Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

The moral courage of the black masses is overlooked at such moments of crisis. But then how could white America acknowledge our moral courage? It would undercut the rationale for terror that we have faced all along. It would mean that your society, your culture, are culprits in a racial terror that is far more damaging than political terror. The terror we face at your hands is far more sustained. The terror we experience has claimed millions more lives over the long haul of history.

A conservative white commentator bravely pointed out what many of you fail to see. In looking at the forces that might have provoked the evil in Dallas, Leon H. Wolf argued that there’s “a reality that we don’t often talk about—that societies are held together less by laws and force and threats of force than we are by ethereal and fragile concepts like mutual respect and belief in the justness of the system itself.”

That compact has obviously been shattered for blacks. Wolf said it is impossible for the police to do their jobs without the vast majority of citizens believing that our society is basically just and that the police are there to protect them. Wolf asked us to imagine what might happen if a subcommunity perceived that those bonds had dissolved in application to them. We are products of the way our parents view society and institutions, and that, in turn, shapes how we view the world, something we don’t often acknowledge. Beloved, that “we” is really “you.”

Most black folk get this point. We have been arguing it until we were blue in the face. Wolf admitted that as the child of white parents in rural Texas, he was taught the police were there to help him at any time and that he should follow their orders and show great respect for them. Wolf asked white folk to imagine that their parents were black and had grown up in the fifties or sixties in areas where the police force was an instrument of oppression. He asked how that might understandably change those folks’ interactions with the police, and their children’s children’s interactions too, and how it might affect their belief that the police can be held accountable for abusing their power.

Wolf delivered a tough reflection on the events in Dallas. He said that, in order to prevent what happened in Dallas, we must bolster the belief that when cops commit crimes, that the legal system “will punish them accordingly.” Wolf said that if minority communities could believe that this was the case, then there’d be little to no perceived need for reprisal killings.

Wolf acknowledged that “a huge, overwhelming segment of America does not really give a damn what cops do in the course of maintaining order because they assume (probably correctly) that abuse at the hands of the police will never happen to them. As long as the cops keep people away from my door, they have my blessing handling ‘the thugs’ in whatever way they see fit.”

Notice, beloved, that Wolf didn’t take easy refuge in the highly questionable 2016 study—cited in the New York Times and many other media outlets—authored by Harvard professor Roland Fryer, that concluded that black folk are less likely to be shot in a conflict with the police than suspects of other races. The study was doomed by a few factors. First, it only studied ten police departments in three states. It also underplayed the widely varying institutional frameworks that shape how policing is done from department to department. The three states Fryer examined are all members of a White House initiative on policing data that got started in 2015, suggesting that a measure of self-selection, self-fulfillment is at play: departments that already value data-collection and transparency will have different outcomes in any such study because of their laudatory priorities.

It quickly becomes clear that there simply wasn’t enough data in Fryer’s study. Compare the amount of information in Fryer’s study to that of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report database, which collects data from thousands of police departments across the land. The data Fryer studied in three states over 16 years is about equal to what the FBI database is able to collect in just two to three years. To quote the philosopher Shawn Carter, “We don’t believe you, you need more people.” Fryer concluded that there’s scant statistical difference between the races when the police stop them. But the basis for his conclusion is troubling. Fryer studied folk who had already been stopped by the police, and were then subsequently killed. He never asks—plain avoids—the question of whether black folk are more likely to be stopped in the first place, and whether they’re more likely to be stopped for no good reason.

The answer to both questions is yes. A serious flaw riddled Fryer’s data: it did not distinguish between the likelihood of getting shot when being accosted by police for a traffic infraction or for shooting up a church—only the likelihood of getting shot. As noted journalist Dara Lind cogently argues, “When people talk about racial disparities in police use of force, they’re usually not asking, Is a black American stopped by police treated the same as a white American in the same circumstances? . . . They’re saying that black Americans are more likely to get stopped by police, which makes them more likely to get killed.”

*

Beloved, surely you understand how vexed we are by our situation. Surely you understand how the legacy of terror stalks us at every turn, dogs our every step. Surely you understand that police brutality pounds our lives in unrelenting waves. Can you not see that too many cops kill us off like animals without a second thought?

For God’s sake, imagine little Johnny being executed because he drank too much liquor and mouthed off at the cops. Imagine little Jill getting her long blonde hair yanked and her arms pulled behind her back and being slapped around and beat down because she dared ask why she was being stopped. Or being thrown around her classroom because she didn’t want to give up her phone. Imagine seeing video of cops high-fiving each other after one of them heartlessly shoots down your unarmed buddy Larry for no good reason. Imagine hearing one cop whisper to a fellow cop that he should make sure his body camera is turned off.

Beloved, you must not be defensive when you hear our hurt. We who proclaim the terror of cops do not hate all cops. We hate what cops have been made to be. We hate how cops hate us. We hate that cops don’t treat us the way they treat you.

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