David’s Story
“No one’s life is more important than another’s.”
“Throughout history, everybody was a slave. Nothing to do with complexion. People are slaves today and not know it.” David.
We all have learned to categorize people and if you saw David, you could categorize him as a Black Ex-Con. Knowing all the characterization that comes with that categorization, if you ever had the privilege of knowing David, you would know that you could not be more wrong. You would know that he is the real deal. He is extraordinary. You would then learn, perhaps the biggest lesson you could learn in your lifetime. You will learn not to be guided by your judgments.
David is Real as can be. He does not lie for the sake of being liked by anyone. He does not lie.
David was one of 9 children in the family consisting of seven boys and two girls. He lived with his mother and his siblings in Cleveland Ohio. Dad was not around. His mother worked at various jobs. David and three of his brothers were from the same father; and his other siblings had three other and different fathers. When he was around six years old, other than his brothers and sisters, everyone in his life were strangers. He and his brothers fought all the time. He has very little memory of his dad; he remembers when he was about 4, one time, his father threw a tv in the hallway after an argument with his mother; the tv rolled and hit the back wall with a loud noise.
He and his family moved a lot from place to place. For a substantial period of his childhood, David and his siblings lived with their grandmother who was very strict. When they got in trouble for touching the table or something, grandma would take them outside, take out a branch from the tree, remove the exterior bark and whip them.
They sometimes had visits with their father’s parents. David noticed how his grandmother favored his younger lighter skin brother. She did not show affection to David and his other brothers with darker skin.
David and his family grew up in poor neighborhoods. Violence was the norm in that neighborhood. David had to deal with bullies every day. David believed in not letting anyone bully him. So he fought every day against bullies. David was 9 when he witnessed a neighbor get shot. When other neighbors called the police. David saw how the police treated the witnesses as criminals. The cops pointed the gun to the women witnesses and told them to lie down on the ground and Shut the F** up.” Most parents in the neighborhood were on drugs or abused. David’s grandmother, whom he lived with for a long period of time, also fostered children in her house. She fostered a total of 18 children during the period of time David and his siblings lived with her. These foster children each had their own problem of having been addicted to drugs from birth or abused. Two of the children’s mother, Kim, was on the run for having stolen drug money from a drug dealer who was looking to kill her. She went to the store and never came back. David’s grandmother fostered two of nine of Kim’s boys.
David said that they didn’t have a normal childhood. They did not celebrate Christmas. David’s birthday waited every year to be celebrated with his brother’s birthday. Later on, David’s mom married someone who was Muslim. David’s family moved many times. David was surrounded by gangs and different people from more troubled and violent backgrounds at 11 years old.
David asked many questions as he grew up. One of great attributes of David is that he never lied. From early childhood, he did not lie to appease people. He did not do something just because he was told he should do it. At this new school, they had the national anthem played at the beginning of each day. David didn’t stand up. He said that he didn’t know what they were talking about so he would not stand up and recite something he did not understand. It looked like some sort of ritual. David got detention for that.
After the September 11, 2001 bombings, David’s step-father wore a turban as a Muslim and people associated him and his family with the bombings. David got looks and was scared. The Islam religion was his step-father’s source of sobriety and he did not want to give up his turban.
David’s first interaction with the police was when he was around 13 years old. His brother had just bought a car. David has not seen the car before. His brother gave him his keys and told David to go in his car and grab a CD out of the car. His brother gave him a vague description of the car and where it was located. David went to a car that was red and tried to open the door with the key. When the door didn’t open, he started walking back home. The owner of the car suspected that David was trying to steal the car. The police put arrested David and interrogated him and would not listen to him even though he had the keys in his hand. David felt bullied by the police. His impression that the police were not good people was reinforced.
When he was 13 David wanted to be a lawyer, but as he grew up he learned that lawyers cowered to the Judge, telling the judge anything to get his favor. It seemed that the Judge played some kind of a god and everyone was at his mercy. It was not real. As a young child, David witnessed how people got special treatment because of their looks and not because of what they did.
