Where is a Black Human Safe in America?

Not in your home , not in a park

Not lying in a street with your hands up in the air

Not in a car, not in Grandma’s backyard

An innocent cellphone in your hand

You are not safe anywhere!

Not in a hallway, not in a store

not biking through a parking lot

Not at the rink, not as a teenager

just riding shotgun in a car

You are not safe anyhow!

When Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012, I still lived in Belgium. I remember reading about the teenager, killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer, and discussing it with friends (mostly Africans). There were those who thought that somehow, the teenager was partly to blame, pointing to reports that he had drugs in his system, that he dressed like “he was up to no good,” that he was no saint (and had been suspended from school). There were those, happily, on the other side of the debate arguing that a teenager in a hoodie should never be the target of a gun toting, trigger happy, overzealous have-a-go hero wannabe. While the latter group did not hold Trayvon accountable and wanted to see his killer brought to justice, there was an unwillingness to accept that racism was the motive behind the murder. The US had a black president, after all, while we lived in Turnhout where none of our children had ever been taught by a black teacher and the first (and only) African cab driver was celebrated. We were all witnesses to the daily big and small humiliations of black people in Belgium that we were sure blacks in America would never be confronted with. In 2008, the Afro-Belgian Wouter Van Bellingen, then alderman and registrar in his city of Sint-Niklaas had three couples cancel their weddings because they did not want to be married by a black man (and have him in their pictures). “That’d never happen in America,” we said. We all bought into the idea of an America that had entered a post-racial phase.

What both sides of that long ago Trayvon Martin debate had in common was that we were far removed from the United States and the reality of the extent of intentional violence meted out on black bodies. By the time Stephon Clark was killed in his grandmother’s backyard because the police thought the cell phone in his hand was a weapon, his name joined the long list of black victims of police brutality. Six days later, a 21 year old white man with a loaded handgun, wearing body armor, and carrying a bag of allegedly stolen SWAT equipment was arrested (not shot at, not killed) by Chicago police at a train station. Clark’s March 18th murder at the hands of Sacramento cops is an unfortunate reminder that there are huge racial disparities in how American police use force.

According to Georgetown University professor and former federal prosecutor, Paul Butler,”People think that black men are violent and dangerous…What the law does is respond to that fear by trying to contain the threat. The issue is always, ‘Did the police act reasonably?’ And in all these documented cases, the police did not. Black humans, understandably, feel more at risk from the police than their white peers. “After the Stoneman Douglas shooting, Trump’s proposal for more cops at schools was met with opposition from particularly black students who feared that they would be more at risk from the cops than from an external threat.

With the 2013 founding of the Black Lives Matter movement, police violence against black people in the US has begun to face a level of scrutiny it had not faced before. This heightened scrutiny has not been without results. While convictions are rare, there have been settlements for the families of victims in some cases. The ultimate victory, however, will come when “the cop is your friend” rings true for everyone in the United States regardless of race. The triumph will not just be for black people alone, but for the entire nation. With recent events, however, the most recent being the forceful restraining of a ten year old black boy by cops in Athens, Ga.,(July 24, 2018) I am not holding my breath.