Tears We Cannot Stop

by Michael Eric Dyson

  We learn how to modify our speech in the face of cops. We temper our passion and modulate our tone so that we barely register as being there. Do you have “the talk” with your kids to warn them within an inch of their lives not to sass the police for fear that they will return home to you in a body bag? I don’t mean the usual conversation all parents have with their kids about respecting the cops. Sheer terror and outright fear motivate our discussions.

  If you’re old enough, and your birth certificate says “Negro” like mine does—from the early 1900s to the early 1980s all African American birth certificates labeled us as such—you’ll know it’s the same way we were taught to speak to white folk in the south. You keep that kind of manual in your backpack? It tells you to make sure to lower your eyes, say yes sir, no smart mouthing, no anger, no resentment, just complete, total compliance without a whiff of personality or humanity. Ever had to endure that humiliation, my friends? We must believe that cops are gods; we are nothing. And the more we remember our nothingness, become experts in the philosophy of nothingness, the better chance we have to survive. Does any of this sound familiar to you? It is our routine, our daily ritual of survival.

  When I was seventeen years old, I was with my brother Anthony and a childhood friend, both a year older than me, and we were stopped by four Detroit cops. They were patrolling the neighborhood in an unmarked police vehicle. This was in the mid-seventies when we cowered in the shadow of the infamous Detroit Police Department task force called STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), which was instituted after the 1967 riots. The unit certainly brought a great deal of stress to black folk in the streets of Detroit. During its two-and-a-half-year existence, STRESS was accused of killing 22 citizens and arresting hundreds more for no good cause. White cops routinely targeted poor black communities. Ours was no different.

  The big four amplified their command for us to get out of the car over their blaring megaphone. Then they approached us. The plainclothes officer snatched me out of the backseat. We were no strangers to their menace and naturally assumed the position against our car. The plainclothes officer who had yanked me from the car announced that our Ford Galaxie appeared to be stolen. That much was true. It had been stolen and returned to us more than a month prior. But the police had retrieved the car without removing it from their list of heisted vehicles. I wanted to quickly, but carefully, prove that the car had been legally returned. I wanted to prove that it belonged to our father, and that we had the proper ownership documents for it. I was quite nervous. Two of the officers had drawn their guns. We had all been frisked.

  “Sir, I am reaching into my back pocket to get my wallet that has the car’s registration,” I said to one of the plainclothes officers. Before I could fetch it the cop brought the butt of his gun sharply across my back and knocked me to the ground.

  “Nigger, if you move again without me telling you to I’ll put a bullet through your fucking head.”

  I rose to my feet. Slowly. Deliberately. Showing complete deference. Barely breathing. Barely raising my head above a supplicating bow. Having mastered my body, having, basically, whipped me, lashed me on the plantation, the officer granted me permission to retrieve what felt like my freedom papers—the car’s registration. But that registration was proxy for my breath. The cop permitted me to live. That was the victory.

  The cops ran the tags, and less than fifteen minutes later, they concluded what we already knew: the car belonged to my father and we had the right to drive it. They offered no apology, and without a single word, with just a nod, they sent us on our way.

  This was hardly the first time I’d had encounters with the cops, all bad, all with the promise of punishment for the slightest gesture of manhood, all with the possibility of violence lurking in the air.

  Could you take that, beloved? Could you believe that most cops are good and well-intentioned when the history of harm forever hangs above your heads?

  My friends, many of you have no idea of this level of anguish. You think that if we merely obey the cop’s commands he or she won’t feel threatened by us, won’t view us as the roadblock to their return home that night. You think that if we keep ourselves in check nothing bad will happen.

  Where have you been? Have you not seen the videos? These videos make it possible to see what has always been the case. Now there is proof of our suffering. Have you not seen how no matter what we do the cops come for us? That no matter how pleasant our speech, how lowly our spirits, how tame our bodies, how domesticated our gestures, we are read as a menace and threat by so many cops? “I feared for my life,” many cops who have shot unarmed black folk have said. Not a gun in sight. No attack in the offing. And yet we are consistently, without conscience, cut down in the streets.

