by Amber Ruffin
One Wednesday night, a white churchgoer couldn’t find her car keys. So Pastor Frank did what any hero would do. He called all of the Black youth group into a room and questioned them, pleading for them to give back the keys. Now, there are 300 people at this church and they don’t know who has the keys. No one saw anything. That white woman had not come in contact with the Black kids, yet they were sure one of the eight of them had the keys. When the pleading didn’t work, they tried a new tactic. Pastor Frank said, “We are gonna turn the lights off and if you have the keys, you can just put them on the table.” Pastor Frank and this woman turn the lights out and count to ten. When they turn the lights on again, they look at the table. It is empty and they are disappointed. So they try again. Again there are no car keys on the table. They beg the kids to “do what’s right” and reassure them they won’t get in trouble. They try again. Nothing. They did this for a good fifteen minutes. The white woman whose car it was was crying. Utterly distraught. “Please, you guys. We know it’s one of you who has ’em.” This ended with someone coming into the room and saying, “Your keys are locked in your car.” It should be said that none of these Black children were even old enough to drive.
Lacey had been a regular at church for quite some time when she was pulled out of the sanctuary and told by Pastor Frank, “Someone said they saw you with a gun.” Lacey was confused. “A gun? Where? Why would I have a gun? We’re at church! What am I gonna do, shoot Satan?” They made her turn around and asked, “What’s in your pocket?” These people who have known Lacey for quite some time and know she’s a delight all of a sudden thought she turned to a gun-toting life of crime. What would make them think that? “Why do you think that?” They explained that a white woman who had never come to this church before in her life, whom they had never talked to save for this incident, accused Lacey of having a gun so of course they’d have to search her. She turned around and lifted her sweater and showed everyone her comb handle.
Now, if you’re asking, “What did they say after these events?” the answer is: not enough. I mean, is there really anything they can say to have any effect on these nutty events? There is not. There is very not.
The Rest of These Heaux
The church would have different Bible studies at people’s houses. This happened all the time, and you got to know everyone. It was fun. This week, Bible study was at Lacey’s friend Poppy’s house. So everyone is in the living room having Bible study. Lacey walks in and sees a butt-ton of her friends. The living room is filled with white teenagers and Lacey’s Bible group of Black teenagers. Poppy’s mom sees Lacey’s group and says to her daughter, “Poppy, can I see you in the next room, please?” Everyone continues socializing. When Poppy gets back from talking to her mom, she looks distraught. She says to Lacey and her group, “Can I see you guys in the next room, please?” When they meet Poppy in the kitchen, they see Poppy standing there looking ashamed, staring at her feet. She is avoiding eye contact and something is wrong. “My mom says you don’t have to leave but you do have to stay in the kitchen. You can eat the snacks, but you can’t come in the rest of the house because you weren’t invited.” She is very embarrassed to have to say this. Now this is where, normally, you would say, “Oh. I’m being treated like shit so I’m out.” But this was an impossibility as Poppy was the one who drove them there. That’s right: Poppy picked them up and took them to a place they were not invited to. Kinda makes me think they were more than invited, but okay. “We’d rather leave.” After seeing the look on everyone’s faces, Poppy works up the nerve to go back to her mom and they have it out. Everyone can hear it. It’s pretty intense. They wonder if they are going to have to leave or if Poppy is going to lose the argument. Poppy comes back into the kitchen holding her car keys. She has lost the argument. She takes them home, apologizing all the way, disgusted with her own mother. No one blamed Poppy; it’s clear she wouldn’t have taken Black people to her house if she knew she was going to be embarrassed like that. But joke’s on Poppy’s mom because she married a BLACK GUY. Now, I don’t want to encourage you to ever put this book down, but now is a good time to get up, make yourself a drink, and sit back and laugh.
(Loudly, to the Black kids) “Sit down on your butts!” Then, to her white friend, “That’s how you gotta talk to ’em.”
—A white woman from church
“When I do my ministry in North Omaha, I make sure I have my gun.”
—One of the white pastors
Back to Pastor Frank. He drove an old Firebird or something along those lines. An old car that he liked for some reason but was a true piece of shit. Like, if you’re a car guy, maybe you could be proud of it. But if you’re a regular person, you’ll apologize for the fact that people have to look at it. The kids would look at it and laugh because it was a hot mess of a car. Frank would say stuff like “One day I hope that you guys have a car as nice as this. And one day I pray that you will move out of North Omaha into a nice place.” He said that as if all of North Omaha was bad instead of it being a giant section of Omaha with great and not-so-great neighborhoods. Keep in mind that our parents live in a three-bedroom, three-bathroom house that sits on an acre and a third. Our folks are doing just fine. Pastor Frank lived in a very not-so-great neighborhood in South Omaha in an apartment he shared with three other guys. So this guy really thought he was out here doing frigging missionary work, when he should’ve been trying to scam a home-cooked meal off of one of our parents.
Lacey’s twelve. Someone from church comes up to her and says, “Hey, you’re from North Omaha! What side are you on?” Lacey replies, “I don’t know, the north side?” He says, “No, Crip or Blood?”
I said Blood and stabbed him.
She did not.
I could have.
That is true.
When Bill Clinton was elected, one of the white pastors stood up and said that it was a sin to vote for Bill Clinton and if you did, you needed to come to the altar and repent. And some people DID! I laugh every time I hear that story. Nuts, man.
There was a big youth group meeting with, like, fifty people at it. All the Black kids were there. For those keeping count, that’s eight Black kids and forty-two white people. They made an announcement. “White women should not come to North Omaha because gang members are being initiated.” Now there’s nothing I can say to prepare you for what I’m about to tell you. I need you to take a deep breath before you read the rest of this story. Maybe take a minute to think about the fact that “North Omaha” is massive and mostly white. It’s also where a lot of the Black people are. Are you prepared yet? One more deep breath. These white people were truly insane. Lord knows how this happened, but this grown man said, “White women should not come to North Omaha because gang members are being initiated. And the way you get initiated into the gangs is by cutting off white women’s clitorises.” Flip the page and leave those feelings here.
A Black man and a white woman got married at white church and, after the wedding, she told everyone jokingly, “My wedding certificate is like slave documents because I own this Negro now and if he acts up, I’ll just whip him!” Everyone, including this man, laughed. Y’all, the joy with which she made this joke truly makes me think this is why she married him. They must have some fucked-up kids by now.
Ryan Prute
The North Omaha Bible study group was invited to a small town in Iowa for a retreat. A retreat is typically where your church meets up with a bunch of other churches and goes to a campsite with a few cabins and has church in a new place. Everyone sings songs around a campfire and eats bad food. Dad hears this and is like, “Go if you want, but I am not driving out there to pick you up.” My dad is a smart Black adult. He knows that this reeks of a bad idea. But there was going to be a speaker there and all the other kids were going, so he let us go. We arrive and it was all white people. We’re a little sad, but what are you gonna do? Then we see that the speaker is a Black man! Finally! These idiots will get to see an example of a
real Black man instead of the insane stereotypes these people are walking around with that me and my friends can’t seem to put a dent in. Joy of joys! This is an excellent opportunity for some of the racist people that go to this church to get rid of some of the horrible stereotypes they believe and see us for who we really are. We are thrilled. Now, this retreat is a whole weekend and we still have these white children to deal with, so we calm it down. We choose places to sleep and as we do, we meet a bunch of white children from Bum-fuck, Iowa. These are children who have never seen a Black person in their entire lives. We’re scared that it will go poorly, but these kids take to our North Omaha group and it’s a relief. We all giggle and laugh and decide to bunk together. As everyone picks places to sleep, they throw their bags willy-nilly together with ours as we claim a room in Cabin A. We all rush to the big auditorium! It’s time to hear the speaker! Dad was wrong. We’re gonna make new friends and memories to last a lifetime! Friendship!
This group of eight Black kids are so proud of this Black speaker that we walk all the way up to the front of the auditorium to sit in the very front row. We’re beaming with pride as this man starts his speech. He speaks about “inner-city Black youth.” Okaayyyy. He was talking about it as us versus them. And he was the “us.” We were the “them.” It was unbelievable fearmongering like you have never seen in your life. Not from a Black person about Black people, not from a white person about Black people. No one—no one—has publicly said things like this in the presence of Black people. Here are some points he made about Black people:
These people will try to rob you.
They’ll try to kill you.
