by Paul Butler
I know they wanted to say it. I know they felt like they had permission from Jay-Z to say it. That they did not say it, in front of me, was probably due to some combination of courtesy, political correctness, and a quite reasonable fear of winding up on YouTube saying the “n” word for the whole world to see.
I love rap music, but some of it borders on minstrelsy. Some people have always been entertained by hyper-violent and hypersexual depictions of black people. Some hip-hop artists literally play into the stereotypes. They don’t only give white people permission to say “nigga”; they also give them permission to be amused by images of black men as gun-toting thugs. If, as this chapter demonstrates, African American men are perceived as criminals, some hip-hop music provides the soundtrack to this warped racial fantasy.
But, at the same time, the negative images in hip-hop are not the cause of the Chokehold. The racial reputation of African Americans is largely outside of their control. Black men were constructed as criminals decades before gangsta rap, and they have retained that construct in the many years since gangsta rap faded from popularity. I’m not saying that music that condones violence is constructive, any more than African American teenagers wearing pants that sag off their behinds, or black men calling each other “nigga” help the cause. I’ll have more to say about those kinds of black male cultural performances in chapter 4. My point here is only that these practices are more a response to the Chokehold than the cause of it.
I’m also not trying to get on a high horse. Maybe you have seen me in my car, on a beautiful summer day, radio turned up too loud, bass thumping. I’m spitting the lyrics to “Blowin’ Money Fast,” Rick Ross’s tribute to two big-time cocaine dealers. It’s a bombastic anthem, and rapping along to it makes me feel rebellious and badass. There’s a reason that catchy refrains are called “hooks.” The most seductive of those songs—even with objectionable lyrics—create an emotional release that bypasses the ego and goes directly to the id. But I understand the disapproving stares, which most often come from other African Americans. Grown-ass man like me should know better. Indeed.
WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE SCARY
Y’all gone make me lose my mind.
—DMX, “Party Up”49
It’s okay sometimes. I have yet to meet the white dude whose ass I didn’t think I could kick. Fortunately, the proposition has not been tested. I think I can fight because I’m black. I know that’s silly. My friends say that being black hasn’t improved my dancing any. Still, if the fear factor gives a middle-aged professor like me some street cred and some cool, I can make it work.
Most of the time, however, people being afraid of you is aggravating, embarrassing, and dispiriting. You take steps to allay the fear. You look down on the elevator. You wear your college T-shirt, and conspicuously display your work ID. You love the Dodge Charger, but if you buy the Mini Cooper you won’t get pulled over as much.
You try not to care. But it comes to feel like you are apologizing for your existence. It eats you up inside because it is relentless. Every time you leave your home, you are the star of a bizarre security theater.
Still I want to suggest, strange as it may seem, that there is a joy in this identity as well. African American men invented cool. The swag in Barack Obama’s walk, the muted ache in Coltrane’s saxophone, the half smile/half smirk on LeBron’s face when he dunks the ball, the wordplay tossed from W.E.B. DuBois to Langston Hughes to James Baldwin to Martin Luther King to Malcolm X to Ta-Nehisi Coates to Kendrick Lamar—all of that binds us together. We see each other. That our gaze is often critical does not mean that it is not loving. The word we call each other, “brothers,” was never meant to imply an uncomplicated relationship. We are brothers born to a hostile world that mainly blames us for the hostility. We have to hold each other up to survive, and, imperfectly, that is what most of us try to do.
THE CHOKEHOLD CRADLE TO GRAVE
The Chokehold starts really young.
There is an urban myth that the criminal justice system uses the reading scores of black boys in the third grade to project the need for prison beds when those boys become young men. This is not true, in part because there is not one “criminal justice system.” Instead we have several different systems. The participants in these systems include police, prosecutors, judges, lawmakers, and jailers. There is not much coordination between these different actors. So, for example, the people who make criminal laws and the people who enforce those laws don’t talk to the people who run the prisons. That is one reason why many prisons are overcrowded.
Still the urban myth contains the essence of truth. Black boys are viewed as more threatening pretty much from the time we start walking. About half the children suspended from preschool are black, even though they are only about 18 percent of kids enrolled in preschool. We’re talking about four-year-olds.
African American boys are perceived to be older than they actually are. The psychologist Phillip Attiba Goff showed several people, including police officers, photos of African American, Latino, and white boys and asked them to guess how old the children were. The black boys were estimated to be more than four years older than they actually were.50 Tamir Rice was twelve years old, and playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland public park, when a police car rolled up, Officer Timothy Loehmann jumped out, and, two seconds later, he shot Tamir dead. To state the obvious, this was extraordinarily bad policing. Every cop learns in the police academy that if you think someone has a gun, you take cover and try to communicate with the suspect. You don’t unnecessarily expose yourself and then use that as an excuse to kill the suspect, which is what Officer Loehmann did.
