I've been meaning to write this for a couple weeks but have been a bit preoccupied of late with the aftermath of the Brown and Garner Grand Jury decisions. Now I think is a good appropriate time to get into this issue because at it's core it relates to those issues as well.
The following video, featuring a very in depth conversation on Race, Sexual Expression and Civil Rights was sent to me by Daniele Watts, an actress who on September 11th was forced to produce her ID for LAPD against her wishes and detained for charges of "Lewd Conduct" because she had been making out with her boyfriend, celebrity chef Brian Lucas, in his car. After the incident both Daniele and Brian wrote about it on facebook and things went viral as at the Daniele had brought up the fact that she and Brian had been stopped by police three previous times [once in Texas, another in Loma Linda] where they had been badly treated or disrespected. For her this was the last straw and she became quite emotional, she also brought up the issue of those previous stops and the likelihood that they were racially motivated. She asked the Sgt who was insisting on having her ID "Do you know how many times police have been called because I'm black and he's white? I'm just being honest with you, Sir." [Full Audio]
This then, was the ultimate sin. The tossing of the "Race Card", even if the question she was posing is in fact - a question, not an accusation. As we look at the fairly loud knee-jerk reaction of Sgt Parker to this question, we can now see echoes of it in response to the Brown shooting and the Garner choking. There's even a hashtag for it.
#StopPlayingVictim
As if being singled out and assumed to be a criminal without evidence or due process - or being summarily executed in the street - were some type of game with prizes and awards at the end. At this point in time the Sgt who detained Watts is under investigation by LAPD for his conduct and his decision to counter Watt's and Lucas' facebook posts by releasing selectively edited police audio recordings of the incident to TMZ, meanwhile the City Attorney, long after LAPD had decided "no crime took place", has chosen to file "Lewd Conduct" charges against both Watts and Lucas, which smacks very strongly of selective prosecution and retaliation for their efforts to publicize this event. They're due to be arraigned on these charges this week.
Some would say this incident is relatively minor and not worth all of this effort in comparison to the police killings of people like Brown, Garner, Darrien Hunt and Tamir Rice. I disagree, those are essentially 5th Amendment Violations - the taking of a persons life without due process - in Daniele's case we're dealing with a 4th Amendment violation, the right of person to be secure in the person, papers and effects. I don't happen to think one amendment is more important than the other, they're both important.
The video is about 90 minutes long, but well worth it.
One thing they don't do in the video is discuss the law in regards to Daniele's case. The room is filled with law students, so that's an issue they've already discussed and the consensus there is that Daniele did not have to produce her ID to the police. That's because California does not have a "Paper Please" law like Nevada's or Arizona. Those who criticized Daniele's refusal to comply have pointed to Hiibel v Nevada which upheld the constitutionality of that states "Show ID" law. However that is a moot point in California because the Show ID law here was struck down by Kolender v Lawson as being too vague, and it hasn't been replaced. In fact that statute was specifically repealed in 2008.
Police since that time have been relying on the "Interference and Obstruction" statute (CPC 148(a)] to compel a person to provide ID.
148. (a) (1) Every person who willfully resists, delays, or obstructs any public officer, peace officer, or an emergency medical technician, as defined in Division 2.5 (commencing with Section 1797) of the Health and Safety Code, in the discharge or attempt to discharge any duty of his or her office or employment, when no other punishment is prescribed, shall be punished by a fine not exceeding one thousand dollars ($1,000), or by imprisonment in a county jail not to exceed one year, or by both that fine and imprisonment.
During some of the
additional audio that Daniele sent me, which was recorded when she was handcuffed, one of the other officers specifically mentions
148 as his justification and both Officers disagree with Daniele when she states - correctly - that she doesn't have to provide ID to police. The problem with this is that the California Attorney General has specifically stated that 148
can not be used this way.
The California Peace Officers Legal Sourcebook ("CPOLS") [note: text not available online] written by the office of the California Attorney General) maintains that failure to identify oneself does not constitute a violation of California Penal Code §148(a)(1), resisting, delaying, or obstructing a peace officer: Unlike Nevada and 20 other states, California does not have a statute mandating that a detainee identify himself, and that obligation cannot be read into Penal Code Section 148. (Rev. 1/08, p. 2.14a)
I bring all this up because it brings you up to speed on what everyone in the room was thinking as they listened to the two professors and Daniele discuss their takes on the situation.
