The Knee on the Other’s Neck

“If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, … and change the history of the world.”

—James Baldwin

The Fire Next Time (1963)

The recurring visual tableau of Derek Chauvin’s knee on the neck of George Floyd is the unavoidable central scene of all stories focused on this historic trial, State of Minnesota v. Derek Chauvin. Commentary on the jury’s verdict will reverberate for a long time. In contemplating my reactions to the Chauvin verdict, I thought it would be helpful to look back at an unusual encounter I had with a police officer some years ago. I wanted a personal point of reference as I proceeded writing this article. So, with my memories at hand, I examine several reports about the legal decision. They came to my attention by chance, in unsolicited email messages or through my haphazard perusal of daily news media.

My experience with the police officer might not meet the standards evident in Erik Erikson’s discussions of “the event” in Gandhi’s life. I cannot claim that my encounter constituted a fateful turn in my life course. Or a fork at which I worried about the path I had been forced onto. However, I have mulled over that soundless, fleeting interaction with my officer on numerous occasions. I know its indelibility, its singularity, and its invisibility. There were no cell phones present to record it for the future. I have used the memory in sifting the chaff from the wheat in the discourse surrounding Chauvin.

I was driving along a narrow city street on the Yale University campus when I spotted a Black colleague I had not seen in a long time. I parked the car in the open space next to a fire hydrant and invited him to chat. I kept the car running to make it obvious that I could easily move if asked to do so. We were both dressed in jacket and tie and calmly minding our own business in the middle of the day.

After a few minutes, a uniformed white police officer approached from behind, on the driver’s side. Seeing him, I lowered the window. He gave me a summons for parking there, said nothing, and walked back to his own vehicle. My friend and I simultaneously asked why he had not just ordered us to move or at least said something that recognized his official act. We then considered the option of complaining and decided to avoid any further interaction with this officer. We felt he was unfriendly and seeking some sort of confrontation. Since we were Black and outnumbered him, we thought he might try to escalate things and get us all into an unnecessary struggle. We felt it would be silly to turn the joy of our mini reunion into something we might regret for a long time. We said goodbye to each other, and I drove off.

We have rediscussed this circumstance several times over the passing months, pleased that we returned home safe that day. The officer could justify his actions based on the idea that blocking a fire hydrant is unlawful. He was within his rights to punish us for the infraction without first asking us to move. Nevertheless, we were angry and upset. The officer did not utter a word. The act, done in silence, did not recognize us. He perpetrated an unfriendly deed, and we did not trust him. As Mathew Alemu, a University of Michigan sociologist, explained in an April 21 Detroit Free Press column, “It’s hard to find the words to express how it feels, as a Black male, to have to process these events.” Then he talked of being honestly afraid at such moments. The collective fear, my friend’s and mine, was palpable. Alemu asked whether our citizenship must be “contingent on our willingness to accept eternal inequality.” The context framed all one wants to know about a policeman’s power and being treated in an undignified way.

It is a natural first step to hope that proper training of police will improve things. However, those of us interested in these phenomena know that one-sided training exercises are rarely enough. In that case, I turn to other explanatory mechanisms I have discussed elsewhere before. That officer and we needed a sustained interactive experience so we could tell him about our fear of his power and his weapon. He could, in turn, recount his feelings toward Black men who put their cars next to fire hydrants in the middle of the day and chat as though they have no pressing cares. However, in truth, I know nothing about what undergirded his decisions concerning lawbreakers. I never met him again. Perhaps he too was afraid.

I have occasionally discussed this incident with White and Black police officers. They said consistently that my friend and I did the wise thing. They advised walking away and celebrating life with our families. I have even questioned them about the cowardice in our defensive behavior. They smiled and said calmly that avoiding conflict with an officer beats a hospital stay and an arrest. Still, none of this gets at understanding why my officer did not at first strike a position of reasonable neutrality and ask me to move the vehicle. The psychoanalyst Anton Hart, writing about what he calls diversity-related pedagogy, advocates cultivation of curiosity about the “other.” I presume this invitation mandates taking this stance toward all officers. However, the tableau of the knee on the neck gets in the way. It demands hostility toward the knee’s owner and blunts our potential interest in and cultivation of a generous spirit toward those who possess the power to hurt us. When the hurt is aimed at our dignity, our anger can be unforgiving.

There is an important lesson here. The officer in my vignette did not put a Chauvin-type knee on my neck. His act was not so baldly violent. It was, nevertheless, oppressive. It troubled my composure and evoked fear; it lowered my dignity and disrupted my confidence as a productive citizen. My officer’s behavior borrows its power from a tradition of pervasive police supremacy. Sometimes it borders on the criminal, as we know well. That is the way it is in many democratic societies, especially where racialized thinking operates. The trouble is that little attention is paid to what the policeman is thinking when he deploys his power. I am also concerned that the sense of supremacy is visible in other systems besides law enforcement. That leads to the unavoidable conclusion that while Derek Chauvin’s behavior may be aberrant because of its duration, outcome, and public nature, it should not be considered a rare exemplar of interpersonal violence. I admit, too, that my personal experience has encouraged a more empathic curiosity and view of Chauvin. I understand that there are obscure structural factors that confirm the reality of the officer’s power and my fear of it and of him.

