Encounters with the Fuzz on the American Battlefront
Three African American writers, Patricia Williams, Lee Hubbard, and Cecil Brown, have complained about taking younger relatives to see George Lucas’s The Phantom Menace only to have these children exposed to stereotypical images of African Americans. I’m actually glad that the children saw this movie in the company of these writers, because movies provide an opportunity for them to prepare for the combat they must wage in a society where media, including Hollywood, television, and newspapers, present African Americans as the enemy.
These media portrayals, fictional or otherwise, are not unlike the portrait of Asian Americans found in Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination and the Psychology of Enmity by Sam Keen. This work deals with propagandistic portraits of the Japanese, who, at that time, were engaged in hostilities against the United States. They could just as well be those of African Americans, who are often shown as inferior and simian, their males a threat to European women. A poster showing a Japanese soldier dragging a nude White woman over his shoulder is consistent with the images thrown up by the Bush candidacy’s Willie Horton commercials during the 1988 presidential campaign. The image of Horton, a Black man who raped and beat a White woman while on prison furlough, was projected as emblematic of all Black men. This is not an infrequent occurrence. Each day, African Americans confront hostilities from their fellow White citizens, who see themselves as unofficial deputies for an occupying army: the police. I experienced two such incidents while working on this essay.
The first incident occurred on July 6, 1999, while I drove to the home of the author Cecil Brown, whose encounter with the police at a swimming pool used by the University of California faculty inspired him to write a poem entitled “Strawberry Creek,” which I published in my zine, Konch. The University of California police subsequently charged that Cecil Brown had been a menace to the White women bathers at the pool, a strange allegation since on the day of the incident, when Brown asked the supervisor of the pool why the pool personnel had called the police, the supervisor couldn’t give a reason. The police put out this story, I believe, because they wanted to cover their embarrassment at having harassed Brown, a Berkeley faculty member, because he had the temerity to use this pool, where one rarely sees a Black person.
When I arrived at Brown’s apartment building at the Emeryville Watergate, I didn’t find his name listed on the directory of the building. This was unusual because it was the building where I had met Brown in the past when we walked around the Emeryville Marina and where, from time to time, we were put under surveillance by the Emeryville police. I returned home to call Brown and was informed that he’d forgotten to tell me that he had moved to another apartment in the building and that he hadn’t received a directory number.
We decided to meet in front of the building. During my first trip there, I’d noticed a police car parked at the end of my block. When I left the block to meet Cecil, for the second time, the car followed me, changing lanes when I did and finally making a dramatic left turn when it was parallel to the left side of my car. I saw my encounter with the policeman as a skirmish. A strafing. A little like when an innocent passenger airplane enters unfriendly territory and is buzzed by fighter jets.
These policemen are descendants of the White patrollers and citizens’ councils whom Booker T. Washington and others have historically complained about. Throughout history, their job was to regulate the comings and goings of African slaves, just as the UC Berkeley police and the policeman on my block were regulating Cecil Brown and my comings and goings. The irony is that I have been the neighborhood block captain, and as part of my job I have complained to the police and to my councilperson about the activities occurring in a house at an intersection located near my home, without response. It continues to be a safe haven for drug dealers and small-time criminals.
An exterminator who rid my house of rats said that the infestation had begun at this pest house, because of the young owner’s unsanitary habits and the steady flow of young men who could be seen entering and exiting the house at any time during the day and night. My oldest daughter, Timothy, a novelist, had been harassed by a young man as she walked past the house. This situation has been going on for a year, without official response, yet the police found the time to tail me. This is a fact of everyday life in the inner city. Meanwhile, across the country, the people who sit on their fake, genteel behinds in their Upper West Side apartments, paid for by their intellectual treachery, and earn their living by writing “tough love” op-eds for the New York Times haven’t the slightest idea about what goes on in these neighborhoods, the subject of their fatuous musings.
UNLIKE THAT of those Black children watching The Phantom Menace, my first scary experience with the representatives of a population that is hostile to African Americans and treats them as members of an enemy nation was more immediate. It was not with the propaganda arm, the television and motion pictures whose job it is to keep the White population mobilized against African Americans by recycling stereotypes in the same manner that the Nazi media aroused hostile passions against unpopular minorities.
