My Thoughts on Cops, Race, Ferguson, Justice, and Whose Side I'm On

A demonstration in New York City protesting
the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, MO.
(Photo via WikiMedia Commons)

When I was about 18, I got into an argument with my best friend* over an article about a man who committed suicide by cop. 

I said something like, “It’s disgusting that getting shot by the police is so predictable that someone can actually plan to commit suicide this way.”

My friend countered, “You know who I feel sorry for? The cop. Imagine having to live the rest of your life knowing that you killed someone just doing your job, and that person used you to commit suicide.”

I don’t remember what I replied to him, but I remember still feeling angry and unconvinced. My friend is white. I am not. That day, I was unable to articulate to him that race had everything to do with where our sympathies lay.

Nevertheless, my friend’s words stuck with me.

I actually have family members who were cops—family members who are not on the brown side of my family—but I have never talked with them in depth about what it was like to be on the job. One of them said to me, “It’s pretty much like [the reality TV show] Cops.” Having seen snippets of the show, I was afraid to ask more. I was too much of a coward to confront the possibility that people I love might be doing things that would enrage me if I knew. (We already have plenty we disagree on.)

I have also met cops that I like (usually police of color), who have been personable, fair, and concerned, who have exactly embodied the ideal of law enforcement as it should be.

Sometimes, news of a policeman killed during duty has sent me into a reverie, trying to imagine what it would be like to have every work day present the possibility of death. I have read writings by and about cops, describing how seemingly innocuous situations can turn bad, or how someone who presents as non-threatening might be extremely dangerous. I can sympathize with the idea that confronting the worst side of human nature, day in and day out, can taint a person’s view of the world and transform every individual into an object of suspicion.

Since Monday, I have been reading with a kind of grim resignation everything I can about the killing of Mike Brown. I read Officer Darren Wilson’s testimony, which I don’t believe for a minute, and Dorian Johnson’s testimony, which includes details that comport exactly with my own experiences of cops’ attitudes and speech with me and with other people of color.

These two accounts encapsulate two world views. In the first, Mike Brown is the belligerent aggressor, who escalates nothing into something, who is huge and terrifying, and Wilson must defend himself. In the second, Darren Wilson is the demon, and Brown must fight for his life.

The two accounts are parallel, yet mirrored. But no matter which account the reader believes, the end is the same: Wilson has a gun, and Brown does not. Wilson gets a hearing, but Brown gets executed.

The gap between these two accounts seems like a chasm. After all, they can’t both be true.

But I wish cops could understand that what they feel—being on high alert, aware that people going about their business might be hiding a threat, knowing that any day they could die at the hands of someone irrational, stupid, or hot-headed—is exactly how African Americans, especially black men, feel around them.

Cops and black men are having parallel yet mirror experiences of each other.

On the face of it, this could provide some common ground, the beginning of understanding. In reality, we know that the construction of race, a construction hundreds of years old and woven inextricably into the fabric of Western culture, functions precisely to perpetuate the divide. An illusion with very material consequences.

I have lived in places where police are not upholders of the law, but agents of bribery and corruption. The kind of life most of us want, with stability and security, is only possible in our current society with a professional, trained, and funded police force. 

It’s hard to hold both ideas in my head, that I want to have cops patrolling my streets at the same time that I also fear them, not just for myself, but for my some of my friends, and some of my kids’ friends who are brown and black boys and will grow up to be brown and black men. I can feel sympathy for an individual cop in a tight situation having to make a tough call (and let me be clear that Darren Wilson is NOT that cop). But such sympathy cannot erase the continuing rage I feel at an institution that regularly mows down men of color and  incarcerates them at a staggering rate.

I don’t have a solution. Rational discussions and state-sponsored “conversations about race” serve mostly to create the appearance of progress and building bridges without shifting the institutional bedrock that supports the structure of the status-quo. Violence usually hurts communities already suffering the most, but sometimes it is the only language that state power understands and responds to. (I am not calling for violence. I am simply looking at history.)

