Naked Harvard Student Assaulted By Cambridge Police, Caught On Video

Going to Harvard will not protect you from police brutality.

When we talk about police brutality, we are generally talking about the white reaction to police brutality. The police have been brutal all this time, long before the cell phone camera was invented. Free black people have consistently, since pre-Revolutionary times, tried to tell people how the cops act, and we have been generally ignored by the white majority. The advent of the surveillance state has put this longstanding brutality right in the face of white America. Many white people steadily deny their own eyes, or make excuses for police behavior, but those whites are merely outing themselves as racists at this point. In the meantime, each new video forces some additional white person to recognize this 400-year-old problem, and much of the discussion is centered around white people coming to grips with the world they’ve literally been living in this whole time.

But there is another group of people who are seeing this visual evidence for the first time: black people. While black people are taught about American police behavior, while nearly all of us have encountered some form of police harassment by the time we can legally drown our sorrows, many of us have believed that if white people just knew and believed what was happening to us, they’d do something about their cops. Still more of us believed, as an act of mental self-preservation, that there were “rules” or “behaviors” that could save us from the police. “It’s not going to happen to me because I [insert whatever white cultural trope suits you].” “That brother deserved his beating because he didn’t [act right].” The greatest trick of the colonizers has always been to instill doubt in the minds of the oppressed. Maybe… we deserve our fate.

I, shamefully, count myself as one of those previously colonized blacks. The summer before I left for college, I had a job at the DMV and was leased out to Indianapolis Motor Speedway (yeah, me) as an “advance man” for events that summer. I got to drive all around the state, making sure things were set up for when the pace car rolled through Terre Haute and stuff. My family was not thrilled with this job, and I eventually learned why. Driving back from Southern Indiana, I was stopped. The cop, who never told me why he stopped me, said that he “smelled drugs” in my car. I responded, casually, that I just had the car washed and maybe that’s what he was smelling. He asked me to get out of the car, and he called for “back up.” He put me down in a ditch with his knee on my back (no cuffs!), then I waited and watched as his buddy cops tore up my car. Nothing was found (obviously), no ticket was issued. I survived my encounter with American law enforcement.

Like I said, this was the summer before college. I was six weeks from getting out of Indiana. And all I could think about, aside from the taste of Indiana grass, was, “This won’t happen to me once I get to Harvard.”

What foolish coonery on my part. I was a goddamn, respectability politics, idiot. From the New York Times:

The Cambridge police have launched an internal investigation into an incident on Friday night in which officers tackled and punched a black Harvard student they were trying to arrest as he stood naked in the median of a busy street…

The video of the incident shows a few police officers standing in a circle around Mr. Ohene for several moments. As he stepped toward one officer, a second officer dove at his legs from behind, the video shows, and Mr. Ohene and the officers fell to the ground. Mr. Ohene could be heard crying out at that point. At least one officer then could be seen punching Mr. Ohene, and the police have acknowledged that an officer punched him five times in the stomach.

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I really don’t need to hear the white man’s mantra on this one. I get it. I know you are thinking: “I just need more information before I can really know if I’m seeing the metastasized effects of racism, because maybe the cops had a really good reason for surrounding and punching an unarmed naked man. The cops probably didn’t even notice he was black, just naked, and anyway isn’t this really about mental health?” Your spineless objections have been NOTED. Spare me the rest.

I don’t want to hear it, because I’m not really concerned with white people arguing among themselves about whether this kid deserved it. What I’d like to highlight is the message that this (and all the other videos) is sending to “elite” people of color — people of color who for a long time have been told that they are “one of the good ones” and have been led to believe that through education and comportment, they would be safe from the wrath of the white man’s paramilitary forces.

The message is: there are no “good” ones. There are no rules and procedures you can follow to stave off brutality if it is your destiny to be brutalized. Any white authority can physically harm you, for any reason or no reason at all. Any notion of due process accorded to you because of your behavior or achievement was a lie. It was all a lie.

It was a lie told to us by whites to keep the most educated among us docile. It was a lie told to us by our parents to help them and us go to sleep at night.

“Why did they do that to Kunta Kinte, Mommy?”
“Because he tried to run away. Don’t worry, we are free now. Finish your problem sets.”
“Why are you crying, Mommy?”
“I’m not. Pull your pants up, goddamn it.”

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The implications of the black middle- and upper-class realizing — some of us idiots for the first time — that white supremacy is still the predominant active operating procedure for modern America could well be devastating for peace and tranquility in our times. These videos are radicalizing people of color. They are telling us that there is no justice, so how much longer can we really expect there to be peace? When the intellectual firmament of a people is bent towards tearing down a corrupt society, instead of working within it, upheavals tend to happen.

All is not yet lost. The Harvard Black Law Students Association published a letter in response to the attack. It demanded accountability from Cambridge Police, and asked that the larger Harvard community work to see it done:

The conduct of the CPD on the evening of April 13, 2018, was unacceptable. We are reminded, as soon-to-be-graduates of an elite law school that we cannot protect our bodies with our degrees — and that is why we also call our current students and alumni to embrace these demands as inclusive to all Black people, not just Harvardians.

They’re still… writing letters. These are black kids with their entire financial futures in front of them, futures that have been borrowed against and sacrificed for, and so they’re still willing to work within the system to effect change.

You better hope that approach holds out. But with every one of these videos, the cautious, respectable center weakens. Elite black America, by and large, still wants to fix it. I don’t think the average white person watching that video understands how close we are to wanting to smash it.

Video Shows Police Tackling and Punching Black Harvard Student [New York Times]
Police Brutality at Harvard, April 13, 2018 [Harvard Black Students Law Association]


Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.