It occurred on Elm Street in Chattanooga, Tennessee, when I was about three years old. The police had been called, ostensibly to get rid of a pack of dogs that had been disturbing the neighborhood. We were told to remain inside. The police invaded the neighborhood and began shooting up the place. It didn’t occur to me at the time, and none of my relatives read anything into it, but looking back upon it I now see that these were war games. The police wanted to demonstrate their firepower to a neighborhood that might become troublesome. This was an act of intimidation. Most, if not all, of the riots that occurred during the 1960s were the results of a police incident. These uprisings should be viewed as stateside intifada.
After having grown up in Buffalo, where I moved from Tennessee, I, like most Black male youngsters I knew, was often stopped by the police. I never gave it much thought, but it occurs to me now that these were checkpoint incidents. Small-scale border incidents. In many countries where the majority is at war with the minority, minority members must constantly show their IDs to the occupation forces located in their communities. When these minorities venture from their neighborhoods and are found to be in enemy territory (which is where Cecil Brown and many other Black men regularly find themselves), they must show proof of who they are, just as during slavery free African Americans constantly had to show their papers. Sometimes, when I am driving through White California towns, I find myself being followed by the police from the time I enter until the time I exit town. It’s as though the Black codes of the late nineteenth century were still in operation.
I lived in Buffalo from the time I was four until I was twenty-two. I became fully conscious of the role of the police when I began working for a newspaper, the Empire Star. I was thirteen and worked as a “printer’s devil” under a staff of Black intellectuals led by A. J. Smitherman. A former newspaperman in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Smitherman had been charged with inciting a riot and run out of town during the famous Tulsa riots of 1921. It was at the Star that I became acquainted with the historical and contemporary legacy of being Black in the United States. African American newspapers, which I used to deliver, filled in the gaps about Black issues that weren’t covered by my “formal education.”
While attending the University of Buffalo in the late 1950s, I became acquainted with the relationship between interracial encounters and police brutality and surveillance. Black and White bohemians began to intermingle and would sometimes party together. I remember on several occasions our cars being tailed by the Buffalo police. Like the “patrollers” of old, they knew their mandate—to confine Black people to Black belts and to monitor any signs of integration. White women have told me stories of being stopped by police when out on a date with Black men.
In 1960, I began to write for the newspaper for which I had worked as a teenager. We reported about police brutality, segregation, and politics. I wrote one story about the Buffalo police’s attack on Black prostitutes. “Cops and Dogs Attack Innocent Girls on High Street” was the headline. The police were offended and got a Black councilman to try to get me to soften my views about the police. I didn’t budge.
My experience with the Buffalo police was mild in comparison with an ugly event that would take place in New York, where, in 1999, the dictatorial mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani endorsed the actions of an elite patrol, the Street Crime Unit, a sort of White ton-ton macoutes, which has stopped and frisked thousands of Black and Hispanic men. Giuliani gets credit from White nationalist journalists for lowering the crime rate, even though this trend was begun under David Dinkins, whose administration saw the New York crime rate significantly reduced after the hiring of seven thousand new police officers following 1990. (Even the New York Times, which inflames its White readers with generalizations about African Americans in almost every section of the newspaper, gave credit to Dinkins for lowering the crime rate.1 Yet reporters erroneously reported that crime had gone up during Dinkins’s term.)
It was in New York that I discovered the historical ethnic divisions that colored the relations between the police and Blacks and Puerto Ricans. The cops were members of the Irish and Italian American upper underclass, who, as one former police commissioner said, were from authoritarian backgrounds. I also found that Whites, no matter how radical, were generally treated better by the police than Blacks. The late Abbie Hoffman said in the New York Times Magazine that he had a nephew-uncle relationship with the commander of the precinct located on the Lower East Side. Ironically, this was the same precinct where I, and other Blacks, men and women, were being beaten up.
When I first arrived in New York in the early 1960s, I was standing on a street corner in Greenwich Village, talking to some friends, and a Black policeman told us to move on. I said something clever, and I’ll never forget the hatred in that cop’s eyes. He banned me from ever returning to Greenwich Village, a demand I of course ignored. Another day we were sitting in Pee Wee’s, a bar, located on Avenue A on the Lower East Side, and the police came bursting in, guns drawn. When they found that no crime had been committed and that there was no disturbance, one of them said, “We just wanted to be ready.”
Ready for what? To wage an all-out ethnic war against Black Americans? No matter how prosperous a Black American, he has, in the back of his mind, the knowledge of what happened to the Native Americans.
