Salon.com > Jill Nelson

Do white New Yorkers care about police brutality?

Mon, 10 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

The morning of the funeral of 26-year-old Patrick Dorismond, the man who was shot by an undercover member of the New York Police Department on March 16 for saying no to drugs, I went swimming at the Harlem YMCA.

I swim nearly every morning, as much to dissipate my anger and frustration and to order my thoughts as for exercise. Somehow, the cool water and the repetition of strokes hones and focuses my passions, especially intense at this moment, living in a city where the police have shot and killed four unarmed black men in just over a year.

That Saturday morning, as always, swimming did its magic. Getting dressed I felt calmer, cooled out, ready to deal with another day. I was wearing a "Stop Police Brutality" button, and the sisters in the locker room asked for one. So I handed them round to all, including a silent white woman who was there, too. She looked at the button, looked at me, and asked, "What's police brutality?"

My first reaction was to slap her upside her head, give her a taste of the brutality that stalks people like me every day. I could not believe that here she was in the center of Harlem -- where white people are moving by the thousands -- still draped in the white privilege that allows her to not know what police brutality is, even as she stands in a community victimized by it.

The beating goes on

Sat, 26 Feb 2000 14:30:00 +0000

I've had this clenched feeling in my stomach for the last three weeks, something between a burn and gnawing hunger. Today, when the four white police officers, all members of New York's Street Crime Unit, were acquitted of all charges in the February 1999 murder of 22-year-old unarmed immigrant Amadou Diallo -- whose crime was having the temerity to leave his house and go get something to eat -- I realized what the feeling was. It was the same old same old African-American clench of apprehension in America, same day, different corpse, and the beating goes on.

I wish I could say that I'm surprised by the verdict, but I'm not. The history of abuse and brutalization of black people by police and other law enforcement authorities is as old as the United States, and includes lynchings, beatings, burnings and shootings. What I am is $10 richer. I bet my mother they'd walk completely, and she bet they'd be convicted of the least possible charge and get probation. Good old Mom. At 81 she's still clinging to a shred of optimism and popping Tums to ease that clenched feeling.

Is sodomy with a stick worse than death?

Wed, 26 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

New York police officer Justin Volpe's guilty plea Tuesday to charges of depriving Abner Louima of his civil rights, conspiracy, obstruction of justice and witness tampering came as no real surprise, given that all last week was spent with his cronies in the New York Police Department testifying to what we already knew: that on Aug. 9, 1997, Volpe and three other police officers beat Louima brutally in a police cruiser, and then back at the station house Volpe sodomized Louima with a broken broom handle while a fellow officer held him down.

While he is now an admitted rapist, sodomizer and sadist of the highest order, Volpe ain't blind. Pleading guilty is simply a desperate attempt to get leniency from the court and save his ass -- and I do mean that literally as well as figuratively -- under an avalanche of damning testimony and damn near certain conviction. The whole defense effort has been both offensive and pitiful, from suggestions that Louima's massive internal injuries -- damage that required multiple surgeries and months of hospitalization -- were the result of consensual homosexual "rough sex," to the bizarre parading about of Volpe's black girlfriend, as if her very existence negated the possibility of Volpe being racist. Hello! Thomas Jefferson had a black girlfriend too, Sally Hemings, and that didn't stop him from owning slaves, demeaning black people in his writings and perpetuating slavery.

White lies

Tue, 04 May 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Leave it to Larry King to remind me that just when I thought I couldn't go any lower, there's farther for me to fall. He snagged me Friday night when, about to put in a video, I heard him say, "We'll be back after this break with the actor Yaphet Kotto, who used to live in Littleton, Colo." I should have known better, but did I insert that video and zone out? No way. I waited for Kotto, who must have been among a handful of blacks in Littleton, to enlighten me about the killings there.

You know you're losing it when you delay video oblivion to hear an actor who stars in a TV series called "Homicide" shed light on the subject of violence in America, but as they say in Narcotics Anonymous, my bottom had come and I knew it, as I listened to Kotto suggest the solution was getting God and prayer back in the schools. Crusades or Jihad, anyone?

Pryor Knowledge

Wed, 25 Nov 1998 14:37:00 +0000

When Richard Pryor received the Mark Twain Prize for humor at the Kennedy Center on Oct. 20 he was too weak to perform or even to speak. That was left to Chris Rock, Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg, a few of the many comedians whose work he has inspired. I'm both exhilarated that Pryor's getting his due before he's dead and pissed as hell that a man who could give "motherfucka'" a thousand profoundly different shadings is, at 58, virtually speechless. You just know he'd have some hilarious and profound insights into Bill and Monica, Sally Hemings and target="_top" href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/feb97/jefferson970217.html">Thomas Jefferson, and all the bizarre happenings in the last days of the 20th century.