We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation (17 page)

Near the end of his freshman year, he was heading out to play basketball with some guys he knew when one of them stole a package. The police arrested the whole group and charged them all with misdemeanors, hoping one of them would snitch. When Dorian was asked to identify himself, he refused to give the policeman his name. Instead he just handed the officer his school and state IDs. Angered, the officer charged him with filing a false report. Soon Dorian quit Lincoln, moved back to St. Louis, and tried to get himself together.

But one day his brother lost control of the car he was racing. Dorian ran to the scene. The car had rammed into a tree and split in half. The police would not let him attend to his brother. He fought them so hard they handcuffed him and took him away. His brother was declared dead in the ambulance.

In time, the court date in Jefferson City had come and gone, and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest. One day, St. Louis County police stopped a car he was riding in, ran his name, and put him in jail. There he sat for two weeks until, as Wesley Lowery and Darryl Fears of the
Washington Post
reported, “St. Louis County police realized that Jefferson City police were not traveling 200 miles to get him.”
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That’s when his luck turned. Dorian returned to face a Jefferson City judge, who threw out the false report charge and gave him probation.

Dorian descended the stairs to see Mike, who was wearing his red Cardinals cap, bright yellow socks decorated with marijuana leaves, and Nike slippers. Mike was staying with his grandmother at Canfield Green, where he had built a small studio to make beats. The two usually talked sports, clothes, fashion, and girls. But today Mike had trouble on his mind. The night before, he and another friend had stayed up talking about the existence of God and the problems they were facing. The friend said Mike was “going through a phase.”
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Normandy High School was the third and last high school Mike had attended in four years. As Nikole Hannah-Jones reported, it was one of the poorest and most segregated in the state. It ranked last in academic performance, receiving from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education a score of just 10 out of a possible 140 points for academic achievement, graduation rates, and college preparedness. Half the Black males never graduated.
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Mike had not finished his credits when he posed for his graduation picture, but he was eager to finish, worked hard through the summer, and received his diploma on August 1, a proud moment for his family, especially his mother.

On Monday he would start attending Vatterott College, a for-profit vocational school that frequently advertised on late-night television. The college was partly owned by one of Mitt Romney’s private-equity firms. It was known to federal investigators as a problem school whose business plan was built off student debt. Its former director of enrollment had pled guilty to federal financial aid fraud.

In an internal document prepared for its recruiters, the college pledged, “We Serve the UN-DER world Unemployed, Underpaid, Unsatisfied, Unskilled, Unprepared, Unsupported, Unmotivated, Unhappy, Underserved!”
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Vatterott had lost a lawsuit brought by a former student, who, after taking out tens of thousands in loans, sought to recover fees for a diploma she deemed “worthless.” A jury required the school pay her $13 million in punitive damages.
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Mike probably knew none of this. He was deeply worried about his future. Vatterott seemed like an opportunity to land a decent blue-collar job as an air-conditioning tech. In the old days, with luck, you might join a labor union and the middle class. Nowadays, there was no luck. You paid predatory schools for years for jobs they promised but probably would not get you.

In mid-July, Mike began going back to church. But he still brooded over his future. On the day they celebrated his high school graduation, he argued with his father. He announced he was becoming a rapper, but Michael Brown Sr. told him, “That’s all fine and good, but you’re gonna stay in school and you’re gonna stay focused.”

Mike responded angrily, “One day, the world is gonna know my name. I’ll probably have to go away for a while, but I’m coming back to save my city.”

Days later, on Tuesday, August 4, he spoke again with his father. His stepmother had just been diagnosed with chronic heart failure, just months after their house had burned to the ground. Mike said he thought she was going to die. Upset, his father hung up on him. Two days later Mike called another family member with a message for his father: “Pop’s mad at me. Tell him I said what I said because I’ve been having these visions and images of death. Tell him I keep seeing bloody sheets.”
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He posted a cryptic message on his Facebook page: “If I leave this earth today, at least you’ll know I care about others more than I cared about my damn self.”
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Dorian could see Mike wanted to talk about life, so he told Mike about his experience at Lincoln, about the mistakes he had made when he was a freshman there. “I was telling him some challenges that he was going to face,” Dorian later told the grand jury. “Basically our conversation was about future, future emphasis.”
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The morning lengthened. Mike suggested the two of them go down to Ferguson Market. When they returned with cigarillos, they could roll some blunts and smoke together. They headed down to West Florissant.

They ran into two contractors who were laying down drainpipe. One of them had been digging, struck a tree root, and cursed. Mike talked them up. They spoke for a while, Mike talking about his anxieties and one of the contractors sharing his own. Mike told the man to ease up with his anger, that Jesus would help him through it. “Boy, you can grab a shovel and come down here and get to picking at these roots,” the worker said.
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Mike and Dorian laughed and left for Ferguson Market.

At the store, things got strange. Mike asked for a box of Swisher Sweets, and handed it to Dorian. Then he grabbed a smaller pack of single cigarillos, turned, and started for the door. The clerk ran to the door to stop him. Confused, Dorian put the box back on the counter and turned to see Mike shoving the clerk aside and walking out with the cigarillos.

Dorian followed Mike out onto West Florissant. “I looked at him, actually, looked at him for a while and stared at him because the times when I did meet him before that day, he didn’t strike me as a person who would do anything like that,” Dorian told the grand jury. “So I was asking him, I was like, you know, ‘Hey, I don’t do stuff like that. What’s going on?’”
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Mike laughed and told him to be cool. Dorian knew they had been caught on camera, and when a police cruiser approached he started worrying. But it passed them by. There were no cars coming or going, so the two crossed into the middle of Canfield Drive to the median line—Dorian walking in front, Mike right behind. Mike was carrying half the cigarillos in each hand.

They picked up their conversation where it had left off. Dorian had a girl, a job, an apartment. How had he transformed himself? Mike wanted to know. How had he gotten himself on track?

“I knew he wasn’t someone like me, I know he didn’t grow up where I grew up from, where there was a bunch of violent gangs and violent stuff occurring all the time. I knew that much about [him] because I read from his demeanor he didn’t come up that way,” Dorian said. “I’m telling him about my life story and how I come up from a bunch of tragedies.”
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What had been left unsaid? What else could he have told Mike? Questions were for the living, questions that could never be answered, but could never stop being asked.

Lives were complicated. The smallest things could trip you up. Those who could least afford it paid the most. Things could escalate in a heartbeat. The biggest mystery was how to turn it down without bowing down. And a life, in all its singularity and strangeness, was always worth the lifting, the telling, and the protecting, and never only for its fragility.

A couple-few cars passed them heading toward West Florissant. It was a Saturday in August, approaching high noon. They were almost home. A white Chevy Tahoe SUV marked “Ferguson Police” was just beyond the bend.

THE IN-BETWEENS

ON ASIAN AMERICANNESS

You went to college on the continent to become Asian American.

There were, as Jonathan Okamura once famously put it, no Asian Americans in Hawai’i. There were “Locals,” there were Native Hawaiians, and there were
haoles
. Locals were the mostly nonwhite, often mixed-race sons and daughters who, during the early twentieth century, had forged a political and cultural identity oppositional to
haole
oligarchic rule. In that way, Native Hawaiians were always Locals. Locals weren’t all Hawaiian. Some
haoles
were Locals. And if one had to ask, one wasn’t a Local.

You were a Local. And by the time you were growing up in the spotless suburbs of east Honolulu, the
haoles
your age, especially the ones not descended from missionaries or politicians or profiteers, could call you “gook” and “chink” all they wanted, and it wasn’t going to bother you. The words had no force, at least not in the way they might have to your parents or grandparents or great-grandparents. That was why
haole
kids had to push you around—to try to get you to pay attention.

You learned what it meant to be Asian American in Berkeley, California, where suddenly, significantly, you were a minority for the first time. When you rode home on your bike past the hippies in People’s Park, they told you to go back where you came from. On a Saturday night, frat boys swarmed you and your Chinese American friend, got in your face, ping-ponged the both of you around their circle while simultaneously shouting, “Get off our corner” and “We love you little guys.” You went with the homies to the Cineplex to see Brandon Lee kick ass in
Rapid Fire
, only to have an easy evening end with white guys in a pickup truck hollering, “Fuck off you fuckin’ chinks.” You went days and weeks feeling like you had never been seen. You were conspicuous and invisible at the same time.

This was hardly the kind of bullwhip-and-machete, chafed-hands-and-stooped-back racism your ancestors survived. You were not even sure you could call it racism. Maybe it had just been drugs or drunkenness or testosterone or you weren’t raising your hand high enough. But still, your body was registering a kind of a system shock. You drank, got high, talked louder and with more false certainty, overcompensated.

When your
maoli
forebears landed in the islands there had been no others. And when your Chinese forebears landed in the islands, the Kingdom of Hawai’i allowed any immigrant who had lived there for a year to become naturalized. There were no restrictions on who could be a citizen. Exclusion was for other countries, like the United States.

Your high school teacher Mr. Lee taught you that Chinese people had built civilizations while Europeans were still messing around in loincloths. (He was also the school disciplinarian, so you got to know each other well.) But your folks didn’t rule anything. They harvested rice and taro and watercress. They fought in boxing rings, delivered restaurant supplies, cooked for soldiers, fixed and maintained American military equipment. They gave their neighbors fruit from their land. They bartered in the markets for meat. They died by runaway plow or intended bullet, their hearts gave out or the water took them. They survived overseers, bosses, gangs, each other.

Hawai’i’s statehood campaign emerged at the same time as the Southern civil rights movement. In 1959, they were given a choice to vote to make Hawai’i a state. Two generations before, they had not been given a ballot but the threat of bullets. But they chose to vote for it. Many Locals saw statehood as a culmination of a nonviolent revolution against
haole
minority rule, offering some as-yet-nameless reward. Not everyone did, though, especially Hawaiians who knew what had been taken.

You were born into the generation after that vote, around the time that Asian Americans announced themselves in San Francisco and Los Angeles and Boston and New York. It was long before “Asian American” had been reduced to a demographic category. Back then the term was still a courageous provocation, like a black leather jacket or a brown beret.

On the continent, these angry young ones—most of them third-generation descendants of working-class East Asians—had invested in a Third World identity. They looked to anticolonial uprisings in Asia and Africa for inspiration. They spoke of revolution. They organized youths in Chinatown and Little Tokyo. They sold Mao’s
Little Red Book
to the Black Panthers. They thought of Hawai’i the way some thought of the South or Aztlán, as a place where the answers were.

In 1980, Governor George Ariyoshi, the first Local Japanese man to rise to the highest post in the state, had given a soaring speech. In it he said,

It was here, in our red soil and black volcanic rock, that a new society was born. It was here that many from other societies gathered in disparate ways to start a new life and form a new society. It was here that sons and daughters of these early immigrants learned their lessons of tolerance and understanding and Americanism. It was here that they learned the verity that all men are truly created equal.… It was here that hard work and application were rewarded. This is the lesson of Hawai’i, and it is one that increasingly is being learned by the world.
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