Shamsud Din Jabbar was born and raised in Beaumont, Texas. I finished my Bachelor's degree (EE) in '88 at Lamar in Beaumont. Great Engineering, Nursing schools, and basketball. Incredibly great blues music, too.
Beaumont and Southeast Texas is (for me) a dichotomy. Some of the nicest people and also some of the most racist. Google "vidor texas racist" if you don't believe me.
Being at Lamar for 3 years, and especially living on campus for 2 years was eye-opening for this mid-West born suburban white boy who had never been around a lot of black people.
On campus, especially at the gym where I spent a lot of time, white people were in the minority. You learn pretty quickly that we are all pretty much the same under our skin and all want pretty much the same things in life. Although brothers who wouldn't put down a towel on the bench so I had to bench with my head sliding around on their Jheri Curl really pissed me off. I digress.
I hadn't been back to Beaumont for decades when my wife and I visited in 2017. Holy sh*t has the town gone downhill. The water near campus was undrinkable, even after boiling, because it stank so bad. The roads are horrible. Everything around the campus has degraded. Lamar is part of UT now, so it looked much nicer than when I lived there, particularly student housing (both dorms where I lived have been torn down and replaced).
Shamsud Din Jabbar would have been a kid when I was there. He would have grown up watching his city degrade and his chances in life as a black man in SE Texas go from low to lower. My speculation is that he joined the military to get a future, spent 10 years learning it is OK to be racist and kill brown people, as long as they were the "correct" brown people to be killed (i.e. foreign and/or Muslim). Then he gets out of the military and finds he still has no future, particularly in racist SE Texas where he both brown and Muslim.
Of course he was still a terrorist, and I have no problem that the NO Police shot him. But it is not hard for me to understand and imagine how he could have turned into an ISIS terrorist from some kid I might I have seen shopping with his mom at the Cash Saver on Lavaca back in the day.
BTW: It wasn't called "Cash Saver" back then. It was part of some national chain and was much nicer than when my wife and I shopped there "for old times sake" back in 2017.
