Tamir Rice Still Not Buried Pending Investigation

While police in Baltimore are attacking Maryland State Attorney Marilyn Mosby, saying she brought charges against six Baltimore City police officers in the death of Freddie Gray, there lays the body of a 12-year-old boy, Tamir Rice, who was shot and killed by Cleveland Police Officers five months ago.

Cleveland police are still “investigating” the incident, and say the child cannot be buried until they complete the investigation because they may need to examine the body further for medical evidence. (http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/04/tamir-rice-family-judge-not-delay-civil-rights-case-against-cleveland)

What in the world needs to be investigated …and why is it taking so long? Why is the Cleveland Police Department adding insult to injury to the family of this child by holding up his burial? And why isn’t the press covering this story?

There are reasons people get angry and take to the streets, and being dehumanized is one of them. I as a mother cannot imagine sitting by while police performed a prolonged “investigation” after they murdered my child. Can any mother be expected to be all right with that? Keeping that child from being buried is the height of disrespect to his person, his family …and his community.

Tamir Rice, you remember, was the 12-year-old boy who was playing with a toy gun. Someone called in to police, saying there was someone with a gun but allegedly said “it might be a toy.”

Police rolled up on the child moments later, got about 10 feet away from him, and opened fire, killing him. They said they shouted “police!” but in the video it looks like they drove up, got out, fired their guns …and maybe said “police” afterward.

Would any police officer be all right with a member of his or her family being kept from being buried while an “investigation” was going on? Wait. Would any HUMAN be all right with that?

Some people balk at the phrase “black lives matter,” but can anyone wonder why those words are being lifted up? Where in the world is the dignity this child deserves? He was a human being, somebody’s son, a child …playing with a toy gun. Officers rolled up on him and shot him like he was a dangerous wild animal…and now, they are keeping him from being buried?

Although officers are upset with Maryland State Attorney Mosby, at least her actions afforded the people who are grieving the murder (the state medical examiner ruled his death a homicide) the appearance of concern for them and for the quest of justice. Everyone knows that filing charges is only a first step; police officers are rarely convicted on charges they face, even when a case seems cut and dry. Remember, the evidence of police beating Rodney King was crystal clear, and the officers were brought up on charges, but they were all acquitted. That verdict caused the streets in Los Angeles to erupt in anger and frustration. So, justice for Freddie Gray is not a sure thing. But at least Mosby recognized that something wrong happened and brought charges against the officers involved swiftly.

The prolonged “investigation” in the Michael Brown case caused the same kind of anger and frustration. The lack of immediate action in Brown’s case, beginning with leaving him lying dead in the street for hours began the tortuous “investigation” which concluded that the officer who shot him was without fault. In fact, that investigation really seemed to concentrate on making the case that Brown was a criminal, and, therefore, deserved what he got. Police were able to say the proverbial “I was in fear for my life,” and those who are inclined to believe that if one is shot by an officer, he or she deserved it were satisfied.

But what in the world can Cleveland police possibly be looking for after five months? How in the world can they and do they justify this prolonged “investigation?”

I hardly know what to say. This is most definitely the most painful candid observation I have come across since I have been writing this blog. A long time ago, a friend of mine said that going to church on Sunday morning, and shouting, was “grief release.” Black people held a lot in, she said, in order to survive. Sunday morning, through the shout, they were able to release the pressure of being dehumanized, ignored and oppressed.

The Fraternal Order of Police in Baltimore are enraged at Mosby’s swift actions, calling it a “rush to judgement.” They say their officers have done nothing wrong. That does not seem likely. But their being charged while the investigation is going on feels a lot better than letting them continue to patrol the community in which Freddie Gray was killed, as if nothing happened at all.

The taking to the streets is yet another form of “grief release.” There are no words to describe how the parents and family of Tamir Rice are feeling. It is as though they do not exist, and do not have feelings.

This is shameful.

A candid observation …

Thug or Not?

In the painful protesting that is going on in Baltimore resulting in the destruction of property and looting of merchandise, more than one person, including Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, President Obama and Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the mayor of Baltimore, has used the name “thug” to describe those who were involved in the melee.

Rawlings-Blake apologized for using the term after receiving stiff criticism. CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer wondered aloud why the mayor found it necessary to apologize for her use of the word.

