★| 6 |★

Dying to Speak of Race

Policing Black America

 

“The Gates situation was interesting,” President Obama said to me in the Oval Office. He was referring to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the furious debate about race and policing that it provoked, especially after Obama was quizzed about the arrest at the close of a 2009 press conference on health coverage legislation.

“I was responding in shorthand to a question that was posed during the press conference, and when you respond in shorthand on issues of race, it poses a great danger. The reason my speech in Philadelphia [addressing the fallout over Jeremiah Wright’s “God damn America” comments that came to light in the 2008 presidential campaign] was successful was because I was able to round out the issues. But in the prism of twenty-four/seven cable news, you don’t get to round out things. So you’ve got the Gates affair; I make a comment, and suddenly everyone was traveling all the well-worn arguments that had been developed since the sixties about police and African American males.”

It would hardly be the last time Obama commented on a hostile encounter between black folk and the police, but compared to the incidents that followed, the Gates debacle was surely the least deadly. By conjuring the phrase “well-worn arguments” from the sixties, Obama was signaling once again that he preferred conciliation to confrontation in racial debates.

The president went on to say: “So folks in the African American community are thinking back to all the stories they heard from their grandpa, uncles, fathers . . . of being stopped [by the police]. Old folks who identified with the police officer are thinking of the dangers that police officers have to deal with and how the decline in order in cities and rising crime rates [forced] their families [to] move out. So it tracked these old arguments, and it wasn’t going to illuminate. What it was going to do was just dig everybody in.”

Obama drew a false racial equivalence between white fear and black suffering: police brutality, which has stalked black folk for a century, is hardly a relic of the sixties; and white flight is driven more by the perennial goad of revulsion to sharing social space with blacks than the fear of black crime.

Obama elaborated on his regret over not having embraced a format that would have yielded more insight about police and race in the Gates affair: “Rather than just give a quick two-line answer at a press conference, maybe I would’ve said, ‘Let me get out the facts.’ Once all the facts were out, then maybe I’d make a twenty-minute speech on it, or a half-hour discussion with some students that was televised. And that might’ve been a better way to do it.” Obama felt obligated to continually seek “opportunities to talk about [race] where it doesn’t look stilted, it doesn’t look artificial, but it doesn’t also just become some media feeding frenzy where there’s a lot of sound and fury but it doesn’t signify anything.”

The Gates case touched an extremely sensitive nerve in the country, one that snakes through black communities and the largely white police forces that serve them, and at times scare and terrorize them too. Gates is one of the nation’s most famous scholars, but his case offers an example in microcosm of many encounters—often lethal—between ordinary black citizens and the police, starting with the conflicting narratives of how the event unfolded. Sergeant James Crowley claims that he arrived at Gates’s house and asked Gates to step outside, and Gates refused, at which point he entered the home and requested Gates’s ID, which he did not initially produce, and that finally he was forced to arrest Gates when the professor followed him outside, “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior.” Gates allegedly shouted, “Is this how you treat a black man in America?” and “You don’t know who you’re messing with.” Gates says that he showed the officer his ID, demanded that the officer identify himself, which he did not do, and that he then followed the officer outside to get the policeman’s name and badge, at which point he was arrested by the gaggle of police who had gathered.¹

Several features of the story suggest lingering bias. A black man in a tony neighborhood simply seems out of place, even to his neighbors. Had a white professor trying to get inside his home called on his driver to help him jimmy his door open, he might not as readily have aroused suspicion. And when police arrived to check out the premises, they probably wouldn’t have been nearly as quick to believe the worst about a white occupant clearly not engaged in a criminal act. Whatever one believes about what happened, Gates did not receive the benefit of the doubt, a reasonable expectation, since he posed no visible threat. Gates also seemed to be the victim of a police mentality that chafes at a challenge to implicit police authority, especially if that challenge comes from a person of color. How dare black folk believe that, regardless of their station or privilege, they have permission to speak back—or, as the arresting officer, Sergeant Crowley, saw it, to speak “black”—to state-enforced authority?

The Gates incident might have nudged Obama to renew his campaign pledge to get rid of racial profiling—or to puncture the illusion that his success represented a post-racial America. But his comments about the Gates affair at the press conference reaped a whirlwind of controversy. Obama said: “I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”²

The police got upset, supposedly because Obama had spoken out against law enforcement instead of helping cover their flanks, but also because, subconsciously, it is perhaps awfully tough to hear a black man, even the president, describe a white man as acting stupidly. Obama himself has been racially profiled by bigots and assorted right-wingers for PWB—Presiding While Black. And yet the political takeaway for Obama, still early in his first term, seems to have been a studied racial caution, when not violently forced out of it. Obama eventually invited Gates and Crowley for what was dubbed a “beer summit” at the White House to calm tensions.

But little the president did could quell the toxic situation that was seething between the police and black citizens in cities across the nation. As he lamented in 2015, a fatal interaction between blacks and the police “comes up, it seems like, once a week now, or once every couple of weeks.”³ Playing a game of racial catch-up—mirroring Obama’s foreign policy doctrine of “leading from behind”—makes the president more reactor than leader, more racial barometer than thermostat. Jelani Cobb argues that the “man who once told us that there was no black America or white America but only the United States of America has become a President whose statements on unpunished racial injustices are a genre unto themselves.”⁴ That genre teems with hesitations and hiccups, as much as it contains insight and gravitas, and reveals Obama’s tortuous evolution on race during his years in the Oval Office.

 

The Fire This Time

Obama faced one of his gravest racial tests when the fires of Ferguson, Missouri, roared after a grand jury failed to indict white police officer Darren Wilson for killing unarmed black youth Michael Brown. From the start, most blacks were convinced that the case would not be fairly considered by Ferguson’s criminal justice system. There were doubts that the prosecution and defense were on different teams. The prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, looked as if he were coaching an intramural scrimmage, with the goal of keeping Officer Wilson from being tackled by indictment. The trove of documents released after the grand jury reached its decision included Officer Wilson’s four-hour testimony, in which the six-foot-four-inch, 210-pound cop said that his encounter with the six-foot-four-inch, 292-pound teenager left him feeling like “a five-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan.” Wilson betrayed the extent of his feeling for the slain youth’s humanity when he used the impersonal pronoun “it” in claiming that Michael Brown looked like a “demon” rushing him.⁵ To many blacks, Brown’s height and weight gave him a fighter’s chance of surviving a battle with a cop as big as Wilson. To the police officer and many whites, Brown was the black menace writ large, the terrorizing phantom that stalks the white imagination. These clashing perceptions underscore the physics of race, in which an observer effect operates: the instrument through which one perceives race—one’s culture, one’s experiences, one’s fears and fantasies—alters in crucial ways what it measures.

