Jill Nelson

Most every comedian under 50 has been influenced by Pryor, and not just the black ones.
Watching and listening to them, it’s as if Pryor’s shadow always hovers nearby, revealing itself to varying degrees in inflection, pacing, body language, choice of material. Crippled by multiple sclerosis, unable to perform, still, Richard Pryor lives! Watching tapes of his stand-up comedy, his movies, his brilliant but short-lived (two months in 1977) television show, I laugh so hard I am forced to the bathroom as tears run down my face. I find comfort in the immortality of his work, that ability to damn near always be timelessly on point.

What is most wonderful and most missed about the humor of Richard Pryor is his simultaneous rage and vulnerability — that sense of being mad as hell yet still yearning for and believing in acceptance and reconciliation, whether he was riffing about black folks, white folks, women, politics, black male macho or drug addiction. For Pryor, humor and talking much shit was a way to reveal not only his, but our collective psyche. In the process he used his voice, body and mind to turn himself into, not them, but us: the old man Mudbone, an angry black woman doing that head thing only we can do, his dick, assorted animals, a junkie getting off, an awkward white guy, his own heart in the middle of a mutinous attack on his much-abused body.

He has written an autobiography, “Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences,” and several books have been written about him. Always 20/20, perhaps hindsight suggests the inevitability of his silencing. Born and raised in Peoria, Ill., by his grandmother, who owned a string of brothels, his mother was a prostitute who got pregnant and married the madam’s son. He grew up in whorehouses frequented by entertainers and vaudeville performers who passed through town. It was a childhood spent in the contradiction between the world of sex and violence in the brothel and the world of middle-class, church-going values his family drummed into him. He dropped out of school in ninth grade, but not before an attentive drama teacher had recognized and begun to nurture his comedic talent. Still, by the time he arrived in New York in 1963 after a stint in the Army, Pryor had convinced himself that the road to success lay in
non-political, raceless joke telling.

It wasn’t until 1970, when Pryor exiled himself to Berkeley, Calif., and spent a year hanging out with writers Ishmael Reed, Cecil Brown and David Henderson that he began to develop his incredible comedic style, one rooted in the characters and experiences of his childhood and in black tradition and folklore. He created a biting, scatological comedy defined by the linguistic and stylistic patterns of poor and working-class black folks. He was often raunchy, sometimes bitter, frequently political and always honest, sometimes painfully so, a racial secret-teller and social commentator who tapped into the cultural Zeitgeist and in the process affirmed and legitimized both black and American experience.

When I was coming of age in the late 1960s and ’70s, the release of a new Richard Pryor album was a major event. We ran to the record store to purchase a copy of “That Nigger’s Crazy” or “Bicentennial Nigger,” seduced by the brashness of the titles, the daring cover art, even before we even heard all that funny, cold-blooded, true shit Pryor was talking. He was an antidote to Richard Nixon, the Moral Majority, the decline of mass movements for social change. Richard Pryor kept it real, and then some.

At his finest, as in the videotapes “Richard Pryor Live on Sunset Strip,” “Here and Now” and “Live in Concert,” he is a revelation. His elastic face melts, his body contorts, his voice gains or loses octaves, before our eyes he morphs into a German shepherd, a deer drinking from a pond, his car as he shoots it to death so his wife can’t use it to leave him. Watching him, we are terrified, exhilarated and provoked. His art, as the best of art does, resonates long after the tape has finished playing, long after his voice and image have faded away. Pryor will forever be the gangly, slightly nerdy, funny and smart kid of our collective childhood. The one who got picked on and whom we defended until he figured out that his wit was far more powerful than anyone’s fists; the boy young girls gave a piece of charity pussy to because he wasn’t athletic, fine or overtly suave enough to cop on his own and then ended up falling in love with because not only was he funny, he could bone; the member of the group we all suspected would do something
marvelous, large and life-changing — if he could ever figure out what that was and beat racism back enough to get to it.

At the same time he’s forever the strutting, expletive-spewing comic, the wide-eyed charmer who in seconds could transform into a hot-tempered brawler, the five- (or is it four-?) times married womanizer and woman abuser, the self-destructive, out-of-control boozer and druggie who set himself on fire and sent himself and his career up in smoke.

