I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (24 page)

As an adult, I would still often get pulled over for DWB—Driving While Black. I even knew what neighborhoods to avoid. If you went through Torrance, you were being pulled over as sure as night follows day. To this day, every black person I know will make a detour
to avoid going through Torrance. I don’t know if it’s still like that, but old habits are fucking hard to break. It takes some sort of pressure to change old ways. In my case, what happened was that I became a dad.

One time I took Kyle out for a ride when he was a toddler. Soon enough, the sirens came on and I was pulled over. I stopped the car and got my son out of the car seat. I knew that a search of the vehicle was coming next. It was standard operating procedure, like going through baggage check at an airport. You get pulled over; your skin color gets checked; “black man detected”; your car gets searched. What
also
was standard operating procedure is that black men were commanded to sit on the curb. It was completely emasculating and it was entirely humiliating. Everyone could see you sitting there on the sidewalk like a dog waiting for his master to be done at the grocery store.

Right on cue, the cop gave me my orders. “I’m going to check your car,” he said. “You and your son sit on the curb.”

“No,” I said, holding my boy.

“Sit on the curb,” he repeated.

“No, man.” (Not “sir.”) “I’m not going to have my son remember that his father was sitting on the curb.”

“I can put you on the curb!”

“Then he’ll remember that somebody
put
me on the curb. He won’t remember that I did it willingly.”

The lovely officer stared at me with anger, but I stared back with calm. “Just go stand over there,” he mumbled under his breath. He searched my car and sent me on my way, and that was the end of it that day.

This treatment we all got wasn’t black paranoia. Nor was it coincidental or an accident. This type of behavior was the
plan
. Police
Chief Daryl Gates’s stated policy was hiring Southern white boys, especially those fresh home from Vietnam. He believed that they knew how to handle these urban niggers. They would have no illusions that they were dealing with anything other than a population of thugs that had to be repressed for the greater good. It wasn’t “to protect and serve.” It was lynch law, imported directly from the source. Any complaints by the black community would be received like a criminal bitching that his handcuffs were too tight: “Maybe you shouldn’t have made us put those handcuffs on you to begin with.” Daryl Gates’s LAPD was even touted as a model for other police forces to follow. They sent him to Israel and to other places so he could show them how it’s done. The fact that what we were living under was presented as an
ideal
made things even more demoralizing. You can’t change things for the better if things are regarded as exemplary. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Things
never
would have changed if it wasn’t for Rodney King. The thing is, I get why the Rodney King jury acquitted those police officers. White people have been so conditioned to believe that black people are “just like them” that they assume our experiences are the same too. Well, they’re
not
. Since our experiences color our perceptions, a black dude and a white dude can watch the same thing happening and come to wildly different explanations for what they’re seeing. Their stories might even contradict each other’s, even if each dude describes only what he thinks is “obvious.” Nowhere are racial attitudes more different than when it comes to the police. It starts from what we see as kids, and that attitude develops as we grow older.

So it’s not that hard to get why the Rodney King cops got acquitted, and frankly it’s not even that surprising. The trial was held in Simi Valley. If South Central is the wrong side of the tracks, Simi
Valley is the right side. It’s one of the top five safest cities in the country. Cops live there, alongside sheriffs and firemen. All these types who work in L.A. County live in Simi Valley. In the same way that my perception of police officers is based on my experiences over the years, the same goes for the people who live in Simi Valley. There, the cops aren’t an ominous force out to mess with you at every opportunity. They coach the Little League team. They shop at the same grocery stores. Their wives have you over for dinner.

Because of the jurors’ experiences with the cops—not “prejudices,” actual personal experiences—they couldn’t see what the police officers were doing as malicious. They looked for every reason to justify their long and deeply held beliefs that cops are good. Once you accept the premise that “cops are good,” then by definition those cops couldn’t be doing what they
appeared
to be doing on that videotape. There was more to the story. There
had
to be. It’s like finding out your wife is cheating on you or your kid is a drug addict. You will buy any excuse they throw at you because you don’t want to condemn them.

The one good thing to come out of the Rodney King fiasco is that much of what the LAPD formerly did in secrecy was now made public. For the first time, white America saw that there was something to what the black community had been saying for years. So if any white people wonder why we’re so loud, it’s because you never fucking listen to us! The investigators did their work, and the truth came out. It wasn’t that hard to find. The LAPD had been
brazen
in its abuse of power. They found cops who were robbing ordinary citizens. It was discovered that there was a task force that would follow suspects around and assassinate them.

Things were revealed to be so corrupt on a systemic level that the federal government had to step in with a ten-year mandate to
make sure things got better. The first President Bush, a conservative Republican from a blue-blood political family, forced Daryl Gates to resign. Bush wouldn’t take out
Saddam Hussein
when he had the chance, but this police chief was too much even for him.

Now think about those kids growing up with the kinds of experiences that I had, and think about how they would regard police officers. All those children that are now men, raising their sons and daughters with that kind of distrust. It wasn’t just L.A. that was like that. It was the same situation in New York and in D.C. and in New Orleans. We all experienced things that we knew to be true—only to be told that
we
were wrong and the
cops
were right. We were told that we were overreacting or that we had brought matters upon ourselves. It made black people feel that white America
knew
what the cops were doing and was okay with it.

