Tears We Cannot Stop

by Michael Eric Dyson

  * * *

  I teach the work of these hymnists at Georgetown, so my students can hear their lessons and perhaps change their tunes of social justice. We have pored over Jay Z’s lyrics. Of course they hear his exaltation of hustling. But more important, they hear in his “A Ballad For The Fallen Soldier” a deep and angry battle with the police terror that grips black life.

  Off to boot camp, the world’s facing terror

  Bin Laden been happenin’ in Manhattan

  Crack was anthrax back then, back when

  Police was Al-Qaeda to black men.

  And we also study Beyoncé. Many of you have danced to her feminist rhymes and absorbed her insistence that black life matters. That insistence rings out on her song “Formation,” whose video features the songstress sitting atop a sinking cop car in the post-Katrina Louisiana bayou and a message scribbled on a wall that says, simply, plainly, unapologetically, “Stop Shooting Us.” Beyoncé also sang the song during an epic Super Bowl halftime show, garbed in black, as were her fashionable phalanx of backup dancers, paying tribute to the Black Panthers. Many cops charged that she was anti-police and threatened to withdraw protection during her “Formation” tour. “Let’s be clear: I am against police brutality and injustice,” she told Elle magazine. “If celebrating my roots and culture during Black History Month made anyone uncomfortable, those feelings were there long before a video and long before me.” On tour her radiant blackness and her ecumenical humanitarianism never once clashed.

  We also study Kendrick Lamar. We listen to his racial catechism and thus absorb as well his subtle and stirring exploration of black life in all of its magnetic contradictions. We watch the black-and-white video for “Alright,” a song of cataclysmic hope amidst cops’ fiendish assaults on black men and women. The video unveils the uplifting dimensions of an urban magical realism. Lamar flies over hood landscapes until he lands on top of a high streetlight, only to be felled by the imaginary bullet spun from a cop’s imaginary gun, a gun formed by the cop’s pointing fingers. Kendrick falls in slow motion, dead, or at least we think he is. Then he opens his eyes and smiles widely. He lets us in on the joke, on the artifice of what we have just seen. It is, too, a stinging rejection of the power of blue to determine black life and death.

  These are our griots. These are their songs. These and a thousand others are the hymns that answer the reign of terror that consumes our days. These are the hymns that rally us against the fantasy of our erasure. May these hymns be sung loud until our slaughter ceases and our blood no longer spills.

  III.

  Invocation

  O! save us, we pray thee, thou God of Heaven and of earth, from the devouring hands of the white Christians!!! . . .

  The whites have murder’d us, O God! . . .

  We believe that, for thy glory’s sake,

  Thou wilt deliver us;

  But that thou may’st effect these things,

  Thy glory must be sought.

  —David Walker

  Almighty, hear our prayer.

  Oh God, how we suffer. We your servants are ensnared in tragedy that doesn’t end. We can do nothing to make our tormentors stop their evil. We cannot convince them that we are your children and don’t deserve this punishment. We have tried everything we can to keep them from slaughtering us in the streets. They hide behind the state to justify killing us. They say we are scary, that they are afraid for their lives. They say this even when we have nothing in our hands but air. They say this even when they are armed with weapons meant to remove us from the face of the earth. They say this even when they must throw down guns to pretend that we intended to do them harm. They say this even when video proves they are lying through their teeth.

  Oh God, we are near complete despair. How can we possibly change our fate? How can we possibly persuade our society that we deserve to be treated with decency and respect? How can we possibly fight a criminal justice system that has been designed to ensure our defeat? How can we possibly combat the blindness of white men and women who are so deeply invested in their own privilege that they cannot afford to see how we much we suffer?

  But most of all, Oh God, how can we keep racism from strangling every bit of hope left in our bodies and minds? How can we arrest the blue plague and keep it from spreading to our children, and our children’s children? Oh God, I have already seen the tragic imprint of grief and suffering on my own children’s fates. I have seen how the poison of racism has tried to claim their bodies and minds from the time they were babies.