The novelist Ann Petry vividly captures this observer effect in her 1946 novel The Street, in which the African American protagonist Lutie Johnson remarks that racial perceptions of blacks “depended on where you sat.” That is, if “you looked at them from inside the framework of a fat weekly salary, and you thought of colored people as naturally criminal, then you didn’t really see what any Negro looked like,” because “the Negro was never an individual” but “a threat, or an animal or a curse.” After a black man is killed in a failed robbery, she notes that a reporter “saw a dead Negro who had attempted to hold up a store, and so he couldn’t really see what the man lying on the sidewalk looked like.” Instead he saw “the picture he already had in his mind: a huge, brawny, blustering, ignorant, criminally disposed black man.”⁶ Our American culture’s fearful dehumanizing of black men materialized once again when Wilson saw Brown as a demonic force that had to be vanquished in a hail of bullets.

If President Obama’s comments on race in the anguished aftermath of the not-guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial gleamed with light, his words on the rage that battered Ferguson, Missouri, were shrouded in darkness. They revealed a gifted leader whose palpable discomfort with race has made him a sometimes unreliable and distant narrator of black life. Obama’s twin strategy of the heroic explicit and the noble implicit was on display as he spoke twice in the aftermath of the Ferguson grand jury’s decision in November 2014. Earlier, when Obama gave his first statement on the cataclysm in Ferguson at a press conference on August 14, 2014, he’d been cautious to a fault. The president understandably did not want to fan the violence. But the pressure mounted for Obama to say something after the rage in Ferguson turned to fire. If Obama felt and looked weary at the prospect of repeating himself—“I’ve said this before,” he reminded us—it hardly matched the moral weariness of black victims witnessing history tragically repeat itself.⁷ Like a Hollywood film franchise, race in the United States, especially police violence against blacks, is haunted by sequels: the locations may change, the actors are different, but the story remains the same.

Given Obama’s extraordinary talent for talking the nation through tough economic or political times, his remarks on Ferguson were extremely disappointing. Obama justified his reluctance to say too much by claiming he did not want to put his “thumb on the scales one way or the other.” The president was right about the need to let the Justice Department’s investigation run its course. To no one’s surprise, the DOJ eventually found that it couldn’t meet the high bar for bringing civil rights charges against Wilson, though it found plenty of fault in the racist practices of the Ferguson Police Department. But one cannot ignore how badly the scales of justice have been tipped against the residents of Ferguson, and how Lady Justice has had her blindfold removed and discarded, and her impartiality along with it, as she eyes black people for harsher punishment than most. The neutrality and fairness that are the bedrock of justice for the larger society are like quicksand beneath the feet of too many blacks. They must use extraordinary measures, including protests in the streets, appearances in the media, and appeals to local and national leaders to amplify their grievances, just to end up where most white citizens start. The folk of Ferguson, and millions more across the nation, have a difficult time getting the state that Obama represents to work on their behalf. In psychoanalytic terms, that is why Ferguson, and Baltimore after it, blew its id.

To his credit, Obama acknowledged that “a gulf of mistrust exists between local residents and law enforcement,” and that “too many young men of color are left behind and seen only as objects of fear.”⁸ In one swift passage he spoke of “communities that feel left behind, who, as a consequence of tragic histories, often find themselves isolated, often find themselves without hope, without economic prospects,” while their young men “end up in jail or in the criminal justice system” rather than “in a good job or in college.” Later in his August 14 statement Obama briefly listed a set of “tends”: black and Latino youth tend to face higher rates of school suspension, tend to have far more frequent interactions with the law, and may be subject to “different” trials and sentencing. Like the president himself, the language was careful and qualified, cautious, and perhaps a tad too clinical—a language that hardly captures the fiery realities that burn in black bodies and communities.

 

A Grammar of Impressions

What Obama said that day was true, but incomplete. Injustice is not simply a matter of perception, an instance in which blacks “feel” left behind or are subject to “different”—rather than inferior—brands of justice. The brute facts help explain why Ferguson combusted into shrieking anarchy: the decades of police aggression; the repeated killing of unarmed black people; the desperate poverty of black citizens; the entrenched bias in the criminal justice system and other institutions that are meant to help; the raging social inequality; the intended or inadvertent disenfranchisement of large swaths of the citizenry; and the dim prospects of upward mobility that grow bleaker by the day. A two-tiered system of justice operates for mainstream and minority communities. Blacks and other minorities often cannot get cops arrested when they are reasonably suspected of behaving unjustly, whether in Staten Island or Ferguson. They often cannot get their local municipalities to release autopsy reports and other pertinent information in a timely manner. And they often cannot make the local authorities treat their slaughtered loved ones like human beings, as they lie prostrate in the street for hours. Obama largely ignored these realities when he spoke from the White House the night of the Ferguson grand jury decision on November 24, 2014, about America as a nation of laws and said that we must respect the jury’s conclusion, even if we do not agree with it, and make progress by working together—not by throwing bottles, smashing car windows, or using anger as an excuse to vandalize property or hurt anyone.⁹

The next day in Chicago, Obama doubled down on his indictment of “criminal acts” and declared, “I do not have any sympathy” for those who destroy “your own communities.”¹⁰ While he avoided saying so, it was clear that his remarks were directed at the black people who “looted” and “rioted” in Ferguson. But their criminal activity is the result of going unrecognized by the state for decades, a crime in itself. As for the plague of white cops killing unarmed black youth, the facts of which are tediously and sickeningly repetitive, and which impose a peculiar psychological tariff on black minds and exact a harmful toll on black bodies, the president was vague, halting, and sincerely noncommittal.

