Читать книгу W.E.B. Du Bois - Elvira Basevich - Страница 12

Recall that the color line withdraws respect and esteem from people of color in general and from African Americans in particular. Though it cultivates a broad focus on racial realities, the Black Lives Matter movement highlights the racist violence perpetuated and condoned by the state. To be sure, the federal government had enabled the scourge of lynching of the Jim Crow era, passing an anti-lynching bill in 2018, a century after the bill was first introduced in the Senate. Legal inaction fueled white mobs. This meant that local law enforcement assured impunity for murderers, and police officials often played a role in lynchings, handing over victims to mobs, standing idle, or lighting the match themselves. The passage of the anti-lynching bill is a symbol of the ongoing fight for accountability for racist police violence as much as it is a symbol of the complicity of the state and law enforcement, then as now.

Du Bois believed that bearing witness to anti-black violence and the resultant trauma shapes the historical legacy of black liberation struggles against white supremacy. In his fictional and journalistic portrayals of the black lives lost to racial violence, Du Bois wanted to stir in his reader a sense of compassion and shared grief with the segregated black community. He endeavored to portray the singular and irreplaceable lives lost; and sometimes leaned on poetic depictions of a person’s subjective consciousness that is snuffed out in death. Given the sheer number of deaths and the lack of quality investigative journalism, with the exception of the efforts of Ida B. Wells and black-owned presses, it is difficult to track all the victims of anti-black violence over the centuries and to tell the story of their lives. Even today, the few names reported by the press represent a fraction of the many lives lost; and headlines often exclude black women and members of the trans community whose lives are notably at risk. For Du Bois, the task of political critique is to defend the humanity of the vulnerable, while also capturing the vast scale of anti-black violence and disenfranchisement without reifying the lost lives into a statistic or an abstract status of “victimhood.” His intuition was that empathizing with the individual behind the statistic would help the public resist the passive acceptance of white supremacist ideology and violence as a customary feature of modern American life.

The Black Lives Matter movement captures the black lives lost in routine policing practices across the country. By bringing attention to each individual victim with his or her diverse family background, gender, and class, the movement showcases how racial blackness mediates the public’s perception of threat and exposes black lives to police violence.

Consider the brief life of Tamir Rice. In 2014, 12-year-old Rice was playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland park and a white man waiting for a bus called 911 to report him as an armed belligerent. Within seconds of arriving on the scene, a white officer fatally shot Tamir in the chest. On the day he died, his mother, Samaria, had packed him a turkey sandwich for lunch and had given him a few dollars to buy chips and juice from the corner store. Tamir still enjoyed playing with Lego and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle video game; he was inseparable from his 14-year-old sister, Tajai. The Rice family had moved to the neighborhood in part to be close to the park in which Tamir was eventually killed. His older sister was the first to rush to her dying brother before the officer who had shot him tackled and arrested her as Tamir lay dying.

Consider, too, the brief life of Freddie Carlos Gray, Jr. He was 25 years old when he was “nickel dimed” by the Baltimore Police Department after being randomly targeted in his neighborhood. As he had done before, Gray ran at the approaching police vehicles and was then arrested. To “nickel dime” detainees is to bind their hands and feet without fastening their seatbelts, leaving them unable to protect their heads. Officers proceed to make sudden stops and sharp turns to fling their detainee inside the metal cage of the police van. Within an hour of his arrest, Gray’s spinal cord was nearly 80 percent severed; essentially, he had suffered internal decapitation. A lifelong Baltimore resident, friends and neighbors called Gray “Pepper.” He had a twin sister Fredericka; they grew up in crushing poverty, just a few blocks from where he was arrested. He had dropped out of high school in the ninth grade. Before being killed, he had suffered food insecurity and childhood lead poisoning so severe that a local attorney had filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Gray children; medical reports confirmed that they had permanent brain damage.

Although the deaths of black men and boys often dominate headlines, black women are extremely vulnerable to police violence. In Fort Worth, Texas, Atatiana Jefferson was killed during a wellness check in 2019; a neighbor had reported that her front door was ajar and was worried about the Jefferson household. Fearing an intruder, Jefferson approached her window to inspect the commotion outside. As she appeared in the window, an officer shot her through it. He had not announced who he was or why he was there. Atatiana had been playing video games with her eight-year-old nephew, Zion. A recent college graduate, she worked in the pharmaceutical industry and was planning to attend medical school. An only child, she was the primary caregiver to her parents, both of whom passed away soon after her murder.

In each of these cases, to this date, none of the officers have been held criminally responsible. Jefferson’s killer was recently indicted, though convictions are rare. The above is just a snapshot of the many black lives lost. Each life tells a different story about the intersection of gender, class, and age in the devaluation of black lives. Like Atatiana Jefferson, African-American women are often killed by police in their own homes, including Korryn Gaines, Kathryn Johnston, Yvette Smith, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Tarika Wilson, whereas black men are often targeted by racial profiling. In building a racial justice movement, Du Bois compelled white folk to conceive the world from the perspective of African Americans, i.e., to hear as they would hear the footfall of police boots at the front door, to feel their fear at an approaching police vehicle. Such an empathetic attitude is an essential tool for preventing future violence. And yet, when vulnerable voices share their distinct perspective on police practices (or the polity-at-large), they are often distrusted and discredited.