Police keep creating Black corpses. We are being crushed under the weight.
Years of police shootings have left us carrying around dozens of names as benchmarks for our grief.
By Hayes Brown, MSNBC Opinion Columnist
It's Monday afternoon. I'm watching the latest news from Minnesota. Daunte Wright is dead. Brooklyn Center police released the body camera video from the shooting Sunday at a news conference. It was a speedy decision, even if local media were barred from viewing the video.
The eyes of the world tune in now when the police shoot an unarmed Black man; the city knew it had to look good on camera.
So many cycles were broken over the last year, disrupting many of the rhythms and patterns woven into American life. So tell me why I'm sitting here at my computer, staring into a screen, somehow not screaming as we learn the details of how the police have killed yet another young Black man. "How is this the pattern that's persisted?" I ask no one, the answer built into the question.
The next few days will unfold as expected. We'll talk about air fresheners, like the ones hanging from Wright's mirror that he assumed got him pulled over, as an excuse for traffic stops. We'll ask why officers who conduct traffic stops are armed in the first place. We'll search for meaning in the gray, an element of humanity to draw from tragedy. We'll ask ourselves why it still hurts so much. Some will march for justice; others will refuse to see the injustice at work.
It's a dance that has become ritualized: the incident; shock as it floods over us; sidestep and pivot to the justification for violence; anger, sadness, pleas and thank you for your attention; disorder on the streets, less palatable than our disordered society; a life's final moments chronicled and repeated ad nauseam on Twitter, with the accompanying content warnings and please don't look away and scrolling past suffering to not let the sorrow seep through the cracks in the mental walls that have been erected.
Somehow, of all the things we've had disrupted as Covid-19 has inundated our psyches, of all the experiences that we've missed, all the moments taken from us, these moments remain. This feeling remains.
I saw Wright's picture, smiling in a red Chicago ball cap at his son's first birthday, before I learned he was dead. I still knew. Black men don't have their names and pictures, frozen in random moments of happiness, go viral like that while they're alive.
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Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Wednesday, April 14th 2021 at 5:12PM
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