Instead Obama lauded the racial progress that he said he had witnessed “in my own life,” substituting his body for our black bodies, his life for ours, and signaled again how his story of advancement was ours, suggesting, sadly, that the sum of our political fortunes in his presidency may be greater than the parts of our persistent suffering. As soon as Obama asserted that black folk are not delusional in saying they have big worries about the police, he reassured white America—he was not speaking to blacks, who need no such reassurance because most do not believe we have made it all up—that even though there are problems, that is not the norm. Even when he sidled up to the truth and nudged it gently—“these are real issues,” the president acknowledged—he slipped back into an emotional blandness that underplayed the searing divide, saying there was “an impression that folks have” about unjust policing, and “there are issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in discriminatory fashion.”

Whose “impression” is it, though that word hardly captures the fierce facts of the case? Who feels it? Who is the subject? Who is the recipient of the action? Obama’s treacherous balancing act between white and black, left and right—“there are good people on all sides of this debate, as well as in both Republican and Democratic parties,” he said, which is true, but in what proportion he dared not say—posits a falsely equivalent relation that obscures the truth about who has held the power for the longest amount of time to make things the way they are. This is something, of course, that he can never admit, but which nevertheless leaves his words strained and turns an often eloquent word artist into a faltering, fumbling speaker. If language had hair and a face, Obama’s grammar would be gray and weary. But his exasperated syntax is hardly a match for the fear and anxiety that black folk feel in the face of the police.

 

Policing the Black Body

It is nearly impossible to convey the fear that strikes at the heart of black Americans every time a cop car pulls up, emotions barely fathomable to whites, who do not generally view police as purveyors of urban terror. When I was seventeen, my older brother Anthony and I and a childhood friend were pulled over by four Detroit cops in an unmarked police vehicle. This was in the mid-seventies, in the shadow of the infamous Detroit Police Department task force called STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), which was initiated after the 1967 riots. The unit lived up to its name and routinely targeted black folk. As we assumed the position against the car, I announced to one of the plainclothes officers that I was reaching into my back pocket to fish the car’s registration from my wallet. He brought the butt of his gun sharply across my back and knocked me to the ground, promising, with a racial epithet, that he would put a bullet through my head if I moved again. When I rose to my feet, cowering, showing complete deference, the officer permitted me to pull out the registration. When the cops ran the tags, they concluded what we already knew: the car was not stolen and we were not thieves. They sent us on our way without a hint of an apology.

The lack of white empathy for black terror at the hands of the police came up at a meeting of black leaders with New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton that I attended in 2014 at the home of Citibank global banking head Ray McGuire and his wife, author Crystal McCrary. CBS This Morning co-anchor Gayle King reminded Bratton that “all black parents have had the conversation with their sons about being stopped by the police and how they have to manage the police’s potential biases” against them. I pressed Bratton about the stop-and-frisk methods he had instituted twenty years earlier, and which continue today, despite their fueling racial disparities between “urban youth who get caught with roaches [the remains of a marijuana cigarette] in their pockets” and privileged college kids with “Breaking Bad meth labs in their dorm rooms.”¹¹ The commissioner was far more receptive to our criticisms than the mayor who’d hired him to lead the city’s police department in the mid-nineties.

My dustup in 2014 with former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani on national television tapped a deep vein of racially charged perception. In a discussion on Meet the Press of Ferguson and its racial fallout, Giuliani steered the conversation down the path of a conservative shibboleth: that the real problem facing black communities is dying not at the hand of white cops but in the grip of black thugs.¹² He cited the statistic that 93 percent of black homicide victims are killed by black people; I argued that these murderers often go to jail, unlike the white cops who kill blacks with the backing of the government. What I did not have time to say was that 84 percent of white homicide victims are killed by white people, and yet no language of condemnation exists to frame a white-on-white malady that begs relief by violent policing. This does not mean that black folk are not weary of death ravaging their communities. I witnessed it personally as I sat in a Detroit courtroom twenty-five years ago during the trial of my younger brother Everett for second-degree murder, and though I believe to this day that he is innocent, I watched him convicted by an all-black jury and sentenced to prison for the rest of his life. But when the deaths of blacks somehow grant legitimacy to cops in the killing of often unarmed black people with impunity, the scales of justice are twice weighted against black interests. What is called for is active intervention on behalf of blacks and other citizens of color by their government—the same government that licenses cops to police black and brown communities.

In the face of it all, Obama did not offer public policies to address these ills, or the hope of politics based on true justice for all, but especially those hampered by race and class in their quest for that justice. Instead the president pivoted to the personal and suggested that his program to lift up black boys, My Brother’s Keeper, would work with the Justice Department in “local communities to inculcate more trust, more confidence in the criminal justice system.” But black youth do not need more trust; the justice system needs fundamental transformation. Obama, in a second statement on Ferguson on August 18, 2014, just days after his first, and well before the grand jury decision in November, proceeded to knock black youth while they were down by directing his law-and-order spiel against their already over-policed and under-protected bodies: “There are young black men that commit crime” who “need to be prosecuted because every community has an interest in public safety.”¹³ That is true, but tremendously tone-deaf in light of the denial of justice and the unjust criminalization of black people that led to a national crisis—for which Obama’s most prominent answer was the recommendation of a social, not a political, program. Obama’s defenders often claim that he is a president, not an activist, yet he sounded like one in his comments, and a bad one at that. In one rhetorical swoop, Obama leveraged the authority of the state against black youth, played to stereotypes of their criminality, offered responsibility lectures in place of public policy, maintained an emotional distance from the desperation of a group of Americans who happen to be his people, and offered them moral lessons instead of official action.

But these moral lessons, whether offered by Barack Obama or Rudy Giuliani, fall far short of the mark, substituting harsh reproof, false equivalence, and respectability politics in place of uplifting policy. Many whites who point to blacks killing blacks are moved less by concern for black communities than by a desire to fend off criticism of unjust white cops. They earnestly believe that they are offering new ideas to black folk about the peril they foment in their own neighborhoods.