WHILE LIVING in New York, I worked in factories and hospitals, as well as a couple of times on the Daily News straw poll and at the New York State Department of Labor, where I was a clerk. I’d spend my leisure time writing poetry and socializing at Stanley’s, a bar on Avenue B, where artists, writers, and musicians would hang out. Some of my friends were members of the Umbra workshop, a group of Black novelists and poets who met weekly to examine one another’s work. I can recall an incident in which, in 1973, Calvin Hernton, a poet, and Duncan Roundtree III, a sociologist, and I were walking down Avenue B. We were in a jovial mood. I had been reading about police corruption that had been exposed by the Knapp Commission. One memorable line I recalled was, “They’re taking bribes in low places.” When I saw two cops carrying something wrapped in paper bags out of the Annex bar, which was owned by the late Mickey Rushkin, I turned to Calvin and said, “They’re taking bribes in low places.” I said it within the earshot of the two policemen, but didn’t think they’d heard me. We kept walking, and Calvin said something to a woman who was walking on the other side of the street. I don’t remember her saying anything, but she wasn’t offended. In fact, she smiled.
The next thing I knew, the patrol car was speeding toward us. The police leapt out of the car and put the three of us in the back seat. They took us to the police station, which was commanded by the man who Abbie Hoffman said reminded him of an uncle. I was put into a separate room at the request of the cop—let’s call him Officer Shrunk—who, on the way to the station, kept going on about how he didn’t want Black guys dating his wife or daughter. Even the other cops looked at him funny. The cop said he wanted to deal with the “nigger” who was wearing the blue shirt. That was me. Shortly after this, I was isolated from Calvin and Duncan. The cop came into the room and began punching me out. I burst into tears because I was frustrated. My urge was to smash him as one would a termite or an ant, but I had enough sense to restrain myself. He had the guns. I knew that if I struck him, I could be killed or accused of resisting arrest. These are some of the tricks that the police use to add more Blacks to the prison population, one of the many facts ignored by people like James Q. Wilson, who believes that Blacks are genetically prone to violence.2 (Wilson is provided with a forum by CNN to broadcast his views to two hundred countries.) That police officer had the power, while I had nothing but my wit, which ultimately would get me out of this jam. This miserable human being was intent upon ruining us, because I had made a dumb remark, and he searched us, hoping to find some reefer so that he could really stick it to us.
Shortly thereafter, we were taken from this station, where White cops had called us “niggers” while the Black cops went about their work. Officer Shrunk came into my cell at the Tombs, a city prison whose gothic style mirrored the state of our racist and primitive criminal justice system. By contrast to the fierce person with the contorted face who’d beaten me at the police station, the man before me was very polite. He said that if I would plead guilty to disorderly conduct, I would only spend a weekend at Riker’s Island, the medieval facility where New York prisoners are stored. I told him that I wasn’t going to plead guilty to anything. Years later, I learned from a British documentary about the New York criminal justice system that indigent Blacks were urged to plead guilty whether they were guilty or not, another factor in the high incarceration of Blacks.
Officer Shrunk got mad and left the cell in a huff. I learned later that the details of the incident had gotten around, and when we were released, some Black cops asked us to tell the story about the incident that led to our being jailed. They thought it was funny. A Catholic priest, whom I shall never forget, visited my cell and asked if there was someone he could call on my behalf. I gave him the number of the woman I was living with. We had been charged with disorderly conduct—the kind of all-purpose charge that’s used to satisfy a policeman’s Blacks and Hispanic quotas, similar to the Black codes that the South used to contain African Americans. Duncan Roundtree had to spend the weekend in jail, but since I was obviously the target of the policeman’s malice and hatred, I raised the bail for him. I borrowed the money from the daughter of one of New York’s most prominent capitalists, who had devoted time and effort to the Civil Rights struggle only to become cynical. She told me in the mid-1960s that most White people don’t care whether Blacks live or die. She was right.
They kept postponing our trial because Officer Shrunk failed to show up. This, I was to learn later, was a vindictive way of running up our lawyers’ bills. When the day of the trial finally arrived, I put on a three-piece pinstriped suit and sat patiently until our case was called. When it was, the charges against Calvin and Duncan were dismissed. I was obviously the target, and I took the stand. This was about a month after one of the first demonstrations against the Vietnam War had taken place in Times Square. Seated behind me were about thirty cops, who were there to testify against the demonstrators whom they had arrested.
