I Am Going to Say Something Controversial
(part 1)
I want to try and share some of the emotion-laden thoughts that are swirling around in my head right now. Maybe writing it all out will help me to make sense of it all. I don't even know where to start. Okay, actually, let me start by putting a basic wrapper around the subject and letting you know, in a general sense, what I'm talking about: racism, and the divide that's growing in America. Maybe a week ago, one of my favorite Twitch streamers had a long stream where she read passages from a book that was written by a white sociologist, for a white audience, and talked very unapologetically about racial divides and biases and viewpoints that white people have. The Twitch streamer talked about how like the Irish author of the book, she (the Twitch streamer - Ava) was also someone who, while not actually white (she's half Korean), had grown up pretty much having the standard white-person experience - being treated like any other "white" kid, being surrounded by mostly white kids, and all that. And until this point, she had never really thought all that much about the issue of race and racial divides and racism. And I should also say that after watching her for years, it's really obvious that she's not a racist person. She had only read a few chapters of the book at that point, and was still trying to wrap her head around a lot of it.
On the occasions when I've tried to learn what it's like to live in other countries, I've always looked for the (very) rare books that were written by authors who were originally outsiders to the country in question, but then moved there and slowly learned about the country as an outsider-on-the-inside. In essence, they start the book from my own perspective - the perspective of a person who's never lived there and doesn't know a hell of a lot about the country - and then as the book continues, they slowly learn about the culture, and come to understand the country. The author of the book genunely takes the same journey that I'm trying to take, and then takes me along for the ride. I feel like that's the only way to truly, effectively learn about something like that - not from a book written from a scholarly perspective, or from a book written by an outsider, or even from a book written by someone who's never lived anywhere else - but rather by someone who's taking the same journey that I am.
So when Ava literally brought this kind of outsider-moving-in-and-trying-to-understand perspective to the issue, I was fascinated, and watched the stream. There are a lot of things that the book's author said that I don't agree with, especially some of the semantic that she used (like taking what I would call "racism" and calling it "discrimination," and taking what I would call "systemic racism" and calling it "racism," and then using that to decide that white people don't ever experience racism). The author also came at it from a sociologists perspective - which inevitably meant that she attributed pretty much everything to sociological factors (including things with a very, very strong psychological component or basis). I heard a line once that said something like "show a problem to a psychologist, and they'll decide that it's caused by psychological factors. Show that exact same problem to a sociologist, and they'll decide that it's caused by sociological factors. Show that same problem to something-something, and they'll decide that it comes from something-something factors." - I forget the other fields that the quote talked about, but the point is that a person will almost always skew the hell out of things based on their own field of expertise, to the point where pretty much anything complex, that has factors all over the map, will get skewed by any expert that tries to analyze it.
But despite disagreeing with parts of the book that Ava was learning from, the author also said a lot of things that resonated with me. Like how (after translating it into my own semantics) white people can't experience systemic racism, because the larger systems in this country are so predominantly white that those systems will never be brought to bear against white people, and so while saying that black people can't be racist toward white people is dumb imo, I do agree that systemic racism isn't something that white people ever have to deal with, and that that's a big deal. The author also talked about how over the years/decades, many races that were originally considered to be non-white have become pretty-much considered to be white - irish people for one, but even a lot of asian people are pretty much considered white, and treated as white, and have a very "white" experience of racism.
Anyway, the details of the book that Ava was working through aren't even really the point here. The point (or at least the first of many points) is that her reading the book on stream got me thinking about the issue in ways that I hadn't before.
Okay, here's where things get complicated, to the point where I don't even know where to start, because there are so many different facets of what I'm trying to say, and each of those facets feels like it has its own starting point...
Hell, let's just take out the big guns and start at the most difficult place - I'm racist toward black people. And not just the super minor racism of a pretty-much-non-racist person who maybe feels a little uncomfortable toward black people and/or racial issues - I mean that after growing up in one of the most liberal, least racist areas in America, to parents that (despite their many, many, MANY flaws) weren't racist, and after working with a butt-ton of black people a few jobs ago (when I worked at a retail store located in a rich area, but also somewhat close to an area where a lot of lower income black people lived) who I genunely liked/disliked at about the same ratio as I liked/disliked the other employees... even after all of that, in recent years I've found myself becoming really, truly, genuinely racist toward black people. It's not something that I expected to ever have grow in me. Not in a million years. And yet, here it is.
