Grassroots/Hank Kalet

Of Course, It’s Racial

The death of Botham Jean in Dallas is part of a national racial narrative with which we refuse to come to grips.

Yes, the shooting appears to be an accident — meaning unintentional — but the underlying assumptions our society makes about black men were the driving force of what everyone acknowledges is a tragedy.

This is what we know, according to the Associated Press: Jean was killed Thursday, Sept. 6, at about 10 p.m. by off-duty Dallas Police Officer Amber Guyger. Guyger, for an unexplained reason, mistook Jean’s apartment for her own. She told police she confronted Jean, who she thought was an intruder, and shot him. Witnesses dispute much of the narrative — she says the door was open, but neighbors say she was banging on the door. She has been arrested, and the Dallas police have turned the investigation over to the Texas Rangers.

In the meantime, police searched Botham Jean’s apartment, implying that the St. Lucian immigrant may have been at fault, hoping to sully the victim’s image — to “assassinate his character,” in the words of Jean’s family attorneys.

In the end, these details may not matter as much as the environment in which the shooting occurs. Policing in the United States has long been influenced by the broad cultural racism that poisons our society. From the fugitive slave patrols to the war on drug’s proscription that America’s urban — read black and Latino — areas are war zones, and that the people living in those communities lack any benefit of the doubt. These communities, as James Baldwin wrote in the 1960s, are considered occupied zones, their residents viewed as enemy combatants.

The police, he says, are guaranteed an “arrogant autonomy” that verges nearly on martial law. They are “simply the hired enemies” of the black population of the ghetto.

They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover — even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity — quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty (Baldwin).

Baldwin then damns the defenders of propriety, those who preach law and order in response to the completely understandable rage within black communities when another police officer kills another black man or woman. The “pious calls to ‘respect the law,’” he says, are “obscene.”

This is the same language used by Ta-Nehisi Coates in in The Atlantic magazine (April 27, 2015) in response to the Baltimore uprising after Freddie Gray’s death, and Darlena Cunha in Time magazine (Nov. 24, 2014) after riots in Ferguson, Mo., following the shooting death of Michael Brown.

Even as the Civil Rights Movement helped win gains for African Americans — in housing, hiring, voting, and access to public accommodations — the imposition of the drug war beginning in the 1970s and its ramping up over the next four decades under presidents of both party continued to poison relationships between the black community and police.

“Cops have come to see the people they serve as a potential threat, as something to fight,” Radley Balko, journalist and author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, told me several years ago. “We are dressing, training and arming them as soldiers on top of that.”

The war-zone mentality undercut — even erased — the police motto of “protect and serve,” transforming the police-community relationship into an antagonistic one. To understand this, one just need watch reruns of television police dramas from the 1980s and 1990s, shows like Hunter, Miami Vice and even NYPD Blue, that privileged the police point of view and excused nearly all police behavior.

The black and Latino communities responded in kind, through hip hop, in fiction, in films hat demonstrated their growing rage. Ice-T’s raps about South Central Los Angeles focused on the growing gang menace, but positioned that against an out-of-control and unrepresentative police department that was perhaps more dangerous than the gangs they were at war with. Writer Ed Vega, in “Spanish Roulette,” a story for his 1991 collection Casualty Report, has his main character Sixto explicitly choose to take matters into his own hands rather than call the police to address the rape of his sister.

At the same time, there were periodic uprisings — white media referred to these as riots — in response to police excesses (the LA riots of 1992, Crown Heights riots in 1991). But these happened before social media, so only the most explosive made news. The full range of police misbehavior and mistreatment of black and brown Americans, therefore, could remain obscured — to whites. Black Americans have always understood what was at stake, even if it took social media to make this a national issue.

So when an innocent immigrant — a black man — is killed in his own apartment, pronouncements that it was not a racial incident ring as hollow as they are.

The question as to whether or how much race was involved as a precipitating factor in this shooting is not my call. I am a white middle-aged man and, as such, I’m generally immune to race’s impact, protected by the privilege of being white in a society that values whiteness. It is the people, the black and brown Americans navigating a system of white privilege that controls the levers of power. If black and brown America says the Botham Jean shooting and Dallas’ response was based on race, as most do, then it is our responsibility as white Americans to listen, and take them seriously.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email grassroots@comcast.net; Twitter @kaletjournalism.

From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2018

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