But what could we expect from this man who at his best balanced precariously on a comic edge, who used the joy and tragedy of his own life and the lives of those derisively called niggers — pre-hip-hop, before it was spelled “Niggaz” and declared cool — to create not simply comedy, but streetwise social commentary? In the end, we are saddened, shocked, but somehow not surprised that Pryor drove himself over the edge, into the inferno. There but for the grace of someone go us.

Richard Pryor is both the best and worst of a time gone but not forgotten, a reflection of our own passions, fears and self-destruction. He may not have died for our sins, but he lived many of them fully, publicly, with gusto. He has suffered the consequences in a no less public way.

I’m happy Richard Pryor got the Mark Twain Prize and lived to see it. I read that when he heard about the award he commented, “It’s nice to be regarded on a par with a great white man — now that’s funny!” which reassures me that while he may not say much these days, Pryor still knows who he is and where we’re at. It’s a hoot and a comfort to know that his work is available on videotapes, audio cassettes, CDs and in books. Toward the end of “Richard Pryor: Here and Now” he does a bit about Hell. “Had so much fun they kicked me out that motherfucka,” he says, looking
simultaneously mischievous, embarrassed and smug. “I know I ain’t goin’ to heaven, I’m just going — I wish you the best.” Backatcha, Richard.

That Saturday morning, as always, swimming did its magic. Getting dressed I felt calmer, cooled out, ready to deal with another day. I was wearing a “Stop Police Brutality” button, and the sisters in the locker room asked for one. So I handed them round to all, including a silent white woman who was there, too. She looked at the button, looked at me, and asked, “What’s police brutality?”

My first reaction was to slap her upside her head, give her a taste of the brutality that stalks people like me every day. I could not believe that here she was in the center of Harlem — where white people are moving by the thousands — still draped in the white privilege that allows her to not know what police brutality is, even as she stands in a community victimized by it.

Of course, someone who purports not to know what police brutality is probably hasn’t heard the term “white privilege.” But back in the day, white privilege was what young recruits to the civil rights movement tried (and usually failed) to shed: the advantages that accrue simply based on being white; the freedom to go about your business without worrying about your race, whether dealing with shopkeepers, schoolteachers, employers or police officers.

In today’s winner-take-all, post-affirmative-action society, apparently privilege of every kind is to be grabbed, not shed, and it seems most whites have lost consciousness of the privilege their skin color represents. That’s always galling to me, but in this period of crisis, it’s dangerous. In the wake of the Amadou Diallo and Dorismond killings I’ve found myself asking desperately: Where are the white voices of outrage?

Since the murder of Diallo in February 1999 and the acquittal of the four officers who fired at him 41 times, the tension in this city is so thick you could grab a handful and put it in your pocket, although this is not necessary since there is no way to avoid it in the subway, on the streets, in stores or nearly anywhere you go. And it’s not just tension between people of color and the police, but also with the white community, which has been by and large silent on the issue of police violence and use of excessive force.

Of course this tension has historic roots. Law enforcement historically was not charged with protecting black rights — we didn’t have any — but white property, including black slaves. Today, many people of color still see the police as protectors of the racial and economic status quo. It’s also clear that many whites in New York voted for Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and remain silent about his excesses, because of their fear of black and Latino people, particularly the young. And they’ve been willing to let Giuliani curtail these people’s civil rights in exchange for feeling more comfortable and safe.

Perhaps there’s cause for hope in the results of a recent polls. A CBS News/New York Times poll released Friday shows Giuliani’s Senate rival Hillary Rodham Clinton with a lead in the race — 49 percent vs. 41 percent. It is the fifth poll in two weeks to show Giuliani losing popularity. More to the point, a Daily News poll released April 2 reported that 72 percent of New Yorkers, across racial and economic lines, agree that the NYPD’s use of deadly force has gotten out of hand.

But I’m not sure. Giuliani immediately dismissed the poll, and he can do that, with no consequences politically, unless white New Yorkers raise their voices against police brutality in an organized and sustained fashion.