  Can you honestly say that if we just comply with the cops’ wishes that we’ll be safe? How many more black folk do you have to see get sent to their deaths by cops while doing exactly what they were told before you’ll believe us? You’ve seen the video of the young black man in South Carolina who goes to retrieve his wallet just as the Highway Patrol trooper instructs, and yet is still filled with lead for no other reason than he is who he is—a black male, a ferocious subversion of all that is decent and humane and worthy of space on earth.

  How can we conclude anything different? How can you? If you’re honest you’ll see that the police force is a metaphysical collective with a gift for racial punishment that has never viewed black folk as human beings, because the law that they are charged to enforce has never seen us as human beings. And the Constitution that the law rests on did not write us in as fully human.

  Can you truly say that you can’t understand why most black folk fear, sometimes hate, the police? I’ve experienced that humiliation on a number of occasions. They’ve embarrassed me in front of my brother and my son. Most painfully, they’ve embarrassed me in front of myself. Every encounter with the police splits us into two selves, one a quiet, brooding figure cursing the cops from within, the other a dawdling doppelganger, a concrete-staring, shuffling Negro we are ashamed to admit lives inside of us.

  Terror and shame go hand in hand. There is fear in realizing that we are helpless to persuade others that we are human. In that moment, there is also deep shame, shame that you do not take our humanity for granted. We are ashamed that there is nothing we can do to keep you from seeing us as worthless.

  * * *

  I felt that same shame when I was a graduate student at Princeton in the mid-eighties. I was excited that my eight-year-old son Mike had come to visit me during the Christmas holiday. I hadn’t had the chance to see him a great deal since my divorce from his mother in the early eighties. I wanted to do father things with him. Catch up on movies. Play a few video games. Toss a football or play catch with a baseball and mitt. Do some reading together.

  On the first day of his visit, Mike and I headed over to my bank to get a cash advance on my MasterCard. I handed the young service rep my card. I felt good since I’d just paid my bill a couple of weeks before. He disappeared into his office. Before long he returned, announcing that I couldn’t get any money, and worse, that he’d have to keep my card. When I asked why, he told me that the bank that issued my card had requested that he retain it.

  I was confused. I was in good standing. The young rep and I went back and forth until I requested a meeting with his manager.

  “He’ll tell you the same thing that I’ve been telling you,” he said as he curtly dismissed me.

  I repeatedly insisted that he get his manager. The rep huffed and puffed his way to the boss’s office to resentfully convey my message.

  Mike asked me what the problem was. I assured him there must be a mistake and that it would all be cleared up shortly. His face filled with “My dad can handle it” confidence. After waiting for nearly ten minutes, I caught the service rep and a man I took to be the manager in my peripheral vision as
they headed to an empty desk. The manager opened the drawer and pulled out a pair of scissors. The blood began to boil in my veins. Those scissors could only mean one thing: he was going to cut my card in two, and with it, my dignity. The manager hadn’t had the decency or respect to speak to me directly before obviously choosing to take action.

  “Sir, if you’re about to do what I fear you will, can we please talk first?”

  Of course he ignored me and sliced my card in half before what had now become a considerable crowd. I bolted from my seat and followed him as he walked off without speaking to me. Mike trailed close behind me, crying, tearfully asking me over and over again, “Daddy, what’s going on?”

  I hurried into the manager’s office and begged him for privacy to spare me further embarrassment.

  “Don’t let him close the door,” the manager barked as he waved three other employees into his office. He wasn’t going to face the angry black man alone, a man who was only angry because he had not been treated with respect.

