What was True All Along But I Just Understood Now

I’ve written probably ten essays about police fatally harming unarmed Black men and women. So, that makes one a year for the ten years, going on eleven, that I’ve published this blog.

In all of them, my foundation is that the brutality was exceptional, that it was a certain cop in a certain situation whose implicit racism made him pull the trigger. So my anger was directed at that cop and the institution which, I believed, had fostered or condoned the cop’s earlier indications that he was going to be a killer. So it was: here’s a police shooting, here’s a guilty cop, now the institution has to prevent a recurrence – through better hiring, better training, better supervision, all of it.

When Dontre Hamilton was shot fourteen times by a Milwaukee Police officer in 2014, I participated in the picking apart of all the racist decisions that had gone into a cop rousting a man asleep in a public park in the middle of the day, escalating a confrontation, and finally pulling out his weapon and shooting the man dead.The barista from the Starbucks who had called police three or four times to report a sleeping man in a public park, calling again when officers checked on him and said he was doing nothing wrong, watched from the window. I don’t know that, I just assume she did. A man died because she wouldn’t take no for an answer, but she didn’t pull the trigger. That was another racist.

Still, even though more than one person shared the blame, I decided to think of a police shooting as an implicit racism-driven act that was inside a racist bubble like a cancer that had metastasized but could still be carved out by a good surgeon. Then, the figuring went, the good cops could close the wound.

But watching the videos of police attacks on George Floyd, Army Lt. Caron Nazario, and Daunte Wright, I see that the cancer has overtaken the body, infiltrated every cell, every blood vessel, leaving every organ rancid and rotting. In each video, a team of officers immediately escalates a simple encounter to an armed conflict. They yell orders, draw their guns, threaten, terrorize the victim, and then, wordlessly and furiously conspire to do great bodily harm. The ferociousness of these attacks is dumbfounding. Why are the officers so immediately angry?

One theory is that law enforcement is afraid of Black people, especially Black men. That doesn’t make sense to me, because if you’re afraid of someone, you tend to be careful around them. What makes sense to me is that the officers are filled, almost immediately, with overwhelming hatred, a hatred so powerful and cellular, that they seem to have no control over themselves. It’s stupefying to see. Never mind the concept of implicit racism. There is nothing implicit about the racism on these videos. It is roaring and aflame and aimed at the closest Black person.

So I come to this realization like a fawn in the forest even though I consider myself informed and aware and consciously anti-racist. I am a fawn and maybe also a fool for not knowing what I didn’t know. I didn’t know the cancer had spread everywhere and it’s too late for surgery. This is a paralyzing awakening. It is depressing and demoralizing and makes me feel deeply that I should apologize for my failure to listen when so many Black people said this was so.

There are more important things than opening one person’s eyes to the deeper reality of racism but that is what happened for me today and so I am reporting it here.