I pointed to the two cops who were sitting below the judge’s bench and told them that I’d seen them taking bribes out of the Annex. After I had called them on it, they had arrested us and beaten me. My narrative got good to me, and some of the Black people and Puerto Rican people in the courtroom began to make sounds of approval, egging me on. I was venting all of the rage that had built up inside me for months. The Blacks and Hispanics knew what I was talking about because a number of them had also been set up, victims of what amounted to relentless paramilitary search-and-destroy missions. I was calm and precise and pulled up a strength that I didn’t know I had. When I finished, the two officers, who at the beginning of the trial were smirking, were now glaring at me.
When I sat down, I felt a wave of hostility aimed in my direction from the thirty or so cops who were there to testify against the antiwar protesters. They’d probably lie too. When I was asked to stand to hear the judge’s verdict, I was prepared to take what was coming to me. The judge said, “Guilty.” But when my lawyer asked for the sentence, the judge almost ran from the courtroom! My lawyer stood with his mouth open. He was stunned by the sight of the judge fleeing the courtroom without sentencing me. He said he’d never seen anything like it. Flo Kennedy, the feminist advocate and lawyer, who was seated in the courtroom, said she’d never seen anything like it, either. I know I was convicted of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor, but to this day, I have no idea what my sentence was. Suspended? Time served? Who knows? I was just happy to get out of the courtroom. We were in a celebratory mood when we left, and some of the Blacks in the audience came up and congratulated me. The two cops were obviously angry. They had their guns and their other toys, but I had the words and had beaten them with the words.
THIS EXPERIENCE, though time-consuming, was worth more than a year at a university. It taught me how I stood as a Black man in the United States. Whites had their government, with its three branches and innumerable services. The police were my government. They could regulate my comings and goings with all of the leeway accorded the modern-day patrollers that they were. They could request an ID check with or without cause. They could invade my home without a warrant, and the criminal justice system would tolerate this invasion with a wink and a nod. They could arrest me without cause, judge me, and in some cases carry out the sentence. Sometimes, this system decides that the penalty is death. Though some Black males and feminists are still engaged in an intellectual war of words, these cops have never heard of a gender war; they shoot Black women as well as Black men. Though Black men are still public enemy number one for many White Americans, Black women are becoming a growing part of the prison population. In the end, the experience taught me that the Bill of Rights did not apply to me.
When Calvin Duncan and I were marched into the Lower East Side station, I said, in my foolishness, “Thomas Jefferson wouldn’t approve of this.” A detective who was passing by said, “Fuck Thomas Jefferson.”
How right he was. Most Whites enjoyed their “rights.” The rest of us lived in a police state, a crude backward nation within this great democracy, presided over by primitives like Officer Shrunk. He could violate my “rights” whether I was an ordinary person or a celebrity football player beloved by millions. He could plant evidence on me, and if I was of little material wealth, he could force me to plea-bargain for a crime I didn’t commit. If I did have some means to hire a lawyer, he could get up in the stand and testify his ass off. When I left New York, I was no longer the innocent idealist I’d been when I arrived in 1962. I knew a thing or two. But if my most serious encounter with the New York police was bizarre, an encounter with the Los Angeles police was even more so.
IN THE SUMMER of 1967, a few months before the publication of my first novel, I moved to Los Angeles. During the week I worked on my second novel, Yellow Back Radio Broke Down, a hip takeoff on the old yellow backs from which the cowboys derived their style. It had taken me a while to adjust to the automobile culture of California, and I didn’t get a driver’s license until the early 1970s; one day, I was nearly arrested for walking while Black.
It had been my custom to walk downtown to the Los Angeles library to do research for the novel. I was passing through a Black neighborhood when a police car pulled up and some police in plainclothes piled out of it. They rushed up to me and snatched the pouch in which I carried my notes and books. A crowd of African Americans who had gathered about the scene began to laugh when they removed the contents from the pouch. Some books and a notebook. The police said they thought that it was a lady’s purse that I had stolen. The pouch didn’t look anything like a purse.
I said for the crowd to hear, “Gee, you can’t even go to the library any more.” The cops were humorless, though, and piled back into their car and sped off. It did not occur to me then that I could have been beaten or shot for acting smart.
