Certain days are so horrible, you never want to relive them.
And then you’re forced to.
I wrote this piece two years ago, in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death.
I really hoped I wouldn’t have to write it again.
I prayed that we wouldn’t see another unarmed young man of color shot to death in the streets of his community, in circumstances filled with lingering questions and conflicting statements and debatable decisions.
With that prayer unanswered, I hoped that we wouldn’t see another such young man murdered twice.
But apparently white Americans just can’t seem to let the dead rest, especially if they’re not white.
So many people aren’t capable of simply grieving the loss of a budding black life, and seeing it as a tragedy. They need to make peace with that premature death by making the dead person somehow responsible for it.
This week social media has been overflowing with proposed “evidence” of justification for Michael Brown’s killing; the kind of shameless, inflammatory victim-blaming that we so often see when someone is sexually assaulted. We’ve received a laundry list of past behaviors and alleged deficiencies that supposedly show that the victim somehow “got what they deserved.”
But instead of leveraging our long-standing gender biases to dehumanize or to destroy the reputation of women, these words target people of color, by taking advantage of the racially-based fear and resentment that are always there in our country; hiding just beneath the surface, just waiting for an opening.
And the media gives us that opening.
Many of these news stories have imposing, sinister looking photos of Brown (or even a completely different young black man—accuracy doesn’t seem to matter when you need to prove a point) and wild, incriminating tales which seek to retroactively make deadly violence against him patently acceptable (as if being littered with bullets is something you can easily earn).
These accusations hope to whitewash over any of the grey of the events of Brown’s death, and make any other alternative than his shooting impossible. If we can somehow do that; if we can make him bad enough, then we can rationalize away his termination, write the incident off as perfectly understandable, and once again lull ourselves into believing that we really don’t have a race problem in this country.
When we launch these posthumous attacks, we aren’t necessarily setting out to vilify Michael Brown or other young black men per se, but it sure beats looking in the mirror and asking some really painful questions, and admitting that our society in its heart, is very ill.
As a result, when it comes to people of color we in white America are often guilty of double murder.
Too many of our young black men get killed in the streets, and later in the media.
In both cases, they are left unable to defend themselves.
Their pasts can be misrepresented, their character can be maligned, their misdeeds can be magnified. They can be categorized and characterized and caricaturized in every conceivable way—and they can’t do a damn thing about it.
The dead, after all, don’t get the benefit of giving their side of the story to a Grand Jury or a reporter or to the world. They simply have to quietly endure.
As is so often the case with systematic injustice, one group is silenced and forced to be defined by the group with the voice.
I’m not okay with that.
And to be clear, the maligning of character and the stereotyping of white people by people of color happens all the time too. The big difference is that whites are usually alive to defend those attacks. That in itself, is part of the story.
Michael Brown, (like Trayvon Martin, and like hundreds of others) might not have been an angel. The last time I checked there are a lot of us “less-than-angel” white folks walking the planet these days.
The question is, was he enough of a “demon” to really deserve death? Is that even an answerable question, and do we need that assurance to help us all sleep at night? Is behaving badly all that we as white Americans require of young black men to be OK with the loss of their lives? What is the real point of assassinating a dead man’s character? What are we hoping to accomplish?
Maybe if we can convince ourselves that this one young black man brought his demise upon himself, we can justify the other deaths, and while we’re at it we can let ourselves off the hook from the last couple hundred years of suffering by people of color too.
Erase-ism.
Even if you believe that Officer Wilson was completely justified in his actions, or that this was all just a horrible, tragic, terrible, escalating chain of events in the streets of Ferguson (as may be the case), is there really wisdom or goodness or decency in trying to paint Michael Brown as having rightly earned the bullets that invaded his body and took his life?
Is that what we do now, in the place of wrestling with the complex root causes of such ordinary violence? Are we content to simply see one person as evil, the other as simply virtue defending itself from that evil?
Do all these sensational picture stories and fly-by-night website blogs and polarizing social media shares do anything other than dump salt into the deep wounds of people of color?
This is not just about this.
It is certainly about Michael Brown and Darren Wilson and Ferguson, but it’s about far more than that too. It’s about decades and decades of injustice and oppression and violence, and patterns of thinking and living that have left our country scarred and terribly injured, especially our people of color.
In incidents like these, we can’t afford to add insult to that injury with cheap shots at the deceased and victim-blaming.
Sooner or later, we need to admit that easy answers and short news articles and tidy “good guys and bad guys” thinking aren’t going to cut it.
It’s going to take men and women who value life enough not to see it in categories or compartments or colors.
Young black men deserve better than to be killed without cause, even once.
And when they are, they certainly deserve more than to be killed twice.
