Satya has ceased publication. This website is maintained for informational purposes only.

November 2002 This is What Peace Looks Like: Watts, Los Angeles The Satya Interview with Aqeela Sherrills

 

In 1992, Aqeela Sherrills did something extraordinary. In the late ‘80s, war-torn Watts, in South-Central Los Angeles, was an epicenter of gang violence. It was here, one of the most hopeless places on the planet, that Aqeela brokered peace.

During the 1980s, primarily African American and Hispanic youths banded into gangs in the low-income or poverty-stricken neighborhoods they lived in. Fiercely loyal, these urban tribes warred against each other with weapons sufficient for minor armies. Clashes over territory, vengeance for a murdered gang member, and access to the drug market, commonly resulted in “drive-by” shootings, executions, and street warfare. It was an American Beirut.

A unique world evolved that influenced popular culture, with music artists and styles, clothing brands and fashion. This culture also gave us the image of the gun-wielding, drug-pushing, hyper-macho, angry gangster that is mimicked by young people nationwide.

Aqeela Sherrills grew up in Watts, and, after seeing 13 friends killed in gang wars, was inspired to bring the warring factions—the Crips and Bloods—together to hammer out a peace treaty. Through faith and perseverance, Aqeela helped turn the hatred around to create a lasting peace. He also appealed to the community to get involved in creating a place where they want to live. This is Aqeela’s story.

Let’s assume that my readers know nothing about your story. Where would you start?
I would start by saying that I truly believe that Watts is the catalyst for the next major peace movement in this country; it’ll come out of a place that looks like hate, that looks like anger and frustration and despair.

We were able to create a peace treaty between the warring gangs in this neighborhood, factions of the Crips and Bloods. We have sustained it for ten years—not without problems and challenges, however. We have redefined what peace is and what it looks like for folks in this community. Peace is not this utopian idea of dashing through a field of dandelions, you know, it’s hard work. Sometimes the peacemakers lose their lives in the process. But the key is that individuals consistently come back to resolve their conflicts to take them the next few steps towards peace.

Watts is a microcosm of what’s taking place in the country and in the world: it’s an urban war zone. Over the past 20 years, in LA county alone, there’ve been over 10,000 gang-related deaths. That’s roughly the number of lives lost in the Northern Ireland and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts combined. But because they’re poor black and brown youths, they have been totally criminalized and marginalized. “Gang member” is a scapegoat term society created that makes them inhuman, and when they get killed, people say, “Oh well, they were gang members.” But these were somebody’s daughter, somebody’s son, crying out for help in their own way. There’s this perception that people in urban communities are hardened killers and it’s not true. They’re bright and intelligent individuals, but they’re wounded deeply and carrying that around, which is basically a trigger. They’re only emulating what they see taking place in the world.

Most of the kids as well as the adults are also suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. People have become desensitized to the violence in this neighborhood, and our approach has been to address this situation, because it truly threatens a whole generation of young people. I mean, it already has taken a generation of folks, and we don’t want it to spread.

How do you go into places and reach people, and turn thinking around?
We do it in a few ways. When we first started, we had Jim Brown as a celebrity and he opened a lot of doors for us. But because of the work that we’ve done, we kind of gained our own celebrity; it’s a sort of pass and we can go into just about any community.
We have an unbelievable street network across the country, because of, unfortunately, the drug trade, gangsterism. We’ve also had a lot of media [attention]. In many cases, we do our street research first, and in a matter of days we’ll know who’s in the different communities and what’s taking place. Then we contact the key gang members and convene meetings to try to create some type of cease-fire agreement. We make connections with whoever wants to be part of what’s going on. There’s a couple of key individuals who have transformed their lives and have that ability to go in every neighborhood because they were once out there on the front line.

I understand football star Jim Brown got involved; what was his role?
We hooked up with Jim Brown in ‘89 and he became the financier of our work, as well as a guide and mentor. He was running a Life Skills program inside a prison and recognized the direct correlation between our work in the streets and what he was doing. We formed the Amer-I-Can program which is basically a curriculum for the development of self-esteem, teaching individuals motivation and the processes of goal-setting and decision-making. Growing up in an environment like this, most likely you don’t automatically just ‘get’ these [skills]. This curriculum created a different form of language for us, it was pretty profound.

