Cops -- 15 June 2020 -- A letter to myself

Stanford Magazine has published a version of this essay, with a cool graphic:

stanfordmag.org/contents/hard-conversations

 

I'm a 70-year-old white woman and I've been going over my feelings about police. It's maybe more complicated than you'd think.

I grew up on a dead-end road in the woods in Western Washington, and police were not on my radar when I was young. I must have seen officers on trips to Tacoma or Seattle, but I can't come up with a single memory before 1963, when I watched cops on TV setting dogs on Black protesters in Birmingham, Alabama. I thought the South must be like another planet where things like that could happen. A couple years later I was at my first political march, along with my parents, demanding the repeal of Washington's Alien Land Law. It was decorous affair, with police on hand but no arrests, dogs, or firehoses.

In college I was a minor league activist, marching and sitting-in to oppose the Vietnam War and support civil rights. My own relations with police were mistrustful but not violent, and I could never feel comfortable with cops = pigs slogans. I was arrested once, in the low-key manner that Stanford campus police generally used with peaceful white protesters (especially polite in this case when one of our cadre was Malcolm Snider -- blond, handsome, and an All-American football tackle). Once at another demo I ran from cops wielding billy clubs and spraying tear gas, and once I lay low when two FBI agents came to our door to collect on the federal phone excise tax that I withheld as a war protest. My housemates covered for me, so the government attached my bank account instead. Once while driving cross country, we were hauled in by parish sheriffs in Louisiana for setting up camp under a bridge. They took us to the station, questioned us awhile, and let our white selves go. Back in California when a violent stranger tried to rape me and I got away by pure luck, it didn't cross my mind to call the police. I couldn't imagine they would care.

In 1975, I moved back home and got a job in journalism. My ideological fires banked a bit, replaced by the "just the facts" ethos of the profession. Within the next few years I actually called the police a couple of times myself, once after a home burglary and once when my purse was snatched  while I was walking near my house. But the time a man clubbed me over the head with a bottle when we passed each other in a crosswalk (I had looked him in the eye and smiled at him and it sent him over some kind of edge), I decided to let it be. The man was old, Black, clearly in mental distress. I wasn't really hurt, and I was afraid of what cops might do to him.

All in all, I'd describe my stance toward law enforcement as wary. The few times I have called 911, I've been relieved when the responding officer is Black. I'm not sure why, since I know character is not color-coded. I guess I imagine, or at least hope, that more black people go into police work to make a positive difference.

And then I adopted Black children. My daughters have had a lifetime of extra attention, sometimes friendly and sometimes not, due to their color and our transracial family. There's the time I needed to bring my toddler with me to an eye exam. The doctor told me I would regret adopting her, and he knew this from working in the South. "They're cute when they're little," he said. (Looking at you, Dr. Tisdall!)

There was the time, actually more than one time, kids at school called the girls racist names (think "n----- bitch, go back to Africa") and nothing happened. When we contacted parents about their kids, and they said that wasn't possible. When the boy who kicked my 8th-grade daughter in the chest -- in the classroom, in front of other students  -- wasn't disciplined because "he's a good kid from a good family" while she got detention from that same administration for chewing gum in the hallway. My granddaughter now goes to that same middle school, with a different principal, and things are better.

There was the time a U.S. Border guard kept us waiting so he could inform me, in front of my wide-awake nine-year-old, that she was not my daughter. He didn't bother to ask for her birth certificate. He just wanted to run his racist mouth and the document in my glovebox would have spoiled his fun.

There was the time a white classmate at UW-Tacoma told the professor that my daughter and the only other black student in the class had threatened her. They had not, as the investigation quickly determined. She just thought they looked scary.

We taught our kids to be proud of their looks, their culture, their history, their resiliency, their grace -- and we also had to tell them to be extra careful with their hands in stores because they will be the first to be suspected of shoplifting, and extra careful at school because they will be expected to misbehave, and -- of course -- extra careful with the police. That has worked out in our family so far, in the sense that they have not been assaulted or jailed while lawfully going about their lives. I guess that counts as lucky. They have friends in law enforcement. They know, and I know, that structural racism and historical racism do not mean that every single cop has it in for us.

Which leads me to grandchildren.

A couple of years ago I was at a playground with my grandson, then about 6. He was romping with a group of little boys, all new acquaintances, all of them white, playing some get-the-bad-guys game. Next thing I knew, he had a kid at each elbow and they were perp-walking him across a deck. All in good fun, I hasten to say: they were smiling; he was smiling. I don't think he felt anything beyond pleasure in making new friends. But I felt instantly sick, as if I was seeing a window into a future he might not survive. The mom next to me didn't like it either. She called her son over and asked him if that is the way we treat friends. That's the way cops treat black people, I muttered. The kids went back to playing.

Then the mom asked if we could talk. She said her husband is a cop. She said that backlash against police is affecting their family, that he no longer wears his uniform in Facebook photos, and that they are beginning to feel unsafe. She asked if I considered how her son felt hearing statements like mine. Did I truly believe what I had said, and was I basing it on personal knowledge or on the sensationalized video clips that don't represent most officers?

We had a decent conversation. I said I understood that police see people at their worst, day after day, and that's not an easy job. I hadn't thought about how a young child might be hearing me insulting his dad's profession. I said that one of my children had a degree in criminal justice, had considered a career in law enforcement, and had worked as a civilian in a police department. (I didn't mention that the racism among the staff in that office was a big factor in her leaving that job.)

She asked me if I personally knew black men who had had bad experiences with police. I do indeed, and I told her so. I told her that when I think of my grandson growing up into a world that sees him as a menace, sees him as expendable, I am sometimes just terrified. We hugged. I did not point out, and I hope I didn't need to, that her husband can take a break from his police identity by taking off his uniform. The people I love most don't have that option.

I did a lot of thinking after that encounter. Finally I decided to risk being awkward and intrusive to see if we could talk some more. What I wanted to know was whether she and her husband believed it was their responsibility to call out racist policing, or simply not to practice it themselves. I wanted to tell her that no matter how lovely her individual family might be, it's not enough to treat racial profiling -- even racial profiling among consenting six year olds -- as a matter of "how we treat friends." And -- for real -- I also wanted to listen. I knew her first name and that she taught at a nearby school, so it wasn't hard to find contact information. I emailed to ask if we could talk more. I also promised not to contact her again if she didn't respond. She didn't respond and I'm keeping my promise.

I wonder what she's thinking these days.

Here's what I hope we could agree on: It's sad that she might have to explain to an innocent six-year-old that some people will hate or fear his daddy because of the color of his uniform. It's sad my grandson has to learn that some people consider his very existence to be basically criminal. We should both be able to tell our children and grandchildren, truthfully, that we are working, every day, to create a world where those conversations aren't necessary.