Goff’s research suggests that another problem is that the cop may not have seen a twelve-year-old boy when he looked at Tamir. If Officer Loehmann is like many other white folks, he would have perceived a sixteen-year-old teenager, and maybe that is why he did not notice that Tamir’s gun was a toy. We’ll never find out because Officer Loehmann has not been charged with a crime.
Professor Goff, in another study, found that black boys get to be children until they are ten. He asked a group of people to look at photos and to say whether the people in the photos looked innocent or guilty. Until the age of ten, the African American kids were thought to be as innocent as the other kids. After age ten, black boys were seen as guiltier than white children.51 The lack of innocence has major consequences when African American children act out. They are treated not like misbehaving kids but rather like juvenile delinquents. Sixteen percent of black kids are suspended from school every year. Many public schools have “school safety officers,” that is, police. In a situation in which a teacher sends a white boy to the principal’s office, she calls the cops on an African American boy. In fact, 70 percent of school discipline cases referred to the police are African American or Latino kids.52
The Chokehold also ends late. Black men die sooner than other Americans, as shown in Table 2.
TABLE 2: LIFE EXPECTANCY BY RACE AND GENDER
On average, black men die younger than white and Hispanic men.
Sources: National Center for Health Statistics, “QuickStats: Life Expectancy at Birth, by Sex and Race—US, 2011,” Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011, www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6335a8.htm; National Vital Statistics Reports, “Deaths: Final Data for 2011,” Center for Disease Control and Prevention, www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr63/nvsr63_03.pdf; Kelly Blake, “Racism May Accelerate Aging in African American Men,” UMD Right Now, January 7, 2014, www.umdrightnow.umd.edu/news/racism-may-accelerate-aging-african-american-men.
For many African American men, between their brief boyhoods and their early deaths, there is arrest and incarceration. Of black men born in 2001, one in three will serve time. The rate for Latino men is one in six, and for white men, one in seventeen.53 And for the same crime, black men will get the longest sentences.54
Perhaps the most revealing emblem of the Chokehold is this: the blacker you look, the more time you get
.
FIGURE 2: PERCEPTIONS OF STEREOTYPICALLY BLACK FEATURES HAVE BEEN LINKED TO HARSHER SENTENCING OUTCOMES
These images are the faces of people with no criminal history and are shown here for illustration purposes only. The face on the right would be considered more stereotypically black than the face on the left.
Source: Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Paul G. Davies, Valerie J. Purdie Vaugns, and Sheri Lynn Johnson, “Looking Deathworthy: Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes,” Psychological Science 17:5 (May 2006): 383–86.
Studies have demonstrated that black men with more Afrocentric features are more likely to be executed and, in non-death cases, receive longer sentences than black men with less Afrocentric features.55 So, in Figure 2, the man on the right would be punished more than the man on the left for the same crime.
FIGURE 3: PREDICTED PROBABILITY OF PRISON BY RACE, SKIN TONE, AND AFROCENTRIC FEATURES
The race effect is so strong that it even extends to white men with Afrocentric features, making them more likely to receive criminal punishment than white men without Afrocentric features.
Source: Ryan D. King and Brian D. Johnson, “A Punishing Look: Skin Tone and Afrocentric Features in the Halls of Justice,” American Journal of Sociology 122:1 (July 2016).
He receives more punishment because he is perceived as more black.
The race effect is so strong that it even extends to white men with Afrocentric features, as shown in Figure 3. A study published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2016 examined 850 photos of black and white men who were arrested in Minnesota. It found that having dark skin increased the chances that an African American would be sent to prison, rather than receive probation or have his charges reduced. Likewise, white men with Afrocentric features like larger lips or fuller noses were more likely to be punished than other white men.56
Blackness, we have seen, is the Chokehold’s mark of the thug.
2
Controlling the Thug
The city of Ferguson, Missouri, has approximately 21,000 people. In 2013, the city’s police officers obtained arrest warrants for 32,975 criminal offenses.1 In other words, Ferguson had more crimes than it had citizens. But Ferguson was not an especially dangerous place. The majority of the arrest warrants were for people who had not paid traffic tickets. Other offenses included “manner of walking in the roadway” and “high grass and weeds.”
