The Story of Kareem Bynum
A Slug in the Neck and a Slug in the Back for the Crime of Being Frightened While Black
GEORGIA IS A ‘RAISIN IN THE SUN’ READY TO POP!
THIS IS A FIRST INSTALLMENT. I AM FINDING MY WAY HERE. I INTEND TO GIVE SOME OF THE INCREDIBLE PEOPLE WHO HAVE PRIVILEGED ME, WITH THEIR PRESENCE IN MYLIFE, A SPOT OF SOME SORT IN THE CULTURAL PANTHEON.
THESE WILL OCCASIONALLY BE JUST “OCCASIONAL” EXPLORATIONS OF CHARACTER AND EVENT. OTHER TIMES, HOWEVER, AND THIS IS THE FIRST OF MY POSTINGS FOR WHICH I CAN ASSERT THIS, THE MATERIAL WILL SHOW UP AS AN EXTENSIVE, ONGOING, PERSONAL, SOCIAL, AND POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY.
KAREEM IS FROM SWAINSBORO. SWAINSBORO IS ESSENTIALLY A MODERN-DAY MAYBERRY WITH WHITE ROBES AND CROSSES STILL IN EVIDENCE PSYCHICALLY, ALTHOUGH GENERALLY IN THE CLOSET POLTICIALLY.
HIS FAMILY STORY THERE IS A SAGA OF TRIUMPH OVER THE LINGERING MIASMA OF SLAVERY IN SOUTH GEORGIA. THE BRUTAL CRIPPLING ATTACK ON HIM---AS AN INCIDENT OF ARROGANT AUTHORITY, OF MEDIA MALFEASANCE, AND OF CONTINUING SOCIAL COURAGE---IS CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT FOR AMERICANS AND PEOPLE EVERYWHERE TO KNOW.
Kareem Bynum
Prologue
Very quickly, his arms have become cords of steel. Perched atop the Naugehyde chair in his mother’s trailer, the moist warmth of a tidewater late November seeps through the doors and windows, and Kareem Bynum sits shirtless. The atmosphere is steamy as the wet air mixes with ten hours of cooking, and then joins percolating turkey, fixin’s’, and greens, along with the effluent of twenty years of human labor and love, fear and wonder.
Kareem combines an iconic Geronimo with a buffed Muhammed Ali. His pecan brown skin glistens when he shifts position and sweat catches light; he resembles a dark neon sculpture than winks on and off, now glowing like a banked fire, now only glimmering like distant lights through a foggy dusk.
His eyes measure each glance. “Can you meet me? Can you feel me? Can you hold me?” His spirit submerges a bit as I approach. Disquiet and uncertainty fight just below the surface of his fiercely maintained calm. Panic lurks like a frightened young beast, only a couple of layers down in his being.
If he could walk still, his legs would dance him away, his enigmatic grimace of a grin then fading like a fleeing Cheshire cat. But he can’t rise, doctors promise that he will never again walk. So he averts his eyes and mumbles, although he manages some real conviction nonetheless. “I’m fine… .you know, it’s hard, but I’m doing fine. …I’ll get through this.”
Introduction and Summary
One hundred eighty days have lapsed since a Georgia State Patrolman’s bullets ripped through the flesh of his back and neck and tore his spine asunder, at the fifth thoracic vertebrae. He tried to flee Swainsboro police and state troopers seeking to arrest him on a random and uncorroborated bench warrant, delivered at a midnight random traffic stop. The genermarie ran him down like errant chattel, and as he lay stunned and semi-conscious in the weedy ditch where his car had come to rest, one officer shot twice, without provocation, ending one way of life while creating another.
The presentation of Kareem’s personal saga is one part of this tale. It involves ties of blood and people who insist on seeing justice done, whatever the risks. It is funny and bawdy and bizarre, as well as tragic. It is about transformation and transcendence in the face of impossible circumstances.
