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.