We Speak for Ourselves: A Word From Forgotten Black America

    D. Watkins doesn’t seem to like the well-known Black American pundits, nor the elite Black professionals who he meets at an Oprah Winfrey event. He finds that the Black professors, who go on TV and talk about Black issues, have no real interest in talking to an unemployed Black man. Throughout the book, he compares the Black pundit to a drone; viewing the people from too great a distance, and not seeing what’s really going on.

One of the more disturbing parts of this book is the collective reaction to the Charlottesville tragedy, where a woman was run over by a White supremacist. Watkins mocks the TV pundits for crying about the racist tiki-torch boys but not shedding a tear for Heather Heyer, who got killed. Then he realizes the problem, which is that they are somehow surprised by open White racism, and that surprises him. He wonders why they’d cry over open racism, but not cry about the deaths of Michael Brown, Freddy Grey, or any of the other unarmed Black men (or women, or kids) killed by White police. Then he wonders if any of these elitist Black Americans know anyone Black outside of their social circle. He finds it comical that with all the horrible things happening in the USA, these people are crying over a sparsely attended rally in a town that nobody had heard of until the tragedy.

Watkins’ chapter on police brutality is titled An American Tradition and uses the difference between rich and poor neighborhoods as a test of American policing. In the more affluent community, the police will make fewer stops, while in a poor one, everyone is a suspect. This point I agree with, because I once lived in a dominantly White area and there were few police stops. Based on what I saw growing up, the worst thing a cop ever had to worry about was a group of teenage skaters. The next problem discussed in this chapter is the “police as heroes” myth, and how it plays into protecting bad cops. However, the author didn’t really do his research on this topic, because there are many reasons why it’s difficult to fire bad cops, and almost impossible to get a conviction. Few police officers have been convicted of committing a murder while on duty (except for Joseph Kent McGowan in Texas), and reasons include unions, arbitration, high-priced defense lawyers, incompetent prosecutors, and the common law doctrine of sovereign immunity.

Once again, on the subject of bad cops (a subject that has dominated political discourse for the last five years) the author writes that while the Freddy Grey cops got off the hook, the system worked for the eight cops convicted of other crimes. At this point in the book, we need to step back. The Baltimore cops whom Watkins refers to are not an example of how “the system works.” The reason that these cops were convicted of drug-dealing, gun-dealing, payroll fraud, and money laundering, is that the prosecution was easier. When a cop makes a false statement, steals from the evidence locker, or gets caught with illegal drugs, the evidence is impossible to dispute. He can’t say “I stole guns and sold them on the street because I had probable cause!” He can’t say “I broke into the store and stole 300 pairs of sunglasses because I was afraid for my life!” Try as he might, no cop could get off the charges by saying “I drove drunk because the guy had a gun.” Furthermore, a cop has no protection for a crime committed while off-duty, which is why Antoinette Frank (from New Orleans) was convicted. The problem is that if a cop shoots someone while on duty, he can claim that his own safety was compromised. All he has to do is say “I thought the thing in his hand was a gun,” and that’s that. For on-duty killings, the burden is entirely on the prosecutor.

Another problem that I have with this book is that the author keeps waxing nostalgic about living in the Baltimore housing projects. There’s no law that says people must live there. And it was never quality housing to begin with. Now that segregation is over, why does he not want his people to get out of the projects? What could he find good about living in disgusting run-down buildings that were designed to segregate? The public housing is the worst form of charity and has led to a further dependence on charity. He writes about classmates whose lives were ruined by teenage pregnancy and absent fathers, but nobody seems to encourage birth control. Watkins is right about police brutality, and he’s right in that the rudeness he encounters is often race-based, but the cards stacked against him involve a lot more than racism. Things like poverty, drug use, poor nutrition, and family violence, can do a lot more damage than a racist cop.

To Sir With Love, by E.R. Brathwaite

Few in history have disobeyed the racist warning of To Kill a Mockingbird, or more Black writers would follow Brathwaite’s path of criticizing low-class Whites. Before I mention anything about the White working class to a Hillbilly Elegy debate, let me remind that Brathwaite is an Englishman and his memoir takes place in London. Ignoring the silly 1967 film version, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, which takes place in 1948, when London was struggling after WWII and there was no G.I. Bill. This book is a contrast to most stories of adventure, because it’s usually the upper-class Englishman exploring Africa, not a Black Guyana-born former RAF officer surviving in London. Furthermore, this man behaves like a judgmental English explorer when he ventures among the White youth of darkest London; they are dirty, unwashed, uncouth, uncultured, and with little appreciation for their country’s gifts to history.

