Some folks asked about my buddy from Howard who was murdered by a police officer. The Washington Post did a very good investigation of the case, unfortunately it's behind a curtain. Here's a piece on the settlement. Here's some info on the cop, who is a piece of work, to put it mildly. And here's the reason I started writing. I knew for years that the Prince George's County police department was one of the most brutal in the nation, and had wanted to write about them. Prince's murder gave me that last push. It really was a small act. But it was something, and it was better than sitting at home stewing.
What's not in that article, is the profound personal effect Prince's death had on me. When I went down to his memorial service at Howard, I was upset, but not beside myself with grief. Truthfully, Prince had closer friends than me, and we'd been out of touch for a year or so. But I was disturbed, and didn't realize how profoundly until a year later when 9/11 happened. Everyone I knew was deeply shaken by it. And yet, again, I was disturbed, but not as grief-stricken as most of my friends.
I have a weird way of dealing with big, emotional events. My brain moves slow, and I tend to experience things in waves--it took weeks for me to understand, emotionally, what Obama's election meant. Ditto for 9/11, except longer. And then one night I woke up yelling and bawling like a four-year old. I'd had this dream where I saw Prince, alive and well, and tried to warn him, repeatedly, of the impending danger. But whenever I tried to explain, he would cut me off and tell me he didn't want to know.
This was a few months after 9/11. Kenyatta had repeatedly admonished me
for being cold whenever someone talked about the attacks.I think I'm an atheist who's yet to come to terms with this fact. I didn't have a spiritual lens to interpret Prince's death or 9/11. I never believed in spirits sending you messages in dreams. But I did have a very concrete epiphany. The world had ended for my old friend, much as it had ended for all the victims of 9/11. But whereas we were hell-bent on bringing justice to Al'Qaeda, I knew that there would be no justice for Prince. The cop would keep his job, they'd rule the murder justifiable, and people would accept the death of a hard-working father, and a college student, the way the accepted the death of Patrick Dorismond and Amadou Diallo. It's the cost of doing business. And it's a cost born mostly by us.
I can't tell you how angry that made me. And anger breeds hate and blindness. And so for a good year, after 9/11 I was blind. I couldn't feel what this city was feeling. My son was almost two, and the thought of raising him right and him still becoming "a cost of doing business" filled me with fear--and more anger. The idea that someone, whose salary you were paying, could be lethally incompetent and yet continue to keep their job just burned me.
Emotions aren't moral. I wouldn't defend how I felt, and as time passed, and I came out of the anger, I came to feel deep shame for not participating in the public mourning after 9/11, for seeking to construct a morbid equation from death. I don't think Prince's murder justifies that. But it was how I felt. I simply didn't know how to cope.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Thanks for sharing.
For the record, PG cops scare the crap outta me, and I'm as white as miracle whip on wonder bread. That business recently, where they killed that accused cop killer in his cell, and the video camera just happened to be turned off, and no one broke the thin blue line of silence? Straight out of the third world. I'd much, much, much rather deal with MPD (DC cops); they've got their issues, but they're not batsh*t insane.
You got a link for that story, or names involved so I can google it?
The young man's name was Ronnie White, and he was killed on June 29, 2008. There's an article on CNN.com from a few days later here. What's appalling is that as far as I am aware to this day no one has been charged or disciplined in any way over this death.
I used to pass the Wakamba every day on my way to and from our office in the Garment district, often late at night.
The effect of trauma on the psyche is remarkable. I haven't been the same since 9/11; not because of anything that happen on that day, but because of how it changed my perception of things that happened in my life 10 and 20 years earlier.
I appreciate your testimony. I'll leave my policy comments for another thread
I'm new to the area and didn't know about that story; really incredible that a jury in PG would even partially believe the officer in that situation. Understandably infuriating (to me, too).
Totally sympathize with being uncomfortable with your own reaction to tragedy, by the way.
Thanks; it is this kind of thoughtful post that has us all coming back.
My one reaction to 9/11 (and reading this) was from Hamlet:
To be or not to be,
that is the question.
Whether it is nobler in the mind
to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
or take arms against a sea of troubles,
and by opposing end them.
Many read Hamlet's soliloquy as a contemplation of suicide, but it strikes me more aptly understood as a response to overwhelming shock and contemplation of what to do, the stakes involved, the rock, the hard place--what to do.
Interesting read of Hamlet... one of those passages that had died the death of over-repetition.
Hamlet was in doubt about something. He was not.
