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As faith leader and activist,
Brother Washington Muhammad faces the unenviable task of
responding to the constant needs of a community of the truly
disadvantaged that is, simultaneously situated in a culture
that tolerates violence, and also located within a larger
society that has been, up to now, insensitive to violence
perpetrated upon them by police.
I had the pleasure of
speaking with Muhammad in light of the increasing deaths of
unarmed black men and women on behalf of police throughout
the nation. The second installment of our conversation is
forthright talk that deals with the topic of mass
incarceration and also the dark side of policing.
Perryman:
Earlier you talked about your strategic response to the
April 18 neo-Nazi rally by implementing a counter rally at
the Frederick Douglass Center, filled with positive
activities designed to empower the black community. I would
like to talk, also, about the mass incarceration problem and
about the dark side of policing in the aftermath of the
heinous execution of Walter Scott by police in South
Carolina.
W. Muhammad:
My view on mass incarcerations, as I said before, it goes
back to right after slavery. One of the things that
happened, some people think, that after slavery black people
didn’t know what to do on their own, so they went back to
the plantations. But that was furthest thing from the truth.
Blacks were skilled. We were architects. We were the
blacksmiths. We were the carpenters. We blew glass. So if we
realized that we were free, we were like, you don’t have to
tell me two times. We’re out of here.
So after that we started
building towns and cities. However, the Great Compromise or
the Great Betrayal of 1877 when - - I think it was
Rutherford B. Hayes.
Perryman:
Right. A president from Ohio.
W. Muhammad:
And a gentleman named Tilden, there was an electoral tie.
And in order to preserve the Union; a Post-Reconstruction
compromise was reached to remove all of the federal
protection from those Southern towns. That gave all of the
Reconstructionists the go-ahead, the Klan and everyone else,
to go into these towns owned by blacks, burn them down, and
seize the assets. So, black people ended up having a
tradition of not building towns. Why build it if they’re
going to burn it down? Why put your money in the bank if
they’re going to just take it? Most of us started putting
money under our mattresses, in a shoebox, and things like
that.
Out of these actions, penal
codes were developed, meaning that if you were loitering, if
you were assembled in a group, if you looked as if you
didn’t have proper identification or papers, you would be
forced to become an indentured servant. So America has
always benefited from various types of slave labor.
Perryman:
And Khalil Gibran Muhammad, grandson of the late Nation of
Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, outlines what you’ve just laid
out, in a book. In that book, the Condemnation of
Blackness, of which I was privileged to receive an
autographed copy, Khalil Muhammad inscribed to me, ‘history
is a powerful tool of social transformation.’ And so you’re
quite correct. America has always benefited from, as Mr.
Muhammad also notes, through mass incarceration or free
slave labor. It’s the same thing.
W. Muhammad:
Yes. America would never survive by just feeding the people
that it warehoused. Those that are warehoused are warehoused
for a reason. We built roads. We built Washington, D.C. We
built railroads. We’ve done it. We built cities as
prisoners. So that’s why even today there will never be a
legitimate conversation about immigration in America
regarding Mexican and Latinos or South American people.
Perryman:
Because of the role it plays in capitalism.
W. Muhammad:
So we’ll always play lip service to the ignorant right-wing
conservatives that want an English-only speaking America.
We’ll always play lip service to that Tea Party group that
wants America to go back to the time when it was great. And
that scares the hell out of me when they say that. I’m
like, wait, wait, wait. When in the hell was it great for
us?
Perryman:
I certainly don’t remember a golden age. When were the good
old days? The days of Jim Crow segregation and covenant
restrictions were never good for people of color.
W. Muhammad:
Right, right. So just as the immigrant labor for Hunt’s
Tomatoes, for Dole, for all of those major food
corporations, they need that slave labor. So you’ll always
get some of them to talk about we need to do something about
it. But I’ll tell you what, as long as they can have
so-called illegal immigrants working for a dollar a day,
three dollars a day and things like that, it’s going to
continue. As long as they can continue to create schools
that don’t teach on purpose, so that young people can drop
out or fail out, they recognize that those who drop or fail
out are always going to be funneled into the streets. What’s
in the streets is the perfect environment for crime, for
drug dealing, gangs.
And they need that population
to channel into those prisons that are private now. These
privatized prisons are now on the NASDAQ. They’re on the
stock exchanges. And they have to make a profit. So there’s
an incestuous relationship between schools, the business
corporate communities, and the prisons.
Perryman:
I’m glad that you bring that up because some of my own
research has brought to light the fact that a lot of Fortune
500 corporations, including Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T,
IBM, nearly a million prisoners are making office furniture,
working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking
hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses,
manufacturing shoes and clothing, and are getting paid
between 93 cents and $4 a day. So these prisons are
employing more people, mostly non-violent offenders, than
any Fortune 500 corporation and operating in almost all 50
states.
W. Muhammad:
And, in order to do that, you have to have systems working
together in concert for these them to operate seamlessly. So
it’s not only, the schools, the jails, and corporate
America. There also needs to be a mechanism that feeds the
idea that crime is popular. And our music industry has been
- - those entities that profit off of prison labor are also
major investors in our music.
