Cries of Rage, Hope and Action

Days of Anxiety, Discontent and Rage

by Jess Womack

Editor’s Introduction

There are two critical initial conditions to a successful negotiation. The first requirement is trust. In the absence of trust, no one feels free to speak the truth. Once trust is established, the second requirement is to listen to your negotiation partner, asking open-ended questions to fill out the story they want to tell.

In the service of both necessary requirements for the resolution of any conflict by way of peaceful negotiation, we will be printing the experiences and cries of rage from our Black friends, acquaintances, and readers. If you want a platform, we offer you ours. We not only post our articles to our blog, but send them out to our 6,000 newsletter recipients. Just drop me a line with your proposal (or completed article) at victoria@shenegotiates.com.

This week we bring you wisdom from a life lived from the Jim Crow South to the Days of Rage the country is now experiencing. The author, Jess Womack, describes his experience, his anguish, and his hope in the next generation below.

I have provided only the titles and photos.

Days of Anxiety, Discontent and Rage

by Jess Womack

As it is with many Americans, the entire Trump presidency has caused me ongoing anxiety and discontent punctuated by episodic occasions of anger and rage.

The Dry Tinder

The events of the last ten days ripped away the psychic membrane that holds my anxiety, anger and rage in check. It began with that infamous 30 second video of a young white woman in Central Park delivering an Oscar-worthy performance as she screamed into her cell phone, “an African-American man is threatening me.”

I am old and black enough to recall the murder of Emmet Till in 1955, a fourteen-year-old boy who was lynched for far less than a threat. That the Central Park call did not result in the murder of the black bird-watcher provided relief only for the survivor.

He was lucky. George Floyd was not.

the match

By Wednesday, the 27th, my anger turned to disgust and rage. Like millions of others, I repeatedly watched the video of George Floyd’s death. A black man, a human being, who lay on the ground begging to live had his life slowly, painfully and indifferently taken by a police officer, a police force and a justice system that chronically fails to acknowledge the humanity of black people.

Watching Mr. Floyd’s agonizing death was so brutalizing and shocking that it deadened my senses so that even repeated viewings failed to reveal the fine details I later saw in a still color photograph. That photograph showed Derek Chauvin, hands in his pockets, staring absently into space as if viewing a sunset from his patio, his freshly cut lawn, or the neighbors’ flowers. I was witness to one human being casually disregarding the humanity of another.

Another photograph from more than 50 years ago is seared in my memory. It was taken during the disturbances in Baltimore following Dr. King’s death, and my recollection of its image hurts as much today as it did then. The black and white photograph showed a white policeman kneeling over the dead, blood stained dress and body of a teenage black girl. His hands wielded a pump shotgun; his teeth clinched a cigar; the corners of his mouth showed a satisfied smile. It was 1968 and he knelt over that black child’s bloodied body with the satisfaction of someone who had just bagged a bird or a rabbit.

And now there was Chauvin, looking at the sunset, the neighbor’s flowers, or his lawn while snuffing out the life of someone, another human being, separated from his humanity by only a thin veneer of pigmentation. And it was all about a reputedly forged $20 bill. Neither Chauvin, his three fellow officers, nor the smiling cop in Baltimore, acknowledged the humanity of those they killed.

Fifty years later, they are still killing us with casual impunity.

Days later, when I could intellectualize my rage, it occurred to me that if Chauvin and his cohorts had been sent to an outlaw den to catch and capture one of the omnipresent junkyard dogs patrolling the place, and if after muzzling a particularly vicious member of the pack, Chauvin had sat on its neck, someone would have said, “ hey man let him up.”

