Portent of Disaster and Discomforting Divergence
I could not but feel, in those sorrowful years, that this human indifference, concerning which I knew so much already, would be my portion on the day that the United States decided to murder Negroes systematically instead of little by little and catch-as-catch can. I was, of course, authoritatively assured that what had happened to the Jews in Germany could not happen to the Negroes in America, but I thought bleakly, that the German Jews had probably believed similar counselors.
—James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)
Remarkably, the steady stream of reported instances of police harassment of Blacks from James Baldwin’s time to the present serves as both a portent of a Black holocaust in America and a divergence of that too awful fate:
• As to the portent, the pattern of incidents clearly reflecting policies unspoken, but no less authorized, conveys the message that Black people are now, as they have been throughout the history of this country, expendable. No matter their status, income, or accomplishments, we are at risk of harassment, arrest, injury, or death by those hired to protect the public peace.
• As to the divergence, the reported instances of police brutality against Blacks are often so blatantly cruel that we who are the potential victims are so diverted by our outrage and fear that we fail to consider that Baldwin’s concern expressed almost forty years ago remains potently authentic. For while much that is positive has occurred since Baldwin’s time, a great many of this country’s White citizens continue to view Blacks as the source of their fears, the cause of their sense of danger, the ultimate scapegoat in times of economic anxiety.
Professor Patricia Williams senses that notwithstanding all our accomplishments and contributions to this country, “White America wishes that Blacks would just go away and shut up and stop taking up so much time and food and air and then the world would return to its Norman Rockwell loveliness and America could be employed and happy once more.”1
Politicians from the presidents on down get this message and translate it into policies that give priority to Whites most of the time, and only work for Black people in the short run as a way of working for Whites in the long run. The police are not stupid. They understand their unspoken mission and that it conforms to the fears and prejudices regarding Black people many of them have harbored since childhood. Of course, what my mother said about Whites—namely, that unless there were some good White folks, all the Black folks would be dead—applies as well to the police. It is a tough, stressful job that in many places offers only modest monetary compensation. No one can deny the dangers of carrying a weapon and enforcing the law in crime-ridden neighborhoods. The wearing of bulletproof vests is not a fashion statement. It has saved an estimated 1,500 officers since the early 1970s. Police must work all hours of the night, a stressful matter for family life, and in most cities their starting salary averages $30,000.2
Acknowledging that police officers have a stressful job, the National Criminal Justice Commission maintained that “no level of stress can justify the mistreatment of citizens or the use of excessive force when making an arrest.”3 There are many methods of increasing police efficiency, such as community policing and reducing the inherent fear of Blacks by hiring more persons of color who are familiar with the communities in which they work. These worthwhile measures, even if adopted, would not reduce the ultimate danger about which Baldwin warns. And our understandable focus on incidents of police brutality serves to divert us from this greater danger, one that history shows White Americans are quite capable of both performing and then excusing.
We live, though, in the present. And prophecies of future disaster are diluted by our daily experience. When we are stopped by the police, the casual can easily become the catastrophic. We know that innocence offers no insulation against abuse, and even graphic evidence of police wrongdoing is no guarantee that their misconduct will be punished rather than condoned. By virtue of color alone, Blacks are suspect, and when stopped, the “wrong” move or the “wrong” response on their part can be fatal. These are the conclusions rather easily drawn from cases that gain media attention. Given the reluctance of most Blacks to file complaints after experiencing racial discrimination when looking for a home, searching for a job, or even gaining equal service in a restaurant or other public facility, it is not surprising that, fearing further harassment or worse, a great many victims of police harassment do not report incidents of racially motivated police misconduct. Getting beyond the traumatic event and mending the possible physical and certain emotional damage to self and others involved serves as sufficient challenge. The mind simply cannot bear thoughts of more widespread terror than has already been experienced at first hand.
Consider one of my top students at the Harvard Law School, who was also getting her medical degree at the same time. White and a woman, she wrote to me about a highway stop that happened a dozen years ago. I have never forgotten the incident and am sure she and the man involved have not forgotten it either. Let me recall what she said in her own words:
It was about seven on a weeknight. It was summer, so it was still light. We were driving on a four-lane road in Westport, an affluent, suburban community in southeastern Connecticut. John was driving. He is a Black man. Westport is a very White town. I was sitting in the front seat. No one else was in the car. We were driving a 1965 Ford in immaculate condition; not one spot of rust. We owned the car. It was properly registered. It was running perfectly. We were not speeding. Neither of us had consumed any drugs or alcohol. We had pulled over about five minutes prior to the incident I describe to ask an “officer of the law” for directions to the interstate highway. He gave John the directions.
