You cannot know how we secretly curse the cowardice of whites who know what I write is true, but dare not say it. Neither will your smug dismissal of unenlightened and bigoted whites satisfy us any longer. That they’re “poor white trash” or uncouth rednecks and that you’re better than they are, that they don’t have your social pedigree or education. As if you can really separate yourselves from them. As if it’s only a matter of personal belief and not social learning and behavior. The distinction between them and you is more self-serving than critical. In the end it only makes the slaughter of our people worse to know that your disapproval of those white folk has spared your reputations but not our lives.
You do not know that after we get angry with you, we get even angrier with ourselves, because we don’t really know how to make you stop.
Do you really think that black people bring this terror upon ourselves? That a woman who’s being intimidated by a cop and calls 911 brings it on herself? How absurd is it to have to call the cops on the cops and then have the cop get mad and not be disciplined or punished? How absurd is it that not a single cop got held accountable for Freddie Gray’s death, as if he somehow snapped his own spine to spite the Baltimore police?
Most of you say nothing, and your silence is not only deafening, it is defeating. And when there is white response, it is often white noise, inane chatter accompanied by the wringing of white hands. There is white frustration at just how complex the problem is and how hard it is for you to tell from the angles of the video just what went down.
Most of us keep our rage inside. We are afraid that when those tears begin to flow we cannot stop them. Instead we damage our insides with high blood pressure, worry our minds with mental distress, or sicken our souls with depression. We pray to God for our sanity. Yet the aggression buried deep inside us sometimes blocks our belief and makes us functional atheists.
* * *
Part of our problem, beloved, is that the police bring overwhelming credibility and authority to the table. Our troubles are worsened when politicians insist that cops and unarmed black folk are equal. Police have badges and batons and Tasers and bullets and guns. Police begin with a shield of honor and incorruptibility. Police start with the support of the state.
We are hardly equal.
Police start with the belief that we must protect our cops as if the history of racial terror doesn’t exist. Police seem to believe they possess what we might term copistemology, or unquestionable knowledge of black guilt and moral blasphemy. There is no need to prove it in court. The streets are where their knowledge is tested as they answer with a billy club or a bullet. Copistemology apparently works wonders. It lets cops know when they should break into the home of a mentally challenged black woman and fatally shoot her while she cradles a child and a shotgun. (But there seem to be gaps in cops’ knowledge too. They didn’t know that the same woman blamed the police for a miscarriage she experienced after an earlier arrest.)
Cops seem to know when to shoot and kill a mentally disturbed black woman as her child watched from the backseat after she changed her mind and drove away from the White House and posed a mortal threat to no one. Cops always seem to know that the black person who is eccentric, or mentally deranged, deserves to die. Yet they also seem to know that the demented white bigot who mows down nine black folk in a southern church deserves to be treated to fast food before being calmly booked. Cops seem to know that all those white folk who come at cops with swinging fists or menacing demeanors or drawn guns don’t really mean them any harm.
Beloved, surely you must see that cops loathe being held accountable for their actions, especially when it comes to us. The cops and their advocates claim that only a few rogue cops give a bad name to the rest. But isn’t that like claiming that most of one’s cells are healthy and that only a few are cancerous?
That metaphor of a few bad apples doesn’t begin to get at the root of the problem. Police violence may be more like a poisoned water stream that pollutes the entire system. To argue that only a few bad cops cause police terror is like relegating racism to a few bigots. Bigots are surely a problem, but they are sustained by systems of belief and perception, by widely held stereotypes and social practice.
Cops are human, they tell us. They are right. That also means that cops cannot possibly be immune to the destructive beliefs about black folk. Their fear and suspicion of black folk doesn’t come from nowhere. It materializes the cumulative history of injustice toward black folk. That history gets reduced to intuition about any black person and their likelihood of presenting a threat to the cop’s life. Some “I feared for my life” testimony is pure hogwash. It is the cop’s attempt, after the fact, to justify his criminal actions. But it is just as lethal when the cop honestly believes that he is in danger just by being in the presence of a black person, no matter how much the objective circumstances suggest otherwise.
To pretend that the solution is to bring back a lost balance between black folk and cops ignores history, ignores racial terror, ignores how things are not, and have never been, equal. It is to ignore the even more insistent strains of Coptopia, an ideal state of affairs where police can display ghastly inventiveness in traumatizing or disappearing black and brown bodies while demanding even greater public reverence.
* * *
The myths and demands of Coptopia flare when there is an egregious crime against the police, like the assassination of officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge. In both cities a young black man took aim at the cops through his hateful crosshairs and cut down innocent public servants. Both men expressed their outrage at law enforcement’s seeming war on vulnerable and innocent black folk. The vast majority of black people sided with the police and not the men whose twisted actions spilled innocent blood.
