The Talk

After the police shootings of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice (and the litany of other African American men and boys and girls too), white folks began to discover that the parents of African American boys gave their sons “the talk” (the literature is primarily about boys, though it should be about girls too). “The talk” instructs young black men how to behave if confronted by a police officer: do not run; do not make eye contact; be polite; keep your hands in plain view; no sudden movements, and so on.

But what happens if this advice—the advice to be passive and deferential—is not simply disenfranchising; is not even useless, but is actually dangerous? What if the advice accepts the loss of rights that white citizens enjoy when confronted by the police; if it makes no difference to the police what people do if the officer has decided to engage in an investigatory stop; and if the officer is trained to look for “body language” signs indicative of guilt, many of which are exactly the signs of angry passivity that African Americans are likely to display when they know they are being subjected to an investigatory stop and at the same time try to behave in a deferential way?

The talk is disenfranchising precisely because of the passivity it preaches. For the most part, we have the right to ignore the police and “go about our business.” Only if the police have some articulable reason to suspect that we might be engaged in criminal activity may they interfere with us. And even if they can interfere, the scope of their interference is generally limited. Having stopped us for a traffic offense, the officer cannot search the car for without our permission unless she has some level of suspicion that drugs could be found in the car; having issued the citation, the officer cannot extend the search if the civilian declines to consent; and having posed questions to the suspect, the officer cannot force him to speak should he assert his right to silence. All these rights to refuse to comply are denied by “the talk” which preaches respectful compliance with the police.

More fundamentally, for many people, their primary objective is to avoid the police. And the reason to avoid the police is that the defense mechanisms preached by the talk do not matter if the police have decided to engage in an investigatory encounter. The difference between investigatory and other encounters was first articulated in Terry v. Ohio and the two other stop-and-frisk cases decided the same day, Sibron and Peters. All three cases recognize that the sort of aggressive investigatory use of stops and frisks can be used as an instrument of domination. More fundamentally, Charles Epp and his co-authors have revealed that at least one police department deliberate plans to engage in separate types of traffic stop, one for safety, another investigatory, and targets minorities for investigatory stops. If the police have already prejudged the scope of their search, there is little the subjects of the search can do (or, more to the point, feel they can do.) The talk is useless for avoiding the harms inflicted by investigatory encounters. The only real solution is avoidance.

Worse, even if the police have not prejudged the type of search, certain forms of deferential behavior may convince a police officer that the suspect is dissimulating. Richard Leo has described the police interrogation as a two-step process, in which the first step is directed towards the suspect’s body language, to determine whether they are telling the truth; and if the officer perceives the offender is lying, the second step is geared towards getting the offender to comply and cooperate by confessing to the crime. One feature Leo identifies as indicating guilt during the first stage is a failure to maintain eye-contact: precisely the sort of deferential conduct promoted by “the talk.” Deference may appear evasive, especially if it is accompanied by barely concealed frustration at having to undergo a discriminatory, investigatory stop.

All this is to recognize the truth in Ta-Nehesi Coates’ claim that “Each time a police officer engages us, death, injury, maiming is possible. It is not enough to say that this is true of anyone or more true of criminals.” Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me 131 (2015). It is particularly true for African Americans, guilty or innocent, and even those of us who are best drilled in deference and compliance—in giving up our standing as an equal citizen in order to avoid the brute force of policing—may simply confirm the worst suspicions of the investigating officer.