Who Not Like Us

“They run out of characters, had to bring back up Kap again. Buddy took a check, I ain’t even mad at him, but along with that check you have to sign a non-disparagement. I’m the one they can’t control.”

Jay-Z

Buddy took a check.

Thought I was done with this one. I had said my piece about the battle and the war, about who eats when we bleed, and I had closed my laptop and gone to bed.

Then Jay-Z had to stand up on a stage and remind me why I was typing this.

Shawn Carter — one of the great ones, a poet who came up out of Marcy houses with nothing but the word — stood in Yankee Stadium at his own thirty-year celebration and freestyled at the people criticizing him.

And in the middle of it he called out Colin Kaepernick.

A billionaire, on a stage he owns, telling a man the league blackballed that he sold his silence.

Except it ain’t even true.

The reporting says Kaepernick signed no such agreement — he is still out here posting, still counting the days no team will call him.

He didn’t sell out. And the man scolding him for taking the league’s money is the same man whose company produces the league’s biggest night, the Super Bowl halftime show, year after year.

“I’m the one they can’t control,” he said — from inside the house they built.

I am not writing to dunk on Jay-Z. I love the man’s catalog.

That is exactly why this hurts so many of us.

I have tried to do my part in trying to recognize who not like us, and I did not expect him to walk out on a stage and answer to the name himself.

Let me take you back to where this starts.

A beat.

I knew the difference between a battle and a war.

A battle ends with dapping and a better verse. The loser goes home sharper. Nobody dies. I witnessed that. I loved that.

Not so much anymore.

Somewhere in the last few years it stopped being a game I was watching and started being a thing I was being fed. And I noticed who was setting the table.

I will be honest about what I love because I am about to grieve it. It is powerful and the most listened-to form of music on the planet.

The art is real.

Black people made a whole way of speaking out of not being allowed to speak. We took the language they gave us to obey in and we bent it until it could carry everything — the hurt, the joke, the warning, the praise.

The dozens on the porch. The signifying that said one thing to your face and another to the church. The toast, the boast, the rhyme that could turn a hard day into something you could stand inside.

And the music. The music is our thang.

I’d be on the stoop at my boy Sandy’s house with Randy and Clint. Sandy was already a preacher before anybody licensed him to be one. The Black Baptist churches around us had him in their pulpits back when he was 12, passing him from one to the next, letting a boy preach because the gift was that plain on him. Randy was the ladies’ man, had a way about him. Clint was the athlete, though the truth is we all played something. And on that stoop, none of that mattered, because when we started to harmonize, we were one sound. The preacher, the lover, the baller and me, the scholar — four boys and one chord.

This was before there was a Boyz II Men, before anybody was going to pay us, before we had a word for what we were doing. We were creating. We were sampling before it was called sampling, pulling a line off a record and a riff off the radio and a sound out of the air and making it ours. Nobody taught us. Nobody had to. It was in us and it came out on the stoop because the stoop was what we had.

The battle comes out of the same place. Two people, a crowd, the wit going back and forth like a blade that doesn’t break the skin. I came up on it. I loved anyone who could take you apart with a sentence and leave you laughing while he did it.

That is genius. That is ours. We made it out of what we had: each other and the word. The young man in Yankee Stadium came up out of the same thing. Nobody rhymed his way out of Brooklyn more powerfully.

So when the crowd leans in and the line drops and the whole place says it back…

I know that feeling in my body. I have felt the floor shake. I am not standing outside shaking my head. I am in the room. The chant is satisfying because it is. It feels like home.

A battle ends with a better verse. The loser goes home and writes something sharper and comes back and takes you apart next time, and the whole thing makes both of you better. Nobody bleeds. That is the blade that doesn’t break the skin.

The other thing ends in the ground.

I have lived long enough to watch it end in the ground more than once. Two of the most gifted poets my people ever produced, gone before thirty, on opposite coasts, over a thing that started as words.

Somewhere a mother washed and dressed a body she had carried. Somewhere a mother sat in a front pew and listened to a room full of people who had clapped for her son say his name like it was a song.

She did not bury a verse.

She buried a boy.

So I started watching who eats.

A love song does well. A diss track does better. And a funeral — a funeral does best of all. When the two poets went in the ground the records had never sold like that. The catalog became a vault. Grief moved units that joy never could.

I used to wonder if somebody in an office somewhere put them up to it, lit the fuse and stood back. Maybe. I wasn’t in the room. But the longer I look the more I think nobody needed to. The thing was already built to pay this way. The market does not have to conspire to reward fratricide. It just has to count the money and let us read the numbers and learn what gets us heard.

So I keep my wondering as a wondering. I cannot prove a hand on the fuse. But I can read a ledger. And the ledger says the same thing every time: when we turn on each other, somebody who is not us has a very good quarter.

And here is the part that is hardest to say, because it is about me too.

We were raised on this. Even more so, my kids. Not just the music — the whole idea underneath it. The idea that the answer to a wound is to destroy the one who wounded you. The idea that watching is a pleasure. We learned it from the cartoons up, the same story over and over, the hero who wins by being the last one standing.

