We Speak for Ourselves: A Word From Forgotten Black America

    D. Watkins doesn’t seem to like the well-known Black American pundits, nor the elite Black professionals who he meets at an Oprah Winfrey event. He finds that the Black professors, who go on TV and talk about Black issues, have no real interest in talking to an unemployed Black man. Throughout the book, he compares the Black pundit to a drone; viewing the people from too great a distance, and not seeing what’s really going on.

One of the more disturbing parts of this book is the collective reaction to the Charlottesville tragedy, where a woman was run over by a White supremacist. Watkins mocks the TV pundits for crying about the racist tiki-torch boys but not shedding a tear for Heather Heyer, who got killed. Then he realizes the problem, which is that they are somehow surprised by open White racism, and that surprises him. He wonders why they’d cry over open racism, but not cry about the deaths of Michael Brown, Freddy Grey, or any of the other unarmed Black men (or women, or kids) killed by White police. Then he wonders if any of these elitist Black Americans know anyone Black outside of their social circle. He finds it comical that with all the horrible things happening in the USA, these people are crying over a sparsely attended rally in a town that nobody had heard of until the tragedy.

Watkins’ chapter on police brutality is titled An American Tradition and uses the difference between rich and poor neighborhoods as a test of American policing. In the more affluent community, the police will make fewer stops, while in a poor one, everyone is a suspect. This point I agree with, because I once lived in a dominantly White area and there were few police stops. Based on what I saw growing up, the worst thing a cop ever had to worry about was a group of teenage skaters. The next problem discussed in this chapter is the “police as heroes” myth, and how it plays into protecting bad cops. However, the author didn’t really do his research on this topic, because there are many reasons why it’s difficult to fire bad cops, and almost impossible to get a conviction. Few police officers have been convicted of committing a murder while on duty (except for Joseph Kent McGowan in Texas), and reasons include unions, arbitration, high-priced defense lawyers, incompetent prosecutors, and the common law doctrine of sovereign immunity.

Once again, on the subject of bad cops (a subject that has dominated political discourse for the last five years) the author writes that while the Freddy Grey cops got off the hook, the system worked for the eight cops convicted of other crimes. At this point in the book, we need to step back. The Baltimore cops whom Watkins refers to are not an example of how “the system works.” The reason that these cops were convicted of drug-dealing, gun-dealing, payroll fraud, and money laundering, is that the prosecution was easier. When a cop makes a false statement, steals from the evidence locker, or gets caught with illegal drugs, the evidence is impossible to dispute. He can’t say “I stole guns and sold them on the street because I had probable cause!” He can’t say “I broke into the store and stole 300 pairs of sunglasses because I was afraid for my life!” Try as he might, no cop could get off the charges by saying “I drove drunk because the guy had a gun.” Furthermore, a cop has no protection for a crime committed while off-duty, which is why Antoinette Frank (from New Orleans) was convicted. The problem is that if a cop shoots someone while on duty, he can claim that his own safety was compromised. All he has to do is say “I thought the thing in his hand was a gun,” and that’s that. For on-duty killings, the burden is entirely on the prosecutor.

Another problem that I have with this book is that the author keeps waxing nostalgic about living in the Baltimore housing projects. There’s no law that says people must live there. And it was never quality housing to begin with. Now that segregation is over, why does he not want his people to get out of the projects? What could he find good about living in disgusting run-down buildings that were designed to segregate? The public housing is the worst form of charity and has led to a further dependence on charity. He writes about classmates whose lives were ruined by teenage pregnancy and absent fathers, but nobody seems to encourage birth control. Watkins is right about police brutality, and he’s right in that the rudeness he encounters is often race-based, but the cards stacked against him involve a lot more than racism. Things like poverty, drug use, poor nutrition, and family violence, can do a lot more damage than a racist cop.

To Sir With Love, by E.R. Brathwaite

Few in history have disobeyed the racist warning of To Kill a Mockingbird, or more Black writers would follow Brathwaite’s path of criticizing low-class Whites. Before I mention anything about the White working class to a Hillbilly Elegy debate, let me remind that Brathwaite is an Englishman and his memoir takes place in London. Ignoring the silly 1967 film version, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, which takes place in 1948, when London was struggling after WWII and there was no G.I. Bill. This book is a contrast to most stories of adventure, because it’s usually the upper-class Englishman exploring Africa, not a Black Guyana-born former RAF officer surviving in London. Furthermore, this man behaves like a judgmental English explorer when he ventures among the White youth of darkest London; they are dirty, unwashed, uncouth, uncultured, and with little appreciation for their country’s gifts to history.

