How long will it take until the majority of my fellow citizens—who may not be black—come to the light bulb moment where something clicks in their heads and they realize: The simple fact that a person is born with skin that is not white is essentially criminal in this country. Just when I think that things are getting a wee bit better, that people are hearing the message that Black Lives Matter, another outrage comes to light and the outcry is loud. But a quick glance at the comments section of an article, or even talking with neighbors disabuses me of my brief moment of uplift.
This week's viral outrage was about a video where we watched a black teenaged schoolgirl get body-slammed out of her chair. Yes, in school. She was lucky her neck wasn't broken. What lesson is this teaching black kids who sit in classrooms? Yes, people have called for the cop to be fired (he was) and to be prosecuted, which is good (if it happens). But what is life like for all those other black kids who have to go to that school, and ones like them? What is the responsibility of the teacher and the school administration?
Let's make this clear: I don't give a damn what that girl was doing in class. I don't care if she was talking on her phone, I don't care if she refused to be sent out of class and stayed in her seat.
I.Don't.Give.A.Damn.
What I give a damn about is trying to get those of you not born in our skin to try to imagine what it is like. We all know about the deaths of black youngsters—they are in the news each week. I really need to talk about just what it is like to be born with black skin in the U.S. of A. in the midst of all this. I need for you to listen, absorb the message (or try to), and then join us in taking action against racism.
Don't just talk at me about income inequality. I get it. I'll fight for us to have economic equity. However, there is no bottle of whiteout that will miraculously make me look like you and erase my visible difference. No green is going to wipe away the original sin you've cast us in. We'll still be black.
Read on below for the alphabet soup of being black.
Life, for us, is an alphabet soup.
We've got a bunch of acronyms for various activities that black Americans and other people of color can't engage in without being targeted by police, store employees, security guards, someone's neighbor, or people with phone apps designed to report "sketchy behavior." Some of them are:
DWB—Driving while black
SWB—Shopping while black (which also stands for swimming while black)
WWB— Walking while black
JWB—Jogging while black
LWB—Laughing while black
PWB—Praying while black
WOYDWB—Walking out your door while black, which segues into:
TWB—Trespassing while black (even when the trespassing is in your own apartment building
BWB—Breathing while black, since Eric Garner and Anthony Baez couldn't breathe in chokeholds.
The last one, BWB, made me think of a powerful ode on breathing written by Onomastic last year:
They have made the Cross of my death into the Lynching Tree.
Now, Roman soldiers wear uniform blue.
Now, Pontius Pilates in three piece suits wash their blood stained hands clean of responsibility.
Now, speakers in the square turn their eyes away
as my people and I hang from the cross,
the lynching tree -
struggling against the prison bars,
the choke hold,
the bullet holes.
We cannot walk while breathing
We cannot shop while breathing
We cannot drive while breathing
We cannot protect our children while breathing
We cannot play while breathing
We cannot laugh while breathing
We cannot learn while breathing
We cannot teach while breathing
We cannot work while breathing
We cannot grieve while breathing
We cannot dream while breathing
We cannot be successful while breathing
We cannot be poor while breathing
We cannot be ill while breathing
We cannot be healthy while breathing
We cannot sing while breathing
We cannot pray while breathing
We cannot rage while breathing
We cannot love while breathing
We cannot breathe
I was moved when I read it then, and I hope it will move you to reflection now.
Mother Jones had its own list of 21 Things You Can't Do While Black.
There's evidence that just being black in the United States is often all it takes to arouse suspicion. Here are 21 examples from the last five years of some of the things black people can't do without others thinking they're up to no good.
1. Listen to loud music at a gas station.
2. Walk home from a snack run to 7-11.
3. Wear a hoodie.
4. Drive after swimming.
5. Drive in a car with a white girl.
6. Appear in public in New York City.
7. Walk on the wrong side of the street.
8. Wait for a school bus to take you to your high school basketball game.
9. Drink iced tea in a parking lot.
10. Seek help after a car accident.
11. Inspect your own property.
12. Show up at your job.
13. Talk trash after an NFL game.
14. Throw a temper tantrum in kindergarten.
15. Buy designer accessories at Barney’s.
16. Buy designer accessories at Macy’s.
17. Be a 13-year-old boy.
18. Enter your own home.
19. Botch a science experiment.
20. Be a tourist.
21. Lay face down in handcuffs.
It isn't like this goes uncovered in the press, though reactions from bigots are the usual litany of calling us "lazy whiners" and "race card-players." I am often moved to comment, "My life is not a card game," which falls on deaf ears—especially since the words are coming from these black lips.
And it isn't like I'm making up the data. Just last week, The New York Times had a feature titled, The Disproportionate Risks of Driving While Black.
An examination of traffic stops and arrests in Greensboro, N.C., uncovered
wide racial differences in measure after measure of police conduct.
