There is a lot of talk about 'the talk' that black parents supposedly feel obliged to give their boys about dealing with cops. There is a lot I could say about this. If they give a talk to their boys about dealing with police because so many of them are getting killed by police, shouldn't they be giving a hundred talks about dealing with other blacks? Because that is about the proportion in which police kill blacks compared to the rate in which other blacks kill blacks.
But what about the substance of the advice? I think it is be polite and obedient. Always address the police as sir or officer and do what they say. Not bad advice, I suppose--its what I do, but it feels somehow off the mark. It sounds like advice to be submissive. No one wants to be submissive, and isn't that the whole problem of race in America, whites demanding that blacks be submissive? Doesn't sound like advice likely to be popular in this era, does it? And why should they be? Are they not equal citizens of a free republic?
When I was watching the video of George Floyd's fateful encounter with the police, the whole encounter, not just the last nine minutes where Mr. Floyd appears to be being choked by the police, there was a phrase that kept coming to me: "be a man". That is what I thought when when Floyd started complaining hysterically about being claustrophobic at the prospect of being put in a spacious squad car (this, after being taken from a cramped economy car). The incessant pleading with the police officers and begging not to be shot when none of the police even had their guns out.
Of course, respectable opinion will have none of this. Whatever Mr. Floyd did was the result of racist oppression. That is what makes 'respectable opinion', ultimately, racist. To lower your expectations, to assume that one cannot meet the minimal standard of adult behavior we expect of ourselves and those we consider our peers, is pretty much the definition of racism.
What is it to act like a man? It is to act as if you are an equal to other men, no better, no worse. You live under the same rules as other men, rules which you had an equal voice in shaping. You break a rule and you may get away with it, but if you are caught you don't make a fuss, and you certainly don't start any special pleading. You don't go on about how hard you have had it, how you are afraid of cramped spaces, have been arrested too many times this year or require special care or consideration, because that would lower you. That would mean sacrificing your dignity as a man. Think of the villains in old movies who would stoicly submit to arrest, sometimes adding, "It's a fair cop, governor". And the police, for their part, did not go in with paramilitary force to make an arrest because they expected the culprit to submit to arrest "like a man".
Or think of the protestors of the civil rights movement getting arrested at segregated lunch counters. Arrested for violating laws that were not the same for them as other men, arrested for violating laws they did not have a voice, let alone an equal voice, in shaping. But still, manfully submitting to arrest because they were intentionally breaking unjust laws while still believing in the ideal of law itself. American law could deny their equal citizenship, but not their manhood.
Such were the heroes of the civil rights movement of a bygone era. Today George Floyd is pictured with angel wings and beatific continence. The infantile pleading and formidable resistance alike attributed to the evils of racism, cast as the effects of racist oppression. But all of the tragedy of that day would have been avoided if he had acted like an adult when arrested for undoubted crime of passing counter fit bill. The next time a black parent gives 'the talk' to a boy, he should remind him of Martin Luther King and the protestors at the Selma lunch counter and say, "Be a man."
