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| Sean Proctor for The New York Times |
Real Consequences:
The War on Drugs, the New Jim Crow and the Story of Jonathan Hargett
by David J. Leonard | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Most basketball fans have never heard of Jonathan Hargett. A basketball legend with immense potential, Hargett never fulfilled this promise. In a recent piece, The New York Times sought to explain this unfulfilled potential, chronicling his story as not just tragic but a cautionary tale.
Pete Thamel’s story is one that begins and ends with the basketball court. It replicates the popular narrative of the African American baller whose immense talents and endless potential were derailed by pathological behavior, a lack of discipline, and a system that did little to curtail these bad behaviors. In an effort to highlight this tragic story, Thamel imagines the tragedy through his greatness on the court, seemingly reducing Hargett’s story to one of talent left to rot in the fields.
Noting how Amar’e Stoudamire, Kevin Durant, and Carmelo Anthony have noted his greatness, Thamel uses their assessment to not only authenticate the wasted potential but to make clear the American Dream that could have been; yet, his life is more nightmare and according to “‘What Happened to Him?’” that isn’t because of a lack of talent or opportunity:
His signature move was his ability to freeze an opponent with a crossover dribble, then blow past him toward the basket, lobbing the ball off the backboard and catching it and dunking it with one hand. It became known simply as a Hargett.
“Especially when you’re talking about memories and things like that from high school basketball and A.A.U. basketball, he’s definitely one of the names that comes up,” Anthony said. “What happened to him?”
The answer is jarring and sadly predictable. Hargett, who turns 30 this weekend, is an inmate at the medium-security Indian Creek Correctional Center here, serving the final months of a nearly five-year sentence for drug possession with intent to sell.
Thamel’s answer is rife with simplicity and stereotypes. We are told over and over again that Hargett ended up in prison rather than the NBA simply because of his own demons and the failures of those around him to save him. Having lost his father, who died of pneumonia, Hargett grew up with his mom and 6 siblings.
Hargett’s mother, Nancy, worked multiple jobs to help support her six children. With his mother often working and no father figure around, Hargett began to form bad habits. Lancaster said that after Hargett’s ninth-grade year, he began showing up late to practice, and Lancaster noticed an entourage beginning to form around him.
In other words, the death of his father, the failures of his mother, and the influences of the street derailed Hargett’s greatness on the court. Lacking the necessary discipline, focus, and ability to see beyond the present, Hargett spent more time smoking marijuana than honing his craft. He eventually became addicted to marijuana, leading him on a path to prison rather than the NBA. For Thamel, Hargett’s own personal failures and demons are only part of the answer as to “why” or “what happened” to Hargett, as the other part of the story rests with the culture of sports.
A story about agents, handlers, and others who saw Hargett as a dollar sign, as an amazing talent who could line their pockets in the long run, Thamel (and others) treat Hargett as an expose about the pitfalls and dangers of contemporary sports. At its core, it really frames the narrative along these lines (in the words of Hargett himself): “The moral of this whole story is to help someone not to make the same mistakes.” In other words, the story that is offered here is one that imagines him as someone who made bad choices because of a lack of discipline and values (“culture of poverty”). Worse, his own failures are exacerbated by a system that never held him accountable. His fate wasn’t simply the result of his own failings but that of a system based in the exploitation and abuse of vulnerable young men like Hargett, whose talent insulates from the necessary discipline. These personal and institutional failings end with his incarceration.
While high school sports and the sports-industrial complexare real issues, the failure of this story to account for America’s new Jim Crow is a significant omission. His life is a story of America’s selective and racially based war on drugs. It is part of a larger history of the destructiveness of the prison industrial complex on communities of color. Hargett’s father was incarcerated, dying in prison. He joined thousands of others of children whose fathers were swept away in the racial tsunami of American (in)justice.
The consequences of America’s war on drugs (a war principally waged against black and brown America), of America’s “New Jim Crow” are evident on this day as black and Latino fathers will celebrate alone, away from their sons and daughters. Writing in response to the widespread debate about the state of black fatherhood, Michelle Alexander highlights the links between the New Jim Crow and black fatherhood. “Here's a hint for all those still scratching their heads about those missing black fathers: Look in prison,” writes Alexander. She continues,
The mass incarceration of people of color through the War on Drugs is a big part of the reason that a black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The absence of black fathers from families across America is not simply a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time watching Sports Center. Hundreds of thousands of black men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed by whites.
