Bernie and We

In the emotional tumult what‘s also become immaterial, unfortunately, is the very material issue of whether Bernie Parks is as reformist as L.A.’s black communities need him to be. Most of his supporters in the last five years have been, at one time or another, vocal about bad police behavior. They have also been critical of Parks, if only implicitly. The questionable officer tactics in the Margaret Mitchell shooting, the call for data collection to combat racial profiling, the glacial implementation of the Christopher Commission reforms, the rapidly rising homicide rate in South L.A. -- these are all things Maxine Waters and company raised their voices over in recent years, and the things that Parks implacably failed to address. But in a classic instance of the heart trumping logic, Parks-the-symbol-of-black-pride-and-endurance overpowers Parks-the-symbol-of-police-resistance. In the age of symbolism, blacks are acutely aware of the power of image, and Parks has a good one: He‘s tall, unbending, dignified. He dresses well. He looks good. He doesn’t speak or act impetuously. He‘s also home-grown, like family; unlike the last black police chief, wily Willie Williams, he’s one of us. Maybe you don‘t agree with everything Bernie has said or done, but that doesn’t mean you turn family out of the house. When the going gets tough, as it certainly has for the black political base lately, you do exactly the opposite. It‘s also immaterial that Parks himself has launched his own campaign to keep his job -- a campaign that emphasizes merit and de-emphasizes race, effectively distancing himself from his loudest supporters. This irony, or strategy, is being ignored by those supporters, who are determined that Parks prevails, as a mere quirk in family dynamics.

So even though what is described as leadership is often really something smaller and more intimate, when it comes to addressing the big issues that affect black people, nobody has the time or inclination for small or ambiguous. Thus the media persist in delivering declamatory black leaders to an undiscriminating general public, and blacks persist in accommodating them. It’s a love-hate relationship that is symbiotic, and problematic: Any black person spotted within 50 feet of the Bernie Parks fight who utters a word about it is likely to wind up in the next Times story as a community leader. This accounts for some of my own hesitation in saying anything; thrilling as it might be to be cast as a leader, or as a spokesperson -- a lesser but no less thrilling position -- I hardly feel qualified for either.

The rub is, nobody‘s qualified -- not Maxine Waters, not John Mack, not me. But we’re all bound by an instinctual understanding that without black leadership, or some semblance of it, there is black entropy, which we already have and don‘t need more of. Bernard Parks may not need us, but we need him to prove a point that is losing a sharpness we took too long for granted. Ultimately Parks’ boosters are not looking to lead so much as they are looking to hold on. A pragmatic but poetically inclined friend of mine once had this to say about aspiring black leadership: “You can call yourself a leader. But if you look over your shoulder and nobody‘s following you, you aren’t a leader. You‘re just somebody out there taking a walk.”