And so, in the midst of the racism that's crept into my heart (which I'll explain more later in this whatever-it-is that I'm writing), and in the midst of the racial divide (and political divide, and other divides) that's increasingly in the public conciousness lately... I have to decide what to do. How to move forward. I have to decide what I want to do with these feelings - with this anger and these conflicting philosophies. I have to decide what I believe is true, in my head, and decide what beliefs to try and direct my heart toward. Which of the paths forward - both in terms of the binary, and in terms of the multifaceted - do I want to take? Which do I believe to be true, and which do I believe to be false, and which do I believe to be somewhere-in-the-middle?
I suspect that this right here is the end of the part of this writing-thingie that's going to flow smoothly from one thing to the next. I suspect that from here on, I'll be jumping around a lot, and struggling to bring everything that I want to say together into a coherent picture. So, with that in mind:
In America, there's a difference between black people and every other race. I've known both the parents and the children of Mexican immigrants, as well as a handful of other races - known them well enough to see parents that in many cases barely learned English well enough to communicate with English speakers, and who have never really "melted" in the "melting pot" that America is seen as being. But with their kids, I could literally close my eyes and listen to them and white people talking, and if I didn't know the people involved, I wouldn't be able to tell the kids of immigrant families from the white kids. With most races, including ones with so many walls between them and the rest of America (including some people wanting to build a literal wall to keep them out), it nonetheless takes literally only one generation for the "melting" to happen. I haven't known any families from any Muslim countries well enough to test the same theory/observation with them, but my suspician based on what little experience I've had with younger Muslims is that while successive generations of Muslim children will continue to hold on to many of the cultural and religious norms of their parents, they'll also "melt" into American culture in more ways than not, to the point where later generations will be about as separate/different from steriotypical American kids as members of any devoutly religious community (including religions "accepted" to be "American", like Christianity).
Every race that I've observed has "melted into the melting pot" with successive generations, at least to a great extent. These observations haven't been exhaustive by any means, but I have enough data at this point to believe pretty strongly, with a lot of personally-experienced evidience, that it's the case with virtually every non-white family and non-white race in America... except for black people. No matter how many generations go by, black people continue to talk and act and live in many, many distinctly different ways than non-black people. Other cultures melt into the pot, but black culture remains separate. A strong, constantly-visible line continues to exist between black people and non-black people. And that's not a value judgement, or a moral one, or anything along those lines - it's an observation. One that I believe to be true, and that I intend to try and understand (and maybe judge - we'll see. I honestly don't know at this point the writing process), but that for now I make no judgement about.
But that line - that difference - is (in my experience) a unique phenomenon that lies right at the heart of the racial divide that only seems to be growing wider every year.
I think that this is a good point to move into another one of the divides/spectrums/whatever that I've been thinking about lately - the clash between... how do I want to frame this... okay, let me start with the specific, and then widen it from there. And more to the point, let me shoot another bullet, literally (not really, but kinda), right through the most difficult, divisive part of it: when an unarmed black person is shot by a cop, a large percentage of people will immediately assume that the cop is racist, and intentionally shot someone who they knew was unarmed because that person was black. And another large percentage of people will immediately assume that the cop isn't racist, and that the specific situation on the ground was one where the black person did something along the lines of ignoring orders to put their hands up, and reaching suddenly for what, from the cops perspective, might have been a gun, and they had a split second to decide whether or not to fire. Something like that. Most people will jump to one or the other of those conclusions long before they actually look into any of the actual facts involved in that particular case. And hell, a lot of people never actually look into the facts of the case. They just jump to their preconcieved conclusions and leave it at that.