If they don’t, racial tension in this city will continue to mount, and New York will divide into two camps, people of color on one side, aided by a handful of progressive whites, and the mayor, police commissioner, police and all the silent white people on the other. A prescription for disaster and urban upheaval if there ever was one.

The woman at the YMCA might have been an aberrant extreme, but she is nevertheless indicative of an insensitivity, or maybe it’s helplessness, that manifests itself among white New Yorkers as silence about police brutality at a time when white understanding and activism is crucial. A few brave white citizens raised their voices early, such as New York Civil Liberties Union director Norman Siegel and public advocate Mark Green, and lately they have been joined by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Hillary Clinton, Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and, hesitantly, City Council Speaker Peter Vallone. Whites were well represented at the protests against the Diallo verdict — but it was the first time New York saw a sizable white turnout on the issue.

So far the only significant and sustained response has been from young white students, several hundred of whom walked out of schools in Brooklyn and Manhattan and marched across the Brooklyn Bridge on March 3, a week after the verdict in the Diallo shooting. Wednesday, 41 days after the verdict, nearly 1,000 junior high, high school and college students participated in a walk-out, rally and march to City Hall protesting police violence. Eighteen students were arrested after they blocked rush-hour traffic on the bridge.

To this day, most of New York’s white elected officials, along with religious leaders, heads of community-based nonprofits, and both of New York’s Democratic senators, Charles Schumer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, have been silent about the brutality crisis within the NYPD. Surely their voices would be raised if their constituents, average New Yorkers, demanded that they speak out.

It’s crucial that they do. Giuliani and his minions have made it clear that they don’t care what black and Latino people experience, perceive or think about police misconduct. He knows that we did not vote for him for mayor and will not send him to the Senate, and he has long since written us off. What he does care about are white residents, whose votes elected him mayor and whose votes, or silence in the face of the current crisis, will help him reach the Senate as the man who saved New York from crime.

Let’s be clear about the fact that many people of color live in high-crime neighborhoods and need police services, too. But it is not rhetoric or hyperbole when I say that nowadays I am more fearful of the police than of potential criminals, since it is the police — who my taxes finance and from whom I should have a reasonable expectation of protection — who have been given a green light to shoot and kill citizens at will, whether it is an unarmed Amadou Diallo in the vestibule of his building, or Patrick Dorismond saying no to drugs on a city street. We’re already paying the police with our tax dollars, must we now pay them with our civil rights as well?

Last weekend I had dinner with my friend Anya. I gave her a button and implored her to wear it. It is important that white residents disturbed and disgusted by police brutality and the mayor’s insensitive, maniacal, blame-the-victim response to it identify themselves in some way. Perhaps the first step is wearing a button. The next step is raising voices and uniting with others to take action. The alternative is that residents of New York continue to be divided into warring camps defined by Giuliani as those who support the police uncritically on one side, those who don’t on the other.

As it stands now, those camps are overwhelmingly segregated by race. Those who consciously or unconsciously partake of white privilege stand on one side; those who cannot and those few whites who will not, on the other. The Southern civil rights movement was in full swing before white citizens, often radicalized by televised images of black people being assaulted by police dogs, members of the Ku Klux Klan, Southern sheriffs and water cannons, raised their voices and put their bodies on the line for African-Americans’ struggle for equal justice and against white privilege.

I’d like to think that these highly publicized police murders, not only in New York but all over the country, might have the same effect and spark a movement against police brutality and for social justice for all Americans.

It is time for white New Yorkers to cross over. If they don’t, the tension will escalate, the killing of unarmed men will continue and this city will be destroyed, all of us burned in the fire next time.

I wish I could say that I’m surprised by the verdict, but I’m not. The history of abuse and brutalization of black people by police and other law enforcement authorities is as old as the United States, and includes lynchings, beatings, burnings and shootings. What I am is $10 richer. I bet my mother they’d walk completely, and she bet they’d be convicted of the least possible charge and get probation. Good old Mom. At 81 she’s still clinging to a shred of optimism and popping Tums to ease that clenched feeling.

Me, I’m 10 bucks richer and eons more cynical, having sat in this very seat in Harlem for more than 20 years and heard the same verdict in the police killings of Clifford Glover, Randolph Evans, Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart, Ricky Lewis and Kenny Gamble, LaTanya Haggarty, the list goes on and spreads across America.

