? Zero. Guess how many spots on mainstream radio including NPR? Zero. Guess how many reviews I got in mass circulation newsmagazines? One. In Spin Magazine, but it was more of a personality piece than a review. Guess how much television? Zero, except for this stupid talk show that wanted me to talk about white kids who act black. When I tried to link it to the situation in prisons, the talk show host cut me off. He wanted me to talk about “wiggers.” The only real coverage I’ve gotten is in alternative media, and that’s only because I pimp the quirks of my personality so they can write colorful human-interest pieces on me. Otherwise, No More Prisons has been treated like every other small press book: If it doesn’t say Time-Warner or HarperCollins, it doesn’t exist. It used to be that independent bookstores would support important or critically-acclaimed small press books, and place them on the front table or in the window of the store. But most independent bookstores have been driven out of business by Borders, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com. And the super-chains reserve their display space for publishers who can PAY to have them displayed.
Um, this is a serious problem. It makes it really hard to have a democracy and free speech and a full and open exchange of ideas, unless people on both sides of a debate have millions and millions of dollars to go through the channels and pay to get our voices heard. And um, our side can’t pay.
So what should we do? Lay down and die? Let the steamroller of smiling totalitarianism roll over us without a fight? I mean we are living in a society that has made it illegal to be homeless. Is that okay with you?
I’m glad people are concerned about defending public space against desecration and advertising. But hey, why don’t you really do it? If you’re annoyed with me for writing on a few sidewalks, why aren’t you furious with Giuliani for sucking the soul out of New York? Why don’t you organize to get him out of office? And why aren’t you a trillion times more angry at all these mega-institutions which are replacing everything public and sacred with for-profit monoliths? It’s very easy to pick on me.
Let’s talk about the morality of writing on sidewalks. What’s so wrong with it?
There are countless other examples of stuff on the street that nobody complains about. Newspapers put out newspaper boxes that not only advertise on public sidewalks, but actually physically block pedestrians. How come that’s okay? Have you written a letter to the New York Times about their obstructive and annoying newspaper boxes? And what about all these horrible gum-spitter-outers, desecrating the sidewalks with their ubiquitous gum marks? Perhaps we should install video cameras to find out who’s spitting out their gum.
Sidewalks aren’t natural things. Paving over nature with concrete is the real graffiti. And since when does painting on a sidewalk “damage” the sidewalk? It rubs off after a few months without a trace. Where’s the damage? City workers spray paint all over the streets and sidewalks with flourescent colors because there is a compelling reason for this. They are saying: Do Not Drill Here. There is a Gas line or a water line and if you drill here, there is a clear and present danger. That’s exactly what I’m saying. “If you keep building prisons and taking away money from schools and social programs, there is a clear and present danger.”
But some people ask rhetorically: “How would you like it if everyone wrote their message on the sidewalk for every cause?” I would LOVE it. I think that in a democratic society, people should have the right to write their views on sidewalks. We live in a very undemocratic society where most people don’t have a real voice. And most people don’t realize the voice that they do have. There are tens of thousands of graffiti writers who only write their names, and they write them on walls that other people have to pay to clean off. No one pays to clean up sidewalks. I am trying to speak to graffiti writers, and appeal to them to write things that matter, and to write in places where it does not cost people to clean off. For less than $200 worth of spray paint, I have reached more than a million alienated young people in more than a dozen cities, many of whom don’t read books or look at websites and who are disenfranchised from civic life, but who deserve to have a say in this country and don’t. There are class and race and generational and cultural reasons why some people like the graffiti and some don’t.
And if you are one of those people who doesn’t like the graffiti, you may want to ask yourself what it means that you so dislike something that truly speaks to so many alienated young people. Adults who care about disenfranchised youth need to find ways to support young people for real. The conventional means are not working. Instead of criticizing what I’m doing, why don’t you figure out how to stop the prison industrial-complex from doing graffiti on people’s lives, and while you’re at it, find a better, equally affordable, way to encourage millions of alienated young people to get involved in their communities and in the civic life of our country. Then I’ll quit writing on sidewalks.

