Skip to main content

Knees on Necks

It was sometime in the late eighties. I don’t remember why I was walking down Amsterdam Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, but I was within a block or two of where I lived at the time.

What I do remember, vividly even now, is approaching the corner of Amsterdam and 92nd just as a group of three or four Black kids, all pre-teens, were rounding that same corner and bounding toward me. They were horsing around, as kids that age do, and one of them — the shortest, maybe ten years old — wasn’t watching where he was going. He was moving fast, looking in the wrong direction, and had no idea that I was there, closing in on him.

Before I could do anything to avoid it, his head slammed into my left hand, just where I wear my watch. It had to hurt. It didn’t do any real damage to either of us, but it spun him around so that he could actually see me for the first time. It also spun me around so I was facing him.

My first thought was that he might be hurt, and I blurted out “Are you okay?” He nodded right away, in a relieved and strangely grateful way. He saw that it was an accident, saw that, yeah, I was an old White guy but I had not hit him intentionally. No harm, no foul.

But it was in the split second before that nod, before he understood what had just happened, that a look came over his face — a reflexive cringe — that I carry with me to this day.

It was the cringe of a small person who is no stranger to getting hit without warning. Who gets hit too often, and expects to get hit again. There was weary resignation in his eyes, as if to say “Damn, what did I do now?”

I thought of this last Thursday as I watched Al Sharpton deliver the eulogy at the funeral of George Floyd.

We New Yorkers have known Reverend Al for decades. Around the same time that kid was slamming into me, Al was out there, getting in our faces, demanding and commanding the public eye.

Now seen mostly as a sober and deliberate MSNBC pundit, we remember Al fifty pounds heavier and larger than life. To New Yorkers, he was the quintessential civil rights firebrand, a flamboyant but reliable presence at protests, rallies, demonstrations, anywhere there were Black lives not mattering.

Always polarizing, sometimes buffoonish, never boring, Al was a showman, and cameras always managed to find him.

Thursday’s eulogy was a throwback to that time. Strident and mesmerizing, he drew on all the call-and-response preacher chops he has honed over his lifetime.

His best set piece — which has since received much attention — was a litany of the many things Black people could have done, could have created, could have accomplished, if only White people would “Get your knee off our necks.”

And there it was. With one deft turn of phrase, Al conjured, from George Floyd’s abominable death, the perfect metaphor for 400 years of oppression:

Get your knee off our necks.

Seen through that lens, I now have a better understanding of the look on that kid’s face. It was the look of someone with a knee on his neck.

To White people — those who are well-meaning and carry a modicum of social conscience — racism is an abstraction. It’s something we learn about in school. Something we see as an unfortunate legacy, a holdover from a darker time in our history.

But we don’t really notice it. We’re sort of embarrassed by it, especially when we consider how we benefit from it, as our forebears have for generations, which is not something we’re comfortable with. So we’d rather think about the progress, which is slow, but hey, these things take time, right? Setbacks are to be expected, right? Besides, we voted for Obama, right? Twice.

To Black people, there is nothing abstract about it. It’s an everyday background hum, not so much of hostility — though there’s plenty of that — but of condescension, patronizing tones, and covert exclusions. It’s going through life with the knowledge that nothing about you — no effort, character trait, social contribution, talent, or expertise — will ever matter more than your color.

That kid on the West Side would be in his forties now, and I wonder how he turned out. I wonder if he got a decent education. I wonder if he avoided the destructive, often deadly hazards that far too many in his demographic faced. And face to this day.

I wonder if he still lives in the City, and if he stayed safe from the virus. I even wonder if he was marching last Thursday, and if he wore a mask. If he saw the video of Reverend Al’s eulogy. If he took something good from the moment.

What I don’t wonder about is that knee on his neck. I know it’s still there.


Berkley MI

Tuesday, 06/09/20

Comments

  1. I came around a corner once and 4 black young men were on the other side coming around the corner towards me. All of us got startled. Then we all just laughed and walked on.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blackmail for Fun and Profit

Once in a while, I like to use this space to indulge in some idle speculation, taking a few what-ifs and seeing where they lead. I tend to do this in response to some stimulus, some ping to my brain. Which is just what Keith Olbermann provided in one of his podcasts last week. He was talking about Jeff Bezos’ upcoming wedding to Lauren Sanchez, the woman with whom Bezos had been having the affair that ultimately ended his marriage. You'll recall that in 2019, Trump operators had a heavy hand in that breakup, having attempted to blackmail Bezos into coercing The Washington Post, which he owns, into covering Trump more obsequiously. It's rare to see such an instance of high-level blackmail surface in public, and we only know about it because Bezos didn't bite. He outed himself, he went public about the whole affair, thereby ending his marriage, which was apparently on the ropes anyway. An unusually happy postscript to this otherwise routine multi-bill

The Mainstream Media Continues to Disappoint

The awkward term "both-siderism" has, at long last, stepped into the limelight, thanks to the graceful gravitas of CNN icon Christiane Amanpour (full disclosure: our dog used to play with her dog). In one brilliant commencement address , to the Columbia School of Journalism, she dope-slapped her own profession and, indeed, her own boss, both of whom richly deserved it. That takes guts, not to mention a reputation for integrity. Both of which she has in abundance. What she said about the "both sides" problem in journalism is nothing new. But to those of us who've been screaming about it for years, it's refreshing to hear it denounced by a mainstream journalist of her stature, in a venue that serves as an incubator of mainstream journalism. While she declined to mention names, there was no doubt about the targets of her irritation. CNN and its chairman, Chris Licht, were still licking their wounds from their treacherous but buffoonish

The Definition of Defamation is Up in the Air

Underlying all the recent commotion surrounding Fox, Tucker Carlson, and the mess they've created for themselves, there's an important legal issue that has flown largely under the radar, but may soon be ready for its closeup. It's a First Amendment issue concerning the meaning of defamation, and the standard that must be met to prove it. The constitutionality of the existing standard was expected to be tested in the Fox-Dominion case, had that case come to trial. But since that didn't happen, I figured it would go back to the back burner. But then, last week, Ron DeSantis had it blow up in his face , giving the whole issue new momentum, and from a surprising direction. His own people took him down. DeSantis had talked his pet legislature into launching an outrageous assault on freedom of the press, eviscerating existing libel laws, and making it easier for public figures — like, say, DeSantis himself— to sue for defamation. One can just imagine DeSantis cackling