What You Actually Know

Who Made Me — No. 3

Campaign Briefing: An Afternoon Post

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

I have known a number of police officers over the course of my life. Some of them I knew only well enough to recognize. A few I knew well enough that they shaped the way I think. Two of them I still think about when I am faced with a situation that would, under ordinary circumstances, produce a highly emotional response in most people.

Neither one of them was ordinary.

The first was a city officer in the town where I grew up. Quiet man. Short, thin, Special Forces veteran. He told me once that he didn't carry a ticket book. His reasoning was simple: if you really needed a ticket that badly, you probably needed to be arrested. Everything in between was a conversation.

He told me once about a stop he had made. He had pulled someone over for a malfunctioning turn signal — a minor thing, a safety concern, nothing more. He walked up to the car and a very large man got out and started yelling at him. Why was he being pulled over. What was the problem. The volume was considerable.

He started walking around the car.

He noticed a hole in one of the quarter panels. He asked about it, the way you might ask about anything you noticed — curious, unhurried. The driver looked at him and said, in approximately these words: what are you, an idiot? You don't know what a bullet hole looks like?

He said: okay. Turn around. You're under arrest.

In Florida, a bullet hole in a vehicle is a crime scene. The car had to be reported to the county, inspected, forensically examined, and released before it could be repaired. The driver had done none of that. It was a criminal offense, standing right there in the open, announced by the driver himself at considerable volume.

He had not gone looking for it. He had simply been paying attention.

He told me once about an Army E-8 — a senior sergeant, the kind of person who has been doing the job long enough that the job has become part of how they think — who was being screamed at by a major one day. The sergeant walked over to a file cabinet. Calmly, without hurry, the way you move when you already know where you're going. Thumbed through it. Pulled out a manual. Walked back over and asked the major whether any of his instructions superseded what was written there.

They didn't.

The point, as my friend explained it, was not that the sergeant won the argument. The point was that he never got into it. He already knew where the answer was. When you know where you are — when you have genuinely done the preparation, learned the terrain, understood the framework — the emotional response never gets a foothold. There is nothing for it to attach to. You just go to the file cabinet.

I have been trying to get to the file cabinet ever since.

The second officer worked off duty in the subdivision where my parents lived, which has since become its own city. He and I used to have long conversations on his walking patrol. After a while he told me that if I put on a jacket and a tie, we could have our conversations in the car. I started doing that.

This man happened to be Black, from New York. I was a young white Jewish kid from South Florida. I mention this not as background color but because it matters to what happened between us and what he taught me.

One day I used the word ghetto in conversation — casually, the way most people used it then, meaning something like poor neighborhood, run-down, left behind. He stopped me. Do you know what a ghetto actually is, he asked.

I thought I did. I was wrong.

He explained. A ghetto is not defined by poverty. It is not defined by race. It is defined by concentration — a minority population, in the broader sense, that has concentrated its living arrangements to the point where it constitutes a local majority. That is all. The Jews of Warsaw were perhaps two percent of Poland's population, maybe five percent of Warsaw's. In one neighborhood they were more than ninety percent of the residents. That was the Warsaw Ghetto. Not because they were poor. Because they were concentrated.

It had nothing to do with what I thought it meant. I had been using a word for years without knowing what it was.

Then he told me two stories. He said he gave them in different orders depending on who he was talking to — for Black listeners he started one way, for Jewish listeners the other. Since I was the Jewish kid in the car, he started with mine.

Picture yourself, he said, as a Jewish family in Europe in the late 1930s. The depression is at its worst. You can read what is coming out of Germany and you understand, if you are paying attention, that it is not going to be good for you. In 1932 a family of four might have paid four hundred dollars for passage on an ocean liner from a northern German port to New York and back. By 1939, if you are Jewish and you want that same passage, without a return trip, the price is over four thousand dollars. You sell everything you own. You scrape together every penny you can get your hands on and surrender all of it. You cross the Atlantic with the clothes on your back. You arrive in New York still in the depths of the depression. You are not going to tip generously. You are not going to spend money you don't have to spend. You are going to work to accumulate what you left behind. Hence the stereotype: Jews are cheap.

Then he told the other story. Picture yourself, he said, as part of a family group or a village in West Africa, living your lives, and the people on the other side of the hill are running short on something — goats, let's say — and they know your herd has grown. So they come over the hill. They kill the men who would fight back. They take the women into their group. They bring the young men and children to the coast and sell them. White men in ships are trading for whatever the coast has to offer, and what the coast has to offer, in this moment, is you. They buy you. They put you in the bottom of a ship and haul you three to five thousand miles across an ocean on just enough food to keep you worth what they paid. They pull you up on the other end, wash you off, put you on a stand, and a man sells you to the highest bidder. They put you in a field and beat you to make you pick cotton. Are you going to work hard? Only if you're an idiot. You're going to work hard enough not to get beaten. That's it. Hence the stereotype: Black people are lazy.

Both stories demonstrate the same thing. A single behavior, observed in a single setting, stripped entirely of its actual context and generalized to a whole population and presented as truth. The behavior is real. The cause is real. The generalization is nonsense — but it is the kind of nonsense that feels like it fits, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous.

A young Black man from New York taught a young Jewish kid from South Florida that. And I have not forgotten it.

There is one more thing I want to tell you about this officer. He would hand me the radio when we got out of the car — no firearm, no uniform, just the radio — which gave anyone we approached an easy way to read me as the detective, the ranking officer, the one to address. I think that was intentional. He was giving them cover. It is easier, and faster, and ultimately more productive, to protect someone's sensibilities and simply get the job done than it is to stop and make a point of what is happening. He wasn't walking around with his feelings. He was doing his work. The radio was how he made that possible, for them and for himself.

That mark sits with me still. Not because it surprised me — I could see it happening — but because he had moved past the point of being surprised. He had absorbed that treatment often enough that the workaround was automatic. He just kept going. With full professionalism. With complete competence. With the quiet authority of someone who knew exactly what he was doing and did not need anyone else's acknowledgment to keep doing it.

There was an arrest he told me about once. The man he was arresting turned around and said: cut me some slack, bro. My friend looked at him and said: I'm not your bro. I'm a police officer. You broke the law. That's it.

Everything else, as he understood it, was beside the point. Something happened that required a response. He was the response. The rest was noise, and he had learned — out of necessity, I think, more than philosophy — not to let the noise in.

I have not always managed that. But I know what it looks like when someone does.

Martin A. Ginsburg, RN

2028 Presidential Campaign of Martin A. Ginsburg, RN