Smoking While Black

I am posting, without comment, but with fingers trembling with rage, the diary that my friend, Weeping posted at My Left Wing.

I was just stopped by the cops while smoking a cigarette on my own stoop, as I do multiple times a day.
I know all the neighbors, who walks their dog, who parks across the street, who's attractive, who goes shopping: I see it all.

But this time, someone saw me.

Or thought they did.
As I was smoking a cigarette, talking on the phone, a police car pulled up across the street and stopped, dead in the middle of the street.

In the back of my mind, I thought somehow this would involve me, but immediately dismissed the thought as paranoia, looked around for some kind of trouble, and proceeded to watch the cop get out of the car and head right towards me.

"I have to go," I said abruptly to my friend, "The police are here."

"Do you live here?" The cop inquired.

I just stared right at him, incredulous (though not really, I know better) and indignant.

That's what it was, indignation.

"Yes." I said tersely, "What's happening?"

Someone called in that there was a "young black male" on my stoop who didn't live there, and did I have ID.

The next maybe seven minutes (the entire duration of the encounter) is more or less a blur.

Although black, the officer seemed not to understand my rage and indignation at being rendered a suspect on my own stoop. I did make an effort to direct the rage away from him, lest he feel threatened, but I couldn't just stand there calmly.

At one point a raged out, from a place of despair, about how this has been happening to me my whole life and I'm sick of it.

He responded that if I raised my voice like that we were going to have problems.

At one point I was in near convusions of rage and asked him why he was intimidating me.

He told me he wasn't trying to intimidate me and that he had better things to do than dick around with me (my paraphrase) and that he just wanted to settle the matter.

He asked me twice how long I'd been living at that address and I told him I didn't know (because I don't, off hand), like a year?

Since April?

Who can think about dates on a calendar in such circumstances?

Finally my upstairs neighbors happened to come home and asked what was going on.

I filled them in, unleashing a torrent of rage: "They got a call that a black man was on the stoop who didn't live here."

"I didn't say it was a black male," the cop said.

Or something like that.

I looked at him and screamed, "You just fucking said that two minutes ago!"

I realize I shouldn't have said that, but it was pure stimulus-response.

Plus, the neighbors being there emboldened me somewhat.

As did the fact that the cop actually remained on the sidewalk while I was four or five steps higher, on the stoop.

I think the fact that he kept his distance like that made me feel somewhat secure, as if he wasn't about to actually arrest me or otherwise lay hands upon me.

And the Americans are going to go door-to-door in Baghdad?

I've had such encounters with the police I don't know, five, six, seven times?

Every couple of years something like this happens.

When the cop gestured at an apology towards the end, just doing my job blahblahblah I shot back, "I know, I fit the description, believe me, I know, this is NOT the first time this has happened to me."

Oh, and did I mention the cop was black?

As were those who shot that guy in Queens, outside of the nightclub.

At some point something I said about race offended him and he was indignant, like I'd pushed a button.

I told him, in some kind of stammering way, that I wasn't blaming him, but that of course this is about race.

I kind of muttered it, I think, because I was conscious of trying not to provoke him, yet still needed to insist that there are indeed four lights, not three.

You know that torture method?--where they show you four lights and tell you there are only three and then ask the question again and inflict pain you until you break and tell them that yes, you're right, there are only three lights.

Well I wasn't ready to break.

Harrass me, fine, but don't insult me.

Don't ask me to pretend that I'm not being victimized.

The first time, fine.

The second time, fine.

The third time, fine.

But eventually a pattern emerges, you know? Even if each and every time I've been stopped is "procedurally legitimate," I feel no less victimized for it.

Especially if each and every time is "procedurally legitimate."

"Young black male."

I'm thirty-four.

I have a four-year old child and another on the way.

I'm young, but I'm not that young. Technically speaking, I'm middle aged.

I'm writing a dissertation about something that few people in the world could even begin to understand.

I could get ten Ph.D.s and win a Noblel Peace Prize and at the End of the Day, I'm a "Young black male."

See my point?

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