Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(45)
Cops are human, they tell us. They are right. That also means that cops cannot possibly be immune to the destructive beliefs about black folk. Their fear and suspicion of black folk doesn’t come from nowhere. It materializes the cumulative history of injustice toward black folk. That history gets reduced to intuition about any black person and their likelihood of presenting a threat to the cop’s life. Some “I feared for my life” testimony is pure hogwash. It is the cop’s attempt, after the fact, to justify his criminal actions. But it is just as lethal when the cop honestly believes that he is in danger just by being in the presence of a black person, no matter how much the objective circumstances suggest otherwise.
To pretend that the solution is to bring back a lost balance between black folk and cops ignores history, ignores racial terror, ignores how things are not, and have never been, equal. It is to ignore the even more insistent strains of Coptopia, an ideal state of affairs where police can display ghastly inventiveness in traumatizing or disappearing black and brown bodies while demanding even greater public reverence.
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The myths and demands of Coptopia flare when there is an egregious crime against the police, like the assassination of officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge. In both cities a young black man took aim at the cops through his hateful crosshairs and cut down innocent public servants. Both men expressed their outrage at law enforcement’s seeming war on vulnerable and innocent black folk. The vast majority of black people sided with the police and not the men whose twisted actions spilled innocent blood.
Yet in each case the advocates of Coptopia insisted on complete empathy with the cops’ outlook. They also sought to erase the long and vile history of police terror. They insisted that Black Lives Matter was racist and a spur to violence against cops, even though BLM spoke out immediately against each man’s actions. Neither of these poisonous young assassins was nurtured in a black movement. They were products of our military. Each was taught to use lethal force in the service of his country. These veterans may have both suffered from PTSD. Imagine if every time a white person committed a crime, especially a mass shooting, all white people had to apologize.
Beloved, you should be honest even when it hurts to do so. It is little wonder that these men twisted their anger at the terror black folk face into a perverted plot to murder innocent cops. The real wonder is that more black folk haven’t gone berserk like these men did.
The moral courage of the black masses is overlooked at such moments of crisis. But then how could white America acknowledge our moral courage? It would undercut the rationale for terror that we have faced all along. It would mean that your society, your culture, are culprits in a racial terror that is far more damaging than political terror. The terror we face at your hands is far more sustained. The terror we experience has claimed millions more lives over the long haul of history.
A conservative white commentator bravely pointed out what many of you fail to see. In looking at the forces that might have provoked the evil in Dallas, Leon H. Wolf argued that there’s “a reality that we don’t often talk about—that societies are held together less by laws and force and threats of force than we are by ethereal and fragile concepts like mutual respect and belief in the justness of the system itself.”
That compact has obviously been shattered for blacks. Wolf said it is impossible for the police to do their jobs without the vast majority of citizens believing that our society is basically just and that the police are there to protect them. Wolf asked us to imagine what might happen if a subcommunity perceived that those bonds had dissolved in application to them. We are products of the way our parents view society and institutions, and that, in turn, shapes how we view the world, something we don’t often acknowledge. Beloved, that “we” is really “you.”
Most black folk get this point. We have been arguing it until we were blue in the face. Wolf admitted that as the child of white parents in rural Texas, he was taught the police were there to help him at any time and that he should follow their orders and show great respect for them. Wolf asked white folk to imagine that their parents were black and had grown up in the fifties or sixties in areas where the police force was an instrument of oppression. He asked how that might understandably change those folks’ interactions with the police, and their children’s children’s interactions too, and how it might affect their belief that the police can be held accountable for abusing their power.
Wolf delivered a tough reflection on the events in Dallas. He said that, in order to prevent what happened in Dallas, we must bolster the belief that when cops commit crimes, that the legal system “will punish them accordingly.” Wolf said that if minority communities could believe that this was the case, then there’d be little to no perceived need for reprisal killings.
Wolf acknowledged that “a huge, overwhelming segment of America does not really give a damn what cops do in the course of maintaining order because they assume (probably correctly) that abuse at the hands of the police will never happen to them. As long as the cops keep people away from my door, they have my blessing handling ‘the thugs’ in whatever way they see fit.”
Notice, beloved, that Wolf didn’t take easy refuge in the highly questionable 2016 study—cited in the New York Times and many other media outlets—authored by Harvard professor Roland Fryer, that concluded that black folk are less likely to be shot in a conflict with the police than suspects of other races. The study was doomed by a few factors. First, it only studied ten police departments in three states. It also underplayed the widely varying institutional frameworks that shape how policing is done from department to department. The three states Fryer examined are all members of a White House initiative on policing data that got started in 2015, suggesting that a measure of self-selection, self-fulfillment is at play: departments that already value data-collection and transparency will have different outcomes in any such study because of their laudatory priorities.