“Black Women and Men: A Threatened
Species”
Press Conference Statement by Julian
Kunnie, Africana Studies Prof.
and Antiwar Activist, Attacked by Police
This is the edited text of a press
conference statement made by Professor Julian Kunnie, director of Africana
Studies at the University of Arizona, on the morning of April 15, 2003, in
front of the Islamic Center, a mosque just a few blocks from the campus of the
University of Arizona in Tucson. A round-the-clock interfaith vigil against all
violence has been ongoing in front of the Islamic Center since shortly after
the invasion of Iraq, to protect the mosque and in particular to protest
violence and threats against Muslims and others of Middle Eastern and South
Asian backgrounds. He was taking part in the vigil, along with several other
people, in the early hours of April 6 when he was attacked by police
In the last two years especially Julian
Kunnie has been prominent in speaking out against war on Iraq and Afghanistan,
and against capitalism and its history of racist, colonialist wars. During this
semester (spring 2003), together with the Young Socialists, Not In Our Name,
and the Committee for a Democratic Secular Palestine, he helped organize a
series of public meetings on the war and related topics that drew hundreds to
each session.
At the April 15 press conference,
attended by a couple of hundred supporters, representatives of the Urban
League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the
Black Ministerial Alliance, and regular participants in the interfaith vigil at
the Islamic Center all spoke in defense of Prof. Kunnie. Another protest
against police racism is scheduled at the University of Arizona for noontime
Wednesday, April 30, demanding the ouster of two university policemen who have
taken part in racist attacks. Also, a 24-hour poetry reading against the war is
scheduled for the Islamic Center on May Day. The text of Prof. Kunnie’s remarks
follow.
I am thankful to the Creator, to the ancestors of
African people, and to the ancestors of Native American people, for my being
alive, and I want to thank my friend at the anti-violence vigil here, Xylem,
for her role in saving my life on the fateful early morning of April 6, 2003.
I want to thank you all for coming out this
morning, to come out in solidarity with me following this very painful
incident.
I would like to take this opportunity to explain
precisely what happened to me on the morning of April 6, raise derivative
questions, cite other examples of racial profiling and terror of Black people
by police, and finally frame these experiences in the context of societal and
institutionalized racism and the criminalization of Black men and women that is
so widely and tacitly accepted in this society.
I am outraged by the humiliation, degradation,
and dehumanization that I have suffered from this incident and have been
traumatized as a result, and would like to take this opportunity to publicize
what happened, to prevent it from happening again to any person on campus and
any person in society because it is ultimately an issue of the recognition and
protection of human rights.
When the campus police officer pulled a gun on
me and then handcuffed me, I saw stars and wondered whether this was a bad
dream. I felt like a slave in the early part of the 21st century, helpless to
explain and defend my innocence, shackled in fetters by my white captor who
assumed confidently that I was guilty, that I was a criminal, predicated solely
on the color of my skin, and my being of African descent; in essence, I was
viewed as just another dirty and dangerous “nigger.”
At approximately 1:15 a.m. on April 6, while
present at an around-the-clock peace vigil at the Islamic Center, corner of
First and Tyndall, where four of us were engaged in a conversation, one of the
persons, Xylem, and I stepped toward the sidewalk to see what was happening on
the north end of Tyndall, at the corner of Speedway and Tyndall, after two
police cars sped through an alley close to the east end of the Islamic Center.
A police car that was headed west on First, after crossing Tyndall, suddenly
made a U-turn and sped back toward the corner of Tyndall and First. Xylem
mentioned that the police officer was not driving well because of the suddenness
of the turn. In a flash, a policeman, a white male, jumped out from the
car after it pulled over at the corner, unholstered his gun from behind an open
car door, and pointed it directly at me, first toward my groin and then
elevated toward my chest, his hand shaking vigorously and nervously, shaking so
badly that even Kate Heck, standing over thirty feet away, could see his hand
shaking. She could not see the gun very clearly because it was black, but could
see his hand shaking. He yelled, “Get your hands out of your pockets! Raise
your hands!”
I was taken aback and did not realize that he
was talking to me. I was mystified by the order and assumed that he was talking
to someone else in the vicinity. At no time did this police officer state that
he had a gun drawn on me. He repeated the order and my friend Xylem yelled at
me to follow the police officer’s instructions. I took my hands out of my
jacket pockets, and raised my hands above my head, as did the others at the
vigil. The police officer returned his gun to its holster and walked towards me
and asked me to kneel on the ground. I have never been humiliated like this
before. He then handcuffed me and ordered Xylem to “get out of here.” She
immediately started videotaping the proceedings.
