Imagine you get lost walking in
the woods. You are starving, unable to find food, and you realize a winter
storm is starting. You happen across a cabin in the woods. While clearly it is someone’s cabin, when you knock no one
answers the door. There are no lights, no shadows. Everything indicates they
are not home. You wait an hour and they do not return home. You call out asking
for help. No one answers. You fear for your safety. You suspect – based on the
few things you can see through the windows – that there might be food or
supplies inside. To save yourself, you’ll have to break a window and take
someone else’s supplies. Do you do it?
The question was raised my first day
of law school. It’s been over a decade, but every now and then I come back to it
– and the responses of my classmates. Every single one of us said we would
break the window and take the supplies.
Would we feel guilty about it?
No.
Do we think we should be prosecuted
for property damage? Of course not.
Why? Because sometimes the need
to survive trumps other rights and interests.
I’ve
had cause to again reflect on this issue this week as I listened to friends
lament the property damage occurring during protests
in Charlotte, North Carolina. The protests are in response to another police killing of a potentially
unarmed black man. Whether Keith Lamont Scott had a weapon or not, and whether
he pointed it at police or not, is currently disputed. The police chief has refused
to release the videotape, which he admits “does not give . . . absolute,
definitive visual evidence” to support police claims that Mr. Scott was
pointing a gun.
It’s
important to note that North Carolina is both an “open
carry” state, meaning there is an individualized right to openly have a
gun, and a “concealed
carry” state, meaning that there is an individualized right to carry the
gun on your person without having to actively show the gun in public.
Collectively, these laws suggests that the police have even less reason to shoot someone for
carrying a weapon; openly doing so should not be regarded as a suspicious
behavior if there is a recognized legal right to do so. Unless he was actively,
absolutely, and definitively pointing the weapon, there is no reason he should
be considered suspect or dangerous for having
a gun (and that’s assuming he did, in fact, have a gun, which is a disputed
fact).
But
Mr. Scott’s death is not surprising. Statistical evidence suggests black men
are 2.5 to 3 times more likely than white to be killed by police. According
to data collected by the Washington Post, about 13% of all black men killed
by police since January 2015 were unarmed; only 7% of white men were. And based
on available data, “[t]he only thing that was significant in predicting whether
someone shot and killed by police was
unarmed was whether or not they were black. … Crime variables did not matter in
terms of predicting whether the person killed was unarmed.”
Mr.
Scott was killed the same week as Terrance Crutcher, a Tulsa, Oklahoma, man
shot in the back while his hands were in the air and he was walking away from
police. The video released by the police also incudes an officer
in a helicopter claiming Crutcher “looks like a bad dude.” And clearly from
a helicopter, he could tell tons of relevant things about Crutcher. Like his
race and his height and his weight and his … well, that’s about it.
The
officer in that case has been charged
with manslaughter, which is a rarity in US police shootings. Had the video
not been released, I’m not certain this would have happened. Particularly since
the female officer who shot him claims
she was “never so scared in my life as in that moment right then.” She was
referring to when Crutcher “reached” into his car, which videotapes and blood
splatter suggests was a hell of a magic trick since the window
appears to have been closed throughout the incident – as was the car door. Without
clear video, her word would likely be enough to exonerate her.
Without any videotape of Mr.
Scott’s shooting, people in Charlotte are left to imagine their own ending, and
when you’ve experienced a series of injustices – from the killings of Tamir
Rice and John Crawford III, neither of which were prosecuted, to the
exoneration of the officers involved in the death of Eric Gardner and Jonathan
Ferrell – the ending seems clear-cut.