    To Sir With Love is a book that is unfortunately ignored today, a loss to all of us. However, most books on the proletarian experience of post-WWII Britain are ignored as well (Been in the Snooker Club, A Kid for Two Farthings, An East End Story) as opposed to more “classical” works by writers like Mary Wesley. Even if you’re not especially interested in the race or education aspects of the book, you still get an eye into what Britain was like after the war ended. The author comes out of his service in the Royal Air Force (where he experienced no hostility) and finds that everyone – employers and the public alike – regards him as a nuisance. There are dirty looks on the train and bus, signs advertising rooms for rent are suddenly a mistake, and the fact that he risked his life for Britain means nothing. Though he doesn’t mention it in the book, the Polish RAF pilots got the same treatment. The British were happy to have them while there was a war going on, but once the war ended, they were asked if they wouldn’t mind leaving the country. Bloody decent of the Brits!

    In terms of plot, the memoir is relatively simple; born and educated in Guyana, graduate work at CUNY, RAF crewman in WWII, demobbed in 1945, and unemployed (like most war veterans regardless of color) in post-war UK. Unable to find work as an engineer, he takes a job teaching 14-year-olds in a crappy school on Cable Street, and here his adventures begin. This educated West Indian, espousing upper-class airs, looks down on their foul mouths and foul hygiene. The famous scene in the movie with the burning bra? Yes, it happens in the book. The scene where he boxes with the class moron? Yes, that happens too, but at the very beginning. These two events serve as a kind of icebreaker.

The story of the new teacher who flies in to rescue the bad kids can be a genre unto itself. We have The Water is Wide by Pat Conroy, and Blackboard Jungle by Evan Hunter, though in the latter, the hero teacher fails. Then there’s Coach Carter, Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers, Death at an Early Age, they’re all cultural icons. Unfortunately, the main character is always the nice White guy or the nice White lady rescuing minority kids, never a Black man rescuing White kids. At the same time, how often do you see (in USA, Canada, Britain, or anywhere else) a Black man or woman teaching White kids? It’s rare. Coach Carter and Lean on Me had one or two White kids, but they’re portrayed as misunderstood and suspicious. Both movies are also part of the “Black disciplinarian” genre to which An Officer and a Gentleman belongs. To Sir With Love is set apart from that genre because Braithwaite isn’t tough, but snobby, with a clear disdain for Cockney ways. It’s a reverse of Heart of Darkness, with the horrors of Africa  replaced with gloomy East End London.

    The kids who the author tries to cultivate are misunderstood in every sense of the word. In the 1967 film, they were nasty and stupid for no reason, but the book explains that in 1948 they were all angry. They’d lost their fathers during the war, and their neighborhood had few male role models. The next problem was that they weren’t expected to graduate high school in those days, so why would they make any effort? Kids in the UK usually left school at 14 to work, unlike in the USA, and there was no GI Bill or cult of upward mobility. When you grew up poor in London, there was no expectation to move up the social ladder, and even Booker T. Washington made note of this in his book Up From Slavery. When Washington visited the UK in 1900, he noted how the American wants to be his own master, but the Englishman wants to do the best he can in the position he has.

While Booker T. Washington refused to give his opinion on the English work ethic, Brathwaite makes his disdain very clear. He would clearly like to see the kids do better in life, so I can forgive him for being such a snob. I would also point out a British film from the 1960’s, called Spare The Rod, which is also about a bleak London school. The kids are rude and dirty with no prospects, and the teachers are too upper-class to relate to the kids. The difference between the two stories is that in Spare The Rod the teachers whip the kids. I had to wonder why the kids in Spare The Rod didn’t just hit the teacher back? They’re not going to stay after 14 anyway, so what do they have to lose? What is the school going to do, expel them a month before they age out?

