How much is a black man’s life worth in America?
The answer was made clear this week with yet another police shooting — not much.
Jacob Blake didn’t die when he was shot seven times in the back by officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin, but that is only because of nothing short of a miracle. The 29-year-old’s injuries are life-altering all the same, the worst being a severed spine that has left him partially paralysed. His family says it will take a second miracle for him to ever walk again.
Then there are his three children — ages 3, 5 and 8 — who were packed in the car as their dad slumped over into the front seat after being hit by the bullets.
The traumatic event will likely taint their lives forever. Apparently, the lives of black children don’t matter all that much either.
The low value of Blake’s life to police was clear that day.
A few days later it still didn’t seem to matter much to law enforcement who stood nearby when a white teenager shot into a crowd of protesters demanding an investigation into what happened to Blake.
The teen walked by officers, while carrying a gun, and raised no suspicions. Remember when 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot for playing with a toy gun in a Cleveland park in 2014? Tell me: what does the life of a black boy mean in the United States?
Vice-president Mike Pence also seemed unconcerned about another black man gunned down by police. During a Republican National Convention speech on Thursday in which he pushed a "law and order" agenda, Pence sounded off on protesters with no mention of why people had taken to the streets.
He never once uttered Jacob Blake’s name.
Instead, he implored that "the violence must stop" and declared that looters and rioters "will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."
Even if you believe the looting must stop, shouldn’t unnecessary police-involved shootings as well? Pence’s message was a clear spare-no-victims one. Law and order even at the expense of someone’s life — especially if it is a black man.
As a country, the US finds itself in the same spot it did three months ago when George Floyd died after a Minneapolis cop knelt on his neck so long he stopped breathing.
We are back to the place we were when Ahmaud Arbery was gunned down by vigilantes while jogging in a Georgia neighbourhood he apparently didn’t belong in.
Some people are shocked that this could happen again. Once again protesters have hit the streets. Once again so many cry for justice that many are sceptical will come because change has been too slow to come. Where are all of the massive judicial reform efforts promised by lawmakers and politicos at the beginning of the summer? Why does it take another incident to spark that movement again?
The ray of hope is that there are so many people who do believe the lives of black men are meaningful.
The TNT sports broadcaster, Kenny Smith, who walked off the air in disgust over how the shooting of Blake has been handled. The NBA and WNBA teams that stopped play in protest.
Tennis star Naomi Osaka, who dropped out of the semifinals of the Western & Southern Open in New York to make a very public statement.
Presidential candidate Joe Biden who said: "What I saw in that video makes me sick."
The average Joe or Josephine who took to his or her
Twitter account to protest. Both the high profile and the everyday person used their platforms.
Without this kind of pressure and attention, the Justice Department might not have announced on Friday an investigation into the shooting.
As people converged on Washington DC, in person and virtually this weekend for the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington, they again demanded that lawmakers create public policy to break down the vestiges of systemic racism in the criminal justice system and other areas.
This is how true change will occur.
So, I ask again: What is the worth of a black man’s life in America?
Their lives do indeed matter, no matter how much some people want us to believe that they don’t.
We must affirm that they do. — TCA
- Andrea K. McDaniels is deputy editorial page editor for The Baltimore Sun.
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Comments
We don't need the violence being fermented in the US brought to Aotearoa.
It's time the ODT did some fact checking before printing garbage exported by leftist US media.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_analysis_tables_...
First paragraph, Abstract
" On the most extreme use of force – Officer involved shootings – we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police officers are utility maximizers"
Roland G. Fryer, Jr happen to be the youngest African-American to be given tenure at Harvard; for the racists that racially profile peoples work before giving it credence.
It's shallow politicized press from Baltimore, a Dem run city of 50 years whose jobs were exported, while the locals got 'benefits' by and from the Dems.
Go and check out the BLM "guiding principles" if you think supporting them is a good idea. "We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure" is among them.
Pure bloody Marxism, is what it is and we have enough of that in NZ already.
READ some HISTORY before you repeat it.
Here we go again. The victims in this STORY - the Blakes - hadn't done anything. Your polemics are less and less relevant.
Everybody keeps avoiding the elephant in the room; more white people are killed by the police than black. In 2017 457 Vs 223, in 2018 399 Vs 209, in 2019 370 vs 235 and to date 2020 242 vs 123. The police in the US are not racist nor are they killing black people indiscriminately! Where is the outrage over murders in Chicago? 75% of the people murdered are black, 71% of murders are black! Unfortunately, we must realize that some black people are a much greater threat to other black people than the Ku Klux Klan or the White Citizens’ Councils. And while some people don’t want to admit it, the aggressive law enforcement tactics that some declare overbearing have worked in reducing crime. The US and NZ are not the same and we cant compare the way they need to police with the way we need to police.