Memorial Day Fishing, Police Brutality, and Good White People

It was a crisp Memorial Day morning, and our reels were threaded with fresh line. We hadn't been out together in a while. I believe there was Atlanta sports talk on the radio. We saw the trailing officer's car first. It followed us for about a mile, then we heard the sirens of the backup. The lights flashed against the morning sun. In what seemed like seconds, our SUV was surrounded. The officers exited their cars with guns drawn, pointed inside the vehicle at us. My dad sat in the driver's seat, and I was riding passenger side. My little brother, of five sat in the back.
 

I remember taking my cues from my father. I had never seen my father's fear, but there was something else - anger maybe? And yet only his eyes gave away his secret. His face was a practiced mask of calm.

Those emotions were dangerous here.
 

When I think about the look in his eyes, I can recall the scene in vivid detail -- the smell of the McDonalds biscuits once happy now sitting sourly in the air, my shock and curiosity at how small the barrel of a gun seemed -- I'd never had one pointed at me before.  One of the officers yells at my father to keep his hands in sight. My father places them on the steering wheel. The car door is locked. The officer tells him to unlock the door. My dad moves to comply with the demand. The officer yells at him again, gun still pointed at his face to keep his hands visible. I think the officer is afraid too. I cannot understand why. The officer has the gun. My dad lifts his hands up and asks the officer to unlock the door. The officer tells my dad to get out the car, but he is wearing his seatbelt. The officer tells me to remove it. I do. They snatch him out of the car, handcuff him and place him on the hood of his own vehicle. His sons watch helplessly from the cab. The five-year-old begins to cry. He doesn't understand why they are doing this to his dad. The five-year-old has not had the talk yet. Dad likely thought him too young. The eighteen-year-old has. The trauma would follow him. I remember what he's told me. I call my mother and relay everything that is happening as best I can. They later found out the car was his. It had been reported stolen a month prior, but was found by the police department and returned the same week. He was sitting on the pavement for an hour still cuffed before they asked for his license from his wallet. They didn't stop treating him like a criminal until they saw his Fulton County administrative ID.  
 

It took years to stop rationalizing this experience. 


Four years later, blue and red lights fill the darkness of the cab of my Jetta. Fear grips my heart. I fumble for my phone with the urgency of a boy reaching for his mother. She answers. I speak quickly and quietly, and I gather my license and registration balancing them in my hands on the steering wheel. The officer comes in minutes. I feel my heart leaping out of my chest. Each beat a jolt of adrenaline, pounding, "Run. Run. Run." I feel trapped and unsafe. He approaches my open window. I say, "Good Evening." He asks me where I'm headed, and where I'm coming from. I know why he's asking those questions. It's late and I don't look like I belong here. This community is monolithic. He asks me is this my car. Yes. He tells me I'm lying, the car is not registered to my name. He says he will ask me again. This time, I remember that it's registered to my mother. I give him her name, my voice shakes. I hope that he believes me. He asks for my license. My address is not the same as hers. It's not the same as the house I'm currently renting two streets over from the side of the road where we're stopped. My hands shake. My voice shakes. My eyes tear when he walks back to his car. I just want to make it home. I haven't broken any laws. I did nothing wrong. He brings my license back and tells me I'm free to go. He never did tell me why he pulled me over. I knew better than to ask. He didn't need a reason. I make it home that night, and counted myself lucky.

I will not sugarcoat this for you, my white friends. This is my life, my pain, my experience, my reality and they matter. These are more than isolated incidents, but shared experiences that are symptoms of a far more pervasive problem of institutionalized, systematic racism that has gone unchecked for far too long and I am calling you into accountability.

I love you, even when the only black icon you seem to quote in times like this in the midst of your many Fox News shares is Dr. King, and yet I understand more than ever exactly how frustrated he felt with white moderates in America from the Birmingham Jail. Not much has changed.

I am calling you Higher - to more than just your thoughts and prayers, but to the next level of love and support for your black sisters and brothers' equality by breaking your silence.

Your quiet, introspective empathy alone does nothing to move the conversation forward forward and in the silence that you find more agreeable than protests and more comfortable than hard conversations, we've continued to mourn the echoes of black bodies across the nation hitting the pavement at the hands of law enforcement. 

