Police, the literal progeny of slave catchers, meant harm to our community, and the race or class of any one officer, nor the good heart of an officer, could change that. No isolated acts of decency could wholly change an organization that became an institution that was created not to protect but to catch, control and kill us.
The record was clear.
In the city of Los Angeles, almost 50 percent of all homicides go unsolved and gang injunctions did absolutely nothing to stave off violence in the street. Protection wasn’t the goal no matter what anyone said.
In the state of California a human being is killed by a police officer roughly every 72 hours.
Sixty-three percent of these people killed by police are Black or Latinx.
Black people, 6 percent of the California population, are targeted and killed at five times the rate of whites, and three times the rate of Latinxs, who have the largest number of people killed by police.
Who is protected? Who is served?
When I am asked to speak at universities, in communities, I share these statistics. I tell them that even as we are labeled criminal, we are actually the victims of crime. And I tell them there are no stats to track collateral deaths, the ones that unfold over months and years spent in mourning and grief: the depression that becomes addiction to alcohol that becomes cirrhosis; or else addiction to food that becomes diabetes that becomes a stroke. Slow deaths. Undocumented deaths. Deaths with a common root: the hatred that tells a person daily that their life and the life of those they love ain’t worth shit, a truth made ever more real when the people who harm you are never held accountable.
Unlike homicides that occur at the hands of non-police, when cops kill, there is the presumption that the killer is in the right, that his or her decision was reasoned and necessary and done in the name of public good and safety, not as a result of poor training and surely not as part of the long history of police violence rooted in racial hate—despite the fact that cops were created in this nation specifically and solely to hunt Black people seeking freedom.
Some version of all this peppers the whispers JT and I share during our time in the corner of the cottage with the helicopters hovering and the six-year-old terrified and us not able to explain things to her but also not able to say nothing at all. Finally I offer, We’re being still right now, and JT, trying to comfort, whispers in my ear, Maybe they are not coming for you this time. We pause and then he says what we both know: of course that would mean they’re about to swoop down in another Black or Brown corner of the city, one of many areas designated as an urban jungle, a place behind enemy lines and ground zero in the war on drugs. Where we live, children are defined as super-predators even by liberal politicians, none of whom pause when the response to that designation is to allow local police to use militarized responses and maneuvers on mothers and fathers, daughters and sons.
Two years later, we will not be shocked at the use of tear gas, assault weapons and tanks when we protest the death of unarmed Michael Brown, shot dead on the streets of Ferguson, some of those bullets entering the top of his head. The federal government has provided these to local police departments for decades, since at least the modern declaration of the war on drugs, and LA, my city, was where the first-ever SWAT raid was ever undertaken. A generation ago, it was another group of young Black activists, the Black Panthers, who had come together around police violence, who were in law enforcement’s crosshairs.
But on the day of the helicopters I am focused on only these two immediacies: keeping us alive and centering myself enough to begin the familiar and terrible process of preparing myself mentally to have to respond to the news of another unarmed child being killed—and with impunity.
Or if there is an arrest and if they survive, will they be treated as Monte was treated, beaten and starved, locked in solitary confinement? Will they be disappeared as Monte was disappeared, only to reappear months later, perhaps even with the charges dropped but the trauma intact? I wonder if any of our kids ever get the proverbial slap on the wrist. The “C’mon son. You can do better than this.” The “Let’s go talk to his parents. Maybe he needs therapy.” Did anyone in law enforcement ever say about one of our kids, “Jail would destroy him, so let’s find another way to help.” Did we ever get a first chance, let alone a second? What did Trayvon Martin get? What did Clifford Glover? Rekia Boyd, sitting in a Chicago park with friends in 2012, talking and laughing, when an undercover cop accosted them and shot her 22 years of life and possibility into oblivion?
I am thinking about all of this, and I am especially thinking about Monte and how grateful I am he is not with us in the cottages that day, when the banging on my front door begins.
Wait here, I say to JT. I cannot let him be the one to answer. As protective as he is of me—JT will become one of the first Black Lives Matter organizers—I know his dark-skinned, six-foot-four, 200-plus-pound frame will present as an opportunity, an excuse for violence.
If unarmed Trayvon Martin, sixteen and skinny, carrying iced tea and candy, could be shot down in cold blood walking home to his own house while he was on the phone supporting a girl who had been bullied …
If unarmed Oscar Grant could be shot and killed, sitting compliantly on the floor of the BART station with his hands on his head …
If unarmed Ramarley Graham could be shot in his own bathroom in front of his grandmother and little brother because cops claimed he had weed on him …
If all this is true, I know JT doesn’t stand a chance. I know if he answers the door, it may be the last thing he ever does.
As the banging continues, I hug JT’s small, dark chocolate girl, an emerging artist—she loves to paint. Nia Imani and I have built a special connection. I tell her everything will be fine. I crack the front door of our cottage just enough to slip outside. Know Your Rights workshops have long drilled into me not to let police in if they don’t have a warrant, which I do not believe they do. We have done nothing wrong. Not that that stops brutality, but I hold on to it anyway and run through a list of what we have done:
We have joined the rest of the country in protesting in order to get Trayvon Martin’s killer charged.