I told him that I was a professor and head of
Africana Studies at the University and that I could show him my identification,
which was in my truck parked on the opposite side of the street (on First). His
response was, “Professors do things too.” The other persons at the vigil were
yelling that I was part of the group. The police officer paid them no heed. I
asked him why I was being handcuffed. He stated that I fitted the description
of a person who had just attempted to stab a person nearby. I shouted that these
actions were racial profiling and were racist. I asked him whether the suspect
was Black. He replied that it was “a Black man with hair.” I asked him whether
the suspect was tall. He said that he did not know. I asked him whether the
suspect wore glasses. He replied that he did not know. There was no other
communication from the police to me to explain fully why I had a gun pulled on
me and why I was handcuffed. Instead, one of the Tucson city police officers
who had since arrived, a policeman named Kendrick, went over to the group of
three at the vigil and informed them that they were looking for a suspect who
had pulled a knife on a person at a Subway sandwich shop nearby, a man wearing
a green jacket. I wondered why none of the police officers communicated with me
directly.
Three other police cars appeared at the scene,
five in all, according to one of the persons at the vigil, Katy Heck. Two may
have been University of Arizona police cars, since there were two officers from
the UA police at the scene. I again mentioned that I had identification to
prove that I was a university professor. Officer Brittain, the other campus
officer, responded, “You have identification? Where?” I replied that it was in
my truck parked across the street. “Is that your car?” he asked. “Yes,” I
replied. He still did not ask to see my identification.
While I was handcuffed, large automobile
searchlights were trained on me. I was made to feel like I was a criminal. I
heard one of the Tucson city police officers say that I was not the
suspect—according, I presume to a witness who was driven over in a police car,
a person that I did not see. Officer Kendrick from the Tucson police asked me
if I was armed and whether it was okay to pat me down. I replied that I was not
armed and that he could pat me down, which he did. He then asked the police
officer who had handcuffed me to release the handcuffs. After I was freed from
the handcuffs, I asked the police officer who handcuffed me his name, his age,
and the duration of his time in the police force. He told me that his name was
Hawke, his number was 0202, he was twenty-three years old, and he had been in
the police force for one year and two months. He defiantly spelled his name for
the video camera. I asked to speak to his supervisor. Another University of
Arizona police officer named W. K. Brittain, appeared, and told me that no
supervisors were on duty at that time, that the police had followed proper
procedures, as taught at the Tucson Police Academy, and that if I had any complaints,
I could report them to Internal Affairs.
I then walked over to a Tucson city police car
parked on the east-end corner of First and Tyndall and asked to speak to the
supervisor of the Tucson city police officer who had patted me down. The
policeman, who was seated in his car, asked me to report my complaint to the
University of Arizona police. I asked him whether he had seen what had happened
and whether he realized what a terrible crime had been committed against me. He
repeated that I needed to go to the University police. I insisted that one of
his officers was responsible for patting me down and was in fact collaborating
with the University police. He defiantly said that I was not hearing him. I
then called the officer who had patted me down and asked him whether he was
part of this operation against me and he acknowledged that he was, and lowered
his head. He gave his name as Officer Kendricks, #27364. The officer in the car
gave his name as Sergeant Schaefer, #10393. The other officers then left the
scene.
There was no apology given to me by either the
University of Arizona police or the Tucson city police for this horrible crime
against me and the violation of my person and human and civil rights by these
police officers. It reminded me of the 1857 Supreme Court decision in the Dred
Scott case when the justices declared that “Blacks had no rights that whites
were bound to respect.” It also was a sobering and traumatic realization that
Black people, when they are arrested or detained by police, are generally
assumed guilty until proven innocent, as was the case with me on April 6, in
direct contradiction of the constitution.
Xylem, Katy Heck, and Ali Ahmed, who were part
of the vigil at the Islamic Center, witnessed the incident of my being detained
in handcuffs. Imam Shahin, the head of the Islamic Center, who was inside the
building, came out to see the incident. I was shaking seriously after the
ordeal, clearly terrified by what had occurred to me.
This entire incident, with the exception of
Officer Hawke pulling out a gun and pointing it at me, was videotaped by Xylem.
