Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

He really is that stupid.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

American history and black history cannot be separated.

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

The only way through is to slog through the muck one step at at time.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

“In the future, this lab will be a museum. do not touch it.”

“Perhaps I should have considered other options.” (head-desk)

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

We can’t confuse what’s necessary to win elections with the policies that we want to implement when we do.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / This Week In Blackness / How Not To Get Killed By the Police, Part I: Don’t Be Black

How Not To Get Killed By the Police, Part I: Don’t Be Black

by | 31 Comments

This post is in: 

Former FBI agent and author of A Survival Guide: How Not to Get Killed by the Police, Part I, Quentin Williams, has been speaking on how to interact with the police and live to tell the tale. He leaves something huge out of his book though:

“Anything that sparks a bit of emotion, sparks a bit of fear, sparks a bit of anger – anything that a person in the public citizenry does will end up hurting that person,” he said. “It will escalate very quickly.” Williams acknowledged that his book does not deal with racism or the “predisposition” of some officers to mistrust black males. “Yeah, that’s the issue,” he told the students, some of whom pushed back or shared stories of their own encounters with police. “That’s the 800-pound gorilla, and that’s the one thing I want to get to at some point, but my first thing is to make sure that I give a tool, a simple tool, that deals with just one aspect of a very complicated issue.”

The book doesn’t cover racism? Williams is a black man who was repeatedly stopped by the police even after he became an FBI agent! Being black is like 80 percent why unarmed civilians are getting killed by police in the first place.

Team Blackness discussed Hillary’s big announcement, another woman killed in police custody, and Madonna’s kiss with Drake.

Subscribe on iTunes | Subscribe On Stitcher | Direct Download | RSS

Reader Interactions

31Comments

  1. 1.

    BretH

    Anything that sparks a bit of emotion, sparks a bit of fear…

    … like being a black male perhaps??

  4. 4.

    catclub

    “It will escalate very quickly.”

    I think this is part of the problem. The militarization has led to this. negotiation and conflict resolution are out the window.

  7. 7.

    scav

    Sounds like cops are filled to the brim with easily ignitable emotions (I won’t be so crass as to say hormones) and lack the discipline, fortitude or training to handle themselves so everyone around must be very very very careful not to set them off, carefully avoiding all those hidden cop tripwires. “[A]nything that a person in the public citizenry does will end up hurting that person” because the protectors must not be in any way ruffled. I hear tell the intimacy in relationships granted by same protectors is great though.

  9. 9.

    Roger Moore

    To be fair, it may be true that being a black male is dangerous, but how is he supposed to turn that into behavior advice? “Hey brother, if you don’t want the police to shoot you, stop being so black and so male.”

  10. 10.

    blueskies

    Anything that sparks a bit of emotion, sparks a bit of fear…

    I know he’s just trying to tell it like it is, but Williams sounds like he suffers from abused wife syndrome and thinks the rest of us should, too. You know, for our safety.

    Why should we put up with wife-beaters, bullies, and psychopaths?

    Oh yeah. 9-11. Or something.

  12. 12.

    CONGRATULATIONS!

    So is he suggesting going out in white face to get around that 800 lb gorilla?

    @sukabi: If so, he’d be stupid. Truth is, cops are shooting everyone these days. The media is ignoring that for obvious reasons. It’s just that blacks, AS ALWAYS, get shot more.

  13. 13.

    Sherparick

    @BretH: Yep, that is what I noted to. Just being a black male will trigger a “bit emotion, sparks a bit of fear, sparks a bit of anger” in I expect most whites when encountering a black person we don’t know in a potential conflict situation. Even if you are self-aware of that stupidity, the lizard brain in us tells us we are dealing with “the Other” and to be prepared to act accordingly.

  14. 14.

    D58826

    I was just out of college in 1968-1969 and I stopped in a spot to wait for my wife. Yes it was marked no parking but everybody dropped off and picked up people there. It was 9pm and not another car in sight. A local cop came over and when I tried to explain why I was there he informed me that he was going to teach me some respect. Well he did teach me something but it wasn’t respect. I guess he had a thing for college age males what with the Vietnam war going on. Fortunately my sister’s high school BFF was a lt. on the force and we got the ticket fixed. Oh bny the way I’m white. So there really is no way to tell what will set a cop off, even though being black certainly leads the list. It also made me much more sympathetic to the breathing while black stories.

  15. 15.

    sukabi

    Obviously besides racism, the problem is with the recruitment of unstable, power-tripping, scared of their own shadows aholes, who are then heavily armed, and trained to shoot first and cover each others asses when things go ‘wrong’….ie, they get caught shooting, murdering folks in cold blood.

  16. 16.

    MomSense

    My older boys drive so one of the things we taught them was what to do if they are ever stopped. And so far, so good but we live in a small town and my boys are white.
    If my boys were black I wouldn’t know what to tell them. The list of what could get you shot is long and conflicting.
    I do not know, much as I try to feel empathy, just how anguished I would feel if I had to live the fear of being mother to a black son because I don’t have to live it every single day.
    We have to do something about this. We cannot just let this happen every day without making an effort to stop it.

  17. 17.

    Melissa

    Will we hear more about Natasha McKenna. She was in jail, in restrains, and then shocked (by taser?) about to 50 000 volts.
    Will this just fall away?

  18. 18.

    wilfred

    Well, justice takes time, doesn’t it?

    Washington (CNN)One former employee of the private Blackwater Worldwide security company was sentenced Monday to life in prison and three others to 30 years each behind bars for their roles in a 2007 mass shooting in Baghdad that left 17 people dead.

    The dead people were just brown, not black, and it sure took a while. But, still. Oh, and:

    (CNN)There was nothing routine about a sentencing hearing Tuesday in Atlanta that wrote the final legal chapter of one of the most massive school cheating scandals in the country.

    Some jail time – not enough, imo, but you have to start somewhere. Let justice prevail, etc.

  20. 20.

    Aleta

    So young people of color are expected to control their hands, their posture, the color they’re wearing, their tone of voice, choice of words, the way they walk, and any sudden movements or high spirits. And when frightened, to suppress the instinctive fight or flight response, the natural impulse to ask questions, answer back, get angry, or raise their voice.

    But police cannot be expected to control anger or refrain from shooting to kill, because sometimes they make mistakes, or they just went to a funeral, are stressed or afraid, or have ‘inattentional blindness.’ Or their behavior ‘slips off the right path and is captured’ by bad behavior.

  24. 24.

    Heliopause

    A Survival Guide: How Not to Get Killed by the Police

    Leaving aside the race issue for a moment, bizarre that it would be incumbent upon citizens to know this. Did Stalin or Mao offer handy government pamphlets of this nature?

  25. 25.

    The Other Bob

    So young people of color are expected to control their hands, their posture, the color they’re wearing, their tone of voice, choice of words, the way they walk, and any sudden movements or high spirits. And when frightened, to suppress the instinctive fight or flight response, the natural impulse to ask questions, answer back, get angry, or raise their voice.

    Yes, because we want our kids to come home alive. It isn’t fair, but that is what I will tell my kids.

  27. 27.

    brantl

    Great link where a redneck (who no longer really is), explains and excoriates white privilege:

  30. 30.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    I have to say after that shooting in Kansas I wondering what we are calling “racism” is just some epic form of stupidity. Less this is some social thing to exploit some sub group in society and more these people are idiots who can’t think beyond the next moment and if doesn’t look like the face in the mirror, it can’t be human.

Comments are closed.