What’s all the fuss about?

I hope that most of you will never have to feel what it’s like to be at the mercy of men with guns who feel like they’re on a different side than you are. I hope you never feel the powerlessness.

I’m fortunate and I’m privileged. I’ve never been charged with a crime, but I have been arrested 3 times in my life.

Even when I wasn’t arrested my interactions with police have often been extremely unpleasant for no apparent reason.

After being followed off and on for the better part of 20 minutes, I’ve had police approach me with guns drawn over a traffic stop in which I was exceeding the speed limit by 7 mph because my car was too nice and I was dropping off my very white girlfriend in a very white neighborhood.

On another occasion I was cuffed and pressed up against a police car and searched. When the cop felt my back pockets he grabbed my butt and whispered “nice patoot” in my ear. His joke, under the circumstances, was not funny. This incident was brought to you by my failure to come to a complete stop at a stop sign when exiting a parking lot.

I watched as the police nearly broke my friend’s arm in an arrest that started with a ticket for spitting on the sidewalk. My friend’s action that provoked such a violent response was asking for the cop’s badge number. I have bailed friends out of jail in four cities.

But the threat of violence from the police isn’t the worst part. I probably should have been more scared for my safety in some of those moments but the thing that was most frightening, the thing that still provokes trauma when I see a police car in my rear view mirror is not the guns or the batons. It’s the knowledge that the police have the power to utterly destroy my life. They have the ability to take away my freedom on a whim.

The night I spent in jail was the most degrading thing I’ve ever experienced. The sheriff’s deputies went out of their way to not acknowledge our humanity. Not only did they fail to answer questions, they failed to even acknowledge that a question had been asked. There were no clocks so the passing of time was indefinite. When we weren’t being ignored, we were being herded like livestock. They moved me from one cell to another every couple of hours, preventing me from getting comfortable and precluding the idea that I might get any sleep that night. This is not how you should treat any human beings, much less human beings that haven’t even been charged with a crime.

For a lot of people, the incarceration is just the beginning. If I weren’t so fortunate, even after regaining my freedom I could end up stuck with a criminal record that might be with me for the rest of my life. It could stifle opportunities for jobs, professional licenses, loans, credit cards, and housing.

That fear is where my trauma lives. My nightmares are not dreams of monsters or ghosts. When I wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night it’s because I’ve just had a vivid and horrifying dream of being arrested and having my happy and successful life stripped away from me.

I can’t imagine a scarier thought and yet that is a thought that I’m reminded of every time I encounter police out in the world. I should not fear them. They are meant to be my protectors.

Those of you who know me know that I have not always obeyed the law, but you also likely know that I’m not a threat to anyone. There is no good reason why I should feel like the police are there to do anything other than protect me.

I would be willing to bet that most of you have never seen me lose my temper or so much as yell at anyone in anger. The fact that so many police officers throughout my life could look at me and see a threat is evidence of just how broken our system is.

I wish I could feel the way many of my white friends do about the police. That they’re on our side. That their presence is reassuring rather than traumatic but unfortunately that’s not a luxury I have.

And realize when I say all this that I’m probably one of the most privileged black people you know. I don’t look black to most people. I’m well educated and well-spoken and levelheaded. I know how to manage bureaucracy and deescalate situations. I feel fluent and comfortable in most white settings.

And despite all that privilege, this is the reality that I live with vis-à-vis the police. I’m writing this so that hopefully some of you who don’t have the same relationship with the police start to understand where some of this anger in the streets is coming from.

I understand that you’re frustrated about the looting. So am I. I have a business in San Francisco and a non-profit in Oakland, both of which have been broken into in the past and both of which I worry about in the riots. But those are buildings and as much as I don’t want them to be harmed, I’m much more concerned for the communities that have been utterly ravaged by decades of heavy-handed racist policing.

In most cases the acts of violence and vandalism that are occurring right now are entirely separate from the protests. But when you see the price that society is paying, I want you to remember that millions of Americans who are good people and not deserving of any law enforcement attention, live in a reality in which there are armed men with badges walking the streets who have the power to beat us, kill us, and take away our freedoms without any repercussions and many of those men view us as their enemies rather than their constituents.

This is about more than the police murdering black people over and over again. It’s also about police harassing and arresting us without good reason. Searching us. Pointing guns at us. Beating us. And taking our freedom away from us. This is what it feels like to be black in America and this is what all the fuss is about.