Elaine is a middle aged Caucasian woman who looks to be about 40 years old, who I sometimes speak to on my way home. She sometimes walks with a cane, and commutes to work from Harm County using mass transit to avoid the hefty parking costs down in Harm City.
This entire persecution complex, that it is only blacks who are mistreated by cops, is bullshit. And then there is the way blacks treat us regular white people on the street. One time I was in Charles Village when I saw these two black cops arresting this skinny white guy, who, granted, was probably using drugs. He also looked like he could be homeless. First off they went out of their way to inflict pain on him with the way they cuffed him. Then, after he was sitting on the curb they talked to him in such a cruel and demeaning way, like he was not even human. I remember feeling angry at the way they were talking to him, as if it were directed at me as well.
Generally speaking black women go out of their way to be mean, cruel and nasty to me. I don’t really get it. Do I look like Scarlet O’Hara to you? Where’s my plantation house? In a lot of ways being a white girl on foot with black women is like being behind the wheel and dealing with asshole white male drivers.
This white dude in an Acura who cut me off at the seven-eleven had been tailing me for a few blocks, got ahead right as he was coming up at the seven-eleven lot, which is where I was heading, so really galled me because it was all BS posturing—he was almost to the seven-eleven when he went around me, so unnecessarily rude BS.
Interestingly, a black lady tried calming me down when I was mouthing off—“Don't pay him no mind. Some people are just like that.”
One time—a long time ago—I was dropping my daughter off at day care in the snow and double-parked, just for a few minutes to get her inside. The driving was hazardous and I could have gotten stuck trying to park on the side. A white female cop ticketed me, was very rude and condescending, and kept me out in the street, in the way for a long time, perhaps twenty minutes instead of the three minutes I would have been there, just to lecture me and write a ticket.
I got to overhear from her radio that she was actually hunting for some guy exposing himself in the vicinity of the elementary school, where my daycare was. She thought it was more important to stop and waste her time with me than keep looking for him. Not sure if I called the precinct and complained or not—I'm sure I thought of it, whether I actually bothered at that point, I don't remember.
Does that sound like protect and serve?
Was I being singled out because I was white?
I had this black housemate, a woman, who was just a horrific person to live with. Her answer to any disagreement, no matter how small, was to get loud. I just could not deal with her. I can easily imagine that kind of attitude does not play well with the cops, many of whom, you have to figure, are on a power trip to begin with.
I had an African housemate for three years, from Cameroon, French-speaking. A few sentences into our phone conversation, I asked him where he was from and then launched into French, and the rest was history. He was surprised that I took him because he said he'd been being treated like a potential criminal or rapist in other housemate interviews.
He wouldn't touch African women, much less an African-American woman, because of how dominating they were. He preferred white women, even though he said they spooked him out a little in the dark, because we ‘glow.’
He was my best housemate ever. Super responsible first-born male with all of the expectations that brings in an African family, who was like a big brother to my daughters, whose dad was a big wig politically in Cameroon, who was named after his white German great grandfather.
I was on the light rail—which is tough enough for me because of walking with a cane—recently dealing with these young black kids who can apparently do no wrong in the eyes of the media. They are just so rude with no sense of propriety. The entire experience is rudeness incarnate, with most of the women and young people setting out their bag next to them so that you have to confront them about getting a seat. How is that supposed to play when every person’s default behavior is to set up or look for confrontation?
And then there are the exceptions. I was talking to an older black lady on the rail, who repeated this morning, in regards to the shitty commute, "Could have been worse."
Elaine is an excellent interview and I will try and get some more specific information from her about her experiences. She has some kind of professional office job downtown.
Interesting read. I was expecting a little harsher viewpoint. I do disagree with it being a persecution complex. I have no misconceptions that cops can mistreat anyone but what I realized the older I became was that it is different. At one point in my young adult life, I lived close to Belair rd and Erdman ave. I literally could count on both hand how many times I left my house and WAS NOT pulled over by the police. It made me hate driving. These stops resulted in 0 tickets and despite my continued questioning as to why I was being pulled over, I can count on one finger how many times a reason was actually given. I always had my registration up to date, always took care of my car, I don't smoke and have never had a warrant. So the reasons begin to thin out. I'm not even going to talk about actual treatment by them as that would take a book and based off the premise of the stop... well it could only go up from there. It wasn't until I got older and moved to nicer areas that I realized my daily meeting with cops should never have been routine and when it does happen and i request a supervisor I should actually get one. Just realizing how normal I felt it was when I was a kid shows me its very difficult to understand the flip side unless you experience it, because in my case I never even knew there was a flip side.