But as usual, the truth is much more complicated than the simple-solutions and easy-answers that most people instinctively reach for. The truth is that sometimes, police are racist and shoot or otherwise hurt or kill unarmed black people in situations where they're not at all justified in doing so - situations where if the exact same events occured with a white person, and the white person did the exact same things, the cops wouldn't shoot them. But other times, cops are justified in shooting unarmed black people. Heh - I KNOW that that sentance will have gotten a strong response from a lot of people. I can understand that. All that I can ask is that you try to put aside your gut-reaction, and to really listen to what I'm saying before deciding what you think of it.
Imagine this situation - you're a cop in a bad neighborhood, at night... you know what, I just realized that I'm bending over backwards in my own mind right now, trying to craft an example that won't get responses along the lines of "but so-and-so thing in the example isn't how it actually is." But that's dumb - I shouldn't try to craft a perfect example for what I'm trying to say. Instead, let me add a bit more preamble first - some situations where white cops shoot unarmed black people happen during the day, and some happen during the night. some happen in good neighborhoods, and some happen in statistically undeniably high-crime areas. Some black people act hostily and belligerantly, some act respectfully or at least not openly-hostily, and some act somewhere in between. And hell, on the other side of it, some cops are racist, some aren't, and some are somewhere in the middle. Some practice good community-relations, some are hostile and oppositional, and some are somewhere in between. Now on both sides of that equation, with some of the things that I just mentioned, I think that things are much more often A than they are B, or are much more often B than they are A, or whatnot. I'm sure that you the reader have similar opinions about which is more often the case with a lot of the things that I mentioned. But those sorts of specific opinions aren't the point that I'm trying to make with this part of the thingie that I'm writing. The point that I'm trying to make is that the example that I'm about to give is NOT meant to be an exhaustive example of every situation where one or more white cops encounter one or more unarmed black people, nor is it meant to illustrate a typical situation like that. No, the purpose of the coming example is to illustrate... at the heart of it, it's to illustrate that the issue of white cops shooting unarmed black people is NOT black-and-white (which is an ironic wording to have here, but there it is), and that there are at least some situations where white cops shooting unarmed black people is justified. That's the argument that I intend to lay out, and it'll be up to you to decide if you agree with it or not - I only ask that you try to consider it before deciding what you think of it.
Okay, so the example is: a white cop and his white partner are in a bad neighborhood - one where, statistically, undeniably, a great deal of violence happens, and a small but noticable percentage of the population are armed. They confront a black man, or possibly a group of black men. Or maybe they're black teenagers - the details don't matter in terms of the picture that I'm trying to paint - the point is that the confrontation occurs. One of the black people...
You know what, there's one more subject that I realize i need to talk about before doing this example. I participated in a grief-ceremony a while back, led by a woman who spent the first decades of her life living in a villiage in Africa, and then spent the more recent decades living in America. And one of the things that she talked about that really stuck with me was that before she moved to America, she had never been depressed. And more than that - she had never known anyone who was depressed, to the point where when she first experienced depression in America, she had no idea what was happening - it was so far outside of her experience that she couldn't even imagine what it was, or give a name to it - not until people who had grown up in America told her what that name was. Because in her village, when a person felt something, they would express it. If they were happy, they would laugh, if they were sad, they would cry, if they were angry, then they'd get angry - maybe even get into a little scuffle with the person who they were angry at - and then, with the anger expressed, they would be able to let it go. And because of that unrestrained emotional authenticity, no one ever got depressed. They would get sad - sometimes for quite a while - but then they'd process that sadness, let it run through them... and then let it go.
And having spent several years living in a city with a large black population, I can say that like many other aspects of black culture, a toned-down version of that emotional authenticity is very much present in a lot of black people in America (or at least in the part of America where I've lived). To put it simply - black culture has a component to it that culturally pushes black people to express their emotions freely, rather than applying the sort of tighter control that some other cultures dictate (for better and for worse). In my personal experience, when a black person is angry at you, they'll more often than not express that anger freely, rather than questioning it or controlling it. That's not always true - not by a long shot - but it's true often enough that any cop who interacts with black people regularly will experience it regularly. And with the anti-cop culture and racial divides that have become so powerful in America lately, it follows that hostility and free-flowing anger is something that most cops who interact with black people regularly will experience often, from a lot of people. And I want to be clear - at this point I'm not saying that that anger is justified, or that it's not not justfied, or anything in between - I'm saying that it's there, and that it's something that cops who interact regularly with black people have to deal with.
