When I thought about locking up with a crew in 1996, I wanted to see a full initiation first, not parts I stumbled upon over the years. My friend Cliff and I arrived at a park not close from my home in Jamaica, Queens. Leaves danced with the wind around our feet, wafting an eerie feeling in my 14-year-old black body. The grounds of the initiation beckoned: a high-rise chain link fence, enclosing two basketball courts.
Through the daylighted chain, I watched scowls and punches and stomps engulf the uninitiated teen—a stoppage, then an awkward transition into hugs, handshakes, and smiles. The striking contrast shot at my core of authenticity, the insincerity of the punch-hug, of the stomp-smile, murdering my thoughts of joining a crew.
The same feeling shot within me five years later in 2001 when I thought about joining a college fraternity. The rumors of beatings and sexual assaults overwhelmed me like the worn-down bodies of pledges inching around campus unclothed in hazing. The before contrasted vividly again with the after: the excitable energy of the sparkling new brothers when they came out each year to the deafening cheers of their potential victims, especially in sororities. At these campus spectacles, my mind became a split screen of the past and the present.
[For more on this story by IBRAM X. KENDI, go to https://www.theatlantic.com/po...ts-and-gangs/555896/]
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