You know Oliver, I can count on two hands how many times I have been harassed by cops and on one hand how many times I've been given a reason. Roughly, this means you have been harassed by cops about 100 times more often than I have living in the same area, and honestly, I look a good deal more sketchy than you and have broken more laws.
Many whites will say, 'But yeah, James gets picked on by black guys more often than Oliver does so it evens out.
It does not even out.
You have been attacked and threatened by black males roughly at the same rate as I have, as their decision to be aggressive is not systemically driven but makes more subjective sense and is based on opportunity in an environmental context. On the other hand your mind bogglingly more frequent harassment at the hands of the cops represents The System attacking you—which is a literal order of magnitude worse than being attacked by an private individual. My recent post Jack Dynomite and Jilneequa is based on numerous real accounts from black coworkers.
For the readers who may not know, Oliver and I have been acquainted through boxing and have inhabited the same areas of Harm City over the same period, roughly 2002-2015. We have even had a cop follow us around in the snow while Oliver was driving me home from the gym—we supposed on suspicion of a drug deal—out in the County.
I have a theory that this harassment is all by design, as it feeds The System. Most urban black folks—who lack Oliver's insight, education, and experience in other environments—who grow up getting their asses kicked by cops just for being black, develop a deep resentment toward authority, laws, and the white community that the police seem to be serving. Of course, the police only serve The State, but impressions count. Terrorizing blacks causes tension between the races that justify the existence of The State as a peacemaker. There is also the fact that the black community generally refuses to help police out of a very reasonable suspicion of animosity. This cultivates crime in that community, thus limiting the upward and outward mobility of its members and keeping them close to the centers of State power in subsidized ghettos, a ready made mob to threaten sissy suburban whites in times of economic woe.
This has a terroristic effect on whites, who cannot even imagine the frequency of harassment by police against hard working young men, who actually make up about half of the black male population—about the same ratio as in white communities. However, due to the abuse by police, a much larger ratio of blacks practice passive aggression as a way to set up confrontations. For instance, yesterday I boarded a bus loaded with college students and working adults, all black. Nota criminal in the bunch. Exactly half of the seats were full. Every passenger had placed their hand bag of purse next to them, necessitating a confrontation or a submissive request on my part. Depending on my mood I might go right for confrontation by moving the objects, which always causes a rush to move it by the owner. However, on this particular day, one of the 34 people saw that I would need a seat and placed her bag on her lap—which is law in most mass transit systems—while most looked stone-faced forward, denying my very existence unless I brought attention to myself and set up a possible confrontation. This is a working crowd of students. On buses packed with youths I have often had to physically move people to sit down.
Such situations for a person like Elaine—a white female suburbanite—are nothing short of terrifying.
The primary ripple this causes among whites is an aversion to vigilante behavior. Yes, I wrote that. Most whites regard blacks—who have been made passively and actively defiant through law enforcement abuse—as a predatory species. I know about a dozen white women who have been raped, and have declined to tell male relatives for fear that they will avenge them and end up in prison as the outnumbered victim of blacks.
Oliver, I see this as a cycle of cultivated fear that preys on us all for the benefit of The State. Even when the white cop who makes a miscalculation when dealing with a defiant criminal gets persecuted by the press, he is still serving the larger State, the Federal police, to whom local police powers are in the process of aggregating to due to these local events.
And I have a bone to pick with you young man. When you don't show up for a training session, and do not inform me by phone, the first thing that crosses my mind is that your are getting a shoe polish shampoo from a squad of Baltimore's finest. So, the next time you reach for your sweats to come to the gym and some vixen drags you back into bed, at least give me a text such as, "Hey James, coming up for air, see you tomorrow."
I'll post this as an article and would like your commentary.
Sounds so dangerous!
Stop the hate! Segregate!
Although I agree that FedGov stirs the hate up.
I'm going to collect your slogans one day and post them together.