Trump And The Death Penalty For Yusef Salam
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Tomorrow the book Punching The Air (hitting the air) of Ibi Zoloboi and Yusef Salam will go on sale as part of Salam’s testimony, an imprisoned teenager in 1989 who was unjustly condemned after a fight in Central Park Park. The book written in verse is a personal exercise and tells the author’s struggle, with 15 years, against racism. A book that has come out at the right time, since, at that time, the current president, Donald Trump, had asked to make the death penalty for the five African -American boys in history.
Incarcerated by error for group violation, which led Trump to ask for the death penalty in the announcements of the main newspapers, Salam has poured his experiences into a novel about Esperanza, Justice and Race.
‘If your ad had full effect, we would have been hanging from the trees in Central Park," says Salam with total naturalness. ‘People wanted our blood to run through the streets’.
You have probably seen the announcement in question: it’s infamous. In 1989, a Blanco investment banker was raped and given dead in Central Park. Five African -American teenagers, including Salam, 15, were accused of their violation. Two weeks after the attack, before none of the children faced a trial, Trump published a full page advertisement in several New York newspapers asking for the death penalty. His incendiary ruse is attributed to having influenced public opinion and contributing to the five Central Park, now known as the five exemptions, went to jail for something they did not do.
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The history of the boys was told last year in Netflix’s drama winner of an Emmy When they see us (they see us), directed by Ava Duvernay.
Salam spent almost seven years behind bars;His youth took him. However, there is no bitterness in the thin, soft voice and 46 -year -old man with whom I am talking: you can get better out of jail, without bitterness, he likes to say it frequently. Salam obtained a university degree in prison and, when he left, he dedicated his life to educating others about what he calls the ‘injustice criminal system’. He has 10 children ("It is a mixed family"), a successful career as a public speaker, a history of political reforms and a prize for the trajectory of Barack Obama. Now he and the Haitian-American author Ibi Zoboi, finalist of the National Book Prize, have been associated in a book for young adults, partially inspired by her experience. Punching The Air, a verse novel, explores institutional racism and the duct of the school to prison through the eyes of Amal Shahid, a 16 -year -old black Muslim child who is unfairly imprisoned after a fight in a parkwill leave a white child in a coma.
Punching The Air has been in process for a long time. Salam met Zoboi in 1999;Both were taking classes at the Hunter College in Manhattan. Salam had been out of prison for two years and was dealing with how to return to the world, so it coincided with IBI: ‘I would tell everyone what happened to me and how Trump hastened to judge us’.
Zoboi spoke with Salam extensively;She was the editor of the University newspaper and wanted to inform about how Trump had intervened in her conviction. "To this day, that was the longest conversation I have had about Trump," he says with a smile without grace. ‘I refuse to participate now’.
Zoboi did not end up writing that story. Salam still distrusted the media;He still fears that people hurry to judge him. "Part of the hesitation in telling my story in its entirety at that time was the fear of who would vilipendiar," he explains. Salam could have been out of jail, but he was still officially labeled as a sexual offender;He would not be totally exonerated until 2002, when a prisoner named Matías Reyes confessed the rape of Central Park. “My mother had this experience in which I was returning home of work at Parsons University when the case was happening;She is a teacher there, teaching fashion. Walk to the train station and pass a police car with the megaphones at full volume: ‘It’s her! That is the mother of that dog Yusef Salam. So I’m knowing things like this.
Two decades later, Zoboi and Salaam re -connected at a literary festival, where Salaam was promoting a self-edited poems book. Zoboi proposed the idea of telling his story in the form of a young man and so Punching The Air was born. The decision to tell its truth through fiction was not "a desire to tell it from a safe space," says Salam, but to universalize it. “The system wants you to think that what happened to me was an anomaly. A mistake. But I’m not the only one, there are many others. We wanted to tell the story of how this is not an anomaly. We wanted to tell ‘the history of the two Americas’;what it is like to live in a world in which it is possible that I do not get home due to racism and systemic oppression ‘.
While punching the air is not an autobiography, Amal is largely based on Salam. Zoboi and Salaam spent hours talking and Zoboi turned those conversations into poetry. "We needed to capture this child’s raw emotion," Zoboi explains about the decision to use free verse. “Sometimes with prose you get confused with all the other details that do not matter at that time. But when it reduces language to make a list of poems or placed words in a certain way to convey a certain mood, it is much more powerful. Poetry reaches the heart of the matter and we needed to capture the heart of this boy. Because it’s not just a story about race or a crime. It is, above all, a story about a human being;About a child, about a child ‘.
It is also a story about who becomes a child;that makes mistakes. Research shows that African -American students have almost four times more likely to be suspended from school than their white counterparts for exactly the same behavior. "What we want readers to learn from the book is that some people come out with their and others are severely punished for those mistakes," says Zoboi.
Amal is a talented artist who enters a good school, but there is no margin of error for a child like him: ‘I think it should have been called / Zero Tolerance Academy, or / / Autonomous School No Second Chances / or Prison Prep‘. His white art teacher, Miss Rinaldi, does not see the real Amal, only the stereotype of a angry black child. "I failed the class / she failed me," says Amal. Miss Rinaldi serves as a witness for Amal in his judgment and is his wrong characterization of him that ends up sending him to prison. She is, Zoboi explains, what today’s young people call a ‘karen’.
There will be many ladies Rinaldis reading this book, says Zoboi. “Librarians and teachers: those industries are dominated by white women. And I find that ironic given the crime that Yusef was accused of committing. I don’t think Yusef could have imagined, back in 1999, that it would be like, you know what? We are going to write a book and many white women will read it. And that guy who was responsible for condemning you? Will be president.
Salam was condemned before the hashtags existed, before viral videos shed light on police brutality. "The worst part of social networks is that we expected that, when telling our stories, oppression stopped," says Salam. But it’s not like that. ‘Social networks have allowed us to be more aware, but it does not seem that consciousness alone makes something change,” adds Zoboi. “It seems that the more awareness we have, the more setback there is. It seems that white supremacists have doubled due to our conscience ‘.
This does not mean that we should lose hope. Amal means hope in Arabic. And while anger and frustration boil over low heat through "punching the air", ultimately, it is a hopeful book. If there is something that Salam wants readers to get out of history is “never lose hope in themselves. Understand that you were born free and that you were born importing for the world ‘. But what about Salam himself? As the 2020 elections are coming and the possibility of another four years of Trump, there is Esperanza Salam? Is silent for a moment, thoughtful. ‘My experience has taught me to prepare for the worst,’ he says, ‘but to wait for the best’.
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