And you know, I used to cry, rant, rave, get fucked up to try and ease the pain. But besides scarfing down a few candy bars, I’m cool, or constantly hot, so it seems normal. I’ve gotten used to dealing with the everyday indignity of being either invisible or threatening, feeling that twinge when I see the police or that clenching when the men I love are late; slowing down when I see the cops hassling kids on the street, just waiting for the next Amadou Diallo or Kevin Cedeno or Anthony Baez or … fill in the blanks.

Just in case you thought it just “seemed” like police have an eternal open season on black males, it’s time to drop the “seem” and dig the bottom line. Amadou Diallo was in the vestibule of the building where he lived and was shot at 41 times by four cops. His crime? He was there, black, and male. Around these parts, that adds up to suspicious behavior and apparently, according to today’s verdict, reasonable cause to kill. And if you found yourself swayed by the defense line that the whole thing was both justified and a tragic mistake — he didn’t respond when the cops talked to him; he reached into his jacket pocket; the wallet he pulled out looked like the barrel of a gun — just close your eyes and imagine that the figure in that vestibule in the Bronx was white. Then try to imagine the same outcome.

Neither can I.

No doubt some were moved to sympathy when the officers testified and cried on the stand. Sadly, people of my race — we of the clenched stomachs — are prone to believe those cops’ tears weren’t remorse, but apprehension at the thought of what would happen to them if the system really messed up and they went to jail. The most frightening thing is I don’t have any problem imagining officers Boss, Murphy, McMellon and Carroll strapped down and back on those mean streets, 9 millimeters polished to a burnished gleam and appropriately notched, dicks swinging with a new authority, committed to making the world safer from their own nightmares, sanctioned by the so-called justice system to enforce the law — with apologies to Malcolm — by any means necessary.

Saturday at 6 p.m. there will be a demonstration on 59th Street and Fifth Avenue and I will go, not hopefully, but to bear witness to my outrage, disgust and sadness, to gather strength where I may, surrounded by others who feel abused as I do. There will likely be many people there, for as many different reasons, and perhaps what we will share is our anger and a painful hunger for equal justice, even though most of us have no idea, find it difficult to imagine, exactly how that would work. But I’m speculating. What I know for sure is that many of us will share that clenched feeling in our gut — one that apparently will never go away.

While he is now an admitted rapist, sodomizer and sadist of the highest order, Volpe ain’t blind. Pleading guilty is simply a desperate attempt to get leniency from the court and save his ass — and I do mean that literally as well as figuratively — under an avalanche of damning testimony and damn near certain conviction. The whole defense effort has been both offensive and pitiful, from suggestions that Louima’s massive internal injuries — damage that required multiple surgeries and months of hospitalization — were the result of consensual homosexual “rough sex,” to the bizarre parading about of Volpe’s black girlfriend, as if her very existence negated the possibility of Volpe being racist. Hello! Thomas Jefferson had a black girlfriend too, Sally Hemings, and that didn’t stop him from owning slaves, demeaning black people in his writings and perpetuating slavery.

The bottom line is that none of the weak balloons the defense tried to float could get off the ground after the testimony of Volpe’s colleagues. The image of Volpe strutting around the precinct brandishing a stick covered with shit and blood, preening in sadistic glee, beating walls and bragging to his cronies that “I took a man down tonight” is simply unforgettable, and unforgivable. Trotting out a soul sister girlfriend ain’t gonna make that shit disappear, and anyway, so what? Even black women have the right to bad taste.

But even if the judge does shave a few years off his possible life sentence, Volpe can probably kiss his ass goodbye. What began as a dick thing outside a nightclub in Brooklyn, when Volpe was decked by an unknown assailant and chose Louima to blame and punish, will as likely as not end as a dick thing inside some prison. The brothers in the joint are waiting for you, officer Volpe, and it ain’t with open arms. As it was in the beginning, so shall it be in the end, or something like that.

While it’s impossible not to be relieved, and happy on some level, that Volpe will surely serve time in prison for his sadistic crimes — where he will definitely, and appropriately, get his just desserts — it’s impossible not to wonder why this case galvanized the attention of so many citizens, not only in New York, but across the nation.

