Beloved, some of you seem genuinely surprised that most black folk fear the police. You are sometimes shocked that we think of them as a brutalizing force. You cringe when we say they are out to do everything but serve and protect us. You think we are manufacturing stories about our bad encounters with police. You think that we must have done something wrong to provoke such remorseless cruelty. And yet we have exhausted ourselves telling you how they mistreat us so routinely that it is accepted as the way things are and will always be.
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.