Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America(46)

It quickly becomes clear that there simply wasn’t enough data in Fryer’s study. Compare the amount of information in Fryer’s study to that of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report database, which collects data from thousands of police departments across the land. The data Fryer studied in three states over 16 years is about equal to what the FBI database is able to collect in just two to three years. To quote the philosopher Shawn Carter, “We don’t believe you, you need more people.” Fryer concluded that there’s scant statistical difference between the races when the police stop them. But the basis for his conclusion is troubling. Fryer studied folk who had already been stopped by the police, and were then subsequently killed. He never asks—plain avoids—the question of whether black folk are more likely to be stopped in the first place, and whether they’re more likely to be stopped for no good reason.

The answer to both questions is yes. A serious flaw riddled Fryer’s data: it did not distinguish between the likelihood of getting shot when being accosted by police for a traffic infraction or for shooting up a church—only the likelihood of getting shot. As noted journalist Dara Lind cogently argues, “When people talk about racial disparities in police use of force, they’re usually not asking, Is a black American stopped by police treated the same as a white American in the same circumstances? . . . They’re saying that black Americans are more likely to get stopped by police, which makes them more likely to get killed.”

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Beloved, surely you understand how vexed we are by our situation. Surely you understand how the legacy of terror stalks us at every turn, dogs our every step. Surely you understand that police brutality pounds our lives in unrelenting waves. Can you not see that too many cops kill us off like animals without a second thought?

For God’s sake, imagine little Johnny being executed because he drank too much liquor and mouthed off at the cops. Imagine little Jill getting her long blonde hair yanked and her arms pulled behind her back and being slapped around and beat down because she dared ask why she was being stopped. Or being thrown around her classroom because she didn’t want to give up her phone. Imagine seeing video of cops high-fiving each other after one of them heartlessly shoots down your unarmed buddy Larry for no good reason. Imagine hearing one cop whisper to a fellow cop that he should make sure his body camera is turned off.

Beloved, you must not be defensive when you hear our hurt. We who proclaim the terror of cops do not hate all cops. We hate what cops have been made to be. We hate how cops hate us. We hate that cops don’t treat us the way they treat you.

And we hate that you won’t deal with the elephant in the room. Black and brown cops have been the victims of racism themselves. They are the guinea pigs of racism on a police force they are often seduced, or coerced, into lying for. Black police often face harsher barriers to promotion. They often witness firsthand the vile bigotry of white police officers but are afraid to report those officers for fear of a blue backlash. Or think of Ohio black police officer Nakia Jones, who caused a firestorm of controversy for telling the truth about how some white cops target black folk for mayhem. “So why don’t we just keep it real: If you are that officer that knows good and well you’ve got a god complex . . . you are afraid of people who don’t look like you—you have no business in that uniform,” Jones said on a Facebook video. “You have no business being a police officer . . . If you are that officer that’s prejudiced, take that uniform off and put a KKK hoodie on.” Cops like Jones are either isolated or silenced. We hate that too.

We hate that body cameras seem to make no real difference, and police often refuse to share the footage. We hate that the folk who share the videos of the cops killing us are often harassed. Chris LeDay, a 34-year-old Atlanta Air Force veteran, didn’t film, but he did post the video of Alton Sterling, a husband and father of five, being shot by a cop outside of a Louisiana convenience store in July 2016. The next day, military security detained LeDay at his job on Dobbins Air Reserve Base as he passed through a routine checkpoint. He was initially told he fit the description of a black man wanted for assault and battery. It was only after he was taken in handcuffs and leg shackles to DeKalb County jail that he learned that he faced a charge of “failure to appear” on an unpaid traffic ticket from 2014. We hate that you do this.

We hate that you won’t admit that if your children or kin were being killed like us you wouldn’t turn your heads or avert your eyes or accept it as business as usual or the price we must pay to keep our society safe. You’d be beside yourself if your children were slaughtered, and then had their slaughter justified on television, and on social media, as their names were heedlessly dragged through the mud because they playfully posed as a gangsta and posted the photo to their Facebook or Twitter account. How many of your kids do that too? Yet they grow up to be bankers and lawyers or cops who kill black people because those black people provoke suspicion by doing the very thing those same cops did when they were young. But they didn’t end up dead. They end up making us dead. We hate that.

Beloved, one thing is clear: until we confront the terror that black folk have faced in this country from the time we first breathed American air, we will continue to die at the hands of cops whose whiteness is far more important in explaining their behavior than the dangerous circumstances they face and the impossible choices they confront.

We do not hate you, white America. We hate that you terrorize us and then lie about it and then make us feel crazy for having to explain to you how crazy it makes us feel. We cannot hate you, not really, not most of us; that is our gift to you. We cannot halt you; that is our curse.