It Was All a Dream by Reniqua Allen

Author:Reniqua Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

BY THE TIME JALEESA WAS GROWING UP AT THE TURN OF THE twenty-first century, the South Bronx had been burned down and was on the precipice of a revitalization. Its progress wasn’t as fast as Brooklyn’s, but it was on the come-up—at least in mainstream culture. J-Lo had made the 6 train infamous; and Fat Joe and Big Pun continued to solidify the streets of the Bronx as hip-hop’s birthplace, where KRS-One and Grandmaster Flash first started out. It wasn’t all gravy. The buildings may have stopped burning, but the ashes still clouded the skies. The murder rate in the Bronx was the highest in the city, drugs like Tango were the new talk of the town, and HBO was filming its Hookers at the Point documentary, about sex workers in the area. But for Jaleesa, the South Bronx was simply home.

On the surface Jaleesa’s life is the kind of story that White liberals love to salivate over—that of a child who “overcame” and “made it out.” You know what I’m talking about: a daughter of a teenager without a degree, a high school life filled with seeing dead bodies, friends with gunshot wounds. But that’s really not Jaleesa’s story. Jaleesa grew up in a tough neighborhood. She grew up with a Black single mom, who gave birth to Jaleesa at the age of eighteen, and a Puerto Rican father. But her parents remained close friends, and she had a good relationship with her dad. She was surrounded by her family, and it extended beyond blood. Her community was her family, and back then she wasn’t trying to leave. She had no desire to even move across the bridge to Manhattan because she was loved and protected on her streets. Sure, she said, it was “traumatic.” She witnessed drug use and was surrounded by violence. But there was humanity that the media never discusses when they talk about the gangsters and drug dealers around her way. They were supportive. The “best” fathers she knew of. They talked to her about how she should carry herself as a woman. She was cared for, “when people didn’t care about the kids in the South Bronx.” Protected when the cops didn’t. And most of all, listened to about her future, and supported about her dreams. There were no accusations of “acting White,” and the drug dealers encouraged her to go to college, to make something out of herself, so that she wouldn’t follow their same path.

She was clearly upset that some of these same guys and her younger brother were recently picked up for having heroin and fentanyl worth $22 million—crimes, she believed, that many of them didn’t even commit. She tied it to the growth of private prisons, which is now a five billion dollar industry that has largely been built on the backs of Black men.

“It was rough growing up, but it was beautiful,” she continued. “It gave me a toughness, and it gave me an edge. It helped me become

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