"You Have the Rite" | Marc Bamuthi Joseph

40,492 views ・ 2019-09-11

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Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:14
Me and the boy wear the same shoe size.
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He wants a pair of Air Jordan 4s for Christmas.
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I buy them,
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and then I steal them from his closet,
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like a twisted Grinch-themed episode of "Black-ish."
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00:30
(Laughter)
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The kicks are totems to my youth.
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I wear them like mercury on my Black man feet.
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I can't get those young freedom days back fast enough.
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Last time I was really fast I was 16,
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outrunning a doorman on the Upper East Side.
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He caught me vandalizing his building,
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not even on some artsy stuff,
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just ... stupid.
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Of all the genders, boys are the stupidest.
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00:57
(Laughter)
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00:59
Sixteen was a series of barely getting away
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01:02
and never telling my parents.
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I assume that my son is stewarding this tradition well.
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Sixteen was "The Low End Theory" and Marvin Gaye on repeat.
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01:12
Sixteen is younger than Trayvon and older than Emmett Till.
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01:17
At the DMV, my boy's in line to officially enter his prime suspect years:
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01:23
young, brown and behind the wheel,
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a moving semaphore, signaling the threat of communities from below.
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On top of the food chain, humans have no natural predator,
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but America plays out something genetically embedded and instinctual
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in its appetite for the Black body.
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America guns down Black bodies and then walks around them,
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bored,
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like laconic lions next to half-eaten gazelles,
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bloody lips ...
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"America and the Black Body" on some Nat Geo shit.
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Well, he passes his road test at the DMV.
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01:56
He does this strut C-Walk broken "Fortnite" thing
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on the way in to finish his paperwork,
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true joy and calibrated cool under the eye of my filming iPhone,
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the victory dance of someone who has just salvaged a draw.
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02:07
He's earned this win, but he's so 16
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he can't quite let his body be fully free.
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02:13
When he's three,
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I'm in handcuffs in downtown Oakland.
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Five minutes ago, I was illegally parked.
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Now I'm in the back of a squad car, considering the odds that I'm going to die
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here, 15 minutes away from my son who expects that in 18 minutes,
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daddy's gonna pick him up from preschool.
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There are no pocket-size cameras to capture this moment, so.
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I learned a lot of big words when I was 16 getting ready for the SAT,
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but none of them come to me now.
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In the police car, the only thing that really speaks is my skin.
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I know this:
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I was parked on a bus zone on 12th and Broadway,
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running to the ATM on the corner.
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I pull the cash out just as a police car pulls up behind me,
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give him the "Aw shucks, my bad," that earnest Black man face.
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He waits till I'm back in the car and then hits the siren,
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takes my license with his hand on the gun,
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comes back two minutes later, gun drawn, another patrol car now, four cops now,
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my face on the curb, hands behind my back, shackled.
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03:12
I'm angry and humiliated, only until I'm scared and then sad.
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I smell like the last gasp before my own death.
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I think how long the boy will wait before he realizes
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that daddy is not on his way.
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I think his last barely formed memory of me
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will be the story of how I never came for him.
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I try to telepathically say goodbye.
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03:35
The silence brings me no peace.
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The quiet makes it hard to rest.
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In the void there is anger mushrooming in the moss at the base of my thoughts,
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a fungus growing on the spine of my freedom attempts.
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I'm free from all except contempt,
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the spirit of an unarmed civilian in the time of civil unrest,
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no peace, just Marvin Gaye falsettos arching like a broken-winged sparrow,
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competing against the empty sirens,
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singing the police.
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Apparently some cat from Richmond had a warrant out on him,
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and when the cop says my name to dispatch, dude doesn't hear "Marc Joseph,"
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he hears "Mike Johnson."
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I count seven cars and 18 cops on the corner now,
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a pride around a pound of flesh.
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By the grace of God, I'm not fed to the beast today.
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Magnanimously, the first cop makes sure to give me a ticket
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for parking in a bus zone,
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before he sets me free.
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The boy is 16.
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He has a license to drive in the hollow city,
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enough body to fill my shoes.
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I have grey in my beard,
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and it tells the truth.
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He can navigate traffic in the age of autonomous vehicles.
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04:44
You know, people say "the talk,"
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like the thing happens just once,
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like my memory's been erased and my internet is broken,
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like I can't read today's martyred name,
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like today's the day that I don't love my son enough
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to tell him, "Bro, I really don't care about your rights, yo.
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04:59
Your mission is to get home to me.
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05:01
Live to tell me the story, boy.
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Get home to me."
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05:06
Today's talk is mostly happening in my head
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05:08
as he pulls onto the freeway and Marvin Gaye comes on the radio.
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05:12
I'm wearing the boy's shoes,
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05:14
and the tune in my head is the goodbye that I almost never said,
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05:18
a goodbye the length of a requiem,
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a kiss, a whiff of his neck,
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the length of a revelation
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and a request flying high in the friendly sky
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without ever leaving the ground.
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My pain is a walking bass line,
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a refrain, placated stress against the fading baseline.
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Listen, this is not to be romantic,
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but to assert a plausible scenario for the existential moment.
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Driving while Black is its own genre of experience.
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Ask Marvin.
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It may not be the reason why you sing like an angel,
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but it surely has something to do with why heaven bends to your voice.
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The boy driving, the cop in the rearview mirror
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is a ticket to ride or die.
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06:01
When you give a Black boy "the talk,"
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you pray he is of the faction of the fraction that survives.
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You pitch him the frequency of your telepathic goodbye,
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06:10
channel the love sustained in Marvin's upper register
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under his skullcap.
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Black music at its best
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is an exploded black hole
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responding to the call of America at its worst.
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Strike us down, the music lives,
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dark, like tar or tobacco
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or cotton in muddy water.
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Get home to me, son.
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Like a love supreme, a god as love,
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a love overrules,
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feathers for the angelic lift of the restless dead,
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like a theme for trouble man,
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or a 16-year-old boy, free to make mistakes and live through them,
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grow from them,
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holy, holy, mercy, mercy me,
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mercy,
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mercy.
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07:02
Thank you.
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07:03
(Applause)
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