I have a 17-year-old black friend, let’s call him K., who, with his family, used to live in the East Mountains and then Albuquerque. Now he is a freshman at Chandler/Gilbert Community College, where he won a scholarship. On Sunday night, Aug. 24, a little after midnight, he was riding a scooter back from a friend’s home to his apartment. He was neatly dressed and carrying a daypack.
“I was riding on the sidewalk because there was no bicycle lane,” he told me later. “I wasn’t doing anything wrong.” A Gilbert policeman drove past him, apparently noticed he was black, then did a U-turn and came back. The policeman, who was white, stopped K.
He started interrogating K. “How much have you had to drink?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you have any drugs?”
“No.”
“Is there something in the pack I should be worried about? “
“No.”
“May I” search the pack?”
“Yes.”
Why are you out so late? Where are you coming from? Where are you going? What is your date of birth?
“He kept firing at me for like 20 minutes,” K. told me.
At one point the cop called for backup and a white colleague drove up to join the interrogation. K. said he remained polite and controlled. “At first they were pretty rude but then they calmed down,” K said. Eventually they allowed him to go on his way without any charges.
“Did this incident have much impact on you?” I asked K.
“Not much,” he replied.
“Why?”
“Because I wasn’t surprised by what happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’d always expected to have an issue with white guys at some point.”
“Do you think you were stopped because you are black?”
K. is a person who almost always pauses before answering a question but he didn’t this time: “Definitely.”
The city of Gilbert, Ariz., where K. lives and was stopped, is a mostly prosperous, mostly peaceful suburb south of Phoenix. Its houses cost more than the state average, its residents have higher incomes than the state or national average, and the city has remarkably little crime. There has been a grand total of one murder since 2005.
Until recently a rural farming village, it is now a conventional suburb where three-quarters of the employed residents commute to jobs elsewhere. Few of the residents have deep roots in the area. The town’s population was only about 5,000 in 1980. For more than a decade it was the fastest growing city in the nation, and currently it is the fourth fastest, despite the deep depression that has stymied growth elsewhere in the Phoenix area. Only 3 percent of Gilbert’s more than 200,000 residents are black.
Gilbert is about as different as is possible from Ferguson, Mo., an impoverished crime-ridden suburb of St. Louis that is 67 percent black. But if the fates had given the screw of life another turn, my friend could have ended up like Michael Brown, who bled to death on a street in Ferguson with six police bullet holes in him. Like K., Brown was a big, unarmed, black teenager preparing to start his first year in college.
Like Brown and K., 17-year-old Treyvon Martin was walking down a street in Sanford, Fla., when he was assaulted and shot to death, this time by a neighborhood watch volunteer, who was subsequently tried and acquitted. Sanford, a working class city of 53,000, is 30 per cent black but few blacks live in the subdivision where Martin died.
President Obama said of Martin that if he had had a son, he would have looked like Martin. My own son is not black, but unlike K. he has a temper that is sometimes explosive. If my son were black, he could easily suffer the fate of Brown, Martin and K.
I talked to K’s mother, who still lives in Albuquerque. Clearly upset, she said, “My son is a nice, calm, respectful young man, but what if he had been belligerent? What would’ve happened?”
Her son is an athlete, weighing 200 pounds and 6’3” tall, but he is a peaceable, introspective, self-contained and quietly controlled youth who was a serious high school student and has no history of being involved in violence or fighting. A clean-cut kid. “He’s a good kid,” his mother said again and again. “He was stopped just because he’s black. I’m angry over the way they treated him.”
It is sometimes said that Americans are an insular people used to homogeneity and alarmed by people who are different, like a black kid walking through a white neighborhood. But although that may have been true once, it has not been so for a long time. In a few decades, a majority of Americans will be people of color, and they already are in the majority in several states, including New Mexico.
The babble of languages, the cacophony of world music, the montage of costumes and the aromas of exotic foods mix in all our cities and most of our towns and villages. If we ever were, we are certainly no longer homogenous or isolated. That cannot be used as an excuse.
What we are suffering from is the same ailment that afflicts many people everywhere, particularly when they do not have able local leaders, and that is xenophobia, a fear of people who look, act, dress or talk differently, and blacks are the most different-looking people in our midst.
Once in the 1970s I was working at an extremely well paid job in a town on the Florida Gold Coast, that wealthy section of southeast Florida along the Atlantic Ocean north of Miami that earned its name not by the color of its sands but the cost of its houses and the size of local bank accounts. Out walking one night along the main road, I was stopped by a cop who aggressively, suspiciously demanded to know where I was coming from, where I was going and, above all, why I was walking. “No one around here walks,” he informed me, as if that proved I was either an escaped prisoner or a recent rapist.
I was stopped because I was different—bearded and sloppily dressed—was doing something different—walking—and, the icing on the cake, speaking like a damned yankee. If I had been black, I would probably have found myself behind bars, if not worse.
Being with people who are different from us, however, is now part of American life. To be an American means to accept difference. There is no longer anywhere to hide.
Back in Albuquerque, K’s mother said she is writing a formal complaint about the police actions. “The police department needs to be aware…I’m upset about the way they just assumed he was drinking or on drugs.” Maybe she hoped, her protest will lead to one more small step forward for American race relations.
The point of this column is not that these Arizona, Missouri and Florida towns are alike. The point rather is that they are no more alike than an ant and an elephant, and that all of them are entirely different from the Albuquerque foothills where a cop killed a homeless man because he didn’t know what else to do with him or the Albuquerque West Side where boys said they beat 50 homeless people, killing at least two of them, because they were homeless. The kind of violence and intimidation that strikes out at others because they are different exists almost everywhere and civilization is its sworn enemy. It could happen anywhere, to anybody, even to you, dear reader.
(Photo by rdjar)
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