    To Sir With Love is a book that is unfortunately ignored today, a loss to all of us. However, most books on the proletarian experience of post-WWII Britain are ignored as well (Been in the Snooker Club, A Kid for Two Farthings, An East End Story) as opposed to more “classical” works by writers like Mary Wesley. Even if you’re not especially interested in the race or education aspects of the book, you still get an eye into what Britain was like after the war ended. The author comes out of his service in the Royal Air Force (where he experienced no hostility) and finds that everyone – employers and the public alike – regards him as a nuisance. There are dirty looks on the train and bus, signs advertising rooms for rent are suddenly a mistake, and the fact that he risked his life for Britain means nothing. Though he doesn’t mention it in the book, the Polish RAF pilots got the same treatment. The British were happy to have them while there was a war going on, but once the war ended, they were asked if they wouldn’t mind leaving the country. Bloody decent of the Brits!

    In terms of plot, the memoir is relatively simple; born and educated in Guyana, graduate work at CUNY, RAF crewman in WWII, demobbed in 1945, and unemployed (like most war veterans regardless of color) in post-war UK. Unable to find work as an engineer, he takes a job teaching 14-year-olds in a crappy school on Cable Street, and here his adventures begin. This educated West Indian, espousing upper-class airs, looks down on their foul mouths and foul hygiene. The famous scene in the movie with the burning bra? Yes, it happens in the book. The scene where he boxes with the class moron? Yes, that happens too, but at the very beginning. These two events serve as a kind of icebreaker.

The story of the new teacher who flies in to rescue the bad kids can be a genre unto itself. We have The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy, and Blackboard Jungle by Evan Hunter, though in the latter, the hero teacher fails. Then there’s Coach Carter, Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers, Death at an Early Age, they’re all cultural icons. Unfortunately, the main character is always the nice White guy or the nice White lady rescuing minority kids, never a Black man rescuing White kids. At the same time, how often do you see (in USA, Canada, Britain, or anywhere else) a Black man or woman teaching White kids? It’s rare. Coach Carter and Lean on Me had one or two White kids, but they’re portrayed as misunderstood and suspicious. Both movies are also part of the “Black disciplinarian” genre to which An Officer and a Gentleman belongs. To Sir With Love is set apart from that genre because Braithwaite isn’t tough, but snobby, with a clear disdain for Cockney ways. It’s a reverse of Heart of Darkness, with the horrors of Africa  replaced with gloomy East End London.

    The kids who the author tries to cultivate are misunderstood in every sense of the word. In the 1967 film, they were nasty and stupid for no reason, but the book explains that in 1948 they were all angry. They’d lost their fathers during the war, and their neighborhood had few male role models. The next problem was that they weren’t expected to graduate high school in those days, so why would they make any effort? Kids in the UK usually left school at 14 to work, unlike in the USA, and there was no GI Bill or cult of upward mobility. When you grew up poor in London, there was no expectation to move up the social ladder, and even Booker T. Washington made note of this in his book Up From Slavery. When Washington visited the UK in 1900, he noted how the American wants to be his own master, but the Englishman wants to do the best he can in the position he has.

While Booker T. Washington refused to give his opinion on the English work ethic, Brathwaite makes his disdain very clear. He would clearly like to see the kids do better in life, so I can forgive him for being such a snob. I would also point out a British film from the 1960’s, called Spare The Rod, which is also about a bleak London school. The kids are rude and dirty with no prospects, and the teachers are too upper-class to relate to the kids. The difference between the two stories is that in Spare The Rod the teachers whip the kids. I had to wonder why the kids in Spare The Rod didn’t just hit the teacher back? They’re not going to stay after 14 anyway, so what do they have to lose? What is the school going to do, expel them a month before they age out?

   Omitted from the film is the eyebrow-raising romance between him and a sexy blonde White teacher at the school. They get nasty remarks from two old biddies on a train during the field trip, and they get attitude from a waiter in a restaurant. When he meets her parents, they’re not averse to him, but apprehensive. It seems that a lot of the xenophobia in the story has to do more with apprehension than outright fear or jealousy. An employer tells him “I’m sorry, but we have Englishmen who’ve been working here for years and we wouldn’t be able to make you their boss.” There’s a funny scene where he gets a hostile response while checking a room for rent, but just as she’s about to slam the door at him, a girl peeks out and goes “oh no, Mum, that’s Sir!” For some reason, I found the woman’s rudeness comical.

