Let’s talk about personal experiences with the police.

D: My interactions with cops have been pretty benign. The typical speeding pullovers, more often than not resulting in a ticket. I’ve always felt that the objective of suburban cops is to give out tickets to pay for their departments. That was my complaint, that speed traps would be set up to generate revenue, which, as I say this, I recognize how isolated and oblivious my community has been to the issues we have witnessed and are witnessing now with police. That said, there has been a growing feeling that you don’t screw with the cops. If I get pulled over now I do pay attention not to look suspicious, to keep my hands visible and just say as little as possible. Ten years ago, I would complain about being pulled over. When I was a kid riding in my dad’s car, if he got pulled over, chances were he knew the cop and what would follow would be a ten minute catch up on family. The cop would let my dad go with a “Be careful, Gene” or “Get that tail light fixed.”

I recognize how things have changed and depending what situation you are in, your perspective on the police changes. I did feel more secure in NYC right after 9/11 because of the anti-terrorism policies. I had the opinion that the violence and killing of Blacks was a result of a few bad apples, but in doing research and simply paying attention I now believe there as been systematic prejudice against people of color. The role and personality of the police department has changed. When I was a kid, at least in my neighborhood the perception of the local cop was he was an extension of your parents; someone who looked out for you. That’s not the perception now. I read about how Black moms and dads tell their kids how to behave around police, how to fear them. I’ve come to the conclusion we need to not only rethink the role of police in our world, but who we attract to the force and why.

H: My encounters have also been limited to traffic violations and I never felt that there was the potential for things to escalate. However I do recognize that each time that it has happened I was with my family and my presence is less threatening with the wife and kids in the car. I have seen people getting straight up tossed on the sidewalk by the anti-crime cops. Prior to that I was in a situation where I was sitting in the park catching up with friends during my freshman year in college on summer break. Apparently the park “closed” at dusk and the police ran up on us with guns all stooped down. My friends started to scatter, but I got everyone to relax. I told them why would we run. We haven’t committed any crime by sitting here. So the park police ran up and started asking us questions about why we were there. I asked why they had their guns drawn. They said there was a lot of drug activity in the area. As we were talking one of the cops recognized me from high school. Being a local track star and a decent guy paid off tremendously that day. 

D: I recognize that split second decisions can determine whether a tragedy happens on either side. When I was in my 20’s in Boston I lived in what they called a “neighborhood in transition.” Translation: a run down area of brownstones that was just at the very beginning of gentrification. The kind of neighborhood where the liquor store had a bullet proof plexiglass partition protecting the cashier. I was standing outside a sandwich/fried chicken shop waiting for my takeout. A police car, lights flashing, siren screaming flies right up in front of me and screeches to a halt. The two cops jump out with guns drawn on me. For that second I thought don’t move, don’t speak, whatever you do don’t move your hands from your pockets. As quick as the cops appeared, they got back in the car. Apparently they were looking for some skinny white kid who had done something and they recognized it wasn’t me. I think we fail to realize there are war zones out there but not all areas are war zones. I think time and time again we see that when you meet force with force it escalates. The solutions to a complex problem (racism, economic opportunity, support of vulnerable populations) aren’t quick or easy. But this current path is not sustainable.

H: I guess this would be the perfect time to tell the story about when my landlord’s son and nephews decided to rob a check cashing spot in Brooklyn. Here’s where it gets complicated. The landlord’s fiancé is also a cop.

So, one cold morning in maybe November my wife and I are both home working. My wife looked out of the window and saw that the house was being descended upon by cop cars from all directions. She decided to go upstairs to ask the neighbors what was going on. I wasn’t paying attention. I was designing something and she calls and asks me to come downstairs. So, I get up and walk into the hallway and at the bottom of the stairs was my wife and an entire police department in helmets, vests, with semi-automatic rifles pointed at me. It was a little like the scene from the Blues Brothers when the cops catch up to Jake and Elwood paying the taxes downtown. 

So they ask me if anyone else is in the apartment and they ask to check it. So they go up and search it and then go upstairs to our neighbor’s apartment. She has a three year old and a five year old up there watching TV. They search them too. But they make us all go outside with no shoes in the cold without coats. 

We’re all like WTF? Why is there an entire police department and I mean everybody, detectives etc at our house.  The landlords fiancé pulls us aside and tells us her son and nephews attempted to rob a check cashing spot in East New York owned by a retired cop. Shots were fired and her stupid son drove directly home, tou our building, after the botched job. He was now nowhere to be found and the woman’s fiancé was a cop too so they’re trying to get him to tell them where Cliff is. 

It was intense. 

Howard and David are two friends talking (and listening).

We’ll see where the conversation takes us.

So, the next question. Aunt Jemima, Robert E Lee statues, George Washington, John Wayne, Masters golf tournament, Master bedrooms; are we are seeing racism everywhere? What’s your take?

