Police Males In James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk

James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk discusses the unique relationship between police officers and black Americans, specifically in regard to their tendency to target black men unfairly act outwardly to hold them down with violence. Dave Chappelle speaks to this behavior in his act, Killin’ Them Softly.Chappelle jokes about the police presence in his home, New York, describing differing experiences which posit race as the deciding factor in the behavior exhibited by police officers. Chappelle’s act echoes the situation put forth by Baldwin’s character Officer Bell, who in If Beale Street Could Talk represents the New York Police Department and their racially-biased actions. Both Dave Chappelle’s comedy in Killin’ Them Softly and James

Baldwin’s character and plot in If Beale Street Could Talk serve as indictments of the racist behavior of police officers. While each artist’s indictments of the racist behaviors of law enforcement are harsh and biting, neither artist’s work offers a solution to the problem. Baldwin’s Beale Street was published in 1974 and Chappelle’s act was delivered in 2000. Twenty-six years passed between the publication of Baldwin’s book and the performance of Chappelle’s act, and yet each work was talking about racism in the NYPD. Furthermore, racism continues to lie at the forefront of policing practices in the NYPD through the Stop-and-Frisk program. What does this show? The above facts indicate that despite the notion that racism has passed out of American society through the years, we as a nation have not made nearly as much progress towards eliminating racism as is publically perceived.
Fonny, one of Baldwin’s protagonists in Beale Street, has a fateful encounter with the racist representative of the NYPD while protecting Tish, his fiancé, from a sexual predator.

Fonny went around the block for some cigarettes, and left Tish to pick out some Tomatoes. She does so, and is harassed by a “small, young, greasy Italian punk” (Baldwin 136). Fonny comes back to see the Italian boy, known affectionately to the reader as an “urchin” (139), putting his hands on Tish, and he proceeds to beat him up. Officer Bell, Baldwin’s main antagonist, sees Fonny beating the boy, and he rushes over, intending to kill Fonny. Tish prevents Bell from killing him with the help of the Italian woman who runs the store. Bell is insistent about busting Fonny for something, however. He discovers Tish and Fonny’s address, and he patrols their neighborhood constantly, itching to ring Fonny up on some charge for his ‘disrespect.’ Bell’s desire to take Fonny down stem solely from a standpoint of racism. He harbors hatred for black people, and is ever eager to stomp on them when he gets the chance. His actions after having seen Fonny beat Tish’s assaulter are not the actions of a police officer who wants to keep the public safe, but rather the acts of an officer who has a goal to rid the world of those who he doesn’t like. He sees Fonny act out once, and he possesses an almost hateful sexual desire to bring him to his knees, licking his lips at the thought of arresting him (138), and pouring his eyes over his body “with the unanswerable cruelty of lust, as though he had lit the blowtorch and had aimed it at Fonny’s sex” (172). Bell’s chief desire as a police officer is not to keep the public safe, but rather to regulate the behavior of black people, and to punish harshly those who do not fit the mold that he feels they need