  * * *

  Oh God, I pray for all children who have to endure the curse of bigotry. It is the most wretched feeling of helplessness when one’s children suffer that fate. My daughter Maisha was six years old the first time racism stole upon her. She had been invited to an ice skating party hosted by a dear childhood friend. Her friend’s parents had moved the family from the inner city to a Chicago suburb. Yes, Oh God, you moved them on up like Weezie and George Jefferson. Maisha was delighted to see her old schoolmate. She was equally excited to get a taste of the suburbs. The group of kids that attended the party spanned the black rainbow from pale vanilla to dark chocolate. A few of the girls decided to break away from the group and play a game on the ice. As they huddled in a circle, three white girls between the ages of six and ten approached them.

  I know they’re your creatures, too, Lord, but sometimes white folk act like the Devil is all in them. The Holy Ghost is nowhere in the vicinity. Well on this occasion the white girls yelled at my daughter and her friends in unison, “Move, niggers!”

  Lord, Maisha was stopped in her tracks. She squinted her little green eyes to make sure that she’d truly heard what she thought she heard. The oldest girl in Maisha’s circle demanded, “What did you just say?” And those lovely little minions, with no hesitation, with the kind of confidence that whiteness offers in spades, blurted out again, “Move, niggers!”

  Maisha’s heart sank.

  And then it started. The predictable questions that hate provokes, all the self-doubt that racism means to implant. Do we know them? What did we do to deserve that? Why did they call us that horrible name?

  You made her, Oh Lord. You know that Maisha’s little mind drifted off into a faraway place. You know she sought to deflect the pain she felt. But she was snatched back into a crude reality. It was a hell of a way for her to be introduced to the ugliness and nastiness that racism unleashes. But there is never a good time to be hated because of a small and insignificant thing like the color of your skin. There is never a good time to know that for many white folk your blackness makes you Old Lucifer himself. There is never a good time to realize that your childhood is gone, that it has been rudely taken away by something as simple as a word, a stupid, nasty, filthy, little word. Nigger.

  By that time the oldest black girl harked up a mouthful of spit. For the occasion it may as well have been holy water. Lord, it should have been regarded as Holy Communion. The saliva in her throat was transmuted from mere water to divine disgust. That blessed angel of a child planted her feet and then showered those white girls with her liquid resentment. I swear that may have been the biggest miracle since you turned water to wine.

  I don’t usually approve of such displays of raw anger. I usually counsel taking the higher road. But I must confess, Oh Lord, that the lower road was just fine that day. Because that was the day precious little Maisha was forced to learn what race meant. That was the day she got an inkling that the world is ruined with tribal loyalties and caste systems and blood oaths pettier than any grudge that children might hold. This was different. This was lethal. The havoc that grownups wreak is always more costly. That episode wore on her for a long spell. But racism is nothing if not persistent and cyclical. It came back to my daughter again a couple of years later.

  When she was eight years old, Maisha received a wonderful
gift. She tagged along with a close family friend and her two daughters for a private tour of Disney World. Maisha was incredibly excited. It was her first time in Florida. She got a kick out of pronouncing the nearby town of Kissimmee because it contained the word “kiss.” After Maisha and her two little companions settled into their modest hotel in Kissimmee, they begged the girls’ mother to let them go downstairs to the pool immediately. It was a luxury they didn’t have back home; they were just grateful to be in a warm climate away from the chilly winds of Chicago.

  The girls plunged into the deep end of the pool. They played mermaids. They played Marco Polo. They pretended to be water gymnasts.

  The girls finally took a brief break from play and parked themselves on the pool stairs. Just then the cutest little girl swam their way. She had the biggest blue eyes and natural blonde hair. When she got a gander at Maisha and her two friends, the little girl exclaimed in a matter-of-fact tone, “Niggers.” The girls straightened their backs and screwed up their faces in disbelief. The little white girl stood up in disbelief too, perhaps amazed at the power of her single utterance to evoke such dramatic response. For a moment, they all froze. Maisha and her friends were in shock.

