Nathan McCall - Whats Going On

S everal years ago, when I began working on my autobiography, Makes Me Wanna Holler, a friend who had already written two books of his own made an interesting prediction. After this book is published, he said, your life will never be the same. Of course I had no way of knowing what he meant. I couldn't have known. But in the years since then, I've come to see that his words were on the money. The 1994 publication of Makes Me Wanna Holler changed my life in ways, both good and bad, that I couldn't have imagined.

Mainly, the book tour and the lecture circuit that came after it took me all over the country to places I probably never would have visited otherwise. Along with the travels came the people. I met literally thousands of people, from Miami to L.A., from Montgomery to Denver. These were folks of practically every race and persuasion you can think of, and it often seemed that every one of them had something pressing that he or she wanted to discuss.

Some folks wanted to rap about various aspects of my life and the story I shared in the book about my experiences growing up as a young black man in America. Others had more personal, close-to-the-heart issues they yearned to address. Like the woman in Portland desperately attempting to save her fourteen-year-old grandson, a gangster wanna-be who had been hanging in the streets. She was trying to locate him because somebody had taken out a contract to have him killed. Then there was the woman in L.A. who said she'd once been gang-raped. She wanted to talk about men and the cultural conditioning that could lead them to commit such acts. And there was the East Indian guy in New Jersey trying to understand the hostility he often received from blacks. And, of course, there were many whites striving to comprehend the experience of being black and, in some related way, to understand themselves.

Often in my travels I encountered more people than I could handle. And I received more lettersgut-wrenching epistles that went on for pages and pagesthan I could possibly answer.

At the same time, I saw and read about things going on around me every day that seemed to demand some kind of response. These were complex matters, social issues that were often connected in some way or another to the private pain expressed by many of the people I encountered. Particularly where black folks are concerned, there's so much unnecessary suffering being passed around, and much of it stems from America's unwillingness to confront its racial hang-ups.

What's been even more frustrating to watch over the past several years is the incompetence of white leadership. Rather than help alleviate some of the pain felt by the powerless, and rather than help solve some of the nation's social problems as they're supposedly hired to do, many white leaders have fanned the flames of racial antagonism. All for the sake of winning elections, they've gone all out to appease a childishly selfish white America, often at the expense of everybody else. These are the same politicians who promote harsh punishment for folks (most of whom are black) convicted of crack possession while allowing lighter sentences for people (mostly white) convicted of similar cocaine-related offenses. These are often the same politicians who talk tough about the need to crush gun violence and urban crimea not-so-veiled reference to blacksbut who do none of that kind of grandstanding about gun fanatics, those crazy white men forming militias to overthrow the government.

But demagoguery is not confined to whites. During the recent outbreak of black church burnings across the nation, it was interesting to see how quickly some black leaders insisted that race was the sole motivation for the burnings, even as authorities turned up evidence that some of the fires were started by other blacks.

And those church burnings revealed another contradiction that sometimes hampers black progress. We almost always have a swift and powerful reaction to white injustice, but we seem to respond much more slowly when we're victimized by one another. No one can dispute the statistics of black men murdered by other black men, yet black communities have failed to respond accordingly. We haven't spoken out forcefully enough against those misguided blacks who help promote a violent mind-set that encourages young people to think that randomly taking someone else's life is somehow a heroic act.

These are just some of the things that have been on my mind as I've traveled about and talked with folks. Needless to say, I've been pissed off about one thing or another a good bit of the time, and when I get pissed off about something, I know it's time to write.

Eventually, it became obvious that I needed to do another book. In Makes Me Wanna Holler I related my experiences; this time, I wanted to do a book that reflected my perceptions about some of the issues that divide people and keep us racially polarized. In an informal kind of way, I wanted to highlight the challenges of young black men and African Americans in general as we try to figure out how to fit in in this mixed-up country. I also wanted to examine why it is that so many white Americans seem to have a hard time respecting people who are different in color, culture, and values.

In doing this book, I shied away from issues-oriented essays. Instead, I used personal observations taken from experiences I've had while simply living and moving about in the nation, and especially in the D.C. area, where I live. In many ways, I believe those experiences are a microcosm of larger issues that people are wrestling with everywhere.

I also tapped the experiences of others. That required me to get out and use my reporting skills to weave into these pieces other people's observations about what's going on.

Although the topics here are varied, most of these chapters have one thing in common: They're related, either directly or indirectly, to race. That underscores my feeling that, as much as some people still like to downplay the role of race in this country, as much as they would prefer to emphasize how much progress we've made, race remains America's foremost preoccupation.

What follows here are pieces that represent a sampling of what I see going on all around us. It's not a particularly rosy picture. But then, our reality isn't a rosy one. These are my little truths, and if I may borrow a line from a review about a book written by E. Franklin Frazier, A sad truth is better than a merry lie.