Asha Bandele, author, journalist, poet and director of Advocacy Grants Program at Drug Policy Alliance, is a former Columbia University Revson Fellow who earned her B.A. at The New School and her M.F.A. at Bennington College. She has spent much of her career documenting issues of social concern through her work as a journalist.
To date, she’s penned five books, including the award-winning memoir, The Prisoner’s Wife, and recently finished her fifth, another memoir about raising a child who has an incarcerated parent.
Here, she shares statistics on the criminalization of black men, the origin of the phrase “Black Lives Matter” and its impact.
What is your opinion on the statutes of liberty given the current state of affairs in America today? What is your opinion about the state of freedom for Black people in particular, and Americans in general?
My own sense is that in varying degrees of intensity, the ongoing and consistent relationship Black people have to this nation, is one of containment — of our bodies, our minds, our spirits. The fact that we are still here and with a profound connection to love and life, is one of the greatest stories of survival never told. But our relationship with America, beginning with slavery, continuing through the era immediately after which gave us the Black codes — a legal method through which we were re-enslaved — and then Jim Crow, which when it didn’t outright kill us, kept the majority of us, legally, from living outside the confines of abject and generational poverty and social degradation. With the end of Jim Crow, Nixon declared the modern war on drugs, which in its 40 years of targeting Blacks who use and sell drugs less than our white counterparts, has incarcerated more people in the last 40 years than all of the people imprisoned since this nation’s birth. So as the targets of 250 years of public policy that meant to destroy us, and as we see that 40 percent of our babies awaken each day in deep poverty, and in some states, our brothers are targeted for incarceration at more than 80 times the rate of their white counterparts who are choosing the exact same behaviors; and of course when we see Black women and men shot and killed for just living and wearing a hoodie, or needing help after a car accident, no I don’t think we are near free. But yes I know we will be. Any people who can survive the onslaught we have, can do anything.
What does the Black Lives Matter protest movement mean to you? How do you see it in its current form and what, if anything, do you expect it to accomplish?
Black Lives Matter, originated by three Black women, Patrisse Marie Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi, originated before unarmed college student Mike Brown was shot down in the street while his hands were raised, by white cop Darren Wilson, and before father, son, husband and peacemaker [Eric Garner] was choked to death in the street where he begged for his life. Patrisse would say that this movement is about us, looking at us, loving us, in the face of a nation that that in myriad ways harms Black bodies. In the face of that harm we stand together and look at one another with love and say, Your Life Matters to me. It reminds of the scene from Beloved where Baby Suggs holds church in the woods and reminds us, even as we were enslaved, to love ourselves, our hands, our everything. #BlackLivesMatter speaks to the core of everything I believe.
What message would you like to send to readers of this story? Is there anything that you would like people to be mindful of, pay attention to, or take action about? Why?
I would ask us to take care of ourselves and each other, to recognize the stress we are carrying from fighting and struggling for more, for a livable world, and remember to stand in patience with one other, to stand in integrity, to admit when we don’t know something, to seek to correct our wrongs, to bring peace to the maximum extent we can into the heart of chaos, to remember to read and know our history, where as Minister Malcolm reminded us, our studies will be rewarded.