Going to school, he realized, what they were teaching about history was not accurate or real. He realized that education is some kind of brainwashing based on someone’s perspective of the truth. He found education as inauthentic.
“We are called “Black.” Why? “No one is black,” he said. No one is white. People are different colors. We are categorized by our complexion.
They say you should be proud of Martin Luther King. Why? What did he do? He breached a treaty that was old from a long time ago. They said Abraham freed the slaves. But it was a business move. The slaves were going to be freed in any way. Throughout history, everybody was a slave. Nothing to do with complexion. People are slaves today and not know it. There is no physical beating. But you have people doing what you want them to do for minimum wage but Minimum wage; they pay you as little as they can under the law and on top of it they don’t offer you anything. You gotta have somewhere to sleep and eat. You have to pay for utilities. You are not free. It is the same as being a slave. Their spirits are broken.
Employers knew employees were addicted to a drug and knew that they need money coming to maintain their addiction and by having them addicted, they had loyal workers because they need the job. But the work does not require the mind; it just requires a body. It is a whole scheme.”
I asked David, what would he consider as free people; he said people doing what they want to do instead of doing what they are told to do. You have a choice and you are asked to think and not just do.
I did the research and found a lot of the laws did not apply to Africans. We were never Americans!! I did not consider myself “Black.” Now going to school, I am learning to characterize myself as Black. I didn’t find myself fitting anywhere. I questioned everything. Why am I doing it? How is this going to benefit me? There is no black and there is no white. The whole thing is not to define your color but to define your status. The term black comes with the characterization of evil, demon, disorderly, uncontrollable. White is holy, clean, untainted, pure. I studied and learned how people from Africa were brought here and they stripped them away from their language, culture, heritage. If we remove language, heritage, and culture and then create a new different race of people and call them “Black.”
Recognizing education as fraud, David did not see how going to school will serve any goal for him. “I knew where I came from and I knew what came along with it. At the end of the day they still see me as what they perceive me as; I did not see any point in going to school.”
Having dropped out of school, David worked 30 different jobs, car wash, fast food restaurants, and working as a temp in jobs. Working as a temp, there was never a guarantee that you have a job the next day. You always had a temporary status. I was the bottom and the lowest and was not given a chance to get more than a temp job no matter how hard I worked. As temps, someone talked to one person directing the temps as if we were a herd and we did not count as people. At one of the jobs, I came early trying to figure out how to start. I saw a lady working there and I started to ask a question about where to start before I could finish my sentence, she ran away into the building and closed the door behind her. I felt I was treated like I was less than, humiliated and degraded. “I didn’t belong.” What was “normal” in his neighborhood was to sell drugs, break into houses, or be a rapper to make ends meet. David broke into houses. At one point, David was so frustrated, he broke into a store.
David was sentenced to probation for a year and had to pay fines. One day, he got into an automobile accident with a police officer and because he had failed to report to a probation officer, he was sentenced to a year in prison. In prison, he found the same pattern of treatments. People being used for purposes of money. Crimes people were convicted of did not match the time they were given. “They sold us off to different programs.” It was like a bidding war. They made money off of people doing these programs.
“I was sitting down with a guy, to determine which program I was eligible for, I asked to join the military, the guy did not care what I was interested in. He dismissed it.
In prison, I was not allowed to read any book I wanted. So I had to steal the book I wanted to read. I read 10,000 years of Native American History. It paralleled the history of people who were brought from Africa.”
David is pursuing his own goals and is out of the vicious cycle of the jail system and homelessness because he respects and values himself. He refuses to be nothing but a number, whether in prison, or working in a factory, or a homeless at the Midnight Mission; he believes that he is better than that. He works two jobs and is studying business administration in college.
“Workers are the Prize; without the workers, a business is nothing.” David.