Be Safe / Feel Safe

On being black in Malaysia

There’s a sign across the glass door at the entrance of the police station in the Taman Tun Dr Ismail (TTDI) area that says “Be Safe / Feel Safe”. It’s the kind of sign that, any other day, would crack me up, which I guess is why my friend Karth pointed it out in the first place. To lighten to mood. But that particular Sunday evening, I wasn’t in the mood.

Karth, a practicing lawyer, came to my aid just an hour earlier when two police officers stopped me outside Souled Out restaurant, the one in Menara LGB in TTDI, for a “random” check.

Having been living in Malaysia for a little over ten years, I’m very familiar with these “random” checks. The kind of random where, for example, I’m walking on the street at night and a police officer sees me from the other side of the road and makes a run for me.

The kind of random where I’m in a car with my friend, and at a traffic stop, I make eye contact with the one of the cops in the car next to us, and then they drive behind us for about five minutes before — all of a sudden — turning on their sirens and ordering us through the PA system on top of their car to stop.

The kind of random where after we stop, one of the officers walks over to my window and asks, right off the bat, if my Malaysian friend is actually my girlfriend.

In this instance of random, the cops — true to script — were riding past Menara LGB when, from the pavement outside, I made eye contact with one of them, and almost on cue, turned their bikes around and came for me. The first officer, whose name starts with an S, asked for my passport. I gave him my i-Kad, which should suffice since it has my name and immigration details on there. But he was not pleased.

“When you came into this country,” she said, “did you show them this at the airport?”

“No, but the Malaysian immigration gave this to me after I came in.”

He asked me to empty my pockets. I complied.

The other officer, whose name starts with an R, came over and pat me down.

This, I should mention, was happening on a pavement by the side of the road at 6:15 PM. The sun was still up, and standing there with my pockets turned inside-out and arms extended sideways, I was in full view of the hundreds of cars driving past on Jalan Damansara.

Officer S took my messenger bag and started going through it. He found my iPad and asked me to unlock it.

Normally, this isn’t something I would do because, for one, I was not under arrest. It’s not an investigation, and it’s a huge invasion of privacy. But I didn’t want to cause trouble. I just wanted to do what I was told so I could get it over with and be on my way. Plus, I only use my iPad for reading, so there’s nothing personal on it anyway.

Or so I thought.

Officer S went straight for the photos, which I didn’t realise had been synced with my phone, and immediately, I felt sick.

I had a flashback to another random check from about three years ago. Five cops kept me in a smoky room at KL Sentral, passing my phone around, going through the photos, and asking if I’m here in Malaysia making “blue films”.

“Are you sleeping with our women?”

It’s incredible how often this comes up. It’s incredible how it always comes down to protecting “their women” from black dicks.

Once, when my girlfriend at the time and I were stopped, the officer threatened to call her parents and tell them that she was with me. She cried the whole night.

There’s no place on the human body you can point to and say: “This is where my dignity is”, which is why it’s very difficult to talk about it when it gets violated.

Back in the present, Officer R asked Officer S to ask me for my phone in Malay. I told them that I will not give it to them. They started talking with each other, which was beyond my basic Malay comprehension.

While they were deciding what to do, I asked them, straight up:

“Why did you stop me?”

Officer S answered, “Just to check.”

“There was a guy in front of me,” I reminded them, “Why did you stop me and not stop him?”

“We can’t stop everyone. There are only two of us.”

I told them that I’ve complied. And they couldn’t find anything.

“So give me back my ID and I’ll be on my way,” I said. “Or tell me why you’re keeping me, otherwise I’ll just assume it’s because I’m black.”

Officer R seemed offended.

“You’re not Malaysian,” he said. “I would be treated the same in your country.”

Even if that were true, which he has no evidence for, it still doesn’t make it right.

“I’m going to call my lawyer now,” I said. They asked me to wait a second.

