Stop Resisting: A Letter To My Son
Shaka Senghor, an Oprah Super Soul 100 member and New York Times best-selling author of Writing My Wrongs, is back with a collection of letters, titled Letters to the Sons of Society. In this collection, Shaka explores the true experiences of black fatherhood and manhood in America through the lens of his relationship with his sons—Jay, whose childhood took place while Shaka was incarcerated—and Sekou, born after Senghor was released from prison. Letters offers an honest and reflective look into raising children in difficult circumstances, with solutions for how we can all rise to the occasion and provide the love and support necessary to raise the next generation. Publisher, Convergent. Editor, Derek Reed. CAA Agency.
Stop Resisting: A Letter to My Son
Dear Sekou,
I’m writing this letter to you as our country burns. Once again, a string of assaults — both physical and verbal — and murders have been brought down upon us by a culture that does not see us as fully human. We are just the latest generation to be reminded, brutally, that we are in chains, as animals are chained. This culture does not believe we are worthy of real freedom because it does not see us as fully human, to the point where we can be threatened, screamed at, assaulted, falsely arrested, or falsely imprisoned, and killed, for one reason and one reason alone: we are not white.
Because the pain of so much of what we go through is forced to take a backseat, or be internalized because new atrocities hit us every day, week, month, and year, it can be too easy to forget the details of what has happened as this rolling endless litany of assaults pile on our backs, day after day. So, let me make a memorial of just four incidents in the last two months so that we don’t let the memory of these things get entirely subsumed by new devastations — because we know they’re coming (they have to — it’s how the culture survives). What is striking about these four incidents is that they only partially show the range of what you might face as you grow up:
On February 23, 2020, a young black man, Ahmaud Arbery, was jogging in a Georgia neighborhood called Satilla Shores ,when two white men — one of whom was a former Georgia cop — decided to chase him down in a truck and shoot him dead. A third white man, who filmed the murder, was also subsequently alleged to have been involved. Let’s be clear, my dear son: he was jogging. He wasn’t, as these racists alleged, a suspect in neighborhood robberies, nor was he stealing anything from a nearby building site. He was jogging, as he often did in the neighborhood in which he lived. For this, he was murdered.
Second, on March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year old black EMT professional working saving lives during our pandemic, was asleep in bed in Louisville, Kentucky. A little past midnight, a gang of plain-clothes drug cops broke into her home, allegedly looking for a suspected drug dealer who was already in custody. When Breonna’s partner, fearful for his life as he believed this to be a home invasion, fired a shot in self-defense, the police responded by unloading their weapons indiscriminately — twenty rounds — eight of which hit Breonna, killing her. Initial reports suggested that the cops were the victims — words like “suspects” were used to describe Breonna and her partner. It wasn’t until civil rights activists got involved that the narrative changed, but it will always be too late for Breonna Taylor. She was asleep; she was murdered for being asleep.
There were two separate incidents on the same day, May 25 (your aunt Tamica’s birthday): one showed the toxicity of white privilege, and the other showed the violence that privilege believes is its right.
First, a black man, Christian Cooper, was birding in an area of Central Park in New York City called the Ramble when he asked a white woman, Amy Cooper (no relation), to leash her dog. His request was fair; she was a scofflaw (the Ramble is not an area where dogs are allowed off leash), and her dog was threatening the safety of the birds Christian wanted to look at. If you can imagine a gentler pastime than birdwatching, well good luck — but even in the most obviously and visibly peaceful of moments, white privilege sees threat: Amy Cooper, incensed at Christian’s reasonable request, calls 911 and pretends to a police dispatcher that her life is in danger. Here’s what she said before that call, and during it — these words alone cannot convey, of course, the screaming, out-of-control, fake fear Ms. Cooper displayed to the dispatcher:
[to Christian]: I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life. . . . [to the 911 dispatcher]: I’m in the Ramble, and there is a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet. He is recording me and threatening me and my dog. There is an African American man. I’m in Central Park. He is recording me and threatening myself and my dog. I’m being threatened by a man in the Ramble please send the cops immediately.
Amy Cooper’s lies about Christian Cooper join a long list of lies about the threat African American men pose to white women. That phone call, then, was an invitation to have police officers kill Mr. Cooper — nothing more, nothing less. A black man is threatening a white woman’s life, or in the case of Emmett Till, sixty-five years earlier, is merely in her presence? That’s all that’s needed. And whether or not she knew this overtly, she certainly knew it at a genetic level, just as Carolyn Bryant in Money, Mississippi, knew it in 1955 when she made false claims that got Emmett lynched.