I've also been attacked by gang members before. In my case there were three of them - one was white, one was hispanic, and one was black. Me and my friend were hanging out in a park near a hospital where I was getting a CAT scan, waiting through the 2-hour period between drinking the foul-tasting liquid that you had to drink before the scan. My friend suddenly yelped in pain and confusion, for seemingly no reason, because he'd felt a sharp pain on his skin. Then it happened again. He went over in the direction that it had come from. Then this little black kid - maybe 16 years old - pops out of a bush with a little airsoft/cap/whatever gun in his hand - apparantly he'd been shooting my friend for fun. By this point my friend had walked past the bush that the kid was hiding in, and had walked over toward the only two other people in the park - a white kid and a hispanic kid, also around 16 years old. The little black kid walks toward my friend from behind, says to the other 2 kids "he's coming for you", and they all attack my friend. They just go at him out of nowhere. I ended up slamming the plastic-cup thingie down on the ground as hard as I can (it had spilled at this point) - making a loud noise that rang out like a gunshot. It froze the fight, and the kids ended up running off. My friend had the good sense to pull out his phone and snap some pictures of them as they ran away, including getting the number on the back of the black kid's jersey. We called the cops and reported it. Later, at the hospital, about half a dozen kids started walking the halls, including the 3 that had attacked my friend. They eventually found us, and one of the kids who had attacked my friend begged us not to tell on them, because he didn't want to go to juvie.
We later learned that the school that the kids went to had a cop stationed on campus, and as soon as the cop heard about it and saw the pictures (including the number on the back of the kid's jersey), he knew exactly who it was - this was far from the first time that this particular group had done something like this. I don't know what did or didn't end up happening to the kids beyond that.
Continued here:
https://similarworlds.com/8226031-I-Am-Going-to-Say-Something-Controversial/3384136-What-that-experience-taught-me-is-that-there-are
I want to try and share some of the emotion-laden thoughts that are swirling around in my head right now. Maybe writing it all out will help me to make sense of it all. I don't even know where to start. Okay, actually, let me start by putting a basic wrapper around the subject and letting you know, in a general sense, what I'm talking about: racism, and the divide that's growing in America. Maybe a week ago, one of my favorite Twitch streamers had a long stream where she read passages from a book that was written by a white sociologist, for a white audience, and talked very unapologetically about racial divides and biases and viewpoints that white people have. The Twitch streamer talked about how like the Irish author of the book, she (the Twitch streamer - Ava) was also someone who, while not actually white (she's half Korean), had grown up pretty much having the standard white-person experience - being treated like any other "white" kid, being surrounded by mostly white kids, and all that. And until this point, she had never really thought all that much about the issue of race and racial divides and racism. And I should also say that after watching her for years, it's really obvious that she's not a racist person. She had only read a few chapters of the book at that point, and was still trying to wrap her head around a lot of it.
On the occasions when I've tried to learn what it's like to live in other countries, I've always looked for the (very) rare books that were written by authors who were originally outsiders to the country in question, but then moved there and slowly learned about the country as an outsider-on-the-inside. In essence, they start the book from my own perspective - the perspective of a person who's never lived there and doesn't know a hell of a lot about the country - and then as the book continues, they slowly learn about the culture, and come to understand the country. The author of the book genunely takes the same journey that I'm trying to take, and then takes me along for the ride. I feel like that's the only way to truly, effectively learn about something like that - not from a book written from a scholarly perspective, or from a book written by an outsider, or even from a book written by someone who's never lived anywhere else - but rather by someone who's taking the same journey that I am.