    Brathwaite’s version of the events is disputed in the book An East End Story by Alf Gardner. The former student states that Brathwaite was mean, abusive, gladly used the rod, and the girls were uncomfortable around him. He also states that while the headmaster had officially banned caning, Brathwaite used it anyway. However, I wonder if Brathwaite was just too much of a Victorian moralist for Gardner’s tolerance? None of the other pupils have come forward (if any of them are still alive) and the school’s radical headmaster Alex Bloom died in the 1950’s. Was Mr. Bloom a Jew? There are several Jewish characters in the book, though their goals and aspirations are different from those you’ll know in the USA (there are few Jewish doctors in the UK.) From my experience, the Jewish Briton doesn’t make a spectacle of himself, probably thanks to centuries of Anti-Semitism. You won’t see lots of noticeably Jewish comedians in the UK either. No Adam Sandlers or Rodney Dangerfields there.

    I’m not sympathetic to all the kids in the book, by the way. When the biracial student named Seale loses his mother, they all buy a wreath, but won’t take it to his house. They don’t want to be seen going to a colored person’s house, because “people will start to talk.” They all go to the funeral, pressed and clean, but won’t visit the house, and this is the part where I got upset. The class asshole, a boy named Denham, likes to be the tough guy, but he’s too afraid of housewife gossip to show solidarity. I wonder sometimes if the ultimate test of toughness is standing up to your own friends and family? When A. Philip Randolph supported Albert Shanker and the Teacher’s Union, he lost a lot of support from his own people. Fidel Castro, another famous leftist, supported everything the Soviets did, and was seen as a desperate puppet. Unlike Castro, Romania’s communist dictator denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and won worldwide respect.

    Perhaps Brathwaite, a teacher in 1949 Britain, had the same problem as US teachers 70 years later? When your dealing with lower-class kids from troubled backgrounds, it’s like trying to de-brainwash a cult member. These kids have been taught that it’s cute to be stupid, and that insults have to be avenged, and that you get respect by being bad. Think of all the White (or educated Black) teachers who keep saying “no, it’s not okay to shoot someone” and the kid is never convinced. It took Brathwaite a while to convince the girls that skankiness is not a turn-on.

    I found the book much better than the movie, in part because Sidney Poitier’s acting style is annoying. The fact that Brathwaite is not an American is a big help, because the social class dynamic plays a big part. During my time in the UK, I found that class differences were a taboo subject that were only mentioned in the occasional comedy. It’s a sore point in the UK, whether Cockney accents are acceptable or not, and whether proper speech means polished vowels. If you go into the courts, you’ll hear the judges and barristers all speaking with refined posh accents, no low-class drawls in the court. Go into a US court, and you’ll hear judges with Staten Island accents. You’ll hear low-class accents among police chiefs, judges, army officers, doctors, and politicians. They’ll wear it like a badge of honor.

The Black and the Blue: A Cop Reveals the Crimes, Racism, and Injustice in America's Law Enforcement

    Ferguson, Missouri, once a sleepy backwater town of African American refugees from the St. Louis slums, has been much in the news in the last decade. Unknown to American before the Michael Brown shooting, it had a budget based entirely on robbery. Starved of any tax revenue, the town’s municipal authorities had the following arrangement; the police would stop cars under any pretense they could, write as many tickets as possible, and the judges, in prior agreement with the prosecutors and police, levied outrageous fines. Traffic tickets that would normally be dismissed by a judge were not only ruled bona fide, but got you a $300 fine for not using your turn signal. If you didn’t have the money, too bad, it was pay the fine or go to jail. If you told the police officer he was mistaken, he’d arrest you for it and write a bunch of lies in the report. The judge would be notified about the arrest before the case got to court, and he’d be sure to disregard your story. When Michael Brown was killed by a cop in Ferguson, and his body left in the street for too long, it the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Yet it was happening all over the USA.

    The Black and the Blue explores the bad relationship between American police and the Black citizens. The author, a Black American police officer, does not let the Black cops off the hook, because he includes a chapter on the corrupt New Orleans police. The NOPD, as his example of the worst, required that officers come from the inner city (which created a very small talent pool) and paid too little (so cops took inappropriate side jobs.) Because it was impossible to find anyone who wanted to be a police officer, the NOPD had to hire Antoinette Frank (currently the only cop on death row for murder). Officer Frank was Black, just like Officer Len Davis (doing life for murder), but they abused the Black citizens of New Orleans, especially the ones living in the worst part of town.

