The Dithering of a District Diva

Ar·che·type –noun: “the original pattern or model from which all things of the same kind are copied or on which they are based; a model or first form; prototype.” The Archetype Series — a companion series to “The Prototype” series — honors Black men who are doing amazing things in the world to remind us that: 1) they exist, *do not believe the hype*; and 2) we can all do amazing things, too. Break down their model, explore their mindset, adopt their habits, and use them to reach your own goals. Anyone can do it. Everyone won’t.

December’s Archetype: Dr. Marc Lamont Hill, host of TV One’s “Our World with Black Enterprise,” regular contributor to Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, distinguished author, social activist, and Columbia University professor.

When 17-year-old African American high school honor student, Genarlow Wilson was unjustly convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, Dr. Marc Lamont Hill was at the forefront of action calling for the overturning of Genarlow’s conviction. Dr. Hill used every platform available to advocate  for Genarlow, and actively worked with Genarlow’s attorney B.J. Bernstein, to bring national attention to this grave miscarriage of justice.  After spending two years in prison, Genarlow’s conviction was finally overturned, but Dr. Hill and Ms. Bernstein knew that more had to be done:

Even though Genarlow should never have been incarcerated and even though we could each play a role in the defense of young people after they’ve had unjust encounters with the legal system, we knew that we had to start doing more.  We knew that to be effective, we had to equip young people to make better decisions, to know how to make better choices so they can make it home at night after a party and be safe while they’re out in the streets.  My5th.org [The non-profit organization dedicated to educating young people on the law] grew out of that.  [Ms. Bernstein] knew that educating youth is something I have been committed to my entire life, so I became a founding board member of the organization.

And Dr. Hill’s advocacy work doesn’t end with youth; he is invested in equipping as many of the disenfranchised as possible with literacy.   None in this country are more disenfranchised than those in the prison system. Dr. Hill devotes himself to working in the prison ministry, by securing books for them and teaching adult literacy skills.  To him, there is no greater responsibility:

It is my intellectual commitment as a scholar that motivates me to equip the disenfranchised with literacy as a pathway to social mobility and pathway to learning to read the word and the world. Literacy isn’t just about being able to decode a text, it’s about being able to understand the world. It has a direct relationship to the distribution of social resources.

And also, because of our [African American] history, we should value literacy. [The poet] Phyllis Wheatley had to go on trial to prove that she wrote her book herself. Frederick Douglass had to write “written by himself” on his works, because black literacy was so challenged. Black folks used to believe that if they could learn to read the Bible and books, they could obtain freedom.  And on a practical level, we’ve got to understand that there’s a direct correlation between literacy and incarceration. If we want better fathers, better ideals, we have to have a citizenry that is committed to reading the world and the word differently.

The relationship between our history of illiteracy and our community’s current social predicament is just one example of why Dr. Hill says that to understand what is going on in the Black community today, there must be an understanding of the impact that slavery has had and continues to have:

Whenever you look at Black people in America, you have to analyze them within historical conditions. You cannot isolate Blacks today from the impact of slavery. We’re still dealing with slavery and white supremacy; it is not at all esoteric, there is a very concrete relationship between exploitation in black labor during slavery and the current exploitation of Black labor in the prison system.  There’s a very concrete relationship between the black codes in 1860 and the crime deals in 1990, the incarceration numbers in Jamestown and the incarceration numbers right now. So, we can never disconnect these things because we cannot understand these moments without an analysis of past history.  So anyone who denies this history is truncating them and can never get to a solution.

Another key distraction to solution is to get into an either, or posture: either we have to accept personal responsibility for our actions, or the system is to blame. Yes, we have to think about how how the system can be fixed, and on the other hand, we also have to think about what can we do even if the government gives us nothing.  We allow the right wing to tell us that any time you talk about systems, you’re avoiding responsibility; I think that is an unwise move. On the other hand those who just say the system is to blame are ignoring the other part of the puzzle. I’m saying let’s do both.

