Here we are again talkng about another young man taken away by police. Unfair, unjustifiable, unhinged. These are all words that describe the brutality shown towards 29 year old Tyre Nichols, the young man killed in Memphis earlier this year by police officers who were also black. I’m not going to link to an article, because the video was just released of the way they tortured him, and I don’t want to link that traumatic event here. I will, however, share this video I saw on Twitter of Tyre skateboarding, because that is just a much better representation of who he was-
Another young man gone too soon, leaving behind young children and a family in shambles. When will it end?
There are so many homicides by police, police violence should constitute as a pandemic at this point. It’s a plague on this country and the only way to root it out is to address how it’s been able to thrive - toxic masculinity and white supremacy. You may ask, but these police officers are black, how is that white supremacy? Without being reductive by saying, all skin-folk ain’t kinfolk, I will give a brief explanation about how this is possible. Being a police officer is inherently different than any other profession as its roots are in slavery. Slave catchers were a considerable part of the early law enforcement system, since wacthmen (white citizens paid by their neighborhoods - most likely slaveholders) were mainly employed to repress enslaved people. Hence a system whose origins were anti-black continued to be well into present day. Instead of slave catching and observing enslaved people to quell any rioting, policing has evolved into maintaining the status quo and still finding ways to terrorize communities of color in the process. Are there good police? Maybe, but operating in this fundamentally flawed system, that is not saying much. It is undoubtedly a complicated matter when talking about police, but under these circumstances there is no complicating what these men did was cruel, wrong, and disturbing.
So yes, you can be black and also be anti-black. There are plenty of instances where the trifecta of the daily onslaught of negative black imagery, dehumanization, and shame of blackness, along with whatever additional issues compound and form a type of self-loathing that gets projected in unhealthy, in this situation, lethal ways. Maybe those men don’t hate themselves, but there is a crucial lack of self-constraint that can only come from unbridled rage. The type of rage that routinely goes unchecked in the police force. I don’t know if those police officers subscribed to routinely brutalizing other black men, but there was certainly a refusal to see Tyre’s humanity. It could be because they didn’t see Tyre as human or because they were expressing their deadly dominance overpowering this young man, but either way they were operating in this white supremacist structure of policing with the brazenness that they would be protected within its confines. This is why even though these men are black, the title of police officer outweighs that fact. They were operating as police first and foremost. Following their predecessors by targeting another black man and ultimately ending his life.
I haven’t seen the video and I won’t. I’ve seen pictures of Tyre in the hospital and don’t need to see any more than that. I can’t stop thinking about how young he was. I can’t stop thinking about his mom and his family. I can’t stop thinking about how this keeps happening. I cannot watch another clear reason why policing is a problem, a death sentence, and a destroyer. How can we continue to go on like this? I honestly don’t know how much more we can take.