High Price

part of the American security team, just like them, as I saw it. Alex simultaneously tried to explain about the problem with the car door. However, rather than placating the officers, this seemed only to antagonize them. Although I knew we’d committed no crime, I was flooded with apprehension. Everyone knew the many ways this situation could go terribly wrong. Images of police brutality flashed through my mind.
    One cop said, “Where’s your state ID; you know you’re supposed to carry state ID.” I wanted to say that military ID was a federally recognized form of identification and should be respected, but I could tell by this point that the best thing to do was to keep my mouth shut.
    Meanwhile, the officers remained fixated on Alex’s screwdriver. “What y’all doing around here?” they asked again. “You gettin’ ready to open that door?” The implication was that we’d stopped at a store that we knew was closed in order to break in.
    Fortunately, because they had nothing on us, they let us go after only a few minutes of disrespectful, condescending treatment. Then Alex laughed at my naïveté. He said, “You thought that military shit was going to help, air force boy. That shit don’t work.”
    That same humiliating scene, which I and countless other brothers had been through before, would be poignantly described a few years later in Ice Cube’s verses on N.W.A.’s 1988 “Fuck Tha Police.” Cube’s angry but brilliant analysis describes how the police routinely harass young black men mainly because of their race and gear, which may fit some stereotypical view of how drug dealers and criminals dress.
    Driving home that night in England, I thought about how different things were there. My second foreign post had been an eye-opening experience, in more ways than one. Although I’d begun my college career in Japan—and had also had my first real exposure there to ideas about black consciousness and politics—it was in Great Britain that I really began to become knowledgeable about the profound effects of race in the United States and what it meant to be a black man from my background. I’d always known that shit was fucked-up, of course. But I hadn’t had clear, precise language to describe it or to understand how best to fight back.
    Having been schooled by Mark in Japan, I now schooled the younger brothers in England. And, as any good educator will tell you, convincing others of the superiority of your arguments is often the best way to master them and to fully convince yourself, too. In Great Britain, I used the social skills and leadership potential I’d developed during my youth to turn other guys on to Gil Scott-Heron and Bob Marley. I immersed myself in their music and studied their lyrics hermeneutically. They became my holy texts.
    On the BBC, I watched documentaries like the PBS series Eyes on the Prize , learning more about the history of the civil rights movement and the real stories of the people behind the fight against segregation and other forms of discrimination. I also saw Cry Freedom and participated in actions opposing financial investments in South Africa, to help bring down apartheid. I began to regret having missed the activism and consciousness-raising of the 1960s and early ’70s.
    Ironically, as I began lamenting having been born too late to join the Black Panthers or protest the Vietnam War, I was unaware that a new assault on black people was being launched back home. That was Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs.

    Getting ready to go out and party in England while in the air force.
    In 1986, in the United States there were isolated protests against Reagan—and in the United Kingdom, a much more visible revolt against Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher—but it all seemed pale in comparison with what I’d missed during the black power years. I didn’t realize what was going wrong at the time in the States.
    But being in England did give me a vital distance from which to analyze America. Though Britain was no prejudice-free paradise, its obsession with class and its early abolition of the slave trade made its racial politics different from ours. I wasn’t constantly facing people who dismissed me before they’d even talked to me there. And English white women certainly didn’t view black men the way American whites did in Miami. In fact, American military personnel—including blacks—were seen as having good jobs and greater opportunities than were