I do know that if cops have any kind of sincere desire to change this dynamic, it is incumbent upon them to listen and learn. Cops have power and resources; impoverished communities do not, which is why the equation of armed white cop + unarmed black man ends with the same tragic result again and again (while armed white men roam freely).

Ultimately, what police are supposed to stand for and what people in the streets are calling for is the same thing: justice. But the scales are weighted, and Americans need to take clear-eyed look at the ways race creates that imbalance. The scales have never hung equal, but until they do, we will have no peace.

* Read about my run-in with a cop and a vigilante with this same best friend here, as part of my reflection on the injustice of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case. 

LINKS:

A petition to President Obama and the US Attorney General to press federal charges against Darren Wilson

A wishlist of books for the Ferguson Library

The NAACP march, Journey for Justice, beginning on Saturday, November 29
 

Seventeen and Stupid

Site of my high-speed chase
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

Here's how I view it:

When I was about seventeen, my friend and I parked, unknowingly, in front of a vacant house. We were just sitting in the seats of my car, talking, because it wasn't yet curfew time. A guy in a pick-up truck drove by us slowly, went around the block, and drove by us again.

At that point, we thought he thought we were making out and was coming back for another look. But when we started up the car to drive around the corner to my friend's house, the guy pulled a U-turn and started to follow us. We didn't want him to follow us to my friend's house, so we continued past and went to a main street. We picked up speed. He picked up speed.

I then got into the only high-speed chase in my life, because we didn't know who this guy was or why the hell he was following us, and it scared the shit out of us. I ran red lights. I got on the freeway and pushed my grandmother's tan 1980 Honda Civic to its limit of 70 mph. The pick-up was practically on my bumper.

Eventually, a cop pulled us both over. The guy in the pick-up turned out to be someone who had babysat my friend when my friend was a preschooler. The guy said, sheepishly, "I know this kid. He's OK." He had assumed we were planning to break into the vacant house and, when we started to drive away, it only proved to him that we must be guilty of something. The cop chewed us both out. To the guy, he said, "Next time, let us handle this." He asked me, "Why did you run?" I said, "We were SCARED." The cop let us go.

If we hadn't been an Asian-looking girl and an Irish-white boy, how might this have gone down differently?

I'm writing this post after thinking about Amy Davidson's question, "What Should Trayvon Martin Have Done?" And I realized, well, I know what I did do. And in other circumstances, in another body, I might have been shot to death.

Vigilantes are, frankly, terrifying: Who is this person? Why are they after me? In the vigilante's mind, you are someone suspicious. In your own mind, you are going about your own innocent business when some stranger starts to stalk you. A regular person would call the police and leave it at that. It's beyond the bounds of societal norms for a person to take the law into his own hands. It's one thing, after all, to stop a rape or a robbery in progress. It's another to target someone who isn't actually committing a crime.

Do you remember being seventeen? I remember being completely absorbed in a world of music, movies, schoolwork, peer hierarchies, and dating. When I thought about adults at all, it was the daily injustices my dad subjected me to: curfews, housework, family obligations, permissions denied. Adults occupied a realm of power that I hadn't experienced yet and that had authority over me. At seventeen, I dreamed of adult autonomy without understanding the reality. I was still living in my dad's house. I was closer to the age of being told to beware of strange adults than to being a true adult, on my own.

The way I reacted to being followed by a pick-up was stupid—I could have gotten into a car wreck, or caused a car wreck. If we had gone to my friend's house, gotten out of the car, and involved his dad, we would have cleared up the misunderstanding. And yet, if the man in the pick-up hadn't been a neighbor, but someone intent on harming us, then getting out of the car might have been the stupid decision. But until you know both sides of the story, you can't know which decision is the right one, if a right one even exists.

I'm sure Trayvon was afraid for his life when Zimmerman confronted him. How many of us, followed and then approached in the dark by a large man, would have fought for our lives in that moment?

