Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(34)
5.
Our Own Worst Enemy?
Beloved, why is it that every time black folk talk about how poorly the cops treat us you say that we should focus instead on how we slaughter each other in the streets every day? Isn’t that like asking the person who tells you that they’re suffering from cancer to focus instead on their diabetes? Your racial bedside manner has always been fairly atrocious.
But we are not fooled. You do not bring this up because you’re genuinely concerned. You want to win points in debates. You want to avoid any responsibility for how traumatized our communities are. You want to hide from the horror of cops mowing us down like we’re animals.
So you hurl that accusation at us like religion. But there is no righteousness in your retort, no healing in your hubris. We are dying, it is a serious matter, and you must lay down your smug self-satisfaction that we are our own worst enemies and face how you are killing us.
Just this once set aside your litany of accusations and listen. Just this once take the side of the true victims of oppression. Just this once please don’t side with the manufacturers and perpetrators of our death. I’ll be honest and admit that there are ways that black folk are doing ourselves in. But I hope you can admit that even those ways are often linked to our gutless embrace of the bigotries you spew.
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Do you think we like being killed by folk who look like us? Do you think it doesn’t bother us? Our bullets are often aimed at each other because we’re too near the site of pain and heartbreak, frustration and depression. We often lack food and shelter, and we live in homes overrun with bodies, leaving us little room or rest. So we lash out at them, or at an acquaintance, or a partner in crime. Yes, it is true: sometimes we send them, or, perhaps, a stranger nearby, to their eternal reward. This is the geography of despair. It is also the pain of never having control, of always being afraid, of struggling to care for and love what we cannot protect. I learned this lesson in a perilous way.
“Give me your money,” the tall, slender black man demanded of my fiancée and me. We were near the corner of a Detroit ghetto street not far from where the ’67 riots were sparked a decade earlier. It was cruelly ironic that we were close to the entrance to a Detroit police ministation. We were walking home at 10:30 p.m. one Saturday night after a late choir rehearsal at church. Our assailant had come out of nowhere. He announced himself ominously with a .357 Magnum revolver at the end of his shaking hand.
Terror washed over us. This was the Detroit of the 1970s, the city that had been dubbed “the murder capital of the world.” It was also a city in transition. America’s manufacturing strength had showed the first inkling of bowing to a thriving service economy. All those well-paying factory jobs that had been an elevator to the black middle class would slowly begin to disappear. Coleman Young became the city’s first black mayor in 1974. He won in large measure by promising to reform a brutal police force. Most white folk scampered to the suburbs after the riots in ’67. That left black folk in charge of shrinking resources and facing the rise of drug gangs and a spiking crime rate. I feared that night becoming one of its casualties.
“Sir, we don’t have any money,” I said. “I literally have a dollar thirty-five cents to my name.”
The man had on a pair of dark sunglasses. I couldn’t see his eyes to gauge his demeanor. All I knew is that I didn’t want my fiancée and I to die that night. She was scared speechless. I feared that any sudden move might cause him to shoot and kill us.
The Spirit urged me to talk to him. We’d just come from church. Why not call on faith to see us through?
“Man, you don’t look like the type of brother that would be doin’ something like this,” I offered, praying it struck a chord of humanity, and, at least, racial intimacy.
Thank God it did.
“I wouldn’t be doin’ this, man,” he said, his voice trembling, his body language suggesting a growing regret about his action. “But I got a wife and three kids, and we ain’t got nothin’ to eat.”
It would be another year before my son was born into poverty and I’d know the desperation a father faces when he can’t provide for his own child. Both his mother and I would be unemployed by the time he arrived. I’d have to stand in the WIC line to collect free food offerings. But for now I was focused on getting to that future.
Then our would-be robber delivered a real shock. He revealed the vicious cycle of carnage that makes some people victims and then pushes them to make others its victims, as well.
“Besides, last week, somebody did the same thing to me that I’m doin’ to you.”
“I tell you what,” I said. “We just came from choir rehearsal. And if you’ll let me reach into my back pocket, I can give you my church bulletin. It has a number you can call to get some help.”
He took the bulletin and briefly glanced at it. He looked stumped, perhaps half in disbelief at my desperation, perhaps half believing that I really wanted to help him. I made my final offer.
“Look, I only have a dollar thirty-five cents, but I want to give it to you.”
“No, man, you need that yourself.”
“I insist. Take it, please.”
He told us we could go free and to walk to the end of the block. I froze. I didn’t want him to shoot us in the back. I asked him to get on his knees. I don’t quite know why I asked, or why he complied. But, miraculously, he did. I said a very brief prayer for him. I didn’t want to test the Lord’s mercy or the man’s patience. He stayed on his knees as we walked away, unharmed.