Yale President Peter Salovey issued a letter to members of the university community on the evening of April 20. In the letter, titled “Today’s Verdict on the Murder of George Floyd,” Salovey termed Floyd’s death an “indictment of our nation’s failure to address anti-Black violence and racism.” He demonstrated cogently and passionately in his public missive that he and his cadre of university officers have developed a thoughtful response to these race matters. However, he did not explain why the university took so long to enter the fray. I remember delivering a public lecture at Yale Medical School in January 1990 on the subject of “Belonging at Yale.” Few others were concerned then about such matters.

I used another presentation around 2006 to recommend steps I thought the leader of the medical school should take to improve the climate of equity and belonging. Afterward, a few full professors chastised me for giving my advice for all to hear. They were not polite in making clear that I had no right to say anything so pointedly to the dean at the time. Talking about knees and necks in an academic institution!

More recently, the university finally became interested in what it meant for minority groups to belong to this academic community and set up a Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. I wonder what elements would have been needed to foment this interest sooner: fiercer political activism, more intensive questioning about the university’s intentions, cultural humility? Now that the university leadership is keen on utilizing its human, sociopolitical, and economic resources in the broad struggle for social justice, the potential impact is breathtaking, especially if sustained.

Charles Blow, The New York Times columnist, recently noted that even in celebrating victories like the Chauvin verdict, sadness accompanies the joy. He explained that between the discernible poles that mark progress, minorities develop “hostility, resentment, and contempt.” Blow sees value in ritualizing the outcome, as such positive results can be “recharging and restorative.” Nevertheless, we must not confuse “the war that still rages for the battle in which we were victorious.” The crusade must continue, Blow argued, if change is to emerge from the verdict. Blow emphasized keeping one’s eyes on the prize, advancing the struggle for human rights.

In the April 21 issue of The Harvard Gazette, Professor Cornell Brooks of the Harvard Kennedy School asserted that Chauvin “is by no means a congratulatory moment or a moment of commendation for either the judiciary or policing. It is a moment of challenge, and it’s a moment of resolve.” Brooks sees the need for multiethnic, multiracial, and multisectoral coalitions to “face down” this problem of racism and police violence. The activism must take place at and on different levels simultaneously. There are roles for all of us. He demands the passage of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act (HR 7120). He assigns to media the task of defining a justice narrative that must be heard everywhere. Only then will it penetrate the courts.

Brooks also wants “a sustained presence of protesters and demonstrators in the streets.” Hopefully, that movement will attract participation of the business community and politicians. He thinks that “our confidence, our hopefulness, our sense of optimism” can be found in the “commitment and courage of those around us.” Once again, passing laws will not bring total satisfaction. Statutes cannot mandate the earnest curiosity that Anton Hart suggests we display toward each other. Neither can we forcefully implement that intersubjective recognition of the other’s inherent dignity. Brooks essentially broadens Charles Blow’s program of making things better through a multipronged approach that relies on a coalition of interdisciplinary participation harnessed by deep commitment from authentic citizenship.

The Rev. Phillip Jackson, priest-in-charge of New York’s famous Trinity Church Wall Street, sent a brief public letter of reflection to his church community on April 20. Father Phil, as parishioners know him, described bearing witness with “teary eyes” as he listened to the judge meting out justice to Derek Chauvin. It was not lost on the priest that the “undercurrent of the trial was quite literally centuries of trauma and injustice inflicted upon Black people in these United States.” He asked whether people might look away as had happened so many times in the past? In the present instance, the people did not look away. They held vigil, “recalled, remembered, and resisted” and “were not afraid.” Coming from a man of the cloth, this is a reminder of the utmost significance. It is reinforced by the call to advocacy issued by Professor Brooks. Someone must stand watch to monitor things and make sure the moral base of our institutions is not eroded.

New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. stated on April 20 that “while this conviction brings a modicum of much-needed justice to the family of George Floyd, it does not, of course, bring him back nor does it deliver justice to the families of the numerous Black men … whose needless deaths at the hands of police resulted in no criminal accountability.” Vance recommended that “the only way to meet the moral imperative of this moment is to enact policies which move our justice system forward … and show every citizen in every community that Black lives matter and police violence is a crime.” This is the pragmatic statement of a lawyer who recognizes the advantages and shortcomings of the legal arena. He also sees that George Floyd and his family are the victims of this terrible episode of violence. Nothing can erase that fact. We must bear witness to that reality and hope that its memory will sustain efforts to make things better for all of us who remain.

Seeking justice is hard work. It requires us, on encountering injustice, to accept responsibility for finding a role to change things and make progress. The knee-on-the-neck tableau is not a problem merely for the justice system and police officers. We must think about violence in other contexts, such as in faith communities, universities, workplaces, political systems. Violence resides in the demeaning behavior of those who oversee others and treat them with scant respect. Paraphrasing James Baldwin, it demands great resilience not to hate the one whose knee is on your neck. Recognizing this demands a level of spiritual humility that unsettles many of us. Still, it is at the core of working together to make change. Standing arrogantly to the side and demanding that my police officer abase himself and take his traffic ticket back will not achieve lasting change. He and I must chat and figure out why we are so estranged one from the other. ■