If the racism of this case can be distilled to a single moment, it's the moment when you have a black kid and a non-black man facing each other, neither sure of what the other is up to. That the jurors and many, many other people identify solely with Zimmerman at that moment tells you everything you need to know about racism in this case. And it's the gap between those with Zimmerman's perspective and those with Trayvon's that seems unbridgeable. 

I Am Not Trayvon Martin's Mother

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I interrupt this regularly scheduled blog because of an egregious case of injustice: the verdict in favor of George Zimmerman.

This morning, I received an email in response to this travesty from Moms Demand Action with the subject line: "Today, We Are All Trayvon Martin's Mother."

I understand what they are trying to say. I know they want us all to realize that gun violence can strike any of our children, anytime, as long as guns are unregulated in this country. I know that their hearts ache as mine does, as we imagine—or remember—what it is like to lose a child.

And yet, I cannot fully embrace this statement. My children, despite their 1/4 Filipino heritage, are not brown, and they will never be considered dangerous simply because of the color of their skins. No one will feel automatically threatened to see my son walking down the street in a hoodie. My children have the privilege of the light-skinned, and it will protect them up to a point.

Particularly after the mass shooting in my neighborhood, I am afraid that someone will shoot my kids. But I don't think I can compare my fear to the fear that mothers of young black men must feel. It's not just the chilling fact that young African-American men die at a greater rate than other young men, nor that the homicide rates for them far outstrip the homicide rates for young men of other races. 

It's the historical reverberations that I find especially devastating. I will never experience it myself. If, heaven forbid, either of my kids gets shot like Trayvon, it's not going to have the echo of over two hundred years of history of young black men killed simply for being young black men. Trayvon's death brought to mind a litany of names: Jordan Davis, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Ramarley Graham, Emmett Till. There are more whose names we know. There are more whose names we don't know. 

So I am not Trayvon Martin's mother. But it doesn't stop me from feeling wronged to my core and betrayed by my country. "Justice is indivisible. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

 

What you can do:

- Sign the NAACP's petition to Attorney General Eric Holder calling on the Department of Justice to bring civil charges against George Zimmerman. 

- Donate to the Trayvon Martin Foundation. Dave Zirin posted earlier on Facebook that $450,000 was raised for George Zimmerman's defense. The Trayvon Martin Foundation raised $150,000. Sadly, we know that justice is not independent of finances, so please give what you can. 

- Join Moms Demand Action, the Brady Campaign, Mayors Against Illegal Guns (founded by Michael Bloomberg and Thomas Menino), and/or Americans for Responsible Solutions (founded by Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly) to stem the tide of gun violence in this country and to repeal Stand Your Ground laws. 

- Search #HoodiesUp and #NoJustice on Facebook and Twitter to find a vigil, demonstration, or march in your area.

- Go see the movie Fruitvale Station about the day Oscar Grant was shot down by BART transit police. Make sure Hollywood knows that these stories matter.

- Always write your representatives. The NRA continues to out-call, -write, and -tweet those of us who believe in common sense gun restrictions. We have to even the score.

Aftershock

Facebook post from Saturday, June 8 at 4:30 a.m.

My kids playing at Virginia Ave. park in
Santa Monica. (Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

Can't sleep. Haunted by the events of yesterday—bullets sprayed at the park where my children play, a woman carjacked at an intersection I pass several times a day and forced to drive the gunman and watch while he shot other people, a student at SMC who assumed the gunman was police... until the guy started shooting at him. My friend's daughter is an SMC student, so glad she wasn't there yesterday. I can't help but imagine the fear and pain of people who lost loved ones yesterday, who were injured, or who witnessed the mayhem. The students who heard the shooting and were afraid they were next.

I want this kind of terror to stop. I can't describe the depth of my frustration and anger that we know what to do to stop this, but we, as a nation, just won't take those steps. I'm going to keep agitating for change, but I also can't help but wonder, What is WRONG with people (ahem, NRA leadership), with certain members of Congress? Have you no compassion? Have you no intellectual sense of injustice? Is a gun "right" really worth the deaths that happen every single day because of guns? If you believe in a Maker, do you honestly feel you will be able to face that Maker with a Second Amendment argument?

