I’ve wrestled back and forth on whether I should write this or not but I have to. I know me putting these words out into the universe could affect relationships I have with people around me and I’m alright with it. To kick things off here, I want to give you a little background of myself. My skin color is white, I am 40 years of age, and I was born and raised in San Diego, California by 2 loving parents who were born and raised in small farming towns in Southern Illinois. The neighborhood I grew up in was predominantly white but the schools I attended and the friendships I built were much more than just “white.” My wife is Mexican. Some of my closest friends are Lebanese, Filipino, Iraqi, Chinese, Portuguese, and African American. My friends also range from not really religious to hardcore Christians. The one core commonality all of my friends have is that they are good people to the core and that is what matters to me.
Now…… Seeing the video last week of that cop in Minnesota driving his knee into the neck of George Floyd for 8 minutes and 46 seconds was the worst thing I’ve ever seen. It’s 2020 and somehow this is still happening? It hurts me more than words can say. And believe me, I’ve been thinking about the right words to say for a long time. And that is why I listen to music so much. I have a world full of emotions bottled up inside of me but I’ve never been good and getting everything out.
For the past 3 months, I’ve woken up around 2am - 3am every single day with my heart thumping rapidly in my chest and a million thoughts racing through my mind when I should be sleeping. For those that don’t know, I have extreme anxiety. I’ve struggled with it a lot over the past year and those close to me know that I basically lost my mind last year. It was scary. I tried different kinds of prescription pills to see what could “fix” me. I paid/pay thousands of dollars to talk to mental health professionals to help coach me through my issues. A lot of people don’t understand mental health and therefore just write it off without trying to understand what people truly suffer through. I’m in a better place now but I will never forget where I was last year. I was in an emotional deep dark place that I hope to never return to. That’s why I write so much on this website. These words are my therapy and whether my audience is 1 person or 1,000 people, being able to express myself brings me some sense of calm.
As I mentioned, I woke up early this morning. As I write these words I’m looking at my clock and it reads 4:00 AM. You guys are all probably asleep but I’m trying to create this Mid90s brand as a means to support my family for the rest of our lives. My wife is pregnant and we have a little boy on the way so I have a little sense of urgency with everything.
I woke up this morning with Jackie Robinson on my mind. Yesterday I went to my mailbox and received my first Jackie Robinson baseball card from Topps Project 2020 and it means the world to me. For those sleeping under a rock, Jackie Robinson was the first African American baseball player that played in the MLB. Before Jackie suited up for the Brooklyn Dodgers, black people were not allowed to play major league baseball and therefore they played in the Negro Leagues. Just writing that makes me feel weird but that’s how times were back then. Jackie Robinson had to go through HELL being the first black man to play in the MLB but he did it all in stride. It was bigger than him. This baseball card is the most important baseball card in my collection because of the story behind Jackie Robinson and what he had to go through to break down barriers for those coming behind him.
Jackie Robinson Topps Project 2020 Baseball Card - Artwork by Blake Jamieson
This morning I didn’t just wake up with Jackie Robinson (and baseball cards!!) on my mind. I also had Killer Mike on my mind. For me, Killer Mike will always be a member of the Dungeon Family which was a groundbreaking crew from Atlanta that included OutKast and the Goodie Mob. Killer Mike is an amazing emcee who has always had great lyrics about societies’ many injustices. His album R.A.P Music with EL-P on the beats was an amazing album where Mike really found his lane. From that album, Killer Mike and EL-P formed the rap group, Run the Jewels who are now carrying the torch that Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine held before them. Run the Jewels have an album dropping this week and the timing of it all might be the best-timed album in music history. Really…. Killer Mike’s real name is Michael Render and he can’t just be labeled a rapper. When we all look back at this current moment of our lives, it’ll be Michael Render’s words from this speech below that most of us will remember. While Killer Mike came up in the rap game simply labeled as a rapper, you can’t just put him in that box anymore. Michael Render is a leader and an activist that is doing some amazing things and is poised to do a lot more in the future.
As I got out of bed I felt the urge to finally get some words out on how I felt about what was going on in the world right now. As I look at social media and my TV screen, I see riots, I see fires, I see vandalizing, and I see peaceful protests. All of this going down with a global pandemic lurking in the background. CRAZY TIMES FOR US!!!!
It’s honestly tough to know the right actions to take here. And we are being swayed a million ways by social media which really just gets my head spinning. While this white cop in Minnesota (he doesn’t deserve a name) drove his knee into George Floyd’s throat and murdered him, this story shouldn’t be all about “F*ck the Police.” If we as a nation would put these horrible human beings who are cops in jail for life this problem would go down drastically. But the systems put in place long ago don’t make it easy to put cops behind bars. The Daily just did a great podcast on this issue which I highly recommend listening to. I’ve embedded the podcast here below.