  And then, spontaneously, they all burst out in laughter. It was an all-too-familiar gesture of self-defense. It was a way to stave off the creep of hate inside your brain.

  This is what race hate does to our kids. It often attacks them without warning. It makes them develop a tough exterior to combat the flow of racial insanity into their minds. Thank you, Lord, that Maisha and her friends were wise enough—yes, Lord, a wisdom that only some children in this country have to possess at such an early age—to know that the little white girl was repeating what she heard, that she was reflecting what she’d been taught. Lessons of race that are learned early are hard to get rid of later on. Often they harden into warped perceptions of black folk. Those perceptions turn to cudgels that are wielded against us when we least expect it.

  Lord, Maisha has grown into a brilliant woman of haunting beauty. Thank you for that. She now lives in Miami. But the impact of race remains. Maisha’s fair skin makes her appear to be what the film and television industry terms “ethnically ambiguous.” Last year she left her apartment late one evening to have a quiet dinner near the water. She listened to music on her iPhone to make her nine-block stroll more enjoyable. Maisha turned onto a usually quiet street. But on this night a few more folk were on the block, likely getting off work at one of the nearby hotels. Suddenly a guy was walking behind her talking loudly on his phone. She soon figured out he must be a black man when she heard him say, “Nah, Bruh, I just got off and I’m trying to relax and chill.” That vernacular was like a letter from home. Maisha chuckled as she thought to herself, Yeah man, I feel you!

  As Maisha made a sharp left turn onto a side street, a white man ran toward her with his arms flailing as if to warn her. Maisha ripped out her ear buds, wondering out loud if he was okay. “Yes,” he exclaimed. “But I don’t know if you realized it, but there was a black man walking behind you!” Maisha furrowed her pretty brow. She was doubly irritated. The man didn’t realize that she’s black. And most annoyingly he believed the black man’s skin immediately made him a suspect. “Yeah?!” Maisha responded. “He had to be a threat just because he was walking, breathing, and black?!”

  That’s my girl. She knew, like I know, like most black folk know, that such fear is what gets black folk killed. After all, this is the same state where 17-year-old Trayvon Martin lost his life to a bigoted zealot who was suspicious of Trayvon because, well, he was Trayvon, because a person like him could exist, but shouldn’t have existed, not in that neighborhood on that day.

  * * *

  Oh Lord, this is my great fear for my children, for Maisha, and for Michael, and for Mwata, and for my grandchildren too. I am fearful that some smart-assed hotshot with a badge and a gun will thrill himself to the slow letting of blood from one of my children’s bodies while he blithely ignores their suffering to high-five his sworn “to protect and serve” compatriot in crime. I am sorely afraid that some snap of racist judgment—which, by now, means that it will be justified as rational assessment under threatening circumstances, circumstances that our color always provokes—will cause the hair trigger of some cop’s weapon to fire fury at my children.

  Don’t let it happen, Lord, please don’t let it happen. Oh Lord, I cannot bear the thought of seeing another black person perish because of the weaponized fear and armed hostility of a society that hates black folk in its guts. It can happen to any of us. It can happen to all of us. That is why we are all scared, Lord.

  * * *

  My oldest son, Mwata, is an anesthesiologist who lives in New York. My three children have six degrees, two of them from Ivy League schools. But that is no protection, Lord. Sometimes it even incites anger and resentment. Black success often breeds white rage. Black educational advance will not keep a cop with a terminal degree of black revulsion from aiming his ignorance at my children’s bodies.

  A couple of years ago Mwata and his oldest son, Mosi, went looking in New Jersey for a Mother’s Day gift for Mosi’s mother, Wanda. Mwata had clocked out of work in Brooklyn in mid-afternoon to pick up Mosi from his after school program in Queens. Mwata didn’t own a car at the time so he rented a Zipcar for the day. Mwata and Mosi set out at five o’clock, seeking to avoid getting snarled in traffic. Mwata consulted an app on his phone to chart the quickest route. He placed his phone on the dashboard to avoid getting a ticket for driving and talking on a cell phone. When he made a right turn onto a street in Harlem, the phone slipped from the dashboard and fell to the floor. As he retrieved the phone, the glare in the dark must have attracted the attention of a cop. Mwata could see the flashing lights from a squad car behind him. He heard the command from the cop’s loudspeaker to pull his car over. Mwata was afraid that he had run a stop sign that he didn’t see.

