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.