This brand of moralizing activism also found a champion in Bill Cosby, who for a decade had leveled moral charges against the black poor with an ugly intensity that was endorsed by white critics as tough love and by black journalists as homegrown conservatism. But Cosby’s put-downs were more pernicious than that: his indictment of black women’s lax morals and poor parenting skills was misogynistic. “Five, six children, same woman, eight, ten different husbands or whatever,” Cosby fumed. “Pretty soon you’re going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to. You don’t know who dis is; might be your grandmother.”¹⁴ Cosby’s Shakespearean fall from grace was attended by journalists who apologized for having earlier failed to consider claims against the comic. He was recast as a king who is more sinner than sinned against as the allegations of drugging and raping women piled up. But writers avoided mentioning their own sexist blinders that kept them from seeing how hateful Cosby was being toward black women long before he was accused of abusing mostly white women.

Cosby didn’t invent the politics of respectability—the belief that good behavior and stern chiding will cure black ills, uplift black folk, and convince white people that blacks are human and worthy of respect. But he certainly gave it a vernacular swag that has since been polished by Barack Obama. The president has lectured blacks about their moral shortcomings before cheering audiences at college commencements and civil rights conventions. And yet his themes are shopworn and mix the innocuous with the insidious: pull your pants up, stop making racial excuses for failure, stop complaining about racism, turn off the television and the video games and study, do not feed your kids fried chicken for breakfast, be a good father.

As big a fan as he is of respectability politics, Obama is the most eloquent reminder that they do not work, that no matter how smart or sophisticated or upstanding one is, and no matter how much chastising black people pleases white ears, the suspicions about black identity persist. Despite his accomplishments and charisma, he is for millions the unalterable “other” of national life, the opposite of what they mean when they think of America. Barack Obama, like Michael Brown, is changed before our eyes into a monstrous thing that lacks humanity: a monkey, a cipher, a terrorist. One might expect the ultimate target of those who fear black otherness to have sympathy for their lesser targets, for people who have lesser standing and less protection, like the folk in Ferguson, in Cleveland, in New York, in Florida, in Baltimore, and all around the country, who cannot keep their unarmed children from being cut down in the street by callous cops who leave their slumped bodies to stiffen into rigor mortis in the presence of horrified onlookers.

Perhaps a measure of empathy lay behind Obama’s sending Attorney General Eric Holder to Ferguson, though he should surely have gone himself, just as he went to Sandy Hook and to the areas struck by Hurricane Sandy. Sending Eric Holder to Ferguson was critical, but bringing Ferguson’s blacks, and millions more like them, into Obama’s presidential view, and into the folds of judicial fairness, would have been far more important. Obama, of course, is acutely aware of the tortured relations between law enforcement and black communities, which he has at times effectively recalled, as he did in his celebrated race speech in Philadelphia and in other pronouncements before he became president. Making such observations as president could help combat ignorance about the black plight in the criminal justice system, demonstrate healing compassion for black victims of police misconduct, and perhaps soften harsh attitudes toward black youth. This is a crucial role of the presidential bully pulpit—to speak with the authority of the office to tip the scales of moral fairness in favor of those who have been treated unjustly. Where Obama failed, his attorney general succeeded. Although Holder was not president, he certainly looked like one as he reached out to a bruised constituency, shook hands and kissed babies, promised fairness and the backing of the state to achieve justice, and reassured a demoralized population that their government cares for them. For all his lectures about responsibility to black audiences across the land, the president could have used a good dose of it himself.

Obama warned the unruly black elements in Ferguson that the nation is built on the rule of law. That is not entirely true. Obama’s life, and his career, too, are the products of broken laws: his parents would have been committing a crime in many states at the time of their interracial union, and without Martin Luther King Jr. breaking what he deemed to be unjust laws, Obama would not be president today. Barack Obama is the ultimate paradox: the culmination of a churning assault on the realm of power that he now represents. No wonder he turns to his own body and story and life to narrate black bodies, black stories, and black lives. The problem is that the ordinary black person possesses neither Obama’s protections against peril nor his triumphant trajectory that will continue long after he leaves office. And Obama’s narrative does not answer a haunting question: If America can treat him as badly as it does, and he is as bright and affable as the best Americans, what will it do to the masses of Michael Browns in black communities? It should be remembered that Obama might have been Brown or one of the millions of black youth harassed by police and thrown into jail had he been busted for his youthful foray into drugs. That recognition sparked his My Brother’s Keeper initiative. But that is only half the equation. What he must address somehow, with a fire that matches his condemnation of blacks murdering blacks, is my brother’s killer, especially when the killer wears a badge and carries a gun on behalf of the country Obama embodies.

 

Fast and Slow Terror

The cruel reality is that nothing black people could say or do can change the minds of the white people who believe that black folks are a threat to them. They will neither love blacks nor leave them alone. Black people cannot be smart enough, good enough, or humble enough to please those who despise them, especially when they find legal cover for their animus behind a badge and a gun. Not even the election of a black president could unseat that stubborn fact. The murder of unarmed black motorist Walter Scott by white officer Michael Slager in South Carolina in April 2015 sheds light on political and social realities that surround similar cases of lethal force against black people. Americans have been forced to lower their expectations for racial justice and now measure racial progress in painfully minimal terms. The tragedy also brings into focus the optics of race—how black people are seen on camera and in history, revealing how black life is valued or degraded. And the spectacle of Scott’s death highlights the fast terror that stalks black life even as it obscures the slow terror that blacks routinely confront in the Age of Obama.

There was great relief in black communities and beyond when Slager was quickly arrested and charged with the murder of Scott. The deadliest moment of their brief encounter was caught on cell phone video: Slager drew his pistol and took aim at the fleeing Scott, unloading eight rounds and striking him dead. The video provided enough evidence to warrant an arrest, which is rare in police-involved shootings. Slager’s jailing took place amidst the national outrage over a rash of unarmed black people like Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in Staten Island dying at the hands of the police. During a recent seven-year stretch, a white police officer killed a black person nearly twice a week in America, underscoring the belief among blacks that they are targets of racial profiling and its violent twin, police brutality.¹⁵ Many outside the black community think that the exercise of lethal force is warranted in most cases involving blacks and the cops.

