“You’d better not be lying to me, young man. If you’re lying, and our dogs catch a whiff of your scent, they’ll track you down and chew you up real good.”
That is a snippet from the first real world interaction I remember having with a police officer. I was fourteen years old, walking through an unfamiliar neighborhood to meet up with a friend, when two police cruisers turned the corner and hemmed me in. After shining his flashlight directly in my face and shouting at me to keep my hands where he could see them, the officer in the driver’s seat of the closest car started interrogating me about who I was, where I was from, and where I was going. He and his partners were on the hunt for two car theft suspects, and according to them I “fit the description”. After thorough questioning they let me go about my business, but not before leaving me with that gem about what might happen if the canines caught my scent.
The next time I “fit the description” was about eight years later. I was waiting at a bus stop on my way to the low wage retail job I was working to get by during the 2008 recession. Just as the bus arrived and I got in line to get on, a police officer approached and instructed me to step out of the line so he could ask me a few questions. He had that puffed chest, carrying heavy suitcases look of a man who enjoys his authority a bit too much. He asked for my ID and made a big show of examining it thoroughly, peppered me with questions about where I was coming from and where I was going (despite the fact that I was clearly wearing a retail work uniform and catching a bus during a typical commute time), and kept the bus waiting on me for more than five minutes, with nearly all the passengers gawking at me through the windows. He explained to me that he was on the lookout for a burglary suspect and that he stopped me because I “fit the description”. He told me I was free to go, sans apology of course, and I got on the bus to enjoy the awkward experience of an entire busload of eyeballs on me as I made my way to my seat.
Those interactions with the police are seared into my memory, but I think they’ve had less of an impact on me than the cumulative psychological effects of the less memorable, micro-indignities I’ve experienced throughout my life: Being greeted with a fist bump by older white men who had greeted their white counterparts with a normal handshake just moments earlier; being called “Tyrone” by random drunken college kids; overhearing white guys who I thought were my friends casually drop the word “nigger” after getting a few too many drinks in them...as if a bottle of tequila were a time warp back to 1940; meeting the father of a girl I dated in college who barely bothered to hide his displeasure at his daughter dating a black guy. The list goes on, but I think you get the point.
Most people who know me have never heard me tell those stories before. Mostly for philosophical reasons - I’ve long felt strongly that perpetuating a victimhood complex is not the path to empowerment for black Americans. This has gotten me into some spirited debates with friends of mine, and it’s the reason I’ve often been critical of Ta-Nehisi Coates and some elements of the BLM movement. But the murder of George Floyd has created a shift in consciousness that seems to demand that black men and women share their experiences of racism with those who up to this point may have only had a vague, intellectual understanding of what it means to be black in America. The image of a white man dressed in the uniform of institutional power with his knee against the neck of a defenseless and shackled black man isn’t just an atrocity caught on camera - it’s a symbol of a greater truth: that racism isn’t just a concept to be “woke” to...it’s a physical reality that has defined the black experience since our nation’s inception. We were born with a knee on our necks.
I now feel that this is the moment to pull back the curtain on that reality as far as possible. Not to shame white people or demand that they confront their “white privilege” (a term that has always sounded a bit too much like “original sin” for my taste), but to make human civilization better by sharing our burdens. Because a burden shared is a burden lifted...and with that burden lifted from our necks, we might one day find it easier to breathe.
No comments:
Post a Comment