Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(44)

You cannot know the terror that black folk feel when a cop car makes its approach and the history of racism and violence comes crashing down on us. The police car is a mobile plantation, and the siren is the sound of dogs hunting us down in the dark woods.

My friends, please don’t pretend you can’t understand how we feel this way. And if you claim that slavery and Jim Crow and the sixties are ancient history, you know your words are lies before they leave your lips. How could that history be erased so quickly?

How can all of that be got rid of overnight? How can it be washed, without great effort, from the mind of a white cop who confronts black folk? How can we deny the structures, systems, and social forces that shape how black folk are seen and treated?

Beloved, the way we feel about cops is how many of you feel in the face of terror. And yet, long before 9/11, long before Al-Qaeda, long before ISIS, we felt that too, at your hands, at the hands of your ancestors, at the hands of your kin who are our cops.

(Do you ever thank your lucky stars that black folk have not done to you what terrorists who despise this country have done? These terrorists claim their actions are driven by hate for our nation. Does it ever give you pause and make you say, “Thank God that black folk never—well, almost never—poisoned our food when we made them cook for us. They never killed our children when we made them watch over them. They rarely conspired to murder us in our sleep when we forced them to share intimate space with us. They never rose up in unison against us because we raped their women, murdered their children, and castrated their men.” Does that ever cross your minds?)

You cannot know how we secretly curse the cowardice of whites who know what I write is true, but dare not say it. Neither will your smug dismissal of unenlightened and bigoted whites satisfy us any longer. That they’re “poor white trash” or uncouth rednecks and that you’re better than they are, that they don’t have your social pedigree or education. As if you can really separate yourselves from them. As if it’s only a matter of personal belief and not social learning and behavior. The distinction between them and you is more self-serving than critical. In the end it only makes the slaughter of our people worse to know that your disapproval of those white folk has spared your reputations but not our lives.

You do not know that after we get angry with you, we get even angrier with ourselves, because we don’t really know how to make you stop.

Do you really think that black people bring this terror upon ourselves? That a woman who’s being intimidated by a cop and calls 911 brings it on herself? How absurd is it to have to call the cops on the cops and then have the cop get mad and not be disciplined or punished? How absurd is it that not a single cop got held accountable for Freddie Gray’s death, as if he somehow snapped his own spine to spite the Baltimore police?

Most of you say nothing, and your silence is not only deafening, it is defeating. And when there is white response, it is often white noise, inane chatter accompanied by the wringing of white hands. There is white frustration at just how complex the problem is and how hard it is for you to tell from the angles of the video just what went down.

Most of us keep our rage inside. We are afraid that when those tears begin to flow we cannot stop them. Instead we damage our insides with high blood pressure, worry our minds with mental distress, or sicken our souls with depression. We pray to God for our sanity. Yet the aggression buried deep inside us sometimes blocks our belief and makes us functional atheists.

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Part of our problem, beloved, is that the police bring overwhelming credibility and authority to the table. Our troubles are worsened when politicians insist that cops and unarmed black folk are equal. Police have badges and batons and Tasers and bullets and guns. Police begin with a shield of honor and incorruptibility. Police start with the support of the state.

We are hardly equal.

Police start with the belief that we must protect our cops as if the history of racial terror doesn’t exist. Police seem to believe they possess what we might term copistemology, or unquestionable knowledge of black guilt and moral blasphemy. There is no need to prove it in court. The streets are where their knowledge is tested as they answer with a billy club or a bullet. Copistemology apparently works wonders. It lets cops know when they should break into the home of a mentally challenged black woman and fatally shoot her while she cradles a child and a shotgun. (But there seem to be gaps in cops’ knowledge too. They didn’t know that the same woman blamed the police for a miscarriage she experienced after an earlier arrest.)

Cops seem to know when to shoot and kill a mentally disturbed black woman as her child watched from the backseat after she changed her mind and drove away from the White House and posed a mortal threat to no one. Cops always seem to know that the black person who is eccentric, or mentally deranged, deserves to die. Yet they also seem to know that the demented white bigot who mows down nine black folk in a southern church deserves to be treated to fast food before being calmly booked. Cops seem to know that all those white folk who come at cops with swinging fists or menacing demeanors or drawn guns don’t really mean them any harm.

Beloved, surely you must see that cops loathe being held accountable for their actions, especially when it comes to us. The cops and their advocates claim that only a few rogue cops give a bad name to the rest. But isn’t that like claiming that most of one’s cells are healthy and that only a few are cancerous?

That metaphor of a few bad apples doesn’t begin to get at the root of the problem. Police violence may be more like a poisoned water stream that pollutes the entire system. To argue that only a few bad cops cause police terror is like relegating racism to a few bigots. Bigots are surely a problem, but they are sustained by systems of belief and perception, by widely held stereotypes and social practice.