After all, police killing citizens is not what put the “New” in New York. This is the city where in the early 1970s officer Robert Torsney shot 10-year-old Clifford Glover in the head after Glover encountered Torsney outside the building where he lived and asked if there was trouble inside. This is where a group of police officers shot 24 bullets and killed Louis Baez in 1984 in response to his parents’ summoning police to help them subdue their mentally ill son.

Where but in the Big Apple was 69-year-old Eleanor Bumpers shot to death by a gang of officers who surrounded her but found no other way to subdue an elderly, overweight grandma brandishing a kitchen knife? And these are only the murders by police that made headlines. There are plenty more. In every one of those cases, and hundreds of others, the victim paid the ultimate price, death.

Yet the response to the Louima case suggests that, contrary to old adages and common belief, there is a fate worse than death, and that is loss of manhood. Not to minimize Abner Louima’s terror, pain, suffering and humiliation, but he is, unlike so many victims of police brutality before him, alive. He still breathes, kisses his family goodnight, awaits the birth of his third child. Even the possible life sentence is more a reflection of outraged manhood than
even-handed justice, given how infrequently rape and murder are punished with
life sentences — not to mention the fact that I’m not aware of any cop spending his life behind bars for the crime of killing someone in his custody. But maybe a case like that escaped me.

What the black community’s response to the crimes against Abner Louima seems to say is that for a black man, nothing is worse than having something shoved up your ass — not even death. It is chilling, and heartbreaking, that black people too have come to devalue black lives. Just as scary is the embrace of patriarchal, racist and homophobic notions of manhood — and by its absence, womanhood — in the ranking of crimes against those very same black lives. Thus, we are able to sustain our outrage at the sadism of Louima’s torture, as well as the magnitude of the number of bullets — 41 — fired at Amadou Diallo, but it’s hard to get it up when it’s just a plain old, home-grown African-American killed by police firing one or two or 12 bullets.

But this primal horror extends beyond the black community. After all, it was the taboo nature of the crime against Louima that made white cops break their code of silence and tell on Volpe. Their candor is welcome, but it would be nice to see similar honesty in cases of police killings, not to mention the routine beatings and abuse meted out by the men in blue.

Just as porn freaks need more deviant stimulation, dope fiends demand more potent dope and violence aficionados are constantly upping the ante, so Americans are constantly upping the price of our horror, compassion and outrage. After the school shootings in Georgia, an acquaintance remarked to me that “he didn’t even kill anyone,” as if somehow the lack of dead bodies make the kid’s crime not only a failure, but passé. Likewise with police brutality. It ain’t enough to simply be shot and killed by out of control cops over some bullshit — no one gives a damn. At the millennium we need a bigger hit, say 41 bullets plus, or the living death of manhood assaulted.

The irony is that with his plea, Volpe may very well have consigned himself to the same hell of assaulted manhood he visited upon Abner Louima, that fate worse than death. “The brothers are definitely waiting for his motherfuckin’ ass,” says a friend who served hard time. “The only hope, if you want to call it that, is that the Aryan Brotherhood is waiting to worship his ass.”

In the end, inside prison and out, it all comes down to that same tired dick thing. And until it becomes a human thing, we’ll all continue getting fucked, one way or another, like it or not.

You know you’re losing it when you delay video oblivion to hear an actor who stars in a TV series called “Homicide” shed light on the subject of violence in America, but as they say in Narcotics Anonymous, my bottom had come and I knew it, as I listened to Kotto suggest the solution was getting God and prayer back in the schools. Crusades or Jihad, anyone?

Loath as I am to admit it, I must say that I was relieved when I heard that the two teenagers who killed 12 classmates, a teacher and themselves at Columbine High School in Littleton weren’t black. Why? Because the thought of spending days listening to smug pundits pontificating on black pathology, black predators, black violence, the broken black family and plain old bad black people at maximum volume was too much to bear. It’s bad enough that the assumption that black people, and particularly young black people, are either used to or inured to violence is an ongoing subtext in American thought, conscious or subconscious. But frankly, the thought of having Katie Couric and Stone Phillips breaking that old Negro pathology down for us 24-7 was too awful.