We have gone to meetings and held one-on-ones with community members.
We have painted murals.
We have wept.
We have said publicly that we are a people in mourning.
We have demanded they stop killing us.
But we have harmed not one single person nor advocated for it. They have no right to be here!
Even still, I am shaking. I am terrified. Outside my door, there are at least a dozen police in full riot gear. I am a single woman, unarmed and five feet two. Every single one of the people standing before me, their faces disguised by helmets, their bodies shielded in Kevlar, has a weapon trained on me or on my home.
A Latinx officer is the one who engages me.
Someone tried to shoot up the station, he begins. We think they may be hiding in one of the Village cottages.
No one is here, I say.
Why are you shaking then? he pushes, aggressive but not nasty.
Because your shotguns are pointed at me. Because all these guns are pointed at my home, I say, and gesture with my eyes not with my arms, another lesson from Know Your Rights.
I reassert, There’s no one here you’re looking for.
I open the door and re-enter, and back inside JT grabs me and hugs me and together we try to breathe.
* * *
Minutes pass, who knows how many, but we hear the police again. They are speaking right outside our window and, it seems, as loudly as possible. I recognize the voice of the Latinx officer who had been the one to address me.
I think she’s afraid because someone is inside. Like influencing her, he says. I inhale deeply.
They are inventing a reason to come in even though they don’t have a warrant, I say to JT, who agrees.
The banging on my front door begins again, and this time we are tol
d that we are to come out. We are told we have no choice.
JT and I look at one another and we look at his tiny six-year-old girl. I wonder, is this how it ends for her, for us? I don’t say this, of course. What we do say to one another is that we need to get out of this alive. We say situations much less charged than this have resulted in death, in needless death.
We decide that JT and Nia Imani exiting first followed by me is the safest way to leave. We pray that they will not harm a father and daughter but we know that if at any moment JT is alone, they will kill him.
I call out, My friend is here with his six-year-old daughter. They’re coming out first.
They walk out. I follow.
Immediately, the police surround the three of us, who are not armed and who are dressed like three people who were sitting in their house and planning out their day, which is what we had been doing when we first heard the helicopters.
Ten, maybe a dozen, cops force us at gunpoint—and by we, I mean also six-year-old Nia Imani—into the courtyard in front of our cottage while the others swarm past us and enter my home like angry hornets or a sudden airborne plague. They are in my home for hours.
Detectives join them at some point and begin taking pictures of everything outside and, from what we can tell, inside my home. We have not been given a search warrant and we cannot protest. We are being held at gunpoint the entire time and are mostly blocked from watching what they do inside my home, what they take, what they leave. They treat my home the way they treat the jail cells my brother was locked in, a place where the police—guards—can remove you for any reason or no reason at all, at any hour, and tear up your belongings, with or without cause, take shit or leave it. And there’s nothing you can say as pieces of your life are scattered or destroyed by what can only be experienced as a violent human tornado.
After three hours or four, without another word to us, they finally leave.
After that, I move out.
* * *
The first time the police ever entered St. Elmo’s Village was in February 2013. We were gearing up for the trial of Trayvon Martin’s killer, still months away, and on that chilly LA night, I had spent some rare time just kicking it with friends at a comedy show, and now it was late, maybe 1:00 in the morning, and I was heading back to my cottage where Mark Anthony was supposed to be sleeping but instead was standing outside our home, barefoot, in pajamas and with his hands cuffed behind his back.
Mark Anthony, the beautiful child of one of the original members of Earth, Wind and Fire. Mark Anthony, whom I’ve loved since I was 16. Mark Anthony, my soulmate. Mark Anthony, who had challenged himself and the privileges he enjoyed, a long, lean, light-skinned wave of a boy all the white girls wanted but who always chose us. He always chose Black girls. He always chose me. And now all we had read about and studied, all we were building our muscles to fight, had come crashing in through our bedroom door and dragged this beautiful healer outside and handcuffed him in the cold night air.
This is who the police yank out of sleep. They were able to gain entry to our home because in St. Elmo’s, before this, we never locked the doors. But on this night, the police entered through our back door. They said he fit the description of a guy who’d done some robberies in the area. They offered no further explanation.
On this particular raid, there are only a few cops at my place, nothing like what we would experience in the second raid. I’m not so afraid as I am angry. Later when I hear others dismissing our voices, our protest for equity, by saying All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, I will wonder how many white Americans are dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night because they might fit a vague description offered up by God knows who. How many skinny, short, blond men were rounded up when Dylann Roof massacred people in prayer? How many brown-haired white men were snatched out of bed when Bundy was killing women for sport? How many gawky white teens were stopped and frisked after Columbine or any of the mass shootings that have occurred in this nation, the immeasurably wide margin of them by young, white men?