...
Here in North Carolina’s third-largest city, officers pulled over African-American drivers for traffic violations at a rate far out of proportion with their share of the local driving population. They used their discretion to search black drivers or their cars more than twice as often as white motorists — even though they found drugs and weapons significantly more often when the driver was white.
Officers were more likely to stop black drivers for no discernible reason. And they were more likely to use force if the driver was black, even when they did not encounter physical resistance.
The routine nature of the stops belies their importance.
You'll want to read the whole piece. It's not telling those of us who drive while black anything new. I headed over to the comments section and was struck by this one:
Miles M Greensboro, NC October 24, 2015
Unfortunately this article is not new news. I live in Greensboro and have had encounters with the police via "traffic" stops. I am a middle aged African American (AA) male who does not fit the poor, uneducated stereotype often associated with AA who have such encounters. I am a highly educated successful, wealthy, business owner. The last traffic stop occurred about 3 years ago when I was stopped for allegedly speeding in a school zone. I was asked if I had any drugs in the vehicle (Mercedes Benz E320 Sedan) if the car was mine, and could he look in my car. I asked the officer why he stopped me he said "you were doing 30 MPH in a 25MPH zone"; (the school zone was no longer in effect because of the time of day) I replied that unless he had probable cause and a search warrant that he was not to search my vehicle. He ran my tags gave me the ticket and drove away. Needless to say I was furious, I contacted my attorney and went to court. The officer lied and changed his story several times on the stand. Unfortunately for him I am also an Adjunct professor of Mathematics and was able to prove mathematically that his version of events (time, locations, speeds etc.) were impossible, to the point the presiding judge was laughing. All charges were thrown out and the case dismissed. Had I not had the resources or the resolve to fight this I would have been another "victim" of this policing strategy. Absolutely disgusting!
This comment actually made me chuckle. I flashed back to Mahari Bailey, a black Philadelphia-area lawyer I wrote about in "
Driving While Black: cops messed with the wrong dude."
Bailey is successful, drives an expensive car, and is—as the news item put it, "always impeccably groomed, whether he sports a gray suit and starched, white shirt or a T-shirt and jeans." Problem is, he is the "wrong" color. We are all aware this country practices one justice system for elites and the well-to-do and another for the working class and the poor. However, when it comes to being targeted, the class advantage is nullified by race. It can help you get out of the mess if you are like the gentleman writing the above comment or if, like Bailey, you are an attorney. But think about how it feels in your gut when you know that no matter how well you do, how well-educated you are, you are just another n-word up to no good, and subject to harassment or even being shot. Sobering, isn't it?
We've seen tennis star James Blake tackled and thrown to the ground and a slew of articles pondering whether it was or wasn't racial profiling. Millionaire Milwaukee Bucks player John Henson got police called on him for simply trying to buy a watch, which calls into question whether racism trumps even profit.
There are news stories about the targeting of black and Latino shoppers at high-end stores like Zara and Barneys.
Chain stores like CVS are also in the news. Our money may be green but our skin is still black, and so we are "suspicious."
Four former CVS loss-prevention staffers filed a lawsuit on June 3 against the chain for having employees follow black and Hispanic shoppers. The lawsuit also claims managers used racial slurs on employees. CVS denies the claim, saying they don't tolerate discrimination. Being followed by security isn't surprising to many.
Now that we live in a world of cell phones and specialized apps, racial profiling has gone digital.
This example is from Washington, DC:
The mobile group messaging app GroupMe, owned by Microsoft, is claimed to have been a useful technological tool in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown district, helping business owners to connect with police in real time in their efforts to curtail crime and targeting shoplifters along the neighborhood’s popular shopping strip. Now the app is in the process of being taken down, because of possible racial profiling toward Blacks.
[...]
An Aug. 10 investigative report from the publication, “Critics Claim Racial Bias in Georgetown Digital Crime Prevention,” noted that although the community worked to identify threats and prevent crime beginning with the app’s launch in March 2014, it also “illustrated a stark racial disparity in how crime and suspicious behavior are reported in the community, raising hard questions about the relationship between community policing and civil rights.”
I remember when "we" couldn't shop downtown in Washington. "We" were not welcome in big department stores like Woodies and Hecht's. That was when Washington was known as the "
Chocolate City with the vanilla suburbs." That changed after formal segregation ended, but many black Washingtonians continued to avoid those stores. Clearly things are different now. But attitudes about "us" aren't.
Black Enterprise covered an app in action in New York City, saying, "It’s useless, racist, and ignores the truth about communities:"
There’s a man eating food out of a garbage can in New York’s Upper West Side, and you should be absolutely terrified. There’s also a piece of dog poop on the floor in Chinatown that should have you heading for the hills, just as quickly as a man following a woman home should strike fear in your heart.
