We’ve reached a moment in American life when blindness is no longer an option. When I say “American life”, I’m referring to the world of relatively comfortable white people, a world I inhabit. A lot of the people in this world were skeptical of the notion that racism is a feature of our society, not a bug. Many still are, I’m sure, but not as many as at the beginning of this year. We’ve seen race-based murder on the part of police and vigilantes many times in the decade prior to January 2020, but like mass shootings, they never seemed to move the needle on public opinion. And again, by “public opinion”, I mean the views of relatively comfortable white people, whose preferences and sentiments drive public policy (not as much as corporate power does, but to some degree).
In July of 2014, Eric Garner was choked to death by a New York City cop. It was an arbitrary, racist killing shockingly caught on video, and yet very little happened as a result. The cop was eventually fired, that’s about it. George Floyd was killed in a similarly arbitrary, racist manner, caught on video, but as if to underline the heinousness of the abuse of power that took Garner’s life, Floyd’s murderers affected a kind of casual air as they choked the life out of him, keeping the knee on his neck minutes after he stopped breathing. And the effect was like, listen up, white people, this REALLY is a thing. If you didn’t get it when you saw Eric Garner heinously murdered by a choke hold, here’s the same crime plus a kind of devil-may-care attitude and mutilation for good measure.
In 2015, Walter Scott was shot in the back by a cop. The heinous crime was, again, caught on video. The cop went to jail, but still, not a lot changed. Now, five years later, Rayshard Brooks was killed in a similar way, under similar circumstances in some respects, but with the added outrage of physical abuse of the wounded victim. When Scott fled, his assailant shot him, then dropped his taser next to his dying victim in an attempt to substantiate his bogus police report. When Brooks fled, his assailant shot him through the heart, then kicked him as he lay dying while another cop put his boot on Brooks’s shoulders. So here again, it was as if the gods were saying, take another look, white people – Walter Scott’s death was not some kind of unicorn. This shit happens all the time.
Obviously, it takes a lot to get through our thick skulls. But if the recent wanton murders of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Breonna Taylor and others have opened some … perhaps most white people’s eyes a bit, well, better late than never, I suppose, though distinctly not better for the families of those we’ve lost.
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Of course, the North Charleston Police Department would likely have stuck to the police officer’s original story if the video hadn’t surfaced; that Scott had grabbed the officer’s taser, that he had posed a threat to the officer’s life, that the cops had administered CPR in some kind of timely fashion. Feidin Santana’s video put the lie to all of that, and in so doing, threw into question every official claim of following proper police procedures. Those initial reports sounded like what we heard after Michael Brown’s shooting. But then, so did the web cam video that captured the police killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Has anyone gone to jail over that? Not yet.