Such clashing perceptions make it difficult to generate the broad consensus against police brutality in the Age of Obama that came to define the civil rights struggle against racial oppression in the sixties. The failure to find wide agreement has hampered racial progress in our criminal justice system, lowering the standards of racial justice, especially in contrast to the past. This has become brutally clear in the jarring juxtaposition of past and present. We have since 2013 experienced national celebrations of the triumphs of the civil rights movement—the March on Washington, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and, in March 2015, the commemoration of Bloody Sunday in Selma. The crowning achievement of a black president in office as so many of these occasions are marked heightens the national appreciation of these jubilee celebrations. But the glory of the past runs up against the gory details of the present: an epidemic of black death at the hands of white police, flaws in a prosecutorial system that misrepresents the interests of black citizens, the failure of grand juries to indict cops in most police-involved shootings, and the vast overreach of a penal system in punishing people of color. Thus, when a white police officer is finally charged with murder, what should be seen as a minimal gesture is celebrated as a big victory because it took maximum effort to achieve. The floor of racial justice has been snatched from beneath the feet of black communities and turned precipitously into a ceiling—a harsh irony in Obama’s America.

Our reverence for saints from the sixties underscores how we are addicted to the easy past rather than the hard present, though only a willful suppression of bitter facts can make us believe that anything about the racial past was easy—a narrative that President Obama has underscored. Its achievements were sealed in blood and cost the lives of some of the greatest witnesses for political transformation the nation has ever had. But Americans are bad at taking in race in real time; we prefer rose-tinted lenses for watching slow-motion replays in which we control the narrative and downplay our complicity in the horrors of our history. Unfortunately, President Obama’s racial procrastination has only exacerbated this tendency.

The racial present is messy, unresolved; it thumbs its nose at stories that promote bland racial optimism about how far we have come. Every black body that suffers unjustly at the hands of a cop chips away at racial triumphalism. Racial optimism and racial triumphalism make it more difficult to organize resistance and gain white allies. There have been many white participants in the series of protests across the nation against police brutality who remind anyone within earshot, in their familiar chant, that “Black Lives Matter.” These actions echo a past when blacks and their allies forced the nation to grapple with its racist legacy through acts of civil disobedience that were harshly criticized and resisted.

Many Americans in the past finally conceded the legitimacy of black struggle because its leaders brilliantly staged their protests for the world to see. White citizens struggled to digest their meals in peace as scenes from Selma’s bloodbath flashed on their television screens. It was more difficult to write off Negro complaints as gestures of self-pity when the fangs of police dogs tore at the flesh of women and children on the evening news. But that, and Americans, and their media, have all changed. Massive black marches have diminished, American guilt and compassion have severely flagged, and American television has been radically transformed: a thousand or more stations compete for our attention, and the rise of the Internet and social media has challenged television in supplying the unifying fiction of American identity and citizenship.

The fractured media landscape has led to the proliferation of images, perception overload, and a vying for digital attention. The demand for spectacle merges with the desire to capture more eyeballs on television, computer, and smartphone screens. This visual barrage and optic glut make it difficult to command the unified national consciousness in the same way as when there were only three networks in play. We are reduced to forging workable rather than wide consensus, more modest goals for justice, and shorter-term alliances with potentially increased numbers of allies, for digital ties are not necessarily those that bind, even if they point to larger landscapes, longer timelines, and deeper truths. The digital can in fact be the handmaiden of the historical when rightly used. President Obama brilliantly proved it when he transformed the American political campaign with his unprecedented success in fund-raising and message-sharing on the Internet.

But all of this seeing and overseeing in contemporary visual culture does not solve the problem of how black folk have been historically viewed in a negative cultural light. Even the sight of a black president whose image is posted daily in cyberspace, plastered on print newspapers across the nation, and televised around the world cannot dislodge the set of images that fix black life in the national and global glare. Tragically, the negative thinking about black life has survived media transformations and Obama’s rise to power. Another way of saying this is that the content of black identity has survived a change in format and presentation. New media, besides breaking barriers so people of color can speak up, has also provided the culture with more ways to stereotype, more ways to be suspicious and hateful.

The optics of race are tricky: while contemporary media and devices allow us to see more—including images of brilliant and beautiful black people occupying the White House and representing the nation’s family values—they do not necessarily allow us to see more deeply. That millennials see race the same way Generation Xers and baby boomers do testifies to a troubling racial continuity. Moreover, stereotypical representations of blackness—some authored by black hands and disseminated as reality TV—are accepted as normative. Yet problems arise when images of blackness contradict a received racial script. That is why it was easier to believe that the video footage of Michael Brown in Ferguson stealing cigarillos more accurately communicated his character as a “thug” than to believe that the last gasps of Eric Garner were the pleas of an unjustly assaulted man. The Michael Brown video reinforced the belief that black males are inherently criminal; the Garner video, despite what we saw, contradicted the script that says even an unarmed black man begging to breathe cannot be believed—that says he is literally lying as he lies on the ground dying. We cannot believe what we see because it contradicts what we have seen and been led to believe. What we see is not simply determined by what we perceive with our eyes; instead, sight registers the cumulative impact of what we learn and what we think we know.

Thus a history of how blacks have been seen is recapitulated each time a new video surfaces of black people being poorly treated by the police—from Rodney King to Walter Scott to Dajerria Becton in McKinney, Texas. But what we see with our eyes is often contradicted by what we see with our collective sight in a culture that has taught us to understand blackness in an especially malevolent fashion. Thus, before the video of his encounter with Scott emerged, Slager relied on a script that many white cops have used, including Darren Wilson in Ferguson: I was afraid for my life; the black man reached for my weapon to harm me; I had to defend myself with lethal force. Those police scripts derive from a larger pool of stories about black people as dangers and threats, and thus these cops’ stories make sense to the majority of white Americans because they have fed on a common diet of black perception. Police reports sync up with images derived from our culture.

Also, what looks obvious to black folk—that they are under siege—seems to shift when white eyes land on black subjects, as people and as issues. Whites and blacks see from two different perspectives shaped by history. For instance, black and white Americans view the presidency of our first black commander in chief in widely varying terms. What blacks see is sometimes not viewed as rational or real, or worthy of respect; it does not count as sufficient evidence to prove a case of abuse or injustice. This is why President Obama repeats, in the wake of police shootings of unarmed victims, that black people are not making up their perceptions of injustice. The demand for proof of what they believe is not foolproof: even when video evidence emerges, it is not seen by many whites as incontrovertible or even persuasive of the case made by blacks that mistreatment abounds. There is a racial Rorschach test going on: we see the same image, but we sometimes do not see the same reality, or the same truth it reveals. This proves that seeing involves more than sight; it involves “sites,” too, of past realities packaged in ready-made images of, for example, black pathology, or deserved poverty.