My relief didn’t last long. In the final analysis the tally’s the same and the loss of life equally tragic whether you have two white kids dressed in black trench coats launching an organized assault on 13 people, or assorted black kids wearing Hilfiger or Mecca in New York or Chicago or L.A. shooting one person a day for 13 days as a way to settle a beef. What seems to be lost in all the pseudo-soul searching, pontificating and special reports is that violence is a virus that replicates and crosses all boundaries. It’s no more a po’ black inner-city disease than AIDS was for gays only. For the last two weeks the media dissection of Littleton has been far more complex, thoughtful, thorough — and dare I say longer — than it would have been had the perps been people of color. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been any more insightful. Our discussion of Littleton keeps us in dangerous denial, as we search for reasons why these “good” kids went “bad.”

Far from shedding light on why this happened or what steps might be taken so it doesn’t happen again, the obsessive coverage of the Colorado shootings has revealed how profoundly racialized, and racist, American notions of violence are. Larded throughout the shock, sorrow, confusion and need to understand the events in Littleton is the pervasive notion that “this couldn’t happen here” — that whiteness, and white privilege, shields communities like Littleton from violence. (In fact, it’s rarely if ever mentioned that all of the young people who’ve shot up their schools in the last 18 months have been white.)

To most people, what seems most profoundly puzzling about the violence in Littleton is that with the exception of Isaiah Shoels — killed because he was black, an ink spot on the American dream of violence-free whiteness — both the perpetrators and the victims were good (read: white) kids living in clean, safe, moneyed (read: not too many people of color in the area) communities, who had everything to live for (read: They were going to a good high school, then on to college and good jobs, as opposed to attending crummy urban schools that are holding pens until the students graduate into privatized prisons). With few exceptions, the national response to the violence in Littleton has brought into the open the American belief that pathological violence, like those signs at Mississippi water fountains during Jim Crow, is For Colored Only. No longer. As Malcolm X said in response to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the chickens have come home to roost.

What’s surprising isn’t that the shootings occurred; they’re just the latest in a pattern of youth violence that has been escalating for decades. What is surprising, and appalling, is how shocked much of white America is by what happened, and how deeply conditioned by racism that surprise it. Did puzzled white suburbanites really think they could physically escape the propensity for and possibility of violence? That segregation from people of color was the answer? That if they lived in the ‘burbs, in a nice house, and earned a better than decent living, they could protect their children from the violence that surrounds all Americans? In a strange way, the events in Littleton could be interpreted as an advertisement for city living, where diversity of race, class and politics and the stress of day-to-day living preclude the possibility of being lulled into a sense of immunity to real-life America, in all its violent glory.

It would be a pleasant surprise if the horror at Littleton opened our eyes to the pervasive and horrific violence that surrounds and is available to all of us, all the time, across race, class and geography. Let’s face it, we don’t even need cable to tune into VNN, the Violence News Network. We need to stop searching for someone to blame — parents, the evil Internet, Marilyn Manson — and look at ourselves. We’re awash in the glow of violence; if you don’t believe it, turn on the TV, go to the movies, open a magazine, look at a few billboards, read a newspaper, listen to our language. The only finger of blame I can reasonably point are at the National Rifle Association and the gun manufacturers, who’ve lulled us into mass delusion with their idiotic mantra, “Guns don’t kill, people do.” Yeah, but people kill a lot fewer people when they’re armed only with their fists as opposed to semiautomatic weapons. And sorry, Yaphet, but God in the schools isn’t the silver bullet — see what I mean about the language? — either. Judging from the memorials we’ve watched since the killing, there was plenty of God in Littleton schools.

The only lesson worth learning from Littleton is that violence in America pervades, crosses all boundaries and, because it is random, is inescapable. You can run, but you can’t hide, and the boogeyman isn’t necessarily a bro in baggy jeans. If we learned that lesson, maybe we’d be closer to doing something about it. Maybe. The only thing I know for certain is that next time it goes down, I’ll be neither surprised nor relieved by the level of violence, and I won’t watch TV expecting enlightenment.