    The author has very little sympathy for police officers who can’t control themselves. Yet he recounts an incident, from his first year in the blue line, when he was faced with a “should I use force” problem. He was responding to a domestic disturbance, and one of the residents was rather large, too large for him to physically subdue. So what would he do, use the taser? Drag the man out the door? It’s the kind of dilemma that I’m sure a lot of police officers get into, and one that gets a lot of cops in trouble. However, he spent most of his career in law enforcement at the Federal level. He wasn’t patrolling the streets in a bad neighborhood all day and night. He wasn’t dealing with rowdy teens in the playground. He didn’t have to deal with (what psychologists call) relational aggression or the stress it induces. A lot of his time probably involved detective work, so he would rarely be in a position to have to chase a fleeing suspect.

    My problem with this book is that the author doesn’t offer a lot of workable solutions. He discusses the problems, like poor training, but doesn’t really discuss what’s wrong with the training. He criticizes police for having generally poor interpersonal skills, but doesn’t try to uncover the reason. Is it because the police have terrible interpersonal skills from the start? Does police training turn you into a bully? He recounts a White police officer pulling him over, and the officer’s reason was “I’d never seen your car before.” Race may have been an issue, but I also have to wonder if a lot of it was paranoia. Do police officers become afraid of things that others would ignore? The author isn’t clear as to whether it’s bad training, fear of Black men, or just being a jerk. He also doesn’t go into the qualification aspect, or whether having a college degree really makes any difference. He’s a Delaware State University graduate, so he himself is educated, but I bet that most NYPD officers who have complaints against them are college graduates too.

    I also wonder if the idea of respect for law enforcement is a little skewed in the USA, at least compared to other countries. I’ve seen countless Youtube videos of British police being called names, ordered away from peoples’ doors, and generally told to “f-off.” Now look at how it is in terms of American events; if a police officer knocks on the door with no warrant, and you open the door, the US police officer can push his way in, but the British cop can’t. In the USA, if you tell the warrantless cop to get lost, you’re asking for trouble. But in the UK, you can be as rude as you want and you’ll get away with it. I suspect that the cops in the UK are under pressure not to pack the court’s docket, especially not with silly cases that can’t be proven. The Bronx courts, with a notorious backlog, probably have hundreds of cases where the only real crime was saying “don’t put your hands on me.”

    Years ago, I took the test to get into the Chicago PD, and I remember the words of the training officer word for word. He said “When you’re a police officer, you’ll have the power to take a man’s freedom away, and sometimes, you’ll be in a position to take his life away.” Then he paused, and asked “Would you want that power in the hands of a guy who’s an asshole?” We all said NO in unison. Now here’s the problem; the training officer was an ex-marine, and most of the prospective cadets had never served in the military. Were they deficient in self-control, self-discipline, and the rules of engagement? Secondly, this man had spent his entire career in the training department. He was rarely in a position to deal with nasty people out in the street. Did it give him the luxury of being able to always mind his manners?

    It remains to be seen if policing in the USA will change, but I won’t get my hopes up. Here in NYC, the police are getting fatter, response time is taking too long, and I consider them the epitome of cowardice. They won’t stop taxis that run red lights, but they knock cyclists off bicycles for riding in the wrong lane. They tolerate open-air drug dealing, but stop and frisk men in building superintendent uniforms. The NYPD pay is low, but I’m starting to think that maybe it’s all they deserve. I also wonder if they don’t understand how the other half lives? When Detective Patrick Cherry went on a tirade against a cab driver, and it was caught on camera, he was punished with desk duty. But did he have any idea what it’s like to be verbally attacked by someone who you’re not allowed to stand up to? My solution is this; take away his badge/gun, suspend him from the NYPD for one month, and force him to live in a housing project in the Bronx. Make him live among the underclass, in a crime-infested community. Let him see what these people go through. We’ll soon see if he’s really that tough.

