Your point is sound.

We've been getting in trouble for being black for centuries. Fear of cops is a difficult thing to unfeel when your body, customs, and trauma are the reasonable suspicion.

My 80 year old grandmother said "Oh hell no. Close the blinds. I don't want them to run up in here and kill me," when she saw a group of cops down the street. She's a funny woman, but it was only half-jest.

I don't want to be out here telling black business to white folks, but the "fuck cops" narrative is a fucking fear response - we're not out here trying to get killed when we don't sit still and quiet. We are panicking. We understand - not that we might die if we do the wrong thing - that we will die if we do the wrong thing in a police interaction. And we still might if we do the right thing.

Y'all are telling us to "stop, drop, and roll" when we get pulled over, but we are in the fire, not merely on fire. Doesn't matter what type of person you are when you're in a fire - you're not gonna be upstanding.

So, yeah. This doesn't apply to all black people, and maybe we'd do better to teach our kids either not to fear cops or how to be calm in life-threatening situations or both, but that's imposing a lot of stoic training from a large, traumatized group that is continually retraumatized by painful fucking media like this. You're talking generations of undoing what generations have done.

My mother remembers getting in police trouble with her mother for being too close to a 'whites only' section and she'd describe this in detail to me some nights as I did my social studies homework in elementary school, and she'd glaze over a bit as she described it.

Friends, I was born in 1990.

Can y'all cut us some slack? Give us, like, you know...I don't know, maybe two fucking generations of new teachings and good stories about white people and power structures before asking us to "act right" around cops? This turned into a rant and I feel fucked up now.

Sorry, but thanks for seeing me, u/dractelectasis.