The first to speak is Law Professor Camille Gear Rich, and rather than address the legal issue that I've brought up above, or the question of whether Daniele and Brian did break the "Lewd Conduct" statute, she takes a different tack. She considers the following:
Are people in the post-racial era sanctioned for identifying racism?
Is contemporary civil rights protests gendered?
What is required to eliminate Reasonable Articulable Suspicion?
Do seemingly neutral police investigative practices subsidize private racism?
What are the bounds of sexual privacy in contemporary society?
The claim that someone is "Playing the Race Card" has become a method to punish people for attempting to identify bias. As the event goes on it becomes clearer that there is no evidence of any crime, and that there is no intention by Sgt Parker to actually investigate a crime. The situation changes from one where a crime is being investigated to another issue - as Professor Rich puts it - "The Politics of Submission".
The Sgt is going to get her to Submit to his authority, no matter what it takes.
"I'm gonna get your ID no matter what".
Professor Rich also discusses the sexual intimacy in regards to Loving v Virginia which ended miscegenation laws and Lawrence v Texas which helped decriminalize being gay, and showing same-sex affection in public.
She then goes on to discuss how people who profess themselves to be non-racist, are highly intolerant and even react with rage when someone attempts to identify neutral actions which may have a racist or bigoted impact as their ultimate result. To them, documenting and identifying the racism, is actually worse than perpetrating that racism and that over-time these person, in resentment, become more and more racism-tolerant bit by bit.
In my mind this case is one about post-racial rage. It's Officer [sic: Sargent] Parker's post-racial rage about having race named in this particular context, and that rage actually distracts him from what he's supposed to be doing. Instead he goes on the witch hunt for an ID. And he seems like, maybe in another context, might act more reasonably, but we know from the sociological literature that certain things happened in that encounter that deeply disturbed him. And he goes on about the "race card" long after the conversation has shifted.
She also addresses the "Fame Card" that Daniele has been accused of dropping.
Sgt Parker says he's the heroic figure who'se about to ruined, and there were going to be race riots in Los Angeles because of what had happened with Ms. Watts presenting this issue on her facebook page, and riling people up. [Drama Queen much there, pal?] He says "I had to make a decision, we were going to have another racially tumultuous situation in L.A. so I drove to the station and I grabbed the recording and I called TMZ. It stopped the next day."
Yes, right in exactly the same way that the Ferguson Police decided to release the video of Michael Brown in the market against the advice of the DOJ. And how those who support the Garner non-indictment have repeatedly claimed that the fact he'd been arrested 30 times of the last 35 years somehow justified the use of the choke-hold and five Officers piling on top of him until he asphyxiated while weakly proclaiming "I can't breathe" In many ways the smearing of the person whose rights and liberty has been violated is all part of the playbook, even when Police have to violate the law, and their own rules, to accomplish it.
Parker chose TMZ and not the L.A.Times who instead published Daniele's Op-ed - not his - because they're the perfect venue to trash and defame a celebrity using the flimsiest of evidence.
That's what they do, they're like a Hater cult of madlibbing jealousy mongers. They've got no career in show business - because
they have no talent other than being a pack semi-pro assholes - so they spend all their time trying to petulantly destroy those who actually do have talent. It's a lot like what people claim those who criticize the 1% are supposedly like, only in this case, it's literally true.
There's another aspect of this that hasn't really been discussed, and it's the issue of how woman, especially women of color, are often perceived and accepted based on their appearance conforming to certain white/anglo norms. Daniele has pointed out that these negative encounters she's been having with Police didn't begin until after she changed her hair.
If you're watching the video while reading this I'm jumping a bit ahead, but in her section Daniele tells a story that as she began as an actress, studied and gainer her degree, then began going out on auditions she wasn't booking any gigs until one casting director - a black female - took her aside and told her "Girl, if you get a
weave I can book you work." So she did just that and believe it or not, she had a booked four acting gigs within the next 4 months after years of getting nothing. From that point forward she was "Weave-Girl". She was all about having that long straight artificial hair that everyone loves so much, however after some time she decided to make a personal choice and change things, knowing at the time that it might impact her ability to work in Hollywood. She didn't necessarily expect that it would also cause police to scrutinize her in an entirely different way, and it occurs to me - and it's something Prof. Williams brought up in the Q&A - that that aspect of things may not be a racial bias but rather a gender or even gay bias because with her new look she could be assumed from a distance to be male - which puts the reason someone may have called the police while she was making out with Brian in a completely different context, although I have my doubts this was the reason for the actually 9-1-1 call because the caller accurately described Daniele as female. Sgt Parker had a detailed description of both her an Brian when he arrived.
