Writing about the wave of deadly encounters — many caught on
video — between unarmed black people and police officers often draws a
particular criticism from a particular subset of readers.
It is some variation of this:
“Why are you not writing about the real problem — black-on-black crime? Young
black men are far more likely to be killed by another young black man than by
the police. Why do people not seem to protest when those young people are
killed? Where is the media coverage of those deaths?”
This to me has always felt like a deflection, a juxtaposition meant to use one
problem to drown out another.
Statistically, the sentiment is correct: Black people are more likely to be
killed by other black people. But white people are also more likely to be killed
by other white people. The truth is that murders and other violent crimes are
often crimes of intimacy and access. People tend to kill people they know.
The argument suggests that police killings are relatively rare and therefore
exotic, and distract from more mundane and widespread community violence. I view
it differently: as state violence versus community violence.
People are often able to understand and contextualize community violence and,
therefore, better understand how to avoid it. A parent can say to a child: Don’t
run with that crowd, or hang out on that corner or get involved with that set of
activities.
A recent study by scholars at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at
Yale found that homicides cluster and overwhelmingly involve a tiny group of
people who not only share social connections but are also already involved in
the criminal justice system.
We as adults can decide whether or not to have guns in the home. According to a
study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, having a gun may increase the chances
of being the victim of homicide. We can report violent family members.
And people with the means and inclination can decide to move away from
high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods.
These measures are not 100 percent effective, but they can produce some measure
of protection and provide individual citizens with some degree of personal
agency.
State violence, as epitomized in these cases by what people view as police
abuses, conversely, has produced a specific feeling of terror, one that is
inescapable and unavoidable.
The difference in people’s reactions to these different kinds of killings isn’t
about an exaltation — or exploitation — of some deaths above others for
political purposes, but rather a collective outrage that the people charged with
protecting your life could become a threat to it. It is a reaction to the
puncturing of an illusion, the implosion of an idea. How can I be safe in
America if I can’t be safe in my body? It is a confrontation with a most
discomforting concept: that there is no amount of righteous behavior, no
neighborhood right enough, to produce sufficient security.
It produces a particular kind of terror, a feeling of nakedness and
vulnerability, a fear that makes people furious at the very idea of having to be
afraid.
The reaction to police killings is to my mind not completely dissimilar to
people’s reaction to other forms of terrorism.
The very ubiquity of police officers and the power they possess means that the
questionable killing in which they are involved creates a terror that rolls in
like a fog, filling every low place. It produces ambient, radiant fear. It is
the lurking unpredictability of it. It is the any- and everywhere-ness of it.
The black community’s response to this form of domestic terror has not been so
different from America’s reaction to foreign terror.
The think tank New America found in June that 26 people were killed by jihadist
attacks in the United States since 9/11 — compared with 48 deaths from “right
wing attacks.” And yet, we have spent unending blood and treasure to combat
Islamist terrorism in those years. Furthermore, according to Gallup, half of all
Americans still feel somewhat or very worried that they or someone in their
family will become a victim of terrorism.
In one of the two Republican debates last week, Senator Lindsey Graham of South
Carolina seemed to be itching for yet another antiterrorism war, saying at one
point: “I would take the fight to these guys, whatever it took, as long as it
took.”
Whatever, however, long. This is not only Graham’s position, it’s the position
of a large segment of the population.
Responding to New America’s tally, Fareed Zakaria wrote in The Washington Post
in July:
“Americans have accepted an unprecedented expansion of government powers and
invasions of their privacy to prevent such attacks. Since 9/11, 74 people have
been killed in the United States by terrorists, according to the think tank New
America. In that same period, more than 150,000 Americans have been killed in
gun homicides, and we have done … nothing.”
And yet, we don’t ask “Why aren’t you, America, focusing on the real problem:
Americans killing other Americans?”
Is the “real problem” question reserved only for the black people? Are black
people not allowed to begin a righteous crusade?
One could argue that America’s overwhelming response to the terror threat is
precisely what has kept the number of people killed in this country as a result
of terror so low. But, if so, shouldn’t black Americans, similarly, have the
right to exercise tremendous resistance to reduce the number of black people
killed after interactions with the police?
How is it that we can understand an extreme reaction by Americans as a whole to
a threat of terror but demonstrate a staggering lack of that understanding when
black people in America do the same?
