More Ponderings on Race and Riots

I’m going to admit something. I was five years old when I was with my mother at a train station waiting to get aboard. She had picked me up because the steps were too steep for my little legs. We were in the immediate company of a group of black people also waiting to board the train. Prior to that day, to the best of my knowledge, I had never seen a black person close up. I vividly remember asking her this question: “Mommy, how do they tell each other apart?” The reason I have such an intense memory of that event is probably because of my mother’s reaction. She was clearly embarrassed and flustered. She wasn’t angry with me and didn’t punish me, I just easily picked up on her agitation, which was not something I had ever experienced with her.

I eventually got old enough to feel chagrin when I thought of that moment, and to experience real sympathy for my poor mother trying to explain the unexplainable in such an awkward situation. I also managed to realize that the real question I was asking was, ‘how do I tell them apart?’ And none of my experiences as a kid in the south in those times helped me to answer that question. I went on to all-white schools, had all white friends, and sat at the front of the bus. Any ability I developed to tell black folks from one another was hard-earned, took a civil rights movement, and was facilitated by my determination to treat everyone the same.

At one point in my early twenties, I majored in criminal justice. I thought I wanted to be a police officer. I liked the idea of people who were keepers of the peace. Peacekeepers had a nice ring to it. In my day, that career option wasn’t available to me, of course. My obvious choices were teacher, nurse, or homemaker. I couldn’t stomach bodily fluids, so I trained to be a teacher. And then, later, a social worker, which was as close to a police officer as I could get, since my understanding was that police officers were social workers with badges—they solved problems, advised victims of crime, calmed people in distress, sorted out disagreements, broke up fights, and tried to prevent trouble before it started. Those things are still the majority of an officer’s day. Are recruits today chosen based on their abilities in those areas, or are they picked for their ability to be tough, ruthless even, in the face of perceived threat? Are they instructed in those peacekeeping services, or are they trained to ‘fight crime’? I honestly want to know.

I learned that most officers never shoot anyone; many never even draw their service weapon. I believe, too, that the majority retire with clean records on police brutality or excessive use of force. I have so much respect for people who put themselves between the public and the law breakers, and I’m distressed that the contract we the citizens have with they the peacekeepers has been broken. It must be overwhelmingly painful for a good officer to want to defend a brother in blue while knowing he was wrong to have done what he did. To know that he, the officer of the law who swore to serve and protect all of us no matter what color, has been betrayed by his brother. That he has been damned by association, not anything he did or ever would do.

We’re in the middle of a crisis. It’s pretty clear that some reforms are coming down the pike. And people a lot smarter than I am will have studied and developed theories about what went wrong and how we can fix it. It’s not too much of a stretch to blame the heinous practice of enslaving human beings and using them like farm animals for the origins of systemic racism, and we’re not that far off the plantation that the descendants of those slave owners aren’t still harboring illusions of superiority. Some of them are owners of businesses. And store clerks. And public servants. Relatives and neighbors. Uniformed police officers.

I wonder how many of those cases of mistaken identity actually started that way, don’t you? How many of those reports of a suspect ‘who fits the description’ are at least vaguely accurate? The identifying factor being skin color. A black man. Is that all it takes?

There must be surveys that determine whether a person is even able to distinguish one black face from another. Able to see a lined face, distinguishing marks, scars, moles, the set of eyes, the shape of a nose, the curve of a forehead, a dimpled chin. Why are our police officers, both white and black not provided with training to address those issues? To familiarize themselves with those subtle, but essential differences? In a few cases, it might be as difficult for some black officers to qualify the facial and body characteristics of a white person. If so, then they need that kind of immersion training, too. At the very least, they need to be in the classroom when their fellow white officers are taking the course. Think of the opportunities for dialogue!

I had a mother who would never have misled me into thinking that black people deserve anything less than my open-minded acceptance as equal citizens. I don’t know exactly how she explained to my five-year-old self that our fellow black travelers told each other apart the same way I recognized her or my father or my friends from one another, but I’m sure that’s the message I got. Not every child got that message. Some were taught, either overtly or by example, that the black people they encountered were less than them and to be disdained. Perhaps even erased from society. Some of the children who got that message of hate grew up to be police officers. And they made it worse for all their fellow officers as well as the black citizens they harassed, abused, and possibly even killed.

And now here we are. Where we go from here will say a lot about us to the world, as well as to each other. When the smoke clears, the signs discarded, and the chants stilled, will we be able to recognize ourselves?