Back in the 90s, I counted, weekly, on Detective J.C. Williams and Eddie Torres to keep us safe.
My household loved Black television, and New York Undercover held a special place in our Thursday timeslots. Shows like Family Matters, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Martin added needed levity to our weeks, showing us mostly an ordered world for Black personhood—nuclear families, education and wealth, and a close-knit (and hilariously bizarre, in Martin’s case) community. My mom grew up in Farragut Houses of 1970s and 1980s Brooklyn; she saw, in the crack epidemic, the worst the city had to offer. New York Undercover allowed her—and the twin sons who watched it with her—to assuage the fear of walking home under the streetlight. The show treated the idea of law and order seriously and deliciously. I got to see detectives of color keep New York city to a sexy soundtrack of 90s hip-hop and R&B. To fight against the fear within our communities, executive producer Dick Wolfe created heroes from our milieu and possessing our melanin. It provided my imagination embers that shined out the terror of gunshots.
The reality that police would be hostile to my existence had not set in yet. Until it did, I wanted to be a cop, or join the FBI maybe. I wanted to be a sentinel. At the time, nothing told me there were different ways to protect and serve my people. I felt I needed the badge and the gun—I felt I needed the state—to have my back.
24 days ago, after entering with high hopes, slamming the frontrunner in debate, struggling with raising money, being hustled out by wealthy white billionaires, and having the strife in her campaign brought out in the open, Senator Kamala Harris dropped out of the Democratic primary race.
I often felt Black Twitter preordained her fall. During her run, #kamalaisacop took off as a hashtag. Harris found her past in law enforcement used against her. Did she lock up parents for the truancy of their children from school, regardless of reason? What was her record in prosecuting non-violent drug offenses, crimes that disproportionally lock up Black men? After a decade of #blacklivesmatter, Black Twitter asked justifiable questions. And despite trucking out her bonafides—her Howard attendance and her skee-wees—she could not overcome it with her people. In the age of mass incarceration, she was seen as the warden.
I was dismayed by both Kamala’s withdrawal and the approbation she got from so many of the peeps on Twitter I followed. These are the people who I followed as thought leaders (I need to evidence this). They were the people on the ground and on the Web agitating for a fairer world. How could my political inner life be against them, yet my political aspirations mirror their thoughts and words? In the age of 45 and his dull, greedy machinations, was she not the balm that the body politic demanded, the one leader who had the skills and drive to drive him out?
I want to lie and frame my examination of Harris’ candidacy and Black personhood as a struggle between fear and imagination. But I would be lying to myself. In truth, I am an anxious man. When I was a child, I would use every subway and bus ride to try to memorize every stop for every subway and bus route. When I lived in New York, I would use HopStop to get my commutes down to the minute before leaving to work and college. I sometimes would pull into the Dollar General parking lot at 6:10AM on the way to work, just to make sure I truly did pack my laptop into my bag—and did I need to rush home and check to see if I did turn the stove off? I have coped with a dull anxiety all my life, and dreaming of a time where I could wake up and know the world was set appropriately.
Kamala’s fall, however, reminded me of how my fear inhibits me from accessing the seat of my full Black personhood. That seat is where my imagination lies. I go back to my days of watching New York Undercover with Mom. I am politically conscious enough now to know the supplier of my fear. Crack did not appear fully formed in our communities. There is political and sociological explanation as to why the communities I had no choice growing up in were deprived of strong educational options, mental health support, and mercy to those born below the poverty line. Wolfe put a melaninated Band-Aid over the true spiritual wounds that Detectives Williams and Torres fought every Thursday evening, at the tail end of Fox’s programming for Black folk.
And I cannot let my fear—and the emotional attachments it causes me to unthinkingly form—constrain my imagination. I want a better world. A decade into #blacklivesmatter, it should have caused me to ask harder questions of the candidate I formed close attachments with early in the primary season. I still would have support Kamala Harris’ candidacy. But I would have asked the harder questions earlier. How did going to Howard inform her approach to criminal justice reform? What mistakes did she make as district attorney that she would correct if she had the chance? What policies would she pursue to end the carceral state? Though I know that she answered some of these questions during her campaign, I am ashamed that it never came to me to ask them to myself.
And asking these questions are important to whether or not Black personhood can reform the American experiment. There are so many Blacks in law enforcement—Rodney Harrison in New York City, Marilyn Mosby of Baltimore, former Attorney General Eric Holder—who hold a place in my imagination alongside prison abolition, Michelle Alexander, and the possibility of a world without police. Not asking them means letting my historic fear limit what may be possible. And asking them may be what I need to fully imagine a better world for my future sons and daughters.