On American Racism and Police Violence Against Black People

On American Racism and Police Violence Against Black People

When I was first in London, England, as an eleven year old kid in 1958 the Bobbies were unarmed. Those London police officers patrolled the city and enforced the law without weapons. Even back then I never quite understood how they could do that. I mean, surely the bad guys had guns. I understand that they don’t do it anymore. I’ve never seen an American cop in uniform without a holstered pistol on his or her hip. I have I suppose heard of police shootings my whole live. Especially in the US with its culture of glorifying the gun and addressing almost any problem with violence I can’t imagine the police being unarmed. I don’t believe in the salvific power of violence the way most Americans do, but I imagine the police are convinced with good reason that at least the threat of deadly violence is necessary in their work for their own protection and sometimes for the protection of others.

In recent times we have heard of case after case of white cops killing unarmed Black people. Sometimes they shoot them. Sometimes they strangle them. Sometimes their use of deadly force may be legally justifiable. Yet we see case after case in which it sure doesn’t appear to the outside layperson to be justified. In far too many of those cases the cops have gotten away with it either because they were never prosecuted or because they were tried and acquitted. Today it looks like maybe that is beginning to change.

On May 25, 2020, four Minneapolis cops arrested and unarmed Black man named George Floyd for the minor offense of trying to pass a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. A bystander, a seventeen year old girl, shot a video of white officer Derek Chauvin getting Mr. Floyd on the ground and pressing his knee against Mr. Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. Mr. Floyd pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. At the end he called out for his deceased mother. Chauvin would not let up his pressure on Mr. Floyd’s neck. Three other police officers on the scene did nothing to stop what Chauvin was doing. One of them may have applied pressure to Mr. Floyd’s back. George Floyd died of suffocation. Chauvin has been fired from the police force, arrested, and charged with second degree felony murder, the underlying felony being assault. The other three cops have been fired, arrested, and charged with aiding and abetting second degree murder. None of them has been convicted yet, and they are therefore legally presumed to be innocent despite the evidence from the damning videotape of what happened.

Not just Minneapolis but the whole country exploded in protest. Demonstrations continue as I write these words on June 14, nearly three weeks after Mr. Floyd was killed. Every city in the country large and small has seen demonstrations. There has been some looting, especially at first; but most of the demonstrations have been peaceful. There has been some police violence, but for the most part the police have controlled crowds without violence. Some law enforcement officers have knelt with the protestors in memory of Mr. Floyd. The president had police tear gas and shoot rubber bullets at peaceful protestors so he could go have a photo op in front of a boarded up church near the White House he has never attended though it is called the church of presidents. Some jurisdictions have enacted laws or policies to reform police practice, including banning choke holds. Demands continue for more meaningful reforms to end police brutality generally and against unarmed Black people specifically.

On June 12, 2020, two white Atlanta police officers responded to a call about a man named Rayshard Brooks sleeping in his car in a Wendy’s drive through. His car may or may not have been blocking the drive through. The police say they administered a breathalyzer test to Mr. Brooks which he failed. Other witnesses say the police did not administer that test. The two police officers arrested Mr. Brooks, apparently for the offense of driving while intoxicated although they had not seen Mr. Brooks driving his car. When they tried to apply hand restraints to Mr. Brooks he resisted arrest. Video shot by a bystander shows him wrestling quite violently with the police officers. He grabbed a Taser from one of the officers and started to run away from them as shown by the surveillance at the Wendy’s. At one point he turned and fired the Taser at one of the officers who was chasing him though the officer was well out of the range of the Taser. I understand that under Georgia law a Taser is not considered a lethal weapon. The cop shot Mr. Brooks in the back. Witnesses say the two officers spent at least a little time picking up the shell casings from the fired shots before calling for medical aid for Mr. Brooks. Mr. Brooks, whose daughter’s eighth birthday was the next day, died of his wounds.

Atlanta exploded. Some fool set fire to the Wendy’s where the incident took place though the Wendy’s was only the setting of the event and otherwise had nothing to do with it. People blocked traffic on Atlanta freeways. The mayor said the shooting was not justified. The police chief resigned. The officer who fired the fatal shots has been fired. The other officer present has been placed on administrative leave. Whether these responses were justified or not all or at least most of them were perfectly foreseeable in today’s atmosphere of increased sensitivity to and outrage at white cops shooting unarmed Black men. I could easily cite other cases of white cops (or other white men) shooting unarmed Black people, but I trust the point is made. It happens far too often. Once is too often. I want here to look at two cultural phenomena that explain but in no way justify these shootings.

First, Black Americans are afraid of the police in a way white Americans aren’t. We hear all the time of people’s experience of being stopped for the violation of driving while Black. We hear how Black parents teach their children how to behave in public so they won’t be arrested—or worse—by white cops. I can hear white racists respond to these stories by saying that Black Americans are overreacting. They’re blowing things out of proportion. We white people however have no right to tell Black people how to react to Black experience. Our task is to listen, to try to understand, then to be allies to Black people in ways that Black not white people define in the effort to change things for the better.

We have no right to tell Black people how to respond to their life experience first of all because no people have the right to tell any other people how to react to their own experience. Beyond that the situation is much more acute between Black and white Americans for the second of the two phenomena I want to discuss here. We white Americans have no right to tell Black Americans how to react to their life experience because we are the bearers and beneficiaries of American racism. The United States of America is a thoroughly racist country. White police shooting Black people is but one ugly manifestation of a culture rotten to its core with racism. Racism is what the late theologian Walter Wink would call a power, a spiritual force alive and functioning within American culture. It functions to benefit white people and disadvantage Black people in all aspects of American life. It appears as personal racism in many white Americans, but more importantly it functions as institutional racism even when the white people in those institutions don’t think they are and may not be racists. Statistics from every aspect of American life show the effect of institutional racism. Whether the statistics be about the economy and wealth, education, medical care, the criminal law system, or any other aspect of American life, Black Americans fare significantly worse than white Americans.

This country was born racist. It’s economy was largely built on the backs of enslaved Black people. White Americans kept Black Americans poor and un- or undereducated for decades after the end of slavery. The US Supreme Court made racial segregation in public schools illegal in 1954. The federal government banned racial discrimination in interstate commerce (understood very broadly) in 1964 and in voting in 1965. Supreme Court decisions and federal laws, however, don’t necessarily change people’s behavior. They are largely ineffective in defeating institutional racism. We have made some progress toward a more just America, but we still are a thoroughly racist nation with a long way to go before true equality is achieved.

The manifestation most in the public consciousness right now is police violence against Black people. That is a hugely important issue, and we must do all we can to curb it. It is however only one manifestation of a much deeper issue, the issue of endemic American racism. How do we overcome that endemic racism? American racism effects everyone but is mostly our white people’s problem to solve because it is our racism that causes the problems. I don’t know how we do it. I doubt that anyone has all the answers. Whatever it takes we just have to do it no matter how much that means we have to change or give up. It’s way past time.