Makers and Takers: How Wall Street Destroyed Main Street

   Andrew Lo, an MIT professor, hears that his mother has cancer and sets out to do his own research on cancer treatment. He’s lucky, his colleagues at the school have contacts in a biotech firm, and they’re developing a new cancer drug. The problem is in the money, and I don’t mean HIS money. The firm is at the mercy of investors in order to fund the research and testing, and the investors want huge guarantees that the drug will work. This isn’t news to me, I remember a 1990’s article about the eight-figure cost of testing McCavor (a cholesterol reducing drug, if anyone still takes it) and all the other medicines, most of which were eventually outclassed. What surprised me in this book is that the drug companies are all moving to Ireland to get tax breaks. Not only is the USA losing the jobs, but the CEO’s  might not have to pay tax on the money.

   The author blames part of the problem on the MBA degree, because, according to her, it teaches useless theories and not real-world finance. Okay, we all remember the scene in Back to School, where Rodney Dangerfield one-ups the stuffy professor and schools him on the realities of business. I can believe that scene, the professor obviously has never been out of academia, so he has no idea of what really goes on. But I disagree with the author’s argument that the MBA is to blame; if the drug companies need financing, they should be hiring pitchmen who can negotiate with potential investors.

    Next comes the charity director (in this case Josette Sheeran of the UN world food program) with a prop that she brings to meetings, and how she shows skeptical plutocrats how hungry the kids are. I disagree again with the author’s argument, in this case blaming capitalism for the worldwide rise in food prices. She doesn’t question other possibilities, like the people in the USA, Britain, and Europe who reject farming as an occupation. She also ignores the fact that India and the Arab oil states are importing more food than ever before. She also ignores the possibility that a country’s farming practices are unsound. No mention is made about unsound farming methods, which George Washington Carver spent years trying to change. It reminds me of the people who cure themselves of illness, and reduce their medicines from 20 to two, by simply cutting processed foods and losing weight.

   I think the problem here is that the author is going for the most expensive solution to a problem, rather than starting at the bottom. She blames the rising corn prices on ethanol in gasoline, but she doesn’t realize that all processed foods use corn syrup as a sweetener, and most US livestock is fed on corn. If Americans were to reject processed foods, corn prices would drop, and with that, the price of beef, pork, poultry, dairy, and eggs. Maybe the problem is entirely on Americans eating too much junk? I had a similar (and funnier) argument once from an old Israeli, and it went like this; “Ben-Gurion brought has own lunch to work and ate pita bread and goat cheese, then Yitzhak Shamir liked to sit in cafes and drink coffee, but now Netanyahu wears $1000 suits and eats $300 steak dinners, and the steaks are all imported.”

    To sum up, I disagree with everything the author says. The problem is not Wall Street, the problem is materialism. If Americans weren’t glued to the TV and stuffing their faces with junk food, the USA would not be dependent on corn and drugs.

Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores

    The subject of imprisonment as the new slavery now takes up a whole shelf in the sociology section of the bookstore. For those of you who read The New Jim Crow, the author mentions it in the introduction as a jumping off place, and unlike the former, Rethinking Incarceration is a bit more progressive; it offers workable solutions.

Dominique DuBois Gillard blames mass incarceration on the War on Drugs. He argues, convincingly that the media pushed the image of the dangerous, menacing Black criminal, while ignoring the White Americans involved. At the same time, he blames Black politicians for supporting harsh anti-drug laws. For example, 14 members of the Congressional Black Caucus supported Bill Clinton’s 1994 anti-crime law. However, I don’t agree with his argument that the churches were responsible for the harsh laws. Whether it was Falwell and Graham on the right, or the Black churches on the left, I can’t see any blame being put on them. The churches only played a tiny part in the War on Drugs, even during the conservative Reagan era.

Another issue in this book is the heavy-handed tactic used in drug enforcement, especially the excessive use of SWAT in the raids. He uses the Catherine Johnson case in Atlanta as an example, involving no-knock warrants, lying cops, and unnecessary shootings. Unfortunately, he ignores the Whites (usually poor ones) who suffer at the hands of corrupt, dishonest, overzealous, or mean-spirited police. By making it an issue of color, he’s likely to make the reader question his argument. Using the Old South’s Black Codes is unnecessary, because they ended over a hundred years ago. The Black Codes have nothing to do with today’s mass imprisonment. Then he discusses mental illness and how people end up in jail when they should be getting mental health care. He’s right about that one, states are shutting down mental hospitals, and dumping the patients out with a week’s supply of Thorazine. So why not write more about this?