It is worth noting that a police car had been parked across the street in the
Bank One parking lot for at least 30 minutes after I arrived at the Islamic
Center, and I thus presume that the police were aware that I was present,
together with three other people and the Imam of the Islamic Center, at the
vigil at the Center.
There are three points that I need to state
clearly and forthrightly for the record, inaccurately reflected in the “Police
Beat” report compiled by the campus newspaper, the Arizona Daily Wildcat,
on April 8 from police reports. Why did this article state incorrectly that
Officer Hawke kept “his gun [aimed] at his leg in case the suspect was armed?”
Officer Hawke had his gun pointed directly at the center of my body and not at
my leg (three witnesses would testify to this, particularly Xylem, who was next
to me). Second, the article states that witnesses described the suspect who was
responsible for pulling a knife on an employee at Subway as “wearing a blue
shirt, black pants, and a black jacket.” I had a large green jacket (visible
right here), which covered my black sweater, and a pair of black sweat pants
with an orange and gray stripe on both sides. Third, I talked at length with
the person from Subway who was threatened by the man who pulled a knife on him
and asked him whether I matched the description of the suspect or resembled the
suspect in any way. He responded with an absolute denial and informed me that
he had given the police a detailed description of the man, telling the police
that the man had a dark navy blue blazer, a blue shirt with white stripes down
the middle, a black corduroy-like baseball-type cap, short-cropped hair, with
scar tissue over one eye that made him appear blind in one eye, and a “Fu
Manchu” moustache, almost like Richard Pryor. The Subway employee told the
police that the man who had pulled a knife on him had come in from off the
street on previous occasions and was known to some of the staff there, and that
he was “dirty and smelly” as he left the Subway on the morning of April 6. Two
Subway employees told me that the man clearly and unquestionably looked
radically different from me. When the employee who had a knife pulled on him
was driven up in a police car to identify me, he was shocked to discover how
different I looked from the actual suspect. It is clear that the description
given to the police by the witness in no way came close to me.
How then did Officer Hawke sound so convinced
that I in fact was the suspect, with all of the distinguishing identification
features, including color of clothes and facial features? Did all Black men
look alike to him?
Why was Officer Hawke unable to give me a detailed
description of the suspect as transmitted to him if he had such specific
details from the campus police as given by the Subway employee? All he
mentioned was a Black man with hair on his head and it appears that the first
Black man with hair, in this instance, me, was going to be the target of
Officer Hawke’s arrest.
My attorney, Bill Risner, has formally requested
copies of the police reports and all traffic recordings concerning my being
stopped by police and my detention in handcuffs from both the University of
Arizona police and the Tucson Police Department.
Now for questions to the police: Why was I not
communicated with directly and even given detailed information as to why I was
accosted at gunpoint by police and subsequently handcuffed? Is it because Black
men who are suspects are not to be accorded the right of information as to why
they are arrested? Why was Officer Hawke and later Officer Brittain
unresponsive, and why did they refuse to see my identification when I protested
that I was a professor and administrator at the University of Arizona and in
fact had identification to verify my identity? How did the color of the jacket
of the suspect in the knifing threat at Subway change from black to green, as
the police officers at the scene described it, clearly fabricated after they
had accosted me? How did these police officers suffer from color blindness at
night, when in fact they were perfectly able to see my dark skin at night? Why
did the officers from the campus police and the Tucson Police Department not
apologize to me after discovering that I was patently and evidently not the
wanted suspect?
Julius Parker, Associate Vice President of
Business Affairs and Administrative Services at the University of Arizona, to
whom Police Chief Anthony Daykin reports, informed me that Chief Daykin was
told by the campus police officers involved in the incident that they
apologized to me following my release from handcuffs. I never received an
apology from the campus police. If in fact, Chief Daykin was informed by the
police officers that they apologized to me, why did they say this, when in fact
they did not apologize? Even if I was the suspect, did Officer Hawke need to
resort to armed force as a way of accosting me? After all, the suspect threatened
someone with a knife and not a gun. Did he anticipate that I was going to throw
a knife at him from where I stood? Did the suspect, an apparent homeless
person, deserve to die if he was guilty of threatening the employee at Subway?
What if I did not understand English or was not
able to hear properly when Officer Hawke asked me to get my hands out of my
pockets and raise my hands? This happened last week in Baghdad when an old
Iraqi man was shot dead by a U.S. marine because the Iraqi did not understand the
order from the marine. This also happened to 17-year-old Andre Burgess, a
soccer star in Queens, New York, who was shot in 1997, because “the
silver-wrapped candy bar he was holding looked exactly like a gun to a federal
marshal.” When the marshals shouted for him to drop the gun, he was startled,
and turned to look, resulting in him being shot. What if I had accidentally
taken out the cell-phone from my jacket pocket in confusion? Would I then have
become a fatality?
