I think it was about 10 days ago. I think it was just off Whiteoak Road somewhere in Kentucky. I had just eaten a breakfast sandwich at a lonely convenience store, and was tightening up some of the straps on my bike, getting ready to go. Two guys outside the store were getting ready to get ready to hurt each other. One was a bulky guy with a trimmed beard. The other was a scrawny guy with a scraggly beard and a pony tail. The bulky guy had told the scrawny guy he didn’t want to see him in this area.
“I told you 3 days ago I don’t want to see you around here.”
The scrawny guy denied that conversation ever happened.
There was some shoving. A knife was mentioned. I noticed the bulky guy had a pistol holstered.
Someone stormed out of the store and said he called the police. And suddenly there was a change in the psychic weather. The psychic winds were still howling, the rain was still falling, but the thunderstorms ceased. The two men separated. The two men waited.
This is how authority works when it works. I believe both men thought they were standing on the moral high ground. And I think both men trusted the cops to sort it out fairly. It’s kind of a miracle, that trust. No one really knows the formula for legitimacy. We just know that that ephemeral quality is the difference between a police force and an occupying force.
Both men were white.
One of the remnants of slavery is that White people and Black people often experience policing differently. Most White people experience authority the way the two men experience it at that convenience store, as part of the social contract. But Black people have a long history of incidents like that of George Floyd, who was murdered two years ago by a police officer while other authorities watched. It’s a history that is hard to grasp if authority has always been on your side, protecting you, saving you, refereeing for you.
I don’t know how you bridge that gap. The blue and white flags I see everywhere I go are banners of an authority that works for them. They reflect a deep emotional tie to that sense of security. Their sense of their place in the world depends on believing in that authority.
In 1850, Congress passed The Fugitive Slave Act, creating a fine of $1,000 against any law enforcement official who did not arrest accused runaways. Habeas Corpus did not apply. The accused could not testify in their own defense. Commissioners ruling on these cases were rewarded $10.00 for guilty verdicts, and only $5.00 for non guilty verdicts.
Throughout the antebellum period, slave owners in the south were the law. They could whip or hang anyone who promoted anti slavery positions. These extralegal traditions revived themselves in the terrorism of the Jim Crow period after Reconstruction withered away. And we continue to see those remnants in the data that show Blacks are more likely to be stopped and frisked than Whites; and they are likely to be sentenced to longer time than Whites —for the same crime.
But there’s something deeper than data going on. Our attitudes about crime and criminals have hardened over the years, since the days when Johnny Cash could sing to inmates at Fulsom Prison. We jail more people now than we did then, and we don’t think of them as humans who have just made some bad decisions. We’ve dehumanized them. But that’s another story.
Law— and some random pics
It would be hard to pick a favorite photo! Those cows are pretty awesome! (o: Very much enjoyed this entry. Thanks for making us think!!!
Thank you, David. It will be nice for a few of us to Zoom with you this upcoming Sunday afternoon. I appreciate your thoughts and photos. ~Lee