Walter Wink, a theologian who has influenced me for some thirty years, called it the myth of redemptive violence — the ancient lie that blood sets things right, that peace comes through domination, that somebody has to be crushed before the world can be healed. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. It is in the cartoons, the westerns, the war movies, the superhero stories, the politics, the policing, the playground, the pulpit when the pulpit forgets Jesus. And it is in us too, because we were catechized by the same empire that wounded us.

But here is the thing the myth can’t explain. The reverence never left us.

I had a friend on staff at West Angeles, the big Church of God in Christ (where I was an occasional guest speaker until I wasn’t) out in Los Angeles. He told me they buried a few young men in those years — Crips, Bloods, boys who died in the thing. The church took the funerals. They had to bring on extra security, because you do not put that many sets in one room and assume peace. And he told me that before the services one of the leaders would walk the sanctuary, go down the aisles to the young men, and tell them: take ya lid off.

And they would. They took their hats off in the house of God.

Sit with that. A boy who would not back down from another boy on the street — who carried, who was ready to die over a corner — and a man he respected says uncover your head, you are in the Lord’s house, and the hat comes off.

The honor was still in him. The reverence was still in him. The same boy who would kill over a corner will bow in a sanctuary.

Both live in him.

So let me ask it the right way now.

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Not the man on the other corner. He came up where you came up. He learned to rhyme so the fear would have somewhere to go. He buries his people in the same ground. He drinks the same water and prays to get out from under the same weight. Look at him hard. He exactly like us.

Not the man who knelt, either. Colin Kaepernick did the bravest thing a man in his position can do — he took the fire that was given him and he pointed it up. He aimed it at the police, at the flag they wrap around the killing, and it cost him his whole career. He never signed his silence. He is still out here saying it. He is exactly like us.

The one who is not like us never has to kneel.

He does not have to rhyme. He does not have to bleed. He does not have to stand under the lights with his mother’s prayers in his chest and his neighborhood on his back. He owns the lights. He owns the room the lights hang in. He owns the platform that counts the plays, the label that takes the publishing, the company that buys the catalog, the fund behind the company, and now the halftime show itself — the biggest stage in the country, handed to a Black-owned company so the league could say it made peace with us while the one man who asked for peace still can’t get a call back.

He has never been followed through a store. His son’s name has never been a hashtag. When the water in the city runs low it is not his tap that goes dry — he had it trucked in, filtered, bottled, branded, and sold back to the people who needed it first. He watches the beef the way you watch a nature show. Two of something beautiful, tearing at each other, and him on the couch. It does not cost him one thing.

Not because he is white, though often he is. Not because he is rich, though always he is. But because he can profit from our wounds without ever having to call them wounds.

And here is the harder truth, the one that has kept me up since that freestyle. Sometimes the man on the couch used to be on the stoop.

Sometimes he stood under the lights with his mother’s prayers in his chest. Sometimes he came up out of the projects with nothing but the word, and he was one of us, he was the best of us — and then one day he bought the building, and the building bought him back. It does not take white skin to sit on that couch. It takes a check big enough to make you forget the corner you came from, and a stage big enough to make you defend the people who own it, philanthropy be damned when it sells our community.

That is what breaks my heart about Friday night. The man in Yankee Stadium was not born on the couch. He built himself up to it, brick by brick, bar by bar. There was a time he wore Kaepernick’s number on his own back on national television, back when standing with that man cost you something. There was a time he was the one who aimed it up.

And now he stands on the platform, producing the league’s biggest night, and aims the four words down — at the one brother who knelt when kneeling took everything, who never took the couch, who is still standing outside the house asking to be let back in. “I’m the one they can’t control,” he says. But the man who cannot be controlled does not need to produce their show. And he does not spend his verse scolding the man who lost everything for telling the truth.

So when a man who once stood beside Kaepernick tells that same brother he took a check and should be grateful, I do not clap. I grieve. Because the diss is not aimed up anymore. It is aimed at the corner. And somewhere an office reads the numbers and has another very good quarter.

He never has to say a word against us, because we are saying it for him. We point the four words at each other and the aim is so satisfying we never lift our eyes to see who set the targets. The genius that could read the building — that could count the take and name the fund and call the spring by its name — gets spent reading each other instead. The fire that was given to us to see in the dark gets turned around and used to burn the house down from the inside, and the man on the couch sells tickets to the blaze.

I am not grieving the rhyme. The rhyme is holy. I am grieving where it gets aimed.

So I am asking it one more time, and this time I am not waiting for an answer, because I think we already know.

I want it aimed at the system, like it was before. I want it aimed at the police, like Kaepernick aimed it (like rappers once did). I want the genius that can take a man apart with a sentence to take apart the lie instead.

I want the four boys on the stoop, the preacher and the lover and the ballplayer and me, one chord, making something out of nothing, with no plan to sell it and no need to. I want the line drawn where it belongs.

Not the man on the other corner.

Not the brother in the ground.

Not the man who knelt.

Not us.

Too many funerals. I am not asking the young to stop being who they are. The fire is right. The gift is real. I am only praying it gets pointed up — at the thing that is actually killing us — before another mother has to sit in a front pew and listen to a room sing her son’s name.

We know. We have always known.

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“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this present darkness.” (Ephesians 6:2)