H: Symbols of Oppression. I went to Woodrow Wilson middle school. There was never any mention of the man in the school. No plaque explaining who he was. No reminder of the great things he did to inspire us to be good students. So, obviously the man wasn’t that important at the time I attended the school. Today, I googled Woodrow Wilson and I found an article entitled “The Worst President Ever, That Title Belongs To Woodrow Wilson”. Now, do you want to send your kid to that school? 

Conversely, I met a kid who attended Paul Robeson high school in Crown Heights and she had no idea who he is. It was infuriating. They must not celebrate black history month at that school.

I never understood why there were Confederate statues in the south. You may be proud of your southern heritage, but the Confederates also lost.  Generally speaking we only erect statues to people who are winners or people who made major contributions to society. For that reason there are no statues of Hitler in Germany. They don’t want to antagonize the people whose ancestors suffered under his leadership. And given the time period that most of these Confederate statues were erected I would say that what they really represent is a state’s desire and or willingness to openly antagonize a segment its own citizenry. Which is crazy because it keeps the South in the context of yesterday where their idea lost a war. To me, it spells out sore losers. No second place team ever got a statue. 

The names of these buildings, military bases and statues can stay or go. Mostly go. But whether or not they stay or go isn’t a big issue for me. What is an issue is that if we bring these historic figures up, we have to put them in full context. Who are these people and what did they do truthfully?  If you like them so much, create something that tells us who these people are in full detail. Not just the stuff you like, but all of it. 

The same thing applies to products, events, inventions. Let’s have full disclosure. For example, Jack Daniels didn’t create the whisky, Uncle Nearest did. Jack Daniels took Uncle Nearest’s recipe and made billions because he had no rights. Uncle Nearest’s family never benefits from his creation. Jack Daniels is an American icon. Black people can tell you story after story like this and white people will claim they never knew. Well, black people aren’t buying your claims of ignorance. 

Black people have been creating bits and pieces of America since we were brought here. However, white people stole the credit and the wealth that comes along with those creations and claimed them as their own, while simultaneously portraying black people as lazy, stupid and mischievous criminals prone to violence and sexual misconduct. I would wager that the average black person doesn’t care about the statues and stuff. They want their ancestor’s money. 

Some of my relatives left the south because they were threatened with violence due to their successful agricultural business and land ownership. Because of those incidents many members of my family actually prefer a more segregated south because it prevents white people from stealing their intellectual property and causing trouble. One of the first things my family in the south will tell you is “You don’t want white folk in your business”. Turn around twice and they’ll own it and you’ll be broke. 

Therein lies the grudge. Forget statues. We want our money.

D: Yeah, it’s about money. From the very beginning, and until the end.

There’s been a lot of nice words from companies and lots of money donated to causes. I hope that money makes it into the pockets of Black Americans, and not pay white people who are running the funds to help. The money needs to make it into the community that needs it.

I see a lot of conversation about the icons of racism that surround us. John Wayne Airport. How could you name an airport after that man after knowing his beliefs? The Masters golf tournament? The Master bedroom? Are we digging down a rabbit hole that leads us nowhere? Is this a distraction to the real issue? Is this political correctness run amok? Many of my social media friends think so.

There are some statues and buildings that obviously should be addressed. I like the idea of plaques that tell the whole story. But what about George Washington? You grow up and he is presented as a hero of the nation. The nation’s capital is named after a slave owner.

Think about that for a second.

The NBA forced the owner of the LA Clippers to sell his team because he was a racist.

We have our country’s defining city named after a slave owner. Now there has been some history written that says Washington was a generally kind slave owner. (Yes, that is how it was described in a book.) It has been documented that he did not feel comfortable owning slaves. But we’re doing a lot of revisionism here, if we don’t confront the reality of owning another human being. How could anyone at any time think that was right?

So what do you do? Do you change the name of the Washington, DC as if it were a package of pancake mix?You need to tell the entire story, honestly and candidly.

All this changes how you view your country, and the moral high road isn’t a place where we’re the only ones with an E-ZPass.That may be ultimately the first step to real and positive change.

Broken. 

Desperate. 

Angry.

Hopeful. 

Willing.

Determined.

Howard and David are two friends talking (and listening).

We’ll see where the conversation takes us.

What did your dad teach you about race?

H: My dad is from a small town in Tennessee and whatever experience happened there influenced how he would live the rest of his life. He’s still mad about stuff that happened in his childhood. Thus, he wasn’t particularly fond of white people. But, he complained about people in general. However, I do recall him having a few white friends from work and we would go to their house on the weekends. So, he wasn’t totally against having relationships with people of other races. 

