A Word on Dallas, Black Lives Matter, and the Dead
[I initially wrote and posted this as a post on my personal Facebook page as a way for me to comment on the awful occurrences in Dallas tonight in the context of the horrific deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. I figured later on that Medium would be as good a place as any to post this. So here we go]
I need to say something.
A number of police officers are dead in Dallas. Others injured.
This is horrific. Abominable. This does not help the struggle for Black lives to be respected and held as sacrosanct, and it does not help the equally important aim of racial reconciliation.
But something concerns me, worries me, scares me. I fear that this struggle for equality and human rights will be drawn into a sick zero-sum game, where if a policeman dies, that is seen as the fault of Black Lives Matter, or if a black man is shot, all police officers — regardless of whether they are just or not in their use of force — are implicated as complicit in that.
This is not so. It is not a zero-sum game and does not have to be. The enemy are the systems and structures of society that dehumanize black people and use institutions, that include white people, as agents in this. The enemy is not the police by default, at least as I see it. The enemy is not white people in general or even specifically. If white people by default are the enemy, racial reconciliation would be impossible and foolish to strive for, and I reject this stance both as a Christian and as a black man.
There are corrupt police, yes. But that does not warrant the deaths of police officers, and regardless of how much our community is hurting and suffering, I will not shrink back from condemning this horrific act. It is absolutely on all of us to reform the police as an institution, both on the outside from pressure on the institution itself, and on the inside with individual officers stepping up to condemn abuses that they witness, regardless of their closeness to the institution or the officers in question or their feelings of brotherhood to all police officers. But that is how we do it — pressure, nonviolence, striving, reform. We don’t go out and gun down officers, because it’s horrific and it’s wrong, and I will be blunt here, they do not deserve that.
Like I said, this isn’t a zero-sum game. Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, the officers in Dallas — they are ALL victims, and they are ALL *EQUALLY* worthy of mourning and heartbreak over their deaths. I see people on my feed mourning just the officers, or just Castile and Sterling. No, I feel we must mourn everyone involved. To do anything less is a disservice to everyone involved, including the pet groups that we feel comfortable mourning.
