In the past few months, we’ve observed that Black people will have police called on them for waiting in Starbucks while Black, sleeping in a college common room while Black, playing golf while Black, and renting an AirBnB while Black.
There is, of course, an underlying charge that is evident in each of these incidents: Being Black While Black Around White People [BBWBAWP].
I can personally attest, as a middle aged White male, that with the exception of staying at an AirBnB, I’ve done each of the other activities, and not had police called.
Perhaps you may have heard the term ‘microaggressions’.
These aren’t.
These are simply aggressions, overt and malicious, since calling the police about a ‘disturbance’ of any kind involving a Black person has a significant likelihood of that Black person: a) being arrested for no particular reason, b) assaulted and seriously injured by police, and/or c) killed by police.
As Adam Harris at The Atlantic notes:
Black people are less likely to call the police than white people. According to federal data on requests for police assistance from 2011—before many of the high-profile killings of black Americans that are etched into the collective national memory—black Americans were slightly less inclined to call police for help than their white counterparts. The data hint at the result of that estimation black people make daily: whether involving police will help a situation or make it worse. Marginalized communities do not feel confident in reaching out to the authorities that are created to protect them—and that is extremely problematic.
Other research shows more pronounced distinctions. The tendency not to call the cops among those in the black community is exacerbated after reports of police violence. Research published in the American Sociological Review by the sociologists Matthew Desmond, Andrew Papachristos, and David Kirk has shown that “police misconduct can powerfully suppress one of the most basic forms of civic engagement: calling 911 for matters of personal and public safety.”
The researchers examined police calls in Milwaukee neighborhoods in the aftermath of the brutal beating of Frank Jude. They also examined calls following the killing of Sean Bell in Queens, New York, in 2006; the assault of Danyall Simpson in Milwaukee, in 2007; and the killing of Oscar Grant in Oakland in 2009. The number of calls to police in black communities dropped following each of these incidents, with the exception of Grant’s death. In each instance, it took a year for crime-reporting to return to previous levels.
It’s understandable that communities enduring a disproportionate share of police violence are skeptical of authorities. But that can create a cycle where some communities and individuals refuse to report crimes, and thus crime is harder to suppress. This is not because safety isn’t valued, but because of the fear that involving police could make an already bad situation worse. As the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones put it, “many of us cannot fundamentally trust the people who are charged with keeping us and our communities safe.”
Harris exposes the structural racism that is at the core of who feels they may call upon armed officers of the law to do their bidding, and who does not, in our society:
In the absence of shared experiences, anecdotal evidence suggests that hindsight might be the best teacher for white people when it comes to understanding the unintended, and potentially deadly, consequences a 911 call might have. In hindsight, it’s clear that the incident at Starbucks was a gratuitous escalation. But the type of hindsight that encourages someone to call the police assuming that they will be protected is a privilege—one that is still reserved disproportionately for white Americans.
How should a community respond when subjected to the routinely racist, the everyday insults and injuries, the depredations and violence that are what the sociologists and philosophers might refer to as simultaneously brute facts, social facts and institutional facts of Being Black In America [BBIA]?
Angela Helm, writing at The Root, reminds us of this recent episode ‘some white person calls the police on Black people for doing something while Black’, and has a defiantly joyful update:
What’s the best way to deal with pervasive, persistent and blood-pressure rising racism on the daily, as well as give a big fat fuck you to gentrification and the criminalization of black folks? Why throw a cookout, of course!
In a pointed response to a recent incident where a white woman thought it her civic duty to call the police on a few black couples using a grill in a public park, the melanated masses of Oakland threw their own party at that very same site, Lake Merritt Park…
And, as you can see, we keep the party going all night …
I hope it goes on all summer; in fact, if I’m ever in Oakland, I will be by the spot with my big piece of chicken, taking up all the space I desire, and having a ball while doing it.
Resist.
It says something that, for Black people, to enjoy a cookout with family and friends in a public space is a form of political expression, an act of civil disobedience.
It says that in a deeply, pervasively racist society, where White supremacy is enacted by police responding to a White person’s emotional discomfort with shows of force that at any moment can turn deadly for a Person of Color, to simply leave one’s house and go about the most ordinary activities is politicized.
It says that every Black body part is politicized:
Get ready to spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about what others are thinking about your hair. Do they think you look “too ethnic?” “Unpolished?” “Too political?” Will a prospective employer be less likely to hire you if you show up with your Fro to a job interview? These are all real questions you’re going to need to start thinking through if you’re planning on rocking those curls.
This is the reality I and other black women live with. But you probably won’t need to deal with any of this because you’re just wearing a Fro as a fun way to “mix up your look.” You can wash out those curls — and the negativity that often accompany them — any time you like.
So even though you won’t be saddled with the same racist pitfalls that black women face because of our Afros, you should be aware of them.
It says every moment of every day represents the prospect of a political challenge to one’s very life, the lives of one’s children, parents, siblings, for no reason other than how one appears to someone else, and to the whims and insecurities of that someone else.
It says we live in an Apartheid state, as we have since the European slavers first arrived:
Apartheid America
Consider these two astounding facts: “The United States incarcerates a higher proportion of blacks than apartheid South Africa did. In America, the black-white wealth gap today is greater than it was in South Africa in 1970 at the peak of apartheid.”
This quote comes from Nicholas Kristof, who has been publishing a series in The New York Times under the title “When Whites Just Don’t Get It.” In an earlier columnin the series, Kristof points out that whites in South Africa owned 15 times more than blacks in 1970s, while the current ratio for the United States is 18 to 1.
In the context of the last 50 years, the statistics look even starker. According to a set of charts the Washington Post published last year on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s“I Have a Dream” speech, the gap between whites and blacks has either remained the same or has gotten worse over the last half century. The gap in household income, the ratio of unemployment, and the number of children going to segregated schools have all remained roughly the same. The disparity in incarceration rates has gotten worse.
U.S. scholars have used the term “apartheid” to refer to specific historical periods (such as the era of Jim Crow), the residential segregation that existed for decades, the educational segregation that persists, and a criminal justice system that is so often criminal in its lack of justice. But can we apply the label of “apartheid” to all of American society?…
But in the United States, very little has changed in five decades. The higher echelons of the African American community have done reasonably well, but not the middle class or the working poor. Since 1970, the percentage of African Americans in the middle class has actually declined. And the depression that hit the country after 2007 wiped out whatever gains this middle class might have achieved…
Call the system of racial inequality in the United States what you will: the “two nations” of black and white, the new Jim Crow, or just plain ugly. But if the term “apartheid” shames the establishment into acting—and prompts pundits like Kurt Campbell to utter the word “race” when discussing inequality—then by all means let’s use the unflattering comparison. It’s a fitting way of bearing witness to the life and times of Michael B and everyone else who has suffered under this abhorrent system.