On Memorial Day, in Miami, a 14-year-old black kid named Tremaine McMillan was walking down the beach with his mother\u2014and bottle-feeding his puppy\u2014when cops blocked his path in ATVs. A few minutes before, the kid had been rough-housing in the surf with a friend, and the cops wanted to question him about it.<\/p>\n
Moments later, the cops body-slammed the boy\u2013still holding his puppy\u2013onto the beach, got him in a chokehold, and arrested him for resisting arrest.<\/p>\n
So far, so sickeningly normal.<\/p>\n
But in this case, the police\u2019s cover-story for the body-slam, the chokehold, and the kid\u2019s subsequent arrest\u2013that he was \u201cclenching,\u201d or, in other accounts, \u201cflaring\u201d his fists\u2014was hard to sell, due to one small but troublesome fact: cellphone video showed that the kid never stopped cradling his puppy<\/i>. So the police spokesman invoked a truly terrifying specter: the teenager, he said, was giving the cops \u201cdehumanizing stares.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, of course you can\u2019t blame battle-toughened Miami cops for starting to panic when a 14-year-old black male\u2014armed with a puppy, mind you\u2014starts to look at them funny.<\/p>\n
But the truth is that these so-called \u201cdehumanizing stares\u201d are really \u201chumanizing\u201d stares\u2013stares that forced the cops to realize that they were not successful in terrorizing this kid, and that he was committing that ancient Southern offense of looking a white man in the eye.<\/p>\n
We can\u2019t help but remember the statutes against \u201creckless eyeballing\u201d, under which, in 1951, Matt Ingram\u2014a black tenant farmer in Yanceyville, North Carolina\u2014was charged with assault with intent to rape a white girl, although he was 75 feet away from her at the time.<\/p>\n
And in good conscience we will never forget Emmett Till, slaughtered for looking at\u2013and, supposedly, whistling at\u2013another white girl. (Till\u2019s torture and murder were heartily defended by feminist Susan Brownmiller, who said that the glance and (alleged) wolf-whistle was \u201ca deliberate insult just short of physical assault, a last reminder to Carolyn Bryant that this black boy, Till, had in mind to possess her.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nice touch, eh, that \u201cblack boy?\u201d<\/p>\n
And to the ranks of Miami cops, wealthy New York gender-theorists, and rural racists we can of course add the name of George Zimmerman, the morbidly obese Chaz Bono-lookalike who killed Trayvon Martin because\u2013according to transcripts of the Mommy-I\u2019m-scared call he made to police\u2013\u201cHe was just staring\u2026looking at the houses\u2026now he\u2019s staring at me!\u201d<\/p>\n
Readers with more stomach than me for literary theory will no doubt be familiar with the academic racket centered around the concept of \u201cthe male gaze.\u201d Once I struggled in good faith to understand it, but then my ADD kicked in and I went outside to play catch with my daughter instead. So I don\u2019t have any intellectual framework for this rage I feel today, sensing that for all the distance we\u2019ve supposedly travelled, we remain stuck on Square One in America\u2013a ragged patch of ground defended by certain cops, certain feminists, and vigilantes of all stripes against That Crime That Goes By Many Names\u2026.a powerless black man looking at white folks.<\/p>\n
John Eskow<\/strong>\u00a0is a writer and musician. He wrote or co-wrote the movies Air America, The Mask of Zorro, and Pink Cadillac, as well as the novel Smokestack Lightning. He can be reached at:\u00a0johneskow@yahoo.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n