My encounters with the police were minor for years, which for a Black man means that there is no physical confrontation, no threat to his life. I’d get followed sometimes when going to work at the university, especially when a Black criminal had committed some crime and was at large. This happens frequently. All Black men come under suspicion when the police are after one Black man, usually when that person has committed an offense against a White person. A typical incident happened a few years ago when I was seated in a restaurant. A police car drove up, and the occupants, a White girl and the police, stared at me for about thirty seconds. I said nothing about it to my dinner companions, and the policeman and the White girl drove away. All the time that they stared at me, I was trying to reconstruct my whereabouts for the previous week, just in case.
In 1983, while I was producing a television version of my play Mother Hubbard, I had dropped off Jason Buzas, a New York director, and was returning home. As I drove down Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley, I was stopped by the Berkeley police, who came down on me, red lights whirling, like gangbusters. They checked out my registration and told me that they stopped me because a robbery had been committed. I was tired and told them that I didn’t feel like robbing anything. When they discovered that I worked at the University of California at Berkeley, they got nervous. One of them said that they had stopped me because I’d been drinking. They were trying to get their lies straight. I was a teetotaler then, as I’ve been ever since.
MY NEXT ENCOUNTER with the police occurred after Kofi Nataumbo, the poet, had invited me down to the California Institute of Technology to give a lecture. We had exited from the John Wayne Airport and were walking in the parking lot when three plainclothes White men approached us. They identified themselves as members of the Airport Narcotics Security or something or other. They wanted to know why I had used an exit different from the one the other Southwest Airlines passengers used. I didn’t have any baggage, so I had departed from the main exit while those with bags went through the baggage claim exit. They were very tense.
I had heard one of the many White experts on Black things, appearing on Terry Gross’s National Public Radio show, Fresh Air, say that the police hassled only the Black underclass. I thought of this when I identified myself as a senior lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley in town to give a lecture at the California Institute of Technology. That only made them more uptight. They asked me to produce a ticket, which I did. I figured that if I exercised my rights and refused, I would have been arrested and my briefcase planted with narcotics so that they could make a charge. Many Whites believe that Blacks are crazy when they accuse the police of planting evidence, yet they’re the ones who are crazy, bewitched by the media, which too often serve as a kind of public relations annex for the police, creating and reinforcing the belief that American crime is Black or brown, even though over 70 percent of arrests in both cities and rural areas are of Whites. In fact, according to recent FBI statistics, it is White adult crime that’s on the increase. People are programmed and manipulated by the media, seduced by an education that traffics in expensive lies. They live in an intellectually and culturally confined world that’s similar to the one inhabited by Truman Burbank, the character in The Truman Show, who has no idea that the world in which he lives is no more than a media construct.
At the turn of the last century, Booker T. Washington complained about the media’s coverage of African Americans when he said that the media emphasized the “weaknesses” of African Americans. According to Barry Glassner, things haven’t changed. In his book The Culture of Fear, he criticizes the media for stigmatizing Black men: “Thanks to the profuse coverage of violent crime on local TV news programs . . . night after night, Black men rob, rape, loot, and pillage in the living room.”3 The media do their part in influencing the attitudes of the White public so that such warlike measures against Black people by the police are tolerated. Mass media provide modern, sophisticated tools of propaganda that Joseph Goebbels would have envied.
I have had only one police incident since then, as bizarre as the others. I appeared on Nightline in a discussion of police brutality and said that one solution would be for the police to live in the communities they served. The next day, I pulled up in front of the Bank of America at Lake Merritt in Oakland and was immediately accosted by the searching eyes of a policeman. I figured he had seen the program and was about to provoke an incident. I was right. As I got out of the car, I put on my headphones. He came up and told me that it was illegal to wear earphones while driving a car, although I hadn’t been wearing them while driving. I said something like, “Thank you, officer, for informing me of that,” and went about my business. For Black men, it often seems like a victory to escape from encounters with the police unscathed and have the last word.
We must understand that the police wouldn’t be able to wage war against the Black population without the collusion of the majority of Whites. In criticizing the growing prison industry, by which Blacks are treated as merchandise and free labor just as they were in slavery, Jerome G. Miller writes in Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System,
To the inner cities, all this criminal activity brought a war mentality, destructive strategies, and vicious tactics, which exacerbated the violence and fueled social disorganization far beyond whatever negative effects might hitherto have been attributed to single-parent homes, welfare dependency, or the putative loss of family values. The White majority embraced the draconian measures with enthusiasm, particularly as it became clear that they were falling heaviest on minorities in general, and on African-American males in particular.4
The majority of Whites endorse the Gestapo tactics of the police as long as it keeps Black people out of their hair. The support for the presidential candidacy of General Colin Powell, according to one right-wing fan, was based upon his ability to handle “crime” and “welfare,” which in the American vocabulary are synonyms for “nigger.” Whites want Colin Powell to be the Head Overseer for Black Americans. Ronald Reagan was elected and David Duke received a large percentage of White votes in Louisiana because the public perceived that they would put Blacks back in their places.