They’re a drain on the economy.
He talks about every last stereotype.
Then he kind of riles himself up with disgust for Black people, saying, “They don’t care; they’re rude. Once, I was at a restaurant and I saw a Black kid walk through a door and not hold it open for an old white lady. The kid just slammed the door shut! Can you believe it? Did you not see there was a human being here? There’s no respect in the Black community for PEOPLE!” This man is now visibly upset. It becomes a fire-and-brimstone sermon, but its only topic is Black people and how bad we are. This man recites Black stereotypes for the next hour and a half. At the end of his speech, we are embarrassed and ashamed of this man. But we also see why he is so popular. We look around at the people we came here with. They look like they’ve just heard the juiciest secret of their whole lives. White people ate this shit up! It confirmed all of their deepest, darkest, most racist beliefs. Suddenly they were justified in treating Black people like crap.
Dang.
Right afterward, we get up and walk up to Ryan and tell him how his sermon made us feel. I will never forget his reply. He rolled his eyes and said, “Hey, this message wasn’t for you. I don’t even know why you guys were here.”
We got up, went back to our room in shock. We looked around, and the white people who were our new best friends two hours ago were scrambling to grab all of their stuff and move as far away from us as possible. We called Dad. He came to get us.
Amber Ruins the Book
The Cops: They’re a Riot!
Just Kidding—They’re Dangerous and Unnecessarily Lethal
The whole point of this book is to tell you a bunch of Lacey’s stories and have everyone see how crazy they are. But we have to take a break from that for a second. I could not write a book about racism and not include a section about cops. Specifically me and cops. So for the next teeny little bit, indulge me and pretend you’re reading a slightly more serious book. Maybe it’s called something like A Troubled Nation. Or it’s an essay called “The Dangers of Overpolicing.”
I used to live in Chicago! It was a very fun time in my life when I was the least aware of the world, yet most independent. I took improv classes and interned at a theater and made new friends every day. I lived right down the alley from a police station. My neighborhood (Boystown) was pretty darn white, which, when you’re Black, doesn’t make you feel safe. Here’s why!
I lived in one of those houses that had three apartments in it. Every once in a while, I would enter my house from the alley instead of the front. My bedroom looked out on the alley and oftentimes I could spy people making out or straight-up getting nasty. One night, my friend Tony (a Black guy) was leaving my apartment. He hopped on his bike and rode off but had left his wallet. I didn’t realize this ’til I had changed into pajamas. I called him, he came back, I stepped out, shoeless, onto the back stairs and reached down and handed him his wallet. He dropped his bike and walked over to me. Sirens went off. “What are you doing? What’s going on over there! Hold it right there!” The cop had Tony put his hands on the hood of the car while she patted him down. I explained that he was just here and I live here. She demanded to see both our IDs. We showed them to her. Now this woman is mad. A lot of the time, when you deal with cops, it’s not only your job to do what they say, it’s your job to de-escalate the situation. A lot of these cops come at you at a ten and if you want to survive the interaction, you gotta get ’em down to a six. This woman was at an eight. She runs our IDs and comes back and is still mad. I tell her that I live here. I’m on the back stairs in pajamas and no frigging shoes, for fuck’s sake. She makes me go inside and get a piece of mail with my name on it. Now, this woman has stopped us for no reason, frisked Tony, run our IDs, and we have literally done nothing wrong. We were in an alley after dark. She explains to us that Tony was running away from her police car. He ditched his bike to get away from them. He was trying to come into my house before they heroically stopped him. I mean, dude.
Many years later, after I had moved to Amsterdam, I came back to Chicago to visit. I’m on my way to pick up my friend Krazny who lived next door to me in police station alley. Our friend parks at the gas station at the end of the alley so I can run up and get her. I’m frigging thrilled. I hadn’t seen her in years and we were on our way to have dinner and catch up. Because he is watching me, I skip down the alley to her house. But little did I know, skipping down police station alley is a big no-no. I end up skipping toward a cop car driving down the alley. The sirens go off. A cop gets out and his gun is drawn. “Put your hands on the hood of the car! Put your hands on the hood. Now!” I think it is safe to say that this man is at a ten. I comply and he pats me down and is livid. It is as if he had just seen me punch a child in the face. This man’s anger level toward me is insane. I’m a young, adorable delight literally skipping down the street and I’ve infuriated him.