What the hell is going on? I demand.
Ma’am, one of them begins, It’s been robberies in the area and he fits the description—
I don’t wait for them to finish their story of trouble in the neighborhood.
What are you talking about? This is my husband. He lives here, I say, trying to put forward a calm I do not feel.
The police back down, and by now members of the community, awakened by the commotion, have come to stand with us. Mark Anthony’s cuffs are finally removed, but the police do not leave my home for another two hours, taking down all kinds of information about him, running his license, hoping to find any reason to take him away, this man they yanked out of his own bed in the middle of the night in the house where he lives in a community where he is loved.
Close your eyes and come close.
Try to imagine this with me:
You are a graduate student whose work is in Chinese medicine.
Your dream is to be a healer.
And maybe while you are sleeping in your wife’s bed, which is in a cottage that is part of a cooperative village where artists live and children come for free painting classes, maybe you are dreaming that you are saving a life, and in the midst of that dreaming, you are yanked out of bed by armed men dressed in riot gear, who possess no warrant, who have snuck into your bedroom through an unlocked back door. Their only reasoning is that you “fit the description.”
And who exactly gave that description? What other proof did they have? How did they know you were even sleeping in that bed, since the cottage is not in your name but your wife’s? How is this different from tactics used by the SS, the KGB, the Tonton Macoutes? And who is the real criminal, the real terrorist, and how will they be held accountable? To this day, the stench of these questions lingers, the stench of rotting meat unaddressed, unanswered.
13
A CALL, A RESPONSE
Freedom, by definition, is people realizing that they are their own leaders.
DIANE NASH
If we know nothing else, we know that in the wake of the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, we have to change the conversation. We have to talk very specifically about the anti-Black racism that stalks us until it kills us.
We begin to plan. Alicia and I start going back and forth on Facebook, and separately, she is also having conversations with Opal. I say, during one of our discussions, We should build a political project.
Yes! Comes her reply. This is more than a hashtag.
This is about building power. This is about building a movement, we agree.
All over, everyone has already been talking about the life of a Black child, a life that mattered. In 2012, the Dream Defenders embarked on their incredible 40-mile trek to the statehouse and occupied it, and the Miami Heat took their iconic photo with their hoodies on. A collective of New Yorkers including Thenjiwe McHarris and Daniel Maree launched the Million Hoodies Movement to push for dignity and justice for us; and in Chicago, Black Youth Project 100, a Queer Black Feminist organization of 18 to 35 year olds, dedicated itself to leadership development. And what we need now, in this early phase, is to press forward with a wholesale culture shift.
And it has to begin internally within our own progressive movement. There are people close to us who are worried that the very term, Black Lives Matter, is too radical to use, alienating, even as we all are standing in the blood of Black children and adults. We continue to push, to be undeterred.
In New York, in the wake of the acquittal, Opal helps organize a major march across the Brooklyn Bridge that culminates in a 1,000-person sit-in in Times Square, the crossroads of the world.
In Oakland, Alicia leads protesters through the downtown business area, where they are set upon by police. The media ignores the hundreds of people who are still in pain from the murder of Oscar Grant in 2009 and who are peacefully marching. Instead they focus on one or two who are not peaceful and they wholly ignore
law enforcement, who attack everyone.
And in Los Angeles, working primarily with women, many of them students from Cal State, I begin planning what will become the largest march I’ve ever planned up until that point. I put a call out on Facebook for people to come to St. Elmo’s Village to meet—I haven’t yet been run out of it by the second raid—and Thandisizwe Chimurenga, one of our most beloved local journalists and radio hosts, helps get people to come. She brings Melina Abdullah, who teaches Black Studies at Cal State, and Melina brings her students, and together we form the core of what will become the organizing committee for our march, indeed for who we are in LA; it is the beginning of the build-out of our Black Lives Matter–Los Angeles DNA.
We have an initial list of demands:
• Federal charges need to be brought against Trayvon Martin’s killer
• Marissa Alexander, imprisoned for attempting to defend herself against her husband, a known abuser, has to be pardoned
• There can be no more new jail or prison construction in LA
• We have to have community control over all law enforcement
We decide, for that first march, to go to Beverly Hills, to Rodeo Drive, where the wealthiest and mostly white people shop and socialize. All the other marches had been in Black communities, but Black communities know what the crisis is. We want to say before those who do not think about it what it means to live your whole life under surveillance, your life as the bull’s-eye.
And as we plan the march, I reach out to all my contacts and others to theirs: the Strategy Center, unions, the Community Coalition. Years later a friend, a veteran organizer, will ask me about security for the march, how we ensured our protection. She will weep when she hears my answer: we didn’t think about that.
That is how they will disrupt the narrative, the work, she says. That is what J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI planned when he created the Counterintelligence Program. That one generation would be dead, jailed or too traumatized to be able to pass on what is needed to make us safe.
When They Call You a Terrorist Page 15