For those who are unable to keep
up, Tamir Rice was the 12 year old with a toy gun supposedly tucked into his
waistband who was killed outside a park gazebo in Cleveland, Ohio, and John
Crawford was the father killed for walking around an Ohio Wal-Mart with an air
rifle he was intending to purchase from the store. Like North Carolina, Ohio is
both an open-carry
and a concealed-carry
state, so unless an individual is posing an active threat, there is even less reason for the police to suspect
they are dangerous. Eric Gardner was the man choked to death by police for
selling cigarettes in New York City, and Jonathan Ferrell was a former college
football player who was shot in 2013 when he went to a house to ask for help
after crashing his car and injuring himself. Technically, the officer in
Ferrell’s killing was not exonerated; instead, a mistrial was declared and
prosecutors chose not to re-file charges. The officer in that case remained
employed by the Charlotte police department until October 2015, approximately
six weeks after the court declared a mistrial.
Now, there is a lot to write about in regards to these
cases and more generally the use of force by police and racial inequality in
the U.S. But today, I want to talk about the response and responsibility of
white Americans as bystanders to this violence. This is not a legal analysis
piece, but one discussing moral and philosophical responsibilities when it
comes to witnessing human rights violations.
When black people get a little
too loud and demanding in their calls for justice – whenever protests get
disruptive to white lives – I watch as white American friends post Facebook
statuses calling for quiet and rest, pointing out that there are ways to
protest but this just isn’t it.
Of course, those friends also
criticized American football player Colin Kaepernick for choosing to sit or
kneel during the playing of the national anthem. That was deemed disrespectful
to the U.S. and to American military vets. (The shooting of 12-year-old Tamir
Rice apparently was not as disrespectful to American values…)
Kaepernick responded to the
criticisms:
“You deplore the
demonstrations taking place. But your statements, I am sorry to say, fail to
express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the
demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the
superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not
grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are
taking place in Charlotte and around the country, but it is even more
unfortunate that the country’s power structure left the black community with no
alternative.”
Actually, that wasn’t Kaepernick.
Sorry, I got my inappropriate protests confused. That’s an edited version of
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter
from a Birmingham Jail.
To me, it’s not surprising that
protests over police killings sometimes result in property damage. The peaceful
ones rarely make the news and black people – desperate for survival in a
country that has a long history of failing to protect them – have knocked on
the door, they’ve checked the windows, they’ve cried for help, they waited in
silence, and now they are desperate to be let in.
What surprises me is the silent
complicity of white Americans – and it is
silent complicity. When bystanders – those with no particular interest in an
outcome – watch oppression with silence, they become complicit.
“In a situation of oppression,
silence does not support the oppressed, it reinforces the position of the
oppressor.” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said
it, but history proves its truth.
It proves its truth in the
silence of Thomas Jefferson on the issue of slavery. A slave-owner himself, he
had reservations about the institution and its premise of racial superiority
(reservations one can only hope increased when his own enslaved children were
born). But he did not speak these reservations publicly, and his failure to do
so has forever tarnished his legacy.
History proves the complicity of
silence in those who failed to speak out against anti-Semitism in the 1930s,
allowing it to become an accepted social standard. In the silent majority of
white South Africans. In the Hutus listening to radio messages calling the
Tutsis “cockroaches” without challenging the dogma.
In such situations, it is not a responsibility on those who are protesting -- standing up for their lives and their survival -- to make those watching feel better about the protest or their silent complicity. Or as the activist (and actor) Jesse Williams put it earlier this year: "The burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job, alright – stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance, for our resistance, then you better have an established record of critique of our oppression."
If you want to complain about property damage in Charlotte, you better have taken a stand against the racism that led to those protests. Otherwise, you are doing nothing to make the situation better.
So when I think back to that first day of law school, I think the question stopped too soon. The relevant questions
of responsibility do not start and end with the prioritization of human
suffering over property, but about the prioritization of human comfort over
lives. The question must be this:
Imagine the cabin is not empty,
but rather people are inside. You knock on the door and they look out at you,
from the comfort of their dining room where they feast on a roast clearly too
big for only themselves. You beg for assistance and they turn away. You call
and pound on the door and on the window, you tell them you have been lost for a
week and will surely die if they do not let you in. Could they at least call
the police or a rescue agency? They simply respond, “You are not our problem.”
If you die, are they at
fault?
I think, regardless of legal
liability, the answer is clearly yes.
