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Part 1: Supporting your friends can be complicated.
Part 2: Encounters with the police can be complicated.
I was frisked two or three times a year— just often enough for it to be annoying. It never occurred to me to be afraid. Getting caught in crossfire while walking to the store was the more salient threat. Even then, neither daytime gunfire nor police raids happened often enough to stop me from going to the store every day and occasionally stopping to talk to my childhood friends while they were working on the corner.
They were charier. “If we tried that [assert your rights] bullshit, they’d kick our ass.” This wasn’t fear, either. This was recognition that cops had clubs, guns, pepper spray, sometimes tasers, and always numbers. This was also recognition that crack sales and possession were felonies. Unlike me, they expected to be pestered by the police. Many believed, or perhaps simply boasted, they could beat a cop in a fair fight. It was never a fair fight. But no one expected to die.
My friend tried to look at the world through my eyes, but the view was obscured by his eyes. It never occurred to him that I draw strength from my experience and calm from my research.
At some point he said, “But this happens every day.” I said, “There are 12.6 million black men in this country. 800,000 police officers. Police officers kill 1,000 people a year. 270 of them are black. Nearly 700,000 black men live in New York City. From 1971 to 2014, NYPD officers killed an average of 25 people a year. Sure, cops kill three people every day. And NYPD officers kill someone once every 15 days (this number has dropped to once every 36 days in recent years). But regardless of whether I look at the city or the country, a cop would expect to find a gun on me long before I’d expect to get killed by a cop."
* * * * * *
Everyone is the hero in their own story. This need to see ourselves in a positive light is called self-positivity bias. The police officer fighting crime. The protestor fighting oppression. My friend, far away from the action, who … might be … wrongly identified with white cops who have killed black men.
This was never going to happen. He wasn’t a cop. I doubt he owned a gun. But the idea threatened his self-integrity, his sense of moral and adaptive adequacy. Calling me was his way of proving his worth to himself and to the cause of black empowerment, somehow wrapped in empathy for me rather than compassion for Castile. This is why, in the end, I found myself reassuring the person who called to comfort me.
He wanted to help. He had better options. Ideally, he could’ve chosen compassion, maintaining concern and the desire to help without mirroring what he mistakenly believed would be my anguish. He could have contacted his mayor and police chief, asking them to implement de-escalation training. He could have donated time or money to programs that help lower-income students improve their academic skills, or a charity that donates money to lower-income parents so their kids are free to attend school. Calling me was the least effective thing he could’ve done.
I shouldn’t have expected to reach him. I didn’t stand a chance against the video. Our brains are wired to emphasize what we see and downplay what we don’t. Fear focuses our attention on danger. Empathy focuses our attention on individuals, not populations or data. There was a lot left to learn about each other, and people tend to fill knowledge gaps about others with stereotypes. One is a narrative that portrays the inner life of every black man as perpetually defeated.
But my inner life mirrors that of my 5’ 2” grandmother, who once beat up my 6’ 3” grandfather. I admire the first generation out of slavery, proud artisans frustrated by people afraid of competition for jobs and political power. And some of the happiest moments in my life occurred in a neighborhood most people would be afraid to walk through. My friend never looked beneath my brown skin. No wonder he couldn’t see me.
