‘It Ain’t No Secret’: My Dad, The Boss and Police Brutality
Growing up, my family would always put on music while we cleaned the kitchen after dinner. When my older brother started to like Bruce Springsteen, we listened to the record Born in the USA for weeks and would dance and sing through three of the six tracks on one side every evening. The frustrations I felt at dinner when my family would talk about things I was too young to understand melted away. My parents were the best dancers I had ever seen. My brother was an idol with an air guitar. Thus began my love for The Boss.
I continued to listen casually to Springsteen for years, even when I went through a stage of finding my parents’ dancing completely embarrassing. In grad school, my roommate Annie and I would play “Dancing in the Dark” every time we finished a paper. We’d dance around our small room, blissfully singing “I’m sick of sitting ’round here trying to write this book,” feeling like we had conquered a small part of the world. Indeed, when Annie moved to Alabama to get her MFA and I moved to Barcelona to teach at an international high school, whenever something momentous happened (including Annie finishing the first full draft of her first novel) we scheduled a Skype-powered dance party. The Boss, to me, represents joy and release. My love for his music is both emotional and physical. It involves sweat and nostalgia. It involves family and friends. It involves deliverance.
So in May, when I found out Springsteen was ending The River tour in nearby Boston on September 14th, I bought my dad tickets for Father’s Day. This would be our second pilgrimage together, just the two of us. The first was when we flew to DC in 2009 to watch Barack Obama be inaugurated as president; we both cried throughout. I figured we would probably cry upon seeing The Boss, as well.
We left Portland after I finished teaching for the day and what should have been a 2.5-hour drive took closer to four hours due to traffic. Gillette Stadium has a noise ordinance that kicks in around 11 p.m. and I’d received an email the day before that said, “No openers, no intermissions, no excuses. The show starts at 7:30.”
After following the enormous flashing signs directing us to lot P10, we followed the crowd through a tunnel and over to the west side of the stadium. As we walked alongside fellow Springsteen fans, my dad, who is 64, said, “I guess I’m not going to be the oldest one here.” I remember thinking that this must be why people love sports and religion. There is something to be said for standing with a mass of people, loving the same thing. As we waited to get our tickets scanned I said, “Well, you’re not the oldest and I’m not the youngest, and we sure fit into this sea of white people.” I was half-joking, but it was a comment that would come back to me hours later when The Boss started playing “American Skin,” his song that addresses police brutality.
We sat down at 7:40 and The Boss walked out four minutes later. Neither my dad nor I had ever seen him live and suddenly there he was, an ant on the stage and a giant on the jumbotron. He opened the concert with “New York Serenade,” accompanied by a string section; the camera angles switched from the folds of his eyelids to his fingers on the strings to all the members of the E-Street Band. When he got to his fourth song, “Blinded By the Light,” the entire stadium was on its feet, the music coursing through us. I looked at my dad and his smile and my heart swelled. It was too loud to speak but there were also no words to sufficiently express the feeling, being present, together, in that moment. The Boss played old songs and new songs and never stopped for so much as a drink of water. He ran across the stage, through the crowd and his performance continued to amplify over the course of the night. Occasionally someone would bring him a different guitar. He told a few stories to the audience. And then, three-quarters of the way through the concert, he performed “American Skin (41 Shots).”
Springsteen wrote the song in 1999 after the murder of Amadou Diallo, where four plain clothes police officers shot at Diallo 41 times, 19 of which hit him. The officers were charged with second degree murder; all four were acquitted at trial. Springsteen’s performance of the song in 2000 in Madison Square Gardens caused the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association to call for a boycott.
But there he was, 16 years later, standing in front of 15,000 fans, singing a song about police brutality against people of color to a crowd of whiteness. The stadium quieted. Some people swayed, some people sang along. When the chorus shook out, my eyes filled with tears.
“Is it a gun, is it a knife
Is it a wallet, this is your life
It ain’t no secret (it ain’t no secret)
It ain’t no secret (it ain’t no secret)
No secret my friend
You can get killed just for living in your American skin”
While my love for Springsteen stems from love from and for my family, this performance of this song broke that circle of comfort and nostalgia. This was not just The Boss singing a ballad, the E-Street Band at his side. This was not a personal recollection of a happy childhood. This was a letter to America. This was the time for each and every white person in the stadium to take a moment to think about our privilege and our safety. This was a moment of social justice. This was a live experience demonstrating what the best music does: it creates a space for joy and sorrow and truth and reckoning. The best music moves you, emotionally and physically, and neither your body nor your heart (or you mind for that matter) can be still.
After the first iteration of the chorus, the song continues:
“41 shots, Lena gets her son ready for school
She says, ‘On these streets, Charles
You’ve got to understand the rules
If an officer stops you, promise me you’ll always be polite
And that you’ll never ever run away
Promise Mama you’ll keep your hands in sight.’”
This was not a conversation my parents ever had to have with me or with my brother. Sure, they taught us to be polite, but to this day, when I see a police cruiser in my neighborhood, my instinct is to wave. To wave. This has little to do with manners and everything to do with being white. Because, as a white woman in America, I have been taught through experience that I do not have to fear for my personal safety when I see a police officer. My American skin is a privileged American skin and, as The Boss so aptly points out over and over in the song, “it ain’t no secret.”
“American Skin” takes five minutes to play on the studio track, but Springsteen extended it for nine minutes in concert. He repeated “41 shots” and “killed just for living” over and over and over, again. As the near-full moon shone down on Gillette Stadium, I thought about how those nine minutes represented an America that could be: an America where we confront hard truths and realities about systemic racism and police brutality; an America where people listen and join in; an America where white people not only take the time to think about their privilege, but also use their privilege to start dismantling white supremacy.
Springsteen played five more songs and the stadium lights came on at 11:00. The E-Street Band did not follow the curfew. They played for an hour more, taking audience requests and not letting up. I got to dance to “Dancing in the Dark” and “Bobby Jean.” The whole night, from hearing him play to sharing the experience with my dad, was unforgettable. But what I am most grateful for is that his moving performance of American Skin pulled me into reality. It’s not a secret that my white skin means I was born into privilege. It’s not a secret that Springsteen wrote his song in 1999 and he could have written it in 1962 and he could have written it in 2016 and he could have written it a century ago. We can dance and we can sing and we can stamp our feet and we can clap our hands. But we need to fight for change. We need to be better.
