The Rutland (Vt.) Herald, April 10:
Two narratives have emerged from the multitude of recent incidents in which white police officers have shot and killed unarmed black men. One is that police departments in many black communities are an occupying force, a colonial military power whose purpose is to oppress. The other is that police departments in black communities are besieged by unruly and defiant young men and that, unfortunately, violence sometimes happens.
The killing of an unarmed black man by a white officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, is in line with the first narrative. In this instance, video captured by a bystander showed the officer shooting a black motorist in the back as he fled on foot. The officer has been jailed and charged with murder.
In previous cases, authorities have found reasons to justify the killing of black citizens by police, even if the continuing pattern suggests a lamentable readiness by white officers to use lethal force. The killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, fit the pattern so well that black residents decided they have had enough and a major protest movement demanding justice for African-Americans has been the result.
In the Ferguson case, it appears that Brown had been involved in an altercation with the officer and was not shot with his hands up, as protesters had claimed. But the case pulled back the veil on a racist law enforcement and criminal justice system; the U.S. Justice Department issued a sweeping condemnation, and leading officials in Ferguson have resigned.
Most incidents leading to killings by police grow out of some kind of confrontation between subject and officer, though the willingness of officers to use lethal force often creates an escalation of violence with the direst consequences. Sometimes, of course, the victim of police violence has done nothing at all. Thus, an officer shot and killed a boy with a toy gun in a Cleveland, Ohio, park last year. It was a mistake.
To black Americans it is not news that police departments tend to act as an occupying force. James Baldwin wrote an essay in 1966 called “A Report From Occupied Territory” describing police brutality in Harlem. “I have witnessed and endured the brutality of the police many more times than once ”“ but, of course, I cannot prove it. I cannot prove it because the Police Department investigates itself.” Baldwin described the no-knock and stop-and-frisk policies that subjected black residents to arbitrary and repeated humiliations.
“The police are simply the hired enemies of this population,” Baldwin wrote. “They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests.” We have seen that this is true in Ferguson, and everyone suggests it is true in the towns all around Ferguson.
Baldwin wrote an apt description that applies to any colonial power. “Since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.”
This cruelty creates a dilemma for black people. “To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.” Baldwin was writing almost 50 years ago in a language that was descriptive and prophetic.
And yet the changes that have occurred over 50 years are worth noting. It is not insignificant that Americans have twice elected a black president and that it was a black attorney general who issued the report condemning Ferguson’s justice system.
The fact of President Barack Obama’s race is not going to persuade racist defenders of the present system; it is more likely to confirm them in their prejudices. But the black complaint ”“ articulated decade after decade by eloquent writers such as Baldwin and by leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. ”“ is gaining wider acceptance and more thorough understanding. Obama’s presidency has brought into the central arena of our public life the facts of African-American life. The racial confrontations we are experiencing now are not new, but we are looking at them in a new way. More and more, America is discovering that the white narrative does not adequately tell our story.
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