Hey friend!

This is a Frankenstein post, pieces written at 3 different times and now combined into one. It probably will read funny. But I’m long overdue to share some of this.

July 12, 2017

"You're too little to be so trill." That's what a friend said to me in 2005. I took it as a compliment. 

I have a big mouth on me. I am a shit-talker by nature, and I'm good with words. Often, that's enough to get people to leave me alone. In fact, it was almost always enough until, July 11, 2017, around 8:45 pm. At that time, words weren't enough. At that time, I got punched in the face.

Prior to that moment, I had never been in fight. In fact, it's probably fair to say I still haven't been in a fight. But a few hours ago, a homeless man with wild eyes rolled up on me and a friend as we were standing outside a bar and said, in a tone both matter-of-fact and menacing as all hell,"I need a cigarette."

By the time he finished his sentence he was already far too close to her, to us, but neither of us had a chance to be frightened yet. The threatening nature of his tone and his stance was not immediately apparent in the 2 seconds it took for him to state his claim. So she just said something normal like, "Oh, I'm sorry, no." But in response, he grabbed her hand and stepped closer.

And that's when I slapped his hand and said, "Don't touch her."

I probably shouldn't have hit his arm, but even with the benefit of hindsight, I'm not sure I would do anything different. Regardless, I did it. He turned to me and said, “Oh, you wanna fight?”, squared up, and swung.

I don't know if I leaned back or he had mediocre aim or what variety of things happened, but I'm fortunate that his knuckles hit me in the forehead hard enough to hurt, but he missed my eyes or my nose or my teeth. Nothing is broken. I don't have a concussion. I do have a lump, much smaller now than it was a few hours ago. I do have a tender spot on my head, and I will probably have a bruise in the morning. But I'm fine.

I'm also probably a little drunk as I write this, and still in a bit of shock, and possibly even pumped on the super strong espresso I had around 2 pm. But I'm fine. So fortunate that I'm fine.

My friend and I passed a cop car as we hurried to a nearby bar to get some ice for my face. Neither of us wanted to stop them – that is, to report him – even though now I feel a little bad about that. Homeless dude seems like he'd be more than willing to punch someone else, so I hate that I could have stopped that from happening but didn't. On the flip side, if the cops tried to talk to him or bring him in and he was still feeling crazy, he might have swung on them and ended up dead, in which case my nightmares would be far, far worse than I expect they will be tonight.

These things are complicated.

The amazing thing is, as previously stated, I'm fine. Definitely physically fine, most likely emotionally fine, too. And I now have this amazing story about how a homeless man punched me in the face in Tribeca, of all the fucking places in New York. As my friend said, I am a superhero. And I am that ride-or-die chick I always believed myself to be, for my friends. And for myself. We are women, and we are human. We are not fucking property, we are not museum exhibits, we are not toys. Don't FUCKING touch us.

Also, don't tell my mama. I may not be scared of homeless men in the streets of New York City, but I might still be scared of her. And she will not like this at all.

But I am who she raised me to be, and apparently she raised me to be a badass.

July 24, 2017

The hits just keep coming.

Literally, this time. In addition to the tax and insurance issues I'm having, the flooded basement, the continued inexplicable failure of my uterus and associated never-ending tests, I actually got punched in the face. By a presumably homeless man in Tribeca, of all places. Fancy ass, well-lit Tribeca, where Jay and Bey had an apartment, where Robert Deniro lives. Two blocks from my job. Tribeca. Huh.

I am not coping with it all that well. Any of it. I hate being a grown-up, so I'm ignoring nearly all my responsibilities right now. But the assault – because that's what it was, whether that feels like the correct label or not – is probably at the top of the list of Things I'm In Denial About (maybe second to the insurance stuff). My shrink thinks denial is not the best coping strategy, especially for something as layered as this. There's the fear, the shock, the mixed feelings that led me not to involve the police, the anger, the relief that I wasn't physically hurt badly, the fact that I was physically hurt at all, how this feels in the context of the work I do and the low-income, often mentally unstable, mostly people of color I serve, and probably more. There's a lot, and I'm ignoring all of it.

October 18, 2017

This incident (getting punched), and what I wrote about it, has been in the forefront of my mind this week. What’s interesting to me is, I never did talk about it in therapy. I never did think more about how I feel about the fact that the man who hit me was like so many of our clients, or about what it means or doesn’t mean that I refused to call the police. Those things have faded into the background and, honestly, feel unimportant. But right now we are in the midst of a national, perhaps international, conversation about sexual assault and sexual harassment and how women are treated in the workplace, the streets, the world. And I remembered that part of my rage that night was related to the entitlement of this asshole to think he had the right to touch my friend, in public, on the street, and she would just acquiesce to his demands and, more importantly, that there would be no consequences. He was homeless, and probably mentally ill, but his initial behavior wasn’t so different from that of men everywhere. Behavior we ignore literally every day.

The punching me part was different, though. That’s something everyone can recognize, that’s something that people were ready and able to name as assault, even when I wasn’t. But he assaulted her, too. Those are the assaults that go unnamed, unnoticed.

