Читать книгу Dispatches from the Race War - Tim Wise - Страница 18

IN THE WAKE of the Justice Department’s long-awaited reports on the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, some would like to have it both ways. On the one hand, they praise the Department for mostly exonerating Officer Darren Wilson, and insist that the facts of the case prove the black community’s outrage about the killing was unjustified. Yet they ignore the companion report, which found a pattern of racist abuse by the Ferguson Police Department stretching back many years.

Much of white America wants to use the first report to beat the Black Lives Matter movement over the head (“See, Mike Brown didn’t have his hands up!”), while paying no mind to the second report at all. They are impervious to the well-documented, daily indignities meted out to black Ferguson residents who have been regularly stopped, ticketed, fined, arrested, and even attacked by police dogs for decades. According to the Justice Department, the Ferguson police have used the black community as a virtual ATM, extracting cash from them in the form of fines and fees for minor infractions. But all that matters to some is that their presumptions about Michael Brown’s actions (which were fixed well in advance of any evidence) turned out to be sufficiently confirmed by the Justice Department.

And yes, by the same logic, so too must we who backed the original “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” narrative accept both reports. And this means accepting that our assumptions about what happened were also concretized ahead of the facts. What’s more, such assumptions were mostly unsustainable. Fine. I can’t speak for others, but I can speak for myself. I am willing to accept both reports, having read them from beginning to end. I am ready to accept that, so far as the available evidence indicates, Officer Wilson reasonably felt endangered, or at least could not be proved a liar when he claimed so, which is the burden the feds had to consider. As such, the law says he was justified in using force against Brown. I am willing to accept that, so far as the bulk of available evidence is concerned, Brown’s hands were not up, and he was not in the act of surrendering when he was shot. And I am willing to accept that Brown was moving toward Wilson, based on eyewitness testimony, and the location of his blood, twenty feet behind the spot where his body fell.

But what does that really mean?

One thing it demonstrates is this: When it comes to white people who kill black people, the system ultimately works, and quickly. Darren Wilson was not jailed for his actions. He will not spend a day in prison.

How nice it would be if we could say the same for Glenn Ford, imprisoned for thirty years on death row for a crime he did not commit, but for which an all-white jury convicted him. How nice it would be if we could say the same for Darryl Hunt, imprisoned for two decades, despite his innocence, for the rape and murder of a white woman—also convicted by an all-white jury. How nice it would be if we could say the same for Ronald Cotton, falsely convicted and imprisoned for ten years for rape of a white woman, only exonerated after DNA evidence proved his innocence.

Or for Marvin Anderson. Or for Herman Atkins. Or for Bennett Barbour.

How nice it would be for the hundreds of black men falsely accused and convicted of crimes they did not commit over the last several years, not a one of whom was able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from strangers for their defense, as Darren Wilson was. Because for every Darren Wilson, whose life, though disrupted, has not been destroyed, there are hundreds of black men not so lucky, men who are railroaded to prison based on testimony far flimsier than that against Officer Wilson.

And no, this is not changing the subject. It is the subject. For two reasons. First, because white America by and large sheds no tears, spills no ink, and exudes no anger about the injustices done to these black folks. Just as most of us say nothing about those killed by police in cases where even video evidence suggests cops lied, and the killings were unjustified, as with Tamir Rice, John Crawford, or Eric Garner, to name a few. So long as most white folks turn a blind eye toward cases where the injustice is apparent, it will be hard for people of color to view concerns about Darren Wilson as anything but white racial bonding and smug supremacy.

And second, because those injustices—the false convictions, racial profiling, police brutality, and harassment of blacks by the Ferguson police—explain the rage that seems irrational to so many whites. To not attend to these indignities—to not be as outraged about them as we are about those who rise to challenge them—is to miss the story. And it is to ensure there can be no healing, no justice, and no peace for any of us.

The reason it was so easy for black folks to presume the worst about Officer Wilson was because they have seen this movie before, and rarely does it offer much in the way of a surprise ending. Does it appear that the facts, in this case, might have been an example of that rare plot twist? Yes. But it was nothing if not rational for the African American community, given the typical script, to feel the way it did.

The same was true with the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995. Most black folks agreed with O.J.’s acquittal (even though many believed he was guilty), because the racist history of the lead investigator set off alarm bells about planted evidence and misconduct by the LAPD. While most whites thought such concerns irrational, black suspicions were borne out a few years later when the Ramparts Division scandal broke, during which it was revealed that LAPD officers had engaged in a pattern of evidence-planting and fraud to procure convictions. In other words, systemic abuse by law enforcement, about which black America is all too aware, is the cause of black suspicion in cases like that of Darren Wilson and Michael Brown, or, for that matter, Mark Fuhrman and O.J. Simpson. Solve the first, and you won’t need to worry much about the second.

For far too many of us, our only angst is directed at people of color. It is their feelings about cops we can’t abide, and their demands that their lives matter and ought not to be snuffed as readily as they often are, that set us on edge. Yet if we’re having a hard time dealing with how people of color feel about the system, maybe we should consider how much harder a time they are having living with it. Their perceptions are rooted in their experience. If we would like for the perception gap to be narrowed, the experiential one must be closed first.

Black America knows that black males are far more likely than white males to be killed by police, even when unarmed and posing no threat to the officer, solely because they are perceived as dangerous in ways white men are not. They know that white folks can parade around with guns in public places—real ones, unlike the toy possessed by Tamir Rice or the air rifle held by John Crawford—and not be shot, tased, or abused by officers.

They know that a white man can point his weapon at officers, refuse to drop it when told to do so, and even demand that the officers “drop their fucking guns,” as happened last year in New Orleans and still remain a breathing carbon-based life form. They know that a white guy can shoot at cops with a BB gun and not be violently beaten or killed for his actions, as happened in Concord, New Hampshire, last year. They know white guys can shoot up a Walmart, as happened recently in Idaho, and be taken into custody without injury; or point a gun at firefighters in Phoenix and not get shot when the cops arrive. They know that a white man like Cliven Bundy can hold law enforcement officers at bay with the help of his family and scores of supporters, who point weapons at federal agents and threaten to kill them, and not be shot or arrested.

Black America knows that white supremacy among police, whether or not it animated the actions of Darren Wilson that day in Ferguson, is pervasive and always has been, no matter how little white America may believe it. They know from the recent cases in which white officers were exposed for sending around racist e-mails, videos, or text messages, as in Florida, San Francisco, or, for that matter, in Ferguson—or posting racist updates on their Facebook walls in dozens of cases exposed across the country. They know it from the way police manage to justify any killing of a person of color, even blaming a 12-year-old like Tamir Rice for his death at the hands of a Cleveland officer who was previously found unfit for service.

In short, to be black in America is to have a highly sensitive racism detector, not because one is irrational but because one’s life so often depends on it. It is to have little choice but to see the patterns in the incidents that white America would prefer to see as isolated. It is to have little choice but to consume the red pill (to borrow imagery from The Matrix), so as to see what’s going on, even as white folks remain tethered to a blue pill IV drip, the reliance on which renders us impervious to the truth.

If that red pill occasionally shows its consumers an image that isn’t entirely accurate, that doesn’t change the fact that it generally provides insights far more profound than those afforded the rest of us. Rather than bashing black people for seeing the connections and presuming them present, perhaps we would do well to remove the blue pill IV and substitute the red for a while. Maybe then we could begin to see what folks of color see. Perhaps then we could understand their rage. At the very least, perhaps we could manage to be a little less smug about the exoneration of an officer who, whatever his crime or lack thereof, still took a young man’s life.

As a nation, the eyes of our whites are misleading us.

Time for some new lenses.