And they pick and choose the
frequency. They pick and choose the dialogue and lyrics that
their paid entertainers are going to talk about, especially
our black entertainers. They can decide if ‘Nigger, I’m
Selling Dope’ is going to be the number one hit record or
video. The rappers don’t decide that. The corporate execs
decide what that is because they know what type of
atmosphere it will create when they have the premier
entertainers always rapping about violence, illegal
activities.
Perryman:
And the misogynistic depiction of black womanhood.
W. Muhammad:
And conspicuous consumption.
Perryman:
Right.
W. Muhammad:
Now, ask people, why is it that you can have a black artist
singing “nigger” every other song, however, if the same
artist - - if the same entertainer’s in another field, if
he’s in sports and says that, he will get fined. If he was
a Hollywood A-list actor and said that, it would be a
firestorm. If he was a politician and said that, it would be
a huge problem. But it’s no problem using the black music
industry to feed that because they know whom they’re feeding
it to. And there’s no better way to enslave a people than to
have one of their own as the chief enslaver.
Perryman:
Exactly.
W. Muhammad:
I would also like to talk about law enforcement. To do so, I
think that I have to go back to its roots and foundation,
which initially were slave catchers. But even today, the
institutional attitude of law enforcement has always been
adversarial and against black people. Before camera phones
we would never know how bad it was. You would always say -
- I was talking to my son yesterday because he was talking
about Walter Scott. And I said, well, when I was your age,
we didn’t have camera phones. If you got beat up or killed
by the cops, obviously you did something wrong.
Perryman:
We instinctively always took the police at their
word.
W. Muhammad:
Right. No matter what cop beat you up, you ain’t going to go
back to your hood and say, ‘man, they beat me up. Oh, man,
that ain’t true. Show us. I can’t show us. I can’t go
back and get the police officer.’ So the reality is that
this is a culture that is racist in and of itself. But I
had a really good mentor in a gentleman named Johnny
Mickler, when he led the Toledo Urban League. And he was
talking to me about language. He said ‘language is like a
set of master keys, and language is like a chessboard.
Whatever you say, think about the next two moves. So if you
say something stupid, they can take your queen, and your
chance of surviving in a chess match without your queen
against someone that has theirs is almost impossible.
Perryman:
It’s over basically.
W. Muhammad:
It’s over. And in language we make that mistake, too,
especially when we start talking about something being
racial. And Mickler told me: ‘Well, sometimes, just present
the gaps in service. Talk about the gap between how many
unarmed black men have been killed by police and how many
white men have been killed. Then explain the gap there.’
That way it’s off of you arguing over racism or a racist
cop, which can be distracting. Because, as soon as I shout
out racism, they will say, ‘Well, how do you know? I just
know. Well, what do you mean by that? ‘ Okay. So now they
shut me down because I can’t say for sure that he is racist
or not. So if I’m coming out of the gate with that rather
than setting some of my ducks in a row, I’m doomed to fail.
So you must get your ducks in
a row. And if you want to insert that racism word, well,
you insert it to get a particular emotional reaction to it.
That’s like the slam-dunk. But then you’ve got to be mindful
not to be arrogant. I’ve seen many guys do a slam-dunk to
excite the crowd and miss in the process. So it’s better to
try to be as principled as you can in battle rather than
arrogant.
But for police, that
institution has always historically been always the leader
in creating the gap in service to black people. The big
difference now since we’ve had a lot of wars going on, a lot
of those young men and women that served in the military are
coming back, and they’re joining the police force. A lot of
the young - - the people that they recruit from, lack
education and have no cultural competence whatsoever. And
sometimes that lack of cultural competence has been fueled
by racial teachings of whatever community they come from.
So you already have police
already amped up, already talk about the dangerous black
people in the community. And they’re fed this, and I think
even now that’s why you see so much of it happening because
we can record it now. You can see it now. It’s always been
here, but now we see it.
Perryman:
Finally, what strategy do you feel would be most effective
in shifting the relationship between the police and the
black community from that which is primarily adversarial to
one of close engagement and mutual respect?
W. Muhammad:
That starts with the mayor. The mayor is the boss of the
police.
Perryman:
So what does a conversation need to sound like with both the
mayor and the police chief?
W. Muhammad:
I think that the conversation needs to start at presenting
points of dissatisfaction and examples of dissatisfaction in
the way that law enforcement is engaged not only those who
may break the law, but also with law-abiding citizens. Now,
regardless if they’re going to change the attitude or not,
what’s going to end up happening is there needs to be more
dissatisfaction. The greater the dissatisfaction, the
greater the chances that change is going to come. But we are
simply early warners to the police that the way that they
currently engage us has got to stop.
This whole Black Lives Matter
movement is like a warning from God, because there’s nothing
else that has brought people together to speak truth to
power. And there’s never been a time that I was a part of
anything that we protested something and never went home. In
the Black Lives Matter movement, we’re not going home. The
young people are still active. They still want to do
different things in the community that’s going to bring
awareness, and nobody’s going home. Nobody’s tired. There’s
no fatigue.
So everybody has a really
good attitude because we’re not asking for something that we
know no one’s going to give us. We’re just creating an image
that’s going to get people’s attention, that’s going to get
people to start talking and having a conversation.
Perryman:
Thank you.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, D.Min, at
drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org
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