Gillard makes good arguments on the economics of prisons, and the ways that private businesses can use them for profit. The Kids-For-Cash scandal is mentioned as an example, though I think that’s a little extreme. He also ignores the fact that the kids in Pennsylvania’s famous scandal were mostly Caucasian. He misses an opportunity to go into how the prison pipeline is in fact pan-racial, and that is something that has to be publicized in order to get broader support. I also wonder if the Kids-For-Cash scandal was entirely the result of greed, or was it feeding into the public’s desperation for a solution to crime? The police usually couldn’t care any less about a kid who throws a lamb chop at her stepfather, or a kid who mocks the school principal on Myspace. So why did the police arrest the kids in the first place? This is where the author’s argument can gain steam. If the police decide to breach their own limits and arrest kids for being rude, does that open up the justice system to corrupt bullies? Will private prison tycoons, or even bribe-taking judges, smell an opportunity to make money? Maya Angelou once said, “Don’t go telling everyone about your troubles, it lets the bullies know there’s a victim in the neighborhood.”

It isn’t just the prisons themselves where you can see the mass incarceration, but in the schools as well, and yes, he writes about the school-to-prison pipeline. I’ve seen troubles schools, Black and White, but it’s the Black students who are suspended more. However, the author misses something that I’ve observed in how Black and White kids are disciplined differently. Black schools often use intimidation to keep the kids in line, while White schools (even wretched trailer-trash) use regular school management. Even the supposedly “good” charter schools in New York have a Black Dean of Students who is scary, nasty-looking, uses “mad dog” looks when he (or she) wants something, and gets in the kids’ faces for anything. As an example, I’ll cite the Vice documentary Expelled From Every Other School (available on Youtube) where a big, nasty staff member barges into a class, gets in the kid’s face, and bullies him into taking his coat off. It’s the same way in the homes of Black children, where the parents use either the “drill sergeant” method of parenting, or they use the same street-thug attitude seen in the jail. I have to wonder, would a Black teacher get away with talking that way to a White kid? I’ve seen public schools with a separate dean for Black and White kids, so I really have to wonder.

We Are Staying: Eighty Years in the Life of a Family, a Store, and a Neighborhood

    Radio Clinic was a fixture in Manhattan, through the early days of radio to the Depression, from the post war boom to the bust, from the best days to the worst days and on. I bought my first air conditioner there when I moved into the neighborhood, though it was no longer called Radio Clinic and radios were only a tiny part of the store. Jen Rubin, a fixture in the store as a teenager, recounts the life of a store that her immigrant grandfather started, and her father inherited. The title We Are Staying is from a sign posted on the store after the 1977 Blackout and looting. It didn’t ruin them, they persevered.

   Let’s start with her grandfather, the founder. He was a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe in the 1930’s, got into radio repair, worked out of a small store, and moved up to the store on 98^th and Broadway. Rubin’s book is a window into the history of the Upper West Side, both in economic and personal vignettes. Her grandfather put his business in the neighborhood because there were more people there, thanks to the huge buildings, and the extra money of the residents didn’t hurt either. Even poor people had radios, and the profit was in fixing the cheaper ones. When FDR began his famous fireside speeches, radio became even more valuable. She also writes about how tax breaks encouraged the building owners to subdivide apartments into SRO’s, and they brought bad elements into the community.

    There’s a funny story in the book about how her grandfather got involved with the Soviets. Two diplomats came in to buy a TV, and they tried, without success, to haggle a lower price. They were shocked to find that her grandfather, Leon Blum, understood Russian, and it brought in a ton of business. The Soviet customers  - diplomats and ballet directors, mostly – would come into buy loads of electronics (though I suspect they were taking them home to unload on the black market.) Soon the FBI got wind of the huge Soviet clientele, and the old man now had a side gig as an informant.

    This book also has a lesson on family business, and how working with relatives can create problems. The author’s father never got along with his relations in the business, especially when it came to how much they should pay their employee, Raymond. He was a Black American who’d worked in the store for decades, and he was much older than the new management, and believed that he deserved a raise. Raymond could’ve owned his own store, but where would he have gotten the capital? No bank would given a business loan to a Black man in the 1950’s.

    The business stayed (hence the title) after the 1977 Summer Blackout, when the huge power outage created opportunity for looting. She says that everyone blamed everyone; first it was Con Ed, with faulty wiring and violations, then the stretched-thin NYPD, then it was the famously unready mayor Abraham Beam (who couldn’t handle even the smallest emergency.) She quotes sociologists who blamed the looting on “disenfranchisement” of minorities, and given the demographic of the looters (Black and Latino bums who lived in the SRO’s) the theory may be true. The stores that were hit the hardest were the ones  with the small, quick-selling items, so Radio Clinic was hit hard. At the same time, the blackout saved some merchandise, because you needed the hoist to get the heavy air conditioners up from the basement. Most retail stores had some theft, but the pizza joints were safe; nobody breaks into a pizza place to steal the ovens.