A police car came up behind us, seemingly out of nowhere. Its flashers and siren were on. It was June 1985. Fear, disgust, anger, and then that learned pervasive calm affected each of us in sequence. We did not need any words. We both knew the routine far better than we wished we did. But there was a twist this time. Neither of us was surprised when the cop approached the car. Neither of us was surprised when, instead of saying, “May I see your license and registration, sir,” the cop reached in the window, unlocked the door and pulled John from the car. Neither of us was surprised when he threw John against the car and ordered him to spread his legs, sprinkling the sentence with various and assorted profanities and comments about “niggers” and “nigger lovin’ White sluts.” Neither of us was surprised by the body search. We were not even surprised when the cop removed his gun from his holster, having uncovered no weapon from John’s person. We knew better than to speak or ask questions. As far as we were concerned, these were not fellow human beings.
But we were surprised when the cop placed the gun not by his side, or against John’s back or abdomen, but against his right temple. Now all the cop wanted was an excuse, any excuse, to pull the trigger. Neither John nor I dared even move our eyes. I sat stone still. He did not flinch. I knew that if I sneezed or burped, they would blow my man away.
Now that they had a gun to John’s head, they wanted to talk. Where were we from, where were we going, whose car was it, did I have any identification, did I know this man, for how long, why were we in Westport, etc., etc.? The gun never moved. When they asked me for my license (they had already discovered John’s during the body search), I asked if I could reach down to get it or if they would prefer to get it themselves. I told them I was afraid to reach down. “Why is that, ma’am?” the “officer” responded. The other cop came around and retrieved my purse. He pulled out the wallet. He did not search the bag. The partner returned to the patrol car. The other cop’s gun remained ready to fire into John’s right temple. And the boy in blue just smiled on. Clearly, we had made his day.
About five minutes later, the partner returned. “They do own the car,” he mumbled. The gun was placed back in the holster. Then, I received the requisite apology. After all, I was the White woman with the registration and had a medical school ID. The trespass had not been the gun at John’s temple, but the ten-minute delay I suffered as a result of “a police computer error.” Clearly, John was still a “nigger,” but I was apparently no longer a “nigger lovin’ slut.”
The couple did not file a complaint. More fearful than angry, they saw little value in perpetuating a painful experience. Countless other victims of police abuse must reach a similar conclusion. Under those conditions, pragmatism prevails over courage. Principle is sacrificed to survival. This is America. There is a long history of de facto authorization for police to keep Blacks generally and Black men most specifically in the subordinate place that society approves and the law condones.
Racial rhetoric? Hardly. From the earliest period in our history, a primary role of law enforcement was to keep Blacks under control, quite literally during the slavery era. To curb runaways and prevent the formation of insurrectionary plots, slaveholders developed elaborate systems of patrols made up of conscripted local Whites who traveled the roads and checked plantation quarters. Slaves caught without passes were summarily punished with twenty lashes, but the brutality of the patrols resulted in complaints from slaves and masters alike.4
The end of slavery in 1863 increased the danger of the now free Blacks, who posed a greater threat to Whites determined to keep the former chattels in their subordinate place. As a child in Durham, North Carolina, during the second decade of the twentieth century, Pauli Murray viewed the local police “as heavily armed, invariably mountainous red-faced [men] who to me seemed more a signal of calamity than of protection.”5 Albon Holsey, growing up in Georgia at the turn of the century, recalled having lived in “mortal fear” of the police, “for they were arch-tormenters and persecutors of Negroes.”6
The North was no better. Richard R. Wright Jr. remembered, “I was convinced early that policemen were my enemies. I never approached a policeman with a question until I had been in Chicago for nearly a year.”7 Leon Litwack has written that during the Jim Crow era, the subject of the police often dominated conversations among young Blacks. The stories revolved around chases, harassment, clubbings, illegal arrests, and coerced confessions.8
Far worse than what the police did to Blacks is what they failed to do. From 1859 through the early 1960s, at least five thousand Blacks lost their lives by lynching.9 There are few reports that police or other law enforcement officials posed a serious barrier to lynch mobs. And, of course, few, if any, of the perpetrators were ever brought to justice. According to a scholar of the period, lynchers had “little to fear from those who administered the southern legal system,” and prosecutors often dismissed lynchings as “an expression of the will of the people.”10
In 1900, for example, there were at least 105 reported lynchings. In New Orleans during that year, White mobs assaulted Blacks for three days, burning and robbing their homes and stores. Mass murder was not sufficient to save the first of several antilynching measures, this one introduced by G. H. White, a Black congressman from North Carolina, from dying in committee.11 Despite earnest campaigns by the NAACP, which was founded a decade later, and other groups, the Congress never passed any of the antilynching bills placed before it.