“Where are you coming from?”
“Amsterdam.” This answer enrages him.
“No! Where are you coming from right now!”
“From the airport. From a flight. From Amsterdam.”
“Why in the world are you running down this alley?”
“I’m not running. I’m skipping. I’m happy to be back in town. I’m going to pick up my friend Krazny and take her back to Jeff’s car. We are all gonna go catch up over dinner.” I gesture back to Jeff and he’s standing outside of his car at the gas station at the end of the alley watching all of this. He waves. Thank god he didn’t come running up to us. He’d have gotten both of us shot. The cop sees that Jeff, a white man, has seen all this and he changes his attitude with the quickness. He tells me not to run in the alley. It takes everything in me not to tell him that if I wanted to run in the alley, that would be perfectly legal. I instead oh-so-gently remind him I was skipping. The cop gets in his car and leaves. I walk away to Krazny’s house. Jeff is really bothered by what has happened. I’m not. Shit, that man could have shot me in a second. People who know me would be running around talking about “Attacking an officer doesn’t sound like something she’d do, but the officer said that’s what happened. So I guess that’s what happened!” The second I see my friend, I feel a lot better. We go out and have a lot of fun that night. It’s kind of my duty to have fun, if you really think about it. ’Cause at any time, I could get murdered by the pol
ice.
My first encounter with the police was in Council Bluffs, Iowa. It’s a city just over the river from Omaha. Black people in Omaha always say that our cops are bad but in Council Bluffs, they’re way worse. So I drop off my friend at work in Council Bluffs one morning. I’ve only been driving for like a year and I’m in the middle of a lot of morning traffic. It’s, I think, one of those streets that has three lanes both ways. It’s the main street that goes all the way through Council Bluffs to Omaha. So I notice that we are all going over the speed limit. I think it’s forty, and everyone is going fifty. I hate it. But when I slow down, it disrupts traffic. So I go forty-five. It’s only five miles over the limit and it’s the fastest I’m willing to go. I’m too new to driving and I’m in Council Bluffs. I’m not really familiar with this place. To make myself feel better, I turn on Busta Rhymes. I blast it. Blasting Busta Rhymes is something I recommend if you’re nineteen and unsure of yourself. So I get used to the pace and start to feel okay driving at this speed. Just then, I encounter a speed trap. No one slows down. We are all speeding. I look to my right and there’s an old white cop standing on the side of the road. Out of these tens of cars, he hears my loud music and sees a Black person driving and chooses me. He’s screaming right at me. If the last guy was at a ten, this man is at a twenty-seven. “Pull over! Pull the goddamn car over right now, motherfucker!” That is what this old white cop screams at me during my first solo drive in Council Bluffs. This is how I die. This man is going to kill me. I start crying. I pull over as this man continues his obscenity-laden tirade. It is venomous. He’s disgusted with me. “Pull over the fucking car!” He walks up to my car and sees the state I’m in. I’m a nineteen-year-old girl and I look terrified. My whole face is wet with tears and I’m trying to remember all the good things that have happened to me in life so I can get to heaven thankful instead of angry. He looks at me and I am not what he is expecting to see. He is taken aback. He goes from a twenty-seven to a negative-two. His whole demeanor changes. “Okay. All right. It’s okay. Let’s just see your license. Okay? Can you do that?” This guy sounds like Mister Rogers. He lets me off with a warning and is so sweet and so kind to me I cannot believe it is the same man. He’s telling me, “You’re all right. Everything’s fine.” As if he wasn’t just screaming at me. I am so thankful. Not in that moment, but now. I think what happened was he couldn’t quite see me. From far away, this cop thought I was a Black man, and he was ready to drag me out of the car and beat the crap out of me. Once he saw I was a young woman, that was less appealing. It was maybe the single most important life lesson I’ll ever learn. Racist people have Black friends, they love Black people, and even protect some Black people. The same cops that would happily beat a Black man to death would catch pneumonia looking for a lost little Black girl all night in the woods. It doesn’t make them less guilty or better human beings. It makes them deceitful little pieces of shit and I swear to god I have no patience for someone who has sworn to protect people beating people to death for fun.