So when Ava literally brought this kind of outsider-moving-in-and-trying-to-understand perspective to the issue, I was fascinated, and watched the stream. There are a lot of things that the book's author said that I don't agree with, especially some of the semantic that she used (like taking what I would call "racism" and calling it "discrimination," and taking what I would call "systemic racism" and calling it "racism," and then using that to decide that white people don't ever experience racism). The author also came at it from a sociologists perspective - which inevitably meant that she attributed pretty much everything to sociological factors (including things with a very, very strong psychological component or basis). I heard a line once that said something like "show a problem to a psychologist, and they'll decide that it's caused by psychological factors. Show that exact same problem to a sociologist, and they'll decide that it's caused by sociological factors. Show that same problem to something-something, and they'll decide that it comes from something-something factors." - I forget the other fields that the quote talked about, but the point is that a person will almost always skew the hell out of things based on their own field of expertise, to the point where pretty much anything complex, that has factors all over the map, will get skewed by any expert that tries to analyze it.
But despite disagreeing with parts of the book that Ava was learning from, the author also said a lot of things that resonated with me. Like how (after translating it into my own semantics) white people can't experience systemic racism, because the larger systems in this country are so predominantly white that those systems will never be brought to bear against white people, and so while saying that black people can't be racist toward white people is dumb imo, I do agree that systemic racism isn't something that white people ever have to deal with, and that that's a big deal. The author also talked about how over the years/decades, many races that were originally considered to be non-white have become pretty-much considered to be white - irish people for one, but even a lot of asian people are pretty much considered white, and treated as white, and have a very "white" experience of racism.
Anyway, the details of the book that Ava was working through aren't even really the point here. The point (or at least the first of many points) is that her reading the book on stream got me thinking about the issue in ways that I hadn't before.
Okay, here's where things get complicated, to the point where I don't even know where to start, because there are so many different facets of what I'm trying to say, and each of those facets feels like it has its own starting point...
Hell, let's just take out the big guns and start at the most difficult place - I'm racist toward black people. And not just the super minor racism of a pretty-much-non-racist person who maybe feels a little uncomfortable toward black people and/or racial issues - I mean that after growing up in one of the most liberal, least racist areas in America, to parents that (despite their many, many, MANY flaws) weren't racist, and after working with a butt-ton of black people a few jobs ago (when I worked at a retail store located in a rich area, but also somewhat close to an area where a lot of lower income black people lived) who I genunely liked/disliked at about the same ratio as I liked/disliked the other employees... even after all of that, in recent years I've found myself becoming really, truly, genuinely racist toward black people. It's not something that I expected to ever have grow in me. Not in a million years. And yet, here it is.
And so, in the midst of the racism that's crept into my heart (which I'll explain more later in this whatever-it-is that I'm writing), and in the midst of the racial divide (and political divide, and other divides) that's increasingly in the public conciousness lately... I have to decide what to do. How to move forward. I have to decide what I want to do with these feelings - with this anger and these conflicting philosophies. I have to decide what I believe is true, in my head, and decide what beliefs to try and direct my heart toward. Which of the paths forward - both in terms of the binary, and in terms of the multifaceted - do I want to take? Which do I believe to be true, and which do I believe to be false, and which do I believe to be somewhere-in-the-middle?
I suspect that this right here is the end of the part of this writing-thingie that's going to flow smoothly from one thing to the next. I suspect that from here on, I'll be jumping around a lot, and struggling to bring everything that I want to say together into a coherent picture. So, with that in mind:
In America, there's a difference between black people and every other race. I've known both the parents and the children of Mexican immigrants, as well as a handful of other races - known them well enough to see parents that in many cases barely learned English well enough to communicate with English speakers, and who have never really "melted" in the "melting pot" that America is seen as being. But with their kids, I could literally close my eyes and listen to them and white people talking, and if I didn't know the people involved, I wouldn't be able to tell the kids of immigrant families from the white kids. With most races, including ones with so many walls between them and the rest of America (including some people wanting to build a literal wall to keep them out), it nonetheless takes literally only one generation for the "melting" to happen. I haven't known any families from any Muslim countries well enough to test the same theory/observation with them, but my suspician based on what little experience I've had with younger Muslims is that while successive generations of Muslim children will continue to hold on to many of the cultural and religious norms of their parents, they'll also "melt" into American culture in more ways than not, to the point where later generations will be about as separate/different from steriotypical American kids as members of any devoutly religious community (including religions "accepted" to be "American", like Christianity).
