I Am A Black Man First

By DeJuan Mason 

My father was a police officer. His father was a police officer. His father owned a bar.  And his father was a sharecropper. The men in my life raised me to believe that the key to success was getting a degree, finding a career, settling down with the right woman, and creating a future. I did just that.

But then Prince Jones was killed. And by an officer who looked like me. When I heard the news I was in the middle of celebrating having passed the lieutenant’s exam. My wife and I had reserved a room at a quaint bed and breakfast in Annapolis. Each room was named for an African American writer and we were in the Langston Hughes room. The walls were dark wood paneled and the window dressings were sheers that allowed the faintest light in the room at both sunrise and set. I would wake before dawn just to watch the sunrise cast shadows across my wife’s face. For the seventeen years that we’ve been married, the sun has found a way to illuminate the deep hues of brown in her cheeks, and that sight is enough to settle me and give me the strength to make it through the day.

We had just returned from an early morning walk to the docks, enjoying the quiet of a city normally bustling with the cacophonous tones of enthusiastic tourists and Navy cadets.  Marilyn, my wife, went to our room to freshen up for breakfast. I grabbed a newspaper from the credenza by the front door and walked to the sunroom to wait for her. The headline, “Shooting Unleashes Questions, Md. Officer Tailed, Killed Driver in Va.” leapt off the page, summoning an incomprehensible mixture of rage, fear and anxiety. Just last year the murder of Amadou Diallo was on every police officers’ lips, if only in whispers. And although we couldn’t understand it, as Black officers we were grateful that his murderers didn’t look like us. Prince Jones’ murder was different, though. The murderer looked like me. He killed a young man who could have been my son. And, according to the news reports, the reason was that Mr. Jones rammed his car.  

The shock, dismay, betrayal and horror I was feeling must have registered on my face, because when Marilyn touched my arm to get me to come and eat, she looked in my eyes and took a step back.  “Aaron, what’s wrong?” she was saying but still walking away from me. I showed her the headline and watched her reach for an imaginary necklace of pearls at her throat.  “What? Why? How” was all she was able to muster. Tears formed at the edges of her eyelids and she wrapped her arms around herself. Weirdly, I felt abandoned at that moment. I understood her hurt, but what about me? How was I supposed to move forward as a man, a police officer, a newly-minted lieutenant, even? When would I have a chance to express my outrage? My hurt?  Instead of speaking that pain, though, I grabbed my wife and held her. And in the holding, she turned to me, pulled my face to hers and said, “This is no reflection of the man, the officer, the father, the husband, that you are. Let’s grieve the death of this young man, but let’s not own it.  The community will speak more loudly than we ever can. I love you.”  We ate breakfast in silence, got in our car and drove home.

Today I’m facing a group of young male reporters, mostly Black, who want answers.  They want to know why police kill young Black men without punishment. They want to know how I can stand before them as a Black man and represent an organization that is run more like a citizens’ council of the 1950s and 60s than something that is committed to its promise to “protect and serve.” I will face them, without fear and without apology. My father’s words will ring loudly in my ears when I respond to their questions. I know who I am and whose I am. I don’t do this for commendation or celebration from men.  I do this because I know what it means to be a Black man in this society.  I know what it means to be afraid that when I walk out the door I might not return. I fear for my son, deeply brown-hued like his mother, full of the dichotomy between love and hyperfixation. I fear for my wife, caught in the crosshairs of walking the line between professional behavior and maintaining her singular identity while bearing the weight of carrying the torch for the Black women coming behind her.

Their questions will come like rapid-fire; a tactic to throw me off my game; to push me to an emotional response so that white and Black alike will be able to say - behold, the angry Black man.  And if I give in, then all Black men coming behind me will be viewed through the same lens and the fight to advance, to be a voice for our communities and our loved ones will once again be thwarted and I will be the face of its downfall.

I am the great-grandson of a sharecropper; a man who maintained his dignity in spite of a system created to destroy him economically, emotionally and physically. I am the grandson of a police officer, a man vilified by his community to wear the same badge as their oppressors; a man who served in the military and in the words of W.E.B. DuBois, “returned fighting.”  I am the son of a Black man who followed in his father’s footsteps because he believed that the struggle for civil rights could be fought on multiple platforms.
I am a Black man. I am a police officer. I wear the blue, and my Black life matters. I hope these young men will tell my story today.