On not talking the Talk

I'm fascinated by police encounters with the public. As the Court in Terry v. Ohio taught us, these encounters come in all shapes and sizes. Quite often, these encounters result in low-level discipline even if they do not result in an arrest: what the *Terry* Court called "harassment." Some turn deadly. As a result, for many members of the public, the encounter, even if just a stare from a police officer in a high-crime neighborhood, gives rise to the fear and deference that comes with trying to avoid or placate the powerful.

I recently reviewed Josephine Ross's article, What the #Metoo Campaign Teaches About Stop and Frisk, ___ Idaho L. Rev. ___ (2018), discussing why Eric Garner did not run. Eric Garner, Ross points out, stood his ground, and said "Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I'm tired of it. It stops today…Please just leave me alone." Ross revels that Garner had been the victim of the sort of physically intrusive touching envisaged by the Terry Court as a serious aspect of the stop-and-frisk. Garner, as Ross notes, had previously suffered "a 'cavity search [in which the officer was] . . . digging his fingers in my rectum in the middle of the street." Garner experienced this as a loss of self respect: "the injuries I received was to my manhood"

Garner's reaction to the officer was that of a victim of what felt to him like a sexual assault. Garner likely knew "the Talk": he knew he was in a vulnerable position and was supposed to show deference to the police. Instead he decided to assert his duty to respect himself and his right to be treated with respect: to act, and to be acted towards, as a fellow human being, someone with cares and interests in maintaining his dignity.

In too many aspects of our society, race work is internalized, by the dominant and the subordinated, as servitude work. People like Eric Garner are expected to perform a sort self-abnegation undermining self-respect to mollify some police officer so as to convince the officer to respond calmly and civilly. This places many of us in a difficult position: enacting servitude has moral and political consequences both individually and collectively

If we are to avoid authoritarian government—on the local or on the national level—we must have equal standing; quite literally, perhaps. The civic republican idea of this non-dominative or anti-subordinating version of equal standing is "the ability to look each other in the eye." The sort of response anticipated by the Talk, and demanded by one policing notion of "respect" quite literally precludes this sort of eye-to-eye interaction, treating these self-respecting looks as disobedient stares and a form of resistance. Too much of the history of people of color in this country is one of not making eye contact, of crossing streets and embodying deference as a form of second-class citizenship. Policing, through its demands for compliance and deference on pain of being treated as resistant, is not a neutral activity, responding to crime, but a political activity, creating citizenship status through the ways the police choose if, and when, and whom, and how to encounter people on the street.