At least, that’s what I gather from searching through SketchFactor, an app that uses crowdsourcing to determine what “sketchiness” is happening in your area. It was created by two white professionals, and is a finalist, competing for $20,000, in New York’s BigApps competition.
It also makes discrimination as easy as breathing.
We can't even relax while black. The "Laughing While Black" category was highlighted
in the stories about the book club of
black women who got kicked off a wine train. That was followed by the women
filing an $11 million discrimination suit.
The Sistahs on the Reading Edge book club members, who are mostly black, said they had decided to sue not for the money but to raise awareness that racism is still rife across American society. “We feel it is really important for us to speak up,” Lisa Renee Johnson, a member of the book club, told the Guardian on Thursday.
“Racism is something we are going through as a country. We hope that as a result of this [lawsuit], people will start to look more at their internal biases.”
The 11 women – 10 black and one white, ranging in age from their 50s to 85 – said that on 22 August they felt severely humiliated when they were marched off the train “as if we were criminals” and handed over to four waiting armed police officers. Johnson said two of the women have also lost their jobs – as a nurse and a financial services executive – as a result of the media furore surrounding the incident.
Good for them, for speaking out and for filing suit.
Even fun is subject to question when black kids go to a pool party. After a week of internet outrage, the Texas officer who infamously pulled his gun was placed on leave, but the memories of "summer fun" will remain in living color for those kids. Just in case you are tempted to bash the south for this story, let's not forget that Philadelphia pool in 2009, which sparked a protest campaign from ColorofChange:
Sixty-five children from a largely Black summer camp in Philadelphia were turned away from a swimming club in the suburbs because of their race. The camp had a contract to use the Valley Swim Club's pool for the summer. Once the club realized the kids were Black, it canceled their membership.
A "Whites only" pool in 2009 should not be tolerated. Please join us in publicly condemning the Valley Swim Club's discrimination, and calling on the Justice Department to investigate whether the club violated federal civil rights laws.
It isn't just parties, or swimming, or shopping. The mundane things in life you might take for granted if you are white, like picking your kid up from school, can be dangerous if you are black.
The latest example of abusive, atrocious police work posted to YouTube comes from St. Paul, Minnesota, where a black father, Chris Lollie, reportedly got off work at Cossetta, an upscale Italian eatery, walked to the downtown building that houses New Horizon Academy, where he was to to pick up his kids, and killed the ten minutes until they'd be released sitting down on a chair in a skyway between buildings. Those details come from the Minneapolis City Pages, where commenters describe the area he inhabited as a public thoroughfare between commercial buildings. If you're 27 and black with dreadlocks, sometimes you're waiting to pick up your kids and someone calls the cops to get rid of you. The police report indicates a call about "an uncooperative male refusing to leave," which makes it sound as though someone else first asked him to vacate where he was; another press report says that he was sitting in a chair in a public area when a security guard approached and told him to leave as the area was reserved for employees. The Minnesota Star Tribune visited the seating area and reported that "there was no signage in the area indicating that it was reserved for employees."
So a man waiting to pick up his kids from school sits for a few minutes in a seating area where he reasonably thinks he has a right to be, private security asks him to leave, he thinks they're harassing him because he's black, and they call police. This is where the video begins, and that conflict is already over. The man is walking away from it and toward the nearby school where he is to pick up his kids.
What the video shows is a man who is politely but firmly telling a police officer that she has no right to ask him for identification because he hasn't done anything wrong or broken any laws, and is present in the building to pick up his kids. "What's the problem?" he asks at one point, and answers his own question: "The problem is I'm black."
Many of my white friends like to jog. I've been meaning to ask them if they think about being white, jogging, and getting stopped by the police. Look at
this brother's experience:
Earlier this month in Talladega, Alabama, Corey Dickerson was out jogging very early Sunday morning when he was stopped by 2011 Officer of the Year nominee Kenneth Price because “a black man jogging at night is suspicious.”
The audibly out-of-breath Dickerson was resting with his hands on his knees as he began recording his encounter. “You look like you been running,” Price noted.
“Where you been running from?” he asked, because any black man who’s been running has clearly been running from something. Dickerson replied that he’d been jogging “nowhere in particular” and “just around,” as joggers are wont to do.
Price demanded Dickerson to identify himself and provide identification, which as the Free Thought Project’s Matt Agorist noted, he is not, under Alabama law, entitled to do.
So shopping is a problem, swimming is a problem, jogging is a problem. We can just stop doing those things and maybe we'll be safe. (HA!) But we all gotta live somewhere. So what happens when even
entering or leaving your home or apartment can get you arrested?
Rodric Small, 29, was outside his three-family Prospect Lefferts Gardens house last Dec. 14, inspecting the vacant first-floor apartment to make sure an actual intruder wasn’t there, when officers spotted him and mistakenly believed he didn’t belong, the Brooklyn Supreme Court suit said.
