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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The woman at the YMCA might have been an aberrant extreme, but she is nevertheless indicative of an insensitivity, or maybe it's helplessness, that manifests itself among white New Yorkers as silence about police brutality at a time when white understanding and activism is crucial. A few brave white citizens raised their voices early, such as New York Civil Liberties Union director Norman Siegel and public advocate Mark Green, and lately they have been joined by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Hillary Clinton, Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and, hesitantly, City Council Speaker Peter Vallone. Whites were well represented at the protests against the Diallo verdict -- but it was the first time New York saw a sizable white turnout on the issue.
So far the only significant and sustained response has been from young white students, several hundred of whom walked out of schools in Brooklyn and Manhattan and marched across the Brooklyn Bridge on March 3, a week after the verdict in the Diallo shooting. Wednesday, 41 days after the verdict, nearly 1,000 junior high, high school and college students participated in a walk-out, rally and march to City Hall protesting police violence. Eighteen students were arrested after they blocked rush-hour traffic on the bridge.
To this day, most of New York's white elected officials, along with religious leaders, heads of community-based nonprofits, and both of New York's Democratic senators, Charles Schumer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, have been silent about the brutality crisis within the NYPD. Surely their voices would be raised if their constituents, average New Yorkers, demanded that they speak out.
It's crucial that they do. Giuliani and his minions have made it clear that they don't care what black and Latino people experience, perceive or think about police misconduct. He knows that we did not vote for him for mayor and will not send him to the Senate, and he has long since written us off. What he does care about are white residents, whose votes elected him mayor and whose votes, or silence in the face of the current crisis, will help him reach the Senate as the man who saved New York from crime.
Let's be clear about the fact that many people of color live in high-crime neighborhoods and need police services, too. But it is not rhetoric or hyperbole when I say that nowadays I am more fearful of the police than of potential criminals, since it is the police -- who my taxes finance and from whom I should have a reasonable expectation of protection -- who have been given a green light to shoot and kill citizens at will, whether it is an unarmed Amadou Diallo in the vestibule of his building, or Patrick Dorismond saying no to drugs on a city street. We're already paying the police with our tax dollars, must we now pay them with our civil rights as well?
Last weekend I had dinner with my friend Anya. I gave her a button and implored her to wear it. It is important that white residents disturbed and disgusted by police brutality and the mayor's insensitive, maniacal, blame-the-victim response to it identify themselves in some way. Perhaps the first step is wearing a button. The next step is raising voices and uniting with others to take action. The alternative is that residents of New York continue to be divided into warring camps defined by Giuliani as those who support the police uncritically on one side, those who don't on the other.
As it stands now, those camps are overwhelmingly segregated by race. Those who consciously or unconsciously partake of white privilege stand on one side; those who cannot and those few whites who will not, on the other. The Southern civil rights movement was in full swing before white citizens, often radicalized by televised images of black people being assaulted by police dogs, members of the Ku Klux Klan, Southern sheriffs and water cannons, raised their voices and put their bodies on the line for African-Americans' struggle for equal justice and against white privilege.
I'd like to think that these highly publicized police murders, not only in New York but all over the country, might have the same effect and spark a movement against police brutality and for social justice for all Americans.
It is time for white New Yorkers to cross over. If they don't, the tension will escalate, the killing of unarmed men will continue and this city will be destroyed, all of us burned in the fire next time.
