Held to answer

The more we talk about race the less we are allowed to say – at least some of us.

“If the city of Portland can’t fix this, it’s going to be a long, hot summer,” Jo Ann Hardesty (formerly known as state Rep. Jo Ann Bowman) declared at one of the recent protests against the reinstatement of a white Portland police officer, who shot an unarmed, suicidal black man.

Hardesty, who is black, can issue that implied threat without fear of retribution.

This week on OPB’s “Think Out Loud,” she took it further. She encouraged black youths not to cooperate with police.

After paying lip service – “nobody wants crime” – Hardesty took a swipe at “faith-based leaders who think police is the solution to crime” and then described her own solution.

When she sees police stopping young black males, asking for ID and asking to search them, she stops and takes pictures with her phone’s camera. Then she asks the youths who have been stopped what the police said to them.

“You have a backpack that looks like one” a suspect is wearing, is the kind of answer she hears.

“They said they were looking for a weapon and wanted to search them,” is another.

When the kids say yes to the cops, Hardesty lectures them: “Why didn’t you tell them no – they can’t search you.”

In Hardesty’s world, if a young black male has just robbed a business, the police should be looking for a white guy. Or if police are following up on a report from a resident who saw a young black male tuck a gun in his waistband underneath his sweatshirt, officers should stop middle-aged black men in suits – with a few old white men thrown into the mix just to show race has nothing to do with the suspect’s description.

What advice would Hardesty have given Trayvon Martin in the days before he was shot dead by George Zimmerman, a fearful neighborhood watch volunteer? “Hold your ground, Trayvon. You don’t have to soothe some scared white guy.”

Martin and Zimmerman expected the worst of each other, and look where it led.

Now Hardesty is counseling young black men in North Portland to continue assuming the worst of police: That officers are stopping them just because they’re black and for no legitimate crime-fighting reason.

If she’s really itching for a long, hot summer to make her political point, maybe she should rent Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” which takes place on a single, hot summer day in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn.

It was filmed on location on one city block over eight weeks.

“It was obvious that crack was being sold on the block,” Lee wrote in the production notes of a companion book he wrote about the movie. “One of the first things we did was let the crack dealers know they weren’t welcome.”

Apparently drug dealers who prey on a neighborhood are expected to be tolerated, but don’t let them interfere with the making of a movie by a prominent black director.

To patrol the set and close the crack houses, Lee hired Fruit of Islam, the security force of the Nation of Islam, the Black Muslim organization.

“We knew we couldn’t bring a white security force,” Lee wrote, explaining that black communities in New York don’t respect white cops. He wrote that more than 20 years ago.

Politicians and activists like Bowman/Hardesty have done their part to make sure that wedge between the black community and police doesn’t change.

Since she is opposed to traditional police in North Portland, maybe Hardesty would prefer an all-black-security force like Fruit of Islam. (I was once searched by the Fruit of Islam at the Inglewood Forum outside L.A. when I went to hear Louis Farrakhan. They segregated the men from the women and had us run separate gauntlets – the women between two lines of female Fruit of Islam security officers, and the men between double lines of male guards. As we each raised our arms and dashed through our gender-specific gauntlets, the Fruit of Islam guards ran their hands all over our bodies.)

Of course, the Fruit of Islam has no arrest authority. They can run off crack dealers for the duration of a movie shoot, but they can’t put them out of business for any length of time.

The Rev. Dwight Minnieweather, who also appeared on “Think Out Loud” and disagreed with Hardesty on several points, wants people who are committing crimes in his North Portland neighborhood arrested.

“I cannot go arrest a teenager who I’ve just seen smoking a blunt and putting a gun away … I want that person arrested,” he said.

Minnieweather thinks it’s the responsibility of adults – including himself and Hardesty –  to protect their community.

“We need to be out there … we’re always complaining about the police,” he said.

Voices like Minnieweather’s are a sign of progress – not Hardesty’s call for a long, hot summer if things don’t go her way.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons