When Black Children Die for the Fears of White Adults
We shouldn’t have to write about the death of 12-year-old children. We shouldn’t be able to because there should be nothing to say. When they die, it should be due to illnesses we haven’t cured, or freak accidents, or unsolved mysteries. It should be random and inescapable and pointless to talk about. The loss of a child is an everlasting moment of pain for their family, but when a society causes the death of children, we have failed at one of the fundamental things civilization is supposed to do.
The fact that we have anything to say at all about why Tamir Rice was shot dead by two grown men who were tasked with serving and protecting him is a damning indictment of the world we live in.
And yet we must talk reasons because the reasons that exonerated Officer Loehmann in the shooting of Tamir Rice are so transparently dubious that they can only stand up as a smokescreen for an important reason that we are loath to admit: the ugly head of racism that rears its head more and more explicitly in recent years.
Yes, the airsoft gun Tamir Rice had is easily confused for a real gun. And yet to suggest that toy gun manufacturers are to blame, as Prosecutor Timothy McGinty did, is to make an argument which serves only as a distraction. After all, open carry is legal where Tamir Rice was shot and killed. So it’s irrelevant that his toy gun looked like a real gun because walking around with a real gun is no crime, as white open carry activists have demonstrated time and time again.
Yes, the full report that the weapon was probably fake did not make it to Officer Loehmann before he arrived on scene, but the first actions of officers upon arriving on scene should be to gather information, not to charge in guns blazing like the unhinged “protagonists” of some buddy cop movie.
Yes, officers have dangerous jobs. But they take those jobs willingly. It was his life or mine is not an excuse for an officer shooting somebody when they are unsure because putting their lives on the line is the job of an officer.
On the other hand, It was his life or mine did not work for Marvin Louis Guy who shot at the intruders in his home — hitting and killing one — before realizing that the intruders were a SWAT team.
If the blame for escalating violence lies solely with civilians and not with officers, we implicitly support the idea that the lives of police officers are more important than the lives of those they are working in service of, and take one more tragic step towards a police state.
However, conceiving of this as an overreach of police authority is an incomplete understanding of events, something that becomes clear when you add one critical piece of information. Marvin Louis Guy was black.
When the same case played out with a white defendant (Henry Magee), he was cleared of all charges. Given the massive inequalities in the way officers, prosecutors, and juries treat blacks and whites in the court system, it is all-too-easy to see a systemic issue that boils down to one fact. Regardless of how America values police lives compared to those of white civilians, it values them all more than black lives.
Americans (left chart) see blacks as less innocent — as early as age 10 — a likely cause of school discipline of black children. Police officers (right chart) show a much more pronounced bias, undoubtedly contributing to the disproportionate use of police violence against black children.
It is only through the lens of racism — the view that black lives are less innocent, less worthy, and less human — that we can possibly make sense of a world in which a cop shoots a child and is not even charged with wrongdoing, let alone found guilty.
And that is why it is important for us to continue to unassert — without doubt, without hesitation, and without cessation — that Black Lives Matter.
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