So, it isn’t what you think. It definitely isn’t what I thought it would be, but this is what ended up happening and I’m ok with it. This is the final result of my work on the inaugural edition of “Political Beast.” Briefly, an explanation of what this column will (usually) be: Each contribution will begin with an interview with someone connected to some important aspect of political life. Not governors or presidential candidates, but the people around them. Not the head of Planned Parenthood or Right to Life, but the volunteers that work with them. I plan to let them talk, let them explain, and I do not plan to argue with or attempt to belittle them. My intention is, quite simply, to let them be. The second half of each report is intended to be an examination of how the System (in all its iterations) is manipulating you, me, and the interviewee.
That is the model.
On to the reality, which is something slightly different. I still have every intention of attempting to stick to this model, but life demands a level of flexibility, and it made those demands quite clear as I made this, my first contribution to ModState. I began my interview with Warren Tatum, 26, on the advice of my friend Julius; Pastor, and son of the largest African American ministry in Mississippi’s Capitol. Warren was never very political, and neither is Julius or his father…at least in the past. That changed for Warren when he began to see the rash of police violence reported in the media. Obvious to Warren was that there is a problem, and he began to become politically active in his community, meeting with the people in his circle and encouraging them to resist police when they feel mistreated, encouraging disrespect for law enforcement, and developing a generally angry demeanor toward authority.
At least this was what I thought.
Warren is from the south side of Chicago, which excited me immediately, but we’ll get to the reason for my excitement later. He is a student at Tougaloo, a historically black college just north of Jackson, MS. He studies liberal arts. Chicago has quite a reputation for violence, and Warren readily admits this. However, Warren didn’t have a run-in with violence or the police until prom night in 2010. Now, before I move on, I want to remind you of my primary bias coming into this interview: I came in looking for an eloquent, extremist, militant, black man who had been radicalized by white-on-black murder. By the way, as an aside, I am convinced that the most egregious journalistic deformity is an inability to admit one’s biases.
But let’s move on.
Warren just left prom. It’s 3 in the morning. White police officers pull them over (no reason given), and nobody has a license. They all take “the ride,” as Warren describes it (and now this interview is getting exciting, falling right into my predicted plan of reporting on an angry black guy feeling oppressed by The Man). Warren says he understood why the teens were taken in, and doesn’t blame the cops.
Hmmm.
A year later, Warren is followed by a DEA car and pulled over. He’s taken in and interrogated for over an hour by two black officers and a white DEA agent, because of his friendship with several known drug dealers. Warren was released, but he felt the arrest was an overreach, and he felt bullied. He did, however, volunteer the opinion to me that the white agent was much more “laid-back” (his words) than the black guys.
Hmmm.
Once we began moving into the more recent instances he’s seen of white cop murder, I personally began a journey into a world I was not prepared to encounter. At this point, I instantly realized the “model” had to be thrown out. This, the first Political Beast installment, was not about an angry black guy and a white journalist with facts and figures. It was an entirely different animal.
I have to stop and tip my hand now before we continue. My expectation of how this column would come out was thus: 1) Interview with radicalized black dude, listening to him whine and yell and snort and stomp and cuss, 2) A logical, fact-filled examination of how the media and “civil liberty” organizations are manipulating our opinions by what they choose to show (or not show) on television. Included was to be the fact that police violence in 2015 was the lowest since the 1980s, and that white-on-black crime is even lower, while black-on-black crime (especially in cities like Chicago) is at the highest rate since 1983.
I never got the opportunity to write that column.
Warren never had another run-in with the police. He got a girl pregnant (his son is four) and he started saying only “yes, sir, no, sir” to the police. He got a scholarship to college and got a job. He told me that social media is the primary reason blacks feel oppressed and threatened by white cops, and that if blacks had less time to sit around and complain, maybe they’d be better off. That was [supposed to be MY line!
Okay, so now, during the interview, I give up mentally and emotionally and surrender to the fact that this article, self-aggrandizing as this is going to sound, is now the story of a journalist writing an article from a biased position who then realizes just how wrong a man can be.
So, I decide to push the limit of his tolerance of white cop interference in black lives and how much it matters. I set up a scenario where an altercation is happening in the parking lot of his apartment complex between a black teen and a white cop. The white cop shoots the black teen. Does Warren go down? His surprising answer–this answer coming from a black community activist–is that he would go down, but only because there would be a chance he could calm the situation. How would he feel once the crowd started burning cars and rioting? He said (and this really got me), “Burning down your community only destroys it, but what’s worse is it gives people an excuse to blame blacks for the nation’s problems. But, whites need to know; when blacks in Fergusson react the way they do, leave them alone. The self-destruction of our homes and cities should be punishment enough.”
At the end of the interview, we spent some time talking about Chicago. At one point, he talked about being shot almost to death in a drive-by, just standing outside a gas station. (This is why I said in the beginning of the article that I was excited about Warren being from the Windy City) The drive-by, however, was not the stereotypical gang attack, just…Chicago. His scar is impressive. Interestingly, his doctors told him he would be dead if it weren’t for his thick hoody, which slowed down the bullet just enough to save his heart. He immediately went out and bought a gun.
To recap, here are our results: A biased journalist with a rigid model for a column meets the stereotypical black militant who turns out to be a man with no axe to grind against the whites, the cops, or The Man, who believes in gun-ownership and teaches his son to say, “yes sir, no sir” to the police. And, so, an article becomes a self-examination that ends in harsh judgement against the writer. In this, the inaugural event that will become Political Beast, I ask my reader to begin a journey with me that will be a vulgar, mean, messy, unadulterated trip on a bus filled with unimportant, wildly interesting people, and a driver who has a vague idea of where we’re headed.
Oh, to get back to the issue at hand, I think during our interview, Warren said it perfectly, “The authorities can fix all of this. They just need to realize that the person might be a criminal, but the criminal is still a person.”
Hmmm.