Ferguson police charged a man named “Michael” with “making a false declaration” because he told them his name was “Mike.” Michael had been playing basketball in a public park and went to his car to cool off. The police approached him and, for no apparent reason, accused him of being a pedophile. They requested his consent to search his car and Michael, citing his constitutional rights, declined. At that point Michael was arrested, at gunpoint. In addition to “making a false declaration,” the police charged Michael with seven other minor offenses, including not wearing a seat belt. Michael had been sitting in a parked car.2
A woman called the Ferguson police to report that her boyfriend was assaulting her. By the time the officers arrived, the man was gone. Looking around the house, the police determined that the boyfriend lived there and the woman admitted that he was not listed on the home’s “occupancy permit.” The police arrested the woman for “permit violation” and took her to jail.3
African Americans are approximately 67 percent of Ferguson’s population, but they constituted the vast majority of arrests, especially for minor offenses. They made up 94 percent of arrests for “failure to comply,” 92 percent for “resisting arrest,” 92 percent for “disturbing the peace,” and 89 percent for “failure to obey.”4
Ferguson is America. A few miles away lies St. Louis, which has approximately 320,000 citizens and approximately 300,000 outstanding arrests warrants. In Houston, the police also have a backlog of 300,000 warrants. In Chicago, the number is around 120,000. In New York City, the police are much busier. There are 1.2 million arrest warrants waiting for the police to serve.5
The second step of the Chokehold is the transformation of anxiety about black men into law and policy intended to contain and control them. The Chokehold is the reason that the United States has the largest and one of the most punitive criminal justice systems in the history of the world. Our methods of defining, investigating, and punishing crime are centered on African American men.
THE HARD STARE
In the contemporary USA the Black man is he who must be seen.
—John Fiske, media studies scholar
African American men and boys are constantly under watch. Police, security guards, school safety officers, basically anybody with a badge and a gun has a mandate to focus on blacks. In the words of FBI director James Comey, police officers “work in environments where a hugely disproportionate percentage of street crime is committed by young men of color. Something happens to people of good will working in that environment. After years of police work, officers often can’t help but be influenced by the cynicism they feel.” Cops are likely to pay more attention to two African American men than to two white men, the FBI director said, because the black men “look like so many others the officer has locked up.” The focus on black men is not racist, according to Comey, but a “mental shortcut” that is “almost irresistible and maybe even rational” and that “complicates the relationship between police and the communities they serve.”6
The problem is so extreme that police are actually more likely to pursue vehicles when they can see that the driver is black. The newspaper USA Today looked at data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. When it’s dark outside and the police can’t see the race of the driver, more white drivers get pursued. When police can see the race of the driver—because it’s daylight or it’s a lit area—then black drivers are more likely to be chased. The study also demonstrated that African American drivers were more likely to be pursued for reasons not related to safety, like having expired registration or being in a stolen vehicle. White drivers tended to be chased for more serious reasons, like reckless driving or having recently committed a serious felony.7
THE BEAT DOWN
Frequently the Chokehold ends with violence. This violence can take any number of forms. Sometimes, when things are done to black men, we don’t think of them as violent in the way that we would if these things were done to anyone else. The next chapter explains how this is true about the police tactic called stop and frisk.
But often the violence the Chokehold authorizes is the old-fashioned kind: beating and killing. Most urban police departments use some version of “use-of-force continuums.” Police are supposed to start at the top and work their way down until they get the subject to comply.
Here are federal guidelines provided by the National Institute of Justice, which is the research agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. These guidelines are recommendations to local police departments, but they are not required to be followed:
Officer Presence—No force is used. Considered the best way to resolve a situation.
•The mere presence of a law enforcement officer works to deter crime or diffuse a situation.
•Officers’ attitudes are professional and nonthreatening.
Verbalization—Force is not physical.
•Officers issue calm, nonthreatening commands, such as “Let me see your identification and registration.”
•Officers may increase their volume and shorten commands in an attempt to gain compliance. Short commands might include “Stop,” or “Don’t move.”
Empty-Hand Control—Officers use bodily force to gain control of a situation.
•Soft technique. Officers use grabs, holds, and joint locks to restrain an individual.
•Hard techniques. Officers use punches and kicks to restrain an individual.
Less-Lethal Methods—Officers use less-lethal technologies to gain control of a situation.
•Blunt impact. Officers may us
e a baton or projectile to immobilize a combative person.
•Chemical. Officers may use chemical sprays or projectiles embedded with chemicals to restrain an individual (e.g., pepper spray).
•Conducted energy devices (CEDs). Officers may use CEDs to immobilize an individual. CEDs discharge a high-voltage, low-amperage jolt of electricity at a distance.
Lethal Force—Officers use lethal weapons to gain control of a situation. Should only be used if a suspect poses a serious threat to the officer or another individual.
•Officers use deadly weapons such as firearms to stop an individual’s actions.
Many police departments use versions of these procedures. Here is a representative sample:
Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina
Officer Presence
Verbal Direction
Soft Empty Hand
Oleoresin Capsicum (pepper spray)
Hard Empty Hand
Intermediate Weapons
Lethal Force
St. Petersburg, Florida
Officer Presence
Verbal Direction
Restraint Devices
Transporter
Takedown
Pain Compliance
Countermoves
Intermediate Weapons
Lethal Force
Dallas, Texas
Officer Presence
Verbal Control
Empty-Hand Control