I’m sick to my stomach writing this. I’m sickened by the callousness with which people I grew up with are talking about the death of a human being, and sickened by the fact that Madison is now on the map for the killing of an unarmed black teenager at the hands of a white police officer. I’m in disbelief that my fellow citizens would be so ignorant as to look at the pervasive, disproportionate use of lethal force against blacks and not see that what we are dealing with is an explicitly racial issue with an entrenched historical precedent.
Maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe I should take a step back and analyze the situation without letting the fog of emotion cloud my vision of the truth. How might my perspective change if I were to let those white, affluent kids I grew up with tell me exactly why I’m wrong when I say that the killing of Tony Robinson in Madison, Wis., is inextricably related to broader racial tensions still plaguing our country? It’s possible I would walk away thinking that because all lives are equally worth saving it does us no good to single out any one demographic for special treatment—even though blacks are killed by police at a higher rate than any other ethnic group in America. This suggests that some need reminding that black lives do, in fact, matter. It’s also plausible that I would consider Tony Robinson’s history of aggression and criminal activity as justification for his death, despite knowing that if my best friend was killed in an altercation in which he was unarmed, no human soul could pry from my lips the words “he deserved to die.”
With these perspectives instilled in me I could finally feel confident absconding to my cocoon of white privilege, ready to shield myself from the reality that American law enforcement visits upon blacks a level of aggression and suspicion foreign to my red-haired, melanin-deficient self. As comforting as this hypothetical is, however, it demands an ignorance so blissfully divorced from the reality of what’s going on and my own intuition that I could never truly subscribe to it. All this talk of who Tony Robinson was as a person and whether or not his behavior warranted the force with which the police officer responded insults his memory and belies how we should actually approach this issue.
What does positioning ourselves as moral arbiters replete with excuses for his killing do to rectify the greater, underlying problem that is the fundamentally tattered relationship between blacks and police? I am not insinuating that the officer who shot Robinson is in any way a racist. However, when you look at the broader pattern of law enforcement consistently acting more punitively in its use of force towards blacks than whites, you have to wonder if there isn’t a deeply rooted tenet in our cultural subconscious that tells us blacks are more deserving of lethal aggression than their white brethren. No, the racism of today does not manifest itself in the strange fruit that grew on the southern trees invoked in Billie Holiday’s song on black lynchings. We may not find ourselves drinking from separate water fountains and movie theaters may not be segregated on the basis of skin pigmentation, but we still harbor prejudice in our collective soul.
Our perspectives diverge so wildly because, in the absence of overt acts of discrimination, many are reluctant to acknowledge racism is still with us. I don’t necessarily blame the people who fail to see what’s happening in Madison as part of a larger historical problem, because we don’t choose the circumstances into which we’re born and the assumptions we inherit. The officer who killed Tony Robinson does not have to be racist to have been brought up in a country still struggling to ensure all citizens are treated judiciously. A country whose extreme social stratification contributes to the tumultuous conditions under which blacks and police interact. That reality underlies what’s going on right now across the country and in Madison, and will continue to inform how we interpret the killings of unarmed black Americans in the future. I am convinced that in the aggregate this tragedy and those it directly mirrors are about race, and that we can’t assume otherwise simply because we are not faced with the glaring racism of the past. As Martin Luther King Jr. so eloquently observed, “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability.”
How do you feel about Elijah’s view toward America’s racial landscape? Do you agree or disagree? Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
