Yusef-Andre Wiley spent 22 years in prison before teaching himself through books and becoming a homeowner, entrepreneur, and nonprofit founder. He argues that hidden trauma from systemic exclusion and generational poverty drives self-destructive behavior in Black communities, and that reclaiming African and Moorish history through culturally relevant education can break the cycle.
Chapters
So what is the real trauma that stops us from getting ahead as a people, as a community? What is the real trauma? Is it waking up every day just knowing that you don't own anything? You don't control anything. When you look at the pictures on the wall, you don't see yourself. You don't see nothing that represents you as an African-American male. You think about slavery, you think about the civil rights movement, you think about all of the atrocities that's happened towards Black folks. Just the things that you see on the surface, that's just one aspect of it, but is there's other things that we're not always seeing, the psychological trauma and injustice that happens that prevents us from getting ahead. Our capacity to really just take it all in and really accept what has happened to us. This is why we find ourselves in the places that we find ourselves— prison, in the graves, drug dealing. Gangbanging, stealing, killing, fussing and fighting, because we don't know anything else. We don't know. We haven't been given anything else. We seen the struggle of our parents. We seen that they didn't really give us much. They worked a 9 to 5. We already seen them because they were busy working. They didn't own the factory down the street. They worked there. They didn't own the grocery store across town. They just went to shop there as consumers. So all our lives, this is all we know is, hey, you're a consumer. You're a slave. You're Black. You're not going to amount to anything. This is difficult for folks. Now, what I just described to you, everybody have not looked at it in the way that I've just showed it to you, but their behavior and their psychological imprint, that's there. That's not going away without some serious, serious training and soul searching and traveling on the spiritual path and discipline. It's so much, it requires so much. To get out of the state that we find ourselves in. Even myself going to prison as a young man, going in and out of juvenile halls as a youngster, and then finally landing in the prison system, serving 22 years in prison, finding myself in prison Finding myself in prison, not finding myself, finding myself, Yusef-Andre Wiley, through books, through studying, through access to studying without the bombardment of the street life. Me choosing not to just rot in jail, in prison, deciding to get up and saying, you know, I need to do something with my life. And I'm going to do something with my life. I'm not going to sit in prison the rest of my life, even though I've been given a life sentence, which so many of us received in the '80s and the '90s and way before that time. I'm just speaking about my generation who went to prison in the '80s. In the '90s, and all of us served at least 20 years. And when I say all of us, I'm talking about Black folk in my era that grew up with me. Why, in the background, uh, Iran and Oliver North, the Contra scandals, and the John Gotti's was in New York, and, and we were in South Central Los Angeles, shoot 'em up, bang bang, being Crips and Bloods and selling drugs and really not seeing anything else because we haven't been exposed to anything else, not in the communities that we come from. So what do we do? So what do we do at this point? Everybody needs to understand that the trauma that most of us come from, no one really understands it. Not even the people that has the trauma understand it. Fully. That's why they still out there. That's why they still finding a way to survive, even though to us is nothing but crime. We see the crime, we see the smash and grab, we see the person attacked at the bus stop, uh, stop. But what do we do? Because they have not went through the same process that some of us have to come out of that state of mind through knowledge, through education, through learning our history as Africans, not as slaves, but as giants, as master builders, as Moors, the Golden Age, right? We sparked the Renaissance in Europe, not the Europeans. It was the Africans, the Moors, that went into Spain and ruled for over 400 years. That history, when we learn that, when we learn that our true religion is Islam that Christianity was something given to us by the slave owner. That's just part of it. But then we truly learn where we come from, that we can be greatness, that we can be the generals and the leaders The master builders, the scientists, the psychologists, right? Mastering metaphysics, mathematics. The parents have to teach these lessons. They have to know these lessons because it's help— it's the same thing that's helped me. Yeah, that's what helps me today still, because now I'm a homeowner, I'm a businessman, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm a CEO, founder of a nonprofit organization that gives back to the very community that I destroyed or helped to destroy when I was in my youth. So now I'm able to give back after lessons learned. So how do we get that to the rest of the masses that still don't know and don't understand why they live the way they live, why they carjack, why they do high-speed chases, why they smash and grab? They have to understand where they come from and what they've been through as a people. Sometimes being in a controlled environment help us to get to that place. No, I'm not suggesting that they belong in jail or prison. I am suggesting that education be free, that education is made available in some environment that they're comfortable in so that they can learn at their own pace, so that we can meet them where they at. So that they too can come out of the state that they're in without having to be in the place that I've been. This is all I'm saying, and I'm just talking right now because I'm feeling a certain type of way, because we have to change the stereotypes of, look at these Black folks acting a fool out here in these streets, have to change. We have to erase that stereotype. We can do it. I've done it, so can you.
