Chapter 66

My journey had gradually "railroaded" me into the ultimate closed system - the prison - where I met again the 3 ghetto robbers who five years earlier had attacked me on my arrival in the country. While society had slowly closed like a vise around me, these people meanwhile had opened up to me and had (through my own ghettoization) become a part of myself.

I now understood that they had had no real choice: Their freedom was one-dimensional. Their choice of whether or not to make me a victim is the choice of white society: Should we stop oppressing an oppressed people in order not to end up ourselves in a repressive kind of prison? Or have we lost the freedom to choose?

The freedom to choose may already be lost in a system where "life's design is already made."  If we think granting billions of dollars for slum clearance, education and jobs will unlock those imprisoned in the ghetto, then our great liberal open hand will soon suffer a quick conservative pull-back.

Humiliating crumbs from above will only worsen the self-hatred among those we disposed of and now halfheartedly try to reclaim - and they will bite the hands which feed them. In the hest years of liberal tokenism, 1960-67, $348 billion was spent on war, $27 billion on space exploration, and only $2 billion on aid to ghetto areas. Is it any surprise that our rejects burned down the ghettos in contempt? No, we can't just pay off our racism!

Such a helping hand from above will unintentionally function just as the American penal system does. Here 95% of the money is used to dispose of the unwanted and brutalize them, and only 5% is spent on paternalistic "rehabilitation" of the waste product which took years to produce. Most inmates are so wrecked by the prison system that afterwards they can never adjust to society outside again and therefore return to prison. No other nation including Communist Russia and South Africa under the apartheid regime has ever locked up more people than America!

Millions of people who need psychiatric treatment as a result of the ghetto's institutionalized, chronic, and self-perpetuating pathology (completely like we now see the same phenomenon in our ghettoized Muslims in Europe) are in our system being locked up instead of getting treatment. 25% of American prison inmates are mentally retarded as a result of their impoverished backgrounds. More than half the inmates are people of color. When I first traveled in America in the 1970's only 10% of black men were in prison. Today 40% of black under 40 are in prison, according to New York Times. In the 70'es I saw more blacks in college than in prison. Today more blacks are in prison than in college!

When in addition you learn that blacks on average receive sentences twice as long as whites for the same offense, you begin to understand why many blacks see themselves as political prisoners. The undisguised contempt they show for the system, the admiration many lucky hustlers receive in the ghetto subcultures as well as the way they justify criminal acts as being a protest against the system which has knocked them down - all of this shows an unmistakable political protest and a deep dissatisfaction with the life society has granted them.

It may seem that I present blacks (or the ghettoized Muslim youth in Europe) as helpless victims, but how else will we see the executioner in ourselves. Throughout this show our racist subconsciousness has tried to disclaim responsibility by thinking that the problem, after all, is probably due to black innate inferiority.

But we forget that black West Indian immigrants, who were not forced to internalize our racism, are doing just as well as whites in America. So when native blacks - deeply shaped by our racism - have only half the white income and make up more than half of all prison inmates, yes, then they are as a matter of fact helpless victims of our racism.

The images of broken and apathetic people in this show are not the images blacks - struggling to maintain a little dignity - like to see of themselves. But oppression always has more human defeats than heroes, and if we do not understand those who are too weak to resist, how will we ever realize how destructive our racism is?

These prisoners did resist. What made them choose our ultimate punishment was not actual need or hunger, but uncontrollable anger - a vicious cocktail of hatred and self-hatred which made them despise everything. They are only the visible symptoms of our oppression, for their anger is shared by all black Americans.

Their anger constantly comes out and defeats them, makes them stumble where others easily succeed, - and instead of looking at the cause of their anger we then blame their lack of success on themselves. We don't understand the ghetto monster we create - therefore turn our backs to it, put it in prison or perhaps one day concentration camps - and destroy our own society in the process.

But let us not forget that for those who can adjust to the system, our society from inside our barred windows and fear-ridden deserted streets can be experienced as the freest in the world. A presentation like this one will to the surprise of most outsiders be greeted with open arms because the system is so strong and massive in its oppression that all criticism is lost upon it and becomes instead entertainment or religious escape.