The Bahamas Know A Truth The American Black Community Seemingly Won’t Own:
Many Black Kids Are Trained Into Communication Habits Suggesting Violence
•
“A harsh word stirs up anger the way a punch in the nose brings forth blood.” – King Solomon
“Do you want not to fear governmental authority? Do what is right, and you will have praise from the exact same people you now fear.” – Paul of Tarshish (a minority man of color) New Testament Book of Romans
“When confronted by a police officer, be courteous and cooperative.” – Government of The Bahamas to Its Citizens Visiting The United States Of America
In response to the developing racial tension in America between the African American community and the law enforcement profession, the Bahamian Government issued the above directive to its mostly of-color citizens. I also call attention to the fact that Governor-General, Dame Marguerite Pindling, and Prime Minister, The Right Honorable Perry Christie, are both people of color.
Their directive to their citizens speaks volumes.
Let me say as I start this piece: the following is not to define all police violence directed at African American as including the patterns below: this piece is a discussion of some plausible contributory factors I have not heard discussed yet at all in the public conversation about how Black people die too often at the hands of police.
The ghetto path to street-cred leaves Black kids dead. I looked like a drug-dealing hippie for the first five years I was driving. I was obviously young. I had really long hair. I played rock and roll loudly on the radio in my convertible. I wore a Boone’s Farm Apple Wine T-Shirt with torn jeans and a cloth belt. Every cop who saw me thought, “There’s a drug collar.” I know what it feels like to be a target for cops’ attention. Now, we would call how I was viewed, “profiling.” Back then, I just looked more like people who used drugs than a lot of others, especially when driving through certain affluent neighborhoods known for drug use. I did not file a class action lawsuit on behalf of affluent white kids with long hair and bell-bottoms. I did not threaten riots if police did not start pulling over more kids in crew-cuts with US Marine tattoos on their biceps wearing “USA – Love It Or Leave It” tank tops. Even if I was wearing a Jerry Rubin T-Shirt with the motto, “Defy The System!” scrawled over an upside-down American flag watermarked with Angela Davis and her raised fist – I wanted cops to experience me as a harmless dude with long hair in clothes they would never wear. The last thing on earth I wanted was a policeman to see me as anyone whose conduct suggested in any way it would be a good idea for him to unholster his service revolver. I am now over sixty years old, and I still address every police officer as “sir” or “ma’am” or “officer,” regardless of their age or rank – especially, when they have approached me, and not the other way around.
In America’s less economically advantaged African communities, it is often the case they function in “honor society” pack and tribal pattern, where getting respect – and the ego, monetary, and romantic perqs that come with it – is often the result of the amount of alpha display behavior one does in the presence of peers. Far-too-often typical response to police, especially among youths looking to make their reputations, is open defiance and inflammatory humiliation of cops – especially, white cops.
The “snap-fight” – the quick humiliation humor of the schoolyard – comes into play. Such talk is too foul to offer an example of it here. It usually involves several references to the cop’s mother and suggestions as to where the cop might store his weapons. I went through several edits trying, and could not come up even with deletions in an example that cured it of being too uncouth to include.
As can be seen in video of police encounters young African Americans often accompany such verbal abuse with arm and body gestures looking a lot like Muhammad Ali warming up for a boxing match. Arm and body language that looks a lot like like moving to attack someone. These verbal and body-language habits are unique to low income African American communities; and they naturally heighten police perception of possible threat.
When you are a 175 pound white police officer facing a 300-plus pound young African American in a hoodie who refuses to show you his face or his hands, speaks to you in defiance of police directives, and with insults that would make Merchant Marine cry into his beer – and must, after enough resistance of cooperation, be physically subdued – for causes like a convenience-store robbery radio alerted to the officers about a perpetrator answering his description having occurred less than five minutes earlier less than a hundred steps from the location – your main thoughts as a cop would logically seem to be: “Get the subject under control, don’t let him pull a weapon from where his hands are concealed, and don’t let him get one of my police weapons away from me.” Pretty much everything else is on auto-pilot until after the sense of possible deadly threat is neutralized. Then, whether or not the subject is actually a suspect can be determined; and the police have a proactive responsibility to determine if the youth is a valid suspect for the crime or not. They cannot simply walk away from him because he is huge and acting dangerously toward them – and is of color.
It is at least plausible enough for consideration that the physical interactions resulting in what activists now call “needless” Black deaths at police hands over the past many years might might not have occurred at all if the response of the young African American to the police had been, “Yes, Sir – here are my hands, and I am going to slowly raise them now to pull back my hood.” That very likely would have been all there was to the encounters. The Broadway hit “Spamalot” made humor of my Jewish people’s ongoing experience of exactly such racial hatred: when King Arthur’s squire confesses to the King, who has been looking for a Jew, that he is Jewish – the King asks, “All this time, right before me? Why did not not tell me?” The squire replies, “It’s a habit we’ve gotten into around heavily-armed knights on horseback.” You just don’t go around casually and consistently provoking heavily-armed people. Such behavior is inherently dangerous – eventually, the law of averages is going to apply in your disfavor.
The Bahamian Government knows this.
They are of color. It is not a racial issue: it is a basic reasoning issue.
Just because they are of color does not mean they have no police force; or that Bahamians can defy or degrade them at will.
