Killing Us Softly: Navigating State and State-Sanctioned Violence Against Black Men’s Humanity
By Charles H.F. Davis III and Keon M. McGuire
This piece is a part of our Spark series Growing Up Amid the Rise of Racism
Earlier this year, former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger was convicted and sentenced for the murder of Botham Jean, a Black 26-year old originally from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Though following equally tragic instances of unarmed Black women, Black Trans folks, and Black men shot and killed by police, the Dallas incident was especially inconceivable given the circumstances in which it occurred. Jean, who lived one floor directly above Guyger in the same apartment complex, was in his home, doing nothing more than eating ice cream and watching television, when Guyger, a White woman, entered. Nonetheless, an off-duty and overtired Guyger still in uniform deemed Jean a threat and shot him. Despite the various indicators that should have clearly signaled she was in another resident’s home, Guyger testified that she believed she was entering her own apartment and assumed Jean to be an intruder.
Given the everyday circumstances of Jean’s murder, many questions remain unanswered. Yet the prevailing emptiness with which many Black people are left reveals a glaring truth: in a system that imbues itself with the absolute right to exclude Black people from protection, even in our own homes, we are assumed we do not belong and can be subjected to acts of racialized state violence. For Black men specifically, it also forces our confrontation of how we remain vulnerable irrespective of various markers of social mobility. Put differently, if it could happen to Botham Jean, a Harding University alumnus and an accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, then it most certainly could happen to any one of us. What is more, there is little we alone can do to prevent it.
A Black Public Health Crisis
Last year, the American Public Health Association, the professional organization dedicated to improving health equity in the U.S., released a statement that addressed police violence as a public health issue. The statement made particular note of the disproportionate impact of police violence on racially minoritized and other vulnerable communities, a finding further substantiated in a recent study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences. According to the study’s findings, police killings are the sixth-leading cause of death for men ages of 25 to 29 in the United States. When examined across race, the study found both racially minoritized men and women* were more likely to be killed by police than their White peers. Specifically, the study concluded that 1 in 1,000 Black men risk death resulting from police use of force over their life course, a rate 2.5 times higher than White men.
As Black men ourselves, these data points reaffirm the realities of what we have long understood to be true. And, as faculty members who work regularly with Black undergraduate men from colleges and universities across the country, these data underscore the countless narratives of concern regarding our collective interactions with law enforcement. Further, the associated risks of indirect traumatic exposure to police violence — such as the messages received through word of mouth, social media, and news media reports of unarmed Black people being killed by law enforcement — are many, and research has shown this exposure to deeply impact mental and emotional health of Black boys and men. Following these premises, the negative psychosocial implications for how Black boys and men develop a sense of self, both racially and as gendered beings, are anything but speculative. In fact, the ways in which Black men are socialized to navigate the racially gendered boundaries of Black authenticity and White approval are wholly operative in how the state, vis-à-vis law enforcement, consistently engages them. Put simply, when Black men engage in the same gendered practices as White men, they are rarely afforded the same sympathetic treatment, individualized attention, and presumption of innocence.
In part, the differential treatment of Black men as a group is connected to longstanding political discourses that have placed the onus of responsibility on Black communities. These discourses are so pervasive, even the rightfully criticized commentary from iconic rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z reflects the deficit perspective of a maligned Black community responsible for its own suffering. However, the demonstrable evidence of state and state-sanctioned violence against Black people in the U.S. makes clear the issue is something far more systemic.
Violence Beyond Police
While police brutality is a clear and visible example, it is but one among many forms of violence the state perpetrates against us. In fact, given the threat of state violence in the forms of prejudicial courts, disproportionate sentencing, and mass incarceration, the risks confronting Black men and boys during otherwise routine police interactions are compounded. When we consider that such encounters with law enforcement may turn fatal, we are forced to present and perform our personhood in ways completely deferential to and in compliance with state power.
Why, then, does the American public largely fail to recognize how the institution of policing, which is grounded in White supremacist patriarchal domination, overwhelmingly fails to protect and serve Black people? More broadly, why have we chosen to accept individual responsibility for authoritarian structures in which Black people are routinely rendered vulnerable and disposable by design?
These structures, which are organized within and across institutionalized systems such as education, housing, healthcare, and the workforce, co-construct the conditions in which the very humanity of Black people is constantly contested and our dignity denied. To be sure, Black boys and men are always already deemed as inherently violent, criminal, and deserving of carceral punishment. Even in death resulting from state violence, and no matter our social status, we are routinely demonized as imperfect victims for whom our families and communities alone are expected to be held accountable. For these reasons, Black men’s existence cannot be predicated upon its value or usefulness to white supremacy in seeing us as human beings. Therefore, we must continue to locate our dignity and worth beyond the white heteronormative, capitalist gaze.
Until All of Us of Free
As we continue to resist the violent material conditions of living in communities hyper-surveilled and overly-occupied by police, we must also engage in a radical, yet necessary, healing of how we as Black people see ourselves. Not only must we take up the necessary work of organizing and mobilizing against gendered-racist policing practices that show up, for example, in the violent actions of some school resource officers, but also consider the work of resisting and rejecting our internalization of white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies. These, too, are what cause us to see each other as threats that must be contained, which then leads to our own self- and community-disciplining in ways consistent with carceral forms of punishment and retribution. In effect, we must resist at every turn the desire to preemptively make ourselves small, relinquish our self-determination, and consistently exist as reactionary and overdetermined-from-without human beings.
In so doing, and specifically as Black men, it is especially important that we situate our own roles in imposing such restrictions on other, differently vulnerable Black people. In fact, it is our sacred duty and obligation to not only see ourselves more humanely, but also to see other Black people — particularly Black women, femmes, and non-binary people — as fully human. In recognizing and ascribing value to those multiply marginalized within Black communities, we offer ourselves a fuller version of possibility for existing beyond the narrowly prescribed parameters of what it means to be both Black and men. Further, we are able to extend our imaginations to envision a world in which being free “necessitates the destruction of all systems of oppression,” thereby securing the sanctity and dignity of all Black lives and not just our own. For when the most marginalized among us are free, then and there we become fully free too.
*The study used sex, not gender, as a variable for analysis. We assume this was based on the limitations of the data analyzed. However, sex and gender are used interchangeably in the study, which is misleading and fails to account for the deaths of trans people of color. Data from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey details experiences of trans people with police.
Charles H. F. Davis III is an assistant professor of clinical education in the Rossier School of Education and currently serves as chief strategy officer and director of research at the USC Race and Equity Center. In addition to his written scholarship, Davis hosted and produced “Saving Tomorrow, Today,” a long-form documentary about the structural barriers facing Black youth in education and innovative solutions to support their success. He is currently working on his first book, Flourish, an ethnography examining the contemporary organizing practices of the Dream Defenders, an organization of Black and Brown youth building power and fighting for freedom in the deep south.
Keon M. McGuire is an assistant professor of higher and postsecondary education in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and a Faculty Affiliate with the School of Social Transformation. Dr. McGuire’s research agenda focuses on the status and experiences of minoritized students across postsecondary educational settings. Drawing from Africana and other interdisciplinary frameworks, Dr. McGuire examines how race, gender and religion shape minoritized college students identities and their everyday experiences. In 2019, he was named a National Academy of Education (NAEd)/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow and ACPA Emerging Scholar.
