For Blacks, Police Racism Is All Too Real

I was 13 years old.

The police car drew abreast of me as I rounded a corner. “Where you headed?” demanded the officer inside.

Startled, I nodded my head toward the building next to me. “Inside the church,” I said. The deacons paid me $2 a week to clean it up after choir rehearsal.

The officer was skeptical. “On a Saturday?” he asked. “What’s that in your pocket?”

I pulled out a large comb.

He drove off, and I exhaled.

We are all prisoners of our own experiences, hostage to the way it is where we come from. Sometimes that makes us miss things we should see.

It’s a truism worth remembering as we ponder the latest twists in two public dramas.

Recently in Los Angeles, tape recordings surfaced that appear to buttress one of the O.J. Simpson defense team’s central contentions - that former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman is a racist who might have planted evidence to frame the former gridiron star of murder. Until now, many white observers considered that an outlandish notion.

And last week in Philadelphia, supporters of Mumia Abu-Jamal faced off in an angry confrontation with the widow and colleagues of Daniel Faulkner, the policeman he is convicted of killing. The scene was an appeal hearing for Abu-Jamal, a death row inmate who claims he was framed by police and received an unfair trial. Again, some white observers find that scenario difficult to buy.

But if you are black, it is not hard to think a cop could set someone up. We have lived a different reality.

I was 25 years old.

My wife and I were driving near the monied enclaves of the Los Angeles foothills when the red and blue lights appeared in the rear-view mirror. I pulled over, and an electronically magnified voice ordered me out of the car.

As I emerged, I found myself facing the barrel of a gun. The officer ordered me to raise my hands.

I was so shaken that I don’t remember much else. I think he frisked me; I think he searched the car. I do remember clearly one thing he said: “You spraying for medflies?”

I was numb with fear. “What?” I asked.

He gestured at the tailpipe and told me the car had been spewing smoke.

It was only after he had let us go that I remembered to be angry. I circled around, found another cop and asked him to stand behind the vehicle while I put the transmission in “park” and floored the accelerator. The engine thundered.

He saw no smoke.

I offer no opinion on the innocence or guilt of O.J. Simpson or Mumia Abu-Jamal. I simply echo what writer Bebe Moore Campbell said in the title of her 1992 book: “Your blues ain’t like mine.”

If you are white and law-abiding, you turn to the police for justice. But if you are black and law-abiding, you never know. You always fear.

And, yes, there’s a flip side. Some blacks are so used to being lied to and about that the cry of misconduct becomes a reflex, potentially applicable to any encounter between an African American and the law.

Sometimes, when blacks protest police malfeasance, I sense a righteous skepticism in white observers. It doesn’t matter how many witnesses come forth, all saying the same thing about the unjustified shooting or the brutish beating - their testimony automatically is discounted. It’s as if blacks are considered unreliable reporters of their own ordeals.

I had hoped the camera that caught the police assault of Rodney King would be the unimpeachable witness some white Americans seem to need. But one wonders how effective it was, given the public scoffing at the claims being made by Abu-Jamal and Simpson.

These two men may well be the basest of liars, but nothing they have contended about police misconduct is beyond the bounds of possibility. Not in my experience.

In my experience, police might shoot you to death even if you are naked and unarmed lying in bed.

In my experience, police might “search” your house in such a way as to leave it unlivable.

In my experience, police might lie and set you up.

If you are black, you probably know these things. If you are white and don’t know them, perhaps it is time you asked yourself why. How is it that this reality has escaped your sight?

Maybe it’s not justice that’s blind.

xxxx