Book Review: 12 Angry Men: True Stories Of Being A Black Man In America Today
by Gregory S. Parks and Matthew W. Hughey
Publication Date: Jan 11, 2011
List Price: $24.95
Format: Hardcover, 208 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9781595585387
Imprint: The New Press
Publisher: The New Press
Parent Company: The New Press
Read a Description of 12 Angry Men: True Stories Of Being A Black Man In America Today
Book Reviewed by Kam Williams
"This book of stories by black men living in America can
serve as a primer to help all Americans understand the dominant roles that
history and culture, race and intergenerational poverty all play in defining
how we enforce our laws… The twelve angry men remind us of the outsized role
that we give to law enforcement in running our lives…
The men are the stopped-and-frisked, the unlawfully detained, the racially
profiled… These men’s accounts of their interactions with the police are
cinematic in their clarity and pathos.
Their anger is understandable, justifiable. It stems from an often
arbitrary, sometimes violent moment of encounter with personified state
power, with its attendant embarrassment, helplessness, and fear…
If we ‘read race’ through the eyes and the pain of these twelve angry men,
we can begin to see… that the conversation on race has moved from the
‘colored’ water fountain and the back of the bus to the profiling moment and
the prison cell."
—Excerpted from the Introduction by Lani Guinier (pgs. xi-xli)
In "The Rage of a Privileged Class," Ellis Cose carefully chronicled the assortment of frustrations experienced by educated blacks upon entering the corporate world. In 12 Angry Men, a dozen brothers are allowed to give full vent to their feelings about another indignity routinely suffered by the majority of African-American males, namely, racial profiling.
Unless you’ve been subjected to such un-Constitutional treatment, you are
unlikely to be very sympathetic. After all, it is reasonable to think that
if someone’s not breaking the law, they presumably should have no problem
cooperating with the cops for what ought to amount to a momentary
inconvenience.
But I could write at length from personal experience about the trauma
inflicted on my psyche by the time I was 25 by a decade of being routinely
stopped and frisked by police about once a month or so, and always on the
flimsiest of pretexts. Back then, the prison industrial complex was
undergoing a mammoth growth spurt thanks to the so-called "War on Drugs,"
which was really just a rationale for feeding the corporate beast with the
bodies of millions of non-violent, black offenders.
And judging by the accounts related in 12 Angry Men: True Stories of Being a
Black Man in America Today, the situation hasn’t improved much over the
interim. Here, a 35 year-old family man recalls how he was recently
strip-searched right in front of his neighbors by NYPD detectives who
suspected him of possessing narcotics. When they didn’t find any contraband,
they left him to pull up his own pants without as much as an apology.
Just as humiliating was the ordeal of the "head of the ACLU’s racial
profiling division who was himself profiled at Boston’s Logan Airport coming
home from a racial profiling conference." Then there’s the case of U.S.
Congressman Daniel K. Davis, who was ostensibly guilty of driving while
black after doing his weekly radio show back in his Illinois district one
evening.
When Congressman Davis had the temerity to ask why he had been pulled over,
the incensed officer not only gave him a phantom ticket, but inexplicably
took away his driver’s license for good measure. Despite his grey hair and
advanced age, Davis wasn’t exactly surprised by the incident, since he says
that, "Over the years, I have been stopped by the Chicago police so many
times I couldn’t count them."
The solution? Harvard Law School graduate Bryonn Bain, himself a victim of
police brutality because of the color of his skin, sarcastically proposes
the passage of a Black Man’s Bill of Rights, ten, tongue-in-cheek Amendments
to the Constitution. But the rest of this eye-opening tome’s entries adopt a
much more serious tone to drive home ever so effectively the salient point
that state-sanctioned racial profiling amounts to a painful assault on
individual dignity and a serious impediment to the collective American Dream
of a colorblind society.