A Solution for Police Officers Who Shoot Out of Fear

With the most recent shooting death of an unarmed black man by white police, we are hearing the same story of why the tragedy happened: offending officers said that they believed 22-year old Stephon Clark had a gun and they were “in fear for their lives.”

It turns out that Clark had an iPhone in his hand; no gun was found at the scene.

The post-shooting rhetoric is always the same. “Police say” the suspect “lunged” at them or was “reaching into his waistband,” giving police just cause to shoot. In the case of the killing by police of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, the offending officers responded to a dispatch call which indicated that someone had called in to say that there was a “man with a gun” at a local park. The caller also said that the gun “was probably fake.”

Police, though, acted on the call. Reports say they drove their cruiser over a curb and came within feet of Tamir. Without warning, they shot the young boy at close range and afterward, did not render medical care. He most likely freaked out when he saw the police car lurching toward him and may have “reached into his waistband,” as police reported. Nonetheless, they didn’t identify themselves and shot and killed him. (http://www.cleveland.com/court-justice/index.ssf/2017/01/tamir_rice_shooting_a_breakdow.html)

They were “in fear of their lives.”

The excuse given by police officers as their reason for taking down black people is the standard line but it just does not work. How can a police officer be in fear of his or her life that often, especially when that same fear is not apparent when they take down white suspects?

It is very troubling that in the case of 22-year old Dylann Roof, the young white man who shot and killed 14 people in a church in South Carolina, who was known to have an assault weapon that he used in a crime, the police had no fear for their lives. They pursued Roof, found him, arrested him and then took him to a Burger King for him to get something to eat before taking him to the police station. (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/dylann-roof-burger-king-cops-meal-article-1.2267615).

If one reads police accounts of these shootings of black men, they too frequently say that the officers “were in fear of their lives.” In the case of John Crawford, who was shot in the toy aisle in a Walmart while holding a toy gun, the officers shot first and asked questions later. Crawford’s last words before he died were said to have been, “It’s not real.” (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/07/ohio-black-man-killed-by-police-walmart-doubts-cast-witnesss-account)

People can only take so much. The scenario is nearly always the same. There is an “investigation,” a grand jury is called, but the offending officers are found to have been in the right because they were “in fear of” their lives.

That’s just too much fear and too easy of an excuse to keep letting police officers wage assault on unarmed black people. In the case of Clark, “police said” he was smashing windows and video shows that he ran from police when they began pursuing him. Though it’s not a smart thing to do, complying with police orders has not necessarily been a good thing, either. Black people have no reason to trust white police officers.

But, the officers said – as they so often do – that they were afraid. They weren’t afraid of Dylann Roof, a known murderer.

If their fear of black people is that intense, then perhaps the solution is that they not be assigned or even allowed in black neighborhoods. Perhaps, for the good of innocent people, police departments should send the officers who are afraid of black people to the suburbs and let men and women who have the capacity to “serve and protect” people and give them a fair chance and treatment worthy of any human being serve in black neighborhoods.

Black communities are tired of so many officers who kill black people get off because they were “afraid.” Send them elsewhere, and give our communities a chance to experience real police work and the justice that such work can bring.

A candid observation…

America Has the Flu

If one of the main problems of influenza is that it attacks the body’s respiratory system, leading to pneumonia and other pulmonary issues which ultimately cause death, it would seem that America, under this president, is on life support, unable to breathe. This president and his administration have shown us our disease and instead of leading us to ways to heal it, is ignoring everything that would “make America right again.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), pneumonia is one of the most common and serious complications of the flu. Pneumonia caused by the flu can be viral or bacterial, but both can be deadly and in fact, do cause many deaths. (https://www.cdc.gov/pneumonia/index.html)

America’s racism has been its chronic illness – its flu, if you will – since its inception; English people came here to escape British oppression, but also to make this “New World” a land created by white people for white people. They immediately began to oppress Native Americans and soon, black people. They declared Native Americans as being savages and brutes and justified their treatment of them on those beliefs about them. Racist ideology was included in nearly everything that these very religious people did from the 1600s on and was built into the United States Constitution.

Black and other oppressed people have fought the racism and sexism, anti-Semitism and many other “isms” for generations. Gains have historically been made and are then lost because angry white people have risen up and worked to undo the gains made by the oppressed groups, almost always violently.

Under this administration, the white backlash is serious and toxic; the venom of white nationalism is filling the lungs of America’s capacity to breathe in “liberty and justice for all,” while simultaneously breathing out racism, sexism, Xenophobia and all other forms of oppression.

Whenever blacks have made gains and fought racism, whites have done everything they could to undo those gains, furious that the federal government has at times supported the quest for freedom, justice, and dignity of people who are just as American as are whites.