Before I offer an opinion on all of this, I beg us to ask the questions: When white kids burn cars and destroy property during spring break or after a football or basketball game, do we call them thugs? When Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) threatened to throw a reporter off a balcony, was he called a thug? I don’t remember that happening …

But when Seattle Seahawks team member Richard Sherman, an African-American, got a little agitated after a Super Bowl, in comments made about a colleague on the opposing team, he was called …a thug. It was Sherman whom I first heard say that the word thug had become racialized, that it was the new way of saying “nigger.”

Our modern-day word “thug” derives from a Hindi word which means swindler, deceiver, or cheat. There were groups who lived in India called Thugs who robbed and killed travelers. They apparently had a long shelf life, terrorizing travelers and other citizens in India from the 14th into the 19th centuries. (http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/thug/391682/) The way they operated was they would meet travelers, make friends with them, and then turn on them, often strangling them or killing them some other way, and stealing their belongings.

When the War on Terror began, the word “thug” was heard again, this time used by President George W. Bush, as “thugs and assassins.” It was a term which was said with passion and deep emotion; one who was a thug, we came to understand, was a pretty bad person.

Some kind of way, the term “thug” began to be used to describe African-Americans. I asked a friend what his definition of “thug” was, and he said it means bully, pushy, uncouth, brash, someone who tries to take advantage of another. That’s fair. But why is it that, these days, the only people who seem to be called thugs are African-American?

I would agree that those who looted and started fires in Baltimore this week were breaking the law. They were and are criminals. And it is clear that President Obama and Stephanie Rawlings-Blake were referring to those who participated in the lawlessness.

But it feels different when news people or law officers or government officials say the term. There has been a fair amount of mixing of the terms protesters and thugs. It feels like many who describe the protests going on are meaning that those protesting are thugs as well. Because they are disrupting the status-quo, because they are making noise about injustice, because they are refusing to be silent and accept the injustice which is so rampant, many people in power seem more than ready to call them …thugs.

Hip-hop, say some, has helped create an association of the word with certain behavior. According to an article in Newsweek, “Hip-hop culture adopted the word…Tupac Shakur popularized the phrase “thug life” in the early 1990s,” The Newsweek article says Michael Jeffries wrote, in Thug Life: Race, Gender, and the Meaning of Hip-Hop, “the concept of the thug underwent a…transformation, from signifying disgust, rebellion, and nihilism to evoking coolness and power.” (http://www.newsweek.com/brief-history-word-thug-326595)

Are the protesters trying to be cool? If Jeffries is right, the meaning of the word for the hi-hop generation moved away from being indicative of a person who was being a brute to a person who was being cool and using his or her power.

Is that what people are saying and feeling when they call the protesters “thugs?”

Name-calling never works; name-calling in a time as fractious and incendiary as this is a very dangerous thing to do. Black people are saying that they feel unloved, unseen, unheard and not valued. To be called a “thug” only adds salt to the wounds…

Lee Atwater, who was Richard Nixon’s campaign manager years ago, said that it was no longer possible to use the word “nigger.” He said that people had to use code words and people would understand what was being said. When one said “affirmative action” or “welfare” or “busing,” people belonging to the base that Nixon wanted and needed in order to win the presidency knew exactly what was being said. The belief was that only black people were recipients of affirmative action and welfare, and black people’s desire for quality education had resulted in busing. To use those words, and others, alerted “the base” that the candidate was aware of the base’s feeling about black people.

Is that the case now? Are news people and politicians trying to express a sense of indignation that black people are tired of injustice meted out by law enforcement? Yes, I know that there are people amongst the ranks of the demonstrators who are throwing rocks and attacking police, although it is believed that many of the people doing that are not a part of the demonstrators at all but are outsiders who are taking advantage of the situation in order to play out their own agendas. But are those watching and reporting unable and/or unwilling to make the distinction and are they trying to say that they are outraged that people would take to the streets and dare to cast doubt on the fairness and rightness of policing in this nation? Are they angry that black people have decided that they can no longer be silent, and are they saying that black people are “thugs” because they are in the streets, chanting, yelling, marching?

The protesters are not thugs. They are Americans, in the truest sense of the word. America came into being because people were angry at a perceived injustice being meted out by the British government. Rather than pay what they felt was an unjust tax, these protesters refused to pay it AND threw tea into Boston Harbor. America was founded because people dared to demonstrate.

I would venture that members of the status quo called the protesters back then a few choice names, things like traitor or maybe insurgent.

But thug?