Rodney King was brutally beaten by police, but a jury acquitted his abusers; Eric Garner pleaded for his life, but a grand jury failed to indict. It is not just what is seen; it is what scenes of race replay in our heads. Black frustration mounts when blacks have what they think is clear evidence of police misconduct, and the failure to appreciate black life is reinforced when there is a rejection of what stands as proof that their lives do not matter the same way as white lives. They cannot matter the same way because they cannot be seen the same way. To make matters worse, the fictional images of blacks held in many minds are taken as literal, while the images from real-life cameras fail to convince whites of what blacks see: that black lives do not matter as much. The smartphone has turned the spectator into a participant, permitting her to record and change history. Given black people’s ready experimentation on the cutting edge of beepers, pagers, and cell phones, that shift seems to favor them. In the case of Walter Scott, a police shooting caught by cell phone, his police assailant was charged with murder by a grand jury. But often the electronic evidence will not relay truth back, because the broader context can never be underestimated or dismissed or ignored. This is why Obama’s importance as a public historian and interpreter of racial experience can hardly be disputed.

This failure to be taken seriously, or to be seen in the right contexts, and to be seen as human, is part of the trauma of black existence, one that reinforces an often submerged truth: the lived experience of race often feels like terror for black folk, whether fast or slow. Few metaphors and tropes more adequately capture what it means to be black and afraid of random and arbitrary forms of violence than the single word “terror.” If the American people now believe they are subject to assault from forces in the Middle East for no other reason than that they are American, that comes close to what it means to be black: for no other reason than their identities, blacks are profiled, abused, dismissed, disbelieved, set aside—literally killed and un-mattered. Black people know what it means to feel insecure in one’s home, unprotected by one’s government; no space is safe or adequate to prevent the plague of assault just because one is black.

The recording of Walter Scott’s death is so terrifying because it could be any black—the real fear that terror seeks to impart. In most cases in the past, and likely in the future, there were, and will be, no cameras to vouch for blacks, no incontrovertible evidence that blacks were assailed; no matter how much education blacks possess, how much money they have in the bank, how many late-model cars they drive, how well behaved they are, how articulate they become, they may, at any moment, be gunned down or feel a baton beating them, a Taser electrifying them, a bullet penetrating their flesh—all because they are black, and therefore seem likely to commit, or to have committed, a crime. Ironically, blacks are seen as necessary sacrifices for the safety of white society; they are viewed as scapegoats, or perhaps collateral damage, in the white war against the terror of black criminality.

The terror that black people experience is of two varieties. Slow terror is masked but malignant; it stalks black people in denied opportunities that others take for granted. Slow terror seeps into every nook and cranny of black existence: black boys and girls being expelled from school at higher rates than their white peers; black men and women being harassed by unjust fines from local municipalities; having billions of dollars of their wealth drained off by shady financial instruments sold to blacks during the mortgage crisis; and being imprisoned out of proportion to their percentage of the population. President Obama has referred to this kind of terror as a “slow rolling crisis.” Fast terror is more dynamic, more explicitly lethal, more grossly evident. It is the spectacle of black death in public displays of vengeance and violence directed against defenseless black bodies. Shootings like that of Scott traumatize blacks, too, because they conjure the historic legacy of racial terror: lynching, castration, and drowning. The black body was not safe then, and blacks today do not feel safe, or accepted, or wanted, or desired.

The last moments of Scott’s life, caught on video and widely watched, are classic fast terror. The video is sickening because it captures the breathtaking indifference to moral consequence that seems to grip Slager as he fires at an unarmed black man in broad daylight. A frozen frame from the video shows a police officer, gun drawn, in pursuit. Fifty years earlier, a lawman in pursuit pulled his gun and shot dead the Selma protester Jimmie Lee Jackson, whom Martin Luther King called a “martyred hero of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity.”¹⁶ The failure to be seen as human unites black people across time in a fellowship of fear as black people share black terror, at both speeds, in common. The way we see race plays a role in these terrors: fast terror is often seen and serves as a warning; slow terror is often not seen and reinforces the invisibility of black suffering. Fast terror scares black people; slow terror scars them.

 

Black, White, Blue, and Gray

The way fast and slow terror occasionally entangle in menacing indivisibility played out in Baltimore in the aftermath of the funeral for Freddie Gray, the young black man who died from a spinal cord injury in April 2015 while in police custody. Gray’s arrest, like Scott’s murder, was captured on cell phone camera video as he was dragged into a police wagon by several officers. The six police officers involved in arresting and transporting Gray were quickly charged with crimes ranging from manslaughter and illegal arrest to second-degree depraved heart murder. It was a rare display of prosecutorial vigilance on behalf of black victims of alleged police misconduct. A grand jury largely agreed with Baltimore City state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby when it later indicted the officers on most of the charges Mosby brought; though it dropped charges of illegal imprisonment and false arrest, the grand jury added a charge of reckless endangerment against all the officers involved.¹⁷

Before any of the charges were filed, the beleaguered community gathered, metaphorically, in the spacious sanctuary of Baltimore’s New Shiloh Baptist Church, at the funeral of Freddie Gray, as the familiar weight of grief descended over participants, not just for Gray but for the countless Freddie Grays across black America who die, unarmed, at the hands of the police. A few hours after the Gray family laid their son to rest, the city’s black anguish burst into flame as cars were burned and young people hurled rocks at cops.

A predictable question trailed closely behind their actions, a question that always reappears like the ghost of riots past: Why are they destroying their own neighborhoods and setting their futures on fire? The question feels helpless, sometimes cynical, but it is exactly the right question. It should be asked, however, not in anger but with compassionate curiosity. Because the truth is as ugly as the facts that fuel riots: without a brick tossed or a building burned—the dramatic response to the fast terror of Gray’s death—the nation hardly confronts the hopelessness, the slow terror, of the future for these young people, a point that President Obama underscored in the smoldering aftermath of Baltimore’s enflamed grief.

