Do All Lives Matter, Or Only Obedient Ones?

Let us suppose that I buy an absence of racial bias in law enforcement. I don’t, for a variety of reasons starting with “because I believe everybody has racial bias personally,” but that’s not what I wanna talk about. So I’m bringing up this example because it’s a young man who looks white to me, who has a white sounding name, in a tidy, nice-looking neighborhood, driving a perfectly decent car, and we have dash cam footage, and the officer looks white to me also.

There’s plenty of potential for a race-related derail anyway, for reasons including that this officer actually was sentenced to jail for this (though only for four years), or what it’s easy to anticipate comments looking like (“Oh sure, so you can actually get sentenced for not even killing a white boy!” or “So they shoot the black guy but taze the white guy?” or “Well he didn’t immediately do what the officer said,” or “we don’t know the whole story” or “Sure, Abby, pick a story about a white boy to see if that pushes white parents’ buttons!” or “zomg that could have been my kid!” as if every kid couldn’t have been your kid regardless of how they looked). But let’s really try to not go there for just one conversation. Even though it’s incredibly hard not to, and even though there is plenty of reason to.

It’s very hard for me to look at this video and not think, “Holy shit, that officer came unglued, flipped shit, and brutalized this guy because he asked a question he’s legally allowed to ask, instead of simply submitting with no question.”

Folks, I cannot accept an answer that says we can do nothing to prevent this. I cannot simply hear “you don’t understand and you can’t understand because you’re not there in the cop’s shoes.” You’re absolutely right that I don’t understand. But if you DO understand, and you’re not busting your ass to try to make it so I, and the rest of the people who count on our police, also understand, then you are failing us all.

You need me to trust you. I need that too. But I can’t do the hard work of mustering up my own trust if you can’t do the hard work of speaking to my fears. This is the impasse of understanding where we find ourselves. This is the gap we must bridge. This is the work we must do.

There are many of you among my friends and family with law enforcement connections who are absolutely busting your ass to spread the understanding. I love you all so much. And it is in part because I worry about your wellbeing and safety, too, that I will ask these questions, and keep asking.

That being said, here’s the video, and here is the story.

If you’d like to join the conversation, please do. Here, Facebook, and Twitter are good places to do that. And we need to be having this conversation, so if you’d like to take my words and share them around to ask, please do.

If this made you think, please click the little green heart and let me know. You might also find food for thought in my recent tale of what happened the first time I got pulled over by police.