And we hate that you won’t deal with the elephant in the room. Black and brown cops have been the victims of racism themselves. They are the guinea pigs of racism on a police force they are often seduced, or coerced, into lying for. Black police often face harsher barriers to promotion. They often witness firsthand the vile bigotry of white police officers but are afraid to report those officers for fear of a blue backlash. Or think of Ohio black police officer Nakia Jones, who caused a firestorm of controversy for telling the truth about how some white cops target black folk for mayhem. “So why don’t we just keep it real: If you are that officer that knows good and well you’ve got a god complex . . . you are afraid of people who don’t look like you—you have no business in that uniform,” Jones said on a Facebook video. “You have no business being a police officer . . . If you are that officer that’s prejudiced, take that uniform off and put a KKK hoodie on.” Cops like Jones are either isolated or silenced. We hate that too.
We hate that body cameras seem to make no real difference, and police often refuse to share the footage. We hate that the folk who share the videos of the cops killing us are often harassed. Chris LeDay, a 34-year-old Atlanta Air Force veteran, didn’t film, but he did post the video of Alton Sterling, a husband and father of five, being shot by a cop outside of a Louisiana convenience store in July 2016. The next day, military security detained LeDay at his job on Dobbins Air Reserve Base as he passed through a routine checkpoint. He was initially told he fit the description of a black man wanted for assault and battery. It was only after he was taken in handcuffs and leg shackles to DeKalb County jail that he learned that he faced a charge of “failure to appear” on an unpaid traffic ticket from 2014. We hate that you do this.
We hate that you won’t admit that if your children or kin were being killed like us you wouldn’t turn your heads or avert your eyes or accept it as business as usual or the price we must pay to keep our society safe. You’d be beside yourself if your children were slaughtered, and then had their slaughter justified on television, and on social media, as their names were heedlessly dragged through the mud because they playfully posed as a gangsta and posted the photo to their Facebook or Twitter account. How many of your kids do that too? Yet they grow up to be bankers and lawyers or cops who kill black people because those black people provoke suspicion by doing the very thing those same cops did when they were young. But they didn’t end up dead. They end up making us dead. We hate that.
Beloved, one thing is clear: until we confront the terror that black folk have faced in this country from the time we first breathed American air, we will continue to die at the hands of cops whose whiteness is far more important in explaining their behavior than the dangerous circumstances they face and the impossible choices they confront.
We do not hate you, white America. We hate that you terrorize us and then lie about it and then make us feel crazy for having to explain to you how crazy it makes us feel. We cannot hate you, not really, not most of us; that is our gift to you. We cannot halt you; that is our curse.
VI.
Benediction
R.E.S.P.O.N.S.I.V.E.
This old man was very wise, and he could answer questions that was almost impossible for people to answer. So some people went to him one day, two young people, and said, “We’re going to trick this guy today. We’re going to catch a bird, and we’re going to carry it to this old man. And we’re going to ask him, ‘This that we hold in our hands today, is it alive or is it dead?’ If he says ‘Dead,’ we’re going to turn it loose and let it fly. But if he says, ‘Alive,’ we’re going to crush it.” So they walked up to this old man, and they said, “This that we hold in our hands today, is it alive or is it dead?” He looked at the young people and he smiled. And he said, “It’s in your hands.”
—Fannie Lou Hamer
Beloved, in this sermon I have shared with you from the depths of my heart what I believe to be true about the state of race in America. As we prepare to part, I offer you a few practical suggestions about what you as individuals can do to make things better.
First, my friends, you must make reparation. I know that you may not have followed the fierce debate over reparations, and even if you have, you may not support the idea. If affirmative action is a hard sell for many of you, then reparations, the notion that the descendants of enslaved Africans should receive from the society that exploited them some form of compensation, is beyond the pale. But surely you can see the justice of making reparation, even if you can’t make it happen politically. Please don’t say that your ancestors didn’t own slaves. Your white privilege has not been hampered by that fact. Black sweat built the country you now reside in, and you continue to enjoy the fruits of that labor.
There are all sorts of ways to make reparation work at the local and individual level. You can hire black folk at your office and pay them slightly better than you would ordinarily pay them. You can pay the black person who cuts your grass double what you might ordinarily pay. Or you can give a deserving black student in your neighborhood, or one you run across in the course of your work, scholarship help. In fact, your religious or civic institution can commit a tenth of its resources to educating black youth.
It may be best to think of reparation as a secular tithe, a proportion of money and other resources set aside for causes that are worthy of support. You can, as an individual or as a small group, set up an I.R.A., an Individual Reparations Account. There are thousands upon thousands of black kids whose parents cannot afford to send them to summer camp or to pay fees for a sports team, or to buy instruments to play if they attend one of the ever-shrinking number of schools that has a band. Their parents cannot pay for tutors for math or science or English or whatever subject their kids need help with. An I.R.A. would work just fine.
You can also pay a black tax, just as black folk do. The black tax refers to the cost and penalty of being black in America—of having to work twice as hard for half of what whites get by less strenuous means. You can help defray the black tax by offering black tax incentives: if a black accountant is doing a good job for you, assume a surcharge and pay her more. If a black lawyer performs good service, then compensate him even more for his labor.
You can also treat some black folk to a few of the signs of appreciation you offer to military veterans. For instance, at football games, there ought to be a “civil rights veterans” night to recognize the valor, honor, and sacrifice of those who made this country great—living legends like Andrew Young, Diane Nash, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Eleanor Holmes Norton.
As part of an I.R.A. you can also pay for massages for working class folk. You can choose five black children to sponsor on an annual trip to the local zoo. You can begin a film club for black children to attend movie theaters in more affluent areas where they might also enjoy a trip to the museum. Or you can pay for the textbooks of ten black college students each year. The point is to be creative in transferring a bit of your resources, even if in modest amounts, to deserving and often struggling descendants of the folk who gave this country its great wealth and whose offspring rescued its reputation for democracy.