to.
Bell does not represent a statistical outlier in Baldwin’s world. Baldwin posits Bell as a member of a regulatory system which is holistically designed to regulate blacks. For, it is not possible for Bell alone to punish Fonny as he is punished in the novel. One police officer cannot ensure that one man is put and kept in jail. Fonny is arrested by a group of men (174), placed in an all-white lineup when the rape suspect was black (182), kept in jail despite the state having lost their witnesses for the crime that he was charged with (109), had his chief witness arrested and held “incommunicado (94), and locked in a solitary cell with a backed up toilet (178). These are not the results of the efforts of one man. These are the results of the work of an entire system set up to keep black men under the boot heel of the white power of the criminal justice system. It is the entire police force that opposes Fonny in this novel, not just the isolated acts of one man. These acts suggest that the actions of the criminal justice system as a whole are racist, and they are designed to keep black men in their place, not to just ‘protect and serve.’
Dave Chappelle’s commentary on the police in his act Killin’ Them Softly fits into this similar vein. He comically describes first some dealings with police that his white friend Chip has experienced and he himself witnessed. Chappelle describes a time when he and Chip were walking in New York, lost, and smoking a joint. Chip notices some police officers, and decides to ask them for directions. The police ignore his confession of marijuana possession, and actually give Chip directions. Chappelle is astounded at the incident, saying “No black man would ever ream of talking to the police high. That’s a waste of weed…I am afraid of talking to police sleepy. [They] fuck around and get the wrong idea (he then takes on the persona of a police officer and mimics striking a man with a billy club, and then says as the officer),“That nigger was on PCP, Johnson. I had to use necessary force! You saw him. No, No, no paperwork. Let’s just sprinkle some crack on him and get out of here.” He then describes another incident where Chip is able to drunkenly talk his way of a speeding ticket, which is also nearly incomprehensible to Chappelle, who repeats the line “let’s sprinkle some crack on him…” Chappelle’s humor is based in the fact that blacks and whites are continually held to different standards by law enforcement officials. White Chip is able to talk to the police while stoned, suffer no consequences, and still be given directions. A sleepy, black Dave might be beaten to death for simply being black.
Chappelle continues to use the line “Let’s just sprinkle some crack on him and get out of here” throughout his act, and it is always used in the context of describing unchecked violence towards black men by police officers. The implications of this joke suggest that in the eyes of New York City police officials, all black males are likely criminals, and the unjustified killing or maiming of a black man can easily be smoothed over and accepted by feeding the stereotype that all black males (like Fonny) are guilty of something, and a simple sprinkling of crack will make up for any misdeed that the officer has committed. It does not matter whether the man had done anything wrong or not, it matters only that he could have broken a law, that he has the ability to have broken a law, or that he might look like someone who might have broken a law somewhere. By his black appearance, he is already guilty of something, and therefore a subject of the white control of the criminal justice system. Whatever that something is insignificant. The only significant item is his need for punishment.
This racist attitude prevails in the NYPD today in the form of the Stop-and-Frisk program, which allows for police to stop anyone they want to and search them for drugs and weapons. The reasons people are stopped vary, but more often than not they seem to be lower forms of DWB (driving while black, or, in this case, walking while black). Chappelle’s joke says that black people are targeted and subject to rights violations by police officers with impunity. Baldwin’s novel laments the ability and practice of police officers to manipulate the criminal justice system to target and punish blacks unfairly and unjustifiably. The Stop and Frisk program which permeates the life of every black and Latino citizen of New York City currently embodies the same injustice targeted by both Chappelle and Baldwin. These injustices, which—in the small context of only the publication/delivery date of the two works examined and also the present—span the time of forty years. This begs the question, how far have we come?
With his majority opinion on the repeal of a portion of the Voting Rights Act, John Roberts claimed that our nation has “History did not end in 1965” (Shelby). The implications of this statement insinuate that racism has been eradicated from our society. One does not need to be a social scientist to recognize that that is not the case. Baldwin’s novel was published in 1974, and it discussed the great injustices propagated in the criminal justice system surrounding the ways in which black Americans are treated by police officers. Dave Chappelle first performed Killin’ Them Softly in the year 2000, and his main joke in the act was that the police can do whatever they want to black men because black males are subjects of white rule. The Stop-and-Frisk program is currently in action. Over a nearly forty year span of time (the span of time between 1974, 2000, and the present), racism is still the cornerstone of the criminal justice system of New York City. If that is “Change for the better,” then one can only wonder what change for the worse would be. It seems more likely that it is not change that has occurred, but rather stagnation. Both Baldwin and Chappelle address the prejudicial modes of operation exhibited by the police force and show them in a negative fashion. Each artist works to reflect the negative aspects of the current situation in his historical moment. Each artists work was well-received, their subject matter was obvious, and yet, nothing has really changed. In 1974, Fonny could be arrested and held unjustifiably just because of his skin color. In 2000, Dave Chappelle and other black people could be subjects to punishments of varying degree from the police simply as a result of their being black. In 2013, people of color are stopped and searched disproportionately because their color makes them suspicious to law enforcement. How far have we come? How much have we changed? Over forty years’ time we have moved from unjust surveillance and arrest to unjust surveillance and search (and yes, often arrest). We have not really changed at all.