The systematic efforts to break families apart, destroy communities, and separate fathers and mothers from their children is a direct result of the incarceration of drug users. According to Alexander, as of 2005, 4 in 5 drug arrests was for possession by individuals with no history of violence; in the 1990s alone, a period that saw a massive expansion of America’s war on drug users, 80 percent of those sent to prison were done so for marijuana possession. Yet, again we see how this is not a war on drugs or even illicit drug use, but use within the black community even though whites are far more likely to use illegal drugs. In a number of states, between 80 and 90 percent of all drug convictions have been of African Americans.
The impact of America’s expansive prison graveyard did not end with Hargett’s childhood; Hargett was arrested on possession charges shortly after the end of his freshman year at West Virginia University. Although he joined a robust group – college students caught with marijuana – he faced unusual consequences: 45 days in jail. His release didn’t change his luck having already lost his collegiate eligibility – he was found to have received improper benefits as a result of his signing with an agent. With limited options, Hargett turned professional in 2003, but found no interest from the NBA. After a failed attempt to enroll in Virginia Union University where the NCAA refused to grant him eligibility, Hargett took his talents to the World Basketball Association’s, joining the Southern Crescent Lightning squad in Peachtree City, Georgia.
Struggling to make ends meet, Hargett began to sell drugs as well, which ended after his arrest in 2008 for “possession of cocaine and marijuana with the intent to distribute.” Having been let down by collegiate sports and by various sporting institutions, having been left behind by a dysfunctional educational system, having suffered because of poverty and countless other injustices, Hargett found himself on the inside looking out. His decision to break the law, to sell and use drugs, had consequences; the war on drugs, missed placed priorities, new Jim Crow, the criminalization of drug addiction, and poverty also have consequences; Jonathan Hargett is one such casualty.
The effort to pathologize drug use, to reimagine the war on drugs through a narrative of undisciplined black youth and an enabling sports culture is not surprising given fact that a study from the Journal of Alcohol and Drug Educationfound that 95 percent of respondents imagined an African American when asked about drug user. The media narrative here (and elsewhere) is both indicative of the racial – Jim Crow – nature of the war on drugs and reflective of ways that dominant culture justifies and sanctions the racist war on drugs. In imagining his story as a tragic tale of criminality and missed opportunities as opposed to a tragic reminder of the costs and consequences of the war on drugs, we see the colored lens that crime and punishment is depicted within contemporary media.
According to Michelle Alexander, “racial bias in drug was inevitable” (104). The inevitability results from false narratives, stereotypes, and misinformation disseminated within popular media. From Cops to ESPN: The Magazine, from the world of politics to the world of sports, from The New York Times to Sportscenter America’s drug habit has been defined through and around blackness, rationalizing and sanctioning a war on blackness. The consequences are clear with Jonathan Hargett.
It is equally evident with the recent death of Garrett Reid (son of Philadelphia Eagles coach, Andy Reid). Despite arrests from drug use, and multiple drug infractions (smuggling drugs into jail; testing positive while incarcerated), Reid spent less than 2 years in prison. Whereas Reid was seen as a kid with a problem, a kid who needed help, Hargett was seen as a criminal without any path toward redemption. Race matters. “In the midst of his legal troubles in his early 20s, Reid said he ‘got a thrill’ out of being a drug dealer in a lower-income neighborhood just a few miles from his parents' suburban Villanova mansion,” noted an ESPN story. “I liked being the rich kid in that area and having my own high-status life,” Reid confessed to a probation officer in 2007. “I could go anywhere in the 'hood. They all knew who I was. I enjoyed it. I liked being a drug dealer.”
Maybe the New York Times should investigate similar situations, pushing back against the racialized narrative of drug use and drug distribution, a narrative that contributed to Hargett’s incarceration and Reid’s death. Both are tragedies .
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David J. Leonard is Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race Studies at Washington State University, Pullman. He is the author of the just released After Artest: Race and the War on Hoop (SUNY Press) as well as several other works. Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan, layupline, Feminist Wire, and Urban Cusp. He is frequent contributor to Ebony, Slam, and Racialicious as well as a past contributor to Loop21, The Nation and The Starting Five. He blogs @No Tsuris.
