By
Lanre Akinsiku
In undergrad, I drove a '92 Ford Taurus
that just hulked, tank-like, up and down the streets of Berkeley. The thing was
conspicuous, an ocean liner. I was pulled over all the time, once or twice a
week at one point. Often I'd see a squad car following me and just pull to the
curb to get it over with.
An officer would walk up to the car,
one hand on that little button that secures the strap over his gun. He'd ask
for my license and registration. Some inner voice would remind me that this was
the time to point out I'd done nothing wrong; I'd ask for a badge number, I'd
take a stand. But black boys are supposed to know better.
So what I would do was: I would slip my
college ID over my driver's license. The officer's eyes would light up. Not your
college ID, he would say, amused. Then he would go back to his car and dally a
little, pretending to check on things, before handing my license back with some
mock-heroic advice about staying out of trouble. The story ends right there. I
remember feeling vague anger afterwards, although I was probably feeling
something a lot closer to despair.
Every time I used the college ID trick,
it bred in me a kind of survivor's guilt, a guilt about a life that feels as if
it's being protected weakly, through cowardice. Because what I was really doing
was saying, Yes, some of us deserve to be shot in the street, but this ID
proves that I'm not one of them. I used the little plastic card to secure
my status as One Of The Good Ones, and I always drove
away ashamed, always. At best, I was reducing my humanity –my right to not get
shot by a police officer –to a giveaway received during freshman orientation.
At worst, I was just delaying what is now starting to feel inevitable.
Mentally-speaking, what happens when
you hear about another unarmed black teen killed by police/police-like
officers? For me, it goes something like this: First, anger, a kind of
360-degree, completely unfocused, completely diffuse anger; but since anger is
a fairly cheap emotion it fades, and sadness settles in; and then I get that
familiar helpless feeling you get when you realize what you're doing is utterly
rote, almost Pavlovian, but you don't know how else to deal. To put it another
way: For reasons I'm still trying to parse out, I've realized that simply
mourning the deaths of other young black men isn't good enough anymore.
I don't mean for this to sound
melodramatic, because my emotions don't really matter; or, they matter less
than a murdered black boy whose body was left in the street. But what I'm
trying to describe here is something real, a sinking-in-quicksand feeling
familiar to anyone who is tired of the terror – which is the only really truly
appropriate term – police officers exact on young black men.
When an unarmed
black boy is killed by a police officer, again, and some loud-talking reporter
is interviewing the boy's mother, again, and you can see his mother's shoulders
slumped until they can't slump any more, and she's been crying so much she's
gotten to the point of simply not bothering to wipe the tears away, and you
watch her as she tries to look into every camera and speak into every
microphone, and watch her as she suddenly gets the spectacle of all of this,
and starts listing all of the good things her boy ever was, so that everyone
can remember him the way she's remembering him right then, in that moment—when
will we decide this is not okay?
This is probably a good time to
backtrack a little and talk about fear. To be black and interact with the
police is a scary thing. The fear doesn't have to come from any kind of
historical antagonism, which, trust me, would be enough; it can also come from
many data points of personal experience, collected over time.
Almost all black men have these
close-call-style stories, and we collect and mostly keep them to ourselves
until one of us is killed. You know how the stories go: I was pulled over one
day and the cop drew his gun as he approached my window; I was stopped on the
street, handcuffed and made to sit on the sidewalk because the cop said I
looked like a suspect; I had four squad cars pull up on me for jaywalking. We
trade them like currency.
And it almost goes without saying that
these stops are de facto violent, because even when the officer doesn't
physically harm you, you can feel that you've been robbed of something. The
thing to remember is that each of these experiences compounds the last, like
interest, so that at a certain point just seeing a police officer becomes
nauseating. That feeling is fear.
We all know there's nothing necessarily
wrong with fear, since it's just a really effective survival mechanism, and
there sure as hell isn't anything wrong with surviving. Legitimate fear can
save your life; it makes sense that many of us are scared of heights and
rattlesnakes. But a constant state of fear, being afraid, makes you a
special kind of tired, in the same way a bully or bad boss makes you tired.
This is no real way to live.
OK: Imagine you know of a guy who
occasionally walks around your neighborhood with a gun. Imagine you don't
really know this guy, so you don't know how he feels about you, whether he sees
you as friend or foe. You do know that he holds his gun a little tighter when
he walks past your house. You also know that if he shoots you, there's a good
chance he'll get away with it.
That's how all of this feels.
What I've seen of the Ferguson Police
Department and their tanks, AR15's, flash-bang grenades, tear gas, laser
sights, helicopters, and military-style detachment makes me believe Michael
Brown was tired. Maybe he'd been harassed by a police officer before, maybe he
was tired of being tired.
So when Darren Wilson tried to bully him, Michael
Brown said no. And maybe it was the "no" of someone who's been pushed
around, which is a more beautiful "no," since it is so clear and
absolute. That a police officer then shot him dead and left his body in the
street is, historically, the kind of thing police officers do when black men
stand up for themselves.
And so for the last week I've been
feeling that helpless feeling. All that's left after helplessness is fatigue,
right? Aren't we all tired yet? We know that what happened to Michael Brown was
not a unique incident but part of a larger phenomenon—and that it will happen
again, soon. Which means we know an even deeper truth: that to be black in this
country means constantly paying a tax on your life. Some of us pay in dignity,
some of us pay in blood. What I'm trying to say is this: Never again will I pay
with my dignity.
Lanre Akinsiku is a fiction writer
pursuing his MFA at Cornell University
(Illustration by Tara Jacoby)
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