Page "lore" Paragraph 1084

It is hard, on the other hand, to blame the policeman, blank, good-natured, thoughtless, and insuperably innocent, for being such a perfect representative of the people he serves.

He, too, believes in good intentions and is astounded and offended when they are not taken for the deed.

He has never, himself, done anything for which to be hated -- which of us has??

-- and yet he is facing, daily and nightly, people who would gladly see him dead, and he knows it.

There is no way for him not to know it: there are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country ; ;

which is precisely what, and where, he is, and is the reason he walks in twos and threes.

And he is not the only one who knows why he is always in company: the people who are watching him know why, too.

Any street meeting, sacred or secular, which he and his colleagues uneasily cover has as its explicit or implicit burden the cruelty and injustice of the white domination.

And these days, of course, in terms increasingly vivid and jubilant, it speaks of the end of that domination.

The white policeman standing on a Harlem street corner finds himself at the very center of the revolution now occurring in the world.

He is not prepared for it -- naturally, nobody is -- and, what is possibly much more to the point, he is exposed, as few white people are, to the anguish of the black people around him.

Even if he is gifted with the merest mustard grain of imagination, something must seep in.

He cannot avoid observing that some of the children, in spite of their color, remind him of children he has known and loved, perhaps even of his own children.

He knows that he certainly does not want his children living this way.

He can retreat from his uneasiness in only one direction: into a callousness which very shortly becomes second nature.

He becomes more callous, the population becomes more hostile, the situation grows more tense, and the police force is increased.

One day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.

Before the dust has settled or the blood congealed, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened.

What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men.