Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(3)
Just as my wife was telling the cop how preposterous this was, two more police cars pulled up with four more white cops.
Damn, I thought to myself, if I had been mugged, I bet I couldn’t have gotten a cop to respond within half an hour. And now, within five minutes of disciplining my son, I’ve got six cops breathing down my neck ready to haul me into the station for child abuse. Or worse.
The other cops formed a circle around our car. The cop who pulled me from my car still refused to explain why he had stopped me. He forcefully patted me down as my wife and my son explained yet again that I had done nothing wrong and that Mike was fine.
“You sure everything’s alright?” the cop asked my wife while looking my way for degrading emphasis. She angrily insisted that all was fine.
Finally the cop frisking me addressed me.
“We got a complaint that someone was hurting a child,” he said.
“I can assure you that I love my son, and that I wasn’t hurting him,” I said in a measured voice. “I punished my child now so that he wouldn’t one day end up being arrested by you,” I couldn’t help adding. And instantly I regretted my words, hoping my brief fit of snarkiness wouldn’t set him off and get me hammered or shot.
“We have to check on these things,” the second cop snapped back. “Just don’t do anything wrong.”
The cop frisking me proceeded to shove me against the car for good measure. Then the six cops got back into their cars and unsurprisingly offered no apology before driving off.
After I picked up my papers, I was still shaken up, and so was my family. Back in the car, I fast-forwarded the tape of N.W.A.’s debut album, Straight Outta Compton, to “Fuck tha Police,” their blunt and poetic war cry against unwarranted police aggression and terror. I cranked up the volume, blasting the song out of my car window. The FBI harassed N.W.A.; local police were enraged by their lyrics. But many of us felt that this song about brutality and profiling finally captured our rage against police terror.
I thought “fuck” seemed the right word for cops who bring terror on black folk.
The historian Edward E. Baptist reminds us that “fuck” is from the Old English word that means to strike or beat, and before that, to plow and tear open. The cops have fucked the lives of black folk.
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Beloved, as your choir director, I implore you to sing with me now. These hymns pronounce profane lyrical judgment on our unjust urban executioners. Some will be unfamiliar to you. But critical times call for critical hymns. These songs reflect our terror at the hands of the police in the strongest words possible. These are what our hymns sound like in America today. Therefore, as the old folk say, I will line out the hymn for you and give you the words of the tune as they are to be sung.
Our first hymnist is KRS-One, our generation’s James Cleveland, the master composer of gospel songs. KRS-One wrote a wonderful song that captures our collective trauma. It is entitled “Sound of da Police.”
Let me call out his words for you to repeat. “Yeah, officer from overseer you need a little clarity? / Check the similarity.” Dear friends, in this song KRS-One argues that his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and his great-great-grandfather had to deal with the cops. KRS-One asks the question, and I ask you to sing along with me, “When’s it gonna stop?!”
We will also sing another of KRS-One’s splendid songs. It is entitled “Who Protects Us from You?” KRS-One says of the police: “You were put here to protect us / But who protects us from you?”
Let us turn our hymnals to our next song, composed by the Fugees, fronted by the powerful Lauryn Hill, who eventually left the group to find even greater applause as a solo artist. Think of her as you think of our beloved Aretha Franklin, who was a member of the New Bethel Baptist Church choir in Detroit before she departed to achieve international stardom on her own. The Fugees wrote a powerful attack on police brutality entitled “The Beast.” In it, Lauryn Hill raps that if she loses control because of the cops’ psychological tricks then she will be sent to a penitentiary “such as Alcatraz, or shot up like El-Hajj Malik Shabazz . . . And the fuzz treat bruh’s like they manhood never was.”
The next hymn was composed by the great Tupac Shakur. He was one of the most influential artists of our time. Shakur began his career composing odes to the Black Panthers. He went on to embrace more universal inspirations before meeting a violent death on the streets of Las Vegas. Shakur brings to mind Sam Cooke, the legendary gospel artist who shifted gears and became a soul and pop star before he was violently shot down in Los Angeles. Let us perform together the words of Tupac’s poignant hymn, “Point The Finga.” In this song Tupac says that he had been lynched by crooked cops who retained their jobs, and that his tax dollars were subsidizing his own oppression by paying them to “knock the blacks out.”
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I teach the work of these hymnists at Georgetown, so my students can hear their lessons and perhaps change their tunes of social justice. We have pored over Jay Z’s lyrics. Of course they hear his exaltation of hustling. But more important, they hear in his “A Ballad For The Fallen Soldier” a deep and angry battle with the police terror that grips black life.
Off to boot camp, the world’s facing terror
Bin Laden been happenin’ in Manhattan
Crack was anthrax back then, back when