I Need Air: Gasping for Breath in the Midst of the Police

The all too familiar feelings of nervousness and panic always accompany the moments I notice a police car behind my vehicle. Although I have yet to be pulled over by the police, I recognize and understand the instant need to evaluate my current, as well as previous actions while on the road. Was I going 5 over? Did I use my turn signal at the last intersection? Will I be pulled over…just because I’m black? As silly and racial profile-esque as that may sound to some folks, that is the thought process of driving while black.

With my thoughts and prayers in mind for those who have been lost to police violence, this piece does not serve to demonize law enforcement nor does it operate to speak for all black people in our experiences of fear. However, it does stand to explain the urgency of #BlackLivesMatter and the need for reform within a system that has been conducive to bias/hate toward black people.

The narrative of black people’s irreconcilable relationship with the police has been propagated for as long as I can remember. Black people are taught to mistrust the very system that carries a reputation to protect and serve them. This sort of engagement reaches back to the terror experienced by black and brown bodies in the antebellum, as well as post-antebellum South. Although police brutality extends throughout the United States, it is crucial to recognize and understand the context of black death in the hands of the police.

Each day brings a new hashtag, as well as a new moment in which black folks are outraged and pained by the lack of justice for our community. We cry because we can feel the pain of a family who has lost a brother or son, because this too could be my brother or future son. We grow angry because we know the system will protect police actions, and folks will justify senseless murder as if a criminal, rather than a person was taken by not one, not two, not three, but countless bullets. We keep pushing because our blackness cannot be taken off, our blackness is not a uniform that is picked out and accompanied with an oath to protect.

We chant #BlackLivesMatter because whiteness and heroism protects cops who fail to deescalate and avoid black death. I sit in moments of silence most days trying to make sense of the America we live in. When your life is colored by oppression and devaluation with no shield of protection, and systems that treat your blackness like a disease, you wonder if someone in your family may be next, you wonder if you could be next.

Our thoughts and experiences as black people vary. We are cis het, we are queer, we are feminists, we are liberators, we are LGTBQ+, we are not a hate group, we are dynamic, and we are black. We shouldn’t have to defend our humanity or give a long list of reasons why someone who looks like me deserves justice. This movement does not sustain an agenda that is anti-cop or anti-white people. We are, however, anti-killing us and anti-discrediting our lived experiences. I can acknowledge and understand the burden of a police officer who feels he may not return home. But when that feeling becomes colored, when that burden becomes contextualized with blackness and engaging black citizens, it becomes problematic.

As we have keenly observed, white criminality bears the privileges of whiteness. White criminality is not treated with violence and bias/hate in our criminal justice system. Black people who may or may not be breaking the law are subject to assumptions of criminality no matter the circumstance. The very existence of my blackness is in direct opposition to the construct of whiteness, and therefore the protection of whiteness and all its privileges. How do you navigate an environment with such stereotypes rooted in these ideas?

You organize. You vote. You advocate. You write. You challenge yourself to be uncomfortable. Unfortunately, the struggle is long road ahead but to reach the end of the road, we must continue to agitate the normativity of whiteness and black death. There’s nothing normal about a father who is taken too soon for being a black man and all of the stereotypes that accompany black masculinity (rest in power Philando Castile…rest in power Alton Sterling). As we go forward, there’s so much educating, understanding, and reform that needs to take place.

We have to understand that not all white people are willing to get it. We have to understand that the actions of a lone shooter should not and will not continue to define a movement that challenges #AllLivesMatter because it is exclusive and ignores black and brown people. We have to understand that black women and children, too, are slain by the police. We have to understand that division within the movement based on transphobia, queerphobia, sexism, classism, homophobia, etc. is just as divisive as the rhetoric of those who argue “black people need to do better to keep their lives.” And lastly, for the sake of length, we must also understand that there are police who are good.

As I gasp for air in writing this conflated and layered piece, we all need to hold law enforcement as an institution accountable. Those who are good and seek to be the change within the system, we need to hear more from you. We need you to speak up with us, because at the end of the day, anyone’s silence in this fight (in my opinion) demonstrates complacency with black death.

Onward,