A Quote by Trevor Noah
A lot of black people worked with the police as snitches. We used to call them bimpees where I grew up. And, you know, they were afforded special privileges. They may have been paid by the police. But you never knew who was informing on you. We lived either next door to or - two doors away from us was a known informant in Soweto.
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It's been rough for me trying to find my position in the struggle and where my voice is needed and helpful. You know, I grew up in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia has a really rough police-brutality history. I grew up in a neighborhood where it was very clear that the police were "them" and we were "us".
I was knocking on people's doors. I knocked on a white couple's door, and I told them, I says, 'Excuse me, but I've been born again.' The guy said, 'Hon, call security. There's a little black guy here talking about how he been born again. Call the police.'
I know there are some good American police. But I grew up in a country where we were afraid of the police.
On the one hand, the guns were there to help capture the imagination of the people. But more important, since we knew that you couldn't observe the police without guns, we took our guns with us to let the police know that we have an equalizer.
I'd never been in a police state. I didn't know what it was. I knew that it was, in the general way that people know that two and two is four, but it had no emotional value for me until I found myself in the middle of it.
Many White people are not sensitive to the kind of abuse that African Americans, especially younger African Americans, receive at the hands of police officers and police departments. I think for most Whites their experience with the police has been good or neutral because they don't interact with the police as much as those in the Black community.
People were encouraged to snitch. [South Africa] was a police state, so there were police everywhere. There were undercover police. There were uniformed police. The state was being surveilled the entire time.
I used to live at the Cecil Hotel, which was next door to Minton's [Playhouse]. We used to jam just about every night when we were off. Lester [Young], Don Byas and myself - we would meet there all the time and like, exchange ideas. It wasn't a battle, or anything. We were all friends. Most of the guys around then knew where I lived. If someone came in Minton's and started to play - well, they'd give me a ring, or come up and call me down. Either I'd take my horn down, or I'd go down and listen. Those were good days. Had a lot of fun then.
In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn't white and I wasn't black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them.
I would say I'm black because my parents said I'm black. I'm black because my mother's black. I'm black because I grew up in a family of all black people. I knew I was black because I grew up in an all-white neighborhood. And my parents, as part of their protective mechanisms that they were going to give to us, made it very clear what we were.
I used to hide behind doors pretending to be a mouse listening to the grown up's conversations. I always wanted to hear them plotting peoples deaths so I could dob them in to the police. unfortunately there were no murderers in my family.
The police are paid by the public and carry a public trust, and they take an oath to protect us as citizens. The police have lost sight of that and must be reminded that we pay them to protect us, not to simply engage and cage us.
Where I grew up - I grew up on the north side of Akron, lived in the projects. So those scared and lonely nights - that's every night. You hear a lot of police sirens, you hear a lot of gunfire. Things that you don't want your kids to hear growing up.
If you only knew what it did to me to have lived in that house where the police were bursting in to take everyone away! I certainly didn't have a happy and serene childhood.
White people's fear of Black people with guns will never cease to amaze me. Probably it's because they think about what they would do were they in our place. Especially the police, who have done so much dirt to Black people - their guilty conscience tells them to be afraid. When Black people seriously organize and take up arms to fight for our liberation, there will be a lot of white people who will drop dead from no other reason than their own guilt and fear.
I wouldn't call it "police reform," but I would say that police procedure enhancement could be helpful - these police shootings are absolutely horrible.
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