And ultimately, Dr. Hill says that a solution to many of the problems in the Black community is to “abolish prison”:

We need to abolish prison. It’s been the most oppressive and regressive system in modern society and has done nothing but undermine the Black community. If we abolish the prison system, we return people to their homes, the labor market and consumer market and we move from incarceration to excarceration and we create new more productive communities.   I don’t want to use prisons as the primary place of adjudicating justice. In the 1970s, we had 300,000 people in prison, today we have 2.5 million. The rise in prison population does not correlate. It’s not that people are committing more crime, we’ve widened the net, we’re putting the wrong people in prison. If we decriminalized all of the victimless crimes, like prostitution, public drunkenness, the prison population would decrease significantly. We had a war on drugs during the Clinton era that led to millions of Black and brown people going into prison, so we’ve essentially criminalized a medical problem. We emptied out mental health care facilities and dumped them in prisons.  So they’re being abused, isolated, and ignored in prison and go back on the street and create larger problems for society.

But I think we need to use pre-trial bondage, and erase mandatory minimums for these victimless crimes to get people out of this system. If you excluded child molesters, rapists, murderers, violent criminals, you could put most of the people back out on the street without a rise in crime. For these violent outliers, they should definitely face punishment as well as treatment, but I don’t think the prison should be the place for that and I think those people represent a very small number of the population.

Every other country serves as the model as to why our prison system is counterproductive. We incarcerate more than Pakistan and Iran combined. One in every 100 Americans is incarcerated. In Canada, they don’t have this kind of incarceration problem and when you look at other capitalist empires, we incarcerate more than the third and fourth countries on the list. That’s because other countries don’t have the same kind of hypercriminalizing policies on the books. We just criminalize more and I think its because of this country’s history of dealing with Black and Brown bodies. We have found other ways to make them wards of the State and to keep them wards of the government. We went from slavery to other forms of indentured servitude and then the Black codes which led to Blacks getting incarcerated for things White folks were doing every day. Then we had the birth of the prison system after slavery, as another league of social control.

Unfortunately, all evidence suggests that the prison is here to stay and we’re just transferring people from one institution to the next. Sure, it’s better than slavery, but its not that much better for those in the system and targeted by the system. There is no cause for hope that suddenly we’re going to decarcerate and excarcerate.  But slavery didn’t end because the masters retired, we stopped it.  Activism is the answer, fighting back is the answer, and personal responsibility is the answer.

Prison doesn’t have to exist; we can have a world without poverty and jails. Another world is possible, and that’s what I am actively working towards.

Impacting social policy and affecting social change are clearly Dr. Hill’s passions, and yet when he advocates for his causes as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, or any other outlet, he manages to maintain a calm, cool, and collected debate style, even in the midst of the most offensive and ridiculous statements by his political opponents (i.e., Fox News Host Bill O’Reilly telling Dr. Hill he “kind of look[s] like a cocaine dealer.”) Most notably, Dr. Hill debated right-wing radio host Ann Coulter on Larry King Live in September in which Coulter purports to educate Dr. Hill on “what Black people think.” He just laughed this off and annihilated Coulter with an analysis of facts and a smile:

Some of it is just disposition, I’m just not a hot-tempered, quick-tempered person. But I’m also very conscious as a pundit on right-wing media outlets. I think about myself as a public defender. I think about myself as someone speaking for those who otherwise wouldn’t have their voice heard, so there is a kind of responsibility that comes along with having that role. The stereotype of liberals is to be mean-spirited, snarky and angry, and for Black men, it’s ten-times that. So I think not just how it will affect me personally, but how that will impact the causes I’m advocating for. I am trying to create a space to talk about poverty when people are only committed to talking about the recession, the prison industry when people really only want to talk about reducing crime. I have to avoid anything that can become a distraction to the cause, whether it’s storming out of  a set or not staying on my agenda. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not about me at all.

Dr. Hill credits his sense of responsibility and duty to the community to his upbringing in an impoverished area of Philadelphia:

I grew up in a community of support and love. I grew up in Philadelphia and getting love and encouragement as somebody who was a good reader. And even though I grew up in a neighborhood that was poor and high crime, it never allowed us to ignore our full humanity. We come from a tradition of lifting as we climb, so I say yes to helping people and younger scholars, writers and activists because, from a moral and ethical standpoint, I was taught to take a little bit out and give a whole lot back.