I’m not going to deny that things are better now. People don’t get pulled over the way they used to in Los Angeles anymore. You’ve got to really be trying. At some point, the cops decided that if we didn’t like the way they were doing it before, let’s see how we’d like it when they did
nothing
. So, yes, that’s an improvement. But are these examples of
heroism
, going from abuse to apathy? Let’s be serious.

Virtually every white person will publicly swear up and down that you shouldn’t judge people negatively by the color of their skin. Then why should you judge people positively by the color of their clothing? Don’t get me wrong. I
do
believe in heroes. But the only motherfucker I know who puts on a blue suit and becomes a superior human being is Superman—and not only is he imaginary, that dude’s not even from this planet.

Police brutality is something that can be addressed. But the antagonistic relationship between the police and inner-city youth is
a bigger problem and a
current
problem. As recently as February 2012, I saw an article that demonstrated that “stop and frisks” are at an all-time high in New York. If the police stopped and frisked you all the time, what possible attitude would you have toward them and society in general, other than hostility and antagonism? It’s humiliating.

The relationship between cops and inner-city crime is a chicken-and-egg scenario in which the presence of one leads to the increase of the other. It’s the same way with parents punishing their kids. If you punish a boy when he takes a cookie out of the cookie jar, he will resent you. But he’ll also understand the lesson. Yet what about a kid who gets punished despite having done
nothing
wrong? If you incorrectly punish a boy over and over for taking cookies when he
hasn’t
, eventually that motherfucker is going to start taking all the cookies that he can. If he’s paying the
cost
, he might as well enjoy the
benefit
. If he’s doing the time, he might as well do the crime. Punishment to kids doesn’t have to mean putting them up against the wall and frisking them. It could be as simple as the way they’re spoken to and the way they’re watched. It’s being questioned for no real reason. After a while, fuck it. He might as well go down the wrong road. All the cool kids are doing it anyway.

Now we have black kids who don’t think of the future, who are discouraged from being educated, and who see the world as beginning and ending where their neighborhood ends. They start to dabble in crime both due to peer pressure and how the authorities regard them. Eventually, like any ignorant kid, they’ll fuck up and get caught.
That’s
when the hammer of justice comes into play.

O
UR
legal system is just like our political system: It is designed for the benefit of the wealthy. Yes, there are allowances for people who can’t afford things. But no one who is on food stamps is thriving. No one with an overworked public defender is going to be “taken care of,” so to speak. In this country, you get what you pay for. And when you can’t pay
anything
, you get shit in return. It’s no surprise what happens to poor, ignorant inner-city kids when they have dealings with the justice system. Let me first show how things operate from the
other
perspective: the buying of “justice.”

In late 1997, I was playing a gig in Westchester County, New
York. At the time, I was bringing my gun with me
everywhere
I went. But at that same time, New York had a law that said that you couldn’t carry a gun. We had ourselves a
dilemma
.

I got to JFK airport with my gun in my bag. Back then, Delta had it set up so that you went through the metal detectors before you even walked into the airport. Before I had a chance to declare that I had a gun, the skycap ran my bag through the machine. Naturally, the alarm went off.

I got arrested.

I went directly to central booking. There was a kid in there with me who was sixteen or seventeen years old. Back in the day, he had written on a public desk and gone to jail. I don’t know if it was at a school or at a library or whatever. All I knew was that his mother hadn’t had the two hundred dollars to pay her son’s fine.

That boy had ended up going to Rikers Island. When you’re at Rikers and you’re a teenager and you’re scared out of your mind, you’re not thinking about following the law or good behavior. You’re thinking about
survival
. Something happened when he was at Rikers—I never found out what—and that kid got sucked into the legal system. By the time I had crossed paths with him, he was in the process of getting two years. I asked the officers if I could take care of his present fines myself, and they told me it had to come from a parental figure. Someone had to go to court and simultaneously declare that they would be responsible for the kid.

Has anyone ever heard of a
white
kid going to jail for writing on a desk? Or even being suspended from class? But for the fact that kid was black, he never would have been arrested. But for the fact that kid was
poor
, he never would have gone to Rikers. I can’t imagine what those two years in jail did to him. Can anyone claim that this was
justice
? How long would it take for him working at minimum
wage to get that desk repaired and restored to as-new condition? A week,
maybe
?

If you drop out of school, you can redeem yourself. You can get a GED or take adult-education classes later. Once you’re in the system, that’s it. Criminal records are like the scarlet letter of our day. That ignorant kid making a stupid mistake is marked for
life
. Every other judge in the future will see him as a serial criminal—and the cycle will continue.

But
I
didn’t have to go to Rikers. There was a twenty-four-hour court, so instead I went straight in front of a judge. “Mr. Hughley,” she said, “haven’t you been watching the news?” She had a point. Christian Slater had just gotten in trouble for pretty much the same thing, and some big famous newscaster was also in hot water for trying to bring a gun on a plane.

“Your honor, I didn’t know.”

“You can’t come to New York with a gun!”

She wanted me to stay in New York until the trial, but I said that I had a family and that I had obligations. And I sure did. ABC had just picked up my show
The Hughleys
, and if I didn’t get back to Los Angeles, who knows what would have happened.