Just another boogeyman
17th September 2018 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
PART I
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane. It’s another Black boogeyman! More powerful than 40 ounces of St. Ides Malt Liquor or a bottle of Hypnotiq, faster than Paris Hilton on a Saturday night, able to snatch 10 purses in a single swipe. Actually, it’s every Black man in America.
I’m sure you know me, I’m the boogeyman. Don’t get it twisted, I’m not the one K.C. from K.C. & The Sunshine Band used to sing about in the 1970s. I’m the one that has been known to send a shiver up the spines of people I have never met, the one who gets blamed for everything from the rise in American violence to underachieving U.S. schools.
I’ve been known to run around getting virtuous women pregnant, shoot anything and everything that wears the colors red or blue, and commit every imaginable crime. I’m the one who was accused of killing Boston resident Charles Stuart’s wife and unborn child as well as South Carolina resident Susan Smith’s two beautiful children more than a decade ago. I was also wrongfully convicted in the violent rape of a Central Park (New York) jogger years ago, as well as the murder of a white man near the Port of Call restaurant in New Orleans in the 1990s. District attorneys and police chiefs see nothing wrong with framing and railroading me in America’s halls of injustice because I was born guilty. Guilty, after all, is just another word for “n-gger.”
I’m the brother that makes you cling more tightly to your purse and cross the street when you see my silhouette coming down the street with a gangsta limp. I’m the cat in the parking lot who makes you double-check those car door locks just in case… If at all possible, you should avoid leaving your home at night because I’m usually lurking behind every tree or standing in the shadows waiting to pounce on you like the gravity-defying, predatory thug I be. As you probably learned from the evening news, I’m the first generation of my family to walk upright and even now, my knuckles scrape the pavement when I walk down America’s streets. No wonder I inspire so much fear and panic in the hearts and minds of decent, law-abiding folks.
Whether we choose to admit it or not, America is still scared to death of Black men in 2018. And why are Americans afraid of Black men? Essence magazine asked that question more than a decade ago and got some pretty interesting answers. One white gentleman said he feared Black men because “they are so much more physical and athletic than white men.” Another white male said that Black men are so angry and full of rage that whites don’t know when they’re going to explode and hurt someone. Still another person interviewed said that every day he looks at the news and sees nothing but violent acts committed by Black men.
Well, just for the record there are a few white men who have committed some pretty violent acts as well. Let’s see, there’s Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer whose favorite dish was barbecued Black folks. There’s Charles Manson, who was killing at will long before the creation of gangsta rap or BET. There’s the LAPD, who beat Rodney King like he was a pinata filled with doughnuts. There was Ted Bundy. No explanation necessary. There’s Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber who killed 168 Americans of all races and ages because he was upset with the government’s handling of the Waco incident in 1993. There were also the teenage Colorado gunmen who slaughtered 12 of their classmates and a teacher at Columbine High School in 1999 before taking their own lives.
Was I the only one who noticed that Timothy McVeigh wasn’t painted by mainstream media to look half as bad as Orenthal James Simpson? Anyone who knows me knows that I am no fan of O.J., but what’s love got to do with it? Fair is fair. O.J. was accused and acquitted of murdering two people in Los Angeles; an unapologetic Timothy McVeigh was tried and convicted of deliberately killing 168 men, women and children in an Oklahoma City federal building. Still, even before his infamous murder trial began, mainstream media fanned the flames of racial hatred and divisiveness, and judging from the opinions of many white people more than a decade later, it worked.
By the way, why was the entire O.J. trial televised when the nation only got snippets from the Oklahoma City bombing trial? White Americans nearly lost their minds after learning that the predominantly Black Los Angeles jury found O.J. innocent. They ran around all over the nation screaming that there was no justice in America. Interestingly, many of these same white Americans couldn’t understand why Blacks were furious after seeing the LAPD get away with beating and pummeling Rodney King, even though video footage clearly showed that these cops were beating a handcuffed (i.e. helpless) man.
You better believe that the image of several cops wailing on a handcuffed Black man is deeply burned into the psyche of every Black man in America. Black men know that if it happened to Rodney King, it could happen to any Black man in America. As some brothers pointed out, when it comes to racist, trigger-happy cops, it doesn’t matter if you’re Rodney King, B.B. King or Martin Luther King Jr.
The list of Black men, women and children brutalized and murdered by cops continues to grow and includes Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, Sean Bell, Eleanor Bumpers, Eric Garner, Philando Castille, Alton Sterling, Justin Sipp, Wendell Allen, Kim Groves, Levon Jones and Steven Hawkins, a Black man who was shot in the head by an off-duty cop just minutes after he was carjacked in the Lower Ninth Ward in 2000.
After seven cops fatally shot two unarmed Black men — Ronald Madison, a 40-year-old mentally disabled man, and James Brissette, 19 — on the Danziger Bridge in eastern New Orleans just days after Hurricane Katrina, a crowd of mostly white people and fellow cops cheered for them and held signs calling them “heroes” when they turned themselves in.
Then there was Robert Davis, a retired educator beaten by cops in the French Quarter in October 2005. His crime: Going out to buy a pack of cigarettes at night. Although police said he was publicly intoxicated, the 64-year-old man says he hadn’t had a drink in 25 years.
New Orleans resident Adolph Grimes III’s name was added to that list on New Year’s Day about 10 years ago. His only crime appears to have been sitting in a car that cops say resembled a vehicle they were looking for. He was shot 14 times, with 12 of those bullets entering his body from behind.
Although a number of cops have been tried, convicted and sentenced for the deaths of Henry Glover, James Brissette, Ronald Madison and Raymond Robair, many of those convicted still insist they did nothing wrong and fought boldly to have those convictions overturned.
That same day, 22-year-old Oscar Grant was shot in the head at point-blank range by an Oakland transit cop while lying face down after a fight on a train that involved a group of men. While some might argue that Grant got what he deserved for getting into a fight, I would point out that young white men all over America get into fights every day and live to tell their children and grandchildren about it.
Very few New Orleanians are comforted by the fact that the Feds said they investigated the incident because very little has been done when the Feds investigated other cases like those of Robert Davis in the French Quarter, Levon Jones, the Black college student from Georgia murdered by four white French Quarter bouncers while cops stood by and did nothing, and the Danziger Bridge incident.
When it comes to cops, it doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with a Black, white, brown or yellow officer. When someone is shot by cops, the men and women in blue close ranks quickly and honor a code of silence that serves them well but does very little to promote justice or community respect for law enforcement.
This article originally published in the September 17, 2018 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
