The horrific beating of 29-year-old Memphis resident Tyre Nichols at the hands of police on Jan. 7 was very hard to watch. The five officers involved — all black — gave contradictory orders to Nichols during a traffic stop, leading to a confused and chaotic situation when it didn’t need to be.
Nichols died three days after the incident. But while many cities prepared for the worst in the lead-up to the release of the bodycam footage, there were only scattered protests around the country. Memphis appeared to get the worst of it, and there were only small protests in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Boston.
Many people were expecting violent protests similar to the riots that occurred after George Floyd’s death. But Mr. Nichols wasn’t killed by white cops. Nichols died at the hands of black cops, and therein lies a tale about narratives and how the left uses them interchangeably to achieve whatever political ends are necessary at the time.
Related: BREAKING: Riots Break Out in Memphis, Other Cities as Police Release Tyre Nichols Video
It’s easy to attract a crowd by screaming “racism” when a white cop beats a black kid. But what happens, as in the Tyre Nichols case, when the cops are black?
No worries. Just change the narrative to accuse black people of being influenced by anti-black rhetoric. Some black people, anyway. Specifically cops.
Van Jones, the former Obama administration radical, wants to change the narrative to show that black cops “internalize” racist messaging in society and therefore act like white people when around other blacks.
But the narrative “White cop kills unarmed Black man” should never have been the sole lens through which we attempted to understand police abuse and misconduct. It’s time to move to a more nuanced discussion of the way police violence endangers Black lives.
What’s that? We have to move to a more “nuanced discussion of the way police violence endangers black lives?”
Why? Is it because in this instance, all the perpetrators of the police violence were black? Why can’t we have a “nuanced discussion” when white officers are involved?
One of the sad facts about anti-Black racism is that Black people ourselves are not immune to its pernicious effects. Society’s message that Black people are inferior, unworthy and dangerous is pervasive. Over many decades, numerous experiments have shown that these ideas can infiltrate Black minds as well as White. Self-hatred is a real thing.
That’s why a Black store owner might regard customers of his same race with suspicion, while treating his White patrons with deference. Black people can harbor anti-Black sentiments and can act on those feelings in harmful ways.
Black cops are often socialized in police departments that view certain neighborhoods as war zones. In those departments, few officers get disciplined for dishing out “street justice” in certain precincts — often populated by Black, brown or low-income people — where there is a tacit understanding that the “rulebook” simply doesn’t apply.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Got news for ya, Van; those neighborhoods are treated like “war zones” because the bangers are running around with powerful automatic weapons — almost like soldiers. The gangs don’t care where they’re shooting or who might get caught in the crossfire. Doesn’t that sound an awful lot like Ukraine?
It’s silly to blame a police beating of a black man by five black officers on “internalized” racism. There is no such thing. Those officers were wrong to beat this hapless man. It was poor police procedure and undisciplined behavior. “Race” never entered into it.
But the narrative on police violence had to be altered so that even black officers would be guilty of racist behavior because they “internalized” it, which led to “self-hatred.
The wonderful thing about Jones’s alteration of the narrative is that it may be impossible to prove but it’s also impossible to disprove. This means that activists like Jones can continue to blame white racism for the death of unarmed black men — even though common sense, logic, and reason say that’s a load of crap.
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