Guns and Anger, Coda

(I described the day my children were shut inside their school because of a man with a gun in Part 1. I discuss the gender politics of the NRA in Part 2.)
 
Of course, I recognize that not all gun owners—not even the majority—are as unhinged as James Yaeger, who epitomizes the kind of volatile personality that I’d like to keep as far away from firearms as possible. My cousins represent, to me, the opposite end of the spectrum: level-headed, generally chill guys who happen to enjoy hunting.
 

Salad. (Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

 My memories of Jorjorian family dinners seem to always involve my (liberal) dad and my (conservative) uncle trying to prove the strengths of their arguments mainly through the loudness of their voices while my grandmother shouted over them in her broad Long Island accent, “DOES ANYBODY WANT MORE SALAD?” Naturally, these arguments were pointless, since neither would budge in his convictions. Despite these clashes, my dad and my uncle clearly love each other, and their bonds run deep. They provided for me a powerful model—never let the little things in life like money or politics drive a wedge between family.

My cousins are older than me, so we were never close, and we inherited from our fathers our strong political convictions. But I always enjoy seeing them at family gatherings, and now that I am a mother, sharing in parenthood has given us a new connection.

I disagree with them about many things, but hunting isn’t one of them. I have eaten the venison and elk they have brought back from hunting trips, and it was delicious. I remember when I was about 12 years old, I said to them, “Deer are overpopulated. Hunting helps keep their numbers at sustainable levels.” (I was probably quoting from Sierra magazine.) I still treasure the looks of shock on their faces. “That’s right,” said my older cousin. “Wow,” said my younger cousin. “I thought you would be like, ‘Aw, the poor little deer.’” “No,” I snorted. (Because I wasn’t an “emotional” girl, but rational and scientific! Did I mention I was a tomboy?)

I recount this to establish my bona fides when I say: I am not against all guns.

But I want to stand up for my right not to have a gun. I don’t want to live in a society where everyone has to have a gun to feel safe because so many unregulated, illegal guns are in circulation due to lax gun control laws. I have lived in sketchy places in the U.S. and abroad, and I have been scared, but never—even when I heard shots and saw the flashes—to the point of wishing I had a gun. I can’t—and don’t want to—imagine how I would feel if I ever shot anyone in error, as an accident, or because I mistook a threat, or because I didn’t read a situation correctly. And if my kids ever died because they accessed a gun in my house, I could never forgive myself.

Ultimately, the “guy with a gun” turned out to be a 19-year-old student who turned himself in to the Santa Monica College psychological services department. He was unarmed.

I am not reassured that the threat turned out not to be “real.” Gun massacres now seem almost like tornadoes: random, unpredictable, terrifying, and inevitable. We know that, sooner or later, it will happen again, because we have had at least one gun massacre nearly every year since 1982.

I am tired of the irrational political calculus that makes gun law reform impossible. The unholy marriage of money and politics, the use of the filibuster to blackmail our democracy, and rampant gerrymandering stand in the way of meaningful change, and each of these is a campaign unto itself. And yet, when we look at places like Australia, it’s clear that reform could get done if politicians would stand by principles rather than by the NRA and their deep pockets.

I am also weary of action via electronic proxy. I send out e-mail messages and tweets, and I know an intern somewhere just checks a box noting my opinion and arranges for a form letter to be sent back to me. As I said in my letter, I am done with e-mails and tweeting. Remember the days when Senators’ offices would be flooded with mail from outraged citizens? We can’t all march in the streets (although we should more often), but we can send letters. On paper. Something material that has to be physically dealt with.

I’ll be participating in the Father’s Day campaign planned by Moms Demand Action. I hope you will, too.

CODA TO A CODA: Today, when I went to pick up my daughter from school, I had a sense of déjà vu when I saw that Santa Monica College was once again barricaded. I arrived at her school to a parking lot eerily empty and quiet. 

