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.