A few Saturdays ago I sat in an area
movie theater clutching my stomach as the film “Fruitvale Station” moved to its
conclusion. With sudden impact, the vulnerability of young black men choked me,
a high school teacher who has seen many young men removed from the student body
for acts that were disruptive, threatening, or violent – or were perceived to
be.
“Fruitvale” recounts the early hours of New
Year’s Day 1999 in Oakland, Calif., when 22-year-old African-American Oscar Grant
and his friends were ordered off a subway train after a fracas in which they were
involved but did not initiate, as the filmmaker has depicted it. Even knowing
how the film would end, I found myself hoping one of the strangers on that subway
train would vouch for Oscar, give him their seat, speak up for him, hide him,
do something to help him elude the transit police, to get back to his family,
to enable his desire for a life do-over.
Detained by the police in the subway station,
the young men put up a vehement verbal resistance, declaring their innocence
and their rights, and cursing the police for flagrantly strong-arming them. Forced
to lie face down on the station floor, Oscar was shot in the back by one of the
officers. Hours later, he died at the hospital.
Filmmaker and director Ryan Coogler does not
show what happened in the weeks that
followed those horrible hours, the reaction of Oscar’s little girl, the community’s
protests, the trial of the transit officer who said he had meant to engage his taser
gun, and who was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, not murder.
Coogler wants America to see, really see, Oscar
Grant, and perhaps to begin seeing other young black men.
The film made it easy to pull for Oscar,
depicted as a young man with a natural capacity for random acts of kindness. Spliced
into the good, however, were a criminal record and a capacity for doing whatever
it took to survive, including dealing drugs.
Yet, viewed through Coogler’s
eyes, Oscar’s hard outer layer was not nearly as durable as his gentle core.
Why didn’t the people on the subway train see
his core? Why didn’t the police? How did they size him up, and how quickly?
Those nerve-wracking subway scenes took me back
to a rush-hour experience on D.C.’s Metrorail a few weeks earlier, a moment that
left me skeptical
about black people’s commitment to the “it takes a village” wisdom. Had black
people in America come to see – as others had -- every young black man in the
public space as threatening? At what point had we decided that they are not our
business? And why had we?
The Tuesday before the George Zimmerman
verdict, a young African-American man, about 16, boarded an evening rush-hour train
blasting the music on his Mp3 player. Some passengers exchanged looks of
aggravation and disgust. One well-suited black man looked as if he wanted to say
something. A briefcase-carrying black man put in his earphones and stared at
the floor. The kind-faced black man across the aisle smiled uncomfortably. The
sick-and-tired-of-it woman next to me said Metro police were never around when
you needed them.
But what if they had been? What if police had
escorted the young man off the train? Sure,
we all would have breathed a sigh of relief, but would we also have felt sorry for
this boy? Feared for him?
Maybe these riders didn’t want to risk a
confrontation. Whichever tone one takes in addressing a stranger in such a
situation, the fear of being shot is real, given the frequency of gun violence
in America.
I
forced myself to give the teen the benefit of the doubt. Catching his eye, I
pointed to my ear and said, “Your music is loud. Could you turn it down, please?”
He turned it down -- slightly.
Five stops from the end of the line, he got
off. I was frustrated. All the talk about taking back our communities and saving
our black boys, and all we could do was sit seething, shutting out the noise,
and wishing for the police?
The young man’s lack of responsibility might
have cost him a run-in with law enforcement, or his life. However, our silence
might have cost him a sense of belonging to a larger community and a lesson in
self-discipline.
As we attempt to vindicate the unjust loss of our children, undoubtedly
we will teach the children still with us to be more thoughtful in guarding
their freedom and their lives. Moreover, maybe it’s time we adults refresh our
view of the young black men we encounter in public, to balance our fear with
our hope, to talk to them, to try and see their core.
###
No comments:
Post a Comment