I slept well last night, and when I woke up this morning I felt better than I did last night. Yes, there is evil in the world. Yes, there is stupidity and ignorance in the world. Yes, there is racism in the world. But there are still good people in the world working to change things. The pace of that change can be agonizingly slow and frustrating--but the constant pressure of our love for each other works on hate the same way that water works against rock. We must not abandon love regardless of the temptation to hate. But remembering we are surrounded by love is only the first step in the process of confronting evil. Using that love as sword, shield and armor against the darkness--acting in that love and through that love--is how we change the world for the better. We should not wait on some higher power when it is within our power to make the lives of others better through our actions. We may get tired and frustrated sometimes--may become so exhausted that we take a day or a week or a month to sleep and recover. But the work must go on--and we must do it--for if we do not take up that work, who will? The short answer is, no one. Kings and priests once ruled because no one dared oppose them. Human beings enslaved other human beings because no one dared oppose them. The rich impoverish the poor because no one dares oppose them. And we are so conditioned to accept these things--to accept the place that others say we should occupy in society--that when anyone rises up and says, Enough, no more, we look for reasons to put them down, no matter how peacefully or lovingly they act. I wont try to defend what happened in Ferguson last week or last summer--on either side. My brother is a police officer in a major American city. My father-in-law was a police officer in a small US city. I have been a police reporter in both a major metropolitan area and a general assignment reporter whose beat included covering police activities in a number of small cities and towns. A former student is an assistant district attorney. I have friends and former students who are or have been police officers. I understand how every traffic stop has the potential to escalate to confrontation. A police officer can never be certain who is driving the car they have pulled over: it could just be a random high school kid who was driving too fast and putting others needlessly at risk; Or it could be someone with a gun who will shoot without a second thought. If a police officer wants to go home at the end of a shift, he or she must approach every situation with that thought in mind. I remember sitting through a police training video that made exactly this point: every encounter is potentially fatal. None of that justifies the initial police actions in Ferguson, Cleveland or New York City in recent months, but it helps put those events in a context that makes their responses at least more comprehensible. My brother, who has served most of his career in a largely minority area, says the average police officer is less racist than the average white citizen. He says that an officer working over time in a minority district, regardless of the officers race, comes to identify more and more strongly with the community he is policing. In addition, police officers in major cities undergo significant amounts of sensitivity training in racial issues and appropriate use of force. My brothers last assignment was writing and supervising implementation of that kind of training in the city he works for. My own experience in talking with police officers Ive known is that my brother is right: the average big-city police officer is less racist than the average white person. That does not mean there are not racist police officers. That does not mean police officers do not, sometimes, use excessive force. That does not mean that what the police officer in Fergusson did was right. That does not mean what the police officer in New York did was right. That does not mean what the police officers in Cleveland did was right. It does not mean that what happened in those three cases was not racially motivated. It does not mean that the grand jury decisions in Ferguson and New York were right or that there were not racial implications in either one, the other or both. Without a thorough investigation of those cases we have no way of knowing--and such a public investigation does not seem likely to be forthcoming. And it certainly does not mean, given the history of the last 150 years and the recent statistical evidence, that people of color in the United States do not have reason to be concerned--very deeply concerned--about these events. Just as we must put the actions of a police officer within the context of his or her day-to-day experience, we must put the reactions of the African American community to those actions into the context of their day-to-day lives. Policing in many minority communities does not look anything like the policing that goes on in most white communities. Even as a young man, no police officer ever stopped me on the sidewalk to question me about who I was and where I was going, despite the fact I constantly wore a cape and carried a quarterstaff. But my African American friends were frequently stopped, questioned and frisked, even in their home communities, by white police officers. That kind of behavior goes on even today in many minority communities. One can argue that those are, perhaps, higher crime communities--and maybe they are. But those kinds of interactions set up an us-and-them reality that simply does not exist in most white communities. If I drive into a minority community, the police do not pull me over to ask what I am doing there. But if an African American drives a nice car into a white neighborhood where the police do not know him, he is likely to be pulled over. As a child, police officers were frequent visitors in my school. We were encouraged to see police officers as our friends--someone we could turn to if we were lost or in trouble. This kind of thing did not often happen in minority communities. There, with some justification during the Civil Rights era, children were taught to fear the police. Today, while there are efforts in some cities to foster a positive relationship between police and children of all races and economic groups, such efforts are often the exception rather than the rule. A young black man is more likely to be shot by the police than his white counterpart is. This creates fear in parents, who instruct their children to act accordingly. These attitudes are reinforced by events. In the same week a grand jury refused to indict a white police officer for the choking death of an African American man that the coroner had ruled a homicide, reportedly another white police officer elsewhere was fired for merely using a chokehold on a white college student until the student lost consciousness. I dont know all the details of the latter case--but those details do not matter here. They demonstrate the contrasting context minority communities deal with every day that create their perception of law enforcement and the rule of law. They see these contradictions and draw their conclusions about their place in the justice system accordingly. It would be one thing if these events were viewed in that community only within recent times. But they take place in a historical context that includes lynchings, rapes, and racially motivated discrimination in employment and civil rights that extends over hundreds of years. Many still living can recall young black men being tortured and murdered for the crime of merely looking at a white woman. And they are taking place in a political context that sees the Republican Party attempting to limit the voting rights of minorities and the poor. As I have said, I abhor the violence on both sides. But some of the complaints I have heard about the protests make me cringe. The worst of these was a bit of whining about a young girl being prevented from seeing Santa Claus because of the protests. I like Santa Claus. But that childs inability to see Santa pales to insignificance next to a group of people who feel, justifiably, that both their rights and lives are at risk. Having been involved in numerous protests in my life, I know that most people do not undertake them unless they feel strongly that a great wrong is being committed. They do not engage in the civil disobedience of blocking roads, subways and high speed highways without significant cause. Rosa Parks did not decide not to give up her seat just because she wanted to sleep--nor did her supporters boycott those buses because they wanted to get in shape for the swimming season. There are serious issues that need addressing here. We would do well to think about that before complaining about our delayed commute.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 16:13:02 +0000
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