Police violence and who gets the benefit of the doubt

“I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” – James Baldwin

An unspoken question lies within debates about race and police violence. Festering beneath a veil of propriety, it endures in spite of our best efforts to scurry around it. We try to ignore it, evading it through ambivalence about what “really” happens in confrontations between the police and communities of color. But, like a guilty conscious, it remains, reminding us of what’s really at stake here. Images of grandfathers in chokeholds don’t dissipate so easily. A teenage corpse lingers in a nation’s memory.

After Mike Brown’s murder, “No one can really know for sure what happened” emerged as an epistemological escape hatch for those unwilling to confront a democracy that exists in principle but not in practice. These equivocal catchphrases got us “off the hook.” Unlike Mike Brown or Eric Garner or the thousands of people of color brutalized by police, we could walk away unscathed. Freed from the disquieting notion of a justice system not really based on justice, we could table the conversation for another day, perhaps when we were in the mood for it or (even better) when the whole thing blew over. And in doing so, we became innocent in our indecision. How could we be blamed if we never really had an opinion in the first place?

Yet, in the words of James Baldwin, it is the innocence that constitutes the crime. Uncertainty about the Mike Brown murder is not uncertainty about whether a police officer was justified in shooting an unarmed teenager — it is uncertainty about whether justice applies to Black bodies. It is uncertainty about whether marginalized persons are expendable in the performance of American equality — whether their deaths are worthy of our moral outrage or whether they are simply nuisances, distracting us from our patriotic stupor. It is an uncertainty rooted in a status quo that traded righteousness for white supremacy and a blue pill. To be equivocal is to be unaffected. To be unaffected is to be either privileged or ignorant or both — neither of which can wash away the stain of racist cruelty.

Dominant media discourse and our flawed legal system constructed credibility in Darren Wilson’s testimony. A careless on-site investigation, a bungling “prosecution,” and a culture of bigotry and “blame the victim” created the shadow of a doubt needed to preclude indictment. Fictitious Black “demons” and “Hulk Hogans” emerging from Wilson’s testimony not as signs of his own depravity but as “truth” constructed to obscure justice. The language was new but the rhetoric was not. It was the invocation of an American tradition dating back three hundred years: blame the “scary” Black man for his own oppression. No need to worry if it seems racist. Race disappeared during Obama’s first term.

Yet, despite this post-racial fantasy, that pesky question I told you about earlier hasn’t disappeared. When we make judgments about police violence and communities of color, we have to decide who gets the benefit of the doubt and what that decision means. If we choose the White cop, we’re left to account for the fact of a dead, unarmed Black person. If we choose the murdered Black citizen, we must account for the fact of a justice system that never really conformed to those democratic ideals we found so lovely to believe in. It’s a question that won’t disappear with body cameras since even video footage requires human interpretation (a fact we saw play out in Rodney King’s case over 10 years ago and recently with Eric Garner’s case). Answering who gets the benefit of the doubt is a politically charged act. It forces you to either relinquish the fiction of American justice or to ignore the fact of an exposed corpse, left on the street for 4 ½ hours like garbage. It forces you to confront injustice or repress it like a bad dream, only to have it bubble up again in next week’s headlines. It either makes you yearn to fight for American democracy or to pretend with all your might that such democracy already exists.

Succumbing to the fairytale of a post-civil rights era, we can coddle ourselves in ambivalence, believing in the possibility of a world in which Wilson feared for his life and Brown was a troubled young man apparently bent on suicidal aggression. We can live in cozy unawareness, drink the Kool-Aid, and neglect the reality of race in America. Or, we can refuse to pamper our psyches with passivity and “No one can know for sure what happened.” We can decide to believe injustice when we see it, rather than jumping through mental hoops to explain it away. We can decide to hear Mike Brown’s voice over the clamoring of coded racist language and assertions of colorblindness. We can decide to read between the lines rather than spoon-feeding ourselves a fable of liberty and justice for all.

And we can choose to stop giving White supremacy the benefit of the doubt. The privilege is in the choice.