As a biracial dad, I don't view the police as the enemy. But something has to change.
- As a middle-class gay biracial dad, normal is a relative term for me.
- Despite my skin color, I'm (almost) as conventional as my white Upper East Side neighbors.
- From a young age, I studiously avoided getting caught up with the police. But I always knew they could turn against me.
- I often feared certain other Black men more than the police. Men who would aggressively threaten me.
- But the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others have forced me to confront my assumptions and my identity.
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More than two weeks into the protests following the killing of George Floyd, so many of us just want things to go back to normal.
And who can blame us? Battered by months of coronavirus quarantine, exhausted from home-schooling young children, and fatigued by a lack of leadership from the White House, we're dreaming of a simpler life filled with office chats, playgroups, and the occasional date night.
But normal is a relative term for me, a middle-class biracial gay dad.
We live in a nation that views police — and policing — as either good or bad, black or blue, cop or criminal. I've never had that privilege.
As a minority within a minority and a member of the economic elite, I inhabit a murky gray area.
Despite my skin color, I'm (almost) as conventional as my white Upper East Side neighbors: I'm college-educated, high-earning, home-owning, and well-traveled.
I'm concerned with property values and how I'm going to continue navigating childcare during lockdown.
I worry more about the bad guys, particularly when they might also be homophobes.
As a gay man, when I embrace my twin toddlers, there's a part of me that's relieved when I see officers close by.
I have no illusions that my family isn't a rarity, even in New York.
For those reasons and more, I welcome the safety and order that law enforcement provides.
Normally, I'd be the last person to suggest that cities abolish the police.
And I'm not alone. Most Americans support police reform, according to a new Reuters poll, but we still want robbers and rapists caught and the crime rate to continue to plummet.
We were raised to see law enforcement as an ally, not an enemy. Changing that perspective takes time, even for me.
To be honest, I've never really had to deal with the police.
I was raised without my Black father in my life. My white single mom never sat me down for "the talk" young Black men often receive to prepare them for a life of police interactions.
She didn't have to: Owing to "white adjacency," the privileges my mother's skin color afforded me, Caucasians would often tell me themselves what they thought of Black people.
Armed with that special knowledge, I studiously avoided getting caught up with law enforcement. I haven't so much as received a warning. Perhaps it was my mom, perhaps just luck.
Of course, many of my black friends have had to deal with the cops. They've been stopped and frisked, profiled, and harassed at an appalling rate.
So while there's a part of me that embraces the police, there's another part that's all too aware they could turn against me. And — as evidenced by George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, and others — with a level of force my white neighbors could scarcely imagine.
When I lived in Harlem a decade ago, I often feared Black men as much as the cops.
Not all Black men, of course. It was a certain kind of poor, aggressive Black man who would inexplicably confront me in public.
It happened a lot — on the street, in the subway, outside the CVS on 125th Street. Someone would inexplicably confront me (just me) with a curse word, or a harangue, or a hard shoulder check.
I was afraid of their hostility and the threat of violence. But I realize now I was really afraid of being dragged into their orbit.
I often thought about how these guys would never tussle with a white guy like that. Even in their state, they knew the Derek Chauvins of the world would never let them get away with it.
One encounter turned physical after a strange man accused me of entering the pharmacy ahead of him. "You cut me," he shouted repeatedly. He approached in a steam of rage and shoved me.
As we tussled, all I could think about was that the cops might come. For my white friends that would be a relief, the end of the nightmare.
But I knew that could just make things worse. There would be every chance the police wouldn't see an educated professional being assaulted by a mentally unstable man.
They'd just see two brothers going at it again. Two Black criminals asking for a knee, or a chokehold, or a bullet.
It's a fear many African-Americans harbor: That, no matter our success, white folks will come and take it all away.
White adjacency offered me the perspective — and, yes, privilege — to diffuse the encounter before it escalated further. And I quickly returned to the "normal" life my adversary likely never knew.
George Floyd's killing has ushered in a new normal, and I'm still learning how to navigate it.
It's been years since I've had one of those ugly encounters, but Floyd's death has abruptly reconfirmed that race and class remain core struggles for both America and myself.
Over the past few weeks, I've felt an odd, somewhat eerie, kindness from Caucasians. The fearful stares and women clutching purses are being replaced by friendly smiles, doors held open, and eyes raised to meet my own.
It's as if white folks finally understand they need to treat the other as an equal.
But now more than ever, I'm brutally aware that we are not equal. Black men are incarcerated at six times the rates of white men. People of color are disproportionately killed by police-related violence.
Until the underlying conditions behind those figures are addressed, no amount of police reform will change how cops look at men like George Floyd. Or like me.
But I have changed my perspective in the past few weeks. The demonstrations along my sleepy stretch of Yorkville Avenue have proven that order and activism can coexist — and create substantive change.
This moment has forced me to confront the gray areas of my identity and not slide back into my comfort zone.