Sirens
FALL 2018
It’s well past magic hour and I have to violate my unspoken rule against driving at night. I don’t have a vision problem, but the lack of light makes it harder to evade any cop cars lying in wait.
I leave the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, drive east on Wilshire Boulevard, and cross into Los Angeles proper. City lights becoming flashing lights, and my heart seizes up. The culprit… the flickering blue and red of a police SUV.
A traffic stop is going down on the other side of the median. An I’m-late-for-my-yoga-class look of annoyance is on the driver’s face—a white woman—as the lead officer, with a reassuring grin, returns her license and registration. So it’s routine. Nothing for her to worry about.
Yet my stomach is in knots, and I’ve done nothing wrong.
A few blocks later, the rearview mirror spikes bright. Those unmistakable, high-mounted xenon beams punch inside my car. The cop SUV is close enough to instigate apprehension; no time to take a detour or pretend to park at a meter. A quick mental inventory:
License? Registration? Insurance?
Check, check, check.
My speedometer stays stuck at 33 as he runs my plates—then the cop veers off, and I’m free to breathe easy. I ask myself a simple, but truly silly question: Do whites fear death when the police lights shine?
“Silly” because I know the answer.
SUMMER 1978
Clint Eastwood’s first renegade cop flick is on the black-and-white Magnavox in the den. My brothers and I watch Eastwood foil a bank robbery. In the aftermath, he strolls up to the surviving Black perp, who’s lying on his back and bleeding out, pretty much no threat. Aiming a .44 Magnum square in the brother’s face, Eastwood taunts him with a quick lick of dialogue. This exchange is subsequently launched into the pop culture stratosphere. You know the one I mean. Did I fire six shots or only five? … Well, do ya feel lucky, punk?
The helpless, hapless, unarmed Black man surrenders, but to service the robber’s curiosity Eastwood’s Callahan pulls the trigger anyway. With an ironic wink, the perp is spared death; the gun was spent. This “joke” is funny to Callahan (and maybe to Eastwood, too). I don’t laugh. I can’t laugh. I cringe. Mainstream culture, however, cherishes that moment… until Rodney King’s mild run-in with LAPD. (Had it happened today, he’d have been shot sixteen times, instead.)
As a child, I didn’t speculate on Callahan’s insolent callousness. Later, when I work in the motion picture industry, I will ask: How many non-whites around the globe, over multiple generations, had this signature image of the perennially criminalized, incessantly dehumanized, and utterly emasculated Black man burned into their psyche? And what role did this four-minute snippet play in underlining an indelible belief that this is how American Blacks should be treated? Deserved to be treated? Are required to be treated?
OCTOBER 2018
Sarah Koenig’s true crime podcast “Serial” returns for a third season. I listen at night before going to bed. The horrors it unearths fuel my insomnia, and conjure eyes-wide-awake nightmares. Koenig takes a deep dive into the Cuyahoga County criminal courts in downtown Cleveland, the seat of Northeast Ohio’s Anti-Nigger Machine.