Yet in each case the advocates of Coptopia insisted on complete empathy with the cops’ outlook. They also sought to erase the long and vile history of police terror. They insisted that Black Lives Matter was racist and a spur to violence against cops, even though BLM spoke out immediately against each man’s actions. Neither of these poisonous young assassins was nurtured in a black movement. They were products of our military. Each was taught to use lethal force in the service of his country. These veterans may have both suffered from PTSD. Imagine if every time a white person committed a crime, especially a mass shooting, all white people had to apologize.
Beloved, you should be honest even when it hurts to do so. It is little wonder that these men twisted their anger at the terror black folk face into a perverted plot to murder innocent cops. The real wonder is that more black folk haven’t gone berserk like these men did.
The moral courage of the black masses is overlooked at such moments of crisis. But then how could white America acknowledge our moral courage? It would undercut the rationale for terror that we have faced all along. It would mean that your society, your culture, are culprits in a racial terror that is far more damaging than political terror. The terror we face at your hands is far more sustained. The terror we experience has claimed millions more lives over the long haul of history.
A conservative white commentator bravely pointed out what many of you fail to see. In looking at the forces that might have provoked the evil in Dallas, Leon H. Wolf argued that there’s “a reality that we don’t often talk about—that societies are held together less by laws and force and threats of force than we are by ethereal and fragile concepts like mutual respect and belief in the justness of the system itself.”
That compact has obviously been shattered for blacks. Wolf said it is impossible for the police to do their jobs without the vast majority of citizens believing that our society is basically just and that the police are there to protect them. Wolf asked us to imagine what might happen if a subcommunity perceived that those bonds had dissolved in application to them. We are products of the way our parents view society and institutions, and that, in turn, shapes how
we view the world, something we don’t often acknowledge. Beloved, that “we” is really “you.”
Most black folk get this point. We have been arguing it until we were blue in the face. Wolf admitted that as the child of white parents in rural Texas, he was taught the police were there to help him at any time and that he should follow their orders and show great respect for them. Wolf asked white folk to imagine that their parents were black and had grown up in the fifties or sixties in areas where the police force was an instrument of oppression. He asked how that might understandably change those folks’ interactions with the police, and their children’s children’s interactions too, and how it might affect their belief that the police can be held accountable for abusing their power.
Wolf delivered a tough reflection on the events in Dallas. He said that, in order to prevent what happened in Dallas, we must bolster the belief that when cops commit crimes, that the legal system “will punish them accordingly.” Wolf said that if minority communities could believe that this was the case, then there’d be little to no perceived need for reprisal killings.
Wolf acknowledged that “a huge, overwhelming segment of America does not really give a damn what cops do in the course of maintaining order because they assume (probably correctly) that abuse at the hands of the police will never happen to them. As long as the cops keep people away from my door, they have my blessing handling ‘the thugs’ in whatever way they see fit.”
Notice, beloved, that Wolf didn’t take easy refuge in the highly questionable 2016 study—cited in the New York Times and many other media outlets—authored by Harvard professor Roland Fryer, that concluded that black folk are less likely to be shot in a conflict with the police than suspects of other races. The study was doomed by a few factors. First, it only studied ten police departments in three states. It also underplayed the widely varying institutional frameworks that shape how policing is done from department to department. The three states Fryer examined are all members of a White House initiative on policing data that got started in 2015, suggesting that a measure of self-selection, self-fulfillment is at play: departments that already value data-collection and transparency will have different outcomes in any such study because of their laudatory priorities.
It quickly becomes clear that there simply wasn’t enough data in Fryer’s study. Compare the amount of information in Fryer’s study to that of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report database, which collects data from thousands of police departments across the land. The data Fryer studied in three states over 16 years is about equal to what the FBI database is able to collect in just two to three years. To quote the philosopher Shawn Carter, “We don’t believe you, you need more people.” Fryer concluded that there’s scant statistical difference between the races when the police stop them. But the basis for his conclusion is troubling. Fryer studied folk who had already been stopped by the police, and were then subsequently killed. He never asks—plain avoids—the question of whether black folk are more likely to be stopped in the first place, and whether they’re more likely to be stopped for no good reason.
The answer to both questions is yes. A serious flaw riddled Fryer’s data: it did not distinguish between the likelihood of getting shot when being accosted by police for a traffic infraction or for shooting up a church—only the likelihood of getting shot. As noted journalist Dara Lind cogently argues, “When people talk about racial disparities in police use of force, they’re usually not asking, Is a black American stopped by police treated the same as a white American in the same circumstances? . . . They’re saying that black Americans are more likely to get stopped by police, which makes them more likely to get killed.”
* * *
Beloved, surely you understand how vexed we are by our situation. Surely you understand how the legacy of terror stalks us at every turn, dogs our every step. Surely you understand that police brutality pounds our lives in unrelenting waves. Can you not see that too many cops kill us off like animals without a second thought?