“Your work is in Bangsar,” Officer R said, looking at my ID, “So, what are you doing in Taman Tun?”

“I’m here to eat,” I said.

“But it’s so far.”

And that’s when I called Karth.

She spoke to them on the phone, and apparently, they told her that they stopped me because I looked suspicious, but then after they’d checked and saw that everything was in order, they told me go.

“But he refused to go,” the one on the phone told her. “He became emotional and started accusing us of being racist.”

I told her that I didn’t trust these guys, especially when they’re lying about what happened. I told her that I wanted to make a report. She asked me to check their pockets for their police ID numbers. When I couldn’t find those, I felt even more unsafe.

For the past few months, I’ve been training for a marathon, and often, friends and acquaintances would ask me where I train.

“Just around Pantai Dalam,” I would tell me. The area where I live has a nice mix of incline and flat streets, so its ideal for training. “I run on the streets at night.”

The most common reaction I get is shock, followed by the question: “Is that safe?” or its close cousin, “Isn’t that dangerous?”

I often answer in the affirmative — “of course it’s safe”, or “no, it’s not dangerous at all” because what they’re usually asking is if there’s crime. If someone is going to mug me at night.

But the truth is, I don’t feel very safe when I run at night in my area because there are police flats nearby. And every now and then, when I’m running, I see the flashing blue lights and my heartbeat picks up pace. Nothing makes me feel more unsafe as a black man than flashing blue lights.

Except, I don’t know, maybe a sign on the door of a police station that tells me to “Feel Safe”.

About half an hour later, Karth showed up dressed in black. And when she got out of the car and took her jacket from the back seat, for that split second before the jacket was fully on, it almost looked like a cape. My own personal superhero.

I wish I could tell you that the story ended when Karth came over. But it didn’t. I don’t want to bore you with the details of how they still refused to give us their badge numbers. How they insisted on following us to the station where we’d be making the report, and how incredibly unhelpful and reluctant the officers at the station were to take my statement.

But I’ll tell you how halfway through typing my statement, I turned around and saw Officer R standing beside me, his phone in his front pocket with the back camera facing Karth and I.

“Did you see that?” I asked Karth afterwards. “Did you think he was recording us?”

“Yes, I saw,” she said, “but I think he was just using the phone to cover his name.”

But that didn’t make sense, because the officer taking our report already gave us his name.

Recently, a friend of mine — who’s also Nigerian — asked me how, after all these years, I’ve managed to stay sane in Malaysia. I told him that my secret is, not to expect anything from anyone. Not from my job. Not from my expat colleagues. Not from Malaysians. Not from anyone.

“The world doesn’t owe me shit,” I told him. “Therefore anything good that happens to me, I see it as a bonus.”

I think that’s a perfectly good way to live your life if you don’t want to cause trouble. If you want to keep your head low and go unnoticed. And there are very good reasons why you wouldn’t want to cause trouble. I, for one, have been conditioned, after all these years of living in a black body, to not want to inconvenience people with my existence. I’ve learned to keep the boat steady whenever I can, and uphold the status quo. Even if the status quo isn’t designed with me in mind — especially when the status quo isn’t designed with me in mind.

But the truth is, there are a lot of things that you’re owed. And it’s true that some of those things you will not be able to get because of bureaucracy, or ignorance, or just good oppression. But if your starting point is “I’m not owed shit” then you’re a lot less likely to even try. And if you don’t try, you won’t know the difference between the things you’re owed but cannot get, and those that you can.

I filed a report that Sunday as a way of trying to salvage whatever dignity I had left after my encounter with the two officers. I didn’t make the report because I’m not a criminal and thus they should have treated me with dignity. I made the report because I’m a human being and they should have treated me with dignity regardless of any possible criminal acts I might have been engaging in.

I don’t think asking to be seen as a human being is too much of an ask.

This was originally published on WAMN in November of 2017 under the title Feel Safe: The Black Experience in Malaysia.