   Omitted from the film is the eyebrow-raising romance between him and a sexy blonde White teacher at the school. They get nasty remarks from two old biddies on a train during the field trip, and they get attitude from a waiter in a restaurant. When he meets her parents, they’re not averse to him, but apprehensive. It seems that a lot of the xenophobia in the story has to do more with apprehension than outright fear or jealousy. An employer tells him “I’m sorry, but we have Englishmen who’ve been working here for years and we wouldn’t be able to make you their boss.” There’s a funny scene where he gets a hostile response while checking a room for rent, but just as she’s about to slam the door at him, a girl peeks out and goes “oh no, Mum, that’s Sir!” For some reason, I found the woman’s rudeness comical.

    Brathwaite’s version of the events is disputed in the book An East End Story by Alf Gardner. The former student states that Brathwaite was mean, abusive, gladly used the rod, and the girls were uncomfortable around him. He also states that while the headmaster had officially banned caning, Brathwaite used it anyway. However, I wonder if Brathwaite was just too much of a Victorian moralist for Gardner’s tolerance? None of the other pupils have come forward (if any of them are still alive) and the school’s radical headmaster Alex Bloom died in the 1950’s. Was Mr. Bloom a Jew? There are several Jewish characters in the book, though their goals and aspirations are different from those you’ll know in the USA (there are few Jewish doctors in the UK.) From my experience, the Jewish Briton doesn’t make a spectacle of himself, probably thanks to centuries of Anti-Semitism. You won’t see lots of noticeably Jewish comedians in the UK either. No Adam Sandlers or Rodney Dangerfields there.

    I’m not sympathetic to all the kids in the book, by the way. When the biracial student named Seale loses his mother, they all buy a wreath, but won’t take it to his house. They don’t want to be seen going to a colored person’s house, because “people will start to talk.” They all go to the funeral, pressed and clean, but won’t visit the house, and this is the part where I got upset. The class asshole, a boy named Denham, likes to be the tough guy, but he’s too afraid of housewife gossip to show solidarity. I wonder sometimes if the ultimate test of toughness is standing up to your own friends and family? When A. Philip Randolph supported Albert Shanker and the Teacher’s Union, he lost a lot of support from his own people. Fidel Castro, another famous leftist, supported everything the Soviets did, and was seen as a desperate puppet. Unlike Castro, Romania’s communist dictator denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and won worldwide respect.

    Perhaps Brathwaite, a teacher in 1949 Britain, had the same problem as US teachers 70 years later? When your dealing with lower-class kids from troubled backgrounds, it’s like trying to de-brainwash a cult member. These kids have been taught that it’s cute to be stupid, and that insults have to be avenged, and that you get respect by being bad. Think of all the White (or educated Black) teachers who keep saying “no, it’s not okay to shoot someone” and the kid is never convinced. It took Brathwaite a while to convince the girls that skankiness is not a turn-on.

    I found the book much better than the movie, in part because Sidney Poitier’s acting style is annoying. The fact that Brathwaite is not an American is a big help, because the social class dynamic plays a big part. During my time in the UK, I found that class differences were a taboo subject that were only mentioned in the occasional comedy. It’s a sore point in the UK, whether Cockney accents are acceptable or not, and whether proper speech means polished vowels. If you go into the courts, you’ll hear the judges and barristers all speaking with refined posh accents, no low-class drawls in the court. Go into a US court, and you’ll hear judges with Staten Island accents. You’ll hear low-class accents among police chiefs, judges, army officers, doctors, and politicians. They’ll wear it like a badge of honor.

The Black and the Blue: A Cop Reveals the Crimes, Racism, and Injustice in America's Law Enforcement

    Ferguson, Missouri, once a sleepy backwater town of African American refugees from the St. Louis slums, has been much in the news in the last decade. Unknown to American before the Michael Brown shooting, it had a budget based entirely on robbery. Starved of any tax revenue, the town’s municipal authorities had the following arrangement; the police would stop cars under any pretense they could, write as many tickets as possible, and the judges, in prior agreement with the prosecutors and police, levied outrageous fines. Traffic tickets that would normally be dismissed by a judge were not only ruled bona fide, but got you a $300 fine for not using your turn signal. If you didn’t have the money, too bad, it was pay the fine or go to jail. If you told the police officer he was mistaken, he’d arrest you for it and write a bunch of lies in the report. The judge would be notified about the arrest before the case got to court, and he’d be sure to disregard your story. When Michael Brown was killed by a cop in Ferguson, and his body left in the street for too long, it the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Yet it was happening all over the USA.