Beyond documented lynchings by vigilante mobs, it is simply impossible to estimate the number of Blacks murdered by individual Whites in cases where the motive was racial antagonism. Only a small number of those who committed these crimes were tried for them. Few were convicted, and almost none were executed. These killings continue. By contrast, in those instances where Blacks kill Whites, the response by law enforcement agencies and the public is swift and often deadly.
Baldwin’s suggestion that genocide could be the future fate of Black Americans has an even more fearsome historical support in the literally hundreds of race riots that have marked and marred this country’s racial landscape. The motivations for these riots, which invariably became Black massacres, were many, but the patterns were quite similar. Mobs of Whites rampaged through Black communities, burning houses and killing every Black person they could find, usually with a government response that was inadequate or nonexistent.
The patterns were set almost immediately after the Civil War. In Memphis, Tennessee, in 1866, for example, a failed attempt by police to halt alleged disorderly conduct by Black soldiers prompted Whites to begin a general massacre, during which forty-six Blacks and two Whites supporting the Blacks were killed, about seventy-five were wounded, and ninety homes, twelve schools, and four Black churches were burned.12 E. L. Godkin, cofounder of The Nation and its editor at the time, wrote that the killing was “inconceivably brutal, but . . . its most novel and most striking incident was, that the police headed the butchery, and roved round the town either in company with the White mob or singly, and occupied themselves in shooting down every colored person, of whatever sex, of whom they got a glimpse.”13
The period during and after the First World War was a racially turbulent time. Between 1915 and 1919, there were some eighteen major interracial disturbances. In July 1917, serious racial violence occurred in Chester, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and Houston. The 1917 riots in East St. Louis were particularly vicious. At least thirty-nine Blacks and nine Whites were killed. Although President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary told the press that the details of the riot were so sickening that he found it difficult to read about them, Wilson himself took no action and, despite media criticism, remained silent.14
Congress did appoint an investigative committee. This committee reported that racial tensions were brought to the boiling point by mills, factories, and railroads that imported 10,000 to 12,000 Blacks from the Deep South, promising good jobs. Blacks were hired in place of Whites to counteract organizing efforts by labor unions, but many found no work and had no decent places to live. Crowded into East St. Louis and swelling the already large Black population, the newly arrived Blacks found themselves in a center of lawlessness.
When an unidentified car drove through the colored section and its occupants fired indiscriminately into homes, armed Blacks were alerted by a prearranged signal: the ringing of a church bell. They flocked into the streets and attacked a police car that had come to investigate the disturbance. The crowd fired volleys of shots into the car, killing two officers. The next day, mobs of Blacks killed other Whites. On learning of these attacks, Whites began to retaliate by attacking every Black in sight. The committee reported,
All fared alike, young and old, women and children; none was spared. The crowd soon grew to riotous proportions, and for hours the manhunt continued, stabbing, clubbing, and shooting, not the guilty but unoffending negroes. One was hanged from a telephone pole, and another had a rope tied around his neck and was dragged through the streets, the maddened crowd kicking him and beating him as he lay prostrate and helpless.
The negroes were pursued into their homes, and the torch completed the work of destruction. As they fled from the flames they were shot down, although many of them came out with uplifted hands, pleading to be spared.
It was a day and night given over to arson and murder. Scenes of horror that would have shocked a savage were viewed with placid unconcern by hundreds whose hearts knew no pity, and who seemed to revel in the feast of blood and cruelty.15
As for the police, the committee reported that police failed to halt the violence and often participated in it. When soldiers of the state militia took White rioters to jail, the police released them by the hundreds without bond and without having tried to identify them. When a White mob held several policemen against a wall while other rioters were assaulting Blacks, the police made no effort to free themselves, deeming the situation highly humorous. At one point, the committee reported, “the police shot into a crowd of negroes who were huddled together, making no resistance. It was a particularly cowardly exhibition of savagery.” The report found that many of the soldiers joined the rioters, later boasting of how many Blacks they had killed.
