Police State?

By Mansfield B. Frazier

An article I wrote for The Daily Beast (which was featured on Cool Cleveland) regarding the brouhaha surrounding the arrest of Harvard professor Skip Gates snagged me an appearance on the Today Show last month… most likely my first and last appearance on that program. It wasn’t that I flubbed any lines or busted any verbs — I’m a pretty fair speaker and know the King’s English — it was what I said that will most likely preclude me from having another 15 seconds of fame.

The offer was originally extended because I’d somewhat taken Gates to task for mouthing off to an armed intruder in his home; sure, the guy also had a badge and a uniform, but he indeed was armed, and he certainly wasn’t invited — which makes him an intruder. To me, and most other blacks with any street smarts, the wise thing to do in this situation is get this dude out of your house with as little drama as possible. You don’t talk about his momma; guns can somehow go off in those kinds of tense confrontations, and guess whose version of the event will be believed in court? Even if a tinge of racism is detected in the officer’s tone or demeanor, that’s an issue that should be taken up with his superiors in the relative safety of the police station — not mano a mano inside a house with no witnesses.

So, evidently the producers of The Today Show thought — mistakenly — that I was one of those conservative black writers, akin to Thomas Sowell (a man I roundly despise), who earn their daily bread by exculpating whites from any responsibility for the racial tensions extant in America. So I can only imagine their surprise when I stated that there is a history in this country of negative and sometimes explosive interactions between minorities and police officers, and, with America being far and away the world leader in per capita incarceration of its own citizens, by that measure and definition we are living in a police state. Somehow I got the feeling that statements of that kind were not what I was brought on the show to give voice to. Oh well.

Now I should have perhaps narrowed my focus a bit and said that black and brown Americans (not all Americans) live in a police state, because, in spite of the fact members of the majority culture don’t care to admit it, there are still two Americas and there always has been. This fact needs to be part of the national dialogue we should be engaging in on the subject of race, or there always will remain two Americas.

Nonetheless, a video clip of my “police state” comments are now posted on some conservative websites and I am being castigated by the “America, love it or leave it” crowd as somehow unpatriotic. Sorry, but I’m from the “America, love it and change it” school of politics and journalism and I’m not about to go any place … why should I? This is my country too, it was built largely on free black — slave — labor.

The old guard reactionaries can keep the hate filled emails and phone calls coming, I’m not changing my number, I’m still listed in the phone book in Cleveland, and I’m going to continue to speak truth to power.

From Cool Cleveland contributor 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://www.frombehindthewall.com.

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