They are telling their citizens to give American police the same courtesies they recommend be given to their own country’s constables. It is mere sanity.
“Like punching someone in the nose,” taught King Solomon in Proverbs, “harsh words stir up strife.” It is mere cogent observation and thought.
The Bahamian Government did the African American community a great service this past week by role-modeling good parenting. Teach your children how to behave in a way that maximizes their safety. Don’t let your kids be convinced that the way to cred is to defy and humiliate police officers casually and consistently in front of their friends.
The ghetto path to street-cred leaves Black kids dead. Snap-fighting rises from a standard four thousand years of ethics consider unsound behavior: “There are people who speak rashly, like the edge of a sword, and then say, ‘Hey, I was only joking!’ But a wise person’s words bring healing.” wrote King Solomon in Proverbs. “Provocation of an authority is like teasing a lion, but the one whose behavior is soothing finds safety.” Scripture preserves these basic sanities for following generations. Beyond King Solomon, the Scriptures of the Christian tradition advise, “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger” – and –“Let your speech be seasoned with graciousness as if it were salt, to impart grace to the listener.” These ideas were penned by New Testament writers James and Paul (actually, Yaacov and Shaül – both of them, Jews Of-Color).
The entire quick-jab humiliation of the snap-fight is a long-known anti-productive pattern because it has enemy-creation embedded into it. Humans are honor creatures in our deep genetic coding – and we can’t live with humiliation. The humiliated will always be looking to even the score. We should aim to train young people to think before they speak, and become good at promoting peace, even in the event of disagreement. Shaming someone in public may win you points in the eyes of your peers for the moment, but you have also created an enemy: someone who is now on the downside of an honor debt, and will always be looking to even or reverse the scale. Such conduct creates vendettas – honor wars. Our low-income communities are filled with them. The streets have never ceased soaking up their blood.
If the government in the Bahamas can figure this out a few dozen miles from our shores and crystalize such wisdom into a few brief sentences from their travel authorities –then there is hope we might see such insight received here as unprejudiced from a source of-color – and activated among our communities of color before there are more Black kids lives lost due to inherited patterns of threatening behavior they see as normal, merely because they have not had other patterns modeled to them.
Can the community of color succeed in re-tooling? CNN on the morning of 12 July 2016 aired an interview with an African-American surgeon from Dallas who told of going out of his way to esteem police in the presence of his daughter: when cops are in a restaurant, he often buys them their meals in his daughter’s presence. When they were standing in line for ice cream, he often pays for the ice cream of the cops in line with them. He explained to CNN, he wanted his daughter to know he sees the police as the good guys. She is being raised into a positive attitude toward police. What are the chances, if a police car pulls that girl over when she is of driving age for whatever reason, legitimate or illegitimate – that she is going to defy, abuse, and disrespect that police officer when he approaches her driver-side window to ask for her license? I think even the most hardened BLM advocate would have to admit, the chances are far less she would give a response that sounds like a gansta-rap lyric, and more like a response Michelle Obama would give. In such a case, the likelihood she and the cop will wind up in a physical altercation is far less – and therefore, her chances of being killed by cop are far, far less. What parents teach their children can and will positively change this pattern – or sustain, or worsen it.
Here is why treating the Black Lives dilemma as entirely a police-sensitivity matter falls flat. While giving police sensitivity training as to the communication habits of low-income communities of color will take up part of the slack as well; at the end of the day, if a young person’s reflex is to see the police as deliberately out to deprive him of dignity and safety – or, if to see the police as a mere tool to beef up cred in front of friends by letting fly with abuse and threatening behavior, as well as defiance of “show-your-hands” type police directives enabling police to do their jobs safely – then the police will still be forced by the defiance-behavior into the position of needing to subdue suspects in order to fulfill the positive responsibilities of their job. And – if subduing and capturing physical altercations are made necessary, then the law of averages will eventually take us into seasons of varying amounts of bloodshed – some as appalling as the present one.
Just in case American Black kids may be taught such conduct equals kowtowing to their oppressors, and cannot result in gain – may I point out we have a President and First Lady who are African American, athletic, Ivy-educated, and the most powerful and influential two individuals in the entire present world. My eldest son once said to me and my wife during his early years, “I like my manners: they get me stuff.” Well said. Is the leadership of the Free World so low a prize that the path having led successfully to it should be discarded in favor of what gets you “turf” on one corner in one low-income neighborhood? To our current chief-executive’s credit – it is hard to call to mind a person more dedicated to modeling conciliatory speech than our first African-American President, Barack Obama – who yet had the strength and insight to go after Osama Bin Ladin, and take him out when the hour called for such strength and resolve.
Let me close with how I opened.
This Op Ed is not to define all police violence incidents with People of Color as having these factors among their causes: this is to identify a major plausible contributing factor I have not heard discussed at all in the current public conversation about how Black people die too often at the hands of police.
It is for policy wonks and the public mind to decide if this line of thought has any merit worthy of action, and how to mobilize resources so as to socialize it effectively.
One man’s sincere thoughts offered in hope that 2016 will be the beginning of the end of the pattern of Black Lives lost at the hands of police – and any race’s lives lost needlessly at the hands of anyone of any color anywhere.