There are equally grim reports of subsequent riots: New York City in 1935, Detroit in 1943, Los Angeles in 1965, and again following the acquittal of the police who beat Rodney King in 1992. The patterns of cause, casualties, and subsequent investigating committees were predictably similar. Race riots, whether sparked by Black or by White violence, always resulted in Blacks’ suffering a disproportionate number of deaths, injuries, and loss of property. And, once the fighting began, law enforcement forces could not be relied on for protection and often gave aid and support to White rioters.
In the last few decades, the “war on drugs” has become the major vehicle for police harassment of Blacks and Hispanic persons of color. In fact, the arrest, conviction, and lengthy imprisonment of Blacks and Hispanics seems the primary goal of the antidrug campaign, which, despite the expenditure of billions of dollars, has had little effect on either the importation or the use of drugs. Far more drugs are used by Whites living in the middle- and upper-class suburbs and on college campuses, but law enforcement has focused its efforts on communities of color.
For example, one study revealed that, in 1989, drug arrest rates for African Americans were five times higher than arrest rates for Whites, even though Whites and Blacks were using drugs at the same rate. Blacks make up 12 percent of the U.S. population and 13 percent of all monthly drug users, but they constitute 35 percent of those arrested, 55 percent of those convicted, and 74 percent of those sentenced to prison for drug possession.16 The result: today almost three out of four prison admissions and 90 percent of those imprisoned for drug offenses are Black or Hispanic.17 Experts predict that, if current trends of imprisonment continue, by 2020 almost two out of every three young Black men nationwide between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four will be in prison.18
Even the most serious instances of police harassment pale when compared with the pattern of Black imprisonment that is sparked by politicians more than willing to stand on law-and-order platforms, encouraged by the billion-dollar prison industry and sanctioned by a general sense, which even some Blacks share, that “if you do the crime, you do the time.” Unthinking slogans ignore the labor market increasingly closed to African Americans, particularly to those presumed unskilled and deemed by many employers less desirable as employees than recent immigrants.
Dionne Brand, the Black Canadian feminist, writes, “North America does not need Black people anymore . . . for the cheap and degraded labour we’ve represented across the centuries of our lives here.” She asks, “Why empower a Black person in America to demand better wages and better working conditions, when you can ship the work off to a less-enfranchised Colombian or Sri Lankan?”19
In a world where technology makes possible the exporting of work and where politics permits the exclusion of those traditionally last hired and first fired, the Baldwin warning becomes chilling prophecy. Black people who have worked the longest and hardest in this nation are increasingly obsolete. What will be our fate? We know that at an earlier time, when the nation lusted for the lands held by the true natives of America, it resorted to phony treaties, open warfare, and finally genocide. What might be the fate of the descendants of Africans brought here to work when the need for their work has ended?
We need not rely on prophecy in dealing with such questions. We can see the answer to them in the policies that ignore the predictable effects that occur “when work disappears,” as the title of a recent book by William Julius Wilson puts it. The result will be massive unemployment and not the lack of family values that has devastated our inner cities and placed one-third of our young men—denied even menial jobs when they lacked education and skills—in prison or in the jaws of the criminal court system, most of them for nonviolent drug offenses. Even those of us who escaped the ghetto and acquired education, skills, and perhaps professional status have not been able to gain insulation through success. Nor do the emblems of American success—the fine car, beautiful home, stylish clothes, fancy vacation—enable us to break free of myriad manifestations of racial subordination, some of which are documented by Ellis Cose in his book The Rage of a Privileged Class.
Our careers, our very lives, are threatened because of our color. Whatever our status, we are feared because we might be one of “them.” And there are few of us who do not have family, former schoolmates, or neighbors who are “them.” Success, then, neither insulates us from misidentification by wary Whites nor eases our pain when we consider the plight of our less fortunate brethren who struggle for existence in what some social scientists call the underclass.
