The light turned red about two full seconds before my father sped through the intersection that day, and It just so happened that a police officer was perched perpendicular to our trajectory, and in perfect position to pull us over. His lights glared, his siren exploded, and he hung a right, pulling up directly behind us.
I felt afraid. We were not only black and from East Oakland, but we were in the city of Alameda, which at that time was known by us native Oaklanders to have a police force that was less than cordial to African Americans.
My father pulled the car over to the right, rolled down his window, and calmly arranged his hands on the steering wheel at ten minutes to two.
The officer approached and said, “Good afternoon.” “Good afternoon, sir,” my father responded.
“Do you know why I’m pulling you over today?”
“No sir.”
“Well, you weren’t even close on that red light back there.”
“I see.”
“What is your name, sir?”
“Peter Robinson.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m an accountant.”
“Are these your children?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where do you live?”
“In Oakland.”
“And where are you headed?”
“Home, to my wife.”
This to me seemed to be a ridiculous line of questioning, and while it was going down, I kept thinking thoughts like, “he doesn’t have the right to ask that! Dad, why are you answering those questions? Tell this guy to get lost!”
You see, I was raised within the crucible of two great realities: the Christian values of my family culture, and the anarchist values of East Oakland culture. My parents taught me to respect people – the police included – but when I was with my friends we’d listen to songs with lyrics like, “F@#& the police,” and “911 is a joke” and “Can’t trust it.” While my father was speaking to the police officer, I was more emotionally connected to the anger associated with the black experience of East Oakland than I was to my family values of respect and civility.
The officer kept asking questions, and my father just continued to patiently and calmly answer every question that was posed.
Finally, the officer said, “Well, I don’t think you need a ticket on your driving record, so just be careful at those red lights from now on.” “I sure will,” responded my father, and the officer went back to his vehicle and drove off.
My father looked back at my two brothers and I and said, “Many black folk would’ve told that cop where to go and the fastest way to get there, and then they would have driven off with their ticket!”
I was 13 years old, and that was the day that my father taught me how to speak to the police. He taught me by example, and the result of that exchange was the organization of my emotions around the subject of the police and justice. The lesson I learned was that even if I feel that I am being treated unjustly, even if I feel that I am being asked invasive questions, or am being unlawfully detained (which my father was not), the best bet is to be cordial and calm when dealing with the police. My father taught me that a soft answer turns away wrath, and this lesson became the foundation for the development of a sense of emotional competence when dealing with the police.
In my previous entry, I spoke of the collective grieving of the African American community for Trayvon Martin. I also briefly mentioned Oscar Grant, the subject of the recent and critically acclaimed film, “Fruitvale,” which is currently playing at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, CA. I went to see Fruitvale last night, and I was deeply moved. By the end of the movie you could hear the sound of weeping resounding throughout the theater, and at the close of the film I joined the recessional and added to it the sounds of my weeping as well. I stood for a while outside of the theater, unable to move on, overtaken by grief. A young life cut short because an officer lost the ability to discern the difference between a taser and a gun.
But the strange thing is that, although I grieve for these situations, I don’t fear that they may happen to me. I am an African American, but I don’t fear that I’ll ever be shot by the police. I just don’t see it as a possibility.
The Oscar Grant story is tragic, and the officer was without excuse. Knowing the difference between a gun and a taser is a basic skill that we should fully expect every police officer to master, regardless of the level of chaos associated with any situation. But it is also true that had Oscar and his companions simply followed the instructions of the officers, Oscar would be alive today. The same could be said of Trayvon; had he not attacked Zimmerman, he would be alive today.
The justice issue is real, and I believe that it needs to be addressed. But we also have the responsibility to do our part to equip our young people with the skills necessary for dealing with the police (and dealing with people in general) so that they can approach difficult situations with confidence, and thus with calm cordiality.
Watching Fruitvale caused me not only to grieve for the plight of Oscar Grant, but for the familial conditions that contributed to his plight. My father taught me how to speak to police officers when I was 13 years old. Oscar had no one to teach him this vital lesson.
When the police officers detained Oscar and his companions, they were emotional . . . they felt that they were being unjustly detained, that they were being unfairly singled out and mistreated. And they felt hopeless about the situation. They felt that there was nothing they could do, that the officers would not listen to them or hear them out.
In that moment, they did not know what to do with their emotions. And when a human being is overtaken by big emotions – sadness, fear, and/or sorrow – and does not know how to organize those emotions, those emotions tend to manifest themselves in the form of anger. Anger is a secondary emotion; it is the result of sadness or fear or sorrow that is unprocessed. These guys were sad, and/or afraid, and/or sorrowful, but they didn’t know how to process that, and so all they felt was anger. Anger when untreated gives birth to rage, and rage leads us to lash out.
But the skill set required for dealing with these emotions is not accessible to the individual in isolation. We cannot learn them on our own, we can only learn them in community. We desperately need to belong, to be cherished, to be loved, and to be taught to regulate our emotions, to organize our thoughts, and to remain ourselves even when we are experiencing a big emotion.
Many people have asked me how the body of Christ should respond to the Trayvon Martin situation, and I have thought and prayed long and hard about it. My preliminary answer is twofold.
First, we need to give people the opportunity to voice their grief over the situation. We cannot simply command people to stop grieving by suggesting that their grieving is invalid. People need to grieve, and people need to express their grief.
Second, we need to teach people how to deal with their anger. It has been brought to my attention that rage is a stage in the grieving process, and yes, we must deal with people’s rage as well. But rage must be properly organized and regulated; it cannot simply be given unbridled expression.
I’ve heard some things over the past few weeks that have caused me to shudder. I read somewhere that a young, black man said of Zimmerman, “If he gets off, I’ma kill me a white boy!” This type of thinking is what led to the Reginald Denny beating in the Rodney King riots in L.A. in 1992. Denny became the object of the rage of four black men who were grieving, but disconnected from their grief. They needed to punish someone, and they looked for the closest white boy to pour out their rage upon.
If we don’t address this problem, if we don’t teach African American youth how to regulate their rage, how to channel their anger, we can rest assured that we have not seen the last Trayvon Martin/Oscar Grant/Reginald Denny situation.
While we are in a state of grieving, our grieving should not be hopeless grieving. We may have yet to achieve the utopian post-racial state that we reach for in America, but we are also not where we were forty years ago. We are making progress, and we have come a long way. Hope must be given a stronger voice in our communities, and we need to be more intentional about living out the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King to the extent that we are able.
Whenever I speak to my parents about their experiences growing up, I am confronted by the fact that I have not had to deal with even ten percent of what they had to deal with. They were kids when the civil rights movement was under way, and they encountered things every day that I never had to deal with even for a day. I did experience racism, but not to the degree that they did.
Dr. King stood on the mountain top and looked over to see the promised land. But we have the opportunity to live in it, and we must take full advantage of that opportunity.
I am privileged to pastor two multi-ethnic churches. We have white people and black people and asian people and hispanic people, and there is no sense of ethnic predominance among us. We want to be intentional about living out the dream, and this is why in the midst of our grieving, we must keep hope alive. Because hope is the one indispensable ingredient that will enable us to embrace our grief, process our rage, and return to joy. Otherwise, our rage will take us further away from the dream of Dr. King, rather than bringing us closer to it.