Incredible stuff TNC. I'm so glad I found this blog. You're a hell of a brave writer.
While reading this post I couldn't help but hear Talib Kweli's "The Proud" in my mind. I don't think it's unusual for people who have faced repeated injustice to be less than empathetic when tragedy befalls the very ones who turned a blind eye to their daily tragedies. In the case of 9/11, it's not that you don't empathize with the individual victims, but the nation as a whole who generally turn a blind eye to the daily injustices, such as murders at the hands of the boys in blue. I'm not saying it's right but it is understandable.
I remember Cornel West talking about 9/11 as a kind of "n$*&erization" of America-- in other words, Americans got to feel what it was like to suffer devastating violence seemingly without reason or sufficient justification. They got a little taste of the lynching/race riot experience. And it sure brought out some interesting character traits in various pundits, writers, etc. didn't it? A lot of sadness, a great deal of insane rage, general disorientation ("What is going on?"), a willingness to throw overboard previous pieties and/or "values" for the sake of vengeance, safety, etc.. You think about what these people would do not to have their child be a "cost of doing business" with al-Qaeda, and then think about how harshly some of them judge TNC and others for not trusting the Prince County police. How many of them would blame Prince Jones? Very instructive, very instructive indeed...
There's some truth to that, but we started 2 wars in our anger. Effective or not, we were able to vent our rage. As TNC points out, there were no repercussions for the cop that killed Prince, which makes it all the more galling.
Shalom Ta-Nehisi,
We all cope the way we cope.
It really is that simple.
B'shalom,
Jeff
I remember what happened to Prince Jones. That was my freshman year at Howard, and I remember how it galvanized the campus.
Ta-Nehisi, I think that spirituality is about believing in language and stories. Our reptilians brains have a need for story-telling, for survival purposes. In this sense, religion actually has a purpose.
I think where aetheism and spirituality part ways is over literalism. Aetheism insists on literalism, and spirituality insists on the validity of storytelling and myth, as a means to understand what is always a non-objective reality.
I say this just because you are obviously a storyteller and lover of words. And a believer in their ability to tell some sort of truth. Not that you are not at heart also an aetheist, but something to consider.
And I'm sorry about your friend. Loss is never ever easy or predictable.
Just as an aside atheism does not mean non-spiritual. As an example Buddhism is atheistic.
Aetheism insists on literalism, and spirituality insists on the validity of storytelling and myth, as a means to understand what is always a non-objective reality.
I'm not going to thread jack much, but I do have to disagree with this premise a bit. You've got it backward--atheists recognize the power and validity of storytelling and myth because we recognize it as storytelling and myth. It's the religionists who insist that their stories and myths represent literal reality--and it's all a matter of degree. Young earth creationists are more extreme than your average Episcopalian (no offense intended to the latter), but there's still an assumption on some level that the myth is literal fact.
The atheists I know--and of whose number I count myself--are strong believers in the notion that we learn about and understand the world through our stories, and personally, I think religious belief is the most successful type of story ever created. Look at the effect it's had on the world. Religion is a mega-meme. But we also recognize its limitations--you can learn a lot about human nature by looking at myths, but you won't understand much about physics or biology that way.
Aetheism insists on literalism, and spirituality insists on the validity of storytelling and myth, as a means to understand what is always a non-objective reality.
A beautiful point. That is amusingly missed by Brain below. Spiritualists are not the same as "religionists," as you put it, who share with (most) atheists an insistence on viewing the non-objective aspects of the world as objective, the emotional as moral, the complexity as a clash of swords. "Religionists" view these things as objective according to their particular (worthy) mythos and atheists to (worthy) physical sciences. Nevermind that there need not be a hard separation between these things and the insistence on creating a dichotomy, whether from believers or non believers always struck me as the same kind of fundamentalism.
Prince was a classmate, a friend, and a brother. I still think of him often and wish for better prospects of justice.
Thank you for sharing this story.
I would say though, that there's no "right" way to handle grief. We work through it, the way we have to work through it.
There's a great project out in Oakland called Youth Radio that collects citizen media from local teens. They've produced a few really interesting pieces in the recent police shootings there; a lot of what they had to say reminded me of your reflections on prison reform. Here are a couple of the videos posted the site that introduced me to the project:
http://el-oso.net/blog/archives/2009/03/25/whether-their-intentions-are-noble-or-not/
Great post, very important. Coping with stuff like 9/11 or the loss of friend to a sociopath with a badge is not going to be the same for everyone. Just hearing different reactions makes us realize that our own authentic ways of processing grief are just as legit as anyone else's.