Sadder still is that the social neglect that sparked the carnage had been largely overlooked by the powers that be. The unemployment rate in the community where Gray lived is over 50 percent; the high school student absence rate hovers around 49.3 percent; and life expectancy tops out at 68.8 years, according to analyses by prison reform nonprofits.¹⁸ These statistics are a small part of the portrait of radical inequality and slow terror that blanket poor black Baltimore. It is no wonder that black Baltimore erupted in social fury. As Martin Luther King Jr. announced in the wake of the Watts riots fifty years ago, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”¹⁹ Judging by the actions in Baltimore, thousands were not being heard. The stale repetition of black death at the hands of the police led to burning rage, a rage that would, sadly, lead elected officials, including President Obama, to label participants in the mayhem “thugs”—while no such label, nor the word “riot,” left their mouths to describe the 9 deaths, 170 arrests, and destruction in the wake of a melee between dueling biker gangs in Waco, Texas, a month after the Baltimore uprising.²⁰

Perhaps a basketball analogy can explain the urban rebellion. Often on the court, a player commits an offense—say, hitting an opposing player in the ribs—without being spotted by the referee. Then, when the offended player strikes back, he is the one hit with a foul. The black youth who took to the streets have been hit with the slow terror of so many unacknowledged assaults—from racial profiling to poor schooling—that their violent responses are frequently viewed through a haze of social stigma that penalizes them without regard for context.

Jesse Jackson—who helped to eulogize Gray, arguing at his funeral service that the young man was now “more than a citizen” and had become “a martyr”—spoke of that context, and reflected on the conditions of slow terror that plague black communities and leave black youth destitute. “Our boys are the least educated, the most profiled, and the most jailed, do the most prison labor, [are] the most unemployed and have the shortest life expectancy,” Jackson lamented. He acknowledged the chaotic consequences of social injustice in black communities. “When there is darkness there will be crime and behavioral issues,” the seasoned minister observed. “It is easier to fight the victim rather than the source of the darkness.” Jackson also admitted that the presence of new technology advanced the quest for justice. “In some sense what makes the difference today is his innocence, and the presence of a camera,” he said of Gray. “If he had been in a gun shootout with the police, or if he had been killed in a drug bust, or caught in some compromising position hurting someone[,] it would have been easier to dismiss his killing.” Jackson touched on the furious tensions between the police and black communities that make a mockery of any sense of security and justice. “The Baltimore police became the pallbearers of an alive man and turned the paddy wagon into a tombstone,” Jackson charged. “We are here because we all feel threatened. All of our sons are at risk. Their number has just not popped up yet. There is too much killing, too much hatred, and too much fear.”²¹

 

All Black Lives Matter

It is not just black sons who are threatened by or at risk of police brutality but black daughters and mothers as well. The horrifying spectacle, caught on cell phone video, of fifteen-year-old bikini-clad Dajerria Becton being violently manhandled by a white police officer, Eric Casebolt, at a pool party in McKinney, Texas, is a graphic example. After an earlier fight between white parents and black teens—the white parents allegedly made racist statements, including telling the youth to “return to Section 8 housing,” and slapped a black female party participant—police were called to the scene to calm any further disturbance. The video shows Police Corporal Casebolt cursing and screaming at Becton and her friends, ordering them to leave the area and later warning them not to “keep standing there running your mouths.” If the angry black male is a stock character in racist mythology, the sassy, loudmouthed, back-talking black woman is another staple. As Dajerria obeys Casebolt’s command, the officer inexplicably yells at her, chases her down, grabs her arm, and drags her from the pavement onto the grass.²²

Dajerria spoke later in a television interview, saying, “[Casebolt] told me to keep walking and I kept walking and then I’m guessing he thought we were saying rude stuff to him. He grabbed me and he like twisted my arm on the back of my back and he shoved me in the grass. He started pulling the back of my braids and I was like telling him that he can get off of me because my back was hurting really bad.”²³ The video shows Casebolt violently slamming Dajerria to the ground and forcefully planting his knee in her back as she cries out for her mother while her friends plead with Casebolt to stop.

Two of the teens witnessing Casebolt’s violent outburst move toward the officer; he suddenly ceases pressing Dajerria to the ground and jumps up, pulls out his revolver, and points it at the youths. After fellow officers restrain him, Casebolt returns to Dajerria and places her in handcuffs. No charges were filed against Dajerria, and Casebolt resigned a few days after the event, but the message the incident sent was no less chilling: black youth peaceably assembled in their suburban community are nevertheless the cause of undue suspicion and unwarranted harassment from both the police and the broader community. They are often subjected to a form of violent state response that was not displayed in April 2014 when white Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and fellow protesters brandished guns in a dispute with the federal government over unpaid grazing fees—or with the mostly white bikers in Waco who murdered nine members of rival gangs.

Black girls and women of all sexual orientations have been erased from portrayals of both the slow and fast terror that black people endure, despite the enormous work they have done to amplify the voices of the unjustly aggrieved, symbolized in the important work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Columbia law professor and co-author with Andrea J. Ritchie of the report “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women,”²⁴ and the Black Lives Matter movement begun by two black queer women, Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, and by Opal Tometti. The Say Her Name protests in 2015 in several cities across America were fashioned by activists to highlight the countless black women who have been harassed, harmed, and even murdered by the police.

Perhaps no other figure has symbolized the complicated status of black women in America, and the micro-aggressions and the slow and fast terror to which they are subjected, more prominently than First Lady Michelle Obama. Many observers initially cast her as the angry black woman, while others framed her as the castrating shrew to her famous husband, Barack—reinforcing black female stereotypes that found sociological sway in the Moynihan Report on the black family. Michelle Obama spoke about these visions of her, and the pain they evoked, in a remarkable passage from a commencement address she delivered in 2015 at Tuskegee University:

 

Back when my husband first started campaigning for President, folks had all sorts of questions of me: What kind of First Lady would I be? What kinds of issues would I take on? Would I be more like Laura Bush, or Hillary Clinton, or Nancy Reagan? And the truth is, those same questions would have been posed to any candidate’s spouse. That’s just the way the process works. But, as potentially the first African American First Lady, I was also the focus of another set of questions and speculations; conversations sometimes rooted in the fears and misperceptions of others. Was I too loud, or too angry, or too emasculating? Or was I too soft, too much of a mom, not enough of a career woman?