    Jen Rubin devotes a full chapter to how her father’s store recovered. He spent a full year begging for loans, haggling with the city for grants, and begging suppliers to delay the bills. He said “I’m responsible for 25 families, mine and those of my employees. He father’s efforts to sustain the business are worthy of being a college course, and all that he had to do can’t be learned at Harvard Business School.

   The store closed by 2008, thanks to online competition and rising rents. It’s impossible to run an independent mom-and-pop electronics appliance store, there’s too much competition and the big chain stores have easier credit and capital. It’s true what Jimmy McMillan says, “The rent IS too damn high,” especially for the little guy. But the store lasted decades when others did not. Her father chose to stay, rather than collect the insurance and declare bankruptcy.

It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America

    Right after Obama was elected, a book came out called A Day Late and a Dollar Short, about the failure of government aid and service. The Obama age isn’t expressly written about in this book, but the Hope & Change ideal (or was it a cult?) was definitely a motivation. Did having a Black man in the White House make a difference? Could anything really change in Alabama or Mississippi, the poorest states in the Union? Would anything change in Detroit, Philly, Camden, Chicago, or The Bronx, where decades of Black Democrat rule had failed?

    Reniqua Allen regards herself as a beneficiary of the American Dream. Born and raised in New Jersey, with educated and successful Black parents, she was (like me) a child of the 1990’s. She recounts the sitcom Living Single and how it inspired her to be just like the character on the show; a financially independent Black women, who can get away without being overly girly and still find a decent man. As an adult, Allen seems to face a puzzle about the goals of American life. Firstly, is prosperity achievable, or do young minorities get left out? Secondly, are young Black Americans achieving the American Dream without realizing it?

    Allen’s first subject is a Morehouse graduate who aspired to live and work in New York City. Not an impossible dream; anyone can take a train north, if they can pay. Unfortunately, his three years in The Big Apple were a disappointment from the very start. First, he didn’t get the journalism job he’d studied for. He became a Teaching Fellow but hated to long commute on the city’s crumbling transport system. He felt stressed, worn out, defeated, and after taking stock of his life, realized that the problem wasn’t the job, but the city! He returned to the South, went to live in Georgia, goodbye dirty subways, hello front porches and easy car commutes. This is an example of a New Millennium trend – The Reverse Migration – now that America’s cities are no longer the so-called “promised land.”

    In the Morehouse graduate’s case, we also face another dilemma in the USA – the student loan debt crisis – and it makes you wonder if a dream is worth it, when you have to spend your life paying for it. The next problem is the delusion of the creative job. Did he know how competitive journalism is? Did he know how low the pay is? Did he think he could compete with someone who’d written for their high school paper, college paper, interned at a paper, and had a record of reporting? When he became a teacher, that was a much more achievable goal. So, the question is, was his dream in fact a “dream deferred,” or was it a broken dream, or was it a pipe dream?

   Just as I expected, Reniqua Allen goes into another American problem, the college athlete. You have a group of boys who fall for the myth that sports are a way out of poverty. These boys waste all their time on their sports, put the ball before the book, never have part-time jobs or summer jobs, get a sports scholarship to college, and then lose it thanks to an injury. This is where I have a problem with the author using the words Broken Promises in the title, because nobody promised these youths anything! One of the saddest examples of the student athlete delusion is the documentary Hoop Dreams, which I hate. Yes, I know you all loved it, but I call it Hoop Nightmares, because it’s about sorry kids being cheated by wolves. All over the USA, high school ball games are watched by men in suits, sent by colleges to find Black athletes for their teams. Is this any different from a cattle call, or even a slave auction? Slave owners used to dress their slaves in fancy clothes for the auctions, and the buyers would select the ones who were big and strong. Never did they look for a slave with accounting skills or legal knowledge, because slaves were never sent to school. Slavery ended 150 years ago, and today the college scouts are after tall Black boys who can play ball. They never visit the school looking for Black kids who are good at science. The kids who are good at science have to seek out the college themselves.

