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Nobody
by Marc Lamont Hill, foreword by Todd Brewster
c.2016, Atria
$26.00 / $35.00 Canada
250 pages
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Truth Contributor
Charges dropped.
You were surprised, but not surprised. Hopeful that it might
be different, but only barely. You know that these days, the
idea of justice can be a slippery issue that’s sometimes
based on all the wrong things, and in the new book
Nobody by Marc Lamont Hill, you’ll see how we’ve
come to this.
On the afternoon of May 1, 2015, when Baltimore’s chief
prosecutor, Marilyn Mosby, said she was bringing charges “on
six… police officers involved in the arrest and detention of
Freddie Gray,” her pronouncement was met with “cheers.”
Gray’s case then was the latest in a long line, nation-wide,
but it wouldn’t be the last of its kind.
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Gray, says Hill, was Nobody.
“To be Nobody is to be vulnerable,” he says in his preface.
It’s being “poor, black, Brown, immigrant, queer, or trans”
and living in an atmosphere that’s “more rather than less
unsafe.” Nobody is “considered disposable.”
Take, for instance, Michael Brown.
By all indications, Brown was a normal guy who acted
spontaneously: he stole cigarillos from a c-store and shoved
the shopkeeper, who called authorities and the rest is
history. The way it happened, though, the
dehumanization, and the aftermath of Brown’s “random
encounter” with police will be talked about for generations,
says Hill.
How did we get here? The answer is found in crowded,
ill-maintained, depressing neighborhoods where schools are
sub-par and few in charge care. It’s in the way the justice
system operates for those who are too poor to hire a lawyer
or afford their bail. Also to blame: so-called “quotas”
within police departments, a lack of differentiation between
serious infraction and minor annoyance, and the relative
ease of targeting minorities in all of the above.
And yet, says Hill, we cannot “individualize this crisis.”
We must fix housing, schools, the justice system, and the
economy overall, in all corners of the country.
“We must reinvest in communities. We must imagine the world
that is not yet.”
You brace yourself, take a deep breath, unfold the newspaper
at the corner and quickly peek at the headline to see if
it’s about yet another shooting of a young person. So
begins your day. Shoulda read Nobody first.
Before you do, though, let’s get the elephant out of the
room: author Marc Lamont Hill isn’t anti-cop in this book.
Instead, I saw a thoughtful, balanced, thought-provoking
look at how today’s authorities, police departments, and
government entities have evolved to be what they are, and
how that can be turned around. In his examination of the
past, in fact, Hill paints real solutions to the problems
that put vulnerable citizens in harm’s way. I also saw that
those solutions don’t lie 100 percent with those in Blue.
This is not an easy book to read; it’s not fun, either, and
it demands that you think about what’s said. Still, if you
only read one book with the intention of making change, then
this is what you want. Start Nobody today, and
there’ll be no dropping this one.
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