The people who looted and started fires and destroyed property in Baltimore broke the law. They were and are criminals. But the people who are protesting, who are fighting for their right to be treated with dignity are …Americans. Kids – black or white – who get rowdy during spring break or after a game …are lawbreakers, not thugs, no matter their color. A black man who offers energetic and passionate verbiage on a subject, even if it is unacceptable to those who hear it…is a person who has perhaps gotten a little too excited for a few moments. But a thug?

No.

We need to rethink the term and use it a lot less, especially now. Name-calling does not work, ever, and will be a death knell to the quest for justice and peace as the people of Baltimore (and of this nation) work to deal with their grief, pain and anger.

A candid observation …

Freddie Gray

What is going on now in the killing of black people by police is merely an extension or continuation of America’s history as concerns legal violence against African-Americans.

Michelle Alexander, in her book The New Jim Crow, as well as others, makes the case that mass incarceration is a way to control black lives in this country. Slavery was a good way to keep black people under the thumb of white people; when Lincoln freed the slaves in the states which had not seceded from the Union, Southerners were angry. The cry of “states’ rights” became common as Southerners deeply resented the “interference” of “big government” in their affairs. Whites began to consciously look for ways to again control black people. The result of their search included sharecropping and convict leasing.

But within the culture of control was also a culture of terror. Black people were objects; people did not regard blacks as human beings, thanks to the interpretation of the United States Constitution and the Holy Bible. Black people were despised for their color but valued for their labor. What white people wanted was to forever be in control; for many, America was a white man’s country. Nobody, not “the law” or God, would object to how they treated their nigras.

Racial discrimination, after Reconstruction, was institutionalized, with laws written into the Constitutions of Southern states to make racism legal. Southern states actually rewrote their constitutions to reflect the legality of racial discrimination. The legality of racial discrimination, accompanied by the criminalization and dehumanization of black people allowed people, including police officers, to oppress black people and throw them into jail for whatever reasons they wanted. Jim Crow laws were put into effect to keep black people subordinate to white people (see “Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror” written by the Equal Justice Initiative.) Black people could be and were arrested or in some cases, just lynched, for the most minor “offenses.” The EJI report tells of a man who was lynched in 1889 because he tried to enter a room where three white women were sitting, and another man was lynched for knocking on the door of a white woman. (EJI report. p 31)

Black people were arrested and many times lynched without the benefit of a trial for vagrancy, for speaking to white people, for looking at white people, for not stepping off a sidewalk or for bumping into a white woman. Though it was common, and had been common since slavery, for white men to rape black women, black men could be and were lynched for even unproven allegations of having sex with white women.

Law enforcement did not protect black people. Law enforcement …and local and state governments, did not protect black people, either. The federal government was basically impotent, refusing to become involved in the way states treated black people unless what was going on threatened to adversely affect the state.

Black people, then, have been living in terror and distrust of law enforcement officers for hundreds of years. The Great Migration happened in large part because black people were tired of living in fear, and tired of being terrorized by mobs and cops. They witnesses horrific destruction of black life – black people hung from trees, then shot as they hung, taken down and dragged through the streets. Often times they were burned alive, and sometimes they were set afire after the hanging was done. Like the Romans who crucified people and let them hang along main drags into major cities to remind people of what happened to those who challenged the government, white people paraded their “catches” through the streets. Sometimes those doing the lynching made family members watch as their loved one was brutalized and mutilated. (http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/spectacle-the-lynching-of-claude-neal/1197360)

In a horrific case, the lynching of Claude Neal in Florida, Neal, who confessed to raping and killing a white woman, he was dragged from jail by a mob. He was taken to a location where he was tortured before he was killed. He was shot; his testicles were cut off and he was made to eat them; his penis was also cut off and he was made to eat it. After he was hung he was shot 50 times. His fingers and toes were cut off and sold as souvenirs. The sense is that everyone knows who killed Neal but nobody talked – not then and not now.

When I heard the account of why Freddie Gray was chased – because he made eye contact with police officers and then ran, a chill ran up my spine. The spirit of racism and of hatred, coupled with the tradition of white law enforcement allowing and often participating in the mass destruction and control of black people…has not died. Black people still do not trust law enforcement – not the police, not the detectives, not the judges or the court system …and white people still feel justified to stop and harass black people for two reasons: one, because they can and get away with it, and two, because they still regard black people as criminals and not quite human. Only when an individual regards another individual as an object can he or she treat others as white police officers have too often treated black people.