Not to romanticize it, but I think the best parts of African American tradition have been commitment and service. I do my best to follow that tradition. Somebody helped me. You may walk in alone, go on T.V. alone, but somebody prayed for you, somebody signed your name for you, and that’s the motivation to keep the thing going.

The other piece of it is that I grew up around people who were so much more talented than me, so much smarter, naturally gifted in areas but who didn’t have the opportunity the support the benefit of the doubt or a second chance. When I think about my own, work my own life, I think about being on the front lines but for grace and mercy. It could’ve been me. I want other people to be able to shine in their gifts. Those who didn’t make it, they now have a chance to make it. It’s a moral duty and an ethical duty to help open the door for them, maybe open it wider if possible.

As a professor at Columbia University Teacher’s College, Dr. Hill continues his career as a distinguished author. He has several books coming out in 2011: Why Don’t I Feel Free? Black America in the Age of Obama,  Knowledge of Self: Race, Masculinity, and the Politics of Reading, and You Ain’t Heard It From Me: Snitching, Rumors and Other People’s Business in Hip-Hop America, and an essay on Black Muslim identity in a post-9/11 context (in addition to a top secret project with a February release, stay tuned to DCDistrictDiva.com for the latest!)

But with great success and advocacy for unpopular issues, one learns to expect pitfalls as an inevitability. In October 2009, Dr. Hill was fired from Fox News and smeared as having “a reputation of defending cop-killers and racists.” But Dr. Hill takes it all in stride:

This is the life I chose; this is what I signed up for. I’m not who they said I was, I don’t “support cop-killers”; I do, however, think that certain people like [social activists] Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu Jamal were wrongfully convicted [of murder]. That’s not based on an anti-cop sentiment, I’ve investigated their cases, and saying I don’t think they’re guilty is what I have a right to do.

I think that it’s interesting that after I was fired for expressing my viewpoint [on Shakur and Jamal’s innocence], Fox was so outraged that [Fox conservative commentator] Juan Williams was fired [from NPR in October 2010] for expressing his viewpoint [Williams said that he gets “nervous” when he sees Muslims in Muslim garb on airplanes]. But I am still grateful for the opportunity to argue my points to a broad audience. There is no way you can take an unpopular stance on an issue and not expect some hardcore feedback and some repercussions. The only ones in clean uniforms are those who don’t play the game. I made the decision to put myself in the game and I took a hit. I’m grateful for the opportunity to stand up for what I believe in. I lost a bunch of money and I took a hit, but I’m just grateful for what I have.

But Dr. Hill was not down for long. In addition to his work as an advocate, commentator, distinguished author and activist, Dr. Hill hosts the new Sunday morning show “Our World with Black Enterprise” which airs on TV One at 6 A.M. and again at 1 P.M. in 40 cities (watch online at http://www.blackenterprise.com/tv-video/our-world-with-black-enterprise):

His goal with this show is “to create a space for a different kind of discussion and analysis.” He explains:

I have an episode on the Black church. We analyzed the Black church in terms of prosperity gospel and sexuality, we went through it for a full hour. Other shows aren’t talking about that. I talked about Haiti with Wyclef Jean and the problems Haiti is still facing even after the earthquake. I’m loving the show and the staff  at Black Enterprise, we’ve had an awesome season and there are some big surprises coming up. We’ve had Ne-yo, Jill Scott, Terry McMillan, we’ve had all sorts of folks who’ve all brought their own piece to African American culture, African American thought, and African American progress.

Dr. Hill hopes his legacy will be:

[T]hat I left the world a little bit better.  I’m not naive or hopelessly idealistic about what my role is or what it could be in 50 years, but  when I die, I’d hope the world is a little more free, more just, and more livable. I’d like to think that I helped free somebody and created peace where there wasn’t peace. I’d like to offer some idea that animates a movement towards freedom. I don’t know what the ideal will be but I would like to use my space as a speaker that helps effect change.

What we can learn from Dr. Hill: “It’s not about me at all”; find a cause that you are willing to take a hit for. Dream wide awake, and put feet to your words, because “another world is possible.”

Dr. Marc Lamont Hill is: The Archetype.

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