For every bad racist cop out there, there are SOOOO many good cops who are doing the right thing daily to provide for their families. I feel for those cops during these times. Being a policeman is such a tough job. I’m so happy that pictures and videos of policemen taking a kneel and empathizing with the protesters are starting to be seen more. You want change? This is change.
But the cops were never the problem. Some people take all of their rage out on cops and with the murder of George Floyd, I understand the rage. But if we can look at the big picture, I don’t think it’s the cops that are solely the problem.
I was lucky enough to be raised in San Diego, California. My childhood idol was my favorite baseball player Tony Gwynn who played for the San Diego Padres. Tony was a great man and luckily my parents raised us in a house where we didn’t use skin color as an identifier. Tony, to us, was a nice HUMAN BEING and that’s what our family valued most.. I got to be around Tony Gwynn a lot as a young kid by going to Padres Spring Training Games in Yuma, Arizona. Tony was a role model to me and my brother and he was never different to us. Tony’s smile and laugh and the way he interacted with his fans taught us so much about the right way to carry yourself. A big smile along with respect goes a long way in friendships and in business and while Tony is no longer here, his spirit lives in a lot of us from San Diego.
This picture below is from the Mid-80’s during a game of stick ball out in Yuma, AZ. Pictured here are me and my brother along with the kids of several of the San Diego Padres players. We stayed at the same hotel as the players so we would often be playing games of pickle, wiffle ball, and just getting crazy in the pool with everybody. We were innocent kids just out trying to have fun. We didn’t care about your skin color or where you were from. If you wanted to play some baseball we wanted to play with you.
Me and my big bro with the boys of Bip Roberts and Gary Templeton
Many kids in the United States weren’t raised with open minded parents like ours. Lots of kids back in the 80’s were raised by parents who watched the news nightly and saw the media portray black people as nothing but bad people who were addicted to drugs and in gangs. Stereotypes were reinforced through our TV sets and towns full of white people began to look at anybody of color in a different way solely on what they saw on the news. And it wasn’t just the media. We had our government and police forces that enforced these stereotypes as well. Our police forces would enter homes in “drug infested areas” with 14-foot steel military battering rams just to get inside. HOW CRAZY IS THAT?!?!?! These six-ton tanks were the answer to the war on drugs? They treated the so-called “ghettos” of California as if we were at war in our own country. These actions mandated by the government crippled communities and set them back in a major way.
Feb. 18, 1986: A Los Angeles Police Department battering ram sits next to a South Los Angeles home damaged during a police raid.
(Jack Gaunt / Los Angeles Times)
Rap artists and groups like Ice-T, Public Enemy, and NWA told the world about what was going on through their music. The stories I heard in my walkman about police brutality were sickening. How could the police be so mean to people? These were human beings and they weren’t being treated that way. I listened to the rap music I loved so much and took mental notes of it all. I had rage building up in me from the way people were being treated.
Fast forward a few years later and the viral video footage of Rodney King getting beaten with white cops with billy clubs was all over the news. I feel that it was at this moment when the world started to realize just how f*cked up things were in our country. Rodney King was beaten on March 3rd, 1991 and this was just 2 days after my 11th birthday. I was just a kid but I was aware of what was going on in the world through the rap music I listened to. And then, in 1982, an all-white jury (WTF?!) acquitted all of the cops in the Rodney King beating. This was a devastating blow to our moral sense of fairness within the American Justice System.
I will never forget where I was when the 1992 Los Angeles Riots broke out. My mom had picked me up from an video game arcade in Clairemont where I was probably getting down on some Street Fighter 2 and some NBA Jams. When I got in the car, my mom had a worried look on her face and told me what was going on right up the 5 freeway in Los Angeles. When I got home and watched the news with my parents, I saw the LA Riots unfolding right before my eyes.
Residents of LA were so enraged with the court proceedings (all acquitted?!) that they took it out on the city that they lived in. It was the Reginald Denny footage was what stuck with me most. Reginald Denny was a white 18-wheeler truck driver who took a shortcut off of the Santa Monica freeway that afternoon while he worked for his employer, Transit Mixed Concrete. He didn’t know about what was going on out on these streets until his life came to a screeching halt on the corner of Florence and Normandie in South Central Los Angeles that day. Reginald got pulled out of his truck and proceeded to get stomped and beaten to a bloody pulp by 4 guys with no officers in site. That footage has played in my head for close to 30 years now. How could I forget what I had seen
So just think… If those cops who beat Rodney King would have gone to jail do you think any of this would have happened? The injustice of it all made people in LA go crazy and I totally understood why. Even as a young white 12 year old kid down in San Diego I empathized with them…. I understood why they were so mad.