That being said there is a bitterness that comes with being raised in the south for many people in his generation. My dad wasn’t as bad as his father; a mean sharecropper that you would want to avoid, but in regards to our family the results were the same in the end. My dad spent very little time with us and was in no way supportive of any extra curricular activities I would participate in. And quite frankly and unfortunately there was a point where I didn’t want him around. 

I was one of the fastest high hurdlers in the state of Illinois and he never attended a race. He didn’t even want to pick me up from practice. It was my business and he didn’t want to be involved. I would be on the evening news or in the newspaper and he never mentioned it. I was the record holder for low-hurdles and he has no idea. 

I’ve only heard my dad give praise and respect to one man, Malcolm X. Like most black people, brother Malcolm represented to my dad an unwavering razor sharp towering  figure that spoke truth to power; white or black. My sophomore year I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X for a research paper in English class. My minds was blown. Like many Americans Malcolm was the gateway to my conversion to Islam.  I saw what my dad saw in Malcolm X, however that’s one of the very few areas where I understood my dad’s point of view. 

My father thought going to college was a waste of my time. He never explained why and by that time in my life I’d isolated him with minimal contact  and conversation. He just wasn’t making sense to me. But I got a scholarship in fine arts and that was that. 

My dad had an issue with white collar black people like a few of my mom’s brothers. He thought they were phony, but he didn’t get along with blue collar black guys at his job either. He would often describe them as stupid. It perplexed me. I didn’t get it. He’s a man with no people. He would go out drinking with these guys every weekend, but I don’t think he really liked these people. But he didn’t spend time with his family either. It didn’t add up to me. 

Today he lives alone back in his hometown in Tennessee. I spoke to him a couple weeks ago. He said he’s ready to move back up north. Why, because everyone in Tennessee is an asshole. That’s my dad.

D: My dad was bipolar so much of the man I remember was altered by the drugs that kept his personality in balance.

Family was the most important thing to him, and he would often say that to us when my mom didn’t want to drive from Rhode Island to Buffalo to see his sister. My brother and I took long road trips and slept many nights in pajamas in the back seat of the Buick. 

The other lesson he tried to teach me was to work hard and let your actions define you.

He hated showboats. He disliked self-promoters.

I don’t think we ever had a substantive conversation about race though, other than the basics of treat everyone fairly and never use certain words. What I learned I learned from my observations. He was a great basketball player in high school and got a scholarship to attend college. He served in the armed forces, so he had more access to diversity than we had in our racially isolated town. He was a guidance counselor in high school and worked to get kids into college. He was proud when he got someone into college who didn’t think he or she could attend or afford it. Those kids were many races and from different backgrounds. He saw education as the great equalizer. I think he recognized that in his own life. His parents fled Russia before WW1 and arrived in the US with little money or plans. The family started a modest business, a bakery, and he was the youngest and first to go to college.

He opened the door for many as a guidance counselor.

The only barometer I can remember about how he felt specifically about people of color was his attitude toward athletes and celebrities, some of who were Black.

He didn’t like Ali, or Reggie Jackson or Bryant Gumble. He also didn’t like Pete Rose or Howard Cosell. They would probably fall in his mind into the self-promoter category. He loved Bill Russell. He truly admired everything about that man. He liked Oprah as I guess everyone did. When he and my mom got older and were failing, they spent a lot of time watching tv. Oprah became an afternoon appointment for them, before the nap. 

My dad’s father owned a bar and for a while the sons ran it. As a kid I loved hanging out and listening to the customers talk about sports and bitch about the world. But when the conversation got a little dicey or inappropriate, my dad would simply grab my hand and say let’s go. So in many ways he was like many people who avoided the discomfort of issues of race and inequality. He left the conversation. 

He was a puzzle that I honestly, and unfortunately, never spent much time trying to solve until later years. I believe he would be disturbed by what is happening in the world now. He watched the race riots of decades past. I think as an educated man, he knew what was happening and the disadvantages many have in this country. His parents were a part of a wave of immigrants and while he loved this country, he understood things were stacked, especially against African Americans. He understood how difficult it is to get ahead. 

Howard and David are two friends talking (and listening).

We’ll see where the conversation takes us.

What was life like at the age of 12?

H: When I was 12 life was great. In junior high I was accepted into a program called CAPA Creative and Performing Arts for gifted kids in Rockford Illinois. It was the early 80’s. That was the age of breakdance and freestyle rap battles. My parents bought me a 5 piece drum kit. In the summer I played for hours every day that could. Other kids were getting turntables and dj equipment. It was a great time to be alive. 

MTV was still pretty new at that time as well so i learned a lot about genres of music outside of R&B, Funk and Hip Hop. I started listening to rock, heavy metal, punk, jazz and classical. 

I was beginning to focused on learning about the fine arts. I wanted to become a graphic designer before I knew what it was. Casablanca Records had a huge influence on me. They had Parlament/Funkadelic and Kiss at the same record company. I’d been drawing pictures of album covers since the third grade. 

