Ok, I’ve read through the comments and now that many people have had their say I do have some thoughts, even though I initially just wanted to let Gregory speak for himself since he does so, so eloquently.
I’d like people to consider that the saddest part of this is how it’s so not unique. It’s not isolated, it’s not just one particular case of one adolescent boy dealing with being repeatedly stalked and harrassed by a vicious predator that he has to encounter over and over and over. The stress of this is palpable, particular for young teenager. We automatically understand this when it happens to a woman dealing with an abusive spouse or an abusive parent. We understand how the terrorism of this — yes, let’s call it what it is, terrorism — can seep slowly into your very soul, how the trauma can begin to slowly drip through your pours like not that subtle lingering hint of alcohol the day after an overnight binge, even while you yourself are perfectly sober.
It stays with you.
It can re-shape you, twist you into a person this nothing like what you would have become otherwise. Then imagine that this is warping and twisting an entire community, that it’s warping and twisting a large portion of our nation into something they wouldn’t otherwise become. Like PTSD expressed across generation after generation. Trauma and loss, stacked upon more trauma and loss.
This is one person’s story, but in in truth it’s merely a microcosm of our national story from chattel slavery, to so-called “emancipation”, to Jim Crow, redlining, white flight, gentrification and ongoing police harassment and violence for young black men and people of color. There are a great many things about black people — my people — that sometimes drive me literally up the wall. Things that get seriously on my nerves, but at the same time I have to take a step back and realize that those element, the false defiance, the misdirected self-disrespect, the disregard of institutions, confabulation and attracting to self-aggrandizing conspiracy, are all symptoms of a larger set of problems.
Those are mechanisms of coping with a trauma that is so broad, so casually and so often repeated that it really can’t even be fully articulated even by some of our most learned and articulate spokesman. We’ve been trying to express this since Maya Angelou’s “I know why the caged bird sings” and it’s still a work in progress. It still hasn’t completely sunk in.
And I also believe that at the same time, as the trauma has seeped itself into us, we have also responded to it with unprecedented mettle. From the Tuskegee Airmen, to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King to the depth of conviction and character of President Barack Hussein Obama Jr. We have time and time again, as individuals and a community accomplish that which not even we honestly believed was possible.
This is, writ small and large, the African-American experience. To be always outnumbered, always challenged, always be placed ten steps behind but expected to somehow end up five steps ahead. It’s amazing that sometimes we actually do it, sometimes we actually do end up five steps, ten steps, even twenty steps away.
And then we have the admission by the officer himself that he regrets what he was “forced to do” to Gregory. How exactly does that work? What is going on within the Portland PD that there officers are being forced to concoct a bogus search warrant to search the home of a teenager and smash their door down with 9 SWAT officers in search of a stolen… calculator.
What in the world is going on with that? Is that this officer just trying to shift blame for his own actions onto the system, or is there really some type of pressure being applied to officers to “get numbers” with arrests, searches and detentions to prove that they are realy active on the streets, rather than just lounging around during their on dury hours, or actually protecting and serving the all of the public and student populations that they are put in place to support?
Is this officer somehow claiming to be just as much of a victim of circumstances as Gregory? And if that’s true, how exactly do we end this seemingly endless cycle of trauma without completely rethinking the relationship between police and the public?
Then again, maybe we just need to completely rethink our relationship between those who are vulnerable and most often the targets of real crime, and the police who are charged to protect them, not just rack up arrests, or stop, frisk and question numbers instead of doing real policing for real people that keeps them free of the kind of trauma that was repeatedly and callously inflicted of Gregory, and his friends, and myself, and the thousands even millions of those like us who just happen to have committed the unforgivable sin of being young, and male, and black… in America, land of the “free.”