“What did I do sir?” “seat belt violation”

Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish has some thoughtful posts on black/white relations today.

I’ll start with a startling one which shows a policeman’s dash cam just as he shoots a black man at a gas station. The black man yells “What did I do sir? off camera. “Sir.” The poor guy has bullet holes in his body and says he can’t feel his legs and ends his question for his attacker with “sir.”

When the officer lamely says something about “seat belt violation” it was almost more than I could endure.

This was part of a longer post which included these words:

…even as police forces ,especially in poor urban areas, come to associate criminality with black men, and treat them as a different class of people – guilty until proven innocent, violent unless proven peaceful.

I can see why this happens, can’t you? Cops are not superhuman. High rates of violence and crime in neighborhoods with large numbers of young black men make a certain kind of prejudice almost impossible to avoid for a fallible human cop – but that makes training to counteract these impulses all the more important to enforce. A cop like Wilson, with clearly minimal finesse in these matters, come across as afraid, unprofessional, and reckless. Ditto this jumpy fool in a much clearer case:

Another post Walking while black showed a short camera video taken by a black man while he was stopped by a white officer who also held his camera up to record the encounter. If it wasn’t so tragic it would be funny.

Several of the Black writers on Sullivan’s posts have wisely articulated the dilemmas they face walking around in black skin with so much white paranoia ready to spring on them from directions they can’t even guess at.

I’d heartily recommend today’s dish which also includes a post that ties in with today’s Tribune story about how the workers at a downtown hospital get the creeps working in what seems to them a dangerous inner city battlefield. The locals don’t feel so creeped out by their surroundings. That ties in beautifully with the Sullivan post on where we live with a graph showing the racial mix of the typical neighborhood blacks lived in compared to the make up of neighborhoods Latinos, Whites and Asians live in.

I hope Duluth cops don’t get so jumpy that they start shooting first and keep firing until the possible black suspect they see is lying inert. Hell, in the old Westerns one shot was usually enough to make a point and sometimes the guns were fired in the air. Imagine that?

I’d like to take time for one more race related post on race but I’ve got to get back to my war vs. plowshares stuff.

About the author