It happens every time a black body has the life taken from it by an agent of the state. Whether choked out, pressed out beneath a knee, or torn away by a bullet, some mourn that life and others rage at its loss, while still others get to work.
Their work is of a different nature, not eulogy but libel. Their purpose is not to memorialize, but to rationalize whatever happens to these black bodies at the hands of police. Typically, this involves noting the decedent’s less-than-angelic history before bullets ripped flesh, or the brain was starved of oxygen.
Because only angels can be true victims. Only saints deserve encomium. And God knows, theywerenoangels. Theywerenoangels. Theywerenoangels.
If you say it enough, perhaps you’ll manage to forget a few things that would be obvious to even the most rookie of ethicists, but which escape notice in the philosophy department at Trump University.
Like the fact that whatever one may have done in one’s life has no bearing on the encounter one is having at a given moment with an officer. One’s drug history does not matter, nor their rap sheet, nor whatever trouble they may have gotten into in school. All that matters, or should, is what one is doing at that moment, and whether it endangers the life of the officer or another person — something that should be evaluated by independent fact-finders, not D.A.s who work hand-in-glove with police every day.
If the deceased person’s actions did truly endanger the officer’s life or that of another person, then we needn’t look into old arrests and legal troubles — that genuine risk would be enough under any rational assessment of self-defense. But if such danger were not present, nothing in the dead person’s background could justify their demise. We do not operate a system of perpetual punishment for past offenses. We arrest, we prosecute, and we release convicted peoples from their terms of punishment once completed.
Of course, these are the same voices that say if you resist an officer, or run from one, as Rayshard Brooks did in Atlanta, whatever happens to you is your fault. But for their unwillingness to follow orders, or in Brooks’s case, to allow police to arrest him for drunk driving, they would be alive. So why, they ask, must black folks run? It is a question the answer to which is fraught with more history than the person asking it likely has the time or the inclination to consider.
White people have been asking this question — why do they run? — for a very long time. It is a question Dr. Samuel Cartwright sought to answer in the 1850s when he insisted that blacks who ran away from bondage were quite evidently in the grips of drapetomania — a mental disorder that caused them to forget how good they had it. However, the Massachusetts Supreme Court re-considered it several years ago, coming to a very different conclusion than the good doctor Cartwright. After doing so, they ruled that for a black male to run from police was not only rational, but so much so that it cannot be the sole basis for reasonable suspicion to stop, frisk, or search them.
No, to wonder why a black person might run from the police or resist arrest is only possible for those with no sense of history, by which I mean the last few weeks, or centuries.
And do we really wish to say that resisting arrest is grounds for execution? Is it to be our official position that even when the police know your name, have your car, and could easily track you down, it is still valid for them to chase and shoot you? Yes, I know Brooks fired a taser wildly at one of the officers. I also know he missed. And the officer knows, even if Brooks did not, that you can’t keep firing a taser repeatedly like you can with a gun. He would need to know how to reset it, which he didn’t, and surely not while intoxicated. He was no threat to anyone, but the officer killed him anyway.
Why?
Because by giving him and his partner the slip, Brooks had injured his pride. And so he had to be punished.
And then he had to be smeared by cretinous Trump cultists like Candace Owens and those white Americans who consider her their honorary black friend. She did it with George Floyd as well, digging up old arrests as if to suggest that a movement to end police violence should not attach itself to the murder of one such as he. It should presumably wait for a more sympathetic victim. But even when there are victims who might check all the necessary boxes for Owens — Philando Castile, John Crawford III, Tamir Rice, and Breonna Taylor, to name a few — she says nothing about them. Neither do her fans. And we all know why.
Ultimately, the search for the perfect victim is as impossible as it is insulting. It is impossible because few who attain adulthood make it there without having done something about which we’d prefer others not know, and which, if they did, would besmirch our character.
It is insulting because it suggests that unless one has a relatively spotless record, one should not expect safety or even the luxury of another breath. It is to say that the Constitutional right of due process does not apply to those with criminal histories or who have a penchant for mouthing off to police or challenging their authority. It is to say that once one has done something defined as criminal, they forever forfeit any right to humane treatment by law enforcement. One’s past will always be one’s present. There is no redemption, no second chance, and no sympathy when things go sideways.
In which case, why even have trials? By the logic of such a standard, we should simply check to see if people arrested have a record already, and if so, pronounce them guilty on the spot and put a bullet in their heads, thereby saving the state the expense of incarceration. The outcome would be the same.
Of course, we only hold out such impossible standards for black people and the poor. I suspect that if some member of the NYPD were to empty a clip on any of the Wall Street grifters whose actions brought us the Great Recession, few would rush to justify the killing because the banker in question had been “no angel.”
Wage theft costs American workers three times more each year than all street robberies and burglaries combined. But if police killed a boss who had been stealing his employees’ overtime or violating prevailing wage laws in a union state, FOX would hardly rationalize the killing by noting the far-from-angelic business practices of the recently-departed.
We would treat those cases differently because we would know that the boss or the banker was not merely the sum total of their misdeeds. We would insist that their humanity was not defined by the worst things they had done. We would not reduce them to an algorithm of pathology. We would not forget that they were somebody’s child, brother, sister, husband, wife, lover, friend, or parent. We would not pronounce them irredeemable the way some do for Floyd or Brooks, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, or others.
For these latter souls, near perfection is required before compassion can attach. Otherwise, they are disposable, only worthy of mention in so far as white folks can use them as examples of black dysfunction.
Consider: those who besmirch black victims of police violence are the same folks who feign concern for the victims of so-called black-on-black crime in places like Chicago, by conjuring them each time a cop kills another black person. As in, “More black people are killed by other black people than are killed by police!” But do white reactionaries really care about those folks? Surely they must know that those victims too were mostly “no angels.” Many were gang members. So when conservatives insist these are the ones with whom we should be concerned — even as they fall into the same categories that elicit judgment for victims of police — they make clear the game. They don’t give a shit about any of them. They’re just props intended to signal how horrible black people are.
Ultimately, there are no real angels in Hell, and a kind of Hell is what we’ve allowed racial inequity to make of this place. Until that ceases to be so, and until we understand that all black lives matter — not just the ones that make white people comfortable and Candace Owens proud — we will repeat this ritual, and likely far sooner than any of us would prefer to imagine.
I’m an antiracism educator/author. Forthcoming: Dispatches from the Race War (City Lights, December 2020). I post audio at patreon.com/speakoutwithtimwise
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Previously Published on Medium
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Image: Lorie Shaull, Flickr