Costel’s Reviews > Blue Rage, Black Redemption: A Memoir > Status Update

On June 25, 2006, Shirley Neal and I traveled to South Africa to fulfill his first request. His ashes were released in a lake at Thokoza Park, located in Soweto, South Africa.

During my last hours with Stan, he made two requests of me: he asked that I scatter his ashes in South Africa and that I continue his work to steer marginalized youth away from involvement with gangs, drugs, and incarceration.

People who claim racism is nonexistent here, or anywhere in the United States, are in denial, or they live above the poverty radar. Racism is not an excuse, it's an obstructive reality.

"Son," I told him, "just because we exist around madness does not mean we have to function like mad dogs."

I am not the violent genetic misfit incapable of change that the courts, society, media, law enforcement, and prison administration believe I am. None of these people really know me. They only know of me.

Peace and blessings to you, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. I'm grateful and proud to have met you.

Winnie responded hotly, in her lilting accented English, "The death penalty should be terminated across the board, wherever it exists!"

The more I read, the more I discovered the contradictions in myself and in the world I thought I knew.

I never knew Raymond's ambitions, but in our small world, ambitions were rare, and mostly fantasy.

My life's soundtrack was P-Funk, music that was notable for the funkadelic phase of musical madness, drugs, sex, and urban violence. Popular funk artists like Bootsy Collins, the Ohio Players, Rick James, The Bar-Kays, and the greatest of all funksters, Parliament, reigned supreme in South Central Los Angeles.