As long as you keep writing from the heart I'll keep reading.
Ditto on the 9/11 attacks. I didn't have the same reaction as anyone I know. I have been watching bombings and terror strikes on the news for years and they all touched me deeply. I can't imagine what it would be like to go to the store with your kids and have someone rush in loaded with dynamite and try to kill everyone. I've thought about that for decades now.
When 9/11 came along it wasn't anything out of the ordinary for me (in a manner of speaking). I had already processed that shock, anger, and fear, and sort of learned that that was just the way the world worked. Maybe everyone else is naive. Maybe I'm just a fatalist, but I was able to see it in a bigger scope and 9/11 wasn't a life-changer for me.
And yeah, I got plenty of shit for not being sensitive to all the hand-wringers. Still do.
"Coping with stuff like 9/11 or the loss of friend to a sociopath with a badge is not going to be the same for everyone."
The problem with this sentence, at least for me, is that this cop was not necessarily a sociopath.
Just like every rapist is not a sociopath. Just power hungry and full of hate.
I hadn't thought about that day in a couple years. Prince was a high school classmate of mine, living across the hall from me in our dorm. (It was a Math & Science magnet school (TAMS), the guy was pretty smart) . Prince's murder made me a basket case for over a week, and reading about it again has brought tears. He was truly a kind and wonderful soul and the world is poorer to have lost him.
While I had always know that institutional racism existed, it really let me know the scale and randomness of the injustice. Many privileged people think that it has declined to the point of not being measurable, but it will always be there.
I went to church for the first time in years the Sunday after hearing about Prince's death. Apparently the Church was low on money so they handed the collection plate around multiple times. I can't say that it helped.
I don't think there's any shame in not knowing how to cope with tragedy--either that of your friend or 9/11. There's no right way to deal with these sorts of things.
TNC -- let me add my thanks for writing this. It's searingly honest and I'm honored you would share it with us.
Let me also join the no-shame chorus, for the reasons stated above. And another: I also did not participate in the public mourning after 9/11, but as it happens I don't find those types of exercises to be of value for myself. For many, it's an authentic reaction, but it generally isn't for me, and in this case, it wasn't for you. I hope you can find some peace with yourself about this.
I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts on this subject and to let you know that I think your prose is just beautiful.
I think your way of reacting to tragic events is probably part genetic and part conditioning.
Since the time I was a young adult I've had the delayed reaction response to tradegies, especially when it comes to dealing with death. After losing my father at 13, my 4 grandparents before 17 and four uncles (my father had 12 siblings) before 21, I stopped experiencing immediate grief when learning of the loss of a life. It takes about a week before it hits me.
I'm saddened that it appears Americans have become conditioned to shrugging our shoulders anytime law enforcement unjustifiably kills or harms one of us. I'm outraged that the victims are usually Americans of color.
Eight months after 9/11, we had a Saturday parade honoring the armed forces that included a military fly-over. I awoke to the sound of planes overhead (rare in our small town) and after a while casually went over to a window for a look.
The body of that behemoth was wider than my house, with wings stretching over two sets of neighbors on either side. The window I was leaning on shook.
I shook, too. I sobbed, I yowled, I wept, and I knew it was the first real emotional reaction I'd had since the Towers went down.
That April reaction had three parts. First, empathy for other mothers who hear planes that big and know they're bringing war. I thought of Afghan moms and Pakistani moms and Iraqi moms. Second, profound gratitude that I wasn't in their place, and that the big planes fly to protect me and mine. Finally, an effort to feel bad about being glad to have the power--which failed completely.
Looking back, I think that from the minute my husband called to tell me both towers had been hit, my brain was trying to work at all those levels, plus sorrow and fear plus hunting for ways to understand. All those conflicting elements netted out to very little external response.
TNC, I find it impossible to imagine you responding simply to a loss as loaded as the one you've shared, and easy to imagine a response so deep that those around you wondered if it had happened at all.
This was very heartfelt and touching, Coates. The loss of your friend is one of those things that just can shake a foundation. Police brutality and the murder of innocent Black folks with no repercussions is what tears at the fabric of the belief system in this country. It's why I'm naturally cynical, and want to be hopeful. There is no 6 degrees of separation for most Black person and an injustice that they know by Law Enforcement of someone Black that they know. If you can make it 3 degrees, I congratulate you.
How you related it to 9/11 was real and honest. And, that's ok.