America’s influenza – its racism – has not only been toxic but contagious. We are seeing white nationalists boldly declaring and boasting about their racism; Steve Bannon the other day said that whites should wear the badge of “racist” proudly. (https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-bannon-racist-label-is-a-badge-of-honor) while the GOP-controlled Congress and Senate sit idly by and let the president do and say what he wants, as well as his followers. There is no outrage about the violence being perpetrated by White Nationalists; there are no efforts to stem the tide.

America’s capacity to be a just nation – a place where there is true “liberty and justice for all” – is being hindered by her lungs filling up with the deadly bacteria which causes cultural pneumonia. The safeguards of liberty and justice, morality, and goodness do not apply in the minds of those who believe that this nation should be a nation of white people. Our very plurality – something which other nations have celebrated – is what the White Nationalists abhor, and neither the US Constitution nor the Holy Bible or the religion called Christianity protect those who are attacked and discriminated against simply because of who they are.

Historian Forrest G. Wood in his book The Arrogance of Faith notes that Christianity has been “fundamentally racist in its ideology, organization, and practice.” Christian idealism apparently means that the dominant ethnicity or race of this country must be homogeneous and puritanical, Wood says.

To hear and to watch this country backslide into a blatantly racist and sexist “norm” is disheartening, but worse, it is ominous because pneumonia damages the lungs and makes it impossible for a person – or in this case, a nation – to breathe. Empires fall. America, the Empire, is in the intensive care unit and its lungs, filled with the bacteria of hatred, are getting more and more weak.

A nation which despises, ignores, and casts aside “the least of these” is destined for death.

A candid observation …

White People and Guns

While there is always a lot of conversation about violence in black communities, a sad fact that is caused by a myriad of reasons, the vitriol is noticeably less when it comes to white men and guns.

To be honest, as this administration increases the surveillance on immigrants in this country, I have shuddered and thought out loud that the last thing we need is more white men with guns and charged with the power to “get rid of the bad guys.”

With the recent and tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which left 17 people dead, the president is pushing his opinion that schools need teachers to be armed, acting out his belief that “the only way to stop bad guys with guns is to have good guys with guns.”

While the prospect of teachers having guns in schools is frightening in and of itself, the fact that more civilians might very well be deputized and therefore authorized to use guns is cause for grave concern.

During slavery, ordinary men – white men – were deputized and given the authority to catch runaway slaves. They were often assisted in their violence against African Americans by law enforcement officers.

White bus drivers in the South were deputized to keep order on their buses; they meted out violence against black people who dared challenge them when they were being unfair or disrespectful to their black passengers.

In her book At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance – a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, author Danielle McGuire writes that bus drivers were granted police powers and that they used their power to enforce segregation “with an iron fist.”

Many, she wrote, kept blackjacks and pistols under their seats and used those weapons when their authority is challenged. Writes McGuire: “The complaint records of the Birmingham buses are riddled with reports of drivers beating, shooting, and even killing black passengers.

One of the major reasons for the Black Lives Matter Movement is the brutality meted against black people by white men, some police officers and some not, with guns. Michael Dunn, who murdered Jordan Davis because he didn’t like the 17-year-old’s loud “thug” music and George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin …were white men with guns who felt like they had the right to shoot their victims.

It is worth noting that the young people who organized the BLM movement have not been violent but have gotten accused of being violent; their fight for justice has been obscured by the cries of “violence,” while these white teens – who are to be applauded – are just being referred to as activists. That double standard way of looking at the actions of black and white young people who are basically doing the same thing – fighting for justice and for their concerns to be heard- is part of why giving white people, specifically white men – more excuses to use guns against black people.

Someone will say that the mass shootings have been committed by white youth in white schools and that any armed teacher will be acting in response to a school shooter. But as happens in this country all of the time, the most often shot will be black students by white teachers who are afraid of them.

Our history is riddled with reports of white people – primarily white men – with guns feeling like they were authorized to attack and kill black people. In the South during the 60s and before, white men felt free to shoot and kill black men for even looking at white women, or for being accused of any number of crimes. No crime had actually to have been committed; the accusation was enough for these men to wield violent power against a black person. These “deputized” civilians were seldom arrested for their actions, and if they perchance did have a trial, they were most often tried by all-white, primarily all-male juries – who refused to convict them.

This is our history.

The underlying feeling of far too many white people that black people are bad and are therefore deserving of any violence they suffer from white people has not gone away; America’s racism is a virulent poison that infects everyone it touches, and black people are by far and away the targets of gun violence from white men.

Black women, long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, suffered horribly on buses at the hands of white men with guns, using them to force black women to acquiesce to being raped and left for dead. Again, even though in many of these cases the assailant or assailants were known, they were seldom arrested, let alone convicted of a crime.

Watching the images of Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) agents rounding up and arresting immigrants, some of whom are illegal and others not, drives home the point that this country does not need another reason to give white men guns with the power to make decisions on who is good and who isn’t, who gets to live and who doesn’t.