Then there was the first time I was on a magazine cover—it was a cartoon drawing of me with a huge Afro and machine gun. Now, yeah, it was satire, but if I’m really being honest, it knocked me back a bit. It made me wonder, just how are people seeing me.

Or you might remember the on-stage celebratory fist bump between me and my husband after a primary win that was referred to as a “terrorist fist jab.” And over the years, folks have used plenty of interesting words to describe me. One said I exhibited “a little bit of uppity-ism.” Another noted that I was one of my husband’s “cronies of color.” Cable news once charmingly referred to me as “Obama’s Baby Mama.”

And of course, Barack has endured his fair share of insults and slights. Even today, there are still folks questioning his citizenship.

And all of this used to really get to me. Back in those days, I had a lot of sleepless nights, worrying about what people thought of me, wondering if I might be hurting my husband’s chances of winning his election, fearing how my girls would feel if they found out what some people were saying about their mom.²⁵

 

It is her racial candor that distinguishes Michelle from her husband—a candor, in all fairness, denied to Barack because of the position he holds—and yet it underlines how much the nation misses when Barack Obama fails to do what he might reasonably be expected to do as an American president: tell the truth about race and make public policy yield to the democratic demand for just governance. Michelle Obama’s achingly honest remarks drew predictable criticism from right-wing quarters, but her forthright expression of the existential angst unleashed by a society not yet at peace with its racial past is precisely the sort of testimony the nation needs to hear from voices that matter.²⁶ (The fact that, according to a former Secret Service agent, it was Michelle who privately pushed her husband to “side with blacks in racial controversies” only burnishes her reputation for being Barack’s black conscience.)²⁷

President Obama seemed to learn from his wife’s candor in the ongoing effort to counter the plague of lethal policing that has engulfed poor black communities since Ferguson. In an April 2015 joint press conference with the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, Obama was as direct as he had ever been in finally acknowledging, “There’s some police who aren’t doing the right thing.”²⁸ Obama argued that since “Ferguson . . . we have seen too many instances of what appears to be police officers interacting with individuals—primarily African American, often poor—in ways that have raised troubling questions.” Obama acknowledged the legitimacy of civil rights leaders’ and black parents’ thinking of the lethal interactions as a crisis—though in his words, it was a “slow-rolling crisis” that has been “going on for a long time . . . [W]e shouldn’t pretend that it’s new.” What was new, Obama suggested, was the broader public’s awareness, because of social media and cell phone video, of a catastrophe of police brutality that black folk have endured for decades.

Obama avoided strategic inadvertence, and even resisted for a spell the call of the noble implicit, and argued that there were deeply rooted systemic issues that had to be confronted beyond a focus on cops. These include “impoverished communities that have been stripped away of opportunity, where children are born into abject poverty” to parents plagued by substance abuse problems, low levels of education, and high levels of incarceration, producing another generation whose “kids end up in jail or dead” rather than going to college. Obama spoke of poor communities with “no investment,” lost manufacturing, and the rise of a drug industry as the primary employer. “If we think that we’re just going to send the police to do the dirty work of containing the problems that arise there without as a nation and as a society saying what can we do to change these communities, to help lift up those communities and give those kids opportunity, then we’re not going to solve this problem.” Obama warned that the failure to address these issues adequately means “we’ll go through the same cycles of periodic conflicts between the police and communities and the occasional riots in the streets, and everybody will feign concern until it goes away, and then we go about our business as usual.”

Obama made a passionate plea for society’s responsibility to address the crisis:

 

If we are serious about solving this problem, then we’re going to not only have to help the police, we’re going to have to think about what we can do—the rest of us—to make sure that we’re providing early education to these kids; to make sure that we’re reforming our criminal justice system so it’s not just a pipeline from schools to prisons; so that we’re not rendering men in these communities unemployable because of a felony record for a nonviolent drug offense; that we’re making investments so that they can get the training they need to find jobs . . .

[I]f we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could. It’s just it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant—and that we don’t just pay attention to those communities when a CVS burns, and we don’t just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped. We’re paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids, and we think they’re important. And they shouldn’t be living in poverty and violence.

 

This is Obama at his best: analyzing the broad sweep of social distress and accepting responsibility to address problems bigger than individual will and beyond the sway of personal accountability. In doing so, Obama serves the interests of a besieged black constituency, and therefore the interests of the country, far better than when he ignores race, denies white responsibility, or criticizes black culture. While all citizens have the responsibility to contribute to the common good, not all citizens are equally able to attend to their welfare and fend off suffering, especially when the state has had a big hand in creating their plight. Race has fatefully shaped the destinies of the nation’s black citizens. The greatest American presidents have memorably wrestled with the destructive legacies of racism to make the nation a true democracy for all its citizens.

In our time, that includes the black girls and women whose needs and challenges Obama finally addressed in his 2015 speech to the annual gala of the Congressional Black Caucus, and in a White House Summit on women and girls of color later that year. It also embraces the youth of the Black Lives Matter movement, whose ideas and activists Obama validated in an October 2015 White House forum on criminal justice.

“I think the reason that the organizers used the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ was not because they were suggesting nobody else’s lives matter,“ Obama said. “Rather, what they were suggesting was there is a special problem that’s happening in the African American community that’s not happening in other communities.

“And that is a legitimate issue that we’ve got to address.”

Occurring late in his presidency, these statements—along with his declaration in October 2015 to the International Association of Chiefs of Police that earlier in his life he sometimes got tickets he didn’t deserve, and “that when you aggregate all the cases . . . there’s some racial bias in the system”—prove that Obama has struggled to find his voice in the face of race; as the nation’s first black president, he has been as much a victim of our poisonous racial compact as he has been the arbiter of the state’s response to racial tragedy and its commitment to racial justice. Finding the nerve to tell the truth about race could only deepen his considerable legacy.