Why did Officer Hawke not believe me when me
when I stated that I was a professor and had identification to prove it? Was
his general impression that I was lying just because I was a suspect and Black
at that? Are all Black people and people of color generally viewed as liars and
lacking integrity in this society regardless of which economic class they
belong to, when it comes to encounters with the police? Why is it that Black
people are so often portrayed as most dangerous and most hostile?
One point is very clear from my encounter with
police on April 6: regardless of my economic and social status as a professor,
I was first and foremost viewed as a Black man, my race overshadowing my class.
I was essentially viewed as a “nigger,” as a slave in the 21st century, with no
human rights, as in slavery days. It is indeed ironic that the University of
Arizona police in particular were silent in face of this criminal action
against me and refused to apologize after the terrifying incident, since these
police officers are hired to ensure the protection of university employees and
students, including myself. Further, why do police officers on campus carry
guns to protect us against violence on campus? Following this horrific
incident, I feel that as a Black person, the greatest threat to my life and
personhood now is potentially from police, on campus and off campus.
It is critical that though this is a press
conference in which I have focused on my personal experience, my personal
experience does not become the sole focal point of this gathering. Rather, I
would like to widen your attention to the broader systemic issue of racial
profiling of Black men and women and other women and men of color and the
terror often visited upon innocent Black women and men by the police.
Almost all Black people that I know have had
some oppressive encounter with the police, including campus police. One
of my colleagues, who is a courtesy faculty member in Africana Studies, Irene
D’Almeida, was brutalized by a campus police officer in her office, had her glasses
broken and her clothes ripped as he attempted to place handcuffs on her. She
has yet to be informed by the administration as to the results of the
investigation of the incident. One of our graduate associates in Africana
Studies was asked for identification while jogging on Speedway during the day
and was visited by police at his apartment complex after he was seen exercising
in the yard. A Black male employee of the university had mace sprayed on his
face in his apartment complex by security personnel who insisted that he
furnish his social security number to them.
In Huntsville, Alabama, a Black teacher who had
on an African dashiki was stopped by the police and asked to undergo a sanity
test since the police officer claimed that the clothes he had on resembled
those of someone who had been released recently from a mental institution. When
I was in Indiana I was stopped by campus police outside my office on the
grounds that I “looked lost.” An African American female colleague on the
campus of Michigan State University, accompanied by her husband and dressed in
formal attire, was accosted by campus police in cars with flashing lights just
outside her office and had her office thoroughly searched on the grounds that
the police were searching for a suspect who had stolen equipment from a nearby
office.
One of our Black students on the university
campus was stopped and questioned by police after a purse snatching, even
though the same student saw the white man who stole the purse ran past
him. One of the students in my History of Ideas class recounted how
police put a gun to his head, informing his friend and him that they were
looking for two suspects wanted in an armed robbery. My brother-in-law,
who is a Professor of Psychology and lives in Aurora, Colorado, was stopped by
police at gunpoint and handcuffed while jogging. He was questioned about a car
theft that had been committed in his predominantly white neighborhood.
More prominent persons, like Mumia Abu Jamal,
who has been on death row in Pennsylvania since 1982 for the alleged shooting
of a white police officer, have also borne the brunt of police lies. Officer
Bell in that situation, who had been with Mumia in a hospital after his arrest,
wrote that he had never heard Mumia say anything during his arrest. Two months
later, following the disclosure that Mumia had lodged a complaint with Internal
Affairs about police brutality, the same officer lied and declared that Mumia
had confessed that he had killed officer Larry Faulkner.
Then there’s the more lethal question of use of
excessive force by police in their encounters with Black men. Amadou Diallo who
was killed by police in New York City, shot at 43 times, with 19 bullets
entering into his body on February 4, 1999 after he reached for his wallet—one
grotesque example of police terror, as was the shooting of a Black person by
police in Chicago, after police assumed the cell phone was a gun, just as
Amadou Diallo’s wallet was perceived to be a weapon. On March 16, 2001, Patrick
Dorismond, an unarmed African American Brooklyn resident, was killed during a
scuffle with plainclothes police, the third instance in 13 months in which
plainclothes officers shot and killed an unarmed man. In the case of the Diallo
shooting, all four officers were acquitted of all charges in February 2000,
confirming that Black life is cheap and has little value in white America, and
that the police are above the law, essentially function as a law unto
themselves, can lie if necessary to cover things up, and are protected by the
law in the process. This is one of the reasons that people of color,
particularly those who are poor, feel that it is futile to challenge police
authority and their abuse of power, principally because the police are shielded
by the state even in unethical or criminal conduct.