We traveled across the country for about three years, developing the program and organizing peace treaties in different cities. Then I came back home to LA to focus on the peace process here. For about two years, it was beautiful; but then people started falling back to things they were doing in the past. So, three years ago my brother and I created the Community Self-Determination Institute [CSDI].

We run the largest prevention and retrieval program in the county, with conflict mediators in three housing developments here. In April, for the tenth anniversary of the peace treaty, we launched a ten-year strategic initiative—The Passage to Peace—to bring gang violence to an end. We developed what we call grassroots commissions, or neighborhood councils, basically organizing and teaching them to become the stakeholders that they are in their communities. Gangs are responsible for the community—they’ve already said “this is our territory;” and it’s about flipping their consciousness, to protecting and providing a service to the neighborhood.

We have a vision, we’re going to make Watts a place to raise our children. We don’t want to move to a better neighborhood because this is a better neighborhood. But it requires us taking responsibility for it. We’re also looking at creating an alternative economy, because Watts has a 20 percent unemployment rate and has had that pretty much for 30 or 40 years.

Twenty percent unemployment?
Absolutely, regardless of how the economy changes, there’s a whole underworld in Watts. People hustle, have sidewalk sales, they do all types of stuff to sustain themselves because they have to. That is the reality we live in. Recently some friends and I pooled our resources and purchased a little strip mall on the main thoroughfare. We’re going to open the first coffee shop, the first bookstore and have a writer’s workshop, to create community around these vacant spaces. I mean, this is the first coffee shop and bookstore in a ten square-mile radius. This is a community of 80,000 people, but there’s nothing here, it’s been branded because of the struggles it’s been through. That’s also why Watts is a catalyst for a major peace movement, it’s a trend-setter: there’s so much genius in this neighborhood, it’s unbelievable; this particular community set the trend for gangsterism, music and entertainment. Sometimes in the roughest places, you find the most beauty.

We’ve been able to separate conflict from violence here; conflict is a healthy thing, but unresolved conflict is what we’re seeking to change. We’re not an anti-gang agency, you can never break up a gang, they are a response to the culture—it’s a surrogate family. [Gang life] is a totally different world that has its own rules and regulations. But you can shift the thinking and focus it towards something great.

How do you deal with people who have such a history of hating each other and literally want to kill each other, and get them to sit down and agree to a cease-fire and agree that it’s in everyone’s best interest to work for peace?
That’s a step-by-step process. There’s no magic to it.

It’s about who can communicate with these individuals and touch their hearts, helping each one to find their own humanity to see that there’s a different way. It’s based upon relationships and can’t be motivated by anything except love. It’s about igniting a conversation about just, you know, life—what makes people happy or sad; what they fear; what things they can change in the neighborhood. And this can be done anywhere.

In every situation, in every conflict, what we’re actually negotiating on is the simple stuff. It’s about helping them go back to that place where they were first violated, and helping them to resolve those wounds so that they don’t become a burden in their lives, and so they can operate without them.

I’ve been speaking at a lot of conferences that are mainly environmentalist, about violence and resolving conflict in urban war zones, and a lot of people ask how those two things relate. They’re related in the sense that there are human beings who are killing animals and trees, and killing the oceans and the biosphere, and that’s the same violence that’s emanating [from the] wars in their personal life. If we keep trying to attack the symptoms, as opposed to focusing on the root cause—the human being and the spirit of the human being—we’re going to waste all of our time. We have to merge all of these movements into a movement for the reverence of human life.

How has law enforcement reacted, are they an impediment to the community’s progress?
The black community has never had any protection from law enforcement or the justice system. Law enforcement is deeply invested in the problems in this community. In the first year of the peace treaty, the gang homicides dropped 44 percent, and law enforcement saw that as a threat to their job security. In LA county alone the LAPD has a $100 million litigation fund; that’s more than every prevention and intervention program in the county. It’s ridiculous, you know, it’s not fair.

All law enforcement, however, is not bad—we just have to organize ourselves so that we can play a major role in how law enforcement polices the community. It’s funded with our tax dollars, so therefore we could have a say in how they do things. They have to understand what the conditions are in the community that produce the symptoms we see.

