“I would love to just interview white cops. The question isn’t why they shoot so many black kids, which is horrible. The real question is, like, “How come you never shoot white kids?’ That’s the real question.”
— Chris Rock, CBS Sunday Morning
The resignation of Officer Darren Wilson is not noble or brave or even sacrificial on its face.
It was a life-saving measure that shows — more obviously even than his fatal shooting of Michael Brown — that Wilson has a delayed sense of timing because if he’d voluntarily stepped down immediately after the shooting at the first sign of Ferguson’s trouble, perhaps it would have gone a long way to salve some of that city’s and this country’s racial anger and confusion.
However, I have learned a lot of hard lessons from the police shooting of unarmed black men and teenagers.
One: The cops involved in these shootings never immediately sit down and/or leave the force because the thin blue line within the cult of personality of police group think and gang mentality mandates a different course.
Usually, it’s presumed the dead black bastard had a gun, was running away or aggressively faced the officer. Either way, the mere specter of a black male body in an anxious confrontation is misconstrued for some white cops as a reason to use deadly force.
So the officer takes his requisite “desk duty” which sometimes means paid leave, talking to a department shrink. He’s usually sitting home trying not to watch news coverage of the mayhem his fatal shooting is causing.
Two: Cops who fatally shoot unarmed black men and kids suddenly find themselves at the other end of a gun’s barrel. Now they’ve become literal targets for enraged, armed black vigilantes — or crazed white supremacists who’d want to make the attempts on a white cop’s life look like a racially motivated shooting — and now the white cop has to go into hiding.
Can he go to Walmart like he used to?
Can he run to the store in the middle of the night for milk or Pampers without being “recognized” and either praised by a supporter or grilled by a detractor?
News reports say midway through cutting his front lawn soon after he shot and killed Brown, Wilson got a phone call telling him there was a target on his back. He went into the house, packed and sofa-surfed in the houses of friends, even sometimes wearing a beard.
Three: It is rare in America that a grand jury ever convicts a cop in the shooting of an unarmed black man or child. Recent history bares this out.
The 1992 acquittal of the four officers who savagely beat Rodney King — on camera — sparked the Los Angeles riots that year that resulted in millions in property damage, 2,000 people injured and 53 dead.
It was quelled only when the military showed up.
Someone with experience or insider knowledge should have gone to Ferguson with this tidbit and shared it with the throngs who waited hopefully for the grand jury’s decision.
Untold property, police manpower and media coverage could have been spared.
I could have gladly told them about the unreliability of grand jury decisions.
In 2001, Cincinnati Police Officer Stephen Roach was acquitted of killing Timothy Thomas, even after it was revealed Roach initially lied to investigating officers about what happened during and after that fateful foot chase through Over-the-Rhine long before it was a Grown-Up Disneyland.
Four: It doesn’t take a sociologist or statistician to know that white officers just do not shoot and kill white kids at commensurate rates that they shoot black kids.
It is a sad, frightening and true fact.
So for all the white hatemongers trying to put the onus of responsibility for running or just looking too much like a scary black thug on Michael Brown just as they tried to place that onus on Rodney King, Timothy Thomas, Roger Owensby, Jr., Sean Bell in 2006 (all officers were found not guilty), Amadou Diallo in 1999, Oscar Grant in 2009 and sickeningly, so many others, then those race baiters should consider for 60 seconds what would happen across this nation if rogue, poorly trained and bigoted black officers gunned down unarmed white kids and men at the rate of their white counterparts.
The streets would not be safe for any black person because the birth of this racist nation would return, reborn as white vigilantism unseen since the KKK freely and willfully lynched us at the turn of the 20th Century.
I do not think whites in this country fully realize how good they have it.
That is, they can literally get away with the murder of specific members of specific populations so long as they’ve been initiated into a police gang. (Think about it: Police are all taught to adhere to the same rules, the same loyalties, to hold the same enemies and to wear the same colors.)
White people can also break from their packs and choose to stand and march and mourn with us, never once fearing for their lives simply because of the color of their skin.
White people get to choose their battles, to fully act out their rage, even going so far as to make our battles theirs.
White skin privilege is better than any American Express card.
I don’t believe in his ponderings that Chris Rock is advocating for the shooting of white kids.
I think he was getting at the audacity of choice and of timing as it relates to race: What do white cops think about when they think about blackness?
Just one or three seconds more and maybe Michael Brown’s big ass would have been in jail a few hours or walking home with his friend with a ticket in his pocket.
Darren Wilson quit too late; he’s not doing us any favors, he’s just saving his own life because he’s got the white right.
CONTACT KATHY Y. WILSON: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Dec 3-9, 2014.
