All minorities are going to feel ambivalent or negative about the majority and enforcing the majority’s laws. This is nothing peculiar to blacks. It’s just basic social identity theory. There is no solution.
Most non-blacks don’t want to be around blacks, most non-Muslims don’t want to be around Muslims, and perhaps most non-Jews don’t want to be around Jews.
He had grown up in Baltimore, been arrested, been slammed to the ground by a police officer. And now, all he wanted was to be one.
So Kyle Johnson flipped through his mail. It was a Wednesday in July, and he had just come home from his 5 a.m. shift at the airport, where he spent eight hours moving baggage around planes. A safe job. The kind no one has an opinion about.
He found the envelope he was hoping wouldn’t be there. It was from Morgan State University’s police department, the first agency Kyle applied to after graduating from a community college police academy. If they had wanted to hire him, they would have called.
“Okay,” he told himself. “On to the next.”
The next, if he were being practical, would be his home town Baltimore Police Department. They were hiring, and seeking minority candidates — actively recruiting locals, who would be familiar with the city and its problems.
But just that day, BPD had been on the 12 o’clock news again. Kyle saw it on the little TV in the airport break room. The charges against the officers accused in the case of Freddie Gray had just been dropped, meaning no one would be found responsible for the death of the Baltimore man who was 25 — Kyle’s age — when he fell into a coma in the back of a police van. Two weeks later, the Justice Department would determine that the Baltimore police had been disproportionately targeting and using excessive force against black people.
Already, Kyle’s Facebook feed was full of opinions on this new development in what seemed a never-ending story of never-ending conflict. More black men dead in Minnesota, in Baton Rouge; police officers slain in Baton Rouge, in Dallas. Each time, his friends and relatives fumed about injustice and fear. Kyle kept his opinions to himself. Rarely did anyone seem to have a solution. Except, he thought, the Dallas police chief, who gave a news conference to say: “We’re hiring.”
“We’ll help you resolve some of the problems you’re protesting about,” the chief, David Brown had said.
That’s what Kyle wants: If the battle is between cops and black people, maybe the solution is to be both.
