The True "Racial Hucksters"

So much for that post-racial America.

 

Anyone hoping for some form of justice, or at least an attempt at justice, after the slaying of 18-year-old Michael Brown was quickly brought back to reality when a Ferguson, Mo., grand jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson this week.

 

That the grand jury did not indict was not unexpected. Whenever a police officer kills a civilian, whether that civilian is armed or not, the chances of an indictment are slim to none because all the officer has to say is that he or she felt that his or her life was in danger. Once such a statement is made the officer is given the benefit of the doubt with little done to ascertain if the supposed threat was real and the actions taken justified.

Such was evident from the beginning of the Ferguson case. The St. Louis County Prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, had all but signaled that there would be no indictment. The same was true of many Missouri officials. Legal precedent had already told Americans which way the wind was blowing.

The only way a white cop will be indicted on state charges for shooting an unarmed black male is the circumstances of the case must be so revolting, so egregious that even white America is appalled. Indeed, some white Americans were, especially when they saw the heavily armed police response to protests in the aftermath of Brown’s death.

But a majority of white Americans, or at least those who were given the largest megaphones, saw little wrong with the police tactics either in the slaying or during the post-slaying protests that ensued. To them, a white cop waving an automatic weapon at protestors and calling them animals that he would kill was a reasonable response. That police withheld the identity of the officer for days; that the officer disappeared from public; that anonymous police sources were quoted as saying Wilson was beaten “almost unconscious;” or that he suffered a broken orbital bone did not stir questions about police practices.

No.

The problem as they saw it was the black male.  

And there is the rub.

A white police officer kills an unarmed black teenager and Rudolph Giuliani, the man who was once dubbed “America’s Mayor,” proclaims on “Meet the Press” that the problem is not with police or police-community relations: It is with black people.

“White police officers wouldn’t be there,” Giuliani told the nation and Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson, “if you weren’t killing each other.”

He also said: “Ninety-three percent of blacks are killed by other blacks. I would like to see the attention paid to that that you are paying to this.”

“Black people who kill black people go to jail,” Dyson said. “White people who are policemen who kill black people do not go to jail.”

Sometimes the white killer does not have to be a police officer.

An unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by a dime-store vigilante and wannabe hero, and it was Martin whose character was assassinated. Trayvon’s killer walked free after a trial.

 

Yet, the most compelling cases seem to always involve police, who seem to have been conditioned to consider every black man a threat. In describing why he killed Michael Brown, Officer Darren Wilson went to great lengths to describe Brown in hulking and animalistic terms. Brown was Hulk Hogan to Wilson, who said he felt like a 5-year-old in trying to defend himself. Brown made a “grunting, like aggravated sound,” his fist clenched, before charging.   

But black men do not have to exhibit animalistic characteristics to be a threat.

In August, John Crawford, a 22 year old black man, was killed by police while carrying a toy gun in a Wal-Mart in Beavercreek, Ohio.

Recently, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed when officers claimed he pulled a toy gun from his waistband in a Cleveland park. According to police, Tamir did not point the gun at police or make any verbal threats. He was shot twice, nonetheless.

In Brooklyn, Akai Gurley was fatally shot by a rookie police officer when Gurley entered the seventh floor landing at the Louis H. Pink Houses. The officer, Peter Liang, his weapon drawn, was on the eighth floor landing. Liang’s weapon, according to Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, discharged accidentally from 11 feet away. The weapon of Liang’s partner was still holstered.

An even more egregious case involved Jonathan Ferrell, a 24-year-old former FAMU athlete, killed in the Charlotte area in 2013. Ferrell had been in a serious traffic accident, and appeared to be seeking help when he was fatally shot for running toward three police officers. One of the officers was charged with voluntary manslaughter, meaning the officer is accused of using excessive force in self-defense.  

The Ferrell case is the rarity where an officer claimed self-defense, but still faces felony charges.

More often, there are no charges, just as there is no clear idea of how many people are killed by police officers every year in America.

According to a Nov. 24 article on The Washington Post web site, 27 police officers were killed in the line of duty in the United States in 2013. That is down from 49 in 2012. Meanwhile, there is no reliable data on how many civilians were killed by police.

The best we know is that America’s 17,000 law-enforcement agencies self-report about 400 “justifiable homicides” per year, according to FBI statistics. Of course, journalists and scholars who study police shootings estimate that as many as 1,000 people are shot and killed by police each year.

Instead of taking that information and using it to ask questions or demand answers, the pundit class – and particularly those who wish to blame black people – decry black activists, saying that those activists are the real issue. Such was the case when Adam Brodsky wrote recently in The New York Post that the real problem with blacks being killed by police are blacks themselves.

According to Brodsky, blacks have failed to take advantage of the opportunities afforded them, instead relying on such “racial hucksters” as the Rev. Al Sharpton. Blacks, Brodsky claimed, need to be more like Jews who do not complain about anti-Semitism. Brodsky does not discuss that Jews have the anti-Defamation League, B’nai Brith, and other organizations that battle anti-Semitism every day.

Of course the more appropriate response would be to ask if there is a problem with local police and the communities they serve, and whether each could work to change the perceptions each has of the other.

 

To do that, of course, would mean that the “racial hucksters” have to be stopped in their tracks, which won’t be done. After all, what would FOX News, conservative politicians, and all those white pundits do if they can’t blame black people and engage in race-baiting.