Waffle House Arrest in Black and White
"To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time."
A friend sent me this quote by James Baldwin to help explain the anger African Americans are feeling after the aggressive arrest of a black woman by white police officers at the Saraland Waffle House early Sunday morning.
"We can't win,” he said. “All we can do is try and survive the double edge sword and excel economically to get above it. Those who don't often fall victim to the system. I sometimes feel like we are losing ground."
It hurts to hear one of the most optimistic people I know talk about losing ground. He is one I turn to for honest conversations about race, often the issues that we as a community avoid talking about. Maybe it takes a crisis to make us ask questions and pay attention to the reasons for the anger.
The Waffle House story isn’t easy. There are different sides with videos, witnesses and news reports that say Chikesia Clemons was drunk and acting out and making death threats over being charged 50 cents for plastic utensils. Another video shows three white officers taking her down. One says he will break her arm. During the arrest, her dress came down and exposed her bare chest.
The story is national news with comments about racist cops and a woman getting what she deserves for resisting arrest, but here we are left with emotions and deeper fears driving us farther apart. Black. White. Police. Community.
What if the police were overly aggressive? Were the police overly aggressive or did her threats justify the approach.
My friend described the deeper emotions for African Americans like this. "The pain or innate passion we have toward any perceived injustices slap us in the face daily. The insensitivity to a situation that we didn’t create or ask for stirs some dark emotions. It’s one thing to just tell us to just pull up our bootstraps and just get with the program, but one must first have boots to even strap up.
"The arrogance and dismissal of afforded privilege is what perpetuates and drives division," he said. "We didn’t create slavery. We didn’t create systemic and institutional racism. We didn’t create bigotry. The fact that a group of people feels we have to remind others that our lives matter reveals the state of our society."
As a white woman, that is hard to hear. I knew almost nothing about James Baldwin until he gave me the quote. I did a little more digging and this is the what Baldwin said next: “Part of the rage is this: it isn’t only what is happening to you, but it’s what’s happening all around you all of the time, in the face of the most extraordinary and criminal indifference, the indifference and ignorance of most white people in this country.”
Indifference. The Lumineers sing that “the opposite of love is indifference.” If we are going to be a city that loves our neighbors, we can’t be indifferent or ignorant about what happens to any of us.
What if this Waffle House arrest makes us aware of bigger issues that we ignored or haven’t acknowledged before? Maybe it starts honest conversations that bring down the anger, encourage sensitivity and finds better ways to for police to make arrests in tense situations. It can even help us find common ground.
It is the only way that we can all win.
