The 6-4 Black Guy

No one in our family was surprised by what happened last week. Ashley Todd, a 20-year-old white Republican campaign worker, claimed she was attacked by a "6-4 African American man" who robbed her, groped her, and carved a backwards B into her cheek to "teach her a lesson." The B for Barack. Rather than an O. For Obama. What a multi-tasker this black guy was, doing all that in a public place.

Please.

I was married to the 6-4 black guy for fourteen years, and still see him every day. We met in junior high, dated through high school, have three daughters, and though we're divorced, we spent most of the last three weeks together because his father was hospitalized and then passed away. Our huge extended family has all been together, nearly two hundred strong, for this time, and there are so many 6-4 black guys in the hospital waiting room, in the house and the driveway of my father-in-law, that it must look like a right-wing nightmare.

During this time, we've had Sarah Palin and other Republicans refer repeatedly to a "real America," apparently a lovely mythical small town with of which we are clearly not citizens; we've seen "Obama Waffles," with an Aunt Jemima caricature of the Democratic Presidential candidate; then "Obama Bucks," on a newsletter created by the president of a Republican women's club in a city only twenty miles from us in southern California, an image of food stamps replete with a smiling Obama surrounded by fried chicken, watermelon, ribs and Kool-Aid. (As we discussed with our daughters and family, pretty funny to imagine Barack Obama, who was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia for part of his early life, grinning and hungry for the stereotypically-represented foods of the American South, connected straight to slavery.)

We heard shouts at Republican rallies of "Kill him!"

We were waiting. We have an amazing collective memory, our family of descendants of slaves in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and descendants of freed people in Oklahoma. We waited for the equivalent of Willie Horton -- remember him? The murderer-rapist-kidnapper whose face was everywhere in Bush Sr.'s ads during the 1988 presidential campaign, as the scary black man that Dukakis let out of prison on weekend passes?

We waited for the equivalent of The Welfare Queens -- remember them? The women Ronald Reagan talked about during his 1976 presidential campaign, the ones collecting so many benefits that they drove Cadillacs.

Wow -- with the $700 billion bailout, the AIG guys having pedicures on their retreat, and the reports of Governor Palin's new wardrobe and stylists, we didn't think the whole Welfare Queen idea would work this time. Yeah -- no.

And then, last week, we got what we'd been expecting. The rapist. The huge black guy. The boogie man.

Can I explain to you how hard it is to love the boogie man, to be married to the boogie man, when all we really see is everyone else trying to kill him? His name is Dwayne.

***

I've seen a shotgun barrel screwed into his ear, just under his Afro, when we were walking down a sidewalk in Westwood, near the UCLA campus. I was eighteen, he was nineteen, a junior college basketball star visiting me in Los Angeles, wanting to see the sights. Underneath the poster of Michael Jackson (back when he had a big natural, too!) for his newly-released album Off The Wall, four LAPD officers frisked Dwayne and our friend Lewis while I stood to the side, being screamed at about whose car we were driving. Why did the officer point the shotgun at Dwayne, inch closer and closer to his head, while he stood with his huge shoulders bowed and his hands on the brick wall? "A 6-4 black guy with a shotgun was seen near the UCLA campus earlier this evening," one of the policemen shouted at us. "Where's the gun?"

We'd been walking and laughing. He wore a black tank top and tight khaki pants (it was 1979) and a white cowboy hat. No place to hide a gun. But the gun was at his head for what felt like hours before they let us go, shouting that we needed to get off the street and go back to where we came from -- Riverside -- or they would shoot on sight.

In his father's driveway -- which is where we'd come from, and where we are still from - this week, I watched the boogie men. My brothers-in-law, nephews, first and second and third cousins. Close to a hundred men, holding beer and soda cans, leaning on cars, moving chairs, serving fried fish from a huge platter because someone had brought a hundred pounds of fresh catfish in honor of my father-in-law.

They are all tall - 6-6 and 330 pounds, 6-2 and 350, 6-5 and on and on. Custodians, parole agents, correctional officers, union foreman for cement layers, construction workers, and drivers for an auto auction. Huge men who have been threatened, arrested on mistaken identities (many times), shot at, called names, and been nervous for decades because they were DWB.

Driving While Black.