In the case of arming teachers, it is almost certain to be the case that the teachers who agree to carry arms will end up disproportionately shooting children and students of color and these children will have no recourse, no defense and not enough money to get a good attorney to keep them out of jail – if they, in fact, survive being shot.

It will be too easy for teachers to say “I was in fear for my life” as the reason a black child is killed, while little white children are given the benefit of the doubt.

Too many white people have been taught that they are better than black people, that they have superior morals and ethics, and that black people are inherently bad. Those core beliefs have been behind the violence – and the acceptance of that violence – that has resulted in the death, injury and/or incarceration of too many black people.

Armed teachers will just be another deputized group who will help keep America’s violence against people of color alive and well. This idea of the current administration is not a good one …and it is doubtful that it will stop mass killings.

It will just give more white people a legitimate excuse to use a gun against members of a race whom they do not understand and do not want around.

A candid observation.

Black Military Veterans, Racism, and Taking a Knee

Ever since former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick first “took a knee” in 2016 during the playing of the National Anthem to protest racial inequality and police brutality, there has been a group of people, led by and including the President of the United States, to denigrate the act and to complain that “taking a knee” is a sign of disrespect of the American flag and the military.

The president has been bold in his criticism of players acting on their First Amendment right to protest, saying at one of his rallies that he wished NFL owners would take a stand against anyone “disrespecting our flag,” saying, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when someone disrespects our flag, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field now.’” ( https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/sep/22/donald-trump-nfl-national-anthem-protests)

The narrative supporting the belief that the protest is somehow unpatriotic has only grown among those who support the president’s views, but the fact of the matter is that this country has a history of disrespecting black men (and women) who have fought in America’s wars. The history is not pretty.

The story of Isaac Woodard, who in February 1946 was attacked by white people while still in uniform, is just one of the many cases of black military veterans being beaten by whites. In Woodard’s case, he had just been honorably discharged and was on a bus headed to South Carolina from Georgia. When he asked if the bus driver would allow him time to use the bathroom during a stop, the bus driver got angry and cussed at the still-in-uniform Woodard – and Woodard said later that he cussed back. The bus driver called someone while the bus was stopped, and further along in the trip, the bus made another stop. It was met by police, to whom the bus driver told the story of Woodard wanting the bus to wait for him to go to the bathroom and about Woodard cussing back at the bus driver. Police began beating Woodard right there. They arrested him and took him to jail, where they continued to beat him until he was unconscious. When he awakened, his uniform now bloody from the beating he had endured, he could not see. The police chief reportedly had used his nightstick to pound Woodard in his eyes. He was charged with disorderly conduct and was made to pay a fine. Someone drove him to a hospital where doctors told him he would be permanently blind.

The truth is, in spite of African Americans being willing to fight for this country, this country has not been willing to treat them with dignity and afford them the full rights of American citizenship. According to a report prepared by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), “Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans, between 1877 and 1950, “no one was more at risk of experiencing violence and targeted racial terror than black veterans. White America, notably in the South but elsewhere as well, had no respect for the men and women who had joined the military but were instead afraid of them, and they were unwilling to abandon their belief in white superiority over black people. The report quotes Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman said that black veterans returning to the Shout would “inevitably lead to disaster.” Whites in America, who wanted to preserve the white supremacy way of life and of thinking, were worried that while in Europe, the soldiers might have gotten confused, thinking they were due human and civil rights. Whites were determined that no such new thinking on the part of blacks would be legitimized. (https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-tragic-forgotten-history-of-black-military-veterans)

The EJI report said that often “the only provocation” for a black in uniform to be attacked was just that – the wearing of the uniform, but the violence meted out against them did not stop blacks from enlisting in the American military. The report says that 1.2 million black men enlisted during World War II. When they returned home, they were subjected not only to violence but were denied benefits offered to white veterans. The GI bill was written in such a way that most of its benefits, including money to purchase homes and/or to get an education, were denied to black soldiers.

While all of the stories of black soldiers being abused, discriminated and ultimately lynched, some stories stand out more than others. Johnson C. Whittaker, the first black to receive an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point was found unconscious in his dorm in 1880. While he was sleep, he was attacked by three white cadets, who beat him in his head, choked him and cut his earlobes doublev_hc_cat . West Point administrators blamed Whittaker, saying he had staged the attack, and they court-martialed him. He was convicted and expelled from West Point. (https://eji.org/reports/online/lynching-in-america-targeting-black-veterans)

The disrespect of blacks who served in the military has not stopped. On Veterans Day in 2016, Ernest Walker, wearing his Army uniform, went to a Chili’s restaurant in Texas where veterans were being offered free meals. Walker says t an elderly white man, wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap, approached him at his table and said that he had served in Germany and that “blacks were allowed to serve there.” The man told the manager that Walker was not a real soldier “because he was wearing his hat inside.” The manager approached Walker and in spite of Walker showing his military credentials, his leftover free food was taken away. (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/chilis-apologizes-veterans-day_us_58297fe7e4b0c4b63b0d47d1)

