This is especially true if you are a black man. Or any other marginal or disenfranchised minority group.
I was meeting a new friend for a 1st date in the Petworth area of DC. It was broad daylight shortly after 5PM.
Although I have driven through that part of town many times, I haven’t stopped to smell the flowers so to speak in a while. This in a town I was born in–yes I’m a DC native–and grew up mostly inside the beltway.
I matched the description of a suspect, 5’9″ black man with dreadlocks.
On foot, I saw the fun wall painting at the mouth of an alley on Upshur St NW near Georgia Ave and went to take a picture.
There I was approached by a DC police officer who seemed friendly. He offered to take my picture with the mural as a back drop. How nice, right?
Well, yes. Right up to the point where he is handing my phone back. Then he grab my wrist tightly and applied hand cuffs.
Naturally, I started to protest, gently. Why gently? Because police are notorious for using any reason for escalation. If you are a person of color, you have been taught this at least from when you were a teenager.
I ask why am I being detained. His partner had arrived by then.
The officer who was applying the handcuffs, “It’s okay. Everything is fine…”
I know I had a look on my face like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? How does this look like everything is fine.’ Meanwhile, I see the people in the restaurant across the street where I was going to meet my date looking. Gawking. People are starting to slow down as they walk by to their happy hour spots nearby, or home as the neighborhood has been heavily gentrified from it’s look from when I was a kid here in the 70’s and a teenager in the 80’s.
His partner chimed in with this expansive statement. I matched the description of a suspect, 5’9″ black man with dreadlocks.
The look I described above I doubled down on. Quietly, I stare down the second officer.
‘Really? In this town? In this neighborhood?? Are you going to go around and handcuff about a third of the black men who still live, work, or hangout in that neighborhood who probably number in the hundreds??’
Their answers were meant to be benign and run of the mill, as if handcuffing someone before you tell them why they are being detained is not in direct conflict with the rights of individual in a so-called free and just country.
“All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’ — Martin Luther King Jr, — “I’ve Been To The Mountain Top’, April 3, 1968
The other uninformative questions I was asked: Where are you from? What are you doing here?
The last time I checked, this was supposed to be ‘the land of the free’. I still haven’t been told of what I have been accused of or what the probable cause is.
For this to happen in a city I generally love and will always call home, it is an embarrassment. To quote Rich Medina in A Foreigner No Longer on King Britt’s Album Adventures in Lo Fi “Shit, free or not I hate this fucking place. Because I know how it cheats at cards and lies to serve its own purpose…”
By the way, it matters not much (if not most of the time) if the police officers are people of color as well. In most places in the United States, they apply very similar tactics. These tactics are still heavily rooted in high altitude stereotyping about race, class, and religion. They wear a veil of the same name, ‘Profile‘.
Both of these officers were black.
Now, I’m the one in handcuffs. I’m the one without a gun. I’m the one without information as to what is the problem.
I’m the one with nothing.
Make no mistake. This is where it all begins for people of color; at an extreme disadvantage from the start of the interaction; not given the benefit of doubt; somehow less than. A negative prejudice in the public eye, at least to the people passing by in the surprisingly sunny DC afternoon. This it where it begins for the Philando Castiles, Freddy Grays, Emmet Tills, or the guys in the Starbucks in Philadelphia. This is my ‘black hoodie’ moment, even though I am in a button down shirt and light brown jeans.
How many of you would be extremely upset by just being cuffed for something you know you where not apart of? You are just living your life, right? Wouldn’t you want to fight back? Wouldn’t you want to protest? How do you think this would be perceived by the strangers passing by, or a business partner, or as in my case a potential new love?
By the way, no. This is not the 1st time this has happened to me. It has happened enough that I have lost count. Who of you who are not a person of color where this has happened even once?
There is no such thing as ‘innocent until proven guilty’ in this country for people of color, or for people who happen to be poor.
I was fortunate. The 1st office walked away to the marked SUV on the radio. After 15 minutes the 2nd officer, who looked a bit older than the 1st, removed the cuffs.
Then both officers attempted to justify the cuffing in a less than convincing attempt to apologize. They repeated the description again. And again.
Still, I was lucky. I get to walk away. I get to not have my face plastered on the 11 o’clock news. I get avoid the lock up with an untenable and unattainable bail amount. I get to walk away from the very slippery slope of how the so-called ‘justice’ system stacks the cards against people of color. By overly prostrating myself to a point lower than most human beings would find acceptable, I avoid a conflagration of the soul, spirit, and being that has been the stuff of highly publicized news in DC and across the country; where the human-ness of a person is forgotten about to sooth the feelings for the mirage of safety which excludes people who look like me, or the woman wearing a hijab, or Spanish speaking dude who is just looking for day-work.
I got to have my 1st date.
I get to tell this story.
The larger question is, will enough of you, whether you are so-called, progressive, liberal, conservative, or libertarian; whether any of you will listen…
Where is ‘and justice for all’?