In the Black Baptist tradition in which I was raised — although I now operate on a spiritual level — a “Come to Jesus” moment is an opportunity for a sinner to wash their sins away by admitting them to the Lord and asking His forgiveness.
By my estimate this type of confession has about a 50-50 chance of working, due primarily to insincerity, but also due to the feeling of some sinners that they can go right back to sinning, and again re-up on forgiveness next week.
However, God eventually gets tired of sinners playing that re-up shit over and over and at some point reins down retribution, usually on an individual level — but if the Old Testament is to be taken literally, he sometimes destroys entire cities, and once even the whole world with a flood.
Which brings me to President Obama’s upcoming trip to Cleveland next Wednesday for a speech at the City Club. Since I don’t have the power of prescience (nor am I in possession of a crystal ball) and can’t predict what our Commander-in-Chief might say, I nonetheless wish he would use his bully pulpit for a “Come to Jesus” moment for police … both in Cleveland and across the country. The dismantling of the city of Ferguson should serve as a clear warning of the awesome power the president wields via his Department of Justice … if he has the willingness to use it.
If I were the president I would start off with a brief history of modern policing, and how, if law enforcement in this country had not strayed so far away from the nine principles of policing set forth by Robert Peel in England in 1829, we wouldn’t find ourselves in the confrontational mess we’re currently in.
From there I would touch on how the first police forces in America were formed in large part as a response to the violence being perpetrated by recent Irish immigrants escaping the potato famine of the 1840s, but arriving on these shores penniless. Nonetheless, within a generation they came to dominate the ranks of police (as well as fire) forces in many Eastern cities … something that still exists today.
But the story of policing in America doesn’t turn real ugly until Emancipation, after which Southern police departments and the Ku Klux Klan became one. To keep a race of people enslaved you first have to despise them, and that thinking is still far too prevalent today, as white frat boys still joyfully sing about hanging “niggers from trees.”
Perhaps then I would address the myth that if a black man simply peacefully submits to the authority of a white cop when pulled over, everything will work out just fine. The fact is, too many black men — even those firmly in the middle class, and even many black police officers — know that to be a lie (and a damnable one at that), having themselves been victims of disrespect, and sometimes far worse at the hands of white cops.
From there I would address another coded and loaded term: Black-on-black crime. White cops like to throw this out to exculpate their illegal actions by rhetorically asking why blacks are not concerned with this phenomenon. The fact is, blacks are concerned, but the truth is, all crime is primarily race-on-race, be it black-on-black or white-on-white … except when it comes to killings by cops, then it’s overwhelmingly white-on-black.
And if deaths are of such great concern to whites, why don’t they mention the overdose epidemic, which primarily affects the white community, and causes twice as many deaths as black gun violence.
With that said, I would certainly touch on the issue of what appears to be an increase of black self-genocide; too many young black males are responding to the toxic brew of too many guns in black communities, unstable upbringings, poverty and drug abuse to kill each other at an alarming rate. And I would call on the black middle class to assist in addressing this critical issue.
But, truth be told, the number of bad actors in the black community aligns pretty closely with the number of white rouge cops on police forces across the country. The problem is, white cops look at blacks and don’t see the person, and they only see danger, lumping all blacks together. Conversely, blacks tend to see all white cops as oppressors. This is the serious disconnect — the distrust that has to be healed.
However, many in law enforcement dispute the fact that anything is wrong with the status quo in policing in America; nonetheless too many dead bodies — like those of Tamir Rice, and the homeless man in Washington State who threw rocks at the police and was shot multiple times — prove otherwise. And it’s hard to fix a problem when those that have it simply deny its existence.
But I do believe President Obama could at some point in a speech offer the mayors of cities like Cleveland the opportunity to “Come to Jesus” … and if they decline and refuse to change the ways in which their police departments operate, he should make it clear there’s going to be hell to pay … and that his Department of Justice knows how to extract a punishing price for recalcitrance.
Can I get an “Amen”?
[Photo: Vinoth Chandar]
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.