In a story making all the rounds this afternoon and evening, James Blake, former world #4 tennis player, was tackled and handcuffed by five undercover members of the NYPD outside of his midtown Manhattan hotel as he awaited a ride to the US Open, where he is making appearances as part of the tournament’s corporate partnership activities.
According to an official police statement to ThinkProgress, a witness in a fraud investigation mistakenly identified Blake as a suspect. On the strength of the witness’s identification, the undercover officers tackled and handcuffed Blake, causing numerous minor injuries. Eventually, the case of mistaken identity was uncovered, and the officers eventually let Blake go, though without an apology.
There really is a lot to unpack here. First, the reliance on witness statements, which are notoriously unreliable, is problematic. Second, the manner in which Blake was approached, in which he describes a man running toward him before eventually tackling him to the ground, is also troubling. Is it really proper protocol for undercover police to act in such a manner? Police commissioner Bill Bratton doesn’t seem to think so. As he said in response to Blake’s claims:
The nature of what he described is not what we do, not what we’re supposed to do…I will not tolerate any type of excessive use of force on the part of my police.
This leads us to the third, and most important and disturbing piece of the story. Blake, born to an African-American father and a British mother, was assaulted by 5 white police officers while standing idle, texting on a phone, and waiting for a car. He was not suspected in a violent crime, and one naturally has to wonder, in the wake of the rapidly rising visibility of what could be generously seen as police improprieties where black suspects are concerned, whether he would have been treated so if he was white.
Blake himself has thoughts on the matter, noting:
“To me it’s as simple as unnecessary police force, no matter what my race is. In my mind there’s probably a race factor involved, but no matter what there’s no reason for anybody to do that to anybody.”
And make no mistake: Blake is right in the first part of his statement. Both he and Police Commissioner Bratton agree that the officers’ behavior was beyond the pale. Bratton, for his part, is dubious vis-à-vis Blake’s claims, however, noting, “…we have that saying, the first story is never the last story.”
In an immediate response, the NYPD has opened an Internal Affairs Investigation and is currently looking for any available surveillance video of the incident.
The alleged treatment of Blake by the NYPD is troubling by itself, of course. But it also speaks to a larger argument some segments of America is having with itself regarding why, exactly, these things keep happening to African Americans, particularly (though not at all exclusively) to Black men. Specifically, I want to take a minute to talk about the idea of respectability.
There is a strain of argumentation that infects both conservatives and progressives alike – though hardly in equal proportions – that one of the answers to the problem of racism lies in some forms of the Black presentation of self. You may have seen the memes: The Pants Challenge, for example, in which Black males are encouraged to present themselves in a way more appealing to the larger (White) society by eschewing pants that sag.
In others, African-Americans are encouraged to speak differently and distance themselves from African American Vernacular English (often imprecisely known as ebonics). Many prominent Black celebrities are proponents of such “adjustments” to certain elements of Black culture, among them Bill Cosby and our own sitting President. These excoriations fall under the larger rubric of “respectability politics.”
The idea behind respectability politics is simple, but insidious. Simple, because it offers marginalized groups a simple and effective way to minimize prejudice and discrimination: act in ways more comforting to white society. Such beliefs are insidious for three major reasons: first, it treats marginalized peoples as having monolithic cultures, obliterating any sense of nuance or differentiation in cultural performances.
In other words, it eliminates any differences in the cultural beliefs and behaviors of the minority groups it proposes to “help.” There is only “Black culture,” for instance, rather than a multitude of cultural behaviors by different groups of African Americans, as varied as any other group’s cultural norms and performances.
Second, it explicitly encourages marginalized groups to eliminate elements of culture displeasing to white society, including elements which may have significant historical or cultural roots, such as hair styles, forms of dress, speech patterns, language usage, or social relations. The politics of respectability is cultural genocide in another guise.
Finally, and I think most importantly, the politics of respectability blames significant portions of racism, prejudice, discrimination, and oppression on its victims. Just act differently, they say, and the world will respect you. Racism, they claim, is a myth. It’s not about color… it’s about behavior. Change your behavior; change your lot in life.
But James Blake is the latest in a long line of African American victims of racism that put this idea to the sword and exposes it for the vile lie that it is. Frankly, people don’t get much more respectable than James Blake, and he became a victim anyway. James Blake went to Harvard. James Blake was a professional tennis player, reaching the world top 5 during his career. James Blake dresses like this. He’s a handsome, well-educated, and extremely successful man. And it didn’t make a bit of difference.
James Blake exposes Respectability Politics as the lie that African Americans around the country have known for centuries: respectability will not save you. Racism is and has always been the fault of racists and racists alone. Blake may be fortunate enough to be able to tell his story for two reasons: 1) in his own words, he has the resources and the platform to tell his story, and 2) he survived the encounter, a privilege some young Black men don’t have. But his achievements, recognized by the larger society, didn’t save him from becoming a victim, so he has a story to tell, as do millions of other African Americans who have been victims of less prominent acts.
I am not personally confident that this incident will change our behavior toward either police brutality toward African Americans in this country or our attitudes toward racism and respectability. We didn’t learn it from the assassination of Dr. King, the totemic appropriation of respectability by the larger society, so I doubt we learn it from the very respectable James Blake being tackled by five undercover cops in midtown Manhattan either. The lie will, most likely, live on.
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