The 7-11 was crowded as I stepped up to the cash register—I always pay before going to the coffee bar. I had to squeeze past a Coral Gables cop. He did a double-take but quickly recovered, apparently deciding that I must belong there after all (maybe it was my black leather brief bag, or maybe it was the absence of gold caps on my teeth that put him at ease finally-who knows?)

Now as I stood there in line behind this boy-in-blue sworn to "protect and defend" the private property of Coral Gables from anyone who looks like me, I wondered: what does he see when he looks at me with those cop-eyes? Does he see a Black man on his way to work (at Barry University in Miami Shores, located 8 and 1/2 miles away from Coral Gables)? Does he see a potential 'terrorist' casing the slurpees and the stale donuts before sticking up the proprietor?

Like many more Black men than you'd suspect, I've been beaten up by the police. It happened when I was in my twenties. A trivial verbal dispute between myself and an abusive bus driver (he was being abusive toward an old woman and I criticized him for it) escalated into his radioing the police. Sitting down and waiting while the irate passengers on the bus denounced me for making them late, I foolishly assumed the police would take my side because my side was just. Instead, they "profiled" me rather than their fellow city employee as the threat to "orderly conduct." They beat me so severely while arresting me that I now bear a fissure in my skull, which will likely be there 'till the day I die. This lesson in interlocking filial interests between parallel sectors of civic labor groups (city transit workers and the police) came cheap. After all, Jesus paid much more dearly for his lesson in common religio-political interests shared by disparate socio-authoritarian groups (the Romans and the Pharisees).

Many Black men live among you whom you'd never suspect of having been beaten, shot, kicked, or slapped around by the police (some of them are professors, lawyers, doctors, clergy, and some are even cops!). Like these other victims of the state I managed to put the experience behind me and got on with my life. Why, some of my best sporadically distant acquaintances are cops. Like every Black male in a police state, even we lower-middle-class Blacks, my day-to-day interaction with the thin blue occupying army brings with it a certain, well, nostalgia, if you will.

I thought about all that as I wondered what the cop sees when he looks at me. Then I thought what I wasn't wise enough to think when I had been in my twenties: He's not the problem, he's just the symptom. He is merely the bulldog of the state, trained by his masters to "profile" me. So, I turned the question around: what do I see when I look at me?

What is the range of imagery I see every day regarding Black men? It's a very narrow range. I am appalled when I consider the utter paucity of possibility allotted to Black men in America where identity is concerned. I can see nothing and no one I would comfortably accept as reflective of me as I scan newspapers and magazines (Black men are responsible for crime). I find no real reflection of myself as I take in popular films (Black men either commit or fight valiantly against, crime) nor as I scrutinize CNN and ESPN (Black men can best escape poverty and, well, crime, by dunking, punting, dashing, jumping, and, lately, chipping). And like everyone else who can think I gaze upon the zoomorphia of national politics with growing alarm (Colin Powell wages war with the Bush boys as the Negro John Wayne, pistol packing Black cop policing the world).

Can we talk about that "range of imagery" then? Well, first, at the top of the arc is Michael Jordan, those wealthy Jordan legs of his dangling in a frozen leap, caught in the timeless frame of the photograph. Michael sees no evil, hears no evil, and speaks no evil—never uses those wealthy Jordan lips of his to utter anything critical against the corporate state (the better to recite those product endorsements, my dear).

Next, somewhere in the middle of the curve are Spike Lee and Colin Powell—the Conjurer and the Enforcer. (Disturbingly, a poll of young, urban Black males found that these two are often cited by young men as "role models" to aspire to.) One, Spike, spins maudlin cinematic myths appealing to the kind of Black audience still resentful over their expulsion from Black middle class Eden (nee Atlanta). Spike's characters arise from his own bourgeois cynicism and they tend to range between this Black Edenic urge on the one hand (Flipper in "Jungle Fever") and the desolate, rough, and ignorant horror rampant in working class Sodom on the other hand (Flipper's self destructive brother). As for Powell, he assists the state in its murderous rampages against third world people not clever enough to have been born in the U.S. From all appearances he serves the state that once called him 3/5ths of a Colin with enormous zeal (Sound suspiciously like Gunga Din to you too?). So, what's the bottom of the heap at the rainbow's end? The misogynist gangsta (as opposed to hip-hop) rap artist of your choice: "Old Dirty Bastard," "Ghost-Face Killuh," and of course, the posthumous Big Poppa (AKA "The Notorious B.I.G."). Each one is a cop's worst nightmare, each has plenty of gold caps on their teeth, and each one has a fan base of suburban white teenagers.

How about the ironies buried here? There are quite a few, actually. For instance, I can't shake the sneaking suspicion that most of Spike's critically acclaimed work is acclaimed mostly because he's a bourgeois Black male and he makes movies. Don't get me wrong; Malcolm X is one of the greatest of American films. Do The Right Thing is, in my opinion, a close second. Much of the rest of his work however is more-or-less audition material for Spike's more recent real gig: director of commercials. Many of his films even play like commercials (stereotypically essentialist racial conflicts, hyper high-key cinematographic treatment, and cartoon-like caricatures passed off as people. They are melodramas imbued with overweening soundtracks that nudge you along, making you imagine you are in the hands of an anxious car salesman trying to sell you something).

As for Powell, he, like Spike, is a bourgeois descendant of the "house Negro" who used to assist pseudo-agrarian feudal lords of the plantations in keeping the niggers (i.e., serfs) in line. How ironic that Powell was born in Harlem under constitutionally ordained segregation. He was born 3/5ths of a man, according to the state. He could only have managed to escape the segregation and the structural racism of American civilian society by fleeing into the Truman-desegregated armies of the American Empire where his keen patriotism was put to use in policing the colonies. He made his bones as part of the Pentagon mob that did fly-by shootings against a populist peasant uprising of his own yellow brothers and sisters in Indochina.

And the gangsta rap artists? Gee, the ultimate irony is that while chanting murder and mayhem against anything without a gun or with breasts, these cats are just as much into money and the patriarchal status quo as the more amiable Michael Jordan.

It goes without saying that radical, critical rap artists (such as Scott LaRoc, Eric B, or the brothers of Digital Underground) are nowhere to be seen in the mass media. In fact, White people comprise the largest percentage of what little audience these thinking Black male rappers can attract, just as a few generations back, it was primarily White males who supported and valued the then-new music called Bebop. Ain't it ironic?

By the time I got to work, I was determined to write about this, and in fact I've spent most of the day tapping away at my laptop instead of doing my work. Writing at work in my cubicle makes me feel less like the property of Barry University, which is what I am, and so are you the property of who or whatever you work for (did you say you were "self-employed"? Yuk-yuk-yuk, tell me another one). I used to teach at Florida International University, but I quit in order to write. I went broke, couldn't pay my bills, and had to go to work here for Barry's "Center for Advanced Learning" as an academic tutor. It's a Catholic university of Ye Olde World type, a private school in contrast to the public school FIU is. And so I get treated more like an academic "fellow" than a mere tutor. That's what constitutes a great workplace to me: I'm not just property; I'm private property.