It also put her confrontation with Sgt Parker in a different context because he's openly gay.
Next comes a discussion of the history of sexuality by Prof. Diana Williams who discusses how society moved from banning inter-racial couples with "miscegenation" laws gradually toward Loving and how we openly accept public displays of sexuality from and between certain groups, but not others even today.
What social and cultural factors may have led to the decision by the person who called the police, to make that call. How do we more broadly decide what is so obscene, so offensive to the eyeballs, that we need to invoke police power to protect ourselves and others from it?
...
Of course I can't read the mind of person that made the [911] call, but it is relevant that inter-racial marriage prohibitions are some of the longest lived laws in American history. They go back to the colonial period and until after the birth of our first "bi-racial" President. Which means that had he not been born in Hawaii, he might have been born illegitimate.
These laws, generally speaking, worked to contain the social and financial effects of white men sleeping with women of color - on the one hand - and on the other hand to keep white women, who were legally defined only women who could legally bear white children, and future citizens, from birthing anything other than white children.
Map of States with Law against inter-racial marriage in 1865.
Rather than declining, anti-miscegenation laws grew following emancipation as we see here in 1913.
She then goes on to point out that in 1967 when
Loving occurred 4 out of 5 Americans disapproved of inter-racial marriage.
To show how some of this played out during the 19th century Prof. Williams displays this cartoon from 1824, which features in the background an image of black female who has been known at the time as the Hotentot Venus. Or to put it another way, the Booty Girl or her time.
Her name was
Sarah Baartman, a slave who was put on display in skin-tight costume a paraded around as an semi-human oddity.
Certainly we like to think we've evolved forward from this kind of thing in the modern age, but then when you look at the modern cult of
Kim Kardashian's Butt that whole illusion comes crashing down around our ankles.
Prof. Williams: Baartman achieved trans-national fame such that her images was shorthand. Respected scientists of the time used her body to make the claim that black people had excessive sexual appetites, and that they were different from whites as a race or as a species. That blacks and whites were separate species. After she died at the age of 26, in 1816, her body was dissected by Georges Cuvier, a scientist considered the "father of" modern biology. And he published a report about the dissection that slipped between science and porn by focusing on contrasting her genitals with those of implicitly "normal" white European women.
...
It's worth emphasizing that throughout most of American history black women dd not have the same social or legal protections available to other women. They were expected to do as much field work as a man, their reproductive capacities were the engines for the production and the reproduction of the enslaved workforce, and indeed rape in most state codes was defined as a crime against a white women's body.
This perspective and view of black/white sexual relations from the 19th Century were still part of the standard before the Supreme Court right until
Loving in 1967.
She then goes on to bring up an incident of public "heavy petting" from 2011 that occurred on USC's own campus and was filmed and photographed just as Watts and Lucas were.
There were at the time hundreds of articles about this, and yet only one blog happened to even raise the issue that what was occurring is indeed a violation of the "lewd conduct" statute. Somehow this didn't raise the
hackles of anyone who saw it at the time, and apparently there were hundreds of onlookers, none of whom felt it necessary to call the police and have this
vile act stopped forthwith.
I wonder why that might be the case?
In fact the only reason people did call the police is because they were worried they might fall off the roof, not because they were offended or that any of this was "obscene".
But that wasn't the response after TMZ publish these photos of Watts and Lucas, which as Prof. Williams points out are far less incriminating than the previous set shown from 2011.
The end point being that although miscegenation laws may no longer technically be on the books, that doesn't mean that aren't still in effect
in practice as police power is still being brought to bear in a specifically biased and prejudicial way against those people whose public affection with others can so easily be found by some to be lewd, obscene, icky, gross and
criminal across both racial lines and/or LBGT lines. And in the case of Watts and Lucas it actually could of been both of those issues, or either of them alone, that prompted the initial call that begin this entire drama.