The fact that in spite of being so badly treated in this country that African Americans have continued to enlist in the military to fight for this country says something about the perception of what “taking a knee” is about. Far from showing disrespect for the American flag and for America’s military, “taking a knee” is a protest against the system that allows, sanctions, ignores and perpetuates the discrimination against black people. If there is a “son of a bitch” in this scenario, it is not the players who kneel; it is the system which, because of its injustice, forces them to kneel. It is a legal way, an action in compliance with the tenets of the United States Constitution, to bring attention to the lack the rights of full American citizenship for people of color.

Now the president wants to have a huge, expensive military parade. Whatever his reasons are, I am sure he is ignorant of how the military has treated some in their ranks who have died or been permanently maimed while fighting for a country which does not fight for them. Wouldn’t it be nice if the president and his crew would read the history of what African Americans have contributed to America’s military efforts …and themselves, “take a knee” to show solidarity, support, and understanding – and a willingness to change what is wrong?

That would be just, I think.

A candid observation…

The Ongoing Lynching of African Americans

It is interesting that, while the federal government is casting doubt on the integrity of the FBI and the Justice Department, that it still finds a way to sanction everything that local law enforcement officers do to people of color on a daily basis.

It would seem that if there is no justice and no integrity in law enforcement at the very top of the ladder, there certainly could be no justice on the lower rungs.

And it seems that if the top level of law enforcement is so corrupt that it needs to be publicly excoriated, presumably threatening the very security of this nation, then the same excoriation of law enforcement agencies on the state and local levels must happen as well.

It has been interesting to hear this president and his crew put down the FBI and the Justice Department – not because they are any more corrupt than perhaps they have always been. Certainly, there were questions about the FBI’s penchant for unchecked authoritarian tactics when J. Edgar Hoover was its director. Under Hoover’s FBI, crimes against black people were too often ignored.

In a 2014 article which appeared in The Nation, it is noted that “African Americans didn’t have to have radical ideas or engage in violence, to merit surveillance.” Hoover’s FBI was known to investigate any group which dissented. But when it came to African Americans, they didn’t have to have done anything. “Being black was enough,” the article said. (https://www.thenation.com/article/just-being-black-was-enough-get-yourself-spied-j-edgar-hoovers-fbi/)

Hoover’s FBI watched African Americans in every aspect of their lives – going to the store, to the library, to church. The Nation article said that for black people in Hoover’s era, a bill collector might be the FBI.

Hoover’s FBI represented nonviolent lynching, the taking of life in the form of government intrusion and governmental interference in the seeking of justice by African Americans. It is highly probable that the worldview of Hoover’s FBI trickled down to state and local law enforcement departments. African Americans were targeted. The FBI knew about violence meted out to African Americans by racist white American civilians and white American police officers and did little to quell the injustice.

Theologian James Cone, in his book The Cross and the Lynching Tree, wrote that while “spectacle lynching was on the decline in the 1950s, there were many lynchings as state and federal governments used the criminal justice system to intimidate, terrorize and murder blacks. Whites could kill blacks, knowing that a jury of their peers would set them free but convict and execute any black who dared to challenge the white way of life.” (p. 49)

There was real damage done to African Americans by law enforcement; bias against blacks was common, and there was nobody to challenge the wrong that was being done. White privilege had its way, with law enforcement either merely turning a blind eye to what was going on or by actively participating in biased, violent and unfair policing against blacks.

Nothing of the sort has happened to this president. This president has no morals and no ethics; he challenges top law enforcement that he feels is getting too close to information that would be damaging to him. He says nothing about the years of injustice that law enforcement has meted against blacks for generations. That kind of real injustice and corruption means nothing to him. The only thing that matters is that this president protects himself and his family.

Mark Twain once referred to the United States as “the United States of Lyncherdom.” He saw what was going on, as did others. Cone said that artists saw what black religious scholars and preachers “merely alluded to: that in the United States, the clearest image of the crucified Christ was the figure of an innocent black victim, dangling from a lynching tree.”

The lynching tree is still being overused, even while a wealthy, privileged white man manipulates the system and the emotions of people who believe in and buy into the rightness of racism and white supremacy. If this president is going to cast doubt on the highest level of law enforcement, then he really needs to cast the net over all law enforcement agencies and, in the name of “transparency,” clean the stench of violent injustice delivered by law enforcement officers out of the nostrils of Americans. If we’re going to talk corruption, let’s talk corruption. If the president’s goal is to expose corruption – then let’s really do it and perhaps give America a new narrative as pertains to law enforcement’s treatment of African Americans.

It is past time.

A candid observation …