AN INDICATION of how little most Whites care about how Blacks and browns are treated by the police comes from a poll about police brutality after an incident in 1997 when a New York policeman sodomized a Haitian American named Abner Louima with a broken broomstick. Most Blacks and Hispanics felt that police brutality was a problem; most Whites didn’t. When NBC broadcast the poll results, it left out the fact that Hispanics agreed with Blacks as a way of isolating the Black population as malcontents and paranoids who are devoted to political correctness, when in fact their views are shared by other people of color.
In Northern California, an Asian American was recently shot to death because, according to the police, he was threatening them with martial arts moves. A Hispanic man, caught in the border wars now being waged against Hispanics and Indians in the Southwest, described his ordeal on Pacifica Radio news after being stopped by the border police. He was stopped at 9:00 P.M., and when he told the officers that he was the town’s mayor, they said, “That don’t cut no ice with us.”
It didn’t cut no ice with them, because they knew that in the eyes of the Anglo population, they had more power than the duly elected Hispanic mayor. On October 22, 1998, the National Council of La Raza issued a news release that complained about police brutality aimed at Hispanics. Groups ranging from Amnesty International to the Mexican American Bar Association to the National INS Raids Human Rights Watch have documented countless incidents of law enforcement abuse and excessive use of force.
Here again, the legion of writers who get paid by places like the New York Times, The New Yorker, the New Republic, and the Atlantic Monthly to coast along the familiar clichés about race and crime show their incompetence in analyzing such issues as police brutality. It’s not single-parent households that get you into trouble with the law enforcement; Hispanics are often praised by the same writers for their strong family ties. It’s your Black or brown skin that marks you, as the Star of David and the pink triangle marked Jews and gays in Nazi Germany.
From the very beginning of American history, when Africans were stored on ships and held in jail, innocent of any crime, while waiting to be sold, prison has been a second home for Blacks. Even Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, a Black man and the most conservative member of the Court, acknowledged, while watching a prison bus full of Black prisoners, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Thomas knows that he too can be injured by a policeman to whom all Blacks are the same. Recently the police detained the son of Detroit’s mayor and a few years ago, in New York, the son of Earl Graves, publisher of Black Enterprise magazine. Some psychotic New Jersey policemen held a famous African American dancer to the ground, until they saw that he was on the cover of that week’s Time magazine.
There is a facelessness, a randomness, and a potential powerlessness and violence that defines many of Black people’s interactions with White people. Leaving the Oakland Civic Center, I mistakenly got off at the basement of the garage, used by monthly patrons. I was wandering about, trying to find my car, an activity that goes on throughout America each day. A White woman walked toward me. When she saw me, she hesitated, a scene that occurs throughout America each day when a Black man and a White woman are alone in a public space. I ignored her and kept searching for my car. While walking through one aisle, I noticed her at the other end of the garage, staring across at me. Hers was the same stare of terror and hate that has gotten thousands of Black men incarcerated, maimed, or lynched and whole sections of the Black belts wiped out and their inhabitants massacred.
In an everyday situation like this, a White woman has more power than a Black woman or a Black male millionaire. When I came down another aisle of the garage, confused because I wasn’t aware that I was on the wrong floor, I noticed a White man, whose job was apparently that of filling the cars with gas. He was standing, frozen, glaring at me. His fists were clenched. He had deputized himself as a patroller. He was ready.
Suddenly a security guard approached me and demanded that I produce a ticket. (I guess they sent a Hispanic because if I was a really dangerous Black man and harmed him, it would be no big deal.) I told him I had left it in the car. He said that it was probably upstairs. He escorted me there and followed me until I located my car. Unlike those kids who were disturbed by The Phantom Menace, I take all of these incidents in stride. You see, I’m a veteran, and this was just another day at the front.
NOTES
1. New York Times, October 11, 1993, sec. A, p. 1; August 11, 1995, sec. A., p. 29.
2. Jerome G. Miller, Search and Destroy: African-American Males in the Criminal Justice System (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 205, 217.
3. Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 109.
4. Miller, Search and Destroy, 241.