Monday, May 8, 2000

April 18, 2000
RALEIGH, NC- Relaxation. Sort of. For the first week in three months, I don’t have anything to do but sit around with Easter and figure out what the hell we’re doing. There are so many options and so many questions Reciprocity needs to think about. We dove into our tour and this is the first time we’re coming up for air to see what we’ve accomplished and to strategize the rest of the year.
Unfortunately, there is less time than we hoped. I have two speaking gigs and once you factor in all the errands and answering emails and phone, there really isn’t time to have the huge brainstorming sessions we need to have.
Yesterday at lunch we attended a presentation at Self Help in Durham with some really Big Thinkers. It was sponsored by some of Easter’s friends, Herrod and Maya who are part of an organization called Fourth Sector Alliance, whose goal is no less than the creation of an entire social/economic sector which combines the best aspects of for-profit and not-for-profit. The speaker was a man named Joel Getzendanner who is the behind-the-scenes spearhead of a similar ambitious venture called The Chaordic Alliance which pushes more traditional organizations to think “out of the box” and to collaborate and invent new ways of working and living in the world.
The protest in DC was not all I had hoped for but it was still beautiful. I was mad I didn’t have time to help more, and recruit more people to come. I was mad our organizations aren’t at a place yet where we could have canvassed the rally for cool rich kids. I’ll write about it really briefly because I have to go. 10,000 to 15,000 mostly white people, and the government flipped out more than they did for the Million Man March. Black men know they couldn’t get out of line in Washington, or they’d be through. Us white kids can get away with being out of line, and not much happens to us. My friend Josh got his camera smashed by a cop. Other people got hit by a police van ramming right into them. Some other people got beat in the head or tear gassed. 600 people got arrested for being at a permitted rally the day before.
It’s funny how differently some whites and blacks saw the police presence. I ran into Bishop, a hip-hop activist from Cleveland who works at BET. I asked him whether he felt more scared of the police at the rally or on the streets of DC. He said: “No I feel safe here. They’re on their best behavior. On the streets of DC, they can do anything to you. I get stopped all the time on the street in DC, just for walking down the street.” He proceeded to tell me stories.
Shoot, I gotta go. I gotta go jogging and get my head clear. We have so much to talk about today. I need to make time for myself to think. I ran into Julia Butterfly at the rally (aka the woman who sat in the tree). I got to talk to her for a few minutes but it made me realize how not present I am right now. I didn’t talk to her like I wanted to and I need to catch my spirit.

April 14, 2000
BROOKLYN- Lord have mercy. I know I haven’t written in so long. It’s hardest to write when there’s so much going on! We just did eight events in nine days. I woke up late today and wondered why I was tired! I’m behind in everything. I’m canceling as many events as I can and raising my speakers fee to $2000. I am financing a movement at this point and I don’t have time to breathe or think straight. Hundreds of unanswered emails, letters and phone calls are weighing on me. Leaving tomorrow for the Jubilee 2000 protest in DC, to get the IMF and the World Bank to cancel the debt and rethink some of their more hideous policies toward the developing world. I don’t know a lot about this issue, but I’m going to go and learn what I can through the clouds of tear gas.

April 14, 2000
BROOKLYN- Newsblast! Ten colleges have done actions against Marriott-Sodexho for their investment in private prisons. See accompanying article. Thirty-five schools around the country have had major actions over the past two months around sweatshops, living wages, and prison privatization. I went with Gita and Kofi to a funder briefing a few days ago at the Soros Foundation with the groups the led the fight against California’s Prop 21. So many dope people were in one room. Half of the progressive funders in America, plus people from Youth Force, Student Liberation Action Movement, The Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence (who are organizing against the immigrant prisons), and Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. I am so excited. The Bay Area is leading the way. I am so proud we funded them. The rest of us need to catch-up. Van Jones and Harmony Goldberg from the Bay Area came to our talk at the School of Visual Arts on Monday. It was beautiful. Five of us spoke: Me, Easter, Luqman, Kofi, and then we brought Van on and he stole the show. He gave a vivid play-by-play of the now historic Hilton Hotel take-over “the first sit-in of the hip-hop generation” and compared it to the lunch-counter sit-ins in February 1960. He predicted the next ten years are either going to be like the 1960 to 1969 in the US (a window of rapid progressive social change), or they’re going to be like the years between 1930 and 1939 in Germany –the rise of Nazism. That may sound extreme, but we are in fact in the midst of the fastest expansion of a prison system aside from Nazi Germany. And we are depending on the new generation of young people to rise to the challenge and nip this monster in the bud.
No More Prisons sidewalk graffiti has been reported in several new towns including: Savannah GA, Durham, NC and Iowa City, IA!!! Send in your photos, and we’ll put them up on the website. The student movement is on!

Saturday, April 15, 2000

Michael Schmelling
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