My Brother Moochie: Regaining Dignity in the Face of Crime, Poverty, and Racism

Description: My Brother Moochie by IssacJ. Bailey A rare first-person account of what one family endured when the eldest brother killed a man and was sentenced to life in prison. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description A rare first-person account that combines a journalists skilled reporting with the raw emotion of a younger brothers heartfelt testimony of what his family endured for decades after his eldest brother killed a man and was sentenced to life in prison.At the age of nine, Issac J. Bailey saw his hero, his eldest brother, taken away in handcuffs, not to return from prison for thirty-two years. Bailey tells the story of their relationship and of his experience living in a family suffering guilt and shame. Drawing on sociological research as well as his expertise as a journalist, he seeks to answer the crucial question of why Moochie and many other young black men--including half of the ten boys in his own family--end up in the criminal justice system. What role did poverty, race, and faith play? What effect did living in the South, in the Bible Belt, have? And why is their experience understood as an acceptable trope for black men, while white people who commit crimes are never seen in this generalized way?My Brother Moochie provides a wide-ranging yet intensely intimate view of crime and incarceration in the United States, and the devastating effects on the incarcerated, their loved ones, their victims, and society as a whole. Author Biography Issac J. Bailey was born in St. Stephen, South Carolina, and holds a degree in psychology from Davidson College in North Carolina. Having trained at the prestigious Poynter Institute for journalists in St. Petersburg, Florida, he has been a professional journalist for twenty years. He has taught applied ethics at Coastal Carolina University and, as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, has taught journalism at Harvard Summer School. Bailey has won numerous national, state, and local awards for his writings. He currently lives in Myrtle Beach with his wife and children. Review "With a keen understanding of systemic racism…My Brother Moochie delves into a rarely explored side of the criminal justice system: the families of the perpetrators…powerful." —New York Times Book Review "Baileys memoir is a triumph, a painful indictment of American inhumanity woven with threads of grace and love…an extraordinary book about crime, punishment, redemption, and the empowerment that can spring from adversity…nuanced, original, and remarkably clear-sighted." —The Guardian"An elegant memoir that speaks to the inequities of the criminal justice system and the damage done to family and community when loved ones are locked away…Bailey tells his story with a raw honesty [and] boldly examines the fault lines etched so sharply in our current cultural landscape." —USA Today"[A] beautifully written book. Its author will inevitably be compared with Ta-Nehisi Coates, recently hailed as the essential voice of black America. But Mr. Baileys writing has much more concrete detail on lives lived one misjudgment away from prison." —The Economist"A raw exploration of [Baileys] relationship to his brother and incarceration writ large, as well as an analysis of the factors that entrap young black men in the South in the criminal justice system." —Electric Literature, A Reading List for Understanding the Prison Industrial Complex"Deeply moving and powerfully written…[Baileys] unflinching account of his brothers suffering is paired with reflections on community, race relations, and the impacts of poverty, crime, and shame." —Booklist (starred review)"Bailey refuses to make things easy for either his readers or himself; he avoids pat analysis of the scourge of racism and never settles for simple answers…Theres a catharsis for all by the end but no smooth path or easy arrival." —Kirkus Reviews "Eye-opening…My Brother Moochie represents a much larger story about the deeply rooted effects of systematic racism, the Jim Crow South and how race, poverty, violence, crime, opportunity and drug abuse intersect." —Ebony"Bailey has a relatable, multifaceted story to tell…compelling." —Minneapolis Star Tribune "Searing honesty—this is what most strikes me about Issac Baileys brave narrative. In paying tribute to fierce, at times despairing filial and familial love, he holds a mirror to the reader, daring any of us to deny the most self-evident of truths: human beings are deeply flawed and all of us are more than the worst thing weve ever done." —Carol E. Quillen, President, Davidson College "Issac Baileys book is one part call to action and another part mirror. A powerful reminder that we are given our skin and genetic fingerprint by nothing short of a lottery, but how we stand in it is often a product of how the world sees or doesnt see us. My Brother Moochie should be on the desk of every schoolteacher, student, and policymaker in this country." —Jennifer Thompson, Founder/President of Healing Justice and coauthor of Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption "In page-turning prose, Bailey explores the self-hatred engendered