It’s an inevitable consequence every time a cop puts metal to primer and fires down on an unarmed black man. We hear the justifications for what we just watched. We learn that Michael Brown did that or that, and that Alton Sterling was some kind of predator or another. We watch as backwater analysts bend themselves into knots trying to find some way to blame Philando Castille for his shooting, becoming white supremacy savants acting like a Mississippi Rain Man, crunching numbers and formulating excuses for an otherwise inexcusable event. It’s always some version of the same. The focus inevitably centers on that particular shooting, with white commentariats taking a flamethrower to context in a desperate attempt to avoid the bigger, broader, more important conversations about police brutality.
I inevitably chime in, as I’m wont to do, that the facts of the individual shooting are irrelevant. Whether Michael Brown stormed Darren Wilson with the force of an NFL linebacker matters so little to the conversation on police brutality that the focus on individual details is a clear distraction. Had Michael Brown never existed, the need for these conversations would be the same. He was a man, but his death is yet another data point in a perverse sociological experiment we’ve been conducting for decades in this country. To acknowledge that the politics of white fear drive police officers to disproportionately murder black men does not require any analysis of the individual facts of any situation. They’re just starting points—the proverbial tip of the spear—for a conversation we should have been having well before any individual death.
But there’s something else that’s missed in conversations in the aftermath of police shootings. For white folks—mostly people who look and talk like me—these conversations are removed from the greater context of racial history in America. If Philando Castille is the tip of the spear on policing culture in America, policing culture in America is the tip of its own spear. It’s the nastiest manifestation of the greatest scam the world has ever seen. People who look like me have convinced the world that people who look like "them” are dangerous, and police are acting with the full support of White America when they over-police black neighborhoods and treat little black boys as dangerous until proven docile.
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Alton Sterling died a soldier in the struggle. Like Eric Garner and many more before them, they were men forced into desperation by a system long designed to do just that. His hustle was CDs. Garner sold “loosies,” single cigarettes to people who couldn’t afford overpriced boxes and cartons. These stories are everywhere. In Houston, just outside the courthouse, a familiar face sells bananas, candy, bottled water, and whatever else he can get his hands on. An abandoned newspaper display is his storefront. Theirs is an American story as real as any tale of middle class mediocrity or upper class mendacity. These are men forced into pseudo-legitimate hustles by a system that long ago determined they weren’t worth the investment.
It starts early. In inner cities across America, white flight has left schools without the resources to compete. In East Baton Rouge, where police killed Alton Sterling, 30-percent of the black population lives below the poverty line. Louisiana’s child poverty rate of 27.7-percent ranks third highest in the nation. Abandoned black communities like Sterling’s bear the brunt of the disparate impact.
The results are predictable. Children in these communities go without food, forced into school lunch programs inadequate to provide for their needs. They receive little support and have no expectation of going on to college. Their brains are affected by years of impoverished living, where danger lurks behind every corner.
In America, we’ve created and emboldened a system of manufactured poverty, forcing people to compete for scarce resources and opportunities. This wasn’t a choice of expediency, either. We possess the wealth and capability of providing for every child and man in places like Baton Rouge. But we don’t, instead watching from the moral high ground we’ve constructed. We have box seats to a show that makes us feel good. Look at what they’re doing to themselves, we remark. We smile haughty smiles as judges admonish desperate people on the moral wares of theft. “I can send a drug addict to rehab,” I heard a judge say once in a Houston criminal court. “But I don’t know what to do with a thief. Yours is a character flaw that can’t be fixed.” He was talking to a poor client represented by an attorney in the Public Defender’s Office. She cried as she internalized the blame coming from on high. From the outside, it sounded right. Stealing is wrong. But I took crooked eyes as I wondered whether the judge understood that the desperation of a drug addict isn’t much different from the desperation of a person without the resources or opportunity to succeed in the way I or the judge had.
We’ve created for ourselves a system where legitimate opportunity is out of reach, but various victimless struggles to make it are outside the law. We lead movements to drug test the poor in an effort to shame them out of what we perceive to be laziness while equipping police officers with badges to watch the every move of those who try desperately to make it on their own. Surely there are success stories—the boys and girls who rise from poverty into a higher social strata. But the data tell us what many black families know to be true: social mobility for impoverished black children is less of an American Dream and more like the kind of dream that’s only true when you sleep. A 2015 report from the Brookings Institute states that 51-percent of black children born into the bottom 20-percent of earnings distribution will remain there at age 40. Worse, downward social mobility for black children is more a reality than upward trends. Seven in every 10 black children born into the middle quintile of earnings will fall into one of the bottom two sections by adulthood.
