Some Reflections on Police Shootings and Shootings of Police
by Cord J. Whitaker
In the wake of this week’s biggest news items—Alton Sterling’s killing at the hands of Baton Rouge police; Philando Castile’s killing at the hands of Minnesota police; the retaliatory killing of five police officers and wounding of seven more and one civilian at the hands of terrorist-style assailants said to be outfitted in full body armor—it seems a good time to talk about what race is. According to experiments that go back at least as far as Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s famous 1947 study about children’s preference for white over black dolls and are as recent as the 2001 study “Can race be erased?” by Robert Kurzban, et. al., about coalitional affiliation, race is fluid. Race is a way of taking some visual or other easily detectable cue and slotting people into categories according to whether they display it or not. Skin color is one of the most obvious—if not the most obvious—visual cue around. Thus, race is usually taken as a synonym for skin color. At very least, it is taken as the heritage that came along with the skin color of one’s ancestors. But skin color is not the only racial cue. Hair, eyes, voice, the way a person carries herself—all of these are cues, too.
Racial cues do not have to be parts of the body. Uniforms are cues, too. For instance, it is common in African-American culture to refer to “blue” as a race. It means the police. He’s no longer black, now he’s blue is a common sentiment when an African-American becomes a cop. The idea that race relies on lineage is reflected in the popular TV drama Blue Bloods, now heading into its seventh season. President Obama referred to police officers’ lives as “blue lives” in response to the murders of the Dallas officers. The identity of a police officer functions similarly to a racial category. When you take into account studies about how humans categorize one another, being a police officer is a racial identity.
A confrontational relationship between police and African-Americans in the US is far from new. Its roots easily trace back to slavery when a black person traveling in a slave state would be routinely stopped and asked who owned him. If he was free, he had to prove it. Given that a broken taillight is what caused the confrontations that killed Walter L. Scott and now Philando Castile (See here for the videos of suspected police brutality against people of color), we might ask: are working taillights the new freedom papers?
We might ask, too, whether the increasing media attention given to black-and-blue relations means that this is the long awaited ‘Race War.’ But the question would be in error. We have been in a race war for a very long time already—and it extends well beyond black and blue individuals, and even beyond black and white individuals. We are in a war against our desire to make fast and easy categories. A war that is likely against our evolutionary drive to compete for resources. A war against the desire to see someone with brown skin, braids, and a white t-shirt as a threat. At the same time, it’s also a war against the desire to see as a threat a person in blue with a gun strapped to his (or her) waist and the stifling power of the state behind him.
But I must admit that when it comes to waging that last war against my own fear of the blue race, I have no idea where to start. When it comes to resisting our desires to see others as a threat, it seems this morning that no one knows where to begin.
Cord J. Whitaker is a professor of English and a critic of medieval literature and modern race. He blogs at whatisracialdifference.com and edited Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages.
Photo by Alex Wong (Getty Images).