The rest of America is still scared of them? After the revelations of the past week? Former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge pleaded not guilty to federal charges of lying about years of torture during his time in the department, a time during which black men were beaten, hung out of windows, and treated in a fashion similar to men held at Guantanamo right now.

Yale law professor Ian Ayres released a report stating that "We found persistent and statistically significant racial disparities in policing that raise grave concerns that African Americans and Latinos in Los Angeles are, as we put it in the report, "over-stopped, over-frisked, over-searched and over-arrested."

"You can't all ride together," my ex-husband and his brothers are always telling their nephews and sons. "Take two cars, so it's only two of you in each car. Otherwise, look at you. Four in a car. That's a gang, not cousins. You're gonna get stopped. And you know what could happen then."

So America is still scared to death of that mythical 6-4 black guy? The one who bumped into the white woman in the elevator in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921? His name was Dick Rowland. He was shorter than that, but still black. He was accused of rape, and the attempt by a white mob to lynch him was the pretext for the Tulsa Riot, when nearly all of prosperous black Tulsa's business and residential districts were burned to the ground and hundreds of black men shot, burned, and their corpses photographed for postcards which were entitled "Dead Nigers in Tulsa, 1921."

My father-in-law's family was from Tulsa. Some of them fled to Los Angeles after being shot during the riot, and others rebuilt their houses and stayed, defiant and successful, brick by brick.

***

Those black men. That night, in the driveway, our cousin T was wearing a quick-made t-shirt from the swap meet - she'd taken the best head shot of my father-in-law and his smiling face was emblazoned on a black shirt, with RIP and his name below. She stood next to another cousin who wore a new black Obama t-shirt which read, above his smiling visage, First African-American President.

"Look, they have the same ears!" Dwayne said.

The men in the driveway and the street beyond ranged from 55 to 25 to 15 months old. We, the women in the driveway, are afraid for them daily and nightly. It has been this way forever. We are not welfare queens - we are teachers, home health care aides, custodians, parole agents, correctional officers, and social workers. Yes. Pretty funny, to the "real Americans" who somehow don't notice us when Governor Palin proclaims: "We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation. This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us. Those who are protecting us in uniform. Those who are protecting the virtues of freedom."

And I guess Rep. Robin Hayes, R-N.C., who mentioned last Saturday that "Liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God" hasn't paid much attention to us, either.

But last week, Dwayne and I took our youngest daughter for a bike ride, and during a stop, he said to me, "I got really scared last week."

"What happened?" I said.

He shook his head. "All the older white guys at work listen to Rush Limbaugh, so I thought I'd better check it out. I listened to him last night."

That was all he said. He shook his head again.

There is no Willie Horton here. There is no mythical boogie man. Just our family. And America has conditioned my own daughters and their cousins, all teenagers or young women, to be afraid for their men as well. My middle daughter is a high school senior with about forty colleges sending her recruitment letters because of her high grades and test scores. Her boyfriend is a football and basketball player already recruited by Stanford and other schools. He's 6-5, weighs 200 pounds, and has braids, and gets hassled by police and school administrators and whoever else. She already knows.

Last week's news, that the Ashley Todd story was made up, that she has no idea how she got a backwards B carved on her face, was not a surprise to us. Convenient big black guys are always around -- Charles Stuart, Susan Smith, and on. But the results of their myths, which are diffuse versions of Tulsa, live on as well.

Today's news, about the ATF foiling a plot to assassinate Barack Obama, is not a surprise to us. By November 4th, we may have elected a 6 foot tall black man as president. The women in the driveway, and all over this country, will be watching with caution, some fear, but resilience and strength and hope, because we have always had those as our only weapons. Powerful weapons.

Comments

[SethBLiNK]

Near the end of an election season that has seen Gloria Steinem tell us that it's wrong to measure racism to sexism... but sexism is worse...

Geraldine Ferrara telling us that Barack Obama is lucky in this election to be black...

And George Will calculate that for every vote lost to Obama for being black, two are gained...

Reading your post rings so true, and so sad.

[ginalee]

One word. Thanks.

[Speakchic]

This post is the BEST post I've ever read on HuffPo and I thank you as a black woman for understanding far deeper issues that touch the African American community and hopefully from here on out the American community.

Thank you thank you thank you.

[WasteNJ]

A very moving piece. My parents resembled you and your husband in the 70's, and my upbringing was during the Reagan /Bush years.
I know the subtle racism that's like living with a terminal disease, and the no-so subtle racism that turns a boy into a man. But let's always remember that fear is a weapon for the weak, and we are strong.

