“Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you.” 1 Peter 5:7 NLT

The last time an unarmed black Harvard man in Cambridge was arrested, it made the news. It was when renowned Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates was mistakenly taken to be an unknown black man breaking and entering into someone’s home – it happened to be his – in 2009. It was a story that went viral internationally, leaving a pox on the city.

This recent arrest of an unarmed black Harvard man may go viral internationally, too, because the student is from Ghana and the Cambridge Police Department (CPD) prides itself in 2018 since the Gates arrest of “being woke.”

How and why a pool of the student’s blood remained on the pavement as an ambulance transported him to a nearby hospital for evaluation fits sadly into the broader and disturbing narrative of America’s culture of police violence and brutality, systemic violation of black men’s civil rights and their bodily autonomy.

The appropriate use of force is always in dispute when police contest black men’s compliance, and their safety during the incident. And too often, the outcome is fatal. With this black male, however, some say he’s lucky because the outcome was a physical altercation and not his death.

The Harvard student was punched five times on his torso. The CPD report depicts the black male as wildly combative that three officers from Cambridge Police and another officer from Transit Police were the needed enforcement to gain compliance, place him in handcuffs and “avoid further injury to himself.”

In recalling the event, the Black Law Students Association offered a counter-narrative that suggests the officers had no understanding or schooling in trauma-informed training, crisis intervention training, mental health training, and de-escalation techniques.

Racial profiling immediately comes to mind when we hear of an incident with white police involving black and brown males. And with this male, a Harvard student, you wonder if he were a white student standing naked and obviously in distress along Cambridge Common in Harvard Square would he had been so dehumanized and humiliated.

On reporting the Cambridge incident, “The Grio,” the largest online news source of black America, stated that both “The Boston and Cambridge police departments are no different than those in the rest of the country. According to the ACLU, police stops target Black residents… most of which were tied to wrongful convictions and police misconduct.”

After Gates arrest, Cambridge City Hall released a report to the public called “Missed Opportunities, Shared Responsibilities.” One of the findings in the report is that “When police believe they are not in physical danger, they generally should deescalate tensions … [which] can be a tool for helping to reduce danger by calming a person who is upset or unstable.”

Had the arresting officers read this report along with employing the appropriate training techniques, this student could have been helped — without five blows to the torso and a pool of his blood left on the pavement.

But, black males aren’t the only ones subjected to police brutality.

I, too, reside in Cambridge.

I am always worried to the point of nail-biting when my spouse leaves in the morning for work if she’ll return home to me, because she’s always stopped by the Cambridge or Boston police. They don’t see the revered physician she is at the hospital where she works. Her gender non-conforming appearance and driving a brand new BMW, that many cops derisively dub as a “Black Man’s Wagon, ” makes her a constant target of suspicion. When gender identity and sexual orientation come into play, the treatment by police can be harsher. And when the police realized my spouse is a woman, and a lesbian one at that, their unbridled homophobia surfaces.

Always nagging my spouse about being safe, she told me that she worries about me, too. She flatly stated she sees Sandra Bland in me – the African American women pulled over for a minor traffic violation on July 10, 2015, by a state trooper and three days later found hanging in her jail cell. African American women combating police harassment is an ongoing struggle, too.

A gay Washington Post columnist asked me what is it that white LGBT people don’t get about the Black Lives Matters movement as well as racism within the community. I told him “This is a time when we need the community front and center in this struggle for both our survival and change, because their African-American LGBTQ brothers and sisters stood by you with marriage equality and other issues. We need now you front and center because we are hurting.”

But the queer politics of discussing race in the LGBTQ community is as unresolved among us as in the dominant culture. However, unlike the larger dominate culture white LGBTQs can suggest and give advice to communities of color from their own experiences of abuse by law enforcement officers, including discrimination, harassment, profiling, entrapment, and victimization that was often was ignored – and all based on our actual or perceived sexual orientations and gender identities.

Of all people to speak out on race and the racial violence between African American community and law enforcement officers in this country former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) has.

“It took me a long time, and a number of people talking to me through the years, to get a sense of this: If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don’t understand being black in America and you instinctively under-estimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk,” Gingrich stated during a CNN interview.

When the dominant white culture doesn’t see and hear African-American voices concerning our pains, fears, and vulnerabilities our humanity is distorted and made invisible through a prism of racist, LGBTQ, and sexist stereotypes. So, too, is our suffering.

I’m calling on my white Christian brothers and sisters for help, because my spouse and I – like so many of us of African descent – don’t know where our Black bodies are safe in America.