Lastly, a few hours after the Christian Cooper assault, 1,200 miles away, a white police officer detained a black man, George Floyd. The officer, jammed him up against a car wheel, held his knee violently on George’s neck for nearly nine minutes, killing him. Since the video of that murder has gone viral, the country has erupted in frustration and anger. People have taken to the streets to protest, but let’s pause for a moment to remember this: in the weeks before George’s murder, heavily armed white men and women took to the streets across the country to protest the stay-at-home orders during the pandemic. In their case, they were allowed to protest as they pleased, with minimal police oversight. When protests began after the murder of George Floyd, the police response was huge, and militarized, and violent. One police officer in New York City told a protester she was a stupid fucking bitch before with two hands violently pushing her ten feet across the tarmac to the ground, sending her to the hospital. There have been baton charges, and rubber bullets, and tear gas, and pepper pellets, and curfews — the whole militarized offensive has been pre-ordained to terrorize us once again into silence, into remembering our place.
This is the country in which you’re being raised. Black bodies can be murdered, threatened with murder, or assaulted, with impunity. The black body is not considered fully, or even partially, human. And the key way this is brought home to bear, again and again, is via two simple words: Stop resisting.
Stop resisting — these are the perfect two words for what we, as black boys and men and women, are told to do by the culture in which we are simply trying to breathe, let alone resist. We are told to stop resisting by cops, yes, but by more than just cops — by angry white women in Central Park (Chris Cooper’s crime was to stand up to her shitty behavior, which she found so threatening that she had to, in turn, threaten his very life). We are told to stop resisting by white culture; when protests erupt in the streets, we are told that we must be impeccably non-violent otherwise our resistance is merely “violent,” or it’s going against the memory of George Floyd, or we’re reminded that property is sacred, even when human lives are not.
Cops use those two words, stop resisting, as a kind of magical cloak behind which they feel free to do whatever they wish with the black body in front of them. Those words are shouted at those they are arresting for no reason and who have the temerity to not acquiesce to an unlawful order; or, those two words are used as a smokescreen for when a police officer is brutalizing a citizen: the two words that justify ill-use of the African American body. What it means is, hey, I can cause you pain and discomfort first, but if you push back at that in the slightest way, you’re resisting, so I then have complete freedom to use your body as I wish. Or, I can threaten your life with a gun or a chokehold or a knee to the neck, and if you don’t meekly give in to that pain, then you’re resisting, and I can escalate to whatever degree I like. Or, you can be as passive as the officer wants you to be, or as passive as a white woman in a park needs you to be, but if you are not cowed by the cloak of power he or she wields — if you are not cowed in the way of the slave — then you are resisting, and I can do whatever I want to you until you stop resisting, up to and including murder.
How will a cop know that you’ve stopped resisting? There’s only one way to be truly sure that a person is no longer resisting. George Floyd stopped resisting; Walter Scott, in South Carolina in 2015, was running away from a police officer, but to a cop raised in a racist police culture, such a piece of behavior is a taunt — if you’re running away, you’re resisting the narrative that white culture is in control — so Officer Slager, following Walter, pulled out a gun and made sure that Walter Scott could never resist ever again. Eric Garner was standing on a street in Staten Island, and had the temerity to resist what he saw as targeted police conduct — he was pulled to the ground in a chokehold and murdered for the sin of not going along completely with his own abuse.
So, what am I to tell you, Sekou, if you’re told to “stop resisting”? Should you do so? Was Eric Garner resisting when his life was ended by a chokehold? Was George Floyd resisting for the more than eight minutes a cop kept his knee on his neck? Chris Cooper resisted, and his life was thereafter in the balance. For years, the black community has decided to “have the talk” with its young black men. Even someone in the lauded position as mayor of New York City — a man who has a black son, and who is control of the police force — said in 2014, “With Dante, very early on, we said, ‘Look, if a police officer stops you, do everything he tells you to do. Don’t move suddenly. Don’t reach for your cellphone. Because we knew, sadly, there’s a greater chance it might be misinterpreted if it was a young man of color.” The response by the police union? Mayor De Blasio was told, “if this individual, who’s in charge of running this city, doesn’t have faith in his own son being protected by the NYPD, he may want to think about moving out of New York City completely. He just doesn’t belong here.” That’s right — he was threatened with being run out of town by his own police force. So, am I to have this talk with you? Am I to tell you to not resist so that you might stay alive?
