...if you are easily offended.
Okay, everybody ready?
A couple weeks ago, Our Lil MILF--who, you'll remember, is Dominican--told us all this joke. It's actually her sister's joke.
Q: There's a black guy and a Spanish guy in a car. Who's driving?
A: The cop. Duh.
After we all stopped laughing in a omg-that's-horrible way, she said, "Yeah. I can tell that joke and it's funny. If you guys told that joke, it's racist."
But, honestly, my first reaction was that the joke wasn't actually making the point that the black guy and the Spanish guy deserved to be in the back of the cruiser, but rather that if someone's non-white, they're more likely to be arrested. That, you know, the joke is less racist than it is social commentary.
My experience with the local police has been unfailingly positive. (If you've already heard these stories, you can look away too.) When D was 17 or so, he was picked up by the police walking home when he was very intoxicated. That he was only taken to the police station then driven home, no charges filed, was due to a number of things. He's a polite young man anyway and smart enough, even when drunk, to realize that you err on the side of "yes, officer," and "no, officer," and no belligerence. That he was lucky enough not to have any illegal substances on him. And that he was white and lived in a comparatively "nice" neighborhood for our community and even in his oversized t-shirt and baggy pants, pinged the cops as middle class. The cop who brought him home, white and in his twenties or early thirties, was all, he seems like a nice kid and we've all experimented blah blah blah. Do I think an intoxicated Dominican kid who lived a mile from me, dressed exactly like my son, might possibly have pinged that cop differently? Oh, yes I do. I'm not saying he would have; I'm saying I'm well aware of the possibility.
My only other recent-ish experiences with the local cops have involved them arriving with the paramedics when I had to call 911, once when D had OD'd and was alcohol-poisoned, and then a couple years later, before his last (and we hope final) hospitalization, when he was accutely psychotic and hallucinating and delusional and panicked and I had to get him into the hospital somehow. In both cases the cops, as well as the paramedics, were unfailingly kind and sensitive and professional and helpful and, yes, I'm well aware that's how emergency services *ought* to be, but I'm also aware enough of other people's stories to know it's not always so. Do I think some of that is luck of the draw? Absolutely. Do I think part of it is, again, that we're white and middle class and have a comparatively nice address? Well, it doesn't hurt.
On this mental illness board I used to frequent, mostly populated by parents of psychiatrically ill adolescent and adult children, there was this woman from upstate NY, whose son, exactly the age of D and exactly with the same diagnosis, was in prison facing charges of aggravated assault and destruction of property for assaulting someone and ripping out a drinking fountain *while he was a patient on a locked psychiatric ward*. That's right, he was being held criminally responsible for actions that were committed when he was committed, when he had already been determined to be a danger to himself and others and unable to act rationally or make decisions for himself. Not only was this my own personal worst nightmare, the injustice and unfairness and, indeed, the total lack of sense of it stunned me. It didn't seem possible.
Except it eventually came out as the story went on over the weeks of this woman posting about it, that her son was biracial and looked black. He was a big, strong, dark-skinned young man, and not always pleasant and quiet, and so, when he ripped a drinking fountain out of a wall and threw it (while he was in a mental hospital) obviously he was a criminal, not a very sick boy. Ohhhh.
That's all I've got to say about that.
xoxo
3 comments:
I think there's absolutely a remaining skin-color bias in our society, (and reflected clearly in our law enforcement), today. The MILF's joke is an easy enough litmus test to demonstrate--if you're "white", it's generally inferred that you're saying the kids are the guilty ones, no matter what you might have meant by it. if you're "not white", it's inferred (and it's true and funny as well, which is why they tell the joke), you're onto the cop's case for profiling, regardless of what you might have meant by it. Neither has anything to do with the truth that sociological indicators of many sorts, including skin color, are used daily by our police while responding to various incidents, but we assume them anyway.
Ironically, I've found youth is often the strongest indicator, as any teenager beaten up by cops for misbehavior can attest. (And this happens all the time in W towns, too, though perhaps not with as much resultant incarceration). Being youthful and "not white" is quite probably the worst possible coincidence of circumstances no matter where you are in the USA, except for being youthful, "not white" and violent. (Good on D for understanding how to play his moment of truth).
It all gets confusing for me when cops are trying to do better, regardless of their possible bias, and they're being called out for even the possibility or appearance of impropriety. If you scream "RACIST!" (or anything for that matter) long enough in the face of most any cop, I'm pretty confident you'll end up down at the station. Skip Gates, in his efforts to highlight a 40-year-old sociological phenomenon that may or may not exist in the form it used to, simply proved that fact, and not much of anything better as far as I'm concerned. Yeah, crazy white guys, like crazy white kids, sometimes get an extra mulligan, but it's seems ever easier to escape persecution these days if you don't push for it.
Two things about the Skip Gates incident:
1.) As soon as I heard the name on TV, I was like, oh yeah Skip Gates, he's kind of an asshole, isn't he? I have no idea exactly what I'd heard about him before that led me to that kneejerk conclusion, but there's not too many Harvard professors I personally would recognize the name of, and he's one, and my vague impression of him was as someone who would indeed flip out and turn a minor incident into a major racially-motivated news story. So I was kind of amused by the whole thing, not outraged in either direction.
2.) I think the fact that the class angle is being totally disregarded, as it so often is, is interesting. Everyone's saying none of this would have happened had Mr Gates been a tenured white Harvard professor, but y'know, I'm pretty sure if you're a Cambridge cop you probably run across your share of entitled, snotty, superior Harvard people every day and if one of them got up in your face when you were only (at first, at least) trying to do your job, the temptation to haul their tenured ass off to jail might well prove irresistible. Even if they were white and you were white. Or even if you were black and they were black. I think the possibility exists! Just as no one likes to be bullied, no one likes to be condescended to, either.
(P.S. I think you meant to say that being youthful, non-white, and *male* is the worst possible combination of circumstances when it comes to involvement with the police and judicial system. I guess women do get beaten up, and occasionally sexually harrassed or raped, by cops, but I think, by and large, we don't trigger that aggressive impulse in "bad" cops like young guys do, and we're a lot less likely to go to jail.)
I'll go over to my location and make my by now obligatory Gates comments there.
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