Later on in 1992, I carried this rage with me and listened to music with more of a purpose in my cheap foam headphones. Dr. Dre dropped The Chronic album late in 1992 and it became the most important rap album in the genre’s history. At that time, I was still that same white kid who grew up in white middle class neighborhood but I was now officially shook from the things I had seen before my eyes and the lyrics I had heard from the rap music that I loved. I felt the pain in my favorite rapper’s lyrics. I felt so bad for the way that they were treated but what could I really do as a 12 year old other than grab my headphones and nod my head to the beat and hang on every word? Snoop Dogg was only a few years older than me when The Chronic came out and while he was black and I was white, I related to Snoop. The pain he had in his words were something that I could feel all the way to the core of my being. If he was rapping out being in jail I was right there with him.
How could anybody have hope when all of this bullsh*t was going down.
As I mentioned earlier, the cops were never the problem in all of this. The problem was bigger than that. One of the biggest pieces in all of this is the systems in place that don’t but sh*tty racist cops behind bars. The other part of this is that these racist cops had racist parents and grand parents. It’s a vicious cycle of racism that is very hard to break. Even more so if you grow up in certain parts of the Midwest and the South when you’re surrounded by nothing but white people.
I’m a 40 year old white guy who is married to a Mexican-American. When I go shopping with my wife, sales people often won’t even look at her in the eyes and even say hello because she is Mexican. But when they see me their tone changes. I live in California so these racial undertones aren’t just in the Midwest and the South. They surround us. It’s not just that either… My closest homies are Lebanese and if there are crazy things going down in the Middle East they will quickly pivot and tell people they are Italian just so they don’t get racist looks. It’s sad man. They are just as American as I am. We all came from somewhere but many don’t remember this. It’s f*cked up!
As a kid, while my parents worked, I was looked after by an Iranian babysitter who came from a different background than me. My friends were Filipino… My friends were Mexican…. My friends were Lebanese… My friends were Japanese… My friends were Korean… My friends were Black…. Again, this didn’t matter because I was raised not to look at people this way but I have to tell you think to paint you a picture of my upbringing.
But, one thing we should all keep in mind is this…………… DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY PEOPLE WERE RAISED DIFFERENTLY THAN US? This lies the problem. If you’re on my site and you made it this far you are not the problem. The problem isn’t you and me. The problem starts with families who have had hate instilled in their bloodlines for centuries. This cycle is tough to break and it starts with parents raising their kids right. If the parents were raised by racist parents then this is their family foundation. You also add in the fact that some people don’t have proper education and do not have any experiences outside of their city and state and they are simply sheltered from the rest of the world. Then their kids are raised with these same racial stereotypes we’re trying so hard to break. Something has to change. I love the peaceful protests but don’t think the looting and rioting is the right way to see change. But a lot of these people have pent up anger that stems back longer than we’ve been alive. How can I judge when I haven’t walked in their shoes? The George Floyd murder was the tipping point of racial injustice and now SOMETHING has to be done.
Do you know somebody who is racist? Can you have a good conversation with them without it getting violent? It’s these types of interactions that can help change things. It’s 1-on-1 interactions where we can start to see change. And it’s super tough! I know! But if we don’t change who we are as a country I fear for our future. I fear for our children growing up the same way that I did. I don’t want my baby boy to grow up in a world full of hate. And if these words can help us take a step in the right direction I will keep writing. I will keep talking… I will do all that I can do. And maybe this will push you to do seek out what you can do. And I don’t even know the right thing to do! If my message is all wrong, let me know! Let’s have a discussion. Let’s grow as human beings.
This is solely my opinion and we don’t have to agree on everything. But can’t we all just get along?! Can’t we agree that the world isn’t right and look to make a change? If we can make this change our country will be stronger than ever. I’m sadly a little bit doubtful that this can happen but I will remain optimistic. So please… Have good conversations with others around you. Spread positivity where you can. Let’s make this country/world a better place.
When I’m up super early in the mornings I am not just writing here on this blog. I am also listening to music and making playlists on Spotify. This playlist below started with me listening to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” but then spun off to other songs that I felt fit this vibe. Give it a whirl if you’re looking for some good music.
Sam Cooke - A Change Is Gonna Come