  I snatched the pieces of my card from his hands. I told him I was a reputable member of the community. I told him I was a good customer of his bank. I said that had I been wearing a three-piece suit, and not the black running suit I had on, and had I been a white man, he would have at least spoken to me in private. He would have spared me the humiliation of having what felt like my manhood snipped before a leering crowd of onlookers who saw only an enraged and deflated black man. I insisted that a mistake had been made and that my bill had been paid.

  The manager showed no sympathy. His face was flushed. He pointed his index finger beneath his desk drawer and pushed a button.

  “I’m calling the police on you.”

  I became even angrier. I fantasized about venting my spleen on his pasty face. I sped through the likely scenario in my mind. I would lunge at his neck. His coworkers would join the melee. They’d all attack me and maybe hurt my son.

  That calmed me down. I knew that if I stayed it was likely the police wouldn’t hear me either and I’d only end up arrested in front of my son, leaving him even more mortified than he was already. I grabbed Mike’s hand and beat a hasty retreat right as the police were pulling up.

  Later, I made several phone calls. The bank’s board eventually apologized to me and issued me a new MasterCard. But the incident reminded me yet again that no matter how much Ivy League education I had, I was still a nigger in the eyes of many white folk.

  * * *

  Beloved, to be black in America is to live in terror. That terror is fast. It is glimpsed in cops giving chase to black men and shooting them in their backs without cause. Or the terror is slow. It chips like lead paint on a tenement wall, or flows like contaminated water through corroded pipes that poison black bodies. It is slow like genocide inside prison walls where folk who should not be there perish.

  Maybe the reason you can’t feel our terror is because you don’t live in our skin. Our skin, our bodies, are relentlessly monitored and policed. Our skin bleeds the secret of our fear in scrapes with law enforcement’s view of “broken windows.” We endure the terror of being stopped and frisked and sent to jail for possessing less than an ounce of weed that the cops discovered while looking for someone who stole beer and “fit our description.” But they all fit our description—black and breathing—at least at the beginning of the encounter.

  We think of the police who kill us for no good reason as ISIS. That shouldn’t surprise you. Cops rain down terror on our heads with relentless fire and make us afraid to walk the streets. At any moment, without warning, a blue-clad monster will swoop down on us to snatch our lives from us and say that it was because we were selling cigarettes, or compact discs, or breathing too much for his comfort, or speaking too abrasively for his taste. Or running, or standing still, or talking back, or being silent, or doing as you say, or not doing as you say fast enough.

  Like all terrorists they hate us for who we are. They hate us because of the bad things they—and you—think we do. Like breathe. Live. That is our sin. Death is our only redemption. You do not condemn these cops. To do so, you would have to condemn the culture of whiteness that produced them—that produced you. Racial terror is not just an act, but a habit, not luck, but a skill, a genius for snuffing out black life over mundane things—a wallet, some candy, loud music, a cell phone, a toy gun, shopping, the failure to signal, or other minor offenses that white people live to tell us about when they commit them.

  It is easy for you to be oblivious to what black people must remember. Memory is survival, and everything about us, around us, on us, even our cells, remembers. Even bodies wrapped in Sunday dress or business wear can’t really mask the memory. Our children cloak their bodies in oversize clothing to smother the hate that might one day suffocate them. Our jewelry is a talisman to ward off the evil that might roll up on us when we aren’t looking. We know that it is hard to run from what we can’t see coming our way and we never want to be caught off guard by your fatal whimsy. We don’t know how or when one of you might pounce. You might be dressed in bright, well-pressed, angry blue with shining accessories meant to club or kill us. Or you might snuff us wearing the jersey of a star who was once a poor black boy who made it all the way from the ghetto to your fantasy. You don’t think of him as black. You think of us as nothing else but black. It is a blackness you despise or fear or resent or simply don’t understand or care to know. And that difference is the margin of life and death for us.

  Dear Gentle White Listener, do you want to know the harsh realities of which I speak? Then let me take you on a brief Tour of Terror.

