The killing of Tyre Nichols, a Black man in Memphis, at the hands of Black police should prompt outrage and condemnation from racial justice activists, police reform advocates and law enforcement officials.
Problems of race and policing are a function of an entrenched police culture of aggression and dehumanization of Black people. It is the system and the tactics that foster racism and violence, rather than the specific racial identities of officers.
Many cities in the US can trace similar repetitive patterns of policing that torments and kills people who aren’t considered white, all the way back to the origin of law enforcement in this country.
Memphis officers took turns kicking Tyre and beating him with batons acted so nonchalantly afterward, as if they had done the same thing many times before. The theories of policing and styles of policing, and the training that police receive are lost when a culture of violence and brutality are more powerful than the race of the officer.
It is hard to stomach when you see everyone involved in this situation is Black.
Officers of all races are indoctrinated into a practice that sees Black people and brown people as less than others.
And I say no to those who say that people of all races do bad things. Black police brutally beating a black man is because of white supremacy, racism and a system.
When you put on that blue uniform, it often becomes the primary identity that drowns out any other identities that might compete with it.
And it is a fairy tale to think that adding more members of a marginalized group in the police will lead to more just and fairer treatment of members of that group.
We now have a blueprint, and we should not accept less going forward in the future. Black officers should not be treated differently than white officers.
White officers historically don’t get prosecuted as much as Black officers. Until we see all officers treated equally, I fear we’re going to be here for generations to come. We want equal justice under the law.
I am stuck on the fact that there should have been federal legislation to prevent such killings.
But there wasn’t, and there isn’t, because America has once again failed Black people who were pleading for help and demanding it. America should be ashamed. It abandoned the issue of police reform.
Police unions also learned a lesson: that they could survive the most intense denunciation of their practices they had ever faced and still dodge federal legislation to address the violence that happens on their watch.
It is high time, again, to stop treating police brutality as just another issue to address with half measures? Or will this be yet one more moment when a vicious, racist (blue) line twisting through our nation continues to be as American as apple pie, and baseball?