I Can’t Speak

Recent events have caused an uptick in the number of people taking a curious interest in my life. Within the past few days, I have had no fewer than a dozen close friends and associates ask what my feelings were towards the happenings just blocks away from my apartment. As I write this, thousands across America have taken to the streets to protest injustice. This has been spurred by a very familiar spat of police brutality, far too common to recall, that has resulted in the death of yet another unarmed African American male. I have been asked to share my thoughts but I feel that the use of words in speech at this particular moment is not adequate. Something about the spoken word does not capture the proper emotion, the gravity, the general feeling of what is going on in my head. In this time I choose not to speak out loud as I find it tautologous to repeat the words we’ve been saying for hundreds of years. My friends seek my opinion of these events because not only am I a Black American male but I am also prior law enforcement and a veteran of the Armed Forces.

I have been long situated in an experience that not many can lay claim to. I am both an intent observer as well as an active participant. A bystander who by virtue of complexion is both a victim and also unharmed. I am a product of the long history of suffering from a demand for freedom and equality that was earned but unhonored by the powers that be. I had parents that raised me to have an acute academic understanding of the price they paid to have a portion of what it meant to be American. But their experience was one I am generationally distant from. I do not have what the philosophers call that great commonality of experience to unify a people. All I recognize is a common struggle. I cannot claim to relate to my Father’s experience of growing up in the Jim Crow South much like I can’t claim to understand my Mother’s viewpoint from witnessing race riots and White Flight while growing up in the much more urbanized Los Angeles. My experience, like everyone else’s, has to be my own. And my experience in my given life can only be described as quietly brave fear. I am half a step below constantly terrified. But, the fear of having an empty fridge is what drives me to need to be fearless. It is this that I don’t believe people completely understand: a need to be fearless. I have traveled much of the Western world and what I have noticed is a commonality of fear amongst people I share an identity with. Everywhere you go, the singular verse “the police, can and will kill you with little to no provocation” is a bonding proverb. It’s gospel. And it has been since their grandparents first started bible study on Sundays. It is a unique fear that is never present but always there. Living in a place like America, where having an encounter over a parking space can lead to your death by a police officer is a very real and tangible thing. It is no longer the part of fiction, a thing that only happens “in bad places”. There are people who exist who if I annoy slightly will call the police on me because they understand the relationship they have with the police and the relationship that I have with them. “Cops kill black folks”, as I’ve been told. Prior to this year, we had reasons for why black men and women were gunned down, sometimes in their homes, by law enforcement. These reasons are always frivolous but at least there was some attempt to excuse the murder. Typically it was by blaming the victim for having had a traffic ticket when they were younger or something along those lines. But this year has shown us that reasons are no longer needed. It seems that at any time and for any reason, I can just be murdered.

The scariest part of these times exists in the veiled interactions between the political space and personal. For some reason, we have gotten it in our heads that when it comes to things like this, the politics don’t matter. The determinations of who gets what is not taken into account. We scream for reform knowing full well that every law exists to resist reform and maintain the status quo that led to these conditions in the first place. The current legal system was tailor-made to exclude social inclusion and encourage stability. It takes a massive amount of force to initiate any kind of change. My more conservative cohorts will tell me it is intentional; that any liberal democracy must make change slow so as to conserve its integrity. I do not see police brutality as a quality of a free and liberal democracy but as an ailment of a sick constituency of people that have long thrived on a fantasy of domination and control. A history of having had control and refusing to loosen it to those they swear to protect. Much of my upbringing was marked by this kind of oppositional relationship to authority and likewise they to me. Therefore, I see the recent killing of George Floyd not as an isolated incident but that of a long-running ailment we diagnosed years ago and are willingly not attempting to treat.

This freedom we value so greatly convinces us that equality has been obtained. Obviously, there are issues with how people view equality. Black people must somehow cope with the idea that within America there are people that exists who make it their lives work to hate them, yet because they pay taxes like every American we must tolerate their existence. We have to share our land with racists because America means freedom to believe in what you want. Even the belief that America should be inherently unequal. For the Black man, the reality is that it is unequal and hostile. For the racist, it is a reality all the same. We call this “marketplace of ideas” a good thing. That somehow these competing ideologies can somehow reconcile and exist peacefully. That those who tolerate are just as viable as those who hate. I use this word “tolerate” as I can’t find another word in common usage that captures the sentiment. I abhor the word. You tolerate a bad smell, you suffer a fool, and you accept the sky is blue. To have the idea that people of separate identities peacefully coexisting should require no proof or explanation and that’s the connotation that each of those words carries.

I am afraid because being generationally separate from the great movements of my ethnicity, I have not been able to find myself in a unified movement for the freedoms of all people. I currently live in a country where there are more incarcerated black youth than there are in college. I am told on a daily basis the system is designed in such a way so I do not succeed on my own. I have a president in office whom I cannot, in any way, count on to offer any words or actions that might ease my plight. He wakes up on most mornings intent on making my life worse actually. To inspire those that hate me to hate even more and much more openly. I don’t know or claim to know the solution to racism. We thought that the real solution was to wait for them all to just die in some great flood but that has not and will not happen. The great trick is to somehow tolerate (ha) their existence and I don’t see this as anything but their victory and an extension of the myth of equality.

My fear is not assuaged even being something of prior law enforcement. I can say all I want from the perspective of a police officer but I understand that a majority of those that wear a badge do so because they believe their occupation is the best way on Earth to make positive change every day. To impact people’s lives in a way that few can do on Earth. Even those these many good ones exist, I too think there should be mass reform in the way they are trained and organized. Reform is needed to weed out those who think that police work is strictly about the paycheck and to find those properly motivated to serve and protect. It’s an old sentiment we’ve been teaching forever since and rarely identified. I understand that as law enforcement, there is a burden and responsibility to be carried by a police officer and if they are unwilling to support that burden they should be offered opportunities elsewhere.

This is most of what I could not say out loud. I can only say I am glad to have the clarity of mind to form any kind of opinion. We are here because we are not equal. We are here because we have been taught to accept that which directly opposes our personal identities. The new American way is to silently grimace at each event that threatens your safety, then in a fit of justifiable outrage take to the streets. The interesting thing about these protests is that as has not been informed by any popular media I have seen, the ones protesting are not advocates but in many cases the direct victims of racism and cultural hostility. The citizens standing on the steps, including myself, have been turned down from jobs because of skin color. They have been ushered out of restaurants. They have been pulled over four times in one day by the police for a frivolous reason. They have had a close friend or friend of a friend die at the hands of law enforcement. They have watched families and neighborhoods change overnight because of some racially charged legal action. They live it every single day much as I do. I can only hope that the product of these times will be a much more socially motivated group unified in the ideal of true equality who are willing to protest and march for all intolerance, not just the ones they immediately recognize. There may not be a common movement but there is certainly a common struggle that has persisted for way too long. It will end someday but until then I plan to spend day after day silently contemplating the names of all who have been lost in the great struggle.

May we never forget.