I’ve come to understand that I’m fed up with people asking me what I am going to tell you to do if you are confronted by police. The reality is there is nothing I can tell you to protect you against a racist cop hellbent on breaking your back, kneeling on your neck, or choking the life out of you; there’s nothing I can tell you about the slurs you’ll hear, the times you’ll be followed or detained or questioned for merely being on a street. So instead, I must out of necessity teach you how to physically defend yourself. If you must die — a thought so heartbreaking I don’t want to even write the words — I would rather you died fighting back, because it is clear to me that complying to commands of stop resisting will end with you being carried away in a body bag. The point is, either way, it doesn’t matter — even if you’re not resisting, this is no cloak for you, only a cloak for the cop. I’m sick of the pickets and protests that haven’t stopped the racists of the world from attempting to get us killed or arrested. I’m tired of listening to leaders talk about how we have to hold people accountable. How can we hold people accountable when the system that employs and validates them is corrupt? How can we hold people accountable when a large part of society is indifferent to the suffering of black boys and men and women? I’m tired of memes and social media post that allow us to hit a like or share button, to say we have done our part. None of these things make me feel safe as a black man, friend, or father in America — in fact nothing makes me feel safe. I am exhausted, just as our options are exhausted, yet there is a part of me that refuses to give up or give in. Meanwhile I will continue to ask myself tough questions like, what can I do to make you and other black boys feel safe and empowered? What can I do to let you and them know, you are loved and valued? What can I do to eradicate the fear that you and other sons of society will die because of your blackness? What the fuck can I do?
The first thing is: resist. There is a proud history of resistance that you need to learn about and internalize and feed upon when you are called to act. As enslaved people we sabotaged tools, created the music of resistance, fled via the Underground Railroad. We stole our masters’ food and liquor and livestock; we fought against the forces of racism in the Civil War and after. We fought back in the Red Summer riots in 1919, in Chicago and Washington D.C. and elsewhere. We created sit-ins and protests and freedom rides and boycotts throughout the Civil Rights Era. We have been Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner and Malcolm X and Rosa Parks and Mose Till, Emmett Till’s uncle, who stood up in a court in the deep south in 1955 and pointed to a white man, accusing him of murdering his nephew. We have created Million Men and Women marches, and Black Lives Matter.
This is resistance!
So many men and women have done their part — now it’s up to you to do yours. Forget the call out, the cancel, or the shaming culture. This is heart and gut check time. This is a collective time of reimagining, what it means to stand for something. This is your moment to exercise a higher way of seeing and believing in the best that is us. This is a moment for clarity of vision and spiritually awakened listening. We have people on the frontlines and operating in the back. Their efforts are equally important. This is a visceral time of reckoning not with who we are, but with who we can become. Never diminish someone’s efforts, because they aren’t the same as yours — this does a disservice to the bigger vision that is calling us all to act. There is no greater than or less than, it all counts. We cannot afford to fall into the trap of divisive rhetoric, that leaves us empty hearted and ineffective. In this moment, and in the future moments where we’re called to respond, we have to love our people up to a state of active engagement. This is your calling son, as a young black man in America — no longer should you not resist, and no longer will I abide by telling you to do so. And no longer will I hold out the expectation for you that you should wait on a hope that those you deal with will treat you fairly. As Malcolm X said “I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don’t believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn’t want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I’m not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn’t know how to return the treatment.”
I’m tired of talking to you about racism, about my anger in racist culture. As you grow, you’ll hear about so-called “diversity training” and all the other socially and politically correct bullshit words used to seemingly soothe our pain. These anemic salves have served no other purpose, other than to silence our cries and dry up our tears in the moment. You no longer need to follow these fake hopes toward peace. When faced with confrontation, resist. Resist with passion; resist with a ram-rod back; resist with a surety that you are a human being. The first step in non-resistance is to aver that you are, indeed, human. Those who seek to deny you this will seek to deny you due process, fair treatment on the streets and in the courts, and will try to jail you whether or not you have committed a crime. Resist; resist this narrative that you are not a boy, that you are not a man, that you are not human.
I’m tired, Sekou; I’m tired of all this. I’m tired because I know that the list of murders of body and spirit that I put in this letter will already be out of date by next week, next month, next year — perhaps by tomorrow. Somewhere tonight, even, somewhere in America, a racist cop will violently grab a person of color and will hurt them physically, will treat them as non-human, or will just tell them they may not drive, or cross the street, or walk, or even sleep; and that person will have perhaps had the talk with their parents, and will know they should acquiesce. The violent treatment hurts, and the invisible chains clank and taunt, and the slightest movement — the inability of a human being to ever fully be a statue — will seem like resistance to the culture that views them as non-human, and the violence will intensify as the culture screams, “Stop resisting.” And then, there is no stopping what will come.
So, I’m not too tired to tell you this: resist. Always resist.
With all my love,
Dad
