Racism in America's police force is linked to cops' role as keepers of the status quo in an unequal society.
May 11, 2012 |
“Get out of the fucking car,” he yelled. I dashed to my apartment window, looked down and saw a cop aiming his gun at a car. Slowly, hands trembling above his head, a black man stepped out and kneeled on the road. Is he going to kill him? I wondered. If he so much as twitches the cop will blast his brains out.
As the afternoon mist thickened into rain, I saw the officer blinking droplets from his eyes. His face was a knot of rage and fear. Thankfully the young man being arrested didn’t twitch as he was handcuffed. After they left and my panic ebbed, I knew it wouldn't be long until someone somewhere was blown into oblivion by the police.
It wasn’t a knee-jerk anti-authority reaction but a heavy feeling based on history. Months later I read of the NYPD killing 18-year-old Ramarley Graham and 68-year-old Vietnam veteran Kenneth Chamberlain. They join Duane Brown, Sean Bell, Timothy Stansbury, Patrick Dorismond, Michael Stewart and others on the growing roster of black men killed by the police.
Once the smoking guns cool and the body is buried, mainstream media repeat the same words, “accident” or “tragic.” But we, who are black or Latino or politicized, hear the slurs and threats shouted in the background. Progressive news show Democracy Now reported that when cops banged on Chamberlain’s door and he told them he was fine, one shouted, “I don’t give a fuck nigger!” In 2011, cops created a Facebook page to complain about working the West Indian Day Parade, on it they called the black partiers “animals” and “savages,” and one wrote, “Drop a bomb and wipe them all out.” Repeatedly, journalists or lawyers smuggle out of the Blue Code of Silence evidence of police using racist, animal imagery to describe the very people they are supposed to serve.
Racism in America's police force is linked to their role as keepers of the status quo in an unequal society. They enforce laws written by politicians on behalf of the wealthy -- laws that end up trapping poor and working-class people in desperate lives. Racial and sexual minorities, legal and illegal immigrants are seen as threats to the social order. When we protest the law and “occupy” a space we are beaten and arrested. When we commit a crime to “get some” we are beaten and arrested. And when we do neither but simply live we’re busted to make a cop’s stop-and-frisk quota.
Language plays an essential role here. It starts with a defensive joke, a “perp” profile that becomes so blurred it encompasses nearly everyone on the street and a constant sense of danger. Each builds on the other until the change is complete and one day, they casually listen to NYPD Capt. James Coan give a racist hurrah speech to detectives executing warrants in Brooklyn. “They’re fucking animals," he repeatedly said of black people from 2008 to 2010, “If you have to shoot, you shoot them in the head.”
A Shot in the Dark
“He was obliged to keep watch all night long with his guns at hand,” wrote slave trader Robert Durand in 1733. “The negroes were continuously ready to force open his hut to rob him…as they were only looking to avenge the kidnapping of their friends.” During the Atlantic slave trade, 12 million people were stolen from Africa and shipped to the Americas. Slave traders herded them from ship plank to the market, where once bought, they shuffled in chains to plantations. And with each jangling step, slaves were circled by men with guns and whips who did not see them as human beings but as dangerous dark animals.
If your job was to herd, whip and sell people like animals then you must see them as such or risk your sanity. From the auction block, jokes and imagery of Africans as savage heathens and apes, swept through cotton fields and upward into the halls of power. Racial ideology, the belief that a physical difference between humans determines their place in society, rose from the material practice of slavery. In his 1781 book Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson equated blacks to animals, writing that they don’t feel love or pain. “Their griefs are transient,” he wrote “Those numberless afflictions…are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them.”
The continuous association of blacks to monkeys created a culture of violent policing of brown bodies. In his 1845 autobiography, abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote of an overseer named Mr. Gore who used his whip like a tongue as if to speak with leather. One day he lashed a slave named Demby who ran into a creek and refused to come out. Douglass writes, “Mr. Gore then…raised his musket to his face, taking deadly aim at his standing victim, and in an instant poor Demby was no more. His mangled body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he stood.”
Slavery By Another Name
After the Civil War ended, African Americans had a brief season of freedom during Reconstruction. But the sight of their former slaves walking the streets terrified Southern whites. In the book and PBS documentary, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of African-Americans from the Civil War to World War II, reporter Douglass Blackmon explained how the Southern ruling class, which wanted the return of free labor, created the Vagrancy Laws. If blacks couldn’t be owned they could be jailed and forced to work. Historian Talithia LeFouria said it meant that, “Anything from spitting or drinking or being found drunk in public or loitering in public spaces could result in confinement.”
Before the war, images of blacks in newspapers were of lazy watermelon-chomping coons or blissful mammies or silent Uncle Toms. After the war they changed into lewd jezebels and fierce brutes. The shift came as slavery gave way to the convict-lease system. Racial ideology still pivoted on the concept of blacks as animals, once safely shackled, now free and dangerous.
Nearly 900,000 black people were arrested and channeled into the convict-lease system, where once incarcerated they were “sold” or “rented” to industries. In this era, police took over for slave catchers and prison guards for overseers as the reactionary force used to turn back history.
Stop and Frisk
“When I was ten, and didn’t look, certainly, any older, two policemen amused themselves by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and sexual prowess,” James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time (1963). If you read black writers of the past one truth becomes clear: an “unofficial” stop-and-frisk policy has always been in effect, though the entire nation.
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Nicholas Powers is an assistant professor of literature at SUNY Old Westbury. His book of poetry, "Theater of War" was published by Upset Press in 2004. He has written for the Village Voice and the Indypendent.
Update:
Wealth Gap Among Races Has Widened Since Recession, April 28, 2013
Related:
5/16/2012
Stop And Frisk Lawsuit Gains Class-Action Status, Judge Slams NYPD Over Policy
New York City Police Infiltrate Sharpton’s Organization, Reporter Says by AFRO staff, February 16, 2012
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