Michael Bloomberg can keep his fake apologies.
I am a 38 year old black woman; racism is a daily part of my life. I have lived the majority of my life in the South. I am a mommy to a beautiful black boy. I have been in a pulled over car, while my black father in a suit and my black brother with his alma mater encasing his license plate have been frisked by the police. I have endured white men with beards, leather, confederate flags branded on their bodies screaming, “fat nigger bitch” while 9 months pregnant. I live in Nashville, TN — where the founder of the Klan — Nathan Bedford Forrest— is bronzed in the capitol building. I am a 5 minute drive away from the north side of Old Hickory Boulevard, which is a part of the route of the Trail of Tears. I live with the ghosts of enslaved black folks and slaughtered Native folks and lynched folks and raped folks — daily sights and scenes of past quotidian violence and torture.
Yet — the place in which I have experienced the most racialized terror was when I lived in Michael Bloomberg’s New York City. I lived in Brooklyn and had to travel daily into Manhattan. What I witnessed on the various streets of New York City are what composes my nightmares… a black boy… a son…my son… coming home from school and being accosted by the state; being stopped, throw up against a wall or thrown to the ground, and groped by a cop.
When you live in New York, you’re out at all times of day and night. However, I would witness the cops beating up youth mostly after-school or before school; kids with backpacks and sports equipment or musical instrument. When there were no boys around, the cops would grab black or brown men in suits, in sweats, in shorts, in tanks, in ties and cuff-links, in work-uniforms, in work boots, in $300 designer shoes, in $20 Payless shoes… it didn’t matter.
These mostly young, sometimes middle aged and sometimes old boys and men were always in danger of being harmed by the NYPD. And those of us who saw what happened could say and do nothing but watch. Like the enslaved on a plantation at a beating or the so-called free folks in a sun-down town at a lynching — all we could do was witness on subway platforms, outside of grocery stores, in the park, on college campuses… We watched and prayed.
Michael Bloomberg can keep his apologies. To quote Ntozake Shange, “one thing [we] don’t need is any more apologies.” His fake sorries are met with a deep eye roll and a laugh. Not because its funny laugh; but a I’m-in-shock-at-the-huge-amount-of-hubris-you-have kind of laugh.
What Bloomberg fails to recognize is that while his unconstitutional “thinking” is problematic — it is what the “stop-and-frisk” policy produced and reproduces. As traumatized as New Yorkers are, the stop-and-frisk policy has further sedimented practices and policies in which everyday black and brown people are perpetual suspects all over the United States. This historical sedimentation and cementation is the very fabric that criminalizes blackness and normalizes black and brown people as a problem in perpetuity. Yes, we are suspects even when we comply and are supposedly respectable.
If Bloomberg were actually contrite for stop-and-frisk, he would pay fines for ex-felons whose voting rights have been restored so they might actually be able to vote. Contrition might look like him putting money behind giving police departments the training that they desperately need around the country. If he were sorry at all, he would personally pay restitution to every single family that has been touched by stop-and frisk, because Bloomberg is just that rich. AND he would drop out of the presidential race!
Bloomberg’s “sorry” should “take a walk down a dark & musty street” and meet the cops that snatched Kalief Browder in the Bronx, go to Reikers without bond and see how useless and pitiful “sorry” actually means.
If we truly care about black, brown and other people of color — Michael Bloomberg is NOT an option. We can not forget that he not only authorized the police to cause violence, but to violate folks’ human rights… their constitutional liberties.
As a black woman, as a mommy to a black son, as an American — I can not and will not accept Bloomberg's “sorry.” And neither should you. Let “sorry” soothe his soul; I’m voting for someone else.