    The Black and the Blue explores the bad relationship between American police and the Black citizens. The author, a Black American police officer, does not let the Black cops off the hook, because he includes a chapter on the corrupt New Orleans police. The NOPD, as his example of the worst, required that officers come from the inner city (which created a very small talent pool) and paid too little (so cops took inappropriate side jobs.) Because it was impossible to find anyone who wanted to be a police officer, the NOPD had to hire Antoinette Frank (currently the only cop on death row for murder). Officer Frank was Black, just like Officer Len Davis (doing life for murder), but they abused the Black citizens of New Orleans, especially the ones living in the worst part of town.

    The author has very little sympathy for police officers who can’t control themselves. Yet he recounts an incident, from his first year in the blue line, when he was faced with a “should I use force” problem. He was responding to a domestic disturbance, and one of the residents was rather large, too large for him to physically subdue. So what would he do, use the taser? Drag the man out the door? It’s the kind of dilemma that I’m sure a lot of police officers get into, and one that gets a lot of cops in trouble. However, he spent most of his career in law enforcement at the Federal level. He wasn’t patrolling the streets in a bad neighborhood all day and night. He wasn’t dealing with rowdy teens in the playground. He didn’t have to deal with (what psychologists call) relational aggression or the stress it induces. A lot of his time probably involved detective work, so he would rarely be in a position to have to chase a fleeing suspect.

    My problem with this book is that the author doesn’t offer a lot of workable solutions. He discusses the problems, like poor training, but doesn’t really discuss what’s wrong with the training. He criticizes police for having generally poor interpersonal skills, but doesn’t try to uncover the reason. Is it because the police have terrible interpersonal skills from the start? Does police training turn you into a bully? He recounts a White police officer pulling him over, and the officer’s reason was “I’d never seen your car before.” Race may have been an issue, but I also have to wonder if a lot of it was paranoia. Do police officers become afraid of things that others would ignore? The author isn’t clear as to whether it’s bad training, fear of Black men, or just being a jerk. He also doesn’t go into the qualification aspect, or whether having a college degree really makes any difference. He’s a Delaware State University graduate, so he himself is educated, but I bet that most NYPD officers who have complaints against them are college graduates too.

    I also wonder if the idea of respect for law enforcement is a little skewed in the USA, at least compared to other countries. I’ve seen countless Youtube videos of British police being called names, ordered away from peoples’ doors, and generally told to “f-off.” Now look at how it is in terms of American events; if a police officer knocks on the door with no warrant, and you open the door, the US police officer can push his way in, but the British cop can’t. In the USA, if you tell the warrantless cop to get lost, you’re asking for trouble. But in the UK, you can be as rude as you want and you’ll get away with it. I suspect that the cops in the UK are under pressure not to pack the court’s docket, especially not with silly cases that can’t be proven. The Bronx courts, with a notorious backlog, probably have hundreds of cases where the only real crime was saying “don’t put your hands on me.”

    Years ago, I took the test to get into the Chicago PD, and I remember the words of the training officer word for word. He said “When you’re a police officer, you’ll have the power to take a man’s freedom away, and sometimes, you’ll be in a position to take his life away.” Then he paused, and asked “Would you want that power in the hands of a guy who’s an asshole?” We all said NO in unison. Now here’s the problem; the training officer was an ex-marine, and most of the prospective cadets had never served in the military. Were they deficient in self-control, self-discipline, and the rules of engagement? Secondly, this man had spent his entire career in the training department. He was rarely in a position to deal with nasty people out in the street. Did it give him the luxury of being able to always mind his manners?

    It remains to be seen if policing in the USA will change, but I won’t get my hopes up. Here in NYC, the police are getting fatter, response time is taking too long, and I consider them the epitome of cowardice. They won’t stop taxis that run red lights, but they knock cyclists off bicycles for riding in the wrong lane. They tolerate open-air drug dealing, but stop and frisk men in building superintendent uniforms. The NYPD pay is low, but I’m starting to think that maybe it’s all they deserve. I also wonder if they don’t understand how the other half lives? When Detective Patrick Cherry went on a tirade against a cab driver, and it was caught on camera, he was punished with desk duty. But did he have any idea what it’s like to be verbally attacked by someone who you’re not allowed to stand up to? My solution is this; take away his badge/gun, suspend him from the NYPD for one month, and force him to live in a housing project in the Bronx. Make him live among the underclass, in a crime-infested community. Let him see what these people go through. We’ll soon see if he’s really that tough.