What’s Going On? Finding the courage to ask the right questions about Police Terrorism — Adisa

Mother, mother

There's too many of you crying

Brother, brother, brother

There's far too many of you dying

You know we've got to find a way

To bring some lovin' here today...

Don't punish me with brutality

—Marvin Gaye, What's Going On?

A few of day ago, Toni Morrison, novelist, Nobel Laureate and one of the finest minds America and Africa has produced, when asked by Charlie Rose on the Charlie Rose Show what was surprising about the latest waves of police terrorism (not a term he used but one that is apt) said in essence that it was the "obvious cowardice of the police" and when asked for her solution, she offered, "better training."

That was an excellent and perceptive answer to the wrong question. The question is what empowers the police to feel as though they can murder Black people with impunity? When asked this way one can see the insufficiency of our esteemed elder Toni Morrison's answer. But it is precisely that question that takes us past the symptoms—police terrorism—to the disease: white misanthropy (we should stop using white supremacy, there is nothing supreme about a system rooted in the destruction of every living thing).

Just because you can shoot an unarmed person, posing no danger to you or others, running away from you, it still doesn’t answer the question: Why WOULD someone shoot an unarmed person running away from them? It is not a typical human response to fear someone running away from us, especially if we are armed. Toni Morrison also noted the example of the officer who refused to shoot an armed suspect asking to be shot as a sign of bravery. Her example also illuminates the point: officers have the option not to shoot, so the question gains motive force: What/Who empowers them to murder Black people with impunity?

Which brings me to the point that animates this essay and the one in which many, many Black folks are afraid to be honest about: Within the system of white misanthropy, Black people are not viewed as human. Within this context the police are empowered by the state to police us, and when we escape the cage of white expectation—to hunt us. In much the same way, someone hunts game, you try to capture it alive, if you cant then capture it dead.

On the rare occasion that a police officer is actually charged and prosecuted for the crime of shooting an UNARMED Black person, the murder is treated not as crime against humanity but rather more in the way one might be prosecuted for hunting a bear past sanctioned hunting season or hunting deer without a license. In other words, as an officer you’re not wrong for killing them; you’re wrong for not doing it the right way—that one must follow the are appropriate procedures for murdering unarmed Black people.

Many whites—if not most; I’m willing to except in a nation of well over 150 million whites that there might be three or four white folks who are the exception—share in this white misanthropic view. How else do you explain the lack of national outrage or even national empathy for the murder of the seven-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones as she slept or the twelve year old Tamir Rice, who was doing what young boys do every day in America, play with toy guns. If you’re white you don’t have be against the police to feel sickened that a little girl was killed in her sleep or young boy lost his life for playing with a toy gun. How do you watch the video of Walter Scott, a father, who had committed no violent crime— and was UNARMED—getting shot in the back eight times as he ran away from the officer, and not feel saddened for such an unnecessary loss of life.

Courage shows up in many forms, one of them is the ability to look the truth in the face and acknowledge it: In America, whites, by and large, do not view Black/African (americans) peoples as human. All one has to do is witness the spectacle of horror and sadness about abused or abandoned animals, the recoiling at commercials that focus on abused dogs, or the overwrought anger at Michael Vick for brutalizing dogs. Given the level white outrage and vitriol directed towards Michael Vick, I don't think it's unfair to assume that many whites would have been okay with capital punishment for his crimes--against animals. Contrast that to inhumane silence by many whites over the murder of two Black children by the police. Let that sit with you for a minute. The irony is embarrassing; the source of it is tragic and revealing in its display of white inhumanity.

The tragedy is compounded because too many Black folks don’t see Black folks as human either—with alacrity many of us accept the most base, backwards and erroneous assessments of our people as hard truth. What else is Black respectability politics but the tacit admission that Black folks must do something extra in order to be viewed as human by whites? What is that but an unconscious acceptance of the lie that we aren't human, yet? You see being human is like being pregnant, either you are or you aren’t. The moment you say women are less than men or that they have to dress a certain way to get respect or Black and Brown folks are less than whites and that they need to earn respect, you’ve already said they aren’t as human as you, which is to say: They aren’t human. And from that point on seemingly any kind of abuse or disrespect is permissible.

This accounts for why you can have Blacks firmly entrenched in the white misanthropic power structure and still get the same dehumanizing outcomes. Exhibit A: The black cop standing over Walter Scott's body, helping the white officer cover up the crime. Exhibit B: The Black Mayor of Baltimore and the other Black Folks firmly entrenched within the white misanthropic power structure, which Dayvon Love laid out eloquently on The Melissa Harris Perry Show. It is also illuminates and cast into a brighter light the disparities that exists between African (Black) people and whites in nearly all quality of life indicators which runs throughout American society like arteries throughout the body; one system for humans (whites), and another system for the almost humans.

This different equals deficient logic is crippling for everyone. Newsflash: This system of white misanthropy doesn’t like white people either—it likes property, profits and white misanthropy, and privileges those who advance that evil triumvirate. white people untutored in basic American history, but well educated in the propaganda of white misanthropy and thus blinded by the white light often cant see this point.

The main reason white folks are under the illusion that they are doing better than they actually are (there are more whites on welfare and food stamps than Blacks by raw numbers) is because Black folks are doing so poorly by contrast. Here the media serves a vital function in reminding its white citizenry: If you think you got it bad, just look at the negroes. The boy who gets physically abused by his father thinks his abuse is not so bad when he compares it to physical and sexual abuse his sister endures. The illusion of Black Pathology trumpeted by mainstream media exist to as means of mind control for whites, to divert their attention from the ways the system is sucking them dry like a vampire on an alabaster virgin.

Returning home: It is not enough to recognize that our own humanity is not being acknowledged, we must also be courageous enough to ask the harder questions about the humanity of anyone who fails to recognize our humanity. In the short term, we must deal with police terrorism. But in the long term, better questions will ultimately reveal that focusing on police terrorism without addressing the system that produces it is like blaming the rope for the lynching.

We can defeat white misanthropy and provide space and oxygen for a better way to live breathe, but it will only be won if we find the courage to ask better and better questions of ourselves, of others, of society and of this venal system, and then summon the bravery to model our lives in ways that follow the life affirming answers.

In life, love, and liberation

— Ádìsá