So, anyone else getting a bit weirded out by the total ubiquity of the victim’s photo compared to, say, any of the high-profile African American victims of police violence in recent years?
I mean, The Guardian used that same photo of her five goddamn times in one article earlier today. Two of those instances have now been superseded by “exclusive video” of the victim rescuing some ducklings on more recent articles, of which there have been several, despite a complete lack of new facts surfacing about the case (I wish I were kidding about this).
There is, however, a benefit to that. The many white Americans who have been saying “Oh it’s OK the police only shoot black people, nothing to worry about” are now having their noses rubbed in it. It is an important message to convey, though I expect very soon they’ll be asking why a police force employs Somalis.
To me this is a cop thing. What are these cops going through that makes them so trigger-happy? What’s conditioning them and what’s being done to fix it? The numbers show racism is a factor, but that white cops also shoot white people sometimes shows it’s not the only factor.
There’s that on-line “game” a university has where you have to decide to shoot or not shoot a bunch of photos of people with something in their hand. Sometimes it’s a cell phone, sometimes it’s a gun, sometimes something else.
It’s supposed to show you how hard it is, how little time cops have before they need to decide to shoot. I always lose because I don’t choose to shoot often enough.
But I wonder about that. That Thai cop who talked down a man who came into a police station with a knife, for example, and finished by hugging the guy and making sure he got medical attention.
Shooting is not the only option, and there’s nothing “soft” about that Thai cop.
The format of those “games” is pinched directly from psych research on implicit racial bias. The general theme of the findings was that white people are much more likely to shoot a cellphone holder if they’re black.
Bias probably relates less to how you identify and more to the context in which you were raised. Gladwell’s background is an upper middle class mixed race family in England and Canada; probably not majority Black neighbourhoods.
This goes back a long way. Researchers in the late 1960s did a trial on the NY subway where actors, black and white, acted out an altercation in which one of the actors drew a knife. Every time it was the white actor, every white person present and subsequently interviewed said it was the black one.
In the early 1990s, in the UK, there was an incident in which a white taxi driver was attacked by two white passengers, one with a knife, and a Nigerian came to his assistance. When the police arrived the taxi driver told the police what had happened, the criminals said the black man had the knife, and guess who was arrested?
The story in this case has a happier ending. The Nigerian was an economics lecturer at the local university, and the altercation was witnessed by someone I know, the widow of an army officer who was involved in a number of local good causes. Late at night the Chief Constable’s phone rang, and when he answered she told him "Your racist police have arrested our Nigerian!"
Sure enough the actual criminals had form and were eventually caught, the lecturer was released. But I suspect that if my friend hadn’t been involved the outcome would have been very different.
This is a common problem that people struggle with about authority systems. People who are part of an oppressed group will try to ally with the group in power and will also internalize the ideas of the group in authority, even against their own interests. They also think that if they ally with the group in power, they will gain protection or be able to get ahead.
This why there are women like Phyllis Schlaffley and pretty much every anti-abortion woman out there.
This is why there were Jews in the camps and ghettos who helped the guards.
This is why there is Clarence Thomas.
Just because someone belongs to an oppressed group doesn’t mean they don’t operate within the system of oppression themselves. That’s how it works.