Posted on 12/30/2014 3:22:19 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
A photo of a young white woman screaming in an NYPD officer’s face makes me wonder what he’d do if I did that. I think I’d better not.
In recent months, thousands of people from all walks of life have flooded the streets of our cities. No matter what you believe about these protests, there is beauty in watching diverse groups of people—black and white, alike—come together in the name of racial equality. Yes, some people have been inconvenienced by traffic delays or annoyed by supportive athletes. But even they should see the marches as expressions of our best and highest ideals.
Unfortunately, those demonstrations have also exposed a disturbing truth—that even among those bound together in the quest for social justice, unexamined privilege is prevalent.
The best example of this came in the form of a single photograph, published by the New York Daily News, of a 20-something white woman standing fearlessly, pressed breasts-to-chest with a New York City police officer. From her expression, we know she is passionately shouting in unchecked defiance as another officer looks on passively from a few paces away. Neither seems bothered that she is in his face. Neither is unnerved by her apparent anger, nor do they see her as threatening.
Like most of the protesters, maybe she’s challenging the belief that equal protection is a reality, or maybe she is demanding that the justice system end over-policing in black neighborhoods, dismantle mass incarceration, and end the school-to-prison pipeline. Maybe, she—like me—is frustrated that two separate grand juries, in two different states, failed to hold police officers accountable in the deaths of two African American men. Maybe (and I amuse myself) she’s shouting: Black lives matter!
My amusement doesn’t last.
I know I cannot be the woman in that photograph. I cannot be indignant, no matter how righteous my fury. And even if I were inclined, I couldn’t shout at a police officer—not in his face, not from across the street. I couldn’t grip my waist and jam my chest against his. “I would not make it home,” I tweeted a few nights ago.
The truth is while I don’t know what she was saying, I do know this: Similar actions by a person of color, specifically a black woman like me, would likely end up with us in jail, in a hospital or who knows—like Eric Garner, on a medical examiner’s table.
I know that I cannot carry a gun in public and neither can my sons, even if it is a toy. If I lay prone on an open highway and point an assault rifle at a federal agent, my next stop would be federal custody or the nearest county morgue. Open carry laws are not meant for me. The rules are different. It’s what it means to be black in this country.
When you look at that photo, think of Garner. His hands outstretched, shoulders in submission, there was no shouting, no expletives, no aggression at all. He was not selling “loosies” that day, no cigarettes were found on his person, and thus there was no probable cause in play. He was not under arrest, because he had done nothing. Garner believed that he could stand on a public street, unarmed, and address police officers rationally.
He was wrong.
In stark terms, that is privilege. That is the difference between the protections embedded in our Bill of Rights and the lived lives of our citizenry. The rule of law, you see, buckles, bends and sometimes crumbles under the weight of racism, sexism, and classism. Whether I am a victim or a suspect, how much justice I can access is largely dependent upon the societal categories in which I reside.
You can’t earn it and you can’t discard it. There is no “coat check” for privilege. And it often travels so lightly that you can forget you are clothed in its benefits. Merely mention the word privilege, specifically white privilege, anywhere in the public square—including on social media—and one is likely to be mocked, as I was as soon as I reposted the photograph. The mockery comes from a place unburdened by history and untouched by the present. Most people, however, understood the significance of the photo immediately-- especially those who share my skin.
I am terrified to imagine what would happen to one of my four grown children, three of whom are also in their 20s, if they found themselves in a similar position. I cried and then I prayed before giving each of them some variation of the coming-of-age chat that has become a tradition in most African American households. Thankfully, they are well-mannered, law-abiding people. Still, I worry that a simple traffic stop could have tragic consequences.
My younger, straighter-than-an-arrow son was stopped and arrested in two separate jurisdictions a few years ago. During the first stop, not more than 10 miles from our home, my then 19-year-old son was cited for a shining his high beams on a darkened highway, and on a trumped-up curfew violation because his driver’s license had not been updated. The arresting officer identified him a “black” on the paperwork. While the desk sergeant ran a background check, he was roughed up by another officer in the lock-up.
With no record and no warrants, he was given a four-figure bond by a judge the next morning. It cost several thousand dollars and a high-powered former district attorney to get the charges dropped.
The second stop for speeding happened in another state a year later. Ironically, it was in a county that I knew all too well. My paternal great grandfather had grown up there. The area is 98 percent white, and the Klan has a strong foothold even to this very day.
