IS HE A MATURE MAN. . . or MALIGNANT MALE?
Jerome DeVonni Wilson © 2018
The prisoner’s struggle is not a spectator sport and our Movement is nothing if the movable parts are not both cohesive and mobilized. Our movement is a constant target and as Jalil Muntaqim is calling for structure and solidarity our Movement is getting hit.
Some of us have found ourselves misinformed and misaligned because when one is lost they are misplaced. Communication is the key to understanding and the mouthpieces of our Struggle are under siege, victims of Cancel Culture for informing and educating the masses into action. WE must not only stand with, but the Move with Kinetic Justice of the Free Alabama Movement who is too just to have the justice beaten out of him. When they censure and censor the words of Comrade Malik, Editor of the San Francisco Bay View National Black Newspaper, we must raise the volume of our voices and man up to answer the Prison Lives Matter call to action.
“Being a leader does not necessarily mean being loved; loving one’s community means daring to risk estrangement and alienation from that very community, in the short run, in order to break the cycle of poverty, despair, and hopelessness that we are in, over the long run.” – Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
TO THE RANK AND FILE OF THE LUMPEN ORGANIZATIONS BEHIND THE WALL, they say that if you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything. I would like to take a moment to unveil you to yourself; to aid and assist you in shedding the decorative skin that covers the authentic fabric of who you really are beneath.
The first question I propose is what exactly is it that you stand for? We know that you’ll stand to protect the morale of your faction. We also know that you’ll stand up to protect your manhood, but here is where things get sticky.
A man is an adult male. Adult means fully developed and mature. Mature echoes the definition of fully developed but also means having obtained a final or desired state. On paper, a man is a male over the age of eighteen, however, in the sphere of life — where we gauge manhood by the units of blood, sweat, and tears contributed to sustaining it — a male who is just a man due to legislation but has been suspended in that animation for calendars on end, is merely a strawman. He doesn’t think for himself or anyone else. He’s not conscious. As such, he has no reason. No reason to speak in a man’s place.
As I stand ten toes deep in the trenches of a Texas gulag, I am bearing witness to a zombie-like colony. The brothers with age are indifferent to the struggle. This indicates tumors — abnormal and functionless growths — to the bodies of their own factions.
The one thing that these organizations have in common is the underlying cause of their embarkation: To defend themselves against any form of threat and/or oppression. Of course one cannot fight what one cannot see, therefore, they had to be given vision. The enemies had to be identified to the combatants. If you are a fly, a spider is your enemy. If you are overweight, cholesterol is your enemy. If you are a human, anything that encroaches on your freedom and/or quality of life is your enemy. If you are a New Afrikan, a Black person in America you have collectively more enemies than any other ethnicity.
Health matters, economic woes, and social inadequacies, all of which derive from racism and are terribly exacerbated by incarceration. A young man looks up and finds himself Black and held captive in an imprisoned colony. He is now at the bottom of the social hierarchy and will embrace those he’s affiliated with or find a social circle to rotate in. The last person he needs to be groomed or influenced by is some strawman walking around with his eyes glued wide shut. Strawmen cannot obtain the title O.G., Big Homie, Tall Folk or the like. Cannot hold leadership positions and should not be taken seriously. Sadly, strawmen are the majority of the population in the prison incubator.
To support my claim and immunize yourself from them, approach a suspect — someone speaking who shouldn’t have a voice — and politely ask him what his goals are. If he stammers or you take note that he’s inventing them right then, he’s a zombie. A goal is an intention. An intention is a purpose. How is he speaking for men when he doesn’t have a purpose in his own life? That’s not normal. Here, the contagion phenomenon is detrimental — the more ones socialize or rotate with zombies, the more abnormal and functionless new growths surface on the body politic. You could just as easily ask the suspect to identify the enemy to you. If he points to someone in prison garb being held hostage and forced into involuntary servitude just as he is, versus a state paid miscreant whose livelihood is to enforce the 13th Amendment, the next question is for you. . . why are you still talking to dude?
Back in 2016 there was a quarter-page ad in the San Francisco Bay View that was a call for ALL Texas prisoners to boycott commissary for the month of May. It said that TDCJ was grossing 100 mil annually, listed five reasons for the boycott, and stated that “The only thing you have to do is refuse to spend your money. That’s all!!” Excitedly, I sent the paper to the Muslim service on my building to get the word out to all three pods which houses 432 people. I repeatedly kept receiving the same ignorant outburst, “These dudes ain’t gone do that in Texas,” referring to the prisoners coming together for the boycott. It was almost as if they were working for administration because they were pessimistically speaking as if they weren’t included in the “these dudes” they were speaking of. These same characters can be heard complaining about the same five issues presented in the ad. The Soulja Queen Angela Davis said in her autobiography: “Nothing in the world made me angrier than inaction, than silence. The refusal or inability to do something, say something when a thing needed doing or saying, was unbearable.” I boycotted commissary by myself knowing that I wasn’t doing it in vain, I showed solidarity with others who did it on other plantations. And the non-participants? They no longer speak words to me, only worms come out of their mouths because that’s all a zombie has to offer.
Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus. Then boycotts took place that garnered a momentum. It was a fight which was a struggle which was action that brings about change which is revolution. Some Black people consciously chose not to engage in Civil Rights activism yet reaped the benefits of those who bore the burden. They didn’t want to march, get hosed, spit on, bit by dogs or arrested (no one did) but they surely enjoyed the fruits of the labor of the activists.
We must mobilize to maximize the momentum of the Millions For prisoners March of 2017 and not be deterred by tumors. Be aware that society can march for prisoners’ rights all they want, but our plight is of a sophisticated sort. We must have boots on the ground on these compounds active in peaceful but strategic revolt. It is an objective of the vanguard to have the multitudes behind us but it is equally essential to have the youth on this side of the wall beside us. They want to fight but they must be enlightened and undergo a mental transformation that informs them that Afrika is the richest continent in natural resources like oil and diamonds but the number one resource is. . . Afrikans!
The Politicians enact laws enforced by police who drive slave ships through urban areas to mine for human resources to warehouse, exploit for labor and be monetized for the coffers of the Kapitalists. It is a natural occurrence for humans to be concerned about the welfare and continuity of humankind, likewise, is the more focal presence of concern that a tribesman has for the welfare of his posterity. We must ameliorate the malignant male to mature man ratio as to eradicate the zombie mentality. A zombie doesn’t have a life to be concerned about, so does it sound logical that he’d be concerned about anyone else’s?
The stance for human rights in its nature is an undertaking that is a selfless endeavor. It is inherently by the people, for the people. If you have been disenfranchised I implore you to identify your SELF to yourself. Discern whether being a slave and having your progeny hunted for slavehood sits well in your heart. If it doesn’t bother you, you’ve been mentally buried alive. If it does, as it should . . . take arms with education and move with a purpose. Answer the call of both our ancestors and our unborn and stand up amongst upright brothers like Kwame Shakur, Joka Heshima Jinsai, Swift and Kinetik Justice, Shaka Shakur, Comrade Malik, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Keith “Malik” Washington, Bennu Hannibal RaSun, and our Sister Tara Belcher along with so many others. With regard for the Millions For Prisoners March of 2017, as Frantz Fanon said: “. . . if you follow up the consequence to the very end”, we will then be able to “brush the cobwebs off national consciousness, to question oppression, and to open the struggle for freedom.”
