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
 

Self-Regulation

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

To play or not to play with toy guns? Christine Gross-Loh asked this question in her recent article in the Atlantic, “Keeping Kids From Toy Guns: How One Mother Changed Her Mind.” She explains how she initially opposed gun play in her family, but after spending time in Japan where gun play is tolerated by parents and encouraged by teachers, she decided it could benefit kids and their imaginations. 

Her argument rests on the premise that a permissive attitude towards gun play results in better self-regulation in children. She notes that weapon play was far more common in the U.S. in the 1950s and cites a study that asserts that American children had better self-regulation 60 years ago. She adds, “But societal panic intensified in the wake of a spate of tragic school shootings in the 1990s, and a shift towards zero tolerance policies and regulating how children should play has been steadily increasing ever since.” 

At which point she lost me. 

This sentence tangles together two concepts: play policy and gun policy. Do American parents and educators discourage weapon play due to a misguided cultural belief that “gun play desensitizes kids to violence”? Perhaps. Yet I would argue that a greater contributing factor is that, in the U.S., it’s far too easy for fantasy and reality collide. 

Gross-Loh acknowledges, “Today in Japan, almost no one owns firearms and there are hardly any deaths by gun” and “there is no easy answer when my Japanese friends wonder at the paradox of our banning gun play when we do not ban the guns that kill thousands of children and teens in the U.S. each year”, but she fails to connect playground policies discouraging gun play with the reality of gun violence in America. 

Let’s reflect on the fact that after the Sandy Hook mass shooting, citizens and politicians have been unable to enact meaningful legislation to make owning a gun at least as difficult as obtaining a driver’s license, in defiance of all evidence that demonstrates a high rate of gun ownership correlates with a high incidence of homicide. 

Let’s consider the children who have gained access to real guns and accidentally shot themselves or others, like this one, this one, this one, and this one, just in the past month. 

Let’s remember as well the children who have been shot by police because they possessed toy guns that resembled real ones. Let’s also contemplate the gun lobby that not only blocks legislation to curb gun ownership and prevents any scientific research into gun violence in the U.S., but also stands against regulations on toy gun designs that would make it easier for police to distinguish a toy from a genuine weapon. 

So I take issue with Gross-Loh’s dismissal of American attitudes towards “gun play” as cultural difference. Bans on toy guns and gun play are rooted in real fears, not phantom overreactions, based on hundreds of tragedies where minors have acquired guns and used them to very deadly effect. Since we who oppose gun violence can’t seem to move by reason or emotion key politicians to enact a less permissive weapons policy, we try to enact those policies at home. We can’t control the guns, but maybe we can control our children. A false sense of security, to be sure. 

I find the second question—does allowing gun play lead to better self-regulation in children?—more difficult to address. Gross-Loh writes, “I have come to believe that one of the secrets of Asian boys’ self-regulation is the way that aggressive play is seen as a normal stage of childhood, rather than demonized and hidden out of sight,” but provides no citation for this assertion. As with many discipline-specific terms, “self-regulation” can be hard to define, particularly across cultures. 

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

Nevertheless, I hardly think that whether American children engage in gun play is the single key to their “self-regulation.” First of all, even with “gun play bans” in place, can we say that gun play has effectively declined? An imaginative child (i.e., all of them) will create a gun out of anything at hand: sticks, pieces of paper, a thumb and a forefinger. Secondly, can we really assert anything about all American children, across all ages, given the vast differences of class, cultures, and backgrounds? The study she cites examined children in Oregon and Michigan, who “were demographically mostly white.” (The Asian children studied were in China, Taiwan, and South Korea.)

I heartily agree with Gross-Loh, however, that American children are not given enough opportunities and time for unregulated imaginative play. My daughter is about to enter kindergarten where, at five years old, she will be assigned homework. (I first received homework at age nine.) Our education system has come to focus on academics at the cost of unstructured play time like recess and imaginative outlets like visual and performing arts classes. Since both parents usually work and require childcare beyond the end of the school day, children can further lose unstructured time to extracurricular language classes, tutoring, sports classes, etc. Additionally, the proliferation of screens—and parents’ needs to get things done while their children are stationary with videos and iPad games—can also reduce time for imaginative play. (I call these “the opiate of my children” and deploy them willingly as needed.) 

I frequently cite an anecdote from another of Gross-Loh’s articles, “Have American Parents Got It All Backwards?”, where she highlights the Finnish model of education. She recounts that an American Fulbright grant recipient queried a Finnish teacher, “How can you teach when the children are going outside every 45 minutes?” to which the astonished Finnish teacher replied, “I could not teach unless the children went outside every 45 minutes!” 

I am fully in favor of educational policies that allow children more time to engage in imaginative play. I am also willing to consider that gun play could be a healthy part of children’s imaginative worlds—as long as it remains in the realm of play. 

I am not, however, willing to continue a national policy on guns that relies on “self-regulation.” In our armed society, children die at epidemic levels, and that is a fact, not fantasy. 

Read my series on gun violence, Guns and Anger, including my response to the mass shooting that occurred less than two blocks from my children's school.  

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?