The Comment Factory

This morning I awoke to news of another black police officer murdered by a white cop. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s response was: “While we don’t know all the details of what happened tonight, this is a tragedy. Rest assured that we will find out exactly what happened here, and we will learn from it so it doesn’t happen again.”

I’m thinking of all the times I’ve heard this bureaucratic okie doke in my lifetime and it has been far too many. Always followed by the ready made excuse -“The white cop was impaired,” “The black officer failed to identify himself,” and the old stand-by “This is not a racial incident.” But it is…and like most post-modern racism it’s hard to pin down with easy civil rights era jargon. This is the new “post-racial “America we live in, where men of color are still the automatic villains, still guilty until proven innocent, still manhandled and harassed on a daily basis by the iron fists of the state — the police.

On the train this morning, angered as I was by last night’s events, I got into a debate with an older white man about the prevalence of police brutality in the black community. His black wife looked on solemnly as we traded barbs. This was a man who had seen the battlefields of Vietnam and the sometimes equally vicious plains of the 1950’s American west. He’d handled guns and he’d used them. And while he made a very good point in his adept observation that if you pick up a gun on the battlefield you will almost certainly use it, I find one very faulty bit of reasoning in his argument. Black communities are NOT battlegrounds. And this is the crux of the matter. While many in the white community see our neighborhoods as cesspools of crime, drug use and economic depression, useful only as pick up spots for illicitly used illegal drugs or as morally decadent wastelands on which to play out their gentrifying fantasies, we live here.

Our neighborhoods are not nightmarish fantasies nor are they chock full of wholesale tragedy. There are tragedies to be had here but mostly there is life. Our communities are places where we raise and educate our children, feed our families, go to work everyday and try to carve out some semblance of the American dream. In this world, the real world of the inner city and not some hip ghetto spin on reality, black men can do everything right and return to their communities as protectors only to be gunned down by peace officers who are not official and bring no peace. That is the reality we see today. The question is what can we, the inhabitants of the community, do about it? Some say nothing and shrug it away as racial reality in a “post racial” America. I reject that.

The famed comedian Paul Mooney put it best when he said that “these white police officers don’t shoot other white plain clothes police officers because the word on the street is — don’t shoot…until you see the color of his skin.” That one sentence speaks volumes. Black people in America are now in the unenviable position of being policed by people who see black skin, and anyone with it, as the enemy. A paradigm we cannot shift with the lackluster programs and initiatives proposed by the Ray Kelly’s of the world. No, we must strive for a more radical solution to the problem, if not for ourselves than for our children, who will continue to be victimized by this system into perpetuity if we continue to stand idly by and do nothing.

I propose that the only solution to a problem not of our making is to move towards sustainable, self-sufficient communities where we own everything in the community from what we eat to what we wear, the small mom and pop business on the corner to the largest community grocery store, the family home to affordable multi-family housing units and most importantly the land on which all these structures reside. Ownership…it is the only way.

Let’s face it, white mainstream America may never be a just and safe place for black people but this realization does not have to be the death sentence it once was. We now have the resources and more importantly the physical, social and psychological freedom to create a new dynamic. Once we own our communities than we can adequately police them with private sector security that both originates from and is familiar with the community. This is not a new idea. Many disenfranchised communities have set up self-sustaining enclaves that act as buttresses against the harshly prejudicial tactics of mainstream society. This is not even the first time black people have considered self-sufficiency as a way of combating American forces that would have us live in squalor and destitution. 89 years ago the Black Nationalist orator Marcus Garvey asserted that “Our success educationally, industrially and politically is based upon the protection of a nation founded by ourselves.” I think it’s high time we revisit this notion or else find one day that there is nothing left, that our communities are scattered and destroyed, our culture decimated and the new hope offered by such profoundly moving events as President Barack Obama’s recent election squandered.

Personally I refuse “to go gently into that good night.” I refuse to see the promise of black America die. Not when there is another option, when we can incorporate total self-reliance and self-efficacy into our lives and give ourselves the tools to survive this onslaught. Honestly, I don’t know that much about sustainability. I’m a native New Yorker and as such haven’t done anything “self-sustainable” recently…possibly ever. I am, however, willing to learn if it means that my children and the children of others can inherit a safer, sounder community.

I said earlier that black communities are not battlefields but that does not mean that we are not active participants in a war; perhaps only of ideologies but then again, on days like today, of actual human lives. On most days, I’ll admit, I don’t want to fight a war. I want to buy a Frappacino and sleep in late. But on days like this I realize that the war rages on, with or without me, and that it is up to me (as it is with all of us) to decide where I stand: in the trenches fighting or in the stands watching. I know now that no matter where you stand, these precarious islands of perceived safety are just that…precarious and perceived…in the end the war comes to you and you must prepare yourself to meet it.