I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot, lately. How hard it is for so many men to appreciate what it is to navigate the world as a woman. How uncomfortable we are in so many situations, and how we’ve largely been taught – by the world, implicitly – that we should keep that discomfort private. How we adjust our lives, change our routes to work or within work, avoid meetings and conversations with certain people, warn other women where not to go and with whom not to speak, smile and laugh so as not to make a scene or draw more attention, or wear a scowl, dead-eyes, or headphones as a form of armor.

Because we know, more often than not, that what that homeless guy thought is accurate – there will be no consequences for a man’s catcalling us, making a suggestive comment at work, pressuring us to stay in a place we don’t feel comfortable, or yes, even touching us. As long as it’s just a pat on the arm, a squeeze of the shoulder, a hand on the lower back, how we feel about it doesn’t matter to anyone but us. That’s what we’ve learned, I think.

Many men think I’m (we’re) exaggerating and these things are harmless, until the thing rises to the level of a recognizable assault – obviously a “forcible rape” (or a punch in the face) would count, especially if it’s by a stranger, and maybe unwanted touching or particularly vulgar words, if the touch is to your genitals or the lewd comment comes from your boss. But short of that, it’s very difficult to convince people that these things are harms. They cause damage. They degrade a woman’s autonomy and sense of self, and chip away, bit by bit, at our conviction that we have a right to exist in peace.

One of the foulest things about slavery is that it is literally premised upon the idea that some people have no rights in their own bodies. A slave is property first, and a person second, if at all. Slaves had no choices, no control over their own lives. A slave could not be raped under the law, because the owners had the right to do whatever they wished with their property. Crimes against slaves – physical damage done to them at the hands of another – were treated as property crimes, wherein the criminal owed restitution not to the harmed slave, but to the slave’s owner. If people were rude, cruel, suggestive, or lewd towards a slave, the slave had no recourse, because a slave’s feelings didn’t matter. No one cares how a glass feels if you knock it over. Such concerns are reserved for humans.

A friend unintentionally helped me realize part of why I might want a baby that’s genetically mine and hubs’, even though I’ve always wanted to adopt and think adoption is so wonderful and important. His wife is adopted, and he was saying how excited she is that their daughter looks like her. I think the baby looks like him (but I know him better), but she does have his wife’s eyes, and probably other details I can’t appreciate. And his wife loves being able to see that, in part, my friend thinks, because although his wife has amazing parents and siblings (two sisters who are biologically her parents’ and one other sister who is also adopted), she has never had that specific connection with family before -- having someone look at her with her family and say, “Oh, she gets that feature from you.”

That is true for me as well. Adopted into the best family a girl could ever ask for (I have literally zero complaints), I have never felt like an outsider, not in any real way. I think some of the things that make me different -- like being the social scientist in a STEM family -- are funny and cool. We’re all brilliant, just different brilliant. And occasionally people even say I look like my mom. But it’s more annoying, or just plain silly, than touching, because it’s so clearly untrue. My brother, it turns out, looks like my mom’s side of the family, and looking at certain pictures, I can see how he looks like not only her family, but just like her specifically. And that was a cool discovery. My sister and my dad share a nose, eyes, teeth, face shape...she is clearly his daughter, and the resemblance has always been obvious.

I do not look like them. That has never bothered me, and families can look like anything. We love each other fiercely, and are very protective of each other and of our relationship. My sister and I have, in the past, practically chewed off the heads of people who have implied that they don’t believe we’re related by looking at us. How dare they judge our family based on something so superficial as skin color, or the shape of an eye? That has nothing to do with who we are and how we’re connected, and I believe we’re tied by something tighter than blood. I BELONG to and with these people, and I always have.

This is a bit of unfocused word vomit.

The issue is not about individual police officers. Yes, there are “bad cops.” Yes, there are overt racists on the force. Yes, there are those who believe the ends (some imagined ideal of security) justify the means (overpolicing of black and brown people). But they are a symptom of the problem, not the source. Those people are a part of this institution because it is a legal, government-sanctioned way to exercise their beliefs…and sometimes their desires. The majority of officers, whose racism is less overt, more average – just a part of them the way it’s a part of all Americans (probably all people) – they didn’t necessarily join to fulfill their desire to stamp out people of color. But the system allows -- encourages -- them to, and so they do. The system corrupts.

This is what I hear in the officer’s panicked yelling after he’s shot Philando Castile, as Ms. Reynolds calmly recounts the situation, and Mr. Castile bleeds out on the seat beside her. The corruption of the system. The officer sounds horrified at what’s happened – at what he’s done. I imagine he didn’t become a police officer to kill black men during traffic stops. And yet here he is. And what I hear in his voice is a plea, a plea for us to understand that this isn’t his fault, that he’s not to blame for Mr. Castile’s death. A plea for us to see it from his perspective, to justify it with him. To recognize that he had to do it, that his part in this screenplay called America called for this particular act.

