Earlier this week, just before bed, an old high school debate teammate, a white man that I once loved affectionately as a younger brother, posted on my Facebook wall, “Do you have sympathy on police officers who are killed on duty?” Though we have been Facebook friends for a number of years, it has also been literal years since our last significant interaction via the site. This was a curious question that seemed forthrightly accusatory in its tone.
Driven, I suspect, by the killing of
Texas Deputy Darren Goforth last Friday, my old friend’s question says much to me about the quotidian ways that otherwise well-meaning white people misunderstand racial discourse in this country. Like many Americans, I watched horrified last week as news unfolded of Vester Lee Flanagan’s cold-blooded execution of a newscaster and a cameraman in Virginia. Then, just two short days later, the news that Shannon J. Miles, a Black man with a previously documented history of mental illness, had executed Deputy Goforth made my heart stop.
These killings of white people are tragic and inexcusable. That should be said without equivocation. But after I affirmed this same fact to my old friend, I asked him, “What would make you think I think otherwise?” That same night on CNN, I watched
Dr. Marc Lamont Hill debate the Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, also an African American man. The chief was there to affirm remarks made by Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman about how “anti-cop” rhetoric from the Black Lives Matter Movement had led to the killing of Deputy Goforth. Sheriff Clarke pointed to the killing of Officers Liu and Ramos in New York last year and the killing of Deputy Goforth, proclaiming it a “pattern.”
How is it that two mentally ill Black men targeting police officers constitutes a pattern, but the killing of Walter Scott, the killing of Samuel Dubose, and the killing of
Jonathan Ferrell, all by police while they were clearly unarmed and committing no crimes, add up to a collection of unrelated, isolated incidents? How is it that the random acts of two mentally unstable Black men who had no formal or informal relationship with the Black Lives Matter movement constitute a trend, but the two dozen police killings of unarmed Black citizens again remain a collection of unfortunate but isolated incidents?
In the case of both
Samuel Dubose and
Walter Scott, we have police officers on tape killing Black men in cold blood, and then we have evidence of those officers and their colleagues blatantly lying about what occurred. This is also true of
Christian Taylor in Texas. This is also true
in the recent case of two police officers who were fired after video evidence proved they concocted an entire story about anti-cop rhetoric to get out of doing their jobs. If two points make a line, then how many incidents of police caught lying in
cases that involve the lethal use of force do we need in order to acknowledge that there’s a pattern?
Let me be clearer. By “we” I don’t mean me. I mean the “We” that was originally included in “we the people.” How many incidents will constitute a pattern for them?
To be clear, the Black Lives Matter Movement is not an anti-cop movement. It is a movement that vigorously and voraciously opposes the overpolicing of Black communities and the state-sanctioned killing of unarmed Black people (and, yes, all people) by the police. It is a movement that insists on holding police accountable for their violence and that will hold police to a higher standard precisely because the state gives police the right to use lethal force. With more power comes more responsibility.
But here’s the thing: White people know this. Conservative Black people who insist on speaking about the rule of law and the issue of Black-on-Black crime know this. This is basic. They know that these young people don’t want to kill cops. They want the cops to stop killing them. That was as true in 1988 when NWA released their hit song, “Fuck Tha Police,” and it remains true today, as protestors blast rapper Boosie’s similarly titled song at protests. Yet, the release of “
Straight Outta Compton” this summer has led to increased police presence in movie theaters, even as we have watched the trial of white male Aurora movie shooter James Holmes.
How deeply emotional must one be to hear a group sing a song that is a critique of the police terrorizing communities and hear the song to be saying that these same communities want to terrorize police? How deeply emotional must one be to deliberately disregard the unspoken “too” at the end of every proclamation that “Black lives matter”? We are all entitled to our feelings, no matter how fucked up and misguided they are. But white people’s feelings become facts in a system of white supremacy and these “facts” are used to guide social policy.
