Quote of the Day (James Baldwin, on White Police Amid ‘The Revolution Now Occurring in the World’)

“The white policeman, standing on a Harlem street corner, finds himself at the very center of the revolution now occurring in the world. He is not prepared for it -- naturally, nobody is -- and, what is possibly much more to the point, he is exposed, as few white people are, to the anguish of the black people around him. Even if he is gifted with the merest mustard grain of imagination, something must seep in. He cannot avoid observing that some of the children, in spite of their color, remind him of children he has known and loved, perhaps even of his own children. He knows that he certainly does not want his children living this way. He can retreat from his uneasiness in only one direction: into a callousness which very shortly becomes second nature. He becomes more callous, the population becomes more hostile, the situation grows more tense, and the police force is increased. One day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up. Before the dust has settled or the blood congealed, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened. What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men.”—African-American novelist and essayist James Baldwin (1924-1987), “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” originally published in Esquire, July 1960, reprinted in Nobody Knows My Name (1960)

Psychologically wounded himself by ongoing racism, James Baldwin described the situation facing America 60 years ago in words that themselves continue to stab with a shock of recognition. It certainly describes the cycle of mutual fear and unrest, the “match in the powder keg,” the blow-up, and the demands ‘to know what happened” that we are now seeing. 

True, so much has changed in American life—and including the relative prospects of African-Americans—in the years since in terms of voting rights and equality of opportunity. But the sense of police as an occupying force in African-American communities remains visceral, as seen this past week in the swelling unrest in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minnesota.

“Occupying force” may take on a whole new level of meaning with President Trump’s recent threats that, if local officials didn’t “dominate the streets,” the federal government would step in. It all has the whiff of martial law.