July 28, 2016
By Mickey Friedman
I mourn for the black and blue and dead. And if the well-meaning prevail, we’ll spend some days talking about what needs to be done.
Judging by ESPN’s community conversation with President Obama it will be all talk: sincere, but largely inconsequential, because real change requires an honest look at the problems, expressions of real anger, despair, sadness rather than stage-managed politeness and deference. Real solutions require sacrifice and extraordinary inconvenience. Telling truth to power, confronting those who resist change in every arena. And that inevitably brings suffering. Look to the Freedom Riders, those who sat in, were beaten, jailed or like Muhammed Ali, vilified, or like Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman, Martin and Malcolm, murdered.
Because black people in America aren’t really Americans the way white people are. Our hometown faux hero, W.E.B. DuBois, whose childhood church rots while a half dozen fourteen- dollar burger places bloom, wrote about this years ago in a book no one reads, “Black Reconstruction.”
Black people are like people in Syria, Egypt, El Salvador or China, or the African lands they were stolen from. Where people are jailed, disappeared just because someone with authority wants them gone. We don’t want to know about this because often it is the American-trained secret police or army doing the disappearing and using American-bought arms to kill those protesting pathetic working conditions or asking for corrupt-free elections. Our tax monies. Propping up the many varieties of slavery.
Barack Obama will have the Secret Service to ensure he isn’t stopped and killed for a broken taillight. But most black people know it just takes one hateful, damaged, or confused cop amongst the virtuous police to end them in a heartbeat.
Some suggest that whites, too, can be dispensed with in the many blinks of an AR-15. So very true, but for now we are talking about the likelihood of death by police. As the Washington Post discovered in their analysis of 2015 gun deaths, if you adjust for population, “black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.” Whites make up 62% of the population, and 49% of those killed by police officers; while African-Americans who make up just 13% of the population, account for 24% of those fatally shot by police. Statistically, “unarmed black Americans were five times as likely as unarmed white Americans to be shot and killed by a police officer.”
If the terribly unnecessary murder of Philando Castile proved anything is that you can throw out many of the myths we white people surround ourselves with: the out-of-work shiftless black guy, probably dealing drugs, who deserved to be stopped, frisked, shot when he made that suspicious move. But Philando Castile was better than most of us: he worked in a cafeteria at a Montessori School and not only fed the kids, he loved them, knew what they could and couldn’t eat and the kids adored him for the care he provided. Like many white American males, he owned a gun. A legal gun with a permit to carry.
He did one thing wrong: he wasn’t white.
As the UK Guardian reveals, even though blacks make up only 6.5% of the population, “roughly 47% of the arrests made in 2016 by Saint Anthony Village, Minnesota, police are of African Americans.”
The talk won’t matter if we don’t connect the dots: the 1% who have siphoned off our treasure. Tax policy that exempts profitable corporations and ensures we don’t have enough to fix our broken cities, schools, health care system, and can’t pay our workers and police enough. Yet the bought and paid-for stooges we call Congress spend many billions on fighter jets and aircraft carriers that won’t work against ISIS suicide assassins. Then they religiously vote against gun control while sending tanks to local police departments.
For many years I’ve lived with a cop: Frank Falco. Once a detective in New York City, he is now the Assistant Chief in Ripton, Massachusetts. Like Ripton, Frank Falco lives only in my imagination and my I Ching mysteries. My job as a writer is to make Frank Falco real, and so my job has been to live with policeman Falco in my mind, heart, and body. In much the same way as making World on Fire, a film about John Flynn’s year in Iraq, taught me more than I ever knew about the life of a soldier, writing Danger Times Two and Folly has made me better understand and be far more sympathetic to those policemen and women whose job it is to protect our communities.
These worlds collide for me as I watch Iraq vets go mad and kill police.
I honor the importance of Black Lives Matter, and I won’t ever forget that, as Martin Luther King so courageously taught us, we transform our lives only by making nonviolent change together.
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For more information:
Aren’t more white people than black people killed by police? Yes, but no.
Washington Post
Police arrest black people at higher rate in city where Philando Castile was shot
The UK Guardian
“Black and Blue and Dead” was first published in the July 21, 2016 issue of The Berkshire Record.
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