Redemption: The Stan “Tookie†Williams Story
This well-acted 2004 film, originally on FX TV, is available on DVD. Jamie Fox plays Tookie Williams, with Lynn Whitfield playing a charming and appealing Barbara Becnel, who asks Tookie to provide her with information for her upcoming book on gang history. While admitting she holds gangs in contempt, she gets Tookie’s cooperation when she explains she intends to be objective and tell the truth about them, whatever the truth may be.
Tookie helped start the Crips to “protect the neighborhood.”Responding to Becnel’s comment that it was a criminal enterprise from the start, Tookie replies that the cops weren’t protecting anyone. “Either I was going to be a victim or a victimizer.”However, he failed to note that he’d been doing drugs since at least age 13 and he didn’t co-found the Crips until he was 18.
When Becnel asks, “How can you possibly justify shooting a man who looks just like you?”Tookie responded, â€At the core is an embedded sense of self-hate…you start to believe those…stereotypes…depicting that the majority of blacks are buffoons or functioning illiterates, promiscuous, violent, welfare recipients [and] criminals…You lash out at those individuals that fit those stereotypes…trying to obliterate those negative images.”However, Tookie neglected to mention the drugs that cause distortions of perception and memory taken by most of those having such belief systems, including him.
He was too out-of-control for his mother, who took him to his father”whom he had never met”and who promptly abandoned him. While now eloquent and likeable, he didn’t remark on when he first used drugs”which may have been a period leading to his out-of-control behaviors.
Becnel put her history aside when Tookie told her, “I don’t want to leave my legacy here as simply being the co-founder of the Crips, if I can keep a kid from coming to this place…”He tells her he wants to right his wrongs by writing children’s books and shooting not people, but videos, in which he would apologize for his part in creating the Crips. “I deeply regret the legacy that it left because it left a legacy of genocide: black on black genocide.”While making it clear that the course of violence must be reversed, he again ignores the role of alcoholism and other-drug addiction in creating the mindset that leads to the lion’s share of abuse.
At one point, the film points out he stopped using when he decided to seek redemption. The link is blurred, but at least it’s there. He stopped using, which allowed him to seek redemption; redemption is impossible while still using, because the user-addict thinks he’s God.
What the movie lacks in forging the link between addiction and misbehaviors, it makes up for in speeches of atonement. “We do good because it makes us feel alive. The first half of my life I was dead…but now the second half I get a chance to live and do something about it. And if I have to die in order to show the meaning”the true meaning of it”then so let it be.”And, he points out the importance of self-responsibility in speeches to children: “This place [prison] does not make you a man. The moment you begin to make excuses for yourselves, that’s the moment you get on to a pathway leading straight to here.”And, “My violent gang past is unworthy of imitation or praise.”He admits his greatest mistake ever was to co-found the Crips, while explaining that life is all about choices and that to assume there wasn’t a choice is “just an excuse.”
It’s a good movie about redemption; we just can’t be sure, without meeting the man, how much is true. My understanding of alcoholism, however, has turned me into a strong believer in the idea of allowing addicts to do what they can to right their sometimes heinous wrongs. I wonder, with a strong likelihood he’s been clean and sober at least a dozen years, whether Tookie Williams shouldn’t be given the benefit of the doubt.