One thing from the summer, these months brought race back to the fore of
national consciousness. Protest for days, weeks, months - maintained by the
repeated blows of new stories, with a new heartbreak coming whenever the pain of
the last one is starting to fade. We don't even have the time to call out "say
her name" or "say his name" because there is always a new name.On March 20 it was Breonna Taylor in Louisville, killed in a hail of gunfire leaving dozens of shell casings and scattered holes proving cops just shot wildly at anything in front of them.
On April 24 it was Nicolas Chavez in Houston, shot down in the midst of a mental health episode.
On May 25 it was George Floyd in Minneapolis, slowly suffocated over the course of more than 8 minutes with a cop's knee in his neck.
On August 23 it was Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot in the back in front of his kids.
On September 2 it was
Daniel Prude
in Rochester, New York,
lying naked
on a wet street without even a blanket, a
hood over his head
and
knees in his back, after experiencing a mental health crisis - of which the police were
informed when the call was made.
Of those, only Jacob Blake
survived.
And finally, one incident in which no one was hurt but
which shows what is wrong with policing in the US and what is wrong with our
society at a whole.
 |
| Breonna Taylor |
September 5, Tempe, Arizona. A cop responds to a report of a trespasser at a hotel. The
manager says the guy has a gun and described him as white, wearing a black
shirt and tan pants. Cop goes around to a side door, sees a black man, an
employee named Tre, coming out, dressed in a light gray shirt and black pants.
Cops
holds the guy at gun point
for over two minutes, claiming he matches the description of the guy with the
gun.
Okay, white guy, black shirt, tan pants. Black guy, light gray
shirt, black pants. Cop looks at the black guy and thinks "that looks like the
guy." The question, and I think the answer is obvious, is why. Why do cops -
no less than the rest of white society, but they have guns - see a black man
and think "criminal. Suspect. Dangerous." You know as well as I do.
The
response to this string of outrages has been an on-going wave of street
protests over police violence and brutality, most particularly over police
shootings of unarmed black men.
Yes, there has been some destruction, some rioting, but frankly we shouldn't
have been surprised any more than we should have been surprised by the media's
abject and repeated failure to put that "rioting" in context, to ever refer to
the anger and frustration that they knew, they had to know, was there,
preferring to repeatedly focus on any violence, equate protest with violence,
and grudgingly refer to the 99% of nonviolent protests with the backhanded
compliment that they were "mostly" or "generally" peaceful before getting to
what they want to show not because it's the most important or the most
meaningful or most expressive of actual events but because it's the most
dramatic, makes for the most exciting visuals, is the most fun for them.
We
shouldn't have been surprised. In the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots
sparked by the acquittal of the cops who
brutally beat Rodney King, I wrote that we knew the anger was there, we knew the desperation was
there, we knew the rage was there, the only question was what would be the
proximate cause for their expression. The same is true now.
Then,
the spark was Rodney King. This time, it was Breonna Taylor who lit the fuse
and George Floyd who set off the blast.
We shouldn't have been
surprised that among all the marches and protests there was some destruction,
some rioting. If anything, we should have been surprised there wasn't more.
Because
we've known all along. We've know about the bigotry and about the anger.
 |
| George Floyd |
We knew it 52 years ago. The Kerner Commission, set up by Lyndon
Johnson to consider the causes of the so-called "long hot summer" of 1967,
when there were riots in 159 cities, found that the causes
were poverty and institutional racism. What's more, quoting the report now, "White society is deeply implicated in
the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and
white society condones it." The nation, the Commission warned,
was poised to fracture
into two radically unequal societies - one black, one white.
We
knew it over 70 years ago, when a commission appointed by Harry Truman
declared that "There is evidence of lawless police action against whites and
Negroes alike, but
the dominant pattern is that of race prejudice. Negroes have been shot, supposedly in self-defense, under circumstances
indicating, at best, unsatisfactory police work in the handling of criminals,
and, at worst, a callous willingness to kill."
We knew it
almost a hundred years ago. In 1922, in the aftermath of a so-called
"race riot" in Chicago three years earlier, a Commission on Race Relations
found that the "Negro problem," as it was called, was not the making of black
men and women. Quoting: "No group in our population is
less responsible for its existence."
We have known all along. And we - and here I mean specifically
white society - did our best to ignore it. Over the years, over the decades,
over the century, we did our best to ignore it, to say it was their fault, it
was their failure, only being roused to some palliatives when that boiling,
roiling, anger broke free to a degree we could not ignore. That is, until
things calmed down a bit - when we went right back to ignoring it.
Face facts, white people: It's our fault.
We are responsible. We are guilty. We are to blame. And we are doubly to blame
because we are the ones with the political and economic power to do something
about it and we continually fail to do so even as we go around bragging how
generous we are.
Last thing on this for now: Don't even bother
telling me the destruction, what there was of it, was caused by the rioters
unless you are prepared to consider the question of who caused the rioters.
Because I doubt you would care for the direction that consideration would take
you.
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