When black mothers and fathers see the death of Alton Sterling, they see more than just a struggle with police. They see a struggle with a system that does everything in its power to ensure that wealth and prosperity is never concentrated in the hands of black people or black families. They see a reality where historically black colleges around the country are in dire financial straits, mostly because the average white family has 11 times more wealth than the average black family, even when adjusting for similar household incomes. The big, generational money just isn’t there for black families to endow their schools. It’s a cycle designed to limit black achievement on the whole.
It’s why calls for police re-training or citizen review boards are more quixotic than helpful. Over-policing and fear of black people is not a bug in the system; it’s a feature. The very fundamentals of modern policing as we know them were developed to respond not to generalized threats to law and order, but to specific, black threats to the white status quo. Police forces in Memphis and New Orleans joined with the white citizenry in the years after the Civil War to raid black communities, killing and maiming men, women, and children. In parts of the country where whites feared that newly freed black people might seek revenge for slavery, police units arose from the rubble of Reconstruction to control those newly “empowered” black populations. It’s how colleges from Yale to Clemson were built using convict leasing, a system that allowed continued slavery under the color of legitimacy offered immediately to post-Reconstruction law enforcement.
Even the SWAT units and militarized police units of today have their roots in black fear. Some of the first SWAT teams came about amid fear of the Black Panthers. To think that the average suburban mom would allow police in her community to have tanks if she had any inkling they would be used against her children is to be naive. Our appetite for these tools of war is directly related to our belief that they’ll be used only against those dangerous people in our community.
It’s why the NRA won’t speak out on behalf of Philando Castille. Despite protestations to the contrary, the real desire for enduring gun rights in America rests not on the belief that Americans must protect against an armed government. Rather, many of the gun-toting patriots believe they need their sidearms to protect against the criminals and thugs that might come to steal their flatscreen televisions. Without the irrational fear of black people in America, the compulsion toward gun rights wouldn’t so strong. So doesn’t it make sense, then, that there’s little desire to defend the rights of a lawfully carrying black man. It’s why, in South Carolina, when Black Bike Week rolls around, police field calls all day and night about lawfully-abiding black people with handguns. In the heart of the South, where the NRA has its deepest reservoir of Second Amendment fighters, the sight of a black man with a gun isn’t reason to celebrate the cause. It’s reason to fear.
We’ve pulled off a centuries-old scandal in the worst form of projection. That people who looked like me stormed the Americas by force, killing the land’s natives before kidnapping Africans is immaterial to the narrative. That we built a Kleptocracy on the buried bones of Indians and the broken backs of Blacks can never override our abiding belief that it’s them--those scary sellers of loose cigarettes—who are truly dangerous. We’ve been taught for years by our teachers, our media personalities, and our parents that our morality is secure. We look to our newspapers and to our courts to affirm this belief, seeing with derision the drug dealer forced into his craft by a system that valued my ability to go to college much more than his.
And when our black brothers and sisters scream out that they are viewed as criminal until proven otherwise, we bleat back with the most pitiful of responses. All Lives Matter, we say, in the ultimate assertion of obliviousness, impressing upon our black brothers and sisters that, Hey, we’ve already taken care of this equality thing for you. Could you just respect that?
That we can’t see this, that we can’t place police brutality within its rightful context, is our prime failing. We can never understand the height of black pain until we understand that every time a bullet pierces the skin of a black man, it’s a reflection of a larger system designed to make it so that people who look like me will continue to maintain control over people who look like Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and John Crawford. It’s a system designed to bend over backward to extricate me from criminal charges while leaving dead the Sandra Blands and Alton Sterlings of the world.
It’s a system so powerful that when I was pulled over a few years ago, at night, an officer never went for his weapon even after I reached carelessly in a bag in search of my ID. My license was actually sitting in the cupholder, right beside me, but I scurried through a bag nonetheless. The officer saw my ID, so he must have wondered what else I was trying to find. But he didn’t shoot me. He instead said, “Hey, there’s your license right there,” before writing me a warning for crossing the yellow line twice. It’s a system where I’m assumed valuable until the last possible moment when an officer can no longer make that assumption, while Philando Castille and all the rest are forced into endangered lives where the itchy, fearful trigger finger of some cop or vigilante might end it all in the name of protecting the white supremacy that’s come to dominate the legal, social, and economic landscape of this country.