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.
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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?)