George Clinton put these comics strips about the characters in the songs inside the album cover. It was the first time I’d seen black characters in a comic strip. It was genius. Listen and read along. It allowed you to get that much closer to the music. You could visualize what was being said. 

Kiss was pure theater. My parents hated it. But what young boy  doesn’t like fire, blood and creepy makeup. 

But along with all that joy was the realization that my parents weren’t happy. There was tension in the house, but I didn’t let it get me down. I had lots of extended family around and I spent lots of time with my family. My parents later divorce when I was in college. I don’t know what took them so long. 

D: The best way I can describe my life at 12 is tentative. I wasn’t on solid ground in a few ways and while I probably didn’t realize it, looking back now it was evident.

I was a bit of a sick kid, having serious surgery at age 6 and then asthma through age 10. So I spent a lot of time inside and that resulted in a few things. I wasn’t a social person and I developed an imagination that sustained me.

As many 12 year olds in New England I was big into sports. In the wintertime I dreamed of being Bobby Orr and Gerry Cheevers. I played street hockey with a few neighborhood kids and we reinacted wins and great plays we saw on channel 38, the Boston network. It would be the year of a Stanley Cup championship which was amazing. I wasn’t a very good ice skater so I became a goalie in Pee Wee hockey. Cheevers was the Bruins goalie then and he had a mask that was marked with stitch marks for all the actual stitches he would have received on his face if he hadn’t worn a mask. The theatrics of that were irresistible to me. So I got a white plastic goalie’s mask and did the same thing.

In the summer, I was Reggie Jackson. Of course, I was a Red Sox fan because of geography and a herd mentally of despair, but in Reggie I found escape. He was brash and confident and everything I wasn’t at that time. He was a badass that stretched the stirrups of his socks so high and tight they were like slingshots. So I would spend thirty minutes on my little league socks before games. It didn’t help my batting average.

I was just getting into music and bands like Canned Heat, Three Dog Night, and Black Sabbath. Girls were not in the picture yet.

It was the year of Nixon, Kent State, Vietnam protests, and an economic recession, all of which I was oblivious to.

It also was the year that the Gremlin, Pinto and Vega were introduced. Which gave us all something to laugh at for the next several years.

Howard and David are two friends talking (and listening).

We're going to see where the conversation take us.

What’s happening in your neighborhood?

H: Out here in Brooklyn on the edge of Bedford Stuyvesant, Ocean Hill and Bushwick it’s a mix of African-American, West Indian and Puerto Rican people with an addition of white residents from all over the world. The neighborhood has this unusual way of attracting creative people who just want to live normal lives. Often times famous and highly regarded by their peers outside the neighborhood, but in BedStuy they’re just people. 

COVID 19 was taken pretty seriously here. The stores and the people responded immediately. The neighborhood has a lot of city employees and essential workers too. People were sick and dying. I lost a close personal friend due to the virus that rocked the neighborhood. However, the murder of George Floyd brought on a level of activity this past week that has overshadowed the virus. 

People are furious.  However, I don’t see any signs of looting at all. Zero. 

This community struggled through stop and frisk so these murders always hit close to home. At times we can hear people marching and protesting. We hear the sirens, helicopters and gunshots. However neither my wife and I have participated in any of the protests. Our children are frightened. We’re trying to keep the world as close to normal as possible for them. Marching isn’t the only way to fight the power. 

Conversely, when i went to work out this morning at 6:30 am in the park a mile away from the house there were people already out getting drunk and high. Tattered women digging through garbage cans for plastic bottles because aluminum cans are no longer en vouge. People are struggling at the bottom in such a way that neither COVID 19 or police brutality is going to change their lives. They’ve lost all hope.

D: Madison is a suburban town in New Jersey about an hour train ride from Penn Station. It’s a college town which makes it a little more progressive than the Wall Street bedroom communities around it.

When Covid hit as well as the fear along with it, signs popped up on lawns. Don’t give up. We’re in this together. You’re good enough, this one struck me, seemingly aimed at those who were hit economically and the feelings of despair that come with it.

Lately though, the signs feel like they are pointing to a different issue. Don’t give up. We’re all in this together. Maybe. Today, driving through the neighboring town Chatham, there was a stretch where someone had taped Black Lives Matter posters on every telephone pole. Ten or so blocks, every pole. It was quite a statement in a lily white neighborhood. Maybe a little self-conscious, but something you might not have expected six months ago.

On Main Street, a few doors down from the ice cream place that everyone seems to be going to each night in their masks, is a store that has a bit of an installation of signs. There was a march of solidarity this weekend and this is where they ended up.

Howard and David are two friends talking (and listening).

We're going to see where the conversation take us.