Outlawry

I've been listening to the Louder Than A Riot podcast on NPR. It's not a natural fit for me, since I'm not at all into Hip-Hop, and the podcast, for all that it's primary focus is the intersection of the criminal justice system in the United States and Hip-Hop, it comes across as by Hip-Hop fans, for Hip-Hop fans. And so, not really being a fan myself, it loses me here and there. Still, I've been working my way through the episodes. (As an aside, the podcast also revealed an interesting facet to the NPR podcast taxonomy. While Louder Than A Riot is listed as a "True Crime" podcast in its description, it's in the "Music" section of the NPR podcast page. The discrepancy is likely because on other podcast services, it's found with the "True Crime" keywords.)

I was listening to the third of three episodes on Bobby Shmurda. At one point, the hosts were speaking to one of Bobby's defense attorneys and a Law professor at Brooklyn College, Kenneth Montgomery. Mr. Montgomery relates a story from when he was a young man:

I remember all of the old guys that I looked up to who was fond of me had told me, like, I had to get somebody back for that. So it was a period after I got cut in the face where I definitely assaulted quite a few people with razor blades on the trains - A train, four or five line, definitely, as a form of getting back.

But, as one of the hosts notes, Mr. Montgomery had the chance to outgrow his upbringing. According to Montgomery:

I think Bobby - and the difference with me and him was that I think he embraced it. I knew all that shit would get you in trouble at some point.

It's the podcast's take on a very typical uplifting story for Black men in the United States. A young guy grows up in "the 'hood," runs with a bad crowd or otherwise is on a dead-end path, and then something happens, whether it's a flash of insight or gaining a mentor, that turns their life around, and they go on to make something of themselves.

But as I listed to the podcast, I found myself wondering how well that served anyone. One of the things that you come to understand with podcasts like this is that "the system" isn't really upfront about what its actual purpose is. And while I'm sure that a lot of people (like the target audience of Louder Than A Riot) would say that the purpose of the criminal justice system is to demonize, criminalize and "deviantize" (for lack of a better word) things that White Americans find too different from themselves, I would suspect that the system itself (as a system) "understands" its purpose as helping people to feel safe. Even when in order to do that, it must first menace people with imaginary hobgoblins, as a means of proving its value. In this, I suspect it's not much different than the political class, who play up threats to the public, be them crime, social change or economic collapse, and then hold themselves out as the solution. And to the degree that the "mainstream" public is already primed to fear Black people, and young Black men in particular, as criminals, how does portraying a now-successful lawyer as someone who simply avoided being caught and/or sent to prison for admitted assaults on people as a form of revenge at all change that? It dovetails into what always seems to be a subtext in these sorts of discussions; that what is of the most benefit to Black people is the system forbearing from prosecution, when the letter of the law warrants it. And this, too, I believe feeds into a narrative that Black people have much higher rates of criminality than is actually the case.

"The 'hood," like pretty much any place that has more people than legitimate opportunities, is going to have people who turn to crime to get by. And it's going to have people who simply understand that as the way of the world, rather than a (perhaps difficult) choice to be made. But I think that it's possible to over-focus on that aspect of things, and perhaps play into the very image that people are attempting to combat.