Mitchell S. Jackson
Autor von Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family
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Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 (2021) — Mitwirkender — 831 Exemplare
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- Geschlecht
- male
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- USA
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- Portland, Oregon, USA
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Jackson knows his relations with women are very problematic. He promises but he cannot deliver. Emotionally. In commitment. Even giving women basic respect. But he doesn’t seem to pay for it until his daughter grows up and his behaviour fills him with guilt and dread.
Jackson’s memoir/thought experiment “Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family” at times reads like The Odyssey, at other times like Dante’s visit to the underworld, and so much like a satire of American life.
This is no satire.
It is his life and the recollections of the many men in his family who did time in the slammer, or had a life “gangbanging”, or drug addiction, or early death. This is an “All-American” family in spite of what white supremacists would like us to believe. This is a story of one not particularly unusual black family in America.
As a youth Jackson navigates between the aspirations of his mother that he get an education and create a stable life for himself and the lives of his many male role models whose great achievements will have been to survive gangstas, gangs, a complex judicial system, the opportunities of dealing in drugs.
His own family, though, is mired in violence and drugs and splintered family relations. That Jackson himself didn’t do upwards of five years in a high security prison was unusual in his family.
Are they bad people or to be admired when they succeed given the rules of the game?
Whether or not you took up drug dealing in his neighbourhood, you had to take sides and create a survivable persona. You had to speak a certain way. You had to walk a certain way, and you had to pay homage to dangerous characters.
I grew up in a somewhat bullying environment, and some would say I learned these characteristics well. But how would my survival skills stack up in Jackson’s neighbourhood? Hmmm....
Talk about navigating the shoals of Scylla and Charybdis. Jackson learns the subtle art of selling dope as a high schooler and uses it to finance his education. But this lands him in jail and only fast talking saves him from losing his place in college.
Jackson is an athlete, as are many of his friends. But the bob and weave on a basketball court doesn’t prepare you for navigating your emotions, the anger you store up inside of you for the father who wasn’t there, for the other father figures who lied, who beat up your mom, who built a business as a pimp, and then tore it down with drug addiction.
Finding your feet in this community is harrowing to say the least and it seems Jackson struggles with it to this day.
I found this book terribly difficult to read. Much of the gangsta dialect simply defeats me.
But, what writing!… (mehr)