Beware when a black woman removes her earrings, but when a brother snatches off his cap, you’d better back your a** up because the brother ain’t backing down.
I made that jovial remark about the riverfront dock brawl that occurred on Saturday, August 5, in Montgomery, Alabama. I posted it in jest as a comment on a few Facebook pages, including my own. Although many folks recognized the humor in my remark and responded with a smiling emoji, at least one of my socially conscious friends didn’t. Instead, he asked me, “Why do you people make everything about race? Why couldn’t it just be two men fighting over a disagreement?
I said, “Did we see the same thing, two men merely disagreeing, or was one man attacking and the other defending himself?”
“Something like that,” he said.
Then, I asked, ” When are you going to wake up and smell the coffee, and what will it take?”
This friend (I’ll call him Urkel, though Mr. Different Strokes might be more suitable) sometimes agitates me. And although our occasional conversations are usually congenial, discussions about racial issues are a hot potato that we often toss back and forth, disagreeing and sometimes being disagreeable until we abruptly drop the subject.
I’ve known Urkel for a while, and he told me he usually doesn’t discuss racial issues with black people even when asked his opinion because it often leads to a nasty argument. He considers that topic, along with religion and politics, off limits. Frankly, I wonder if he was born with (or sometime during his life developed) a black gene deficiency because, contrary to what some people reading this might think, he is a black man. His deep walnut complexion and vernacular would not allow him to pass for white if he wanted to. Based on our conversations, and though he has never admitted it, I think he wishes he could pass. His self-loathing is apparent, but not to him.
He has a distorted tendency to fault the black man for most of his problems. For instance, we’ve had heated debates over race-related events, including the murders of George Floyd, Philando Castile, and the “alledged” suicide of Sanda Bland. Aside from his warped view of reality, Urkel is kind and level-headed. 
(Sorry about that, Urkel. I couldn’t stifle the laugh.)
Although honest communication is critical to understanding another person’s perspective, sometimes one can’t help but wonder if the person they are conversing with is not only uninformed and misinformed but blind, deaf, and dumb. Or perhaps they live in an alternate universe.
Regarding Urkel’s question about why I read race into everything, I told him it’s not true. However, the past is always present; I call it as I see it. In the riverfront dock incident, this armchair quarter-back saw a white man charging and assaulting a black man because his pride would not let him be seen as subservient by adhering to the directive of a black man.
And at the risk of sounding condescending, I’ll add that I have an amicable relationship with non-racist white friends throughout the country whom I’ve known and cared about for years.
I don’t condone violence, but black people are sick and tired of being disrespected. We are not our ancestors. I think activist groups like Black Lives Matter have clarified that. The men who came to the rescue of the dock captain, including the guy who jumped off the boat and swam to the dock, embody the words of Maya Angelo, “I am the hope and the dream of the slave.”
Despite how often the media, TV programs, and movies portray black people, many of us are not violent. Many friends and acquaintances have told me their parents raised them as I was raised: you don’t start a fight, but you don’t run away from one. When I was a child, if I ran inside my home after getting into a fist-swinging scuffle with one of the kids in the hood (usually girls, but sometimes boys), my mother would send me right back out there. Her attitude was the only way to stop a bully was to stand up to her (or him), and mother was right. Unfortunately, too many bullies today are cowards. They eschew a fistfight. Instead, they’ll go home, get a gun, and come back and shoot you.
If the dock captain (identified in a CNN article as Damien Pickett) had been white, would the aggressor (Richard Roberts) have reacted the same way toward him? I doubt it. Roberts may have been a new “kid” on the dock, but he refused several times when Pickett asked him to move his pontoon boat. In his rage, Roberts didn’t see red; he saw black and went after Pickett. And then backup came by land and sea to aid Pickett. One man swung a chair. Rapper Gmac Cash even wrote a song about the incident.
To the amusement of Wakanda fans, MSNBC host Joy Reed humorously wrote, “I’m gonna tell my grandkids this was Black Panther and the Avengers.”
I’ll tell mine that when Roberts started the brawl, if he didn’t know then, he knows now that homies don’t play that.