So we partner with them. We have an excellent relationship with the sheriff. He doesn’t lie to us about the problems of policing on the street. When an individual wants to solve the problem instead of the symptoms, he becomes a real haven to the community.
With law enforcement, when you keep seeing them be so brutal, how do you not take to the streets? Amadou Diallo for example—there are more extreme and less extreme cases, but it’s just constant.

I think that we’ve got to be more strategic and more focused. As James Baldwin said, as long as we’re out screaming and protesting and begging for our rights, the slavemaster will always know he has us under control. When that kind of thing happens, we can go directly to where the source is, to whoever is responsible—local politicians or whatever—and put pressure on. That person is supported with public dollars. When individuals do things like that and the system turns around and protects them, that protection is saying it’s okay. It’s our responsibility to stand up and do something.

We live in a culture that’s about suppressing authentic emotions. Folks carry stuff like abuse and abandonment around their whole life, and die with it. Folks need to see inside themselves and confront the injury and the hate. We have to create an environment, a sacred space, in our personal lives, to allow that to come out. That would totally revolutionize the whole tension in this country. With LA law enforcement—if the chief of police and some officers got up and apologized to the community for all of the wrongs that they’ve done, under the badge as our protectors and servers. If they say, we want to start off on a new note, I’m telling you, it would blow people’s minds. If George Bush apologized for slavery in this country, if they teach people the true story about what happened, it would do so much good. You can only conquer hate with love.

You remind me of an interview I heard of Godfrey Reggio, the director of the new film Naqoyqatsi, who said, “I hope that I have the courage to be hopeless about the world we live in now, in order to be hopeful that we’ll turn to something more attune to being a human being.” Being more humane. Where do you put your energies towards building the new paradigm?
You start right where you are. You see, the most powerful thing that we can do is connect with another human being; and it’s the scariest thing. People are a literal reflection of who we are, and the things that we love and hate about them are the things we love and hate about ourselves. There’s a lot of stuff to do. For instance, we’ve got a lot of people in our country who are fighting to stop wars in other countries, but if they’d focus on stopping the war in our own house [country], it would be an example for people in other countries. We’re the world superpower. We police the world, trying to save it and make it more democratic every day, but we don’t practice democracy here.

This country is at the same point that Babylon and Rome—all those great empires—were; we’re at a critical crossroads. It’s dying extremely hard and it wants to take many people and things with it. My vote is that we, who are conscious about what’s taking place, [need to] focus all of our time and energy on building a new paradigm. George Bush and all are going to do what they’re going to do; I can’t give it no energy.

Until we address our own ills… Black folks hate themselves and they feel inferior. White folks have been conditioned to feel superior. I’m not talking about black vs. white, I’m talking about the conditioning process itself. It’s so deeply rooted that it’s subtle; people [don’t] even see it most of the time. But it’s there, and it really needs to be addressed. To do that, the heart has to be bust open. We try to do everything in life to keep our hearts from being broken. But there is so much beauty in having a broken heart—there’s pain, but you discover things in yourself that you ain’t never thought about before. We live in the microwave generation, people want everything now. We’ve forgotten to really enjoy the process of achieving the success that we want in our life. The process is everything because once you achieve the goal, you realize, “I thought this was it,” but it’s not.

That’s something of a meditation right there. Do you have anything else you want to add? One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of my readers live in New York City.
I would add that in New York especially, I think people probably connect a lot more than maybe in a place like LA. LA is an individualist town. New York would be an amazing place to launch a movement of connecting with people, and I think it would spread like wildfire. Instead of just staring at a person on the subway, you actually speak, because you never know who you might meet. You might be passing God. You might see this person every single day, and in a simple conversation, [discover that] in their story this person has the answers to all your problems. You might just have a two-minute conversation, but at least you made that connection. Our biggest resource lives right next door in many cases. I’m not talking about money or material things, I’m talking about that gift of helping me to open up and see deeply into myself, to still my own waters. And it’s a scary place to be. My work is truly an extension of me. As I resolve the wounds in my own life, I’m able to see more of what I need to do in the community I live in and that I love.

To learn more about CSDI, visit www.csdiwatts.com or call (323) 586-8791. CSDI welcomes visitors to Watts and does guided tours each week to show peace in action.