"Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family" by Mitchell S. Jackson

Where to start with Survival Math, part memoir, part historical analysis, part ethnographic study? Mitchell Jackson's book is the story his upbringing and the Black men in his life, centered in Portland, Oregon. Through his and others' personal stories, he explores expectations of masculinity, the pimp life, the draw of drug culture, and gangs. The cultural elements could feel well-tread or stereotypical, but Jackson's introspection and empathy help them feel meaningful. 

The most meaningful--and jarring--section for me was his discussion of women. Jackson describes expectations of men that demand poor treatment of women, treatment that Jackson freely admits his participated in himself. These abuses were not just of his youth, either. He explains juggling various women, lying and manipulating them, well into adulthood. Maybe it was just jarring to see a man describe his harm with such candor. But, then again, that candor itself is unsettling. By virtue of being our honest, open, and forthright protagonist, Jackson gains our sympathy and understanding. Thus, when he openly acknowledges his many abuses of women, he paradoxically becomes even more sympathetic. I'm not sure what to make of that, and I'm not sure Jackson is either. He lets the women he's wronged tell their side of the story, verbatim, at the end of that section, and the most telling is Statement Four:

Ok, so your asking all of us who may or may not hv been broken to help? Just trying to understand cuz the irony feels really sad... (119)

Jackson spends a lot of time on the expectations of behavior, which include not only how men treat women but also how men treat other men. Such expectations demand bravado and often led to jail or death. He also describes the normalization of using and selling drugs. Jackson has no solutions for these cycles of violence and incarceration, but he does paint a portrait that allows the reader to see how easy it is for them to continue. 

Throughout the book, Jackson covers such issues by switching from intimate personal stories to sophisticated theses on cultural patterns with little warning. The unusual mishmash of genre can, like his content, be startling, particularly because his book follows the same pattern stylistically. 

I spent a lot of time thinking of The Grammarians, which I recently finished, while reading. The books have almost nothing in common, but the twins of the Grammarians argued over "standard English" versus colloquial, and I realized Jackson might just be the compromise the twins need to bring them together. His book weaves the casual vernacular of his upbringing with the lofty syntax and vocabulary of academia, often in the same sentence. Take his discussion of Black men and white women:

Much, but never enough, has been said about the extreme violence white men have been willing to perpetrate in the name of chivalric and paternal protection of the women they've invested (burdened?) with the expectation of piousness, whom they've weighted with lifetime roles as the incubators and progenitors of the white race. But let me call it, white men were never protecting the purity of white women, for couldn't no mortal woman satisfy his needs nohow. (71)

Though not the explicit focus of his book, Jackson's style is itself a commentary, a challenge that colloquial equals uneducated or unworthy or that "standard" English means a life of ease. 

I would suggest there's times the loftiness can feel a hindrance. Take the end of that paragraph: "Indeed, the white man has committed malevolence after malevolence to secure his hegemony over the apple: perforce, his most prized possession. She being vital to his dominion over whomever and whatever he envisaged," where both "malevolence" and "envisaged" seem needlessly verbose. Similarly, some of the segues into fruit seeds of Don Giovanni might have been a little long.

Surprisingly, Jackson spends almost no time on what, at first glance, a reader might expect to be the focus of the book: his "escape" from his "troubled" upbringing. Here's a former drug-dealer who spent time in jail and yet is now a lauded, published author and NYU writing professor. The American Dream in reality! But while Jackson is undoubtedly successful, I think part of his point is that while he's avoided jail and death, he hasn't "escaped" his upbringing nor is his story some easy pathway to success. He spends some time on why he was able to make it out fairly unscathed, including his unwillingness to murder and his willingness to step down, but his book isn't meant as a treatise on how with grit and hard work anyone can make it. With a little bad luck, Jackson could easily be one of the many he knows who didn't survive.