    Back to the subject of student loan debt, Allen calls the chapter Don’t Double Down on Stupid, and recounts another graduate drowning in bills. He takes out loans to go to college, doesn’t get the job he wants, takes out another loan for graduate school, and despite all his education, he has no job and huge debt. It sounds like this young man is pretty stupid, despite his education. Nowhere does the graduate (or even the author) consider all the other viable options he could’ve taken. He could’ve become a police officer, or corrections officer, or he could’ve gone into teaching. I know that law enforcement isn’t attractive to a lot of young Black men, and few desire to go into corrections, but these jobs are easy to get into and they’re a way to quickly pay off debts. After doing two horrible years as a corrections officer, you’ll be glad to take any other job, or go to grad school. Maybe do a degree in political science? I’m sure the years in corrections will give you plenty to write about!

    One of the problems that the author herself suffers from is lack of financial sense. Throughout the book she makes it look like a “microaggression” for a Black man to have to wait patiently for something and declares it racist to discourage a Black kid from college. She admits she dumped a $70,000 TV job for another degree, which she pretty much admits is useless. Then she writes about a UCLA student, the daughter of an LAPD cop and kindergarten teacher, limited in life because her parents never went to college. Here again is the author’s blindness to reality. This man had 25 years on the force, plenty of time to take a 2-year degree at a cheap college, and so did her mother. On one hand the author laments the strain of the student loan, but then declares that having no college degree means you’ve been cheated out of American life, obviously through racism.

    Nowhere in this book does Allen give blue collar careers any respect, not even a modicum. When I saw the chapter titled Blue Collar I thought “maybe now she’ll acknowledge that college is NOT the magic pill to sure all of Black America’s ills.” Tough luck for me, she doesn’t. She describes Appalachian coal towns as a good pace to be because mining pays so much, but then she goes back into her routine of indulging the underachiever.  Brandi, the author’s new martyr, finds that coal towns don’t suit her, goes to college, drops out when her mother gets pregnant, and ends up at Walmart. This sort of thing I’m sure happens to White people, but if it happens to a Black woman, then the author will obviously use it in her quest for victimhood. A page is devoted to the story of a Black coal miner who preferred Trump to Obama, and when I read it, I knew that Allen has a huge dislike for the White working class. The miner makes no bones about the racism that exists, but Allen seems to resent him for getting along with the Whites, not fighting them. There’s a story of a Black farmer and army veteran who sought out farming as a form of therapy. He doesn’t deny the racism either, and he speaks of the ignorance among farmers, but the author does plenty of ignoring herself.

    Next comes the African immigrant and his experience as a Black American. An African boy, the son of diplomats, is raised in Switzerland, moves to the USA and gets a culture shock; his host family are Mennonites in Pennsylvania and they have no TV! They all assume that in Africa everyone rides elephants, but back in Nigeria his house had a TV! All the while, I’m thinking of all the US families, Black and White, ruined by materialism, so hooray for the Americans smart enough to get rid of their boob tube. Those simple-living Mennonites (or even the Amish without electricity) could teach us something about life. As for the African in the chapter, I’m surprised he didn’t prepare better. He could easily have stayed in Switzerland after his parents were recalled (liberal Switzerland wouldn’t have thrown him out) and gone to college or a trade school in that country for free. Then he could’ve emigrated to the USA with either a top education or a marketable skill. He would’ve entered the USA as one of the highest order of people. Another missed opportunity.

    It Was All a Dream is basically an exercise in Millennial whining. She goes looking for Black American who have problems (often they’re the same problems that Whites have) and uses them to prove that America is racist and Blacks are the victims. My theory is that Black leaders like Sharpton and Jackson needed to find a common enemy, and it was easier to gain support from their own power base by playing the victim. Then the Black Democrat politicians did the same thing, by convincing Black voters that their problems were the result of racism and that they deserved money. They’re not going to go to poor Whites and say “listen up, we’re all getting screwed, let’s work together.” Police abuses, for instance, effect Whites as much as Blacks (if you don’t believe me, look at New Mexico) and the problems of drug use, teen pregnancy, student loan debt, and civil asset forfeiture are a problem for all races.

    Reniqua Allen is just another young whiner. She needs to see racism in everything so that she can play the victim. These “dreams” she discusses are just dreams, and these so-called victims may be just that; victims of the American Dream. When it comes to dreams versus reality, remember what Josephine Baker once said, “Sometimes the best way to make a dream come true is to wake up from it.”