Every race that I've observed has "melted into the melting pot" with successive generations, at least to a great extent. These observations haven't been exhaustive by any means, but I have enough data at this point to believe pretty strongly, with a lot of personally-experienced evidience, that it's the case with virtually every non-white family and non-white race in America... except for black people. No matter how many generations go by, black people continue to talk and act and live in many, many distinctly different ways than non-black people. Other cultures melt into the pot, but black culture remains separate. A strong, constantly-visible line continues to exist between black people and non-black people. And that's not a value judgement, or a moral one, or anything along those lines - it's an observation. One that I believe to be true, and that I intend to try and understand (and maybe judge - we'll see. I honestly don't know at this point the writing process), but that for now I make no judgement about.
But that line - that difference - is (in my experience) a unique phenomenon that lies right at the heart of the racial divide that only seems to be growing wider every year.
I think that this is a good point to move into another one of the divides/spectrums/whatever that I've been thinking about lately - the clash between... how do I want to frame this... okay, let me start with the specific, and then widen it from there. And more to the point, let me shoot another bullet, literally (not really, but kinda), right through the most difficult, divisive part of it: when an unarmed black person is shot by a cop, a large percentage of people will immediately assume that the cop is racist, and intentionally shot someone who they knew was unarmed because that person was black. And another large percentage of people will immediately assume that the cop isn't racist, and that the specific situation on the ground was one where the black person did something along the lines of ignoring orders to put their hands up, and reaching suddenly for what, from the cops perspective, might have been a gun, and they had a split second to decide whether or not to fire. Something like that. Most people will jump to one or the other of those conclusions long before they actually look into any of the actual facts involved in that particular case. And hell, a lot of people never actually look into the facts of the case. They just jump to their preconcieved conclusions and leave it at that.
But as usual, the truth is much more complicated than the simple-solutions and easy-answers that most people instinctively reach for. The truth is that sometimes, police are racist and shoot or otherwise hurt or kill unarmed black people in situations where they're not at all justified in doing so - situations where if the exact same events occured with a white person, and the white person did the exact same things, the cops wouldn't shoot them. But other times, cops are justified in shooting unarmed black people. Heh - I KNOW that that sentance will have gotten a strong response from a lot of people. I can understand that. All that I can ask is that you try to put aside your gut-reaction, and to really listen to what I'm saying before deciding what you think of it.
Imagine this situation - you're a cop in a bad neighborhood, at night... you know what, I just realized that I'm bending over backwards in my own mind right now, trying to craft an example that won't get responses along the lines of "but so-and-so thing in the example isn't how it actually is." But that's dumb - I shouldn't try to craft a perfect example for what I'm trying to say. Instead, let me add a bit more preamble first - some situations where white cops shoot unarmed black people happen during the day, and some happen during the night. some happen in good neighborhoods, and some happen in statistically undeniably high-crime areas. Some black people act hostily and belligerantly, some act respectfully or at least not openly-hostily, and some act somewhere in between. And hell, on the other side of it, some cops are racist, some aren't, and some are somewhere in the middle. Some practice good community-relations, some are hostile and oppositional, and some are somewhere in between. Now on both sides of that equation, with some of the things that I just mentioned, I think that things are much more often A than they are B, or are much more often B than they are A, or whatnot. I'm sure that you the reader have similar opinions about which is more often the case with a lot of the things that I mentioned. But those sorts of specific opinions aren't the point that I'm trying to make with this part of the thingie that I'm writing. The point that I'm trying to make is that the example that I'm about to give is NOT meant to be an exhaustive example of every situation where one or more white cops encounter one or more unarmed black people, nor is it meant to illustrate a typical situation like that. No, the purpose of the coming example is to illustrate... at the heart of it, it's to illustrate that the issue of white cops shooting unarmed black people is NOT black-and-white (which is an ironic wording to have here, but there it is), and that there are at least some situations where white cops shooting unarmed black people is justified. That's the argument that I intend to lay out, and it'll be up to you to decide if you agree with it or not - I only ask that you try to consider it before deciding what you think of it.