For God’s sake, imagine little Johnny being executed because he drank too much liquor and mouthed off at the cops. Imagine little Jill getting her long blonde hair yanked and her arms pulled behind her back and being slapped around and beat down because she dared ask why she was being stopped. Or being thrown around her classroom because she didn’t want to give up her phone. Imagine seeing video of cops high-fiving each other after one of them heartlessly shoots down your unarmed buddy Larry for no good reason. Imagine hearing one cop whisper to a fellow cop that he should make sure his body camera is turned off.
Beloved, you must not be defensive when you hear our hurt. We who proclaim the terror of cops do not hate all cops. We hate what cops have been made to be. We hate how cops hate us. We hate that cops don’t treat us the way they treat you.
And we hate that you won’t deal with the elephant in the room. Black and brown cops have been the victims of racism themselves. They are the guinea pigs of racism on a police force they are often seduced, or coerced, into lying for. Black police often face harsher barriers to promotion. They often witness firsthand the vile bigotry of white police officers but are afraid to report those officers for fear of a blue backlash. Or think of Ohio black police officer Nakia Jones, who caused a firestorm of controversy for telling the truth about how some white cops target black folk for mayhem. “So why don’t we just keep it real: If you are that officer that knows good and well you’ve got a god complex . . . you are afraid of people who don’t look like you—you have no business in that uniform,” Jones said on a Facebook video. “You have no business being a police officer . . . If you are that officer that’s prejudiced, take that uniform off and put a KKK hoodie on.” Cops like Jones are either isolated or silenced. We hate that too.
We hate that body cameras seem to make no real difference, and police often refuse to share the footage. We hate that the folk who share the videos of the cops killing us are often harassed. Chris LeDay, a 34-year-old Atlanta Air Force veteran, didn’t film, but he did post the video of Alton Sterling, a husband and father of five, being shot by a cop outside of a Louisiana convenience store in July 2016. The next day, military security detained LeDay at his job on Dobbins Air Reserve Base as he passed through a routine checkpoint. He was initially told he fit the description of a black man wanted for assault and battery. It was only after he was taken in handcuffs and leg shackles to DeKalb County jail that he learned that he faced a charge of “failure to appear” on an unpaid traffic ticket from 2014. We hate that you do this.
We hate that you won’t admit that if your children or kin were being killed like us you wouldn’t turn your heads or avert your eyes or accept it as business as usual or the price we must pay to keep our society safe. You’d be beside yourself if your children were slaughtered, and then had their slaughter justified on television, and on social media, as their names were heedlessly dragged through the mud because they playfully posed as a gangsta and posted the photo to their Facebook or Twitter account. How many of your kids do that too? Yet they grow up to be bankers and lawyers or cops who kill black people because those black people provoke suspicion by doing the very thing those same cops did when they were young. But they didn’t end up dead. They end up making us dead. We hate that.
Beloved, one thing is clear: until we confront the terror that black folk have faced in this country from the time we first breathed American air, we will continue to die at the hands of cops whose whiteness is far more important in explaining their behavior than the dangerous circumstances they face and the impossible choices they confront.
We do not hate you, white America. We hate that you terrorize us and then lie about it and then make us feel crazy for having to explain to you how crazy it makes us feel. We cannot hate you, not really, not most of us; that is our gift to you. We cannot halt you; that is our curse.
VI.
Benediction
R.E
.S.P.O.N.S.I.V.E.
This old man was very wise, and he could answer questions that was almost impossible for people to answer. So some people went to him one day, two young people, and said, “We’re going to trick this guy today. We’re going to catch a bird, and we’re going to carry it to this old man. And we’re going to ask him, ‘This that we hold in our hands today, is it alive or is it dead?’ If he says ‘Dead,’ we’re going to turn it loose and let it fly. But if he says, ‘Alive,’ we’re going to crush it.” So they walked up to this old man, and they said, “This that we hold in our hands today, is it alive or is it dead?” He looked at the young people and he smiled. And he said, “It’s in your hands.”
—Fannie Lou Hamer
Beloved, in this sermon I have shared with you from the depths of my heart what I believe to be true about the state of race in America. As we prepare to part, I offer you a few practical suggestions about what you as individuals can do to make things better.
First, my friends, you must make reparation. I know that you may not have followed the fierce debate over reparations, and even if you have, you may not support the idea. If affirmative action is a hard sell for many of you, then reparations, the notion that the descendants of enslaved Africans should receive from the society that exploited them some form of compensation, is beyond the pale. But surely you can see the justice of making reparation, even if you can’t make it happen politically. Please don’t say that your ancestors didn’t own slaves. Your white privilege has not been hampered by that fact. Black sweat built the country you now reside in, and you continue to enjoy the fruits of that labor.
Tears We Cannot Stop Page 15
