Heavy: An American Memoir(52)

I just didn’t buy it.

I loved my job, and I understood the first week of school it was impossible to teach any student you despised. A teacher’s job was to responsibly love the students in front of them. If I was doing my job, I had to find a way to love the wealthy white boys I taught with the same integrity with which I loved my black students, even if the constitution of that love differed. This wasn’t easy because no matter how conscientious, radically curious, or politically active I encouraged Cole to be, teaching wealthy white boys like him meant I was being paid to really fortify Cole’s power.

In return for this care, I’d get a monthly check, some semblance of security, and moral certainty we were helping white folk be better at being human. This was new to me, but it was old black work, and this old black work, in ways you warned me about, was more than selling out; this old black work was morally side hustling backward.

? ? ?

The judicial case we were tasked with looking at that night was sad and simple like most of the cases we heard. Security came into Cole’s best friend’s dorm room. They saw and took pictures of felonious amounts of cocaine, little scales, and Baggies on the table. Cole’s best friend, a small, smart white boy with massive eyebrows, was being charged with possession and intent to distribute. I never really understood how or why college judicial boards were hearing potential felony cases, but I had more trust in the college judicial boards to fairly adjudicate these situations than actual jails, judges, juries, police, and prisons.

During the small, smart white boy’s opening statement, he talked about being at a club in the city of Poughkeepsie and being approached by a “big dark man” who made him buy cocaine. I sat back in my chair and looked around the room. Everyone in the room was white. And every white person in the room was transfixed by the story of the small, smart white boy being made to buy cocaine by a nigger on the floor of a club in Poughkeepsie. I breathed heavy through the student’s opening statement, through security’s statement, and through the student’s closing statement. I kept thinking of Brown, the first person I met in Poughkeepsie. He was in prison for violating parole, and he went to prison the first few times for selling less coke than was found in this small, smart white boy’s room. I thought about how even when we weren’t involved in selling drugs, big, dark folks like us could be used to shield white folk from responsibility.

Brown was five-seven, 220 pounds. Big and dark.

I was six-one, 179 pounds. Big and dark.

Mazie was five-nine, 158 pounds. Big and dark.

I’d looked like a big, dark black man since I was an eleven-year-old black boy. I’d been surrounded by big, dark black men since I was born. I never met one big, dark black man who would make a white boy buy cocaine. Apparently, there was one such big, dark black man in Poughkeepsie, New York.

The rest of the disciplinary committee said we couldn’t hold the small, smart white boy responsible for possession because the details of what led to his possession of cocaine were so frightening. We don’t know what it’s like to be as small as this kid, the professor next to me said, and be forced to buy coke from a scary person in a downtown club.

“We don’t?” I asked him.

We don’t know what it’s like to go through what he went through, another administrator said.

I asked both of them why any man who could make a person buy cocaine would not just take the person’s money and keep his cocaine. The professor started talking to me about transformative justice. I told him that I knew well what transformative justice was, and asked again how anything transformative could be happening in this room if it’s predicated on us believing a big black dude made the small, smart white boy buy cocaine.

Everyone in the room looked at me like I had hog-head cheese oozing out of my nose. He never said the guy was black, another member of the committee said. If the small, smart white boy did not technically possess the cocaine, the small, smart white boy could not be held responsible for intent to distribute cocaine. If the small, smart white boy was found not responsible for distributing cocaine, he would have to be let free.

No expulsion.

No suspension.

No disciplinary probation.

I kept looking at the black-and-white pictures of felonious amounts of cocaine, the scale, the Baggies. Apparently, I did not see what I saw because a big black man in the city of Poughkeepsie, a nigger, made me see it.

I didn’t have my own computer or Internet at home, so I walked back to my office after the hearing to e-mail Cole. I believed in prison abolition. But I wasn’t sure how fair it was to practice transformative justice on the cisgendered, heterosexual, white, rich male body of someone who’d been granted transformative justice since birth. I didn’t want Cole making a home in my office anymore. I didn’t want his little skinny white self talking to me about drugs he’d never be guilty of consuming or selling in Poughkeepsie. I asked Cole over e-mail if we could meet in the library from now on.

I leaned back in my chair and looked at my office.

I picked up a chewed pen, a green spiral notebook, and I wrote the names of every person I knew in jail or prison for drug-related offenses. I filled that white piece of paper with black friends, black cousins, black uncles, and black aunties. Some of those black names were serving upwards of thirty years in prison for far less cocaine than the small, smart white boy who was forced to buy cocaine in a club. Then I wrote the names of young people I met in Poughkeepsie who were locked up for drug-related offenses.