  A white cop, about 5'9" and in his early forties, approached the car and asked to see Mwata’s driver’s license. He offered no reason for stopping my son. The cop went back to his car for about ten minutes before returning to Mwata, who asked the policeman why he pulled him over. “It’s illegal to drive and talk on a cell phone at the same time in New York,” the cop replied. Mwata said that even though he had a Washington, D.C., driver’s license, the law certainly made sense. “However, officer, I wasn’t talking on the phone, nor was I texting, for that matter.”

  I have always impressed on Mwata the need to be extra courteous and not to in any way rile up the police. It is often an exercise in humiliation, one that white folk barely have to think about, but one that can mean the difference between life and death for us. Mwata tried to make nice with the cop. He informed him that as a physician he had spent many years as a member of trauma teams in Chicago, Phoenix, and New York. He told him he was well aware of the dangers of multitasking while operating a vehicle. He said that he had saved, and unfortunately lost, many lives because of tragic car accidents. Mwata told the cop that his phone had slipped to the floor and he simply picked it up. Now Mosi, who had fallen asleep, began to stir.

  The policeman went back and forth with Mwata about driving and talking, and Mwata kept politely insisting that he had broken no law. The cop was growing more belligerent and insulting. Still, Mwata tied to placate him by speaking in measured tones. It didn’t help. He even showed the cop a police benevolent association card with the name and cell phone number of a cop he had just treated a couple of days earlier. The cop told Mwata the policeman on the card wasn’t in his precinct. He coldly said it meant nothing to him. The cop grew more agitated as he tried to extract from Mwata a confession that he had broken the law. He took a couple of steps away from the car and ominously placed his hand on his gun.

  Every time I think of it, Oh Lord, I shudder. The cop asked Mwata a question that haunts him to this day. He asked, nastily, hatefully, if Mw
ata were stupid.

  You crafted Mwata in his mother’s womb, God. You know him inside out. You know the quiet anger my son felt at having acquired a world-class education only to be questioned about his intelligence by a white boy whose IQ translated to an Intimidation Quotient provided by a shield that allowed him to mow down smart niggers with impunity. When Mwata said he didn’t know what he meant, and wondered aloud why he asked such a question, the cop got even more agitated. He snapped that he should take Mwata to jail and that my son had no right to be driving a car. He shouted that if his son weren’t with him that he’d have no problem placing Mwata in handcuffs and locking him up. The cop admitted that the only thing that was stopping him was that he had no place to put the five-year-old. That may have saved Mwata from certain arrest and—who knows?—maybe from an unjust, untimely death.

  It was at that moment that the force of everything rained down on Mwata. The cop’s tone was threatening, his hand was on his gun, and Mosi had awakened from sleep to see his father being disrespected and threatened by an officer of the law. Fear struck Mwata hard. He glanced at his son in the rearview mirror and had one thought.

  I don’t want to die tonight. I don’t want my son to see me shot.

  That brings tears to my eyes even as I chant this prayer. Even as I ask you, Oh God, to give me the strength to soldier on. What a chilling recognition of the high cost for such a simple offense, all because an enraged white male cop was feeling his oats and seeking to humiliate my son. All because he could get away with it. Even if my son had been guilty, his crime wouldn’t have merited the implied threat of lethal force.

  Mwata continued the dance of complete compliance. He nodded his head in agreement with the cop, doing anything he could not to be cut down in front of Mosi, my grandson, who, earlier that day, had been chosen to go to the principal’s office to recite the Pledge of Allegiance over the loudspeaker for the entire school. The bitter paradox wasn’t lost on Mwata or me when I heard the story.