in him, his immediate family, and his broader communities, by the intersecting oppressions of racism, poverty, violence, and physical disability. But this is also a story of redemption. My Brother Moochie is, in fact, two eloquently interwoven coming-of-age stories: the authors own story of growing up, silenced by a debilitating stutter but free to roam the streets of his neighborhood, and ultimately his country; and Moochies story of growing up, loudly speaking his truth, but only from within the cinderblock confinement of prison walls. The result is a read simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming." —Keramet Reiter, author of 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement Promotional A rare first-person account that combines a journalists skilled reporting with the raw emotion of a younger brothers heartfelt testimony of what his family endured for decades after his eldest brother killed a man and was sentenced to life in prison. Review Quote "With a keen understanding of systemic racism... My Brother Moochie delves into a rarely explored side of the criminal justice system: the families of the perpetrators...powerful." -- New York Times Book Review "Baileys memoir is a triumph, a painful indictment of American inhumanity woven with threads of grace and love...an extraordinary book about crime, punishment, redemption, and the empowerment that can spring from adversity...nuanced, original, and remarkably clear-sighted." -- The Guardian "An elegant memoir that speaks to the inequities of the criminal justice system and the damage done to family and community when loved ones are locked away...Bailey tells his story with a raw honesty [and] boldly examines the fault lines etched so sharply in our current cultural landscape." -- USA Today "[A] beautifully written book. Its author will inevitably be compared with Ta-Nehisi Coates, recently hailed as the essential voice of black America. But Mr. Baileys writing has much more concrete detail on lives lived one misjudgment away from prison." -- The Economist "A raw exploration of [Baileys] relationship to his brother and incarceration writ large, as well as an analysis of the factors that entrap young black men in the South in the criminal justice system." -- Electric Literature , A Reading List for Understanding the Prison Industrial Complex "Deeply moving and powerfully written...[Baileys] unflinching account of his brothers suffering is paired with reflections on community, race relations, and the impacts of poverty, crime, and shame." -- Booklist (starred review) "Bailey refuses to make things easy for either his readers or himself; he avoids pat analysis of the scourge of racism and never settles for simple answers...Theres a catharsis for all by the end but no smooth path or easy arrival." --Kirkus Reviews "Eye-opening... My Brother Moochie represents a much larger story about the deeply rooted effects of systematic racism, the Jim Crow South and how race, poverty, violence, crime, opportunity and drug abuse intersect." --Ebony "Bailey has a relatable, multifaceted story to tell...compelling." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune "Searing honesty--this is what most strikes me about Issac Baileys brave narrative. In paying tribute to fierce, at times despairing filial and familial love, he holds a mirror to the reader, daring any of us to deny the most self-evident of truths: human beings are deeply flawed and all of us are more than the worst thing weve ever done." -- Carol E. Quillen, President, Davidson College "Issac Baileys book is one part call to action and another part mirror. A powerful reminder that we are given our skin and genetic fingerprint by nothing short of a lottery, but how we stand in it is often a product of how the world sees or doesnt see us. My Brother Moochie should be on the desk of every schoolteacher, student, and policymaker in this country." -- Jennifer Thompson, Founder/President of Healing Justice and coauthor of Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption "In page-turning prose, Bailey explores the self-hatred engendered in him, his immediate family, and his broader communities, by the intersecting oppressions of racism, poverty, violence, and physical disability. But this is also a story of redemption. My Brother Moochie is, in fact, two eloquently interwoven coming-of-age stories: the authors own story of growing up, silenced by a debilitating stutter but free to roam the streets of his neighborhood, and ultimately his country; and Moochies story of growing up, loudly speaking his truth, but only from within the cinderblock confinement of prison walls. The result is a read simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming." --Keramet Reiter, author of 23/7: Pelican Bay Prison and the Rise of Long-Term Solitary Confinement Promotional "Headline" A rare first-person account that combines a journalists skilled reporting with the raw emotion of a younger brothers heartfelt testimony of what his family endured for decades after his eldest brother killed a man and was sentenced to life in prison. Excerpt from Book MONSTERS I held my thirteen-year-old sons chin between the index finger and thumb of my