He was just operating within the system, the system that says anyone who doesn’t obey the police (Eric Garner, Rekia Boyd, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, Alton Shelton, to name a few), and even those that do (Mr. Castile, maybe), and especially those who have no opportunity to do so (Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice) can be killed, and it’s definitely not the killer’s fault. The killer, the officer, was simply doing his job. The victim’s only recourse would have been to not encounter the police in the first place. 

But how do we change this? How do we create a system where the officer’s job is to de-escalate, to extricate himself if possible and safe, to use other than lethal force except in response to lethal force? The high level of deference we give to police in dealing with all people, but especially black people, is part of the problem. It’s the gray areas, the areas of discretion, that mean there is no justice for the victims of police murders. The gray areas allow an officer to use lethal force in response to an imagined threat, no questions asked. And black people, our mere existence, will always be perceived as a threat.

This is not to say every shooting by police is automatically unjustified or that there are never real threats. Or that there are never indictments and even convictions when the police were clearly unjustified. But a conviction does not always mean justice (see, e.g., Akai Gurley). Even if the officers in Mr. Castile’s or Mr. Shelton’s cases are indicted, which I don’t expect they will be, that won’t mean that justice has been served and the system is improving. To quote Malcolm X, “If you stick a knife in my back nine inches, and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made.”

To heal the wound, we need more than just indictments. More than individual convictions. We need to break the system and rebuild it. We need to study other countries, and even American cities, where there are low incidences of police brutality and duplicate the things they’re doing right. We need to train officers, investigators, administrators, judges, prosecutors on the meaning of implicit bias and the role it plays in all of our decision making, even the things we think are objective. We need to have policies and clear protocol in place that discourages police from using lethal force and provides other avenues of engagement and de-escalation. We need mental health training for all law enforcement professionals.

And those are just a few thoughts on how to begin healing the particular wounds created and perpetuated by the criminal “justice” system. There are so many other wounds. So many others.

What sucks is the system isn’t broken. It’s a fairly well-oiled machine, old, but functioning more or less how it was meant to when it was built. Our lives were never supposed to matter. Our lives were never supposed to be ours.

It’s funny that this post comes just after my acknowledgement of my love for our national anthem. I started this post last night, but somehow in my stupor, my weariness, my stress, I deleted it without posting. And then I woke up today to another death. One that, from a legal perspective, may be easier to justify. But it hurts no less, and it’s no less wrong. This man, who did nothing wrong except try to comply with possibly conflicting police orders. This man, who was not actually a threat, no matter what you perceived. This man, who was my age, who was gainfully employed, who apparently had no criminal record for you all to point to this time. He’s dead now.

It doesn’t take much. In his case, it seems Philandro Castile was reaching for his wallet when he should have had his hands in the air. That is always a risky move. But it doesn’t take much. He could have been selling CDs, and then refused to lie perfectly still when police tackled him, as it appears Alton Shelton did. Or maybe you broke up a fight, and then demanded to know why police were treating you like a criminal, like Eric Garner did. It’s also risky to leave a party with friends and ignore a plain-clothes cop’s order to be quiet, and to perhaps have the audacity to talk on a cell phone, like Rekia Boyd did. And, for the love of God, don’t be a child, a mere baby not yet in your teens, and play with a toy gun in the park. Rest in Power, Rest in Paradise, Rest in Peace, Tamir Rice.

There are no consequences for the people who commit these acts of violence against black people because there are not supposed to be any consequences. These people have been entrusted with maintaining “security” in America, and that security is not, and never has been, for us. We are the threat.

The system dictates that certain folks are on top, that certain folks have the power. And that requires that other folks be on the bottom. It’s a sum-zero game, apparently. The pie isn’t big enough for everyone, and the people with the biggest slices do not want to share.

Since the beginning, they (the Founders, the politicians, the landowners, the white men who established -- but did not build -- this country) used race as the way to delineate who should be on the bottom. And then they announced that we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. But that was never their Truth. Yet we -- America -- explain away the discrepancy, and we -- black people -- remain on the bottom. And for the powers that be to keep us there and not have extreme guilt, to maintain the cognitive dissonance that is so much a part of our American belief system, black lives cannot matter. They simply can’t. We can never be worthy of American protection, security, or -- God forbid -- equity. Our poverty, our lack of access, our un- and underemployment, our treatment by the criminal justice system, our deaths -- all must be preordained. All must be justifiable. Our fault. Our failures. The system works fine.

If we mattered, THAT would break the system. Maybe it would shatter it so thoroughly we could rebuild from the ground up, and we could become the America we sometimes pretend to be.

I’m a lot less hopeful about that than I once was. But maybe one day.

I am writing to express my interest in the position of [civil rights staff attorney with your organization]. For the past eighteen months, I have been a staff attorney in the Housing Unit at [this organization], a position I enjoy immensely. I admire [this organization’s] commitment to race-equity and the eradication of poverty—a commitment that I share and that has shaped my legal career. However, as an attorney whose duty it is to provide direct legal services to clients facing eviction, I find it difficult to make time to engage in policy advocacy and pursue affirmative litigation to challenge broader issues of racism and structural inequality that plague our clients.