Police drag 65-year-old woman out of her car. Guess what race she is ...

[EffieBlack]

20. Why were several police officers there in the first place?

I once heard a very high official in the Obama Administration, an African-American man, talk about being stopped by police when he was 16 and had just started driving.

He tried to remember everything his mother had told him to do in these situations, but he was so frightened he kept messing up. He said the blood was pounding so loudly in his ears that he had trouble hearing the cop and his hands were shaking so much, he was very slow at following his orders. He kept asking the cop to repeat himself, which the cop took as being uncooperative and a wiseass.

The cop got more and more agitated and started yelling at him, which, of course, made him even more nervous and shaky. The cop lost his temper and ordered him out of the car. He was so terrified at that point that he just froze. Then the cop pulled his gun and ordered him out again, telling him he had better be out in five seconds or there’d be hell to pay.

Just then, another police car pulled up and - thank God - one of men in that car was a community policing officer who was one of this kid’s basketball coaches. He saw the look of confusion and terror on the kid’s face, how red-faced the cop was and immediately what was going on. He calmly stepped between the angry cop and the car and de-escalated the situation on the spot.

My friend said that he still shudders when he thinks about that incident and how it could have turned out had his coach not shown up.

It also helps to demonstrate why the admonishments that people “should have just done what the police told them” and “he wasn’t following orders so she was committing a crime” are so misplaced and, frankly, tone-deaf. Such expectations might be fine for whites people for whom being beaten or shot by a police officer isn’t anywhere on their radar. But if you step into the skin of an African American and consider what this looks and feels like to them, it’s not so simple.

“Cooperation” for a 65-year old white woman probably looks very different than it does for her black counterpart. Refusing to get out of the car may, to a white woman, be defiance and a crime. To a black woman, it may be a survival instinct.

Please take into account the abject, visceral terror that flashing blue lights and a police officer barking orders can trigger in an African American before judging their non-violent reactions as a criminal act that deserves further abuse.