Summary

Being Black in America: Coptopia. The author, still referring to the reader as “beloved,” describes several personal circumstances that embody, or represent the kind of treatment that he and all black people live with – in general, manhandled (literally and otherwise) and disrespected by authority figures in general, and by the police force in particular. The latter, he says, is particularly dangerous because their powers are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution which, in its origins, refused to see black people as human beings. The author describes the essential attitude of the police towards black people, how they are all perceived as suspects, because suspects tend to “… all fit our description – black and breathing – at least at the beginning of the encounter” (178). After commenting that this treatment is ultimately about how whiteness fears blackness, he then offers to take the “…Gentle White Listener...