Americans respect the humanity of dogs. But not George Floyd’s. Instead of urging Chauvin to let the man up, they aided and abetted the taking of his life. Today, with my emotions having moved from the thalamus to the cortex, I can feel some peace and even dare optimism by watching a diverse and multi-cultural tidal wave of youthful humanity march in protest of this horrific event and so many before it. These young people have internalized the best of the movement that began in my youth. Their activism will hopefully reverse police polices left by the legacies of slavery, Nineteenth Century black serfdom, and Twentieth Century apartheid.

don’t let anyone slow you down

. . . or highjack your movement

Part of that change has to start with rejecting much of the past narrative about policing in America. We must begin by rejecting the bromide that “most police are good people; it is only a few bad ones that are the problem.” Yes, there are “good people,” within police departments. But that is not the problem. Systemic racism within police departments is the problem.

Hell will freeze over before a police officer’s union calls out a bad cop. The institution through its supporters, management, and unions protect their own. Sometimes they are called our modern centurions who protect “us”. Blacks are not barbarians at the gates, only citizens seeking fair treatment in a just society, and they must be treated fairly.

We can and must police differently as many other countries do. While the coercive power of the state must at times be exercised through the police departments to ensure the orderly working of civil society, policing can be done without the continued use of the brutal post-slavery enforcement practices instituted to keep blacks and other “undesirables” in check.

We can learn from our fellow democracies in other lands how to police more humanely. We must move beyond the insularity created by two oceans and our sense of superiority due to our success as a nation to learn from the modern democracies that treat their citizens fairly and more humanely. That is something the young folks now protesting must demand. In his letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. King rejected the moderate whites’ go-slow request.

Similarly, young people must not let moderate people, regardless of their coloration, bog them down in the false narrative that conflates peaceful protest with theft, arson and burglary. Thieving and burning is wrong and the perpetrators should be fined, jailed or both. Enough said.

The actions of a those taking advantage of peaceful citizens’ protests have nothing to do with the incontrovertible fact that George Floyd, and all of the other unmanned and unrecognized George Floyds, unjustly died at the hands of people tempered in a culture of systemic racism where killing black people with impunity is for some no different from a day of bird shooting or viewing flowers from the patio.

That is the spark that causes the explosion, and it that which must change.

DARE TO HOPE

the personal is the political

Despite my rage and pain, I see hopeful signs. I have seen the arc of history move in remarkable ways during my life. I am a black man born in the segregated South to working class parents who brought our family to the North during the great migration in hopes of finding better opportunity. At Albion College where I was the only black in my class of over 500, I agitated and negotiated for social justice and demanded recognition of my own humanity, often alone or with a few allies. An outsider, I was nevertheless elected class president.

I take a certain sense of pride in self- identifying as the personification of the light and dark of American foreign policy during the 60s, having served first in the Peace Corps in Kenya and thereafter serving in Vietnam as combat platoon sergeant with the 101st Airborne Division. Few other Americans can make that claim.

I married interracially when that often meant ostracism from both black and white communities. I went on to graduate from Michigan Law School after which I had a 40 plus year career as a corporate litigator and environmental lawyer in the private and public sector.

I and many of my black friends and cohorts who pursued professional paths similar to mine often fought the lonely battles accompanying racial “firsts.” We learned to survive and succeed in the absence of mentors and the presence of skeptics. More often than not we were often the only blacks in the rooms where it happened. My personal and private life has given me a perspective on life in black and white America not shared by many which makes the diverse spectrum of protesters particularly heartening.

If we can stay the course during the difficult days, the seeds we planted fifty years ago may finally germinate. Small singular events sometimes have cosmic consequences. A fire at a shirtwaist factory in Greenwich Village, an assassination in Sarajevo, or a refusal to leave a bus seat in Montgomery were each events that led to cosmic changes in the world order. That diverse, multicultural mass of humanity that saw the video recorded murder of George Floyd and the video in Central Park is embodied with a sense of universal social justice that may well be finally initiating the conversation that was left unaddressed in 1787, and that has been deferred too long. It can start with police reform ,and hopefully it will silence the scream made in Central Park and prevent another Minneapolis. Believing and feeling that calms some of my rage.

Jess Womack recently retired from his position as Deputy General Counsel, Los Angeles Unified School District and Inspector General