The school was on lockdown again. This time, some of the parents had heard the shots, and one had even seen the man with the gun. We were all shut inside with our kids. My daughter kept whining that she wanted to go home, and I kept saying, "We can't go home yet, honey. What do you want to play?" 

My husband had texted that the gunman was in custody shortly after I arrived, but the lockdown remained. After about an hour, with our kids climbing the walls, most of us decided to try to leave. My son was at home, and I wanted us to be all together.

But it wasn't quite over, and the drone of helicopters constantly overhead grated at my nerves.

It's now 9:30 p.m., and the kids are in bed. It has been a harrowing day. Four people are dead. The gunman was killed on the scene. 

We can't live like this. It has to end. 

Guns and Anger, Part 2

So: More on that anger (continued from Part 1).

Less than two weeks before my kids were locked inside their school during a gun threat, Sarah Palin, addressing the NRA convention in Houston, accused President Obama and other politicians of using “the politics of emotion” following the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, CT, to raise support for anti-gun violence measures. She said:

“Emotion is a good and necessary thing. Who among us didn’t feel despair, sadness, and that anger, absolute anger, after Newtown, and Columbine. We could use a bit more emotion, by the way, about what goes on every single day on the streets of cities like Chicago and New York. But here is the thing that Nancy Pelosi and Feinstein and Boxer, what those gals won’t tell you: emotion won’t make anybody safer. Emotion won’t protect the good guys’ rights. And emotion is not leadership. The politics of emotion, it’s the opposite of leadership. It’s the manipulation of the people by the politicians for their own political ends. And it’s not just self-serving, it’s destructive, and it must stop.”

I am surprised to hear that Palin now cares about what happens on the streets of Chicago and New York, and while part of me is itching to unpack the racial implications contained in that sentence (“It’s those ghetto black people who cause gun violence, not the white ‘good guys’ like us!”—sorry, just slipped out), I’m going to try to stay on task and focus on the use of the word “emotion.” Robin Abcarian noted in the L.A. Times that the NRA seemed to have highlighted the word in their talking points for the conference.

I have certainly said things in anger that I regret. For me, the image of saying something in anger brings to mind a preschooler screaming, “I hate you!” And the proper response is not to say, “What?!? How can you hate your own mother?!?” but to sigh and say, “You sound really angry.” I know as a mother that my daughter doesn’t hate me, but what she is saying isn’t exactly wrong or untrue. She just doesn’t have the words yet at age five to articulate precisely the quality and degree of her anger towards me. Instead, she uses what she has.

When I’m angry, I express my thoughts and feelings in a way that is less delicate and more barbed than I would during a time when I’m calm. (Right, honey?) Issues that I have submerged can bubble over in a torrential release of grievances. Yet the actual things I argue over are not phantom complaints: finances, inequality in housekeeping or child care, miscommunications.

And no one can argue that gun violence in the U.S. is a phantom threat.

I detect in the way the NRA and other gun enthusiasts dismiss angry, “emotional” responses to gun violence a soupçon—or a ladleful—of sexism. In her speech, Palin named Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer, but not Michael Bloomberg, and termed them “those gals.” (The best way to deflect the accusation of sexism? Have Palin deliver the message.) The words the NRA and their minions use—“emotional,” “hysteria”—are those typically deployed against women to discount or silence them. If stronger evidence is needed, any casual look at the comments to articles about Gabby Giffords will find the predictable invective: mannequin, whore, pet monkey, ugly, bitch.

Since writing my open letter on Facebook, I have joined Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. I can only imagine that we are exactly what the NRA expects in a gun-control organization. And yet, as advocates for universal background checks, a ban on assault weapons, a ban on high-capacity magazine clips, and HR 2005, which would mandate personalized technology for handguns, we are not making an emotional plea, but rather putting forth the only solutions that have been scientifically proven to work. (Of course, I could strengthen this argument if the NRA didn’t block research on gun violence.) So sure, we’re angry, but not based solely on emotions, Sarah—based on the evidence.