The statistics that we have on racial profiling
and arrests of African Americans and other people of color are staggering. Even
though the average white youth is four times more likely than his African
American classmate to be a regular cocaine user, a Black youth is one and a
half times more likely than his white counterpart to be sent to prison. For
every Black man who graduates from college, 100 other Black youth are arrested.
The U.S. Public Health Service reveals that 76% of all drug users in the
country are white, 14% are Black, and 8% are Latino. Yet African Americans
account for 35% of drug arrests, 55% of convictions, and 74% of prison
sentences. This is “criminal justice” at work for Black people.
Finally, friends have asked me whether this
incident involving the police brutalization of my person was politically
motivated. I do not know. Given the repressive political status of the country,
particularly the harassment, brutality, and terror inflicted by many police
departments across the country against those who have been involved in antiwar
demonstrations, one ought not to be surprised. I have been a leading speaker at
numerous antiwar rallies, and my picture has been taken by campus police on at
least one occasion. I was videotaped by Tucson city police at an antiwar rally
outside the Federal Building in March 2003. My picture was published alongside
an antiwar article in the campus paper, the Arizona Daily Wildcat, on
April 3, 2003. Activists, including the moral conscience of the University of
Arizona, the students who have been in the forefront of struggles for justice
on our campus, the University of Arizona Peace Refuge, have been harassed by
campus police and even had antiwar materials destroyed by police. Such actions
on the part of any law enforcement agency are not indicative of a democracy,
but smack of repression and inclinations toward fascist suppression of any
dissent against the war industrial machinery of the state.
The attack on me outside a religious center, a
place of worship, makes this incident of April 6 even more sinister because it
implies that there is little respect for a peaceful, nonviolent gathering at
this Islamic Center, known well by campus and city police. We know that every
Islamic Center and mosque in the United States, including this center, is under
police and federal law enforcement surveillance, since Islam is now blatantly
equated with terrorism, and though I am a non-Muslim, my presence here may have
invited certain hostility.
It is in the same vein of repression that
Professor Anthony Van Der Meer, a faculty member in African and African
American Studies at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, was brutalized
by campus police on April 3 for defending a student who was distributing
antiwar literature in commemoration of the assassination of Martin Luther King,
Jr. Prof. Van Der Meer defended the student against an attack by a military
recruiter, who then summoned police, who subsequently roughed up Prof. Van Der
Meer, threw him to the ground, ripping his jacket badly, and then handcuffed
and arrested him. This was clearly a situation of police repression of dissent
against war, of which we all need to be cognizant as it envelops our country.
I cite this incident and others at this press
conference to underscore the feelings and illuminate the experiences of
hundreds of thousands of Black women and men in this country who have been
harassed, intimidated, brutalized, or humiliated at the hands of law
enforcement officers for no legitimate cause and who have been wrongfully and
immorally criminalized by the police, as I was on the morning of April 6. It is
high time that these criminal practices be ended, that the laws permitting
racist searches of people of color stop immediately.
Now is the time for the scourge of racism and
racial profiling of people of color to be eviscerated from the activities of
law enforcement, and for racist police officers to be held accountable for
their actions. Police officers, like all segments of society, must be required
to take classes on multicultural and multi-ethnic education and racism, just as
students take classes at college, since the police are people who have been
indoctrinated like most other people into believing racial stereotypes about
people of color. Those law enforcement officers who persist in racist practices
must be charged with criminal conduct and violation of human and civil rights.
It is time that racism practiced systematically in law enforcement be
recognized and acknowledged for the injustice and evil that it is in our
society and that the silent veil that obscures this horrific reality from the
public eye be pulled apart.
No longer can society, particularly white
society, be complicit in the crime of racial profiling and racial terror of
people of color, and expect that all is well. The campus police need not wait
for my formal complaint against the police regarding this incident of terror
against me, as Police Chief Daykin suggested. We must have a zero-tolerance
policy against racism on the University of Arizona campus. The administration
needs to act for justice now. Justice delayed is justice denied.
Thank you.