right hand, squeezing and lifting it ever so slightly to make sure our eyes locked. Our faces were so close Im sure he could smell my breath, feel the spittle from my mouth. "I cant tell you how angry I am," I told him in a barely audible voice. If I yelled, I knew Id lose control. He was nearly my height and athletic, a nationally ranked high jumper and middle-distance sprinter. I was still built like the football player I had been a couple of decades earlier. I wanted him to feel that physical difference like he never had. "I cant tell you how angry I am right now," I repeated. The slightest tear began welling up in the corner of Kyles right eye. I let his chin go and left him alone in his bedroom, though, sadly, not because of what I had almost done, but because I wanted to do something more to cause real tears, because I wanted to ignore that my wife, Tracy, told me hitting him would be wrong, and ineffective, because I wanted to literally shake maturity right into him--because I so desperately wanted to save him from . . . Im not even quite sure what. All I had caught him doing was being a teenager, being less than honest with me one too many times, letting his grades slip a little, arming himself with a more defiant attitude as if to announce his newly discovered manhood to the world. Still, hes well on his way to becoming a better man than Ill ever be. And yet, my instinct was to crush his soul to save his black body from some undetermined future harm that may never materialize. He was born in 2001, the year researchers said we crossed a Rubicon, when fully a third of young black men Kyles age were projected to end up behind bars if we didnt make significant changes in the way we treat them, and how they treat themselves. It wasnt that statistic that scared me, though. It was what I had long known, and why when Tracy and I decided to have kids, I initially wanted a girl. I was afraid of black boys. The image of them was everything I didnt want to be. The shameful truth is that a not insignificant part of my mind had so thoroughly absorbed the ugly myths about black boys, I seriously wondered if violent behavior was the result of an immutable genetic reality unique to those born black and male like me. I was a black boy who grew up with eight black brothers, and a nephew raised like a brother, along with two black sisters. While researchers might turn out to be right, and a full third of young black men might end up in jail or prison at some point in their lives, its already been worse for us. Half of the black boys in my immediate family ended up behind bars. I spent much of my early parenting years trying to deny that the shame of that reality had any effect on my treatment of my only son. I was lying to myself. I knew it almost instantly when I walked out of Kyles room and downstairs and remembered the years-long debate within my family about why some of us went astray. Half of my family seems convinced our disparate outcomes resulted from my mothers decision to not beat the youngest, those who got into the most trouble, the way she had beaten the rest of us. That belief is rooted in how black people were treated as slaves in the American South and the Bible most black people--nearly 80 percent of black Americans self-identify as Christian, more than any other group in a nation in which religious identity is undergoing a transformation--read and swear by. I cant count the number of times I heard the words "black people!" in exasperation at the sight of another black boy who dropped out of school or a black man milling around at the park with a tall can of Schlitz Malt Liquor in a brown paper bag. They werent individuals who had made wrecks of their lives or succumbed to overwhelming challenges; they were representations of the black race. Thats the way many of us spoke about struggling black men. Even in the black churches I attended, Fathers Day was used more often as a scolding for deadbeat dads than a celebration of fathers working twelve-hour shifts in a nearby factory to keep the lights on. I never said such things out loud. But it doesnt mean I didnt grow up believing them, too. Deep into adulthood, I thought I was one of the progressive ones--until I almost beat my son for no good reason. About a week after the encounter with Kyle, a cop in a South Carolina high school made national news for assaulting a black teenage girl who had refused to put away her cell phone. He threw her around as though tossing trash in a Dumpster. I was horrified and outraged and argued with anyone who tried to deflect attention from what that officer did. "No, she was not the problem, it was the adults," I said loudly. "She did what teenagers since the Stone Age have done, get under the skin of adults." What I didnt say is that too many black parents treat their kids the way that cop treated that teenage girl, with a kind of desperate hatred born of a warped sense of love. Im not just referring to extreme corporal punishment, the kind on display during the Baltimore riots when a black mom was deemed heroic for being caught on TV wailing on her wayward son. Its also because despite our loud protestations, many of us dont think weve been fully accepted in this still