Why Some Can't

"It's difficult to recruit black men for the police force," an official recently said, commenting on all the brass on the sreets, TV, and radio about white police and blacks.  Now imagine a beautiful Duchess and a Prince, her husband, coming to the United States and someone has them pose for a picture with a black basketball player.  The Prince is dressed in a dark suit and tie, a topcoat fits the Duchess snugly.  She stands between the Prince and the basketball player.  The black basketball player, huge beside her, is dressed in his red basketball trunks and matching sleevless jersey as if he had just stepped off the basketball court.  He must  have been sweaty -- and his right arm was around the Duchess' shoulder!  What!  The difference in their race is obvious; we can imagine the difference in their class, their education, and their social status throughout the world.  What could the Prince have been thinking standing there knowing some dude, a black basketball player, had his arm around his wife's shoulder.  Who could have subjected the Duchess and basketball player, so opposite in class, to taking such a photo?

"Maybe the Law of Opposites," the guy the official was talking to said.
"That's my point.  Some things are so different in us it's like built into our DNA.  I say 'built in' because when our butts first hit the air on this magnetic rock we call the Earth we didn't know anything about colors.  And there's this  business of positive - negative, beautiful - ugly, high class - low class about "black" and white and people of other colors built into the DNA of all of us.  Now, for just a moment, like a streak of greased lightening on the back of a speeding bullet let us return to that time when intellectually superior people segregated themselves from intellectually inferior people and decided: 'Maybe if we hired some black policemen they would be more acceptable to black people than we are.  We just won't let them try to arrest white people, especially in some southern  towns, because then we will have one hellish problem.  So to be a policeman a black man had to be a tough, mental superman, had to conquer that feeling of humiliation, and had to try  to put police man over that black man built into him.  And every time he tried to arrest a black he had to do mental calisthenics, knowing he was going to  hear: 'I ain't done nothing, brother man,' the man would say.  'I'm a police officer,' he'd tell him.  'I know that,' the man would say, 'but you still one of us, brother, give me a break . . .'  He'd  repeat, I'm a police officer'  and the man would say, 'You ain't nothing but an ol' uncle tom . . . .'  Every time he had to arrest one it took a little out of him.  All these people screaming white police this and black people that I wonder if we can ever be absolutely harmonized."
"What about relativity?  Every time you say 'absolutely' you bring in relativity."
"Relativity is the Gestapo."
"You think that basketball player was ignorant of the protocol to be observed with royalty because he was black?"
"If people on the street, TV, and radio are so ignorant about police think what they'd be like without police."