Move over Karen: Being an “Amy” will keep you out of Franklin Templeton and the White House
On Saturday morning, many of us who live in the Twin Cities awoke to the smell of our cities on fire. Protests raged for a fourth straight night against the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by Derek Chauvin, a white former Minneapolis police officer. Mr. Chauvin has been charged with third degree murder and manslaughter. I’d like to believe that all Minnesotans arose with heavy hearts. But as a Black woman who has lived here most of my adult life, I know that such a belief simply is’t true. Similar to New York City, where a white woman named Amy Cooper, who voted for Obama, but weaponized her privilege by calling the police on a Black birder in Central Park; Minnesota has our own Amy who aided and abetted police brutality. The difference is that our Amy has risen to the top of the short list to become former Vice President Joe Biden’s running mate; Minnesota’s Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Amy Klobuchar and Amy Cooper have more in common than their first names. Why do I say this? Some might think Amy Cooper’s biggest crime was calling the police on a Black man who asked her to stop breaking the law. I beg to differ. Amy Cooper’s biggest crime is being an “Amy.”
Amys are powerful white women who are the gatekeepers of privileged spaces. Amy Cooper held a coveted position at Franklin Templeton, a world-renown investment firm. What white-collar Black people like me know, is that if Amy were in the position to ever hire someone, an overqualified Black man with a degree from Harvard like the man she called the police on, wouldn’t have been a “good fit.” Those of us who are Blacks in highly coveted white collar jobs have the cops called on us metaphorically all the time. For some reason, we are never chosen, never promoted, and it’s never due to racism because white liberals like Amy Cooper, who supported Hillary Clinton, aren’t racist. In fact, they swear that they are color blind.
Yet we know that the Amy Coopers and the Amy Klobuchars of the world do, indeed, see color. If Senator Klobuchar did not see color, she would have prosecuted at least one of the more than two dozen cases in which a Black man was killed during an encounter with a white police officer while she served for eight years as the top prosecutor for Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis. Instead, as this Washington Post article from March 21 highlights, she focused on prosecuting smaller offenses and routinely sought long sentences, actions that disproportionately affected people in lower-income and non-white communities. We have come to expect such “tough on (Black) crime” policies from white Republican men, but why do so many still refuse to believe that white women Democrats, when in the same position of power, have acted the same way?
Amy Cooper has apologized and Amy Klobuchar has acknowledged that her record as a prosecutor “isn’t perfect.” As one of the character’s in Ntozake Shange’s play, For Colored Girls, says: “One thing I don’t need anymore (are) apologies. I got “sorry” greetin’ me at my front door, you can keep yours.”
If Joe Biden is serious that what’s happening in the Twin Cities is an “open wound,” then he shouldn’t choose Senator Klobuchar as his running mate. After this week’s events, he should understand that putting another “Amy” in a position of power would just add salt to police brutality’s open wound. If he doesn’t get it now, then one might question if he ever will.
Duchess Harris is a professor of American Studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn. and the author of multiple books on race in America, including Race and Policing published in 2017.