[mikey2]

I am a Black man (not quite 6-4). How could you - a White woman - speak so eloquently of my own feelings, fears and even some of my own experiences? How could you know?
Suppose you've seen it, huh?
It's nice to know that someone who isn't Black, understands.
If you don't mind, I'd love to share this with a lot of my White republican friends and relations. From my heart: Thank you..

[liviapeacock]

Mikey2,

She knows you the same way an African American blogger on HuPo got inside my mind in his blog last week about how Sarah Palin got him interested in politics. I asked him the same thing;how does an African American male from Kansas know the heart of of a white female in New Hampshire? if nothing else, this election has taught me without a doubt, that we are all more alike than we are different.

[FJRinLA]

WHY WESTERN PA FOR THIS HOAX? PART ONE

JUST A COINCIDENCE?

I don't think so.

I have empathy for her, patsy or not, but we really do need to investigate if she was encouraged and/or compensated in any way by McCain supporters in PA or TX where she is from.

Does anyone really believe it's just a statistical analomy, a political freak of nature that of all the McCain offices in all 50 states that this young woman who was mentally-healthy enough to leave the sanctity of her home in Texas to travel to battleground states in support of the Republican standard bearer, picked western PA, the land of the Reagan Democrats offended by Sen. Obama's guns and religion comment to volunteer and have a nervous breakdown with behavior mimicking several well-known and highly publicized race-baiting and pre-meditated murderers like Charles Stuart and Susan Smith who were found to be not at all emotionally unstable, but rather extremely calculating and depressed only by their inability to persuade others of their race-based theories.

I pray that the media continues to ask questions. She is most likely a patsy that will receive very expensive defense counsel from the RNC which will claim that it is just out of concern for a troubled 20-year old when in fact it will likely be to protect her handlers.

[FJRinLA]

WHY WESTERN PA FOR THIS HOAX? PART TWO

COULD SHE BE THIS SMART, DUMB, OR SICK ALL ON HER OWN?

I have no evidence, just common sense that understands the following:

1. Drudge and others seemed prepared for something like this.
2. The odds of a lone college ATM-card wielding Republican college wacko from Texas going crazy in Western PA within 2 weeks of this election are astronomical.
3. Right wingers rogue operatives are simultaneously running from McCain and running for cover.

If we don't want to continue to be victimized by these types of drive-bys, we can't be content with just surviving them; we've got to drill down to their source and commit to prosecuting these people like the Mosad on the PLO-Munich killers if we're ever to have honest elections inthis country again.

[MsDebate]

Wow, you had me crying with this piece. I admire you for walking in his shoes and learning what the world is about for alot of black people. You seem to be a great teacher to your kids as well on what challenges they might face just being who they are.

[akena]

Thank you for this article. Your matter-of-fact, lucid style make way for the sunlight to shine on the
HUMANITY of the people you have written about.

[ohioan73]

I'm in an interracial relationship with a white man. He was stopped by the local cops one night for speeding. They let him go and actually came to pick me up at the house to drive his vehicle and him home even though he was DWI--obviously drunk. I couldnt believe it.

He later confessed to me that he was scared to tell them my black/Arabic sounding name when they called me to pick him up. He thought they would ridicule him as a "coal burner"and take him to jail because their view of him would change from "just a drunk white guy from the neighborhood" to "suspicious n-word loving w***er".

I told him later to stop freaking out and calm down and be happy he got away with it because if he was black...our dog would be at the pound (the dog was with him), car in the impound, money for bail, points off license, jail time, rehab and lord knows what else.

Things must change. Yesterday.

[Semper]

We will bring Obama home.

[mwestorca]

Wow! This story should be in every newspaper in America! It's an op-ed piece! I hope someone shoots it up to the MSM.

Thank you so much for sharing your story!

[Makesense]

Wow. Great peice.

[BluesDogLefty]

Well, written---

[MPeter]

Here, Obama is at his best. Get out and do your part. Obama is on fire. Guys, get out and bring it home.

http://dailykos.com/

[drsmc41]

...and people tend to be scared of the "6-4" Black man...It sounds like they have reasons to be scared of "the people." I wish others could understand this.

[LetMeUnderstandThis]

What?