Okay, so the example is: a white cop and his white partner are in a bad neighborhood - one where, statistically, undeniably, a great deal of violence happens, and a small but noticable percentage of the population are armed. They confront a black man, or possibly a group of black men. Or maybe they're black teenagers - the details don't matter in terms of the picture that I'm trying to paint - the point is that the confrontation occurs. One of the black people...
You know what, there's one more subject that I realize i need to talk about before doing this example. I participated in a grief-ceremony a while back, led by a woman who spent the first decades of her life living in a villiage in Africa, and then spent the more recent decades living in America. And one of the things that she talked about that really stuck with me was that before she moved to America, she had never been depressed. And more than that - she had never known anyone who was depressed, to the point where when she first experienced depression in America, she had no idea what was happening - it was so far outside of her experience that she couldn't even imagine what it was, or give a name to it - not until people who had grown up in America told her what that name was. Because in her village, when a person felt something, they would express it. If they were happy, they would laugh, if they were sad, they would cry, if they were angry, then they'd get angry - maybe even get into a little scuffle with the person who they were angry at - and then, with the anger expressed, they would be able to let it go. And because of that unrestrained emotional authenticity, no one ever got depressed. They would get sad - sometimes for quite a while - but then they'd process that sadness, let it run through them... and then let it go.
And having spent several years living in a city with a large black population, I can say that like many other aspects of black culture, a toned-down version of that emotional authenticity is very much present in a lot of black people in America (or at least in the part of America where I've lived). To put it simply - black culture has a component to it that culturally pushes black people to express their emotions freely, rather than applying the sort of tighter control that some other cultures dictate (for better and for worse). In my personal experience, when a black person is angry at you, they'll more often than not express that anger freely, rather than questioning it or controlling it. That's not always true - not by a long shot - but it's true often enough that any cop who interacts with black people regularly will experience it regularly. And with the anti-cop culture and racial divides that have become so powerful in America lately, it follows that hostility and free-flowing anger is something that most cops who interact with black people regularly will experience often, from a lot of people. And I want to be clear - at this point I'm not saying that that anger is justified, or that it's not not justfied, or anything in between - I'm saying that it's there, and that it's something that cops who interact regularly with black people have to deal with.
I've also been attacked by gang members before. In my case there were three of them - one was white, one was hispanic, and one was black. Me and my friend were hanging out in a park near a hospital where I was getting a CAT scan, waiting through the 2-hour period between drinking the foul-tasting liquid that you had to drink before the scan. My friend suddenly yelped in pain and confusion, for seemingly no reason, because he'd felt a sharp pain on his skin. Then it happened again. He went over in the direction that it had come from. Then this little black kid - maybe 16 years old - pops out of a bush with a little airsoft/cap/whatever gun in his hand - apparantly he'd been shooting my friend for fun. By this point my friend had walked past the bush that the kid was hiding in, and had walked over toward the only two other people in the park - a white kid and a hispanic kid, also around 16 years old. The little black kid walks toward my friend from behind, says to the other 2 kids "he's coming for you", and they all attack my friend. They just go at him out of nowhere. I ended up slamming the plastic-cup thingie down on the ground as hard as I can (it had spilled at this point) - making a loud noise that rang out like a gunshot. It froze the fight, and the kids ended up running off. My friend had the good sense to pull out his phone and snap some pictures of them as they ran away, including getting the number on the back of the black kid's jersey. We called the cops and reported it. Later, at the hospital, about half a dozen kids started walking the halls, including the 3 that had attacked my friend. They eventually found us, and one of the kids who had attacked my friend begged us not to tell on them, because he didn't want to go to juvie.
We later learned that the school that the kids went to had a cop stationed on campus, and as soon as the cop heard about it and saw the pictures (including the number on the back of the kid's jersey), he knew exactly who it was - this was far from the first time that this particular group had done something like this. I don't know what did or didn't end up happening to the kids beyond that.
Continued here:
https://similarworlds.com/8226031-I-Am-Going-to-Say-Something-Controversial/3384136-What-that-experience-taught-me-is-that-there-are