There is more, however. I fear that those “fortunate few” Blacks, like this writer, are unintentional, but no less critical, components in the structure of racial subordination. For the charade that people of color are complicit in their conquered condition is made more believable because there are those Blacks who, through enterprise, good fortune, and, yes, sometimes the support of White progressives, have achieved a success that many in the society believe all Blacks could attain—if they just worked hard or were lucky, or both. “You made it despite being Black and subject to discrimination,” the question goes, “so why can’t the rest of ‘them’ do the same?” For those who pose it, the question “Why can’t the rest of ‘them’ make it?” carries its own conclusion. It is a conclusion that justifies affirmation of the racial status quo, and opposition to affirmative action and, for that matter, all civil rights protections offering remedies that might disadvantage or inconvenience any White less guilty of overt racism than Bull Connor or the head of the Ku Klux Klan.
Despite the undisputed upward mobility of some Blacks, serious disparities in education, income, quality of housing and health care remain for most of them, with the gap growing both between Whites and Blacks and between poorer Blacks and more successful Blacks. Efforts by community groups and churches to address these conditions are praiseworthy and sometimes impressive; overall, though, the status of far too many Black people remains on the vulnerable fringe of a society that values wealth and Whiteness.
Given this awesome array of racially related barriers to a full life for Black people, how should we explain the priority concern we give to police brutality? It is, obviously, a serious problem, but it is also dramatic in a media-drenched era in which the drama trumps substance. As I write this, in July of 1999, the nation has ended a full week of media-led mourning over the deaths of John Kennedy Jr., his wife, and his sister-in-law in an airplane crash. During the same seven-day period, perhaps 800 people died of the 40,000 expected to lose their lives in auto accidents this year. Unless the crash is spectacular or ties up traffic for long periods, fatal auto accidents seldom make headlines and may not be reported at all.
Blacks, like all people, allow the dramatic incident to shield the more unnerving reality. We identify with the victim of police violence, but in that very identification we unconsciously embrace a discomfiting divergence. Our citizenship is far more shaky than we wish to acknowledge. And out-of-control police officers, with all the risk they pose, are far from the top of the lengthy list of dangers that threaten us both individually and as a people.
This deconstruction of the danger racist police pose for Black people is not reassuring and is not intended to be so. It is one among many contradictions in the state of Black people in America who, while never wanted, have managed to survive all the racial handicaps intended to obstruct their lives. The human debris of racial restrictions are all around us, and yet, somehow, Black people manage, not as I would have them or as by any objective standards they should function, but they do. As a character in one of my stories, “Redemption Deferred: Back to the Space Traders,” puts it as he urges Black people not to accept the offer of aliens from another world to join them,
It’s true. Life in America was hard for African Americans, as we all know. But as we all also know, my friends, America, whether Whites liked it or not, is our land, too. For better or worse, it is our home. Our roots are there. Our work is there. There we have lived our lives, and there we have engaged in the struggle for our dignity, a struggle that—win or lose—is our true destiny. The humanity which so attracts the Space Traders is not a gift that came with our color. It is the hard-earned result of our efforts to survive in a culture everlastingly hostile to our color. It is the quest for freedom and equality that has been our salvation. We must continue that quest or betray the hopes and prayers of those who brought us this far along the way.
NOTES
1. Patricia J. Williams, “The Executioners Automat,” The Nation 262 (July 10, 1995): 59, 63.
2. The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission, ed. Steven R. Donziger (New York: Harper Perennial, 1996), 161.
3. Ibid., 168.
4. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974) 617–18.
5. Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), 15.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. The names of the victims, along with the place and date of their lynching, are listed in Ralph Ginzburg, ed., One Hundred Years of Lynchings (1962; reprint, Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1988), 253–70.
10. Michael R. Belknap, Federal Law and Southern Order: Racial Violence and Constitutional Conflict in the Post-Brown South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 8–9.
11. Peter M. Bergman, The Chronological History of the Negro in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 330.
12. Ibid.
13. E. L. Godkin, “The Moral of the Memphis Riots,” in Uncivil War: Race, Civil Rights and The Nation: 1865–1995, ed. Peter Rothberg (New York: The Nation Press, 1995), 3.
14. Elliott Rudwick, “Race Riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917,” in The Politics of Riot Commissions, ed. Anthony Platt (New York: Collier Books, 1971), 83.
15. Ibid., 63.
16. The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission, 115.
17. Ibid., 103.
18. Ibid., 106.
19. Dionne Brand, Bread out of Stone (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1994), 116–17.