Do you know what? I
watch your television show. I generally appreciate your openness to the
seemingly sadly foregone days of actual bi-partisan politics. I also appreciate good police officers, and I
am thankful for them. I am thankful for
the good that they continue to do and have done. They ALL have a hard job. I think they would have an easier job if they
did not have to worry about a hyper militarized citizenry to be fearful of; but
I digress.
Do you know that not all of them are good? Here’s the thing; there are a LOT of people
of color in the United States who have genuine and personal experience being treated poorly by police officers, for
what we suspect is nothing more than being
a person of color. Is that so hard to
believe that you need to try to marginalize all of us by lumping us together as
supporters of looters trying to create a martyr out of a thug? I am not a looter and I am not a looter
apologist, I am not even burning down a building. I am a citizen; an educated citizen, an
educator in fact, and I have been treated poorly by some police officers. Not all of them, but enough to decide that I
would rather always drive the speed limit than take a chance that I’ll meet a
bad one. Bad ones have guns just like
good ones do. The bad ones will also lie
to justify the things they do. I don’t
just believe this; I have experienced this. It appears…looking all across the country,
that I am not alone. Are you tempted to
dismiss me? Here’s a fact: There are a
LOT of people of color in the United States that this experience resonates
with.
Do you think I’m being unreasonable? Here’s what I think is unreasonable; people
who decide how the lived reality of another person should be properly
interpreted. Would you, as a man, tell a
woman how she should feel when she’s giving labor or how she should interpret
treatment by another man? I’ll bet you’d
see that as pretty preposterous. Why is
that? When you decide that I can’t be
trusted to interpret my own lived reality properly, how is that not a
reflection of a belief in your superiority over me? Is it that you think that I have bias while
you are above this? Is it that I have a
“stake” in a particular interpretation of that reality which you think biases
me so much that I ignore the truth? Are
you really so blind to your own bias and your own “stake”?
Your level of outrage at the creation of a narrative in the media
that doesn’t reflect your own lived reality is just beautifully ironic. In response to your missive, actually nobody
“needs” to tell you anything. If you
were simply to accept that their reality is just as valid as yours it would
provide all the reconciliation you seek.
You could abandon your own rigid inability to allow the voices of others
whose reality differs from yours to coexist and the integration of multiple
perspectives could create a fuller and more informed version of truth. There is not a massive disconnect between reality
and the perception of others, there is a massive difference between your
perception and theirs. Your assumption
that your perception IS reality is the only root of this disconnect.
And finally, yes, Michael Brown is worth standing up
for. Michael Brown was not a “thug”, he
was barely an adult and it looks to me like he made some mistakes. I will admit, however, I did not know him and
all that I know about him seems very incomplete and very biased, but I don’t
want to perpetuate the dehumanization of this dead young man by continuing to
call him a “thug.” I saw the tape of him
in the store and leaving the store. I
don’t like what it looks like he did and he should have been held accountable
for those choices. I don’t pretend to
know the full truth of that matter, but from what I saw, it does not look
good. I know I am softhearted; I work
with students about his age. I see them
and read their papers. I know that I am
sometimes surprised at what I come to know of them by reading what they
write. An exterior that does not match
my expectations of what they sometimes write can fool me. I know that a tough exterior sometimes
develops especially in young men of color as a defense mechanism against a
world where they feel the odds are stacked against them. I say this not to excuse poor choices, but to
humanize someone that was a student, maybe a flawed student, and maybe a
student on the wrong path, but a student nonetheless who will now never have a
chance to work on improving himself for himself.
That grand notion of equal justice, in fact, is not meant
to apply exclusively to people that aren’t “thugs.” That grand notion is meant to apply to all of
us. Calling him a “thug” over and over
is both unkind and dehumanizing and calls into question the motive of seeking
to discredit him. If he is not worth
being a martyr, why is his character worth being sacrificed?
The Michael Brown response is not a strategy. Michael Brown’s story is a tragedy. It is one tragedy too many. What if I told you that I thought that the
quote by Neal Boors about free speech sums up my feelings on Michael Brown and
equal justice? Boors’ idea that “Free
speech is meant to protect unpopular speech. Popular speech, by definition,
needs no protection”, it is this idea that invites in me a notion that Michael
Brown may be, in fact, exactly the right symbol for a rigorous standard of
equal justice. Maybe it’s exactly
because it’s so easy for so many people to immediately accept an alternative
narrative that he was an irredeemable “thug” that equal justice is so important
for someone like him.
Maybe he deserved to be arrested, maybe he deserved to be
physically restrained, maybe he deserved to be in jail. I don’t believe he deserved to be shot over
and over and left to die in the street like an animal. It is too easy for me to believe that a police
officer might operate using all the tools at his disposal with an unaccounted
for level of bias informing his perspective, and it is too easy and too
credible for me to believe that he would lie to protect himself. That is not just a problem for me. That is OUR problem. Michael Brown’s story is one tragedy too
many, and even he deserved the protection of the equal justice that remains
worth fighting for, for ALL of us.
Michael Brown’s death and the activism since does not risk the
possibility that well-meaning people of color will elevate an unwilling martyr,
it presents an opportunity for all well meaning people to look comprehensively
at a reaction that seems disproportionate to them and either ask “why?” or to
conveniently dismiss it as “BS”.
