Mark Naison
[email protected]
April 28, 2008
My response to the Sean Bell verdict, when I heard it, was very similar to that of journalist Kevin Powell. I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach akin to nausea.
But it was not because I looked at Sean Bell and his friends and thought “that could have been me.” It was because I knew that, as a white male, no matter what confrontations I got in with police officers, that couldn't have been me!
And that wasn't because I am someone who controls his temper and avoids dangerous situations. Over the course of the years, I have been in numerous demonstrations where I have been in arguments with police officers, some of which have involved physical confrontations. I have been clubbed, gassed, and hit with blackjacks, and in a few instances fought back and gave as well as I got. In one incident, described in White Boy: A Memoir (and visually depicted in Students for a Democratic Society: A Graphic History). I was part of a group that fought and disarmed police officers who attacked us in a Brooklyn coffee shop and was beaten in the station house following our arrest.
But at no point in any of those encounters did I feel my life was in danger. I feared being hurt, but the thought of being shot and killed never crossed my mind.
And that realization – and the social reality that underlines it – is something that separates me from my Black colleagues, friends, and family members. If you are a Black man in this country, encounters with police are fraught with dangers you can't afford to ignore. You are, in those moments, face to face with the nation's troubled racial history, which lives inside people in terms of images and stereotypes they rarely understand, rendered all the more deadly because the person confronting you has a gun, and the power to use it without penalty if they even think they are at risk.
Most Black men I know, even those far more gentlemanly and law abiding than I am, fear those moments. could be life threatening. No white men – at least none I know – ever do.
This is what makes the Sean Bell verdict so damaging. When police officers who killed an unarmed Black man are able to do so without legal consequence, will this make other officers more reluctant to use their weapons the next time they are in argument or confrontation? Or will it encourage a resort to deadly force early in the encounter that may lead to another life being needlessly taken?
I wish I could say that race is irrelevant in the way people are perceived in conflict situations, whether in the workplace or in the streets. But I know, from long experience, that Black men who get angry arouse levels of fear and even panic among people in positions of authority that can lead to huge over reactions on their part. And when such people carry weapons, such responses can be truly deadly in their consequences.
In the aftermath of this verdict, I walk around with a deep sense of sadness, knowing that many of the people I am closest to face dangers and risks that I will never know, not because of their actions, but because of their gender and the color of their skin.
A friend once said to me “Mark, if you were Black you would have been dead a long time ago.”
Never did I feel the truth of those remarks more poignantly than after the Sean Bell verdict.
Sadly, race in America is still a life and death matter. We delude ourselves if we think otherwise.
Mark Naison
[email protected]
Bronx African American History Project
Fordham University
April 28, 2008