American Skin (41 Shots)
Tuesday, April 4, 2023 Entry #70
It has been awesome to be back in New York City these last few days, getting to see two more transcendent Bruce Springsteen concerts and spending a glorious day in Asbury Park in between. It’s time to head back to the real world. But, before I do, I would like, over this entry and the next, to spend some time reflecting on two more epochal Springsteen interactions with New York.
On February 4, 1999, Amadou Diallo, a man from Guinea living and working in New York, was killed by four police officers in what turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. The officers were searching for a rape suspect and they stopped Diallo for questioning. When Diallo reached into his pocket, the cops, thinking he was going to pull a gun, fired 41 bullets, 19 of which struck Diallo, killing him. As it turned out, Diallo was definitely not the person the police were looking for; he was completely unarmed; and the only item in his pocket was a wallet (from which he was presumably trying to retrieve his identification).
The public outrage that followed led to daily protests outside New York City’s police headquarters in lower Manhattan organized by longtime racial justice activist Reverend Al Sharpton. The demonstrations kept Diallo’s story in the news, and spotlighted the issues of profiling and police brutality. In March 1999, I joined the protest with a large group of rabbis and rabbinical students (I was living in New York City at the time, attending the Hebrew Union College for my rabbinic ordination). There, I engaged in an act of civil disobedience by crossing a police line. I was then handcuffed and taken in a van stuffed with dozens of similarly arrested demonstrators all the way uptown to a police station in Harlem. I used my phone call to let my wife know that I might be late in traveling to Boston to join her for our family’s upcoming Passover seder. We were kept in a large cell for a number of hours before we were released, uncharged.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe0933523-f3ab-4db3-a60d-fade1c1ee378_1779x1187.png)
Later that spring, the officers who shot Diallo were indicted on charges of second degree murder. However, they were all acquitted in a jury trial on February 25, 2000. The wide latitude given to police officers when in the line of duty carried the day, despite the unusually large volume of fire power directed at the innocent Diallo.
This is where Bruce Springsteen comes in. That June, Springsteen debuted a new song called “American Skin (41 Shots)” with the reconstituted E Street Band when their “revival” tour stopped in Atlanta. The song was obviously about the shooting of Diallo, and it begins with a haunting melody and a chanting of the number of bullets used against the unarmed immigrant.
After the concert in Atlanta, Springsteen moved to Madison Square Garden (see Entry #55) for a tour ending 10-night stand. Whether or not he would include “American Skin (41 Shots)” in New York, the scene of the infamous shooting, became a matter of intense speculation in the media as well as in police stations throughout the city. From Africa, Diallo’s mother said that she took the song as a sign that people still cared about her son. Having relocated to St. Louis, I remember taking all of this in (without having actually heard the song yet in that pre-YouTube era) and feeling heartened that this man that I had come to care about posthumously and the righteous cause in his name were being given a renewed platform because of one of my musical heroes.
Even before opening night, Rudolph Giuliani, then New York City’s mayor, criticized the song, and publicly asked Springsteen not to play it at the Garden. The NYC Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association called for cops to boycott the shows and some officers said they would refuse if asked to provide security for Springsteen and his band. Refusing to bow to the pressure, Springsteen indeed played "American Skin (41 Shots)” every single night in New York City. While most in the audience showed appreciation for the new song, there were boos and some fans turned their backs to the stage as an organized sign of displeasure. Here is how Springsteen described what went down at his first MSG concert of the new century, on June 12, 2000:
“Come opening night at the Garden, needless to say, some tension filled the air…The police backstage, usually a great part of my audience, were unsmiling and uncommunicative…I gathered my band in a circle backstage, explained that something unusual might occur but that this was what we did at our best…I’ve never stood onstage and felt people waiting, waiting, waiting for just one song, Finally, six songs in, I cued Roy and Max to go into the dark, drawing the riff and clocklike rhythm that introduced “American Skin.” Some in the crowd began to incongruously clap along and I asked for some quiet, then each band member, beginning with Clarence, chanted the opening lyric, “Forty-one shots.” At that point I could hear some scattered booing (…it is quite distinctive to the ear from “Bruuuuuue-ing!”)…Then, several angry young men, one flashing a badge and saluting me with the New Jersey state bird, rushed to the front of the stage...We played on to a mixture of cheers and boos…and that was it.”
The song itself is a masterpiece, in my opinion. Like other great Springsteen songs, it toggles between telling a deeply personal character driven story and revealing universal messages. It fits into one of Springsteen’s overarching themes, the distance between the American Dream and the American reality. The beginning of the song is actually told from the point of view of the officers (“You’re kneeling over his body in the vestibule, praying for his life. Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it a wallet? This is your life.”). The next verse is a portrayal of “The Talk,” the words African-American parents unfortunately need to convey to their teen boys about how to try to stay safe from the (sometimes deadly) ramifications of being profiled on the streets (“Promise mama you’ll keep your hands in sight.”). Remember, Springsteen’s song is a full 12, 14 and 20 years before the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown George Floyd respectively. Somewhere in this later era, “The Talk” became a common part of the lexicon in “Witnessing Whiteness” workshops about privilege and bias, but here Springsteen was ahead of his time in his sensitivity to this heart wrenching reality.
Then, the searing line, “We’re baptized in these waters, and in each other’s blood,” of which Springsteen has written, “The idea was: here is what systematic racial injustice, fear and paranoia do to our children, our loved ones, ourselves. Here’s the price in blood.”
But Springsteen has also long claimed he wanted to present a balanced voice in “American Skin (41 Shots).” In this effort, he prefigures the language of the future first African-American president who would become his friend, Barack Obama (See Entries #30, 31, and 32). President Obama effortlessly wove the story of Black America into our larger national narrative. He talked about racism as a sin that isn’t only about the obvious victims, rather one that involves us all. Springsteen said about the killing of Diallo that the “sheer number of shots, forty-one, seemed to gauge the size of our betrayal of one another.” This conviction comes through most strongly in the title line, “You can get killed just for living in your American skin.” Brown skin, Black skin, Amadou Diallo’s skin-Springsteen is demanding we recognize all these skins to be as American as white skin. In coining this term that should be obvious but it is clearly not yet, Springsteen is artistically expressing despair over the lingering privileges and disadvantages one receives based on the type of American skin they were born wearing.
Decades later, “American Skin (41 Shots)” is sadly still a relevant song, and Springsteen released a studio version of it on his 2014 album High Hopes. It remains a not uncommon selection on Springsteen’s live setlists. A few years after the Madison Square Garden concerts in 2000, Springsteen performed at New York’s Shea Stadium and the New York Police Department yanked their planned post-show security escort detail for Springsteen and the band because they dared to play the song about Diallo. Springsteen pointedly included “American Skin (41 Shots)” in his concerts following the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. While due to the pandemic, he could not perform live at all during the 2020 summer of civil unrest through the Black Lives Matter movement following the murders of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor, Springsteen dedicated one of his Sirius XM radio shows to the topic. He opened the episode by playing his now over 20 year old song about Amadou Diallo. “This song is almost eight minutes long,” Springsteen remarked, “That’s how long it took George Floyd to die with a Minneapolis officer’s knee buried into his neck.”
Bruce Springsteen ultimately received an award from the NAACP for his creation of “American Skin (41 Shots).” He said at the time “I was always glad the song brought me a little closer to the Black community I always wished I’d served better.”
This video is from one of the performances of “American Skin (41 Shots)” from Madison Square Garden in 2000, among the very first times the song was ever heard.
“It ain’t no secret my friend, you can get killed just for living in your American skin.”