Why Are You Suspicious?

It's time to examine our assumptions for potential anti-Blackness

Author

Sharon Hurley Hall
September 09, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Hello friends,

Some time ago I read a post on LinkedIn quoting Matthew Horace, author of The Black and the Blue: A Cop Reveals the Crimes, Racism, and Injustice in America's Law Enforcement.

He was talking about the tendency the police had to see Black people as suspicious, no matter what they were doing. He said:

“When I was on the police department in Virginia, I was often dispatch the calls of a “suspicious Black male” and, in response, I would ask via the radio, “What is he doing?” My question was simple. Just what is he doing that makes him suspicious, other than being a Black male?"

As he pointed out:

"It was always innocuous stuff. It’s not that we shouldn’t investigate “suspicious” people, but what makes them suspicious?”

And note that while the author was talking about the US police, the police in the UK and Europe aren’t exempt from that behaviour. At all!

Matthew Horace urged them to look at the behaviour before deciding that a person was under suspicion. It’s a good tip, and one that more people can apply.

I’m not going to go over the long, long list of innocent things Black people have been doing that’s ended with them losing their lives, or even the stuff that’s not so innocent which a white person would have survived. Instead I’m going to talk about those experiences of suspicion - what I once called an assumption of wrongness - in our every day lives.

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