#18 | September 25 - October 8, 1997  

by Mark Ames

It happened yet again just the other day: I was buying a newspaper on the street when a cop powerwalked up to me, clutching his rubber truncheon, and asked for my dokumenty.

"Huh? Doc-u-what?" I asked. In this situation, I usually play the naive American.

"Dokumenty!" he growled. He figured I might be a blackass without a propusk, which should be good for anywhere between 50,000 and 500,000 rubles. (By the way, a "blackass," or chernozhopy, refers not to Afghanis, as Jennifer Gould claims, but to Azeris and anyone else from the Caucuses.)

"Oh, you mean this?" I asked, pulling out my thrashed American passport. He blanched, saluted like some Benny Hill, and tucked tail.

I could go on about how "dehumanizing" it is to be harassed just because of my complexion. Perhaps I'd score a publishing contract with Verso, and have Geoff Winestock write gushing reviews over my painful experiences. I could shave my head and hang out with New York intellectuals and go to art house cinemas and hiss at Edward Limonov when a documentary shows him firing into Sarajevo. Yeah, and I could also have a sex change and become Ellen Degeneres.

I have a special fashion statement which almost guarantees that the militsia will fuck with me: first, don't shave; second, wear my cheap thigh-length leather jacket that has "shuttle trader" written all over it. That outfit nearly landed me in jail a couple of times, especially when I lived in my dacha last winter. I'd take the metro out to the Molodyozhnaya metro station, where a squad of pigs waited at the exit, fishing for blackasses to pack into the back of their caged jeep. A few times they almost took me in. I really had to lay on the "ya nyet govorit po russky" shtick to worm my way out.

One time my Nigerian neighbor drove me from my dacha into the center of town. I was looking pretty mungy-three day stubble, chelnoki jacket, thrashed backpack... I somehow became a suspect in a burglary at my ex-girlfriend's apartment building. She wasn't home, someone's alarm went off, and the cops needed a suspect; when I walked out of her building, I was the answer to their prayers. These cops didn't hesitate. No alibi. Thrashed leather jacket. Unshaven. Haul the blackass in!

I protested that I did have an alibi, and made the cops follow me to my Nigerian neighbor's office, which was nearby. I pulled my neighbor out onto the street and showed him to the cop: "Tell the cop that you drove me here from the dacha! He wants to arrest me!"

But my neighbor just shook his head sadly and shrugged.

Right then I realized why: A nigger vouching for a blackass? At best, it'd make for a good joke down at the station, in between the beatings and the car battery tortures.

Another time, a captain in the vice squad detained me, a friend, and our two girlfriends in the Kievskaya metro. They brought us into the holding cell at the top of the escalator and checked our documents. A cage to our right was overcrowded with drunks and blackasses. They were a grim-looking bunch, staring at the floor, mouths open. It stank of urine and vodka. We asked the cop what we did wrong. The captain said it was routine.

"Don't they do this in America?" he asked with affected naivete.

"No, we have rights there," my lawyer friend responded.

"Well this is Russia, not America!" barked another cop. "You don't have rights here."

They threw us out, but kept the girls for a verbal thrashing, calling them whores and thieves and doing everything to humiliate them for no particular reason. They came out crying and shaking.

Recently, a friend's mother accused me of being a blackass. "You can't be American," she said. "Real Americans are fair-skinned. Your eyes are Asiatic." I'm Asiatic?! Russians are hardly in a strong position when it comes to the Racial Superiority Olympics. I wanted to tell her, Lady, no people on earth have swallowed more Asian sperm over the centuries than Russians, and you're accusing ME of being a slope?!

Like most people, Russians are obsessed by nationality, and the racial discrimination here is horrible. But cops are scum in my country too-only their form of harassment is slightly more subtle.

I used to have this Nissan Sentra that I'd bought from some hippie. I jewed her on the price, but she got her revenge by pasting all these hippie dolphin stickers on the windows. You couldn't sandblast those fucking dolphins off if you tried. Anyone who knew me at the time-I was a Young Republican activist-got a big kick out it. Later, the Nissan earned the ironic name "The Trip Mobile" when my friends and I would load up on mushrooms and slowly cruise Oakland's upper class suburbs. I really thrashed my Nissan on those nights. I never saw what I hit, I just heard things that made us laugh.

When I moved to LA, the cops took one look at my car and pounced. I'd have my documents checked, just like here, including drugs and weapons searches. America's version of human rights abuse isn't strictly racial. Instead, they harass you for class reasons-it's more subtle, and keeps Amnesty International off your back. No one recognizes class anymore-it's all gender and ethnicity these days. A black man in a Cosby sweater driving a Ford Taurus would have no problem in West LA; but four white punks in a beat up Sentra were meat. The closer we got to Beverly Hills, the worse it got. I was accused of everything from running stop signs to drunk driving, but never booked because it was always a lie.

The truth is that all manifestations of authority are inherently "de-humanizing." That's the definition of authority: to separate the humans from the herd, to de-humanize society and make it as recognizable to the herd as possible. The very presence of a cop is harassment. That's what they get paid to do, to harass people. Discrimination is the soul of any society, its very DNA. Cops are the enforcers of whatever form of discrimination society wants: whether a "sensitive" Social Democratic Swedish cop, or a brutal LA or Moscow cop, it's all basically the same. The point is that by discriminating against someone, a society's bonds grow tighter. Back home, I was in danger of being jailed first for driving a shitty car, then for being a Straight White Male. Out here I'm either a White God or a blackass. Depending on whether or not I shave.