  * * *

  Beloved, you must understand that for us terror pulses in the body of the cop. The police come loaded with far bigger weapons than they carry on their hips. The heat they pack is drawn from history. It’s all there next to their badges and guns and their Tasers and mace. Spreading state-sanctioned violence. Menacing black communities. Seeing blackness as criminal. Punishing back talk. Killing blacks who run.

  The policeman has never been neutral to us. From the start he was not there to protect or serve us, but to protect and serve you, which often meant getting rid of us. The policing of the black body started in slavery when enslaved men and women had handcuffs slapped on their wrists and irons fixed on their legs as they got jammed into the hulls of slave ships.

  The nation got up slave patrols to bring back the enslaved who ran away—to stop, question, and frisk them, just like many of us are treated today, to monitor, search, and arrest them, to beat them down when they were recaptured. Free Africans weren’t so free. As many of you learned by watching 12 Years a Slave, free Africans were routinely tracked by bounty hunters and sold into slavery. The line between enslaved and free was never sure, and the word of a free African meant little in a southern court when pitted against the claims of white bounty hunters. When slavery ended, the slave patrols ceased, but the need to police black space did not, so the Klan and police squads rose up in their place. The rapper KRS-One drew a direct line from the plantation to postindustrial urban America phonetically when he pronounced “overseer” as “officer.”

  In the fifties and sixties, many local police officers swore by white supremacy, and some even secretly joined the Klan to terrorize and kill black folk. The Klan was legal, but, still, officers of the law shouldn’t join a white terrorist organization to illegally kill black folk. Jimmie Lee Jackson was a black, unarmed Vietnam War veteran whose murder in a café by white Alabama State trooper James Bonard Fowler in 1965 helped to inspire the Selma to Montgomery marches. It was not until 42 years later in 2007 that Fowler was finally charged with homicide in Jackson’s death, pleading guilty to one count of second-degree manslaughter and serving five months of a six-month sentence. When Fowler shot him, Jackson managed to flee the café, but was clubbed by other state troopers before he was eventually taken to a hospital where he died eight days later.
Jackson relayed the story of his shooting and beating to his lawyer, Oscar Adams, in the hospital in the presence of FBI agents. The FBI often dragged their feet on official civil rights investigations and suppressed information about assassination plots against movement leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., who referred in his “I Have a Dream” speech to the “unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”

  Since the seventies the police have battled efforts to integrate their forces so that they would reflect the communities they serve. They have often been a vicious occupying force in our neighborhoods. White cops have frequently tried out their racist talk and ugly behavior on black and brown officers before assaulting the broader community. When politicians talk of restoring trust between black folk and the cops, they are seriously deluded, or they have a gigantic case of amnesia. Black and brown folk have never trusted the cops.

  You cannot know the terror that black folk feel when a cop car makes its approach and the history of racism and violence comes crashing down on us. The police car is a mobile plantation, and the siren is the sound of dogs hunting us down in the dark woods.

  My friends, please don’t pretend you can’t understand how we feel this way. And if you claim that slavery and Jim Crow and the sixties are ancient history, you know your words are lies before they leave your lips. How could that history be erased so quickly?

  How can all of that be got rid of overnight? How can it be washed, without great effort, from the mind of a white cop who confronts black folk? How can we deny the structures, systems, and social forces that shape how black folk are seen and treated?

  Beloved, the way we feel about cops is how many of you feel in the face of terror. And yet, long before 9/11, long before Al-Qaeda, long before ISIS, we felt that too, at your hands, at the hands of your ancestors, at the hands of your kin who are our cops.

  (Do you ever thank your lucky stars that black folk have not done to you what terrorists who despise this country have done? These terrorists claim their actions are driven by hate for our nation. Does it ever give you pause and make you say, “Thank God that black folk never—well, almost never—poisoned our food when we made them cook for us. They never killed our children when we made them watch over them. They rarely conspired to murder us in our sleep when we forced them to share intimate space with us. They never rose up in unison against us because we raped their women, murdered their children, and castrated their men.” Does that ever cross your minds?)