Every time an unarmed black person dies at the hands of law enforcement that took an oath to protect and serve them, I go silent for a period in response to my instant hyper-awareness of the powerful force that I am while my instincts are screaming for me to be a destructive one.

In those moments, Andrea Gibson's The Etiquette Leash reminds me to be my best self. The spoken word poem starts with "I want a good heart. I want it to be made of good stuff...", but the apex is when she begins to suggest that love is more than something introspective, that it will call our bodies to action. She says,

Hallelujah to making everyone uncomfortable.
Love readies its heart’s teeth, chews the etiquette leash.
Love insists well-intentioned white people officially stop calling themselves color blind.
Insists hope lace its fucking boots.
Always calls out the misogynist, racist, homophobic joke
Refuses to be a welcome mat where hate wipes its feet.
— Andrea Gibson


The truth is, I'm surrounded by good white people.


Good white people who've affirmed my destiny, spoken into my life, loaned me money, who care about my well-being, etc. And when I consider my parents' experiences, and some of my family's stories from my mom's hometown or even undergrad in Tallahassee, I certainly feel fortunate. I'm likely surrounded by more good white people than anyone else in my family has ever been.

In the years since the BlackLivesMatter movement first gained nationwide attention with the murder of Trayvon Martin, I've only deleted a single Facebook friend (he shared a series of Tomi Lahren rants and other incredibly offensive memes about the protests, the movement, and how if black people would only act right, they wouldn't get shot. He thought BET was racist, and wanted a white history month. You know the type.). 

The vast majority of my white friends have been silent, but most who have responded to recent events have done so with empathy. Fewer with outrage. Only a handful engage other white people on the subject -- at least through social media. Strangely, I am more frustrated with them than the condescending racist trolls. I see silence, and fluctuate between anger and grief, feeling the increasing weight of cumulative black trauma and death. I think about their silence and willingness to justify murder while I watch black man after black man bleed out on the concrete. As the officers always watch the life escape their body. As none of them call for a medic or offer first aid.

I see Philando Castille, with his fiancé and child in the car and think of my father on Memorial Day almost five years ago. I see Alton Sterling's size and think of my Uncle Art. Tamir favors an old mentee. Trayvon reminds me of my cousin Trenton. Sandra Bland with her sass but a compass that always points north, of my cousin Rhonda. Indictments are always rare, and never followed by convictions. 

They form rationalizations like,

"If only the audio were clearer, we'd know for sure he was innocent."

"Don't make assumptions! Its not as if there's a video. Only two people saw what happened and unfortunately one is dead."

"He was afraid for his life, he had to defend himself."

"The video doesn't show *all* the angles. He could've been reaching for a gun."


They are good white people, and they don't even realize that they are putting dead men, that they have already presumed guilty on trial for their own murders - the same trend of presumed guilt which is especially reserved for black people in this country and pervades our collective national consciousness, black people included leaving men like my father sitting on the asphalt, and others not so fortunate lying there breathing their last.
 

We all want so desperately to have moved forward, to step finally into the light on the other side of the shameful wounds of genocide, slavery, and inequality that blight our nation's past that it becomes easy to relegate things like racism to history - something to be associated with long gone Civil Rights leaders and politicians, and folded away in long ago discarded KKK sheets and hoods. And when this is the approach we take, it is easy for some to believe racist police brutality as being invalid and nonexistent if not racially motivated. 

This might surprise you, but while I do believe that the string of most recent high profile police shootings recently have been racist, 

I think the vast majority of the officers involved in these altercations are good white people too. I don't think they wake up motivated to kill black people. But what good are their good intentions if they kill us?


So open dialogue with your white friends with good intentions, especially if you are my white friends. Speak up at racist comments when you hear them. Question racist behaviors. Challenge statements and jokes that perpetuate harmful stereotypes of black people. Because the truth is as loud as I protest, and as well as I write there are some people that I will never be able to influence, that my voice may never be able to reach, but you can, and yours will -- if you have the courage to let it. And for whatever reason, whether naivety or optimism, I cannot decide, I believe in you.