On May 25, 2020 I saw two different viral videos of white people threatening violence against Black men: the murder of George Floyd by the police, and the harassment of Christian Cooper by a jogger.
I am ashamed to say that it was not the video of George Floyd’s death that affected me most.
To be clear, the death of Mr. Floyd was horrible. It was horrible to see him prone on the pavement, a knee pressed to his neck, crying for help, for his mother, for breath. It was horrible to see the cop, smug smirk on his face and hand tucked casually in his pocket, ignoring onlookers’ pleas to get off him, even after Mr. Floyd had slipped into unconsciousness. It was horrible to see yet another Black man asphyxiating flanked by police and passersby, gasping “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,” like some kind of racist reality-show rerun. It was horrible to see the subsequent explosion of anguish and desperation and frustration and rage. It was horrible to see the police transform en masse into fascist fanboys, attacking the aggrieved and aggravator alike with contempt and cruelty.
And when the horror of it became overwhelming… when it affected me too much… I could compartmentalize it and tuck it away. I can choose when I want to confront racism or police brutality or white supremacy… and I can choose how much.
It is the privilege I wield as a white man in America.
The video of Mr. Cooper’s altercation with a female jogger who refused to leash her dog in Central Park’s Ramble is tame by comparison. The pair never come in contact; he records her as she makes a phone call to the police; she relents and puts her dog on a leash; everyone lives another day. But there is something in those sixty seconds in Central Park that I cannot shake off. His repeated “Please don’t come close to me.” Her taunting “I’m going to tell them [the police] there’s an African American man threatening my life.” Her comic patience waiting for a manager to pick up. Her sudden panicked cries of terror juxtaposed against her putting a leash on her dog. His concluding “Thank you.”
I bet that jogger was a good person on most days. I bet she recycles her paper and plastics and recoils when she hears racial slurs; she probably believes in equal rights and uses all the progressive temporary profile pics on Facebook; she definitely adopted a shelter pup and let it explore the woods. But when momentarily inconvenienced, she sharpened every facet of her privilege into blade to cut Mr. Cooper down. She understood the threat police pose to Black men. She knew that even though she had broken the park rules, even though she was not being attacked, even though there was a video disproving her claims, even though all of that… she knew the odds were that Mr. Cooper would bear the brunt of the police’s fury. He was just a thing to be disposed of. She was a 21st Century Carolyn Bryant doing everything she could to lynch herself another Emmett Till.
But.
But she wasn’t some jack-booted police thug mugging for the camera as he snuffed out a man’s life. She was just a run-of-the-mill person out for a dog walk. Nothing special about her at all… except white skin and the willingness to weaponize it in an instant.
An ally into a liar.
White supremacy as banal evil.
This video got under my skin, a toxic spill that I could not compartmentalize. I had thought I understood, at least in the abstract, what racism and white supremacy were. I was wrong.
It is not just the discrimination spewed by hateful bad apples, nor is it just the systemic inequities encoded in our laws and traditions. It is also the recognition that any white person can command that system to harm Black Americans; and it is the fear that any given white person might. I can viscerally feel that horrible truth and that noxious fear, though what I feel pales by orders of magnitude to the daily experience of my Black brothers and sisters. Michael Harriot, an award-winning Black poet and journalist, describes this fear far better and with more experience and authority than I ever could; as does the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah. I will include links to their words.
To my friends of color, I am sorry that I did not feel that fear sooner. That I chose not to feel that fear sooner. That I chose to alleviate my minor discomfiture at the expense of your safety. I will not let that feeling go.
I often turn to art when I am saddened or confused or enraged or, in this case, ashamed. I have working on portraits of Black men and women who have been murdered by the police on the altar of white supremacy as a way of doing that, of forcing myself to grapple with that feeling over and over again. Not just to document the unjust death of a Black person at the hands of white supremacy, but to learn what I can about their life and their loves. To force myself to stare long and hard at their faces, to experience a little joy at seeing our shared humanity reflected in their eyes, and to experience the pain of knowing why they are not here to share it. To feel that sickening, clarifying fear of the banality of white supremacy, and to resolve to tear that shit the fuck down.
I will share them with you, and implore you to do the same.
Black lives matter.