Another part of the story is the bloody murder that is the rictus core of Emmanuel County’s history. To say that slavery never ended here is false. To deny the complexity of the past 150 years is foolish. But to overlook the way that terror and oppression has led here to an uneasy White supremacy is at best hypocritical and self-serving disingenuousness, some combination of the marginally moronic and the willfully ignorant.
The finish of the primary tryptic that makes up this account is the current portrait of Swainsboro, over the years of Kareem’s life that he has been a father and a worker, and now, a paraplegic. Swainsboro’s surface appears like an idyllic “Mayberry”. The scrolling color photo on the City website shows fifty-odd people in close-ups and medium shots, 3 of whom in the background are Black. From sixty per cent to six per cent is a neat trick, although all of them being in the background is surely a reflection of the City’s reality.
As the members of his family who were able to---a sister in California; a brother in Connecticut; and his elder brother, in Iraq; could not be present---prepared a South Georgia grassroots Thanksgiving feast, the tale of Kareem’s personal thanksgiving glittered like ancient star shine winking through scudding country clouds. This luminescence was most powerful in the troubled eyes of Kareem’s elder son, who at nine years old has just begun to make sense of the enormity of his father’s loss.
In this serene, if surreal, presentation of social substance, the brutality visited on young Kareem Bynum is jarring. One way or another, the crime committed against him is percolating a social cauldron here, discernible in schools, churches, social clubs, and commercial establishments as well. Swainsboro will undergo a transformation, or it will explode, like an improperly vented septic tank filled far beyond its capacity, unable to absorb further fecal matter without a volcanic reaction.
Kareem Bynum’s magnificence, as a man and as a moral arbiter, is a metaphor for the South today. The relations of power and domination here cripple the potential for moving forward, but like someone who confronts an accidental second infancy and must learn to cope in the face of apparent incapacity, Kareem reflects how, even in the teeth of this viciously snapping maw, one can transcend anything that leaves life and breath in a body. We must all watch, and learn, or surely the future is a bleak disaster that will crush our lives and the hopes of our children.
THUS ENDS THE FIRST KAREEM BIO INSTALLMENT, AS NOTED ABOVE THREE INTERRELATED STORIES COMBINING TO MAKE HIS LIFE. THESE THREE SECTIONS OF THE BOOK OF KAREEM WILL APPEAR, IN ORDER, BIT BY BIT HERE AND ELSEWHERE FOR PEOPLE TO PERUSE.
Overview
The Big Picture data is daunting. Of 50,000 plus Georgia citizens behind bars---qualifying us here in the Peach State for the number one prison-population-rate on earth ---nearly 35,000 are African Americans. As Joseph Lowery puts it, “Anybody who thinks that Black people are committing 75% of the crimes in Georgia, they’re crazy!”
Blacks do tend to have a higher crime rate than Whites, which makes sense, inasmuch as the number one correlative for lawbreaking is poverty. Black households are poor at a rate two to three times greater than White families. Unemployment among African Americans in Georgia also occurs at more than double the frequency among those of us with ancestors from Europe. Ultimately, prison is the wages of poverty and joblessness. What makes these phenomena especially ugly, of course, is the specter of racism.
The system is ludicrous and hilarious, if the vantage point for viewing it is distant enough. Up close, racial profiling, attack-the-poor profiteering, White supremacist divide-and-conquer politics, and other attributes of the Prison Industrial Complex are like parts of some nightmare vision of hell on earth. I have witnessed crass harassment of Black friends over and over again, in small towns and every big city but Atlanta.
The police shoot numerous Black men every year, killing a dozen or so in the last twelve months, and maiming many others. The disparities and discrepancies in treatment and options have reached a point where HUGE social unrest is pending, not in Georgia alone, but definitely around the region, and possibly around the nation as well, where the patterns are nearly as pronounced and obvious as they are here in Dixie. This work is thus both a description and a call to action. Let us address the inequitable iniquities that plague us, lest we spend fifty years---or all eternity---whining and complaining about the beautiful possibilities for life which we flushed down the toilet of intolerance and bigotry instead.