Why we should say their names, too
We need the police, and we need them to stop unjustifiably killing American citizens: this is not a radical statement.
Last night, I found myself on the edge of a sidewalk wedged between a mixed group of protestors and onlookers to my back, and a line of NYPD police officers inches in front of me. About a half block up the street, standing in the glow of Times Square jumbotrons was a group of protestors; an assemblage of people gathered to demonstrate against the two most recent seemingly unjustifiable police shootings that resulted in the deaths of two black men. The two cops just in front of me happened to also be black men.
A number of tourist, speaking in broken English, stopped to ask me “What is this, why are they protesting?” Both of the black male police officers standing close to me tried to help me explain why we were all there. And what became obvious in that moment is that we all: the protestors, the police, the onlookers, found ourselves in Times Square on a muggy evening for the same reason. The same series of events, the same system, the same issues, the wrongs, the same moral fight led us into that space together.
Thousands of miles away from New York City’s flashing lights, those same series of events brought hundreds of Dallas police officers into Dallas’s downtown area along with hundreds of other protestors.
Earlier, in the evening as I walked down the sidewalk, half journalist-onlooker, half protestor, I heard a white woman cheering on the crowd of protestors in the street as they entered Times Square. “Kill the police!” she screamed from underneath the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not awning. Compared to the actions of the protestors and the chants of “No justice, no peace”, the woman was an outlier, as outliers seem to always be found glommed onto all of the most contentious moral fights of our time. These are people inspired by real beliefs shared by many, who act in the most violent of ways condoned by few.
Dylan Roof was a moral outlier, Timothy James McVeigh was an moral outlier, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik were moral outliers, Ismaaiyl Brinsley was a moral outlier, James Charles Kopp and John Salvi were moral outliers.
Being a moral outliers is not to be confused with the idea that these people and their views are not born out of very real beliefs and very present movements.
But if we are going to have very real conversations about what happened last night in Dallas when a gunman opened fire killing five police officers, and about what happened on Wednesday in Baton Rouge when a man selling CDs outside a convenience store was penned to the ground then shot numerous times, and about what happened Tuesday outside of Saint Paul, Minnesota when another black man paid with his life for the everyday gesture of reaching for one’s wallet; if we are looking for real solutions and real progress, then we have to say all the names all the time.
We have to say the names of all the moral outliers that illustrate why a movement has to be examined on the basis of its central moral ideals and not characterized by the actions of the outliers, and the names of all who have died on the wrong end of an assault weapon as a result of a broken system that devalues life, but especially if that life happens to belong to a black person.
Black lives still matter, and cops are often heroic individuals that earn respect by serving us with their very lives. These two statements are not contrary to one another but are born from the same place, out of the same democratic ideals, the belief that no one should be subjected to unwarranted harm, that life is precious, and that it should be protected regardless of what skin color a particular person happens to have or what uniform they happen to have on.
If we truly believe this then, we know that outrage for the deaths of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Micheal Brown, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile, as well as the outrage for Brent Thompson and the other four police officers gunned down in downtown Dallas should be equal and the same.
Last night, as the line of police before me moved into what appeared to be a battle formation against the crowd at the intersection, the only thing that I could utter to my boyfriend standing next to me was, “this is not how it should be,” to which he responded, “many things are not as they should be.” My only hope is that we can now have the kind of sophisticated conversations that are necessary to determine how we want things to be moving forward.