None of what the white mobs did to black people was done without violence. I guess that’s why I cringe as news anchors express so much dismay over the potential for violence as black people gather in frustration and anger to protest the way they (we) have been treated. White mob violence meted out against not only black individuals, but against entire towns and neighborhoods was nothing short of barbaric. But again, the resentment of whites against black people for their standing up for justice is not a new thing; in the past, some people who voiced opposition to the unjust laws and murderous treatment they received were lynched.

My prayer is that the family of Freddie Gray gets justice. I am not confident that any investigation of what happened to him will yield charges against the officers who were involved. I hope that we do not receive the dreaded phrase, “the force used was justified.”

Those who lynched black people in the past used that same phrase. That enabled them to kill black people when and as they wanted …and never look back. They accused and killed black people because they could.

It feels like that privilege is still alive and kicking.

A candid observation …

What If It Were My Son?

Freddie Gray is dead and nobody seems to know how it happened.

His body has not yet been released to his family. There has been an autopsy – though the results have not been yet released – and another, independent autopsy has been requested by the family.

But meanwhile, Freddie Gray lies dead and nobody seems to know what happened.

It is maddening that, after a week, nobody knows anything. It feels like incompetence and it begs an explanation as to why such incompetence exists. It feels like information is being withheld in an effort to protect the police.

It brings back memories of how the death of Michael Brown was handled.

I keep asking “What if it were my son?” I can only imagine the agony, the added-on agony, of Gray’s family as they wait for answers, and as they wait to lay their son and family member to rest.

His spinal cord was 80 percent severed, according to reports …and in this day of the highest technology, nobody seems to know how that happened. It begs credulity.

Eighty percent severed…

His ordeal began at 8:39 a.m. on April 12. He was put into the police van at 8:54 a.m. and by 9:24 a.m. he was not breathing or moving. He underwent “extensive” surgery, but it didn’t help.

What if it were my son?

What do you do, as a distraught parent or family member, when life has been snatched from someone you love but nobody will tell you how it happened? That type of death is as problematic as one caused by a plane falling out of the sky. Survivors want to know why and how? Anything less is unacceptable.

I know I would be suspicious by now. I would think that police and the courts and the coroner were keeping information from me. That belief would pour salt into the raw wound called grief and would cause deep anger.

This type of tragedy, suspicious deaths of people at the hands of police, has been happening for decades. The deaths have happened and the circumstances have primarily been blamed on the victim. The word of the police and courts has been taken as sacrosanct. As a result, there are a lot of parents, wives, and other family members who are walking around with two holes in their spirit: one caused by the death of their loved one and the other caused by the lack of knowing what really happened and by the knowledge that the police have been exonerated.

If it were my son, if I were seeing him being dragged by police officers, seemingly unable to walk, I would be weeping. If it were my son, my imagination would be making up all kinds of scenarios as to what happened to him, and I would be weeping. If it were my son, and I heard his cry as he was being dragged to the police wagon, I would be weeping.

But I would also be indignant and angry at the lack of explanation of what happened, why, and how.

My prayer is that the official report being waited for does not end up being an insult – to his family or to the community. My prayer is that someone will honestly explain why Freddie Gray was pursued without probable cause. Running from police may not be wise, but it isn’t grounds for arrest…and if there was no reason to approach him in the first place other than he didn’t look an officer in the face, then his arrest is even more problematic.

If it were my son, I would be weeping …but I would be working to get answers. I would be weeping but I would be reaching for some kind of viable explanation as to why my son was dead.

The six officers who were involved in the arrest have been put on paid administrative leave. That is not acceptable, not for me.If it were my son, their continued ability to make a living while my son lay dead would be insulting and troubling.

The mothers and fathers of slain children, no matter how old they are, are bleeding, all over these United States. They are hemorrhaging and nobody …seems to notice or to care. They are crying, weeping, wailing …because their children are “no more…” The mothers and parents and family of Trayvon Martin, Kendrick Johnson, Jonathan Ferrell, Rekia Boyd, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, John Crawford, Jordan Davis,Lennon Lacy, Walter Scott. Eric Harris …and so many more … are weeping and hemorrhaging their grief over the earth.

The death of a loved one is hard enough on its own. For a loved one to die this way takes one past the point of being able to be consoled. There would be no words to assuage the pain if it were my son…

A candid observation …