So, who is employing “the politics of emotion” as defined by Palin?


 

QED.

(Tomorrow's post will be a coda: my huntin’ cousins, political barriers to change in gun laws, and thoughts on activism.)

Guns and Anger

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

On my way to my kids’ preschool on the morning of May 16, I found my route past Santa Monica College barricaded. When I arrived at school, a teacher told me that they had received an alert about a man with a G-U-N at SMC and so were keeping the children inside. John Adams Middle School, across the street from the college, and Will Rogers Elementary School, around the corner, were also on lockdown. I talked with other parents dropping off their kids. Should we take them home? Or should we continue with normal life and not alarm the kids unduly? The threat seemed vague, and our school was not within the lockdown perimeter, so we left the kids there. I came home and immediately went to the Los Angeles Times blog to learn that the man had specifically threatened schools. I kept refreshing the page until they posted that the police had arrested the man.

This is a tirade, lightly revised, that I posted on Facebook while I was waiting for the lockdown to be lifted. I wrote this in the heat of the moment, and it shows. In Part 2 of this post, I have a calmer response. But I wanted to post my initial reaction because I want to honor my anger, and the anger of so many other people who have suffered due to gun violence.

***********

Santa Monica Community College is on lockdown this morning because there’s a man wandering around the campus with a gun. Off the top of my head, I count three elementary schools, two preschools/day cares (including the one where my kids are), one middle school (also on lockdown), and two public parks that are always filled with children located within a few blocks of his location. I dropped off my kids as usual, and they are staying inside until we get the all clear.

On the east side of Los Angeles, in Monterey Park, schools are in lockdown as well because someone called and threatened to “shoot up” one of the schools.

So here’s what I say: Screw you, America. We tout being the “land of the free,” but hundreds of supposedly “free” children are confined indoors because one idiot managed to get possession of a gun. Is “freedom” blocked-off streets, refreshing internet news to see if the danger is all clear yet, and parents huddled in groups, wondering if they should just take their kids home?

I don’t call this “freedom.” I call it tyranny of the few. The few who are so afraid of “government tyranny” that they are willing to impose gun tyranny on the rest of us.

I’m not willing to let my children be sacrificed to an antiquated and outdated “right” to form a militia. My children are smart, and they are going to be well educated. They are, to put it in crude economic terms, money in the bank of the nation.

But apparently this nation doesn’t care enough about the health and safety of its future citizens to protect them from what is a clearly defined mortal threat with an obvious solution. There is no “debate” about whether gun control works—it does. And yet as a nation, we can’t muster the strength to pass the laws that will ensure that no child will die of a gunshot at her school, that no mother will be pierced by a bullet while dancing in the street on her day, that no teenager will be massacred in a movie theater. >

So screw you, United States of America. You’ve lost the right to my love, to my patriotism. Screw you, all you Senators who worked against gun control laws. I’m calling on citizens' groups to make gun control the centerpiece of your agenda. I’m calling on local representatives to show the courage of conviction that escapes our national politicians.

Because this is terror. I don’t worry any day that I send my kids out the door that a random extremist with a political agenda who hates our country is going to kill my kids. I’m afraid that a U.S. citizen with a gun and a chip on his shoulder is going to kill my kids. Take away the gun, you take away his power to end my child’s life in a fraction of a second. It’s that simple.

I don’t want this in another election cycle. I want this NOW. There are helicopters circling over my house NOW. We can do this NOW if we say: We won’t shut up. We won’t forget. We are watching you, and if this doesn’t change, we are going to force it. We will withhold donations. We will keep our tax dollars. We will stop work. We will take our kids out of school. We will stand in the halls of our government houses until gun control gets done.

I’m done sending e-mails and tweeting my reps because frankly, the only response I get back is bullshit. I’m ready to put my body on the line—in a demonstration on the street, in a sit-in in the state capitol, at the steps of the Senate—to keep my kids out of the line of fire. Who’s coming?

(To be continued in Part 2, in which I quote Sarah Palin and my 5-year-old daughter.)