largely white-dominated society. Unruly, nappy-headed kids in our midst make us think we never will. Thats why so many of us are more comfortable when our kids fit, rather than reinvent, the mold. We are willing to beat our children to near death if thats what it takes to get to a successful adulthood. When they step out of line, we first wonder if we spared the rod too much, not if we didnt give enough hugs. We are willing to call them the ugliest names, label them as thugs, see them as monsters, likely out of an effort to prove to others that, yes, we, too, believe in personal responsibility; we, too, can do right and be right and worthy of their respect. Before that awful day with my son, heres what I had done to prove I was one of the proverbial good black people: I married Tracy Swinton. We took precautions to not have kids before we were ready. We bought a house, then planned to bring kids into our world. We decided we wouldnt be working full-time jobs simultaneously because we wanted a lead parent home with our children. That decision caused us financial stress--it got so bad we had to dig out coins from between the couch cushions to buy gasoline--but we thought it was the right thing to do. We worked hard to advance in our careers, me as a journalist, Tracy as an educator and consultant who earned a doctorate in education and founded a nonprofit literacy program to help at-risk kids. We joined a church, did community work, kept our kids in the presence of good influences. We volunteered in the schools and showed up for performances and parent-teacher conferences. We monitored their homework and responded every time a teacher had a report, good or bad. We cheered at their sporting events, provided incentives to keep them inspired, implemented various forms of discipline--took away privileges, instituted earlier bedtimes, unleashed a plastic ruler on an open palm--and hugged them and told them we loved them, that we expected great things from them because they could accomplish just about anything they wanted. And despite all of that, I was standing in my sons room believing hurting him was the way to save him from dangers that had yet to manifest. I wasnt only angry. I was hurt, disappointed. Terrified. All parents are afraid for their children. My fear was deeper, because no matter how much Ive tried to leave it behind, the stereotypical image of the violent black boy who deserves to have been shot down in the street by a cop or forced to rot away in solitary confinement never leaves me. It doesnt matter that Ive studied the issue for the past two decades and can cite study after study about the myth of such an image, about how implicit and overt bias continue fueling it, about how black boys, and black girls, start off at a disadvantage because of the historical realities that accompany them and their skin wherever they go. Im scared for Kyle in a way many black parents are scared for their kids. I suspect, though, that white parents dont wonder about the pathology of their race no matter how many times white boys shoot up elementary schools or movie theaters. Many black parents, like most black people Ive ever known, grimace every time a mug shot of a black boy shows up on the TV news or in the local paper, because they know the image of yet another black boy doing something awful suggests something awful about them. We arent just parenting and suffering the silent second-guessing that affects everyone who has ever tried to raise a teenager. We are still trying to prove our worth. And because we dont realize thats a large portion of our motivation, our children take it on the chin. We lament that society doesnt allow them to just be kids, to work their way through the stupid things we all did as kids. But we dont allow them to be just that, either. Their talking back to the teacher isnt just typical teen defiance thats been with us since man began communicating and needs to be dealt with proportionately; its evidence that we, as a people, have failed, that they are making us look bad, as a race. In our quiet moments, we find it hard to believe what should be obvious, that at-risk black boys who find in gangs stability and love they couldnt find elsewhere, for whatever reason, are just following a natural pattern seen in all groups of young people who feel alienated and left behind. Ins Description for Sales People Bailey is a contributor to Politico and CNN.com and has been published by Esquire. The hardcover was featured on NPR and in the New York Times Book Review, USA Today and more. An intimate look at a timely subject. Details ISBN1635420032 Pages 304 Publisher Other Press LLC Year 2020 ISBN-10 1635420032 ISBN-13 9781635420036 Format Paperback Imprint Other Press LLC Subtitle Regaining Dignity in the Face of Crime, Poverty, and Racism in the American South Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States DEWEY B Short Title My Brother Moochie Language English UK Release Date 2020-02-04 Publication Date 2020-02-04 AU Release Date 2020-02-04 NZ Release Date 2020-02-04 US Release Date 2020-02-04 Author IssacJ. Bailey Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:126655960;

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