That officer believed my fair-skinned son was white, according to the traffic citation I examined. Rather than face time in a jail cell and post a bond, as is customary for out-of-state drivers, my son was politely taken to the sheriff’s office and allowed to call his parents. Unable to reach us immediately, he hung out in the office joking with deputies until I picked up the phone with an obligatory “code-switched” voice. He was released within the hour without a bond on his own recognizance.
The reality is none of us are truly colorblind. Having a badge does not erode one’s propensity toward racial bias nor does it preclude any actions informed by it. If anything, officer training and in-field policing methodologies reinforce those beliefs. It is that predilection toward suspicion of black males that drives an officer to see my sons as older and more prone to criminality than their white counterparts. In the most extreme cases, it allows for the extrajudicial killing of black people without consequence.
Conservatives, and many liberals, fight with that truth. But the fact of the matter is the equal protection they cling to is not the reality. To the contrary, it remains a virtue to which this country aspires, but it’s one that only some of us can embrace.
She's saying:
Don't say no again, I want to have your children, right here, right now....right here, right now!
Do we know for sure nothing happened to that “girl” for that? After all, it is just a still photograph....we don’t know what happened before or after.
I would have beat her like a drum. That is uncalled for, and it’s assault.
Uh huh. As a young white woman I once jumped into a driverless moving vehicle that a drug addict rolled out of, I managed to get it stopped before it crashed throughout the front of my neighbors house (into the living room, on a Sunday afternoon, right after the dinner hour). I stepped out to cheers from my neighbors, and one red faced, very angry female police officer who threatened me up one side, down another, and said she would do her best to have me prosecuted with the contents of the car, regardless of the fact that none of it was mine. Then the other police officer informed her that none of these things would happen, and told me that what I did put myself at risk and to be more careful in the future.
So no. The officer being screamed at by the little idiot was on camera in a crowd of witnesses, rather like the police officers being treated like garbage by all sorts all over the evening news. 99% of our police officers really are the gold standard of human interaction and we are lucky, very lucky, to have them.
Nice sideburns on the chick in that picture.
” It is that predilection toward suspicion of black males that drives an officer to see my sons as older and more prone to criminality than their white counterparts. “
Or maybe it’s just the cold dose of reality one gets from being a cop and having to deal with young male thugs every day.
The central problem is that being a ‘thug’ has become the right of passage for black culture.
I would bet that Goldie lives in a predominantly white upper class neighborhood.
He should have put a knee into her nuts.
The idiot is attempting to use a counterfactual to prove a point.
The idiot however doesn’t realize on the night of the Antonio Martin shooting a black female was filmed walking up to white cops and screeching as loud as she could inches from their face. The cops didn’t do a thing to her.
This woman is so incredibly dumb she should feel bad.
Some NY’ers, especially the Manhattan/Brooklyn Heights Yuppie leftists, are the most annoying, entitled, and self-righteous people on earth. Its the phony progressivism in the air and water.
She focuses constantly on me, myself, and I. It’s all about her. Like Barky how could someone so in love with their own sh*t not be a homosexual?
They should have taken her out back and had a “soup kitchen” with her in Gamble’s Prius.
When the truth doesn't work for you - just make something up.
Actually, he WAS being arrested, because he HAD done something wrong.
Details, details.
“Shes in his face, thats in his space.
Id would have Maced that look offa her face.”
Plus, of her there’d not be a trace,
As she’d be in a barred place.
Shouting While Black: What Would Happen if I Got in White Cop’s Face?
Well Goldie... if you got that close to any guy you could get pregnant. So, ask the cop if he has ‘protection’ first.
“She can get away with it because she’s a woman, not because she’s white.”
It’s so much easier to blame race then you don’t have to take responsibility. Obama said he felt the sting of racism when people would lock their car doors when he walked by. It wasn’t because of race...it was because he’s a man.
I don’t believe his story. He’s a liar.
Yes, you have to read between the lines.
The truth is likely that ... He was driving around, after curfew, with his headlights on high beam all the time, blinding other drivers, and when the cops pulled him over , his license was expired.
The author of this piece is a racist.
Sorry but statistics do not lie. If a white police officer is in a confrontation with a suspect, he or she is more likely to die if the officer is white and the suspect is black rather than the other way around.
I do wonder if this is a grass is greener thing. It’s like there is this image of what life is like if you are white which in no way jives with reality, and the more people do not reach that fabled place, the more they think someone is holding out on them.
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