Would that same person have made that same call if what they were seeing were the two people on the USC roof from 2011? Technically, no one but they could ever say - and then it's not even clear that they wouldn't be so offended and angered by the question, just as Sgt Parker was and many are in this "post-racial era", that we can't really trust the accuracy and honestly of their response to such a query. But in a way we don't have to wonder because that one example from 2011, and how it played out in social media afterward, shows that the criminalization of that conduct by those particular people was just about the last thing on anyone's mind, but it's pretty much all people can think about in relation to Watts and Lucas.
The video is worth watching particular for Daniele own statement at the end talking about her time at USC, and how her mother was from Jamaica, and her father grew up in the south where you could be killed for being an inter-racial couple. She had been the only black girl in all white private school, and she would get in trouble for things that were not really a infraction and her mother told her when she was just 7.
Daniele, I love you, you're awesome, but you have work twice as hard to not get in trouble. You have to work twice as hard to get what the other girls are going to get handed to them, because you're the only black girl in the class. They see criminals on tv, they see prostitutes on tv, and they think "Ew, are we getting one of those people in our school?" On some level that was the environment that I grew up in. So I worked very hard to present myself in a way that wouldn't threaten people.
That right there says a ton to me, because I know I went through the same type of thought process, particularly when I used to live in Glendale which wasn't exactly a minority rich environment.
Be as non-threatening as you can. It's on the mind of many black people who
aren't criminals, or robbers, or thugs, or rapists, or prostitutes that they have to somehow carry the load of those people on their backs day in and day out. It's exhausting.
It's also fucked the hell up IMO.
I'm not gonna be the "angry black woman", I'm going to be the person that mediates this type of conflict. But when I interacted with Sgt Parker on Sept. 11th, it had been not the first time, not the second time, not the third time - it had been the fourth time since I'd shaved my head that a police officer had been called because there was "suspicious activity", um, and I had about questioning my partner and I about based on that assumption of suspicious activity.
...
One of those times were sorting through his dad's garage in Loma Linda where I was born and he's also from there... and someone called the police saying "suspicious black and white couple were loitering the area, and that their may have been a potential robbery". So when the police officer arrived, and the time in Loma Linda had been the third time, and the first time I gave my ID and I tried to be a gracious as possible, I tried to go along with it, second time same thing.
Even outside of the police my mom was having surgery a few months back and we had go to the Hospital at 3 in the morning and I'd gone out to the courtyard to get some air and I'd fallen asleep and I woke up with a Security Guard standing over me saying "Ma'am what's in your cup?" So my boyfriends an awesome chef, I had green juice in my cup. But apparently somebody had called hospital security at the Christian Hospital saying there was a drunk in the courtyear. And the Security Officer was trying to actively escort me out of Hospital. I burst into tears, I explained to him my mom's having surgery, I'm very stressed, perhaps your first line of inquiry might be to ask if I was OK, right?
And again, these are all swimming my identity, in my emotional body when I talked to Sgt Parker. Also swimming in my emotional body was watching on the news, Ferguson. Talking to my dad about all these things in the news that had been coming up. "Black Men gets shot when reaching for his ID". These things, like, are we in the 60's? I can't, it's hard for me, all of this has been hard for me to digest. And I've just been trying to be just like, ok, be gracious, be gracious. Approach this in a way that's civil.
But when Sgt Parker approached me that day... actually he didn't approach me, he approached Brian, and asked Brian for my ID. Now to some people that may not seem like a big deal, for me having experience what I just described... for the Officer not to even give me the dignity of addressing me and explaining what happened. For him to make the assumption that is was OK, to speak to the male there, the white male there, things are like - I'd like to say "No, were beyond this it doesn't matter".. but... again, all of these things stirring in my emotional body by the time we got to that day.
It was upsetting.
... As I said in many interviews and to the Officer there, "We were making out", "there was no nudity", "we haven't done anything wrong" - in that moment it seemed like none of that mattered, because what mattered was what you can hear Sgt Parker say on the police audio "She needs to learn that she doesn't dictate what happens." That dynamic is what I experienced. As much as I wanted to just make it easier for everyone I just felt enough is enough and you have to say something.
So the anger that you see me expressing, the frustration, the desperation, the feelings of invisibility, it had reached a point where I couldn't repress that any longer.
Daniele saying what she said, in the moment of those events, has been described by critics as an act of petulance, and act of immaturity, a "diva throwing a tantrum"... but I think what it truly was, was an act of courage.
If you have the time, watch the video - including the Q&A at the end.
Highly worth it.
Vyan