Black death has become a cultural spectacle: Why the Walter Scott tragedy won’t change White America
http://www.salon.com/2015/04/08/black_death_has_become_a_cultural_spectacle_why_the_walter_scott_tragedy_wont_change_white_americas_mind/
On Tuesday, Slager was charged with first-degree murder. I am glad there are charges. I hope for a conviction. But charges and convictions are not the ultimate solution here. We need the killings to stop. We need the state to stop creating a culture that facilitates the taking of Black lives and that induces Black mothers’ tears. Walter Scott belonged to somebody. He has brothers, parents who have been married for 50 years; and he has four children of his own....
Lest anyone be tempted to excuse this as again just another bad apple, the San Francisco chief of police fired eight police officers late last week, after evidence surfaced of them trading racist and homophobic text messages. One text message read: “All niggers must fucking hang.” And another said, “cross burning lowers blood pressure. I did the test myself.” How many rotten apples do we need before we start chopping down the apple tree?...
As long as white people remain unconvinced that policing is a fundamentally anti-Black, racist enterprise in this country, the police will keep killing unarmed Black people. As long as the ridiculous argument that this is “just an isolated incident” proceeds unchecked, Black bodies will continue to pile up. Local juries might opt to throw the book at “individual” suspects, but individual solutions will not solve the epidemic of police murder. As of February 2015, the police were killing someone every eight hours. That is simply too much killing, and it far outpaces the police murder rate in every other developed country.
In this cultural climate, it will take, it seems, an ocean of Black bodies to convince white people that structural racism is a problem. Therefore, I am not convinced in this moment that this video means anything. We watched Eric Garner die on video. We watched Tamir Rice die on video. The officers who killed both of them are free. Black people have no reason to trust that video evidence will lead to any significantly different outcome in the case of Michael Slager.
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