“I was doing my usual tour of the house for the night, to make sure my family is safe,” said Small, whose family has lived at the Winthrop St. home for 15 years.
Nice stable family. Long-time home ownership. The problem: They are black.
TWP, or Trespassing While Black, has been a problem for New York City black and brown residents for years.
'Operation Clean Halls' is a part of the NYPD's stop and frisk program which allows police officers to patrol thousands of private apartment buildings across New York City. The program began in 1991 and was intended to deter crime in private apartment buildings. But, instead of targeting suspicious activity, the NYPD is using 'Clean Halls' as an excuse to stop, question, frisk, detain and even arrest totally innocent people. This video contains the personal testimonies of people who live in buildings with clean halls.
"Operation Clean Halls has placed hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, mostly black and Latino, under siege in their own homes," NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said. "For residents of Clean Halls buildings, taking the garbage out or checking the mail can result in being thrown against the wall and humiliated by police. Untold numbers of people have been wrongly arrested for trespassing because they had the audacity to leave their apartments without IDs or visit friends and family who live in Clean Halls buildings. This aggressive assault on people's constitutional rights must be stopped."
The ACLU filed a lawsuit, and
New York City was directed to stop.
Almost one year after NYPD officers viciously beat 19-year-old Jateik Reed during a stop-and-frisk in the Bronx, a ruling by federal judge Shira Scheindlin today dealt a significant blow to the controversial stop-and-frisk policing tactic.
Citing evidence of misuse, Schiendlin essentially ordered police to follow the law when prosecuting trespassing charges. Her ruling targeted Operation Clean Halls, a program that allows landlords to grant police access to privately-owned buildings, and has led to police-harassment of residents in their own homes. As AlterNet reported last year, Bronx residents, particularly those in their early-to-mid teens, complain that bogus trespassing charges are among the most common examples of how suspicionless stops turn into police misconduct, including potential abuse, and legal injustice.
As of March 2015, the situation is reportedly being addressed with new guidelines.
We shall see. And before anyone raises the question of tenant safety, which is valid, there are other ways to secure buildings from unwanted intrusions. I've lived in two NYC housing projects and in three city-owned lower-rent buildings. Harassing and arresting tenants who are not carrying ID for a quick trip to the store and messing with family members and guests cannot be allowed to stay the norm.
Hot off the presses, we have more news of the perils of coloration. This article is titled:‘Walking while black’ can be dangerous too, study finds:
Sadly, it seems, “walking while black” can have dangerous consequences.
That’s because a recent study suggests motorists are less likely to stop for an African American pedestrian in a crosswalk. A black pedestrian’s wait time at the curb was about 32 percent longer than a white person’s. Black pedestrians were about twice as likely as white pedestrians to be passed by multiple vehicles.
The small but provocative study — conducted by researchers at Portland State University in Oregon and the University of Arizona — suggests that biases just outside people’s conscious awareness can make them less likely to yield to minority pedestrians. And that could put those pedestrians at risk, said Kimberly B. Kahn, an assistant professor of social psychology at Portland State University. Put another way: Not only do black men have to worry about being hassled — and possibly shot — by police for simply being black, they have to worry about being run over by motorists.
In conclusion, while I appreciate the efforts of politicians and advocates for our community who talk endlessly about the "1 percent" and "Wall Street" as the root cause of our all our ills, I have to disagree. It is not that simple.
Racism predates Wall Street—at least the white one. Black Tulsa, also known as "Black Wall Street," wasn't burned down in 1921 by the 1 percent. The endless series of lynchings in this country were participated in and put on postcards by everyday white Joes and Janes.
I'm growing weary of attempting to point out that just because my husband and I have jobs, own a home, and drive cars that aren't clunkers, we don't slip out of blackness. We cannot peel off our skin. Our economic status doesn't grant us immunity from the day-in and day-out reminders that we have committed the crime of not being the right color—the white color. A gated community won't fix it: Just ask Trayvon Martin's mom. A fancy car won't fix it (and may even make it worse). Upscale shopping locations don't solve shit. Moving out of Harlem makes no difference, and in fact calls more attention to our hue.
I was a straight A student, went to "good schools," had educated parents, and none of it stopped some teachers from treating me differently than my white classmates. Moving to a white neighborhood didn't stop the outraged white folks there from burning crosses, and hurling firebombs, and like magic in a few years that same neighborhood was no longer white—it was all black. Neither my degrees nor my attire prevent me from being followed around in stores or from being dissed at a shop counter.
Yes—fight to abolish economic disparities, expand employment and educational opportunities for everyone. But don't cop out from taking a good, hard look at the underbelly of racist rot in this nation. It's a feature, not a bug or a sidebar issue.
Until racism is dealt with, black folks will still be criminals. And that, my friends, is a crime.