The Residue Years by Mitchell Jackson Page B

arrested with fifty grams on his person, what amounts to the size of a jumbo meatball, is subject to the same sentence as an all-league dealer caught with five kilos!
    Now that we all know the numbers, can we agree they don’t add up? That the math adds up in the worst way.
    [Pause.]
    Now here’s another billion-dollar question. Which ethnic group is most sentenced to the unsportsmanlike bids?
    Answer: The lion’s share don’t look nothing like Commissioner Tip and his team of rah-rah politicians.
    [Pause. Eyes.]
    Before you accuse me of playing the race card, check out a few more stats
    Nationwide, blacks make up eighty-two percent of the cocaine defendants, while whites and Hispanics make up two-thirds of cocaine
users
!
    Nationwide, blacks receive eighty-eight-point-three percent of the mandatory crack sentences!
    In Bias’s home state, the stats aren’t any better.
    There, blacks make up sixty-eight percent of all people arrested for drugs.
    There, blacks now land drug-related prison terms at eighteen times the rate of whites!
    I could go on. Believe me, I could.
    [Pause. Pause. Eyes.]
    It’s safe to say—no, it’s
true
and
right
to say—Commissioner Tip and his Dream Team of legislators not only dropped the ball ondrug laws, they exacerbated it to the crisis of a forty-four-billion-dollar (take
that
salary cap!) annual blunder. Commissioner Tip has passed on, so the new question, the question for all the bank, is this: Which politician will have the guts to amend what has become the biggest mistake of twentieth-century American law?
    * * *
    Even a super-senior such as myself don’t know what to make of this silence.
    Haskins stands and tucks the hem of his African-colored ethnic print shirt, the light turning his natural into a gibbous black globe. Polished wing tips, pregnant wallet stuffed in the front pocket of slacks cinched at the waist into specs of a corset. This is what the activist-turned-professor look looks like live in vivid color. He saunters up, and I make my way to the back to a seat. He makes a comment that I don’t hear from eyeing the Filipina chick across the room.
    Would anyone like to offer feedback? Haskins says. Or ask a question. I sit up, roll my neck, press my toes to stretch my calves. The pugnacious earthy chick with the tangled hair, who stay shooting me a cryptic eye, shoots up a hand. You make it seem like some big conspiracy, she says. She pulls her knees to her chest, leaves her demolished boots hanging off the lip of her seat. As if America has some goal to put blacks in prison. Like, that’s just so ridic, she says, and waves her hands past her eyes. Like beyond ridic.
    I kind of agree, a dude from across the circle says. He don’t raise his hand cause, shit (his T-shirt is two sizes too small and jeans are shrink to snug!), if he did he might bust a seam. Hey, I’m not prejudiced or anything, he says, but it sounds likeexcuse-making to me. Do you really think Congress has it out for blacks? C’mon, bud, he says. People commit crimes and criminals go to jail. It’s simple. Everything’s not about race.
    If this was another year, my freshman or sophomore or junior year, those quarters my brain’s alchemy was tweaked by a legion of black studies courses (you’d be surprised how riled the right reading list can make you), if this was then, those days I spent stalking campus with a militant’s scowl, I’d say something to set dude’s snug-ass jeans aflame. But this ain’t then; it’s now, my last year, and the real is, no matter what I say, white folks won’t ever hate themselves like us.
    You’re right, not everything’s about race, I say. But what if this is?